The Pea Coat

He had purchased the pea coat at Canal Jeans on lower Broadway in the area called SoHo, south of Houston. The cross-street is not to be pronounced Hewston, as in the Texan city, but articulated as Howston. The Texas City is named after Sam Houston, a Texas general and statesman, but the New York City street is named after William Houstoun, who, according to Wikipedia, served as a delegate from Georgia to the Continental Congress from 1784-1786 and then to the Constitutional Convention in 1787.  Houstoun then married Mary Bayard in 1788 and Mary’s father, Nicholas, named the street after his new son-in-law. In the early 1970s SoHo was an area occupied by factories catering to the clothing trade and possessing for reasons he never explored but certainly welcomed into his life, a countercultural vibe. He worked rather dejectedly in one of the many clothing manufacturing factories, but he took his lunch in the newly opened artist run hippie restaurant FOOD. Every day he alone joined the crowd who frequented FOOD and ordered a bowl of soup, two slices of Anadama Bread and three slabs of butter. He had not before heard of this bread nor tasted anything so delicious. In his home Wonder Bread had been the only dough.
            On the east side of Broadway about two blocks from Houston Street sat Canal Jeans. It was, in his memory, a cavernous establishment filled with rough-hewn, large tables piled high with jeans and shirts. In earlier and casual visits to the concern he had purchased several pairs of painter jeans in a variety of bold colors: sun-yellow, sky blue, summer green. The walls were lined with shirts and coats, some that had even been previously worn. The idea of second-hand clothes was a novelty and certainly not something of which his mother would approve, though he recalled that once in college he had exchanged with a friend a perfectly fine sweater for one with a tear in the elbow. 
            Along the walls of Canal Jeans is where he found the pea coat. It was not a traditional Navy-issued garment. That style could probably have been purchased at the Army-Navy store around the corner, and, in fact, he didn’t even know that he was looking for this item or even that he had need of one. The coat was longer than that worn by navy seaman; it hung somewhere between his knees and waist. He pulled it from its place on the rack and put it on. He looked at himself in the mirror, and without another thought purchased the coat. He recognized in the mirror who he thought he was and wanted to be. He loved the way he felt in that garment, like a second skin he felt hugged by coat. And for several years he wore that coat until one day he didn’t. At then some point he lost contact with that garment and even perhaps with a version of himself. I think that for the rest of his life he has looked about for that coat. 
            Thoreau cautioned us to beware the enterprise that requires new clothes and not a new man to wear those clothes. No, clothes do not make the man, but clothes do fit the man. There are clothes that are the external expression of the self. Yes, of course, the self does change, and it must dress itself into the world. I think that when one shops for clothes there are at least two options: to purchase the clothes that when worn will impress the world with the image, and then there are the garments that when acquired clothe s the self exactly as it would be expressed. Though he has purchased a great many covers, he thinks that he has only rarely found that pea coat or eaten lunches at FOOD.

Restless

And what is the sense of feeling unfocused. When my eyes are not focused I I cannot see clearly: everything is indistinct. I remember the Jimmy Cliff song, “I Can See Clearly Now.” He sings, “I can see clearly now the rain is gone/I can see all obstacles in my way Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind/It’s gonna be a bright, bright, sunshiny day.” But when the soul cannot focus, then what? For the past several days or weeks I have not seen clearly nor can I see the obstacles in my way or even know the road I would travel on this bright, bright sunshiny day. I can’t see anything clearly. That particular state is not like that of the hallucinogenic experience when the hard boundaries that defined the shape of things evaporated and the things of the world flowed smooth and connected as in the colors of the light shows that moved behind the bands at the Fillmore East. But that is not my present experience.
            Now I walk about from room to room and cookie jar to cookie jar without a sense of purpose or patience to remain seated anywhere. I forget what I intended, or aware of that intention, find myself incapable of attending to it and pass easefully into distraction. I walk about seemingly in a stupor and often forget why I am in motion. I straighten everything in the house and wipe the counters clean. And I am not ill at ease but not quite comfortable.
             I suppose that one could describe the condition I am experiencing as depression. Perhaps. Certainly thinking about the state of the world and scanning the newspapers—too horrifying to actually read—could result in a depressive state. Wars. Assassinations. Ruthless dictatorships. Ruthless exercises of power. Truthless Trump. Floods and earthquakes. Craven Republicans. And that is usually the reports on page one! But, in fact, depression is not what I am experiencing right now which might be what a depressed person might say. Rather, I think that I am allowing myself to be lost, to be bored, and await the moment when something embraces an interest and I follow my inclination and set off in pursuit of something of which I do not yet know. Come Watson, the game’s afoot, I will shout, and turn dedicated to the tasks at hand. The important element here is to leave myself open not to inspiration but to experience. Then the work will begin.
             Perhaps I am in the moments just sauntering. Thoreau says that there is a great art to saunter. I would be an artist of the saunter. In his essay “Walking,” Thoreau says “What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine wither we will walk? I believe that there is a subtile magnetism in Nature, which if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us though the actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea.” And so though he inevitably walks in a westerly direction, though as he admits “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world,” it is lost Thoreau would be. So, I, too, am walking West . . . into the wild, which seems rather ironic as I sit here in front of the computer screen and watch through the window as the leaves begin to turn colors. But as I have learned also from Thoreau I should pile high the cans of canned meat if that is what I would have for my saunter. I am not restless though, of course, as usual somewhat anxious. I recognize which way I walk, but I am uncertain what I might find but certain that I will find that for which I look. 
              

 

 

              

 

              

 

Red Whine to White Wine

I am certain that there are many ways to tell a story, but I have been thinking specifically about two of them: one that is told with complaint and one with irony. The former rails against the world and cries, “Why me?” while the latter shrugs their shoulder and says, “Well, what did I expect?” The former bemoans and the latter laughs. The complainer howls with rage and the ironist narrates with wonder. In the former there is an urgent request, sometimes even a demand, for sympathy and the story contains righteous anger; but in the ironist’s narrative there is embedded an invitation to mirth. Paper, short for Newspaper, from the counter at which she holds regular court, tells the news to the townsfolk of Pottstown in James McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. “Rolling out rumors and news chatter was her gospel song, always melodious and joyful.” One of her listeners calls out to her, “C’mon Paper, story it up like you know how. Put a little pop in it, a little scoop, y’know.” Paper’s stories are longed-for and colorful even if the story she narrates is doleful. What the ironic tale lacks is bitterness, but the complaint story, lacking irony, offers an environment that is dirge-like and burdensome. The complaint story invents a vengeful world and the ironic story offers an untidy one. 
            We all want to be understood, but the complaint story is not told necessarily for understanding. The complainer simply wants to be recognized as a beleaguered party and defined in the role of an oppressed victim. The ironist accepts to a substantial degree their complicity in events in which they realize themselves and attributes the happenstances in some part to their own eccentric stable of hobby-horses. In the complainer’s story the teller is a victim but, in the ironist, they are an unintentional (but not innocent!) co-conspirator in the situation. A story about a schlemiel—a complainer—depicts the ill-fortune of a victim, but the tale of a schlimazel—the ironist—describes the experience of a simply luckless individual in the wrong place at the right time. In the story replete with irony there is humor—I think of Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin, Alvy Singer, or Dr. David Huxley, in Bringing Up Baby: there is humor. But in the complaint story there sits pain and misery. The latter might be John Dowell (the narrator of The Good Soldier) or any number of memoirists writing about their troubled lives. Seinfeld’s George Costanza or Shakespeare’s Richard II are story tellers of complaint. The ironist can find humor in the complaint to which the complainer is oblivious. I think that the comedians I enjoy most are ironists who narrate with affection the exigencies in which they find themselves in a world of turbulence and chaos; the complaint comedians dislike the world that oppresses them and would be rid of it. The complainer demands acceptance, but the ironist invites to hearers an almost absurd sense of involvement and resulting joyfulness.
            I grow weary of the complainer because their stories turn me into a sounding board and from whom only a sympathetic response is required, even sometimes demanded. Oh, I listen, but I become resentful, for there is only a specific place assigned to me in the complaint story. The ironist welcomes their listeners to join in the experience and they express amazement and joy in the world. In the television now streaming series Northern Exposure, Dr. Joel Fleishman in Cicely, Alaska, goes from complaint to irony and in the process learns to share in community and its sense of wonder. In that experience he becomes a better person and maybe a better doctor.
            I would be an ironist . . . and, as one, I recognize that implicit in this post is complaint!

 

Nice and Good

I don’t ever remember thinking that I wanted to be good though now that I have arrived at seventy-six years of age I tend to think of myself as being good. A good person. I suppose that I had earlier considered that being good was either an unconscious given—I was raised to be a good person—and therefore I was good; or relatedly, I was raised to be good without ever having cause to wonder what good might mean. Good was what they told me I was to be but they never came any closer to defining what that might entail. Iris Murdoch’s novel, The Nice and the Good presents me with an occasion to do so now.
            As in Shakespearean comedies, at this novel’s end all except Theo and Casie become coupled and marry. I think each in the relationship has gone from nice to good. Teen-aged Pierce and Barbara end their virginities and espouse their love for each other and end their self-absorptions. Paula has reconciled with Richard and will return to their marriage, John Ducane will wed Mary Clothier, Ewan Fivey takes off to Australia with Judy McGrath and Jessica has followed after a retreating Willy and the reader is led to believe that they, too, will marry, or at least become a committed couple. Octavian and Kate have settled into their comfortable married arrangement; and Theo Gray has considered returning to the monastery in India which he had earlier left in disgrace and where he believed himself somehow to have failed in his commitment. Theo’s earlier residency there had seemed to him an attempt to leave his past utterly behind [him] and to leave a renewed life, but there he had found himself experiencing “the relentless egoism which he now saw had not suffered an iota of diminution from his gesture of giving up the world.” Theo considers that he might return and attempt again to join the brotherhood. These final relationships and Theo’s hope result from a waning of egotism on the part of each, and this waning allows each to see and hear the other. I think they each become good.
            Theo’s acknowledged failure might offer some insight into the character of the nice and the good. What apparently had led to Theo’s failure was his inability or unwillingness to act without the authority of ego. Perhaps his conscious decision to be good obviated his attempt to achieve being good. It might be that the wish to achieve some moral state blocks the accomplishment of it. Ego gets in the way. John Ducane, a consummate egotist, seems to reach some sense of this insight in an epiphanic moment. Pierce, in an adolescent pique at Barbara’s rejection of him, had foolishly swum into Gunnar’s Cave despite the danger of high tide closing the mouth of the cave, flooding it and thereby drowning him. Ducane swims into the cave to rescue Pierce where he “vaguely imagined that he would easily be able to find Pierce and would use his authority to make the boy come out.” But once Ducane enters the cave “everything seemed different . . . He felt removed from reality,” and like Alice falling through the looking-glass, Ducane plummets into another world. In the absolute darkness of the cave and confronted with the real possibility of his death, Ducane comes to some understanding of how he had in his daily life and relationships functioned under the directing influences of his egotism. In the cave he thinks “[I]f I ever get out of here I will be no man’s judge. Nothing is worth doing except to kill the little rat, not to judge, not to be superior, not to exercise power, not to seek, seek, see. To love and to reconcile and to forgive, only this matters. All power is sin and all law is frailty. Love is the only justice. Forgiveness, reconciliation, not law.” Ducane has come to understand that his positions in the world were founded based on his egotism. He had considered, “How instinctively I assume that what everyone needs is help from me.” But his opinion of himself as ‘good’ had been a false conception: he had been merely nice, a surface appearance exhibiting agreeable and concerned behaviors but really an exhibition of ego. In fact, it is questionable if he had, indeed, helped anyone. His behavior is self-aggrandizing but leads ultimately to unhappiness for others because narcissistic egotism cannot address conflict between people. Another character, Willy Kost, who had survived Dachau, says, “Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one’s ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonizing preoccupation with self.” To be nice must be exhausting. In the novel, Ducane comes to understand that the greatest evil is “the self-justifying ruthless selfishness of quite ordinary people.” 
            Perhaps love can only exist in the absence of egotism. Love is the good and maybe that is as good a definition of each as I can understand. “Love,” Iris Murdoch writes, “is the extremely difficult realization that something other than ourself is real.” I think I have learned something akin to that from D.W. Winnicott. Love and hate occur when I can acknowledge that the other exists outside of my creation. For Murdoch the difficulty in being good arises from out tendency to egotism; for Winnicott the process effected through transitional objects.
            I don’t believe I have the capability to act outside the demands of ego. There is a form of healthy necessity in narcissistic egoism; each of us needs to take care of ourselves. At some point we all leave the breast and must learn to fend for ourselves out there. For some, I know, there has been no breast and they grow up having learned to do whatever is necessary to protect the self. Sometimes this results in unhappy consequences. But selfless ego is neither good nor nice. It is a blank face. Theo’s decision to return to the monastery would allow him “to keep company with the enlightenment of others, and [there] he might regain at least the untampered innocence of a well-guarded child.” If Theo could not give up ego, then he might at least live in the environment of those who had achieved such renunciation and there he might be happy. There, he might enjoy not the blank face of love but an acceptance of himself that would allow him to consider that “perhaps he would die after all in that green valley.” Perhaps in the presence of those who have given up egotism Theo would have nothing against which to compete or that he might judge. And perhaps an acceptance of ego would make possible the good to exist.