At the Beach

From my sedentary seat on the beach chair I watch the children run from their arrival at the beach to the water of the Pacific Ocean! Arms spread wide like wings and with a scream of absolute joy, the children rush runningly to the water. During low tide it could certainly seem to me a long way to Tipperary, so to speak, especially for those with little legs. As I sit heavily in my beach chair, I comment to Elizabeth that as soon as a child hits the beach and sees the water, they take off as if they were a sprinter at the crack of the starter pistol. Most seem not at all afraid of the water and do not pause as they approach the ocean: even at high tide a three-year-old can plop safely down sitting in the water with seemingly little concern of being overwhelmed by the water. They do so. Sometimes the children just falls face down into the surf and spread themselves face down in the warm water, though even then in the shallow water their little backsides appear sounded above the tide almost like the small hump of a baby whale. Parents don’t usually seem overly concerned for their child’s well-being; some do follow slowly behind to enjoy the child’s cavorting delightedly in the shallow waters. Others watch from a distance unconcerned. And the children don’t look back. But when they are done, they exist the water and again take off in a run back to where the parents have sat themselves down in beach chairs. 

The water of the Pacific Ocean here in Costa Rica is warm, and even I, who am not a swimmer, a surf or a boogie board rider, occasionally enjoy a tussle with the waves and especially so in high tide. But I walk slowly to the water, at first allowing the weakening waves close to the shore to climb up my body; I continue to walk until I am acclimated up to my neck at which time I dive into a breaking wave. I go to the water to cool myself down from the scorching temperatures and not to play. The waves crash in and I dive under them—with less and less enthusiasm—until finally my nose is so filled with ocean water that I head back to my chair, clear my sinuses, refresh my sun screen, put on my hat and sun glasses and watch the amateur surfers attempt to rise up and all too readily fall. And I marvel at the children as they run with so much glee to the water. 

As I age, which I do too quickly and regularly, I move more slowly. The only destination is to death, and I am in no hurry. I choose to saunter and measure my effort in steps and not in time. As Thoreau says, it is a great art to saunter. I have become an artist of sauntering.  I step cautiously, nonetheless. I’ve been thinking about Chris Smither’s song, “Leave the Light On.” He sings, 

These races that we’ve run were not for glory – 

No moral to this story –
We run for peace of mind.
But the race we’re running now is never-ending – space and time are bending
And there’s no finish line -
Don’t wait up – Leave the light on
I’ll be home soon

I’m not exactly sure what Smithers might mean when he refers to the race never-ending with no finish line. Or perhaps I just have a different perspective. Though I walk slowly to the water and head directly back to my chair, I still head into the waves that at least on the warm Pacific Coast I enjoy. I understand that it is at least no longer fame and wealth for which I run, and that perhaps it never was my goal. But somehow whatever it was that I did I felt that I did by some inner compulsion that I probably little understood at the time. It is possible that even now I can’t know the complex motives that inspired me to act and that still does send me out walking to the waves, But though I am sauntering and not running, though I move slowly towards the water’s edge and tentatively approach the waves, I want to remain out there in the race, so, yes, I’ll be home soon so leave the light on, please, and maybe have a large towel with which I might dry off.

Roche limit

The narrator’s opening sentence in W.G. Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn reads “In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have competed a long stint of work.” And from this period of doldrums in his walk the narrator seems to have recovered . . . well, for at least a while. But walking through the remote places on the southeast coast of England he confronted “traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past.” It was from this paralyzing horror that exactly one year after the walking tour that the narrator reports that he “was taken into hospital in Norwich in a state of almost total immobility.” Now, one theory of the origin of the rings of the planet Saturn is that they are debris from a meteor or moon that was pulled into the planet by Saturn’s gravity. The Rings of Saturn explores the dangerous closeness the narrator in his walk approached trauma and horror that ultimately pulled him to destruction by the gravity of the events he observed. But I suppose the book itself is evidence of his recovery.

The opening lines of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick are Ishmael’s declaration that “Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.” I grow ornery myself as I maneuver through the world in the Novembers of my soul and I then confirm the location of my burial plot and arrange the elements of my funeral ceremony and order my eulogy. As Ishmael sails, he gets too close to tragedy and is pulled into the object’s gravity. In the end he is saved floating atop Queequeg’s coffin when he is found by the whaler Rachel. It had been sailing the seas searching for its missing children who had been aboard the ship when it had been destroyed by Moby Dick, the white whale whom Ahab maniacally chases and whom he views as the root of all evil in the world. The Rachel had flown too close to the object’s gravitational pull and been destroyed. So had Ahab and the entire crew of the Pequod. And so too, almost had Ishmael. That he could write Moby Dick is evidence of his ultimate survival.
            Henry David Thoreau, too, sometimes would take himself out for a walk when he experienced his hypos. He says, “In my walk I would fain return to my senses.” Thoreau was no stranger to his hypos: in his narrative concerning the burning of Breed’s hut, Thoreau admits, “I lived on the edge of  the village then—” [he was at Walden] “and had just lost myself over Davenant’s Gondibert, that winter that I labored with a lethargy . . .” Thoreau attributes this state of lethargy with which he suffered to an heredity family complaint; alternatively he ascribes this lethargy more amusingly and dismissively to his “attempt to read Chalmers’ collection of English poetry without skipping.” But despite his rationalizations regarding the origins of his emotional state, I am certain that what he suffers from is the very condition of depression that has led to the ubiquity in our modern-day of a wide assortment of psychotropic drugs. He had been drawn into the gravity of the object and was crushed, but his long period writing Walden offers evidence of his survival.

I am thinking of the Roche effect. I read in Wikipedia, “In celestial mechanics, the Roche limit, also called Roche radius, is the distance from a celestial body within which a second celestial body, held together only by its own force of gravity, will disintegrate because the first body's tidal forces exceed the second body's self-gravitation.” The math and scientific explanation exceeds my bandwidth, but I know enough to understand that being drawn into the gravity of the first object will lead to the destruction of that second object. And I am wondering now how others deal with their hypos, their doldrums, their confrontations with the traces of destruction they experience in their lives and still maintain their own orbits. How do we hold ourselves together and not disintegrate when being pulled to destruction by the gravity of the first object. As for myself, to maintain my distances sometimes I would take myself out for a run. I have circled Central Park at 4:00am not a few mornings when I suffered my hypos; run in almost all fifty states; accumulated thousands of miles on the Red Cedar trail; listened as I ran to hours and hours of music first on a radio Velcro-strapped to my arm (before Apple devices were available) and then when they appeared on the market listened on various sized iPods. I walk now listening to the music on the iPhone nestled in my pocket and with my wireless Power beats plugged into my ear. I have written ten books on the roads, one a memoir aptly entitled Anxious Am I? I baked a great many breads during the pandemic. 

I begin to wonder how much of our lives might be spent in response to our hypos, our madnesses, our lethargies. What strategies do we employ to avoid being pulled by the gravity of another object, what it might be, and crash into that object. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn came about after he had apparently crashed; Thoreau’s Walden after suffering his lethargies; Ishmael’s Moby Dick after the experience on the Pequod; I composed Anxious Am I? after the anxiety had sent me during my life out on the roads . . . or at times to my bed, and even before I knew it was anxieties from which I suffered and that these anxieties were common and ubiquitous. I think that perhaps our hypos send us out, into the world, but out there we struggle to resist the gravity of that object whose gravity might overwhelm our own and would pull us to destruction. Yes, we are all in a struggle to maintain our selves in a world that threatens to pull us into it and break us to pieces. That struggle makes us crazy and human. D.W. Winnicott says, “I must ask your forbearance if in the process I seem to suggest that all of us are ill, or, on the other hand, that the mentally ill are sane.” But that is alright, Winnicott says, for “we are poor indeed if we are only sane.” Or as Ricardo Reis plaintively says, “We are all ill, with one malaise or another, a deep-rooted malaise, that is inseparable from what we are and that somehow makes us what we are, you might say that each of us is his own illness, we are so little because of it, and yet we succeed in being so much because of it.” I am comforted by that idea. My hypos, lethargies, anxieties, and doldrums are not separate from me but are essential to me; yes, I am my hypos, my anxieties, my doldrums, and how I accept them and manage them become the strategies that I employ to avoid being pulled by the gravities of other objects out there to destruction. My hypos are the source of my life and work. My hypos are my life.

 

  

Desire and Longing

We returned home from a lovely dinner at a plant-based restaurant in Jaco. And settling in and down we thought to view again Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film Lost in Translation. I know that I had screened the film in the theater when it first opened, and Elizabeth remembered seeing it in the movie theater as well. In the film, Bob and Charlotte are booked into an expensive Tokyo hotel: they are not a couple but both have rooms. Bob has been hired for a Suntory whiskey commercial for a fee of two million dollars, and Charlotte is accompanying her husband who is a photographer on a job. Shae has recently graduated, apparently from Yale, as a philosophy major. But neither Bob nor Charlotte appear satisfied with their lives: Bob has apparently given up seeking parts in legitimate theater for the money he can earn in commercials. The scenes in which he sits for the commercial are humiliating, partly because the directors do not speak English and Bob doesn’t speak Japanese, and partly because the very idea of his commercialization evidenced in his bored and almost benighted expressions suggests the state of his disoriented state of mind. A great deal has been lost in translation. Charlotte has experimented with a number of vocations but has not felt empowered by or drawn to by any of them. She is lost herself in translation from college student to a passive and married adult. Bob has been married for 25 years and has two children, but when he calls home his wife is a bit too busy to talk with him, though she has sent carpet samples for his study from which he is expected to choose. Bob’s children, too, are not eager to talk with him and the time difference between the United States and Japan makes most communication difficult. Much is lost in translation. Charlotte, on the other hand, has been married for only two years but something is obviously lacking in the relationship despite the voiced expressions of love between she and her husband. Charlotte as yet is childless and there is no hint that she is anxious to begin a family. When she asks Bob what it is like to have children, he tells her that when he had children it was like he had lost his life. Charlotte doesn’t yet have a life to lose. Much is lost in translation.

I think this is a film about longing, a state I want to distinguish from Desire. The latter I understand as an energy that sends one out into the world to discover something for which one doesn’t yet know they are even looking. Bob is ordered to Japan, a city that from the beginning baffles him, and Charlotte, as I have said, just accompanies her husband for apparently having nothing else to occupy her. I have earlier defined Desire as the pilot light on a stove which existence is necessary to use any of the burners to cook anything, but that pilot light cannot be found in any individual burner flame. Or perhaps it exists unrecognized in all of the burners. Cooking requires that the pilot exist, but the pilot light is only valuable if there are burners it can ignite and food that can be cooked. Longing is blocked Desire. If Desire sends one out into the world, then longing keeps one fixed in place. Desire leads to creativity as it finds objects to realize, but longing, because it does not venture, finds no object. Desire is looking in the world. Greg Brown sings, “I’m looking for Rexroth’s daughter/And I guess I always will be.” What sends Brown out is Desire, but he knows that Rexroth’s daughter, a friend of a friend of mine, will never be found: the seeking for her is the motive for his life. But longing isn’t looking for an object. Sitting at a window overlooking Tokyo, Bob tells Charlotte that he had scheduled that day a shiatsu massage in which he experienced unbearable, excruciating pain. I am not certain that longing is exactly the experience of Bob’s shiatsu massage, but certainly longing is frustrative and extremely discomforting. Longing is to experience hunger but there exists no pilot light to light a burner to cook any food. Bob Dylan sings, “Well the sun went down a long time ago/And doesn’t seem to shine anymore/I wish I could have spent every hour of my life/With the girl from the Red River shore.” That sentiment represents what I define as longing: he would abandon the searching for the having.  Ironically, however, Dylan has created a song from Desire. The narrator admits, “Well I’m a stranger here in a strange land/But I know this is where I belong/I ramble and gamble for the one I love/And the hills will give me a song “ The longing is for the girl from the Red River Shore, but the Desire is where he belongs.

 

 
 

Just a Trifle

It was just a trifle. Elizabeth and I are wintering again in Costa Rica this year—nine weeks in the Jaco area. After thirty-four years in the mid-west suffering arctic-like temperature that would fall often enough to -20 degrees with a wind chill factor that caused the air to feel much colder. I had grown intolerant of winter, such even as winter seems to be this year in Minnesota and other mid-west cities. Chicago temperatures actually rose to 70 degrees in the final days of February and there has been minimal snow fall in Saint Paul as the temperatures hovered in the forties and fifties. I have experienced significant snowstorms into May! Anyway, Elizabeth and I were sitting at the beach in Costa Rica as part of our morning rituals. The temperature was already eighty degrees. And in the afternoon when we return to the beach it would rise into the nineties. Before we headed to the beach I would take a morning walk, at first along a noisily trafficked road, then on a quieter and safer road with a return to the casa along a pseudo-boardwalk, but at present I walked along the beach where I could watch the waves and the other folk on their morning ritual walks. Elizabeth would begin the morning with her workout schedule that has now evolved into a daily yoga routine. Then together we packed our water bottles and sunscreen, fold up our beach chairs parked outside our casa and head out for our morning sojourn at the beach. We tend to settle into the same locale daily mornings and afternoons.  Along this beach there are few sun-pilgrims but in the mornings there are not a few vendors offering massage: once during an earlier week we were entrapped, as it were, for a session with Diana and Basilia. Neither spoke any English and we spoke minimal Spanish and suddenly we found ourselves getting upper body (me) treatment and reflexology care (Elizabeth). The cost was forty dollars for each and Elizabeth had to run back to our casa to collect the monies. And almost every morning since these women would pass us, greet us by name and inquire if we would like a massage. I say in my broken Spanish, “hoy no,” or “Mas tarde.” They nod and laugh and move on until the next morning. In fact, we never see these lovely ladies in the afternoon though we would not employ them if we did. Also hawking along the beach though mostly in the afternoons are men selling jewelry, weavers (or salesmen) of colorful hammocks, charitable youth club vendors offering what pass for homemade pastries, and somebody offering something to do with tattoos though we do not know exactly what is he is offering: the man carries a large stretched sheet covered in tattoo designs and he calls to us “Tattoo?”. We have been speculating that he is offering temporary tattoo inkings, but we are reticent to engage the man with our minimal Spanish and his minimal English. I do not fancy either a stencil of a sailing ship or Ché Guevara on my upper arm. Actually, my upper arm is not thick enough to accommodate the visage of dear Ché. I am certain that neither Elizabeth nor I are interested in getting a tattoo, and even if we were we would be averse to having one carved into or stenciled onto our skin in the non-sterile environment of the beach where at a minimum dogs run unleashed and free. Traveling along the beach as well are horseback riders plodding very, very slowly. I would think the diapered horses must suffer frustration to be traversing back and forth along the beach carrying people who are merely recording the experience that is not really an adventure on their phones. They do not look happy, neither the horses nor the riders.

            It was just a trifle. Sitting quietly on the beach, lathered up in sunscreen, I was thinking about Amelia and Lilian. These two El Salvadoran ladies have been cleaning my apartment for years. When they began their fee was $80.00 for four hours bi-weekly, but in fact my apartment was spotless in less than two hours. I paid them for four. I didn’t care: my home was clean, and I could afford the charge. Every year I raised the fee the ladies had set, and now I pay them $130.00 for the exact same cleaning session and now it seems to take even less than two hours to clean the apartment. Perhaps they have learned my living patterns and know where attention needs to be paid. I don’t care, my apartment is clean and their life is more difficult than mine. I don’t feel like I am condescending, but well, maybe I am being so and I know that I suffer middle class guilt. Anyway. To continue, while I winter in Costa Rica Amelia and Lilian come in at their leisure, so to speak, and do what Amelia has termed “a deep clean” of the apartment for which I contentedly pay $200.00. And while I winter away in Costa Rica I pay them nonetheless for a regular bi-weekly cleaning. In addition, the condominium association has for the past several years hired these ladies to clean the entire building. I recall during the pandemic when I regularly paid Amelia and Lilian their cleaning fee despite the fact that they were not permitted into my apartment that Amelia wept that so many of her clients were canceling services that she lay awake at night worrying how she might buy food for her family. I was in my anxious bread making state and I gave her a loaf or two every two weeks when she arrived for her check.

            And it was a just trifle. Sitting on the beach I was thinking thinking about Amelia and Lilian. And then for some reason it crossed my mind that, perhaps, I might purchase something to bring the ladies from Costa Rica. And suddenly this memory arose: My father had a factory in lower Broadway in New York City, and he employed workers from Latin America who belonged to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. And whenever he would go on vacation, he would purchase souvenir trinkets from the countries he had visited for each of his employees.  I don’t know why he did this, but then, we did not speak very often about much other than the time or the work. And then one year, perhaps it was 1972 or 1973, when I was working in my father’ factory, I planned to visit Israel where my fourteen year old sister was living and attending school, and to which my 21 year old brother would travel from his study abroad at Lincoln University in England, my father instructed me not to forget in my travelling to buy something for the ladies in the factory. And on the last day of my visit, I searched out a market to purchase some thirty or so meaningless items that I could offer to the ladies in the factory on my return. 

I consider that the ladies might have recognized that this was a tradition organized by my father and I had become just a vehicle for him to continue to ingratiate himself to the ladies who worked for him, and perhaps the gesture served as a subtle way of informing the ladies that I was meant to be a future factory-owner and their boss. Through me my father promised the continuity of his presence and power. My trip became a mission organized for the enhancement of his relationship with his workers. The joy with which I planned and enjoyed my trip became compromised by my father’s directive. And I wonder now was it the women for whom I purchased the trinkets or was it for my father? 

The narrator of W.G. Sebald’s novel, The Rings of Saturn recounts (and paraphrases) the words of the Vicomte Chateaubriand, who had written, “Memories lie slumbering within us for months quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life . . . what would be without memory? We would not be capable of ordering even the simplest thoughts, the most sensitive heart would lose the ability to show affection, our existence would be a mere never-ending chain of meaningless moments, and there would not be the faintest trace of a past.” Memory acknowledges the existence of Self, the insertion of self between space and time. No, I believe that memory creates the self. Without memory we would live completely in the present and would know nothing. Our observation of the world is not perfectly of the world; that observation requires the existence—the creation— of a distance that permits that observation to become knowledge, and this occurs by the insertion of time (and space) that acknowledges the Self remembering. I come to exist.

It was just a trifle.