Reason for Being in the World, Ch. 9
Welträson
Regular readers know I’m drafting Reason for Being in the World as I go, detailing the preconceived chapters as I begin to write them, so, as once before, I recognize a chapter that looms too large for Substack. I need to divide it in parts. This final chapter, “Welträson,” appears before me, for current purposes, two, maybe three parts. We’ll see.
Further for now, I want to offer a big thank you to my latest Founding Subscriber, Norman Mailer scholar and OG Vitruvian, the estimable
. Makes me want to ride that horse. Thank you, Enid.Writers can get down in the face of their challenges. You’ll read that below. Your support lifts me up. Your readership and your likes, your comments, shares, and recommendations, and your free and paid subscriptions enable me in the project of my writing life. Thank you again.
Part 1: No Hiding Place
I bought a new, black, wide brimmed Italian Fedora, with black and white headband and feather. It joined on the rack the smaller, brown, New York Makin version I’d been wearing since my high-flying executive heyday of the early 1980s. I matched the black Fedora with a new, black, single-breasted, slim-fit wool overcoat of the kind I never got to wear in Los Angeles. In that heyday back when, I dressed like that. I dined out and drank a lot, all over Manhattan, mostly, sometimes in the Boroughs. near the East River, and on “the Island” of Long.
Now, I would be stylin’ for my 68th birthday.
In those earlier days, I was living a dream I shared with a hundred million other young men and women (only a million or so at a time) – of Manhattan’s metropolitan high life. Of art and culture, of the senses, of a celebration of life – of yourself if you got lucky.
New York was drama then
as now, nova of secret and public dreams
scorching young and old in its halo.1
I’d left all that behind thirty years earlier.
When I walked away from my business success to write, to return to college, and then go to graduate school, I also reversed my financial trajectory in life. I had rejected the prospect of wealth for values I held dearer, and what followed, then, was more than a decade’s downward financial course.
For almost all my graduate years, I was the fortunate recipient of full university fellowships, with TA-ships attached, but nearly a decade older than most of my classmates as I was, I still had to work to support myself, usually night shifts, managing — through continuing connections in the air courier business — a trucking transshipment warehouse in lower Manhattan’s Tribeca. Then, usually a meticulous planner, I made one of a few miscalculations in my life for which I’ve paid a literal price.
In those days, Columbia University’s graduate program in English required, rather than one master’s essay, as with most programs, two, which I completed over two years, part-time, because of my working fulltime. My first essay, “A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man: The Word Made Flesh,” was nominated for the M.A. essay prize. So was my second, Milton’s “‘Lycidas’: Pastoral Anti-Pastoral.” Neither essay won the prize, which, in its close-but-not-quite character, has been typical of my writing life. Nonetheless, the nominations were an honor and they no doubt aided my acceptance into the doctoral program, which was not automatic.
Another atypical characteristic of the Columbia program in those days was that it was designed to make money off its graduate students. It did this by accepting substantially larger classes than its peers. Whereas the other Ivies and major programs were mostly already fully funding small classes of grad students all the way through to the Ph.D., Columbia did not. Most master’s students, many of whom had not been fianced from the start, didn’t make the cut. A similar situation, on a smaller scale, carried through to the doctoral program, with insufficiently budgeted resources to fund all the students. Each year, tough decisions had to be made. Nonetheless, I was not only accepted into what was, technically, an M. Phil. program prior to the dissertation, but I received again a university fellowship.
I also had to submit, now, an M. Phil. paper. I wrote multiple papers that year, now full-time, and I was free to designate any one of them as, officially, the M. Phil. paper. Since Hemingway, like Joyce, was a specialty of mine, I chose “Hemingways of Knowing” as my official submission at the end of the spring semester. And I chose, in order to give the important paper my full attention, to save it for last. This proved to be an error in judgment, I submitted it a couple of days past the due date. And I lost my fellowship — a $13 thousand value — for the coming year.
Appeal to the director of the doctoral program that I had submitted three other papers before that date and that I might have designated any one of them as my M. Phil. paper may have touched his heart, but it did not unlock it. I had given the committee opportunity, and a rationale, to spread the money around.
My growing debt spiraled to a level that prohibited the kind of life in New York that provided someone with my tastes and interests reason to continue to live in New York, so with my classwork behind me, along with my written comprehensive and two foreign language translation exams, and a long period of study for my oral comprehensive exam still ahead of me, my romantic partner and I drove a Ryder truck across the Hudson River toward a new life — for a few years, we thought — in San Francisco. Waylaid along the way in Minnesota, I arrived, instead, three years later, in Los Angeles, bankrupt, broke, and alone.
I recount this episode, in part, to explain why Columbia University alumni fund-raising appeals to me may touch my heart but do not unlock it.
Decades later, never having intended to leave New York for good, but with circumstances having led me to remain in Los Angeles, I sorely needed to live in New York again.
So it was that the ever game and supportive Julia — who had founded an organization named the Los Angeles Center of Photography, which perforce needed to remain in Los Angeles — accommodated my desire and the budget-torturing regime (with my heavy teaching schedule) necessary for us to live for a time in both cities at once.
I became, at last, after originally dreaming it on my first trip to California, at 17, bicoastal.
Having left New York late in my 30s and returned to live in it in my 60s, I was, of course, a different person from the one recalled in memory. I belonged to the city, but the city no longer belonged to me. On subway trains in 1989, I rumbled through the dark tunnels of the city one of many dreaming dreamers among my cohort of striving New Yorkers. In 2016, I would look around me and think, you are the oldest person in this subway car. The discontinuities were everywhere, on the buses, in the streets and parks, sitting in restaurants. People around me decades younger had lived a whole epoch of New York City life — their whole lives — in a New York City that, despite my regular visits, had not contained, as part of its history, me.
Still, I embraced what I could of a second chance. Gladly traveling by public transportation, daily to work, on weekend jaunts around town, and out for the evening with friends, I tapped out half the poems of Waiting for Word on my smartphone while riding the Q25 bus from Jamaica to Queens College, the Q train over the East River, in sight of New York Harbor, the SBS bus over the Whitestone Bridge from the Bronx into Queens, the vision of Manhattan’s skyline in the distance recalled from childhood, the name Trump Links not, yet still scarred into the lawn to the bridge’s left, while the La Guardia jets launched into the sky to the south.
I couldn’t go home again, but I could return to New York.
“Where you headed?” the Uber driver asked me that first dark, early morning heading out from our small studio apartment off Prospect Park to JFK for a flight to L.A.
I told him.
“You on vacation?”
“No. I live there.”
“So you were on vacation here?”
“No,” I said, anticipating the direction of our conversation. “I live here, too.”
He glanced at me in the rear-view mirror. “You a producer?”
I had dreaded this moment, in part because our circumstances were so very far from what my friendly driver was at that moment imagining. If there is another person in the world who in my financial circumstances would have extended himself over a daily-monitored checking account to live in two different cities a continent apart at the same time, I’d like to meet him and form a brotherhood. I have been even thus, but I was never “a producer.”
Once, I might have enjoyed the misapprehension, enjoyed even more the reality of affordable luxury to live in multiple cities, but I was no longer the young man who dreamed of that kind of exhibitable, affluent ease, Soon after returning to New York, I had made Sutton Place’s quiet reaches, along the East River, one of multiple locations I hadn’t visited in years, a stop on my return tour of the city. Walking its relatively short stretch, I found its light, off the river, oddly rarified — as I’d sensed it, too, when Julia and I drove the long winding mountain roads that approach the Riviera. It felt rarified in an unseemly way. The children I watched exit doorman buildings into chauffeured cars, I thought, were passing through a portal from which it would require the most extraordinary effort to exit into the world of ordinary human fellowship. For the first time, I felt sharply — after a youth of only modest envy of my mostly more affluent friends — that I was glad I had been born into a working class immigrant family, however unlike it I gave the impression.
Regardless, I still enjoyed wearing an expensive hat, with a stylish coat over a fine jacket, and the finest of what Manhattan had to offer. That Thursday evening in March, before my birthday, Julia moderated a discussion with photographer Fran Forman at the Strand Bookstore. After, we dined nearby on the best Neapolitan pizza in the city at Ribalta, with the restaurant full. For the next evening, along with my oldest friend and his wife, we had tickets to see the new, fully reconceived, Justin Peck-choreographed West Side Story on Broadway. On Saturday, my birthday, Julia and I would make our appearance in new apparel 60 stories above lower Manhattan, to dine at Manhatta. Sunday, after a grand week, Julia would fly back to L.A. without me, while I remained behind, already teaching my classes online, and figured out what to do with the contents of the apartment.
But early Friday morning, I received the email informing me that Broadway was going dark. Only a couple of hours later, Manhatta wrote its patrons that it, too, was shuttering. The world was closing up, flights were canceling, and who knew what was coming. I said to Julia, the way things are looking, if you return to L.A. without me, we don’t know when we’ll see each other again. So I booked the seat next to Julia on her Sunday flight. We boarded a plane only a quarter full in an empty JFK airport that echoed post-apocalyptic. And that was how we left New York and the apartment we never saw again.
Downtown Los Angeles, to which we retreated, also felt post-apocalyptic. By 2020, we’d been living there nearly a decade, during DTLA’s great construction boom and residential revival. Still, five times as many people commuted into work as lived there and they were all now gone. The homeless population, the worst in the nation — consisting. downtown, overwhelmingly of the substance addicted and mentally ill, often both — had spread out of skid row into the otherwise deserted streets, wandering them now like ghosts of Macondo. With fitness centers closed, and as I continued to work on Waiting for Word, I took to long hikes, sometimes over the city’s hill trails, often, more conveniently, ranging all across the downtown streets.
Through the spring and into the summer, as deaths soared around the nation and the world, and those vacant streets loomed ahead of me, the atmosphere was stark, my mood, as the 2020 presidential election approached, despairing. Even after the predicted cruelty, corruption, and, finally, disastrous authoritarianism of Trump’s term as president, the chances seemed good that he would be reelected. I despaired not just at that prospect but at the state of the humanity that would return him to power.
I listened to music through earbuds as I walked, a melancholy playlist of my own creation. I was repeating my experience — the first time, riding my bike beside the Pacific Ocean — in the aftermath of 9/11. Then, too, I sank under the weight of a tragic apprehension, the eternal recurrence of our long human malady.
There are those, more actually or performatively cynical than I, who might scoff at such feelings of surprise. How could any educated person, fully exposed to the record of barbarity that marks the rise of what we call civilization, any Jew living in the aftermath of the Holocaust, feel freshly, personally wounded at a recurrence of evil?
Good for those people that they wear such armor. But isn’t one of the lessons of a fully humanized life a recognition of the difference between knowledge conceptually acquired and a thing learned, even relearned, through experience? Isn’t that why I write this accounting?
Knowledge is of the body as well as the mind.
I had begun fully to form my own tragic vision of earthly time, following on childhood and teenage experience, as soon as I entered the City College of New York, where I first read the Greeks, from whom one learns, extracted out of experience thousands of years before our own, that things are never going to end well. I read Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche. In my darkest night I read Camus. Still reading him, I read a lot of Hemingway.
This was a period in my mid-twenties just a couple of years before the personal salvation of my business career, before I was transformed by acting and doing and not just thinking and feeling. Out of college again, I had moved to Los Angeles for the first time to escape a haunting, inescapable love affair.
“The problem is all inside your head”
She said to me
“The answer is easy if you
Take it logically
I’d like to help you in your struggle
To be free
There must be fifty ways
To leave your lover.”2
That was when I re-encountered Tony Alda.
But I had returned after just three months, found a very old one-bedroom apartment on a timeworn West 93rd Street between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. I haunted, literally, Riverside Park, reading on its benches, blinding myself staring into the glare of the Hudson’s sparkling light. This was the old, pre-World War II Upper West Side of Manhattan, long before the current, reconstructed bougie incarnation. Young, pretty prostitutes still strolled Broadway in the evenings. I couldn’t afford them. There was one, light skinned African American who approached me repeatedly . . .
I supported myself with odd job after odd job. I boarded dogs. Late into the night, every night, I was reading all of Hemingway’s short stories, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, that first big biography, by Carlos Baker. I was dreaming more vividly than I had since childhood or ever since. In a crime-ridden Upper West Side, dream intruders kept entering my apartment in the night. Once, at the entrance to my bedroom, he shot me dead center in the stomach confronting him. I fell to the floor, felt the life radiating out of me in waves. I knew I was dying. I was about to die.
Another time, I left my bed at the sound of intrusion, entered the living room to find its two large, twin windows thrown open, the moonlight shining through blowing curtains. I climbed onto the sill to look out but saw nothing, turned, standing in the open window as if the intruder, to peer back in.
I understood from “Big Two-Hearted River,” as I did from Camus, that in encountering the world that loomed before me, I would need to find within myself the resources to live, that like Robert Jordan, what there would be in the end, as I took aim at what it was coming for me, was my own “heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest.”
One of the songs on my 2020 hiking playlist was “I See the Sign,” by contemporary folksinger Sam Amidon. Amidon’s version of the traditional song first appeared on his own 2010 album, but the version I first discovered was his performance of it with the Kronos Quartet, on their 2017 Folk Songs. Both versions are extraordinary, with the Quartet’s rendition largely employing the musical parts of Amidon’s own stripped-down arrangement, but with the further inventiveness of adapting the arrangement to the resources of the quartet.
The origins of the song are hard to pin down, like so much American traditional folk music, with histories tracing back to Ireland, England and Scotland and even the European Middle Ages. The earliest history I find for “I See the Sign” is actually as an African American congregational “ring shout” song titled “Sign of the Judgment.”
I see the sign I see the sign Hey Lord time draws nigh
The “ring shout” originated among African slaves, who were deprived of any musical instruments, so substituted hand clapping and foot stomping for rhythmic accompaniment.
The sign of the judgment A sign of the judgment Hey Lord time draws nigh
One can find original-sounding versions performed by the McIntosh County Shouters. Rhythmic and fast, with little attention to vocal performance, it is a very different song from what Amidon makes of it with his supple vocal. Slow and dirge-like, with one line altered so that despite the obvious religious nature, there is no direct reference to Jesus, we hear not a congregational celebration of faith, but a tragic lament of judgment coming. And the lyric, whoever authored it, is haunting in its imagery and suggestion.
Loose horse in the valley Loose horse in the valley Loose horse in the valley Loose horse in the valley Hey Lord time draws nigh Tell me who's gonna ride him Who's gonna ride him Who's gonna ride him Tell me who is gonna ride him Hey Lord time draws nigh
“Loose horse in the valley.” Is it an image of chaos, of wild time needing to be harnessed? Of the judgment coming? Amidon, out of a Vermont folk heritage, renders the song more mid-Atlantic, more Appalachian, with transcendent, judgmental doom sounding more baked into culture than theologically specific.
Said I come out the corner Come out the corner
Striding quickly under my backpack north of Chinatown, with Radio Hill and Elysian Park rising up on my left, the old Southern Pacific Railyard, now Los Angeles State Historic Park, below me on the right, I internalized it all. I had written “Impolitic Manifesto” for the poetry collection, to mark the history and what we had done to ourselves. “For we cannot know the end of what we do, / though what we do will end.” I was approaching the Broadway Bridge over the Los Angeles River, a concrete aqueduct engineered by the Army Corps over the natural bed to cure the history of disastrous flooding that had plagued the Los Angeles basin.
Said, I run to the rock
Run to the rock
Run to the rock
Said, I run to the rock
Hey, Lord, time draws nigh
But the rock cried out
Rock cried out
Rock cried out
No hiding place
No hiding place
Hey, Lord, time draws nigh
I was over the bridge now, across the river, into Lincoln Heights, one of L.A.’s oldest neighborhoods. It has been transformed many times over nearly two centuries, mostly by immigrant populations. The original East L.A. before the name change, they were Mexican, Italian, Irish, French, industrial workers, many, who worked the businesses that lined the naked banks of the river before the Army Corps completed the channelization in 1960.
Dark clouds a'rising
Dark clouds a'rising
Dark clouds a'rising
Hey, Lord, time draws nigh
Sunk in my dread, I marched on along, up North Broadway, until I turned around and headed home. I crossed a different bridge over the river when I came to it.
AJA
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
from “This New England Spring,” published in Footnote #1: A Literary Journal of History.
from Paul Simon’s “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover,” on Still Crazy After All These Years.
Love the photo with your hats and that Kevorkian gift certificate (am I showing my age, knowing who he is?).
The way that 2020 COVID changed our lives strikes me only partially as the metaphor that holds this eloquently written memoir. I say partially because I infer the Trump oligarchy foreshadowed here. Maybe right, maybe wrong.
One thing for sure, Jay, the writing is "virtually" unputdownable. Kudos, my friend.