Fugue #78

The decision to go feels like you’re almost there.

Paul didn’t take much convincing. Well, any convincing. That night he was into the wine, ha, and into long speeches about time and place and context - mix tapes, even. Ana saw her chance and jumped.

She was excited, and anxious: To be on the road with him, to visit schools, to see her mom and step-dad in L.A. And hopefully lower the stress by bringing this new boy.

(On the telephone with her mother last night:
- So who is this new boy?
- Somebody who lives in my neighborhood.
- What’s his name?
- Paul.
- Paul? Hmmm...
- What? What’s wrong with that name, Mom?
- Nothing. Where’s he from, originally?
- I don’t know.
- You don’t know?!)

They had worked out the ground rules for the radio last night. Driver’s choice - and the driver changes every two hours. One passenger veto every six hours, and they planned to do twelve hours every day. Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, Ana wondered if they could they get all the way to Chicago today.

Fugue #77

"When people got to the first coast - when the boats landed at Jamestown or Plymouth Rock - they carved out places for themselves and pushed the Native Americans back. From there, there was only West, all the land was in front of them. And they pushed farther, hearing Manifest Destiny’s monotone instruction: ‘If you take it, it’s yours, now go.’

When they got to the second coast, 200 some years and ten generations later, there was only East. All the land was behind them. Some people stopped along the way. We did, obviously. We quit halfway - not because it was too hard to keep going, but because we wanted to stay.

We don’t have an ocean in front of us or behind. We don’t have a sunrise from across the water to announce the new day, or a sunset from across the water to remind us to put today to rest. We have land, and more land. An ocean of land, and rowcrops to catch the sun like waves."

Paul smiles at his grandfather, "Yeah, it does seem like an ocean sometimes."

"And these little towns are like islands." His grandfather smiles back. He fought in the South Pacific during the War.

Fugue #76

The young Neil Marbell: documentary photographer.

Writer first, then documentary photographer. Ok, student first, then writer. Then documentary photographer.

Document everything. Keep a journal, take pictures. Let them know. Let them know you were here.

"This is where we are. This is what we see. And this (a broad wide-armed gesture across and around his studio) is what we think and do about it."

He’s talking to a group of like-minded friends, and they’re trying to decide whether to form a collective (fuck, yeah!), and what to call it. Someone suggests "Project Counter Point."

(Deena smiles. She knows Neil is full of himself - his horn-rimmed glasses, his tight white t-shirt, his rumpled hair, his permanently pained look of exploration and expression. But he’s also smart, and he clearly adores her. And there isn’t a mean bone in his body. Plenty of pompous ones, but none that would ever hurt her, none that would ever betray her trust.)

And a motto. Neil opens his notebook:

Add light, make a shadow.
More light, more shadow.
Move the light, move the shadow.

Fugue #75

Ana holds the fortune in her left hand, traces its outline with her right index finger, places it on the table, blinks, and reaches for her wallet. Behind her driver’s license is another fortune.

Yep. It’s the same. The same fortune she got in high school - on that Christmas trip into the city to see Cats. They ate Chinese before the show. She had Mongolian Beef and an eggroll. Her mom had something with shrimp. And her dad had hot and sour soup and something that looked gross and smelled worse. She had been practicing with chopsticks for weeks and didn’t disappoint herself when her food arrived. Her parents complimented her, but didn’t speak very much to each other. The tea was too hot, and the cookie was too bland.

"There is prospect of a thrilling time ahead for you."

It seemed so perfect. It summed up what she felt, how she saw the world and her place in it. Where she would go.

She realizes that she’s still waiting. Outside her apartment, she sees Christmas lights hung from condo balconies and snagged in trees, in bushes, along the sidewalk. She thinks about home, singular, this home - and then about all her homes. They got divorced her freshman year in college. Her mom remarried and moved around a lot, ending up in L.A. Her dad stayed in New York.

Fugue #74

"It calls for a lot of patience," Ana explains to the waitress, who’s half-listening to the rhetorical answer to her rhetorical question, "How do you put up with him?" She ignores Ana.

"I’m teasing," the waitress pats Paul’s shoulder and winks, "you’re cute."

Ana, half-jealous, raised eyebrows:
- Wow, I never noticed. You are cute!
- C’mon now.
He blushes, dips a fry in ketchup, bites it.
- I’m not really that hard to put up with, am I?
- No. You’re ok.
She smiles, drinks some coffee, holds her cup between her cold hands, elbows on the table, eyes him over its lip, puts it down to steal a fry.
- What were we talking about before?
- How bad that coffee tastes?
- No, before that.
- Oh, L.A.

She looks out the window. Addresses.

- I don’t know my way around there. I haven’t visited my mom much since she moved. I’ve only been to this house once, actually.
- Nice? Big?
- Yeah, both, I guess. It doesn’t feel like home.

Fugue #73

Meeting and separating. Drifting apart, coming together, again. To complement and detract, distract. Unravel, ravel, weave and lock together into a threnodic pulse. Sometimes I can see them even, farther apart, then suddenly closer.

Power lines with electron messages - strung sagging and pinned to poles, still. Between them, like beads on necklace, red balls to warn the prop planes. The higher wire is taughter, straighter than the bottom wire, which droops down and rises up to the next pole, holding your eye with its movement.

After ten miles, the wires go up and keep going, and there the hills begin. Rising gently from the flat fields on either side of the road - the road cuts through them - steeper now, they cast a shadow that you drive through. The hills rising falling rising and always hiding the fields behind them. Until you can start to fool yourself that the fields aren't there anymore. That climbing that row of hills, to the last blades of grass, you could peer off into nothing.

This is the end of the world.

Fugue #72

Let’s talk about how that applies in the context of today’s literature.

Rhythms repeat. (And echo off our minds’ back walls.) Point, counterpoint...

We aren’t ATOMS, we’re MOLECULES. We emerge as parts of communities and networks. Webs of simultaneous narratives, the din of which, at a certain remove, becomes a pleasant hum.

Back to Frost...he insists that poetry requires complete freedom to move about in and establish relations within the material - regardless of time or space. (WE ARE EVERYWHERE.)

Seriously, here we go:

"The artist must value himself as he snatches a thing from some previous order in time and space into a new order with not so much as ligature clinging to it of the old place where it was organic."

He’s right, and he’s wrong. Right about the need for freedom to REecontextualize influences, but wrong about the need to DEcontextualize them. There is simply no way to remove all the ligatures - all the sticky details of context that necessarily affect the meaning of the material. We take the material with its context in tact, and use it for our own purposes...sometimes because of, but often despite that context.

Fugue #71

Ana at home, eating Chinese with Enbal.

"Does it ever feel colonial to you?"

She laughs and puts on the paddy hat that her father brought home for her from Thailand last year. She finishes her rice, and opens a fortune cookie.

Enbal, shaking her head:
- What’s it say?
- "There is a prospect of a thrilling time ahead for you."
- In bed.
- What?
- Did you ever play that game? Adding "in bed" after a somebody reads their fortune?
- Ha, no. What about yours?
- So is Paul coming over tonight?
- You’re an ass. What’s your fortune say?
- "You are the center of every group’s attention."
- In bed?
- So true! (wink) Is Paul coming over tonight?
- No.
- Have you talked to him today?
- Yes.
- How many times?
- Oh my god, what’s with you tonight?

Fugue #70

- Ana?
- Paul?
- Come with me.

They leave the football field, the marching band’s echo bounding over the terraced fields all the way to the horizon. They walk across the gravel road ringing the high school and out into the fields.

- Is this where...
- Yep.
- Wow.

Ana walks between haystacks. They surround her and buoy her up, figuratively toward a blue sky full of clouds.

Dreams, now a drifting white cloud, pass behind your eyes. Ideas forming about your life, and what do you want to do? Yes and no, and maybe this is so, this is not, and I could be anything.

The possibilities are limited only by your imagination.

She spins around and again. Then stops.

Paul is sitting on the ground, hands behind, legs out, knees bent. He twirls a straw back and forth in his mouth, then tosses it to the ground. His eyes fill with tears, which wait, then pour down his cheeks, as he lowers his head.

"Hey," Ana sees him, "hey..." She kneels next to him, "It’s ok."

He nods.

"We’re going to find it again. It’ll be different, and in some ways, not as good. But we’ll find it. We’re going to. This is the way."

Fugue #69

- I’ll pick you up, then?
- No, I’ll meet you there.

Marbell’s Midsummer Night’s Party. Paul’s late, sweaty, in khakis and a short sleeve white oxford. He looks around the rooftop veranda - there’s Marbell, and Zed, there’s Enbal and...whoa, Ana.

She has a surprise for Paul.
- There are some perks to modeling.
- I’ll say. That dress is....wow, you look great.
- Thanks.

She blushes, lightly checks the strap over her left shoulder and pushes the hair off her forehead, back with an open hand, and holds her wrist in front of her. She looks down, looks up. So does Paul (there’s alot to see). They look up. Their eyes meet.
- Happy Anniversary.
- What?
She’s blushes again, embarrassed.
- I’m sorry, Ana.
- That’s ok. It was a year ago, tomorrow actually, that we met.
- On the stairs?
- You were going up.
- And you were going down, on your way to that concert.
She smiles, weakly.

After the party, after Paul walked her home from the subway, she’s sad again. It’s late, and she steps out of her dress, and into a t-shirt. She goes to the bathroom to pee, to take off her makeup, and to brush her teeth. Then bed. She flicks on her bedside lamp. On her pillow, a daisy with its stem tucked under the covers, and a note:

Thank you for a great year.
Love,
P