The Answer’s in the Book
I’ve been reading two books that reach for us, readers, both extensively far into our pasts and down to the moment. Noé Álvarez’s Accordion Eulogies does the first, foremost, to understand the music of his family’s past, so-to-speak. More teaser than spoiler, if you’ve wondered about your own journey—or the broken steps of a system or state that astonish you for what they have left—you may find that Accordion Eulogies has a meditative heart after all.
For, if we are down to moments (including how one makes coffee or tea, notices the slanted light, or the voice and countenance of another stumbling through words to say they’ve had enough)—as Patrick Holloway parses in The Language of Remembering—you’ll probably find comfort in this kind of language: “Sometimes you can see further down the line, things crumbling, peeling away. A distance doubling and doubling between you.” (Yet): “Pushing the lid down, the smell of coffee reminds you of so many things: mornings as a child, walking sleepily into the…room.”
How many times have I walked sleepily into the room? How welcoming, that sunlight.
Light comes through the window. We are each not apart from that. We thrive, seen or unseen, like the planted thing: is it ever too late for the rain?
Tulips, arms akimbo, stretch and reach from the thick frosted glass container as if the day outside is what the tulips know. Ivory tulips open silky petals like legs in nearly blinding light. The seeds, stamen, poke at the height of some readiness that defines itself with apex, life. Burgundy others pinch their faces into fists that also feature lips, as if to wage compromise: how best to survive? We, in our little glories, ball up or open and reach and persist but these flowers “still in time” are the heart stopped; not dead, not gone, not at all having left.
Patrick Holloway’s main character says, “It feels mundane, all of it, the world itself, a humongous ball spinning out prosaic plans to keep everyone busy, busy, running this way and that to stay alive and keep the ones you love alive, while most of the time never really living.”
Virginia Woolf “exorcised” the disadvantages, the terrible griefs, the daily despairs, with an abundance of happiness where it could be found—never in cruelty but in thought; the observation noticed and taken in before lost. Open. Like silk pages where in the interior words grow, from having known. Stem, sea, cord; breeze, saltwater, sand; someone was a painter, someone used words, the battles would subsume strangers and loved ones before the wars would be subsumed by living—elsewhere or in the interiors. A lighthouse could be a candle, match, one glint. It may as well be moons and mornings, the glimpse of somebody doing the things that fill their day, the shade reflected that remains the mysterious color. The disappearance, and only because you know its features, the substance returns.
“What are you still chasing?” asks Álvarez in Accordion Eulogies and sometimes I have chased that answer and other times I leave it be. Set it down. Let the sun make silhouettes replacing the question.
As if a parallel subject, I repeat to myself: people are suffering. The equity map is disproportionate. There’s room for all. To this I add incantations: folded hands, temple, touch, safety, mound, sail. Cave, earth, structure, turned pages, loosely bound. The words become chimes and destinations, hopeful rests along the journey. With them I will a resolve to a new way.
Who’s willing to wait 99 days? Nine seconds, nine hours, nine days: to not tire. “From the blur after 99 days, emerges the subject” Carole Maso writes. Patience gives into action because the subject emerges, literature teaches us. Of all the Arts, writing is probably the best teacher of this.
The day begins to warm my back and a fire seems to widen and narrow the lamp over a book loosely about Tolstoy. As famous as he was in his life, the great writer Tolstoy was treated unfairly when—in disguise—he roamed his country for new stories. “Ah, this is how it feels…” he might have said inside.
Stories remind us that it’s not the disguise but the kindness that opens eyes. It’s not the lamp, really, it’s the light.
…
Human beings continue the theatre of what they think will solve a temporary problem. This is one thing books can mitigate. “Live with it a while,” Bernard Shaw might have said to the actor. Find the rhythms in your blood, Agnes de Mille might have encouraged. She also insisted that we must listen to our conscience. I want to believe the enigmatic emotionally empathetic parts of the Cosmos guide our consciences. We can invite this into our lives, yes?
Do the meditation, do the meditation, do the meditation rock, Ginsberg sang. I’ve heard it in Jack Kerouac’s own improvisations, recorded: the novelist-poet who died short of his long lasting visions meditated. (At what abuse of the body does the mind defend, willing to mend?) Time is a theater, a stage to behold.
I come here to mix with people, I think. Thank goodness the theater is active again. There’s life in the stationary words in a script. I want to feel connected to that. I walk the block, fortunately in sunshine that is warm but not too hot; I could walk it in a rain or snowstorm too but people are out today. We are a city of each other. I step inside the “Library & Gallery.” They don’t know I’m a secret painter, an actor on behalf of my own imaginary beholding. I overhear a conversation with a possible benefactor, someone who has been building up this town as it looks more like a city—but a hip one, fortunately, so far, until the tables turn. I decide to buy a book. One of the gallery artists is in a chair near me, waiting to speak to the director. The director knows I share an office with a famous author, let’s establish, and as he mentions this, I realize I am buying a book that my office mate also has in the office. I could borrow the copy that’s likely five feet from my desk or I can continue and purchase this one. I am too embarrassed, and I am also feeling generous—although I have no job that pays, at the moment, except occasional gigs with the band. Or if I sell a painting. “Secret painter,” be known! I am supporting the Arts, I say inside the recess of my farthest brain. I know I am. It is an act of kindness from which I will benefit, have benefited, because in fact I sat with that book for a half hour. The book is Exposition, by Nathalie Léger; I’ve always wanted to speak French—and feigned, or got by, a couple of times. I am immediately taken by Léger’s writing, just as I was many, many, many months ago when I walked into the gallery for the first time. The same conversation was had, almost: your office mate, Peter, he also likes those books. We are of a similar mind, that Peter and me.
“the perpetual work of beauty,” (it begins in the lower case,) “all of this work for a glance.”
It strikes me as the sunshine does, as I figure eight around the block, checking in with the gallery, visiting Kim at Revolution clothing (she offers me an oat milk latte and I happily accept), window shopping, appreciating the customers at the Turkish restaurant and at the vintage shop, noting which odd or classic items I would buy if I were buying, which pottery I could use if I needed it or if I knew a friend who was getting married. And I walk the steep stairs to where the theater’s premiere red carpet is set up and I feel…excited by this: the theatre! And here I am, passing through.
If I waste time it is time made, time contributed, a matter—like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly scene with the eye blinking and gulp sounds—reminding me that this is the only this. The hem of the day is the beginning of the night. The further on is the delight of morning. The song is also the key. The key does not necessarily turn the lock. Opening the lock is not necessarily anyone’s goal. I fall into appreciation during these moments, like I have gone somewhere, to some new and strange country that almost immediately feels familiar and safe, supportive and challenging. I am writing again, I am beholding what I feel on my back, warming me to an impossibility if I were no longer here. Let this be a lesson. But, as lesson, allow it to be an endless moment changing. I can live with this, just as I do having spent money I don’t think I really have on a book by a French writer who sends me now. I am, after all, a companion traveler.
Peter Money is a poet, playwright, and author of the novel Oh When the Saints (Dublin). His writing has appeared in The Irish Times, The Sun, American Poetry Review, on The Writer’s Almanac and RTE Radio 1 Ireland (“Loves: Silence and the Music of JS Bach”). Peter plays in the bard band Los Lorcas. His mentor was Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg. Part of this essay will appear in a forthcoming memoir.