A New Way Of Seeing Things

R reminds me each day how much time before we leave for Kauai. I’ve been trying to get in the mood for travel. Psyched, as they say. I’m not big on travel these days, maybe it’s age, maybe it’s the disintegration of everything, the ravages of pandemic and climate change catastrophe and war and neoliberal economics, the sadness, the despair and graffiti and prostitution. I try turning all that around like a lazy Susan to look at the benefits of travel. There are constants. Travel is stressful, but also stimulating, I mean hugely stimulating, everything is new, dislocated, you’re outside time, outside your anesthetizing habits, the structure of events and people you’ve built around your life, the architecture of the everyday. You’re displaced. Tired. Craving rest. Quiet. There’s excitement as soon as you enter a lobby and go through the usual ritual. Get a key card, open the door, walk in, and the quiet embraces you, pulls you into its comfort zone. Flop on the bed. Ignore the luggage. Wallow in that interval between disarray and hurry and pandemonium. That’s what I love about hotels: the voluptuousness of anonymity.

Take that Edward Hopper painting, for example, Hotel Room, with the woman sitting on the edge of a freshly made bed wearing nothing but a slip and holding a thick paperback on her lap; it’s such a wonderful moment, so relaxed, her luggage still on the floor, unpacked, plenty of time to get to it later, but for now what’s important, is this book, this riveting passage, this loaf of time. The writer said this is a painting of loneliness. No it’s not. Does this woman look lonely to you? Is this an American obsession, loneliness? Like there’s something weird about being alone, or feeling comfortable in whatever solitude one can grab for oneself, and simplicity, the wonderful simplicity that comes with solitude, when the madhouse pandemonium of the social arena has been shoved sweetly aside and the time has come to focus, to let the senses dilate, and discover life.

Hotels are inherently literary. You sense it immediately as soon as you step into the lobby. If it’s a big lobby you’re in a big production. Expect to see Fred Astaire tap dance toward your luggage. Mae West will hold the elevator door for you. If it’s a small hotel there’ll be a little bell on the counter and a woman in a polka dot dress reading Sense and Sensibility on Kindle. Always, Ritz or Ramada, is a desk in the room. It’s inviting in a strange way. It seems to be saying come here and write something. Something full of Weltschmertz and charm. Insights are the flowers of inquiry. Regrets are the currency of the street. The coinage of alienation. And so I made my decision. I’m mailing myself to the Kuiper Asteroid Belt, c/o God, or anyone willing to take me. Dear Universe I’m a refugee stuck at the border between grim acceptance and Edward Hopper can you get me out of here I’ll do anything you ask (within reason).

A change of medium can be psychotropic. I recommend water skiing when it comes to anything boisterous and fun and maintaining balance. Parasailing whenever you feel cherubic like Reubens. And when it comes to the supramundane we have romance, knights with lances in good humor, exchanging jokes and making light of the situation, the dark ages and all of its underlying factors, such as the sheer irrationality of human behavior, and the need for armor. Dragons are a blessing. They bring a vivid energy to our discussions around the fire. So please. Enjoy the conjecture. Electrical current is a circular flow. The electric field that is applied to the wire causes the electrons that are inside the wire to move. This movement involves electrical resistance, which in turn causes heat, and the emission of photons, or Huckleberry Finn. You and a book under a lamp. You and a lamp and Vivaldi riding the canals of Venice with a violin.

I watch a YouTube video about Edward Hopper. I have a poet friend very much interested in Hopper and we exchanged some email concerning Hopper and the knee-jerk assumption of loneliness in his paintings. There’s so much more than mere loneliness going on in his paintings. As for YouTube, it’s become a major feature of my life. I listen to music almost constantly. When I saw the reference to Hopper in the YouTube feed, it was a little disquieting, a sure sign of surveillance. Most of the time, I’m amused by the choices the algorithms cough up, depending on the patterns of my listening history. Lots of classical (Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi) and lots of rock, The Kills, Mark Lanegan, Bob Dylan, Karen Carpenter. Yes, Karen Carpenter. That one surprised me. But her voice is sublime. Likewise Yvonne Elliman, Etta James and Aretha Franklin. And whenever the upstairs neighbors starts banging around in the kitchen I go in search of big sounds, full sounds, a density of music whose volumes and intricacies are oceanic. 

I listen to music a lot, generally on earphones. It’s become an environment, an immersion, like Jonah in the whale. In a real whale you’d be mucking about in krill and hydrochloric acid. But this is an allegorical whale. The immersion is biblical. It’s in the belly of the whale that Jonah finds revelation, a dissolution of the ego that leads to a divine understanding. Immersion is conversion. Consciousness becomes cosmic. Oceanic. And when the whale vomits Jonah on a beach, he becomes a mighty surfer, and people come to listen to his story of immersion at night before a flaming bonfire, which I just now added, because I like bonfires, they remind me of good times, and because I’m a whale. The universe is a perpetual, protean swarming of things, a theatre of ephemeral phenomena. We’re processes. We’re flux. And 180 tons of blubber.