Cows in the Mist

Talked to the guys at Southend Cycle today. My bike needs new rear brakes. I knew this, actually. Discovered it over the course of riding last week. They also suggested (strongly) a new chain and sprockets. So by sometime next week (not Saturday, darn it) I’ll have spent as much repairing the thing as I did to buy it in the first place. I was told it should be good for another 6,000 – 8,000 miles with these repairs. That should work out pretty well, and I’ll probably save money in the end anyway by spending less on gas. Besides, riding with a bad chain and bad brakes would be bad for my health, and a few hundred invested in good repair will prevent a lot in hospital bills later on.

“And after all the violence and double talk/There’s just a song in the trouble and the strife” (“Walk of Life,” Dire Straits)

Mark Knopfler gets it. After spending the evening with one of my closest friends, I discovered I have been thinking a great deal about my grandmother. Her mind is gone, torn up by Alzheimer’s at the age of 89. It saddens and scares me. I wonder when and how I will go. Will my mind fail? Will the only thing left of me be this wasted physical shell? Does it matter?

When I got home and found my guitar, I also found my metaphor. This is not a “life” post, but a “literature” post, because it’s the metaphor that I found inspiring and uplifting. The song is the “walk of life,” and we all do it, all the time. Each of us has the motion, all of us can play. It is not limited to the artist to have a unique understanding. The act of living, the striving, the violence, the double talk, the hunger, the anger, the joy — these are the songs we sing. This is the stuff of life. The artist, the poet in particular, helps us to see and sing it, points out to us that we’ve been singing all along.

It brings to mind another, once-upon-a-time-comforting lyric. “‘I am the Lord of the Dance,’ said he.” Sydney Carter got it, too, as did the Shakers before him. The song, the dance, the tune and turning, the dancing, the singing, are the beautiful and ongoing representations of the life that will not die, that does not end. It goes on and on, reincarnating in a sense, through each new generation.

Wallace Stevens’ “Man” could not “bring a world quite round” (see, for our purposes, this excerpt) for good reason. It can’t be perfect. We are replicators, not reincarnators. Our replications are inherently unstable. Evolution demands that be the case. Were we perfect replicators, we could not evolve. And yet, here we are. Not perfect, but here. And so we fail. We break. We die. That is, in the way of things, as it should be. Or, perhaps it just is what it is, with no intention. In any case, our response to the recognition of the end is an inability to accept “things as they are” (Stevens again) and instead to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

And so we do. And in that struggle, in that violence, is the beauty of life, indeed is life itself — this constant struggle and tension between being and not-being. In its two extremes of birth and death, becoming and unbecoming (I know I have fallen here into classic Western dualism, but forgive me), we experience fear, excitement, wonder, awe. It is, after all, a song we all know, though we sometimes forget.

It is good to be reminded, in the midst of the struggle, how the tune goes.

Since I’m so very, very new to motorcycle riding, and I know less about my bike than I do about my Exploder, I figured the first getting-ready-for-summer service should be done by some pros. I picked the guys at Southend Cycle. The Yamaha dealer recommended them, since my bike is so old.

I dropped it off, with some assistance, Saturday morning, and I’ll hopefully rescue it next Saturday. That means I’m without it for a week, though. I’m hoping they get to it early! The weather has been so unbelievable that it feels criminal not to be riding to work. That and the price of gas have me thinking the bike will be my primary mode of transportation this spring and summer. In the meantime, say hello to Metro routes 10 and 217, and Sound Transit 554. Thank T-Mobile for Flex Passes!

Today was my “little” brother’s birthday. I can’t call him my little brother anymore, since I have good friends who are the same age. That, and he’s got two kids. And a house. Seems like he’s probably an adult. Certainly the path of his life has more resembled that of my father’s path than mine. I remain, it seems, the one who just doesn’t quite fit in.

Today is also my grandmother’s birthday. She, of course, is much older than my brother. Eighty-nine, in fact. My dad and I went to see her today. It had been a while for me. I haven’t been avoiding her, just haven’t been as conscientious as I should about seeing her. Really, though, it’s more for my folks, since Grandma won’t know if I’m there or not. She is dying from Alzheimer’s. She is well beyond the point of having enough of a consciousness to deal with the world. She is awake, and clearly maintains some level of interaction with the outside world, but only her name makes her my grandmother. She still reacts to people’s presence, but that’s about it.

See Grandma like this. . . knowing that what I’m seeing sitting there in the wheelchair muttering is not really Grandma at all, not the parts of her that made her who she was, raises a number of questions in my head. Foremost among these is “Why do we let them linger?” It’s not as if there is any hope of recovery, nor is there a medical breakthrough that could reverse the disease. It has eaten away at her brain, taking her consciousness with it, destroying moment by painful moment what 87 years of life had built. And today, on her 89th birthday, it is as clear as it can be to a family member that there is no Grandma-ness left.

So why do we let them linger? There is no honor in her suffering. There is no lesson for her soul to learn. There is no meaningful burden borne here. She doesn’t even know enough now to know that she is suffering. Which makes her, in an odd way, non-suffering, right? But that’s not true. From moment to moment she knows, at a basic level, if she is in pain or not; if she has what she wants (though she cannot name what she wants, nor even speak); if there is someone in front of her. She still reacts to the world, so some small part of Grandma is still present. But it’s not the opinionated, strong, stubborn, I-grew-up-in-the-Depression-so-I-know-about-hardship, smart, cookie-making Grandma of my memory.

Is she suffering? The progression of Alzheimer’s pretty much rules it out. The screwed up blessing of this horrible disease is that after a certain point the calcium-riddled brain doesn’t know that it doesn’t know. The self crumbles away and leaves mineral deposits in its place. That’s not my grandmother anymore.

This has been hard on my dad. Hard, hard, hard. His hair first started thinning when my grandpa died, over twenty years ago now. Grandma’s longer illness and its inexorable outcome have aged him. It’s been a tough, tough year for my folks. I sometimes feel I have not been there enough for them. Especially when we go to visit Grandma, I wonder. . . am I seeing my own future?

I went for a long ride tonight. It started because I had trouble making a right turn coming onto I-90 from I-405 in Bellevue, headed back home, and decided I needed practice. Being a biker, I was in the carpool lane, which veers off sharply from 405, flies up and over I-90, then finally comes back down in a fantastically beautiful feat of engineering. It was, however, quite the problem for me. I was a bit distracted, and not obeying the cardinal rule of riding — look where you want to go. Don’t look at traffic. Don’t look where you are going. Look where you want to go, because your bike will go where you’re looking. Naturally, I looked at a minivan.

Minivans may be the bane of my existence, but on a motorcycle I can be my own worst enemy. A creative mind is a terrible thing to waste, and I remind mine constantly to pay attention or the only thing my brain bucket will be good for is identifying me through dental records. Riding takes a great deal of attention and intention, and seems to require equal parts fear and arrogance. I am learning a lot about myself through riding.

I ended up being out for an hour and a half, initially with the thought that I would make the 90/5/520/405 loop around Lake Washington and take that carpool exit again, this time doing it right. I did, but decided I wasn’t done riding yet. I headed for West Seattle, and rode out along Alki. I’m sure this summer that’ll be a fun drag to cruise along. Tonight it was cold, though. I had planned to go up to Queen Anne from Alki, to look out from Kerry Park at what is, in my opinion, the best view of Seattle that you can find, especially at night. But it was too cold, so I just headed for home. I’m still trying to warm up, but at least I had the sense to get off the road before the cold and the late hour made me unsafe.

This seems to be helping my shoulder. I rode most of the week to and from work, and my shoulder has better motion than it did last week. My orthopedist and my best friend gave me dirty looks about the bike, but if I fall I’ll have much more to worry about than just my semi-healed shoulder, anyway. I am being careful, though, and not staying out too long, since I can tell after about an hour that my shoulder’s had enough and is tired.

I just read Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem. Wow, what a book! I was inspired to read it after breezing through another of his titles, As She Climbed Across the Table. The latter was fun, and playful, and comments on the nature of reality and perception, blah blah blah. But it was stilted in voice. Perhaps that is just a reflection of the setting — a university campus — and the narrator — a professor who studies university social interaction. Talk about insular.

But I digress.

Motherless Brooklyn is nothing short of fantastic. The premise of the book is unrevealing: a small-time mafia hood, who thinks of himself as a private investigator, is trying to solve his boss’ murder. The events of the plot follow along a fairly typical detective-in-the-big-city story (the narrator at several points unselfconsciously compares himself to Bogey’s Marlowe in The Big Sleep). Nothing terribly unique here so far. But then we get the hook. At first glance, it doesn’t seem that having a narrator who suffers from Tourette’s Syndrome would be a useful mechanism. However, Lethem’s Brooklyn orphan (thus the title, though “motherless” is more figurative than the surface meaning), Lionel Essrog, Tourette’s suffer and avid reader, is stunningly drawn. The first-person narrative voice is so utterly convincing and well-crafted that it is difficult to detect any authorial intention. I wager that if I were to pick up a non-fiction account of Tourette’s, I might well find something completely different than what “Freakshow” (as Frank Minna, the missing man, refers to Lionel) believes to be the nature of his condition. Such is Lethem’s power to express his character’s point of view that we are convinced, as readers, that in the context of the novel’s reality, Lionel’s understanding of his condition is the only correct and appropriate one, personal though it may be. While some quick reading of this site (http://www.tourettesyndrome.net/tourette_primer.htm) reveals that the character’s understanding of his syndrome is fairly typical of adult patients, Lethem engages us so completely in his portrait that it simply doesn’t matter if this constructed reality is coherent with an external reality.

Throughout the short novel, Lionel’s tics (physical, mental, social, — simple and complex) limit, inspire, define, and free him. They are a wedge between people, as his somewhat distant relationship with the other orphans attests, while serving to give him an odd intimacy with others, either in fact (his brief relationship with the girl, Kimmery) or through his perception that other people’s life-patterns are somewhat tic-like. In no case, however, does Tourette’s become a plot hook. While Lionel’s relationship with his symptoms can be revelatory to him and help him to make sense of his world, they do not force the narrative down a particular path, nor do they seem intended to inspire any particular response in the reader. As I’ve been hearing often lately, “It is what it is.”

Many of the narrator’s tics seem to be meaningful utterances, gestures, or behaviors. They are not random, as indeed real-world Tourettic compulsions are not. He spends a great deal of time wondering about “Bailey” – a name-like verbal tic that has always been present. The most memorable occurrences of the Bailey tic are at moments when Lionel could be thought to be feeling vulnerable. The most touching of these is near the end of the novel. By then we have come to understand the emotional and internally descriptive content of his tics. Thus, during his last encounter with Kimmery, when she prefaces her announcement of the end of their relationship with “I have to tell you something, Lionel” (309), his reaction, a whispered “Tellmebailey,” is all the description we need to understand the full emotional response he has to her news. This is simply one example of the many ways in which Lionel’s tics inform us (and him) of his internal state. In some ways, they become shorthand for the descriptive language Lethem could have used, but didn’t. So fully are we drawn into the narrator’s world, though, that every coded tic is as meaningful to the reader as to the character.

Given the compulsive and never-ending variations Lionel displays with his verbal ticing, the constant mutilation of his own and others’ language (asked “Are you accusing Tony?” “Accusatony! Excusebaloney! Funnymonopoly!“ (175) is Lionel’s involuntary response), there is one progression that is curiously absent. It is this, I believe, that is a clue left by the author, the barest shimmer of intention that we can use to unravel the real mystery of this story – the “onelineness” (to borrow from e. e. cummings) of the characters, their disconnectedness in this city of tens of millions.

I was cat-sitting for some friends while I read Motherless Brooklyn, and thanks to a cuddly little calico named Bella (bella bella bo-bella), I stumbled on a Tourettic progression that is significant in its absence. These men are orphans. They are the lowest of the low on the mafia totem pole. Their jobs as investigators and drivers are a false front. Their direct employer is dead. They are, in a word, nothing. But never once does Lionel’s subconsciously alert Tourette’s spin out ”Minna Men-Minute-Men-Minimum.”. These men are the minimum men. And yet they don’t see themselves this way at all. Not even Lionel’s pinballing Tourette’s verbalizes the extent to which they are alone. This, I believe, is a clue to Lethem’s novel. In the act of omitting this verbal tic, the absence is clear, and becomes thematically apparent.

In spite of the seemingly intentional absence, there is, thankfully, no irony present in Lethem’s work. Lionel’s narration is complete enough from his viewpoint, and he himself is complete enough as a person, that it is unnecessary and would be inappropriate. The tale is told with a frankness and earnestness that gives truth to Lionel’s self-announced comparison with Marlowe. While by the end Lionel is a detective, he leaves us more clues than he picks up. They are subtle, but they are there, coded inside his Tourettic utterances and his equally compulsive silence. Into that silence and motherless absence creeps, at the very end, Brooklyn herself, the adoptive mother, speaking for her orphans through Lionel when he asserts they don’t need us: “Put an egg in your shoe, and beat it. Make like a tree, and leave” (311) and, finally, the hurry-up-and-be-here saying of Frank the father-brother — “Tell your story walking.”

I just read Motherless Brooklyn a brilliant work of fiction by Jonathan Lethem. I encourage everyone to read it. I am writing a short essay on it, which I will post soon. In the meantime, get the book.