It’s Sunday afternoon and we are both sitting on the couch and listening to jazz because I told him it was hard for me to write when people are singing. He fell asleep with his laptop still buzzing and notebook half-closed beside him. The weekend has been warm for the first time after what felt like an extra long winter. Now the windows are all open, laundry just finished, his feet are swaying with the wind or the music, and inside our apartment is my favorite place. Sometimes I think how sad it is, that we're going to leave this behind.
their lonely betters
Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters;
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:
Words are for those with promises to keep.
—W. H. Auden
the tropics
Waves breaking gently on a small beach, picking up pace as a boat goes by; rustled water like wind passing through a reed. Blended drinks of varying color, sweet, and easy to sip though with no umbrella to keep from the sun. Behavioral mix-ups as to whether I was swimming in the ocean or in a pool. And happy red toes, dressed and ready for their adventure in the open air.
Certain things are easy to get used to. Others remind you we must struggle. Perhaps this was a trip set far to one side of the scale, but seeing as how the last two plus years have often tilted in the opposite direction, I think it may be time for us, if only for a while.
In a moment of lengthier living, I would never choose that without struggles—the grappling sensation for discovering intention to be realized or at least considered. But, to never be forgotten, there is that part of us as well that says it never hurts to jump. Off the end of a dock that floats to the earth’s sway, you pretend for a little while you’re just a boy again.
le mal du pays
“Usually it’s translated as ‘homesickness,’ or ‘melancholy.’ If you put a finer point on it, it’s more like a ‘groundless sadness called forth in a person’s heart by a pastoral landscape.’”
I picked up Murakami again after my encounter with 1Q84 two years ago was more of an assault than a pleasant reading experience. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki was, thankfully, a welcome departure from the supernatural magical realism that guided the aforementioned three-volume tome, one that tended more in the vein of Norwegian Wood's personal investigation of self-discovery—there's a time and a place for both types, I think, but my hesitation in waiting so long to read it was admittedly because I wasn't sure how many more talking animals and creepy erotic encounters with deities I could take. But that limit went untested and my fears were unfounded, happy as I am to report, and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, though plot-wise slightly unambitious, was quiet and wonderful and fulfilling, a long talk with an old friend about the lives we used to lead.
I don't necessarily dwell on the plot (loosely: an emotionally detached man in his mid-thirties, quintessentially a Murakami character, is urged to dig into the whys of an event from adolescence that caused his closest friends to abandon him, leaving him mildly traumatized thereafter with dependency and relationship skepticisms), instead I fixate on the external devices Murakami chooses to deploy in triggering the purest and perfectly preserved depths of memory. Music, in this case. Adolescence is a place I revisit often, mostly to make sense of what I did in those strange and awkward years, and because I'm still no closer to knowing I still don't let go, and there's a special closeness I feel with people who are haunted by the same faraway things. Franz Liszt's Années de pèlerinage ("Years of Pilgrimage") was the narrator's time machine of choice. When I searched for an audio recording on the Internet I was led to a YouTube page whose comments section read "Murakami brought me here."
Sometimes I think it's no surprise that since coming to New York I've preferred spending time with friends from high school over others. Much has changed throughout the so-called official transition to adulthood (getting a job, signing a lease, knowing your credit score), and holding on to easier times is my main comfort in combating the acceleration of it all. I like talking about Japan, the little island and our long, laughing days, being naive and the confidence that resulted from not knowing any better.
train rides, fleeting instances, parallel lines
My own life teems with elements of fiction that don't quite come together in a satisfying way—the closer they get the more I demand, and maybe it's a subconscious rule that we constantly adjust these self-imposed benchmarks so we never reach the ideal of a full and poetic control over what happens to us and what we offer ourselves up to.
There's so much I want to possess. My perception of the world's immensity shrinks and expands as I navigate it, but it escapes my grasp completely when I confront the sheer vastness of human stories I'll never know.
On trains I lose any tenuous strings that tether to reality. I spent two groundless weeks some summers ago racing through little towns populated with a million little people who have lives as complex and vivid as mine, people with hopes and dreams and ambitions and friends and happinesses and craziness/es, stories that unraveled all around me and stories that went on in spite of me, stories in which I was just a random passerby. Something to color the background. And I became really sad then, saying lightning-fast hellos and goodbyes to things I won't ever be a part of, really beautiful people who are nothing more to me now than overheard conversations in a coffee shop, or a memory of a window lighting on at dusk. I don’t think I’ll ever stop wanting everything.
on ruins
“What is a ruin, after all? It is a human construction abandoned to nature, and one of the allures of ruins in the city is that of wilderness: a place full of the promise of the unknown with all its epiphanies and dangers. Cities are built by men (and to a lesser extent, women), but they decay by nature, from earthquakes and hurricanes to the incremental processes of rot, erosion, rust, the microbial breakdown of concrete, stone, wood, and brick, the return of plants and animals making their own complex order that further dismantles the simple order of men. This nature is allowed to take over when, for economic or political reasons, maintenance is withdrawn. Ruins are also created by the vandalism, arson, and war in which humans run wild. Cities in Europe and the American South have been consciously ruined by war, but this country’s North and West have fallen into ruin only for other reasons. Ruins were the symbolic home of much of the art of the time, some photography and painting, much music, the science fiction movies of the time, even the backdrops for rock videos and fashion photographs, for clothes that looked ancient, worn, combat and cobweb stuff. They were landscapes of abandon, the abandon of neglect and violence that came first and the abandon of passion that moved into the ruins.
A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture. Ruins become the unconscious of a city, its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life. With ruins a city springs free of its plans into something as intricate as life, something that can be explored but perhaps not mapped. This is the same transmutation spoken of in fairy tales when statues and toys and animals become human, though they come to life and with ruin a city comes to death, but a generative death like the corpse that feeds flowers. An urban ruin is a place that has fallen outside the economic life of the city, and it is in some way an ideal home for the art that also falls outside the ordinary production and consumption of the city.”
jet lag
“How strange that we cannot love time. It spoils our loveliest moments. Nothing quite comes up to expectations because of it. We alone: animals, so far as we can see, are unaware of time, untroubled. Time is their natural environment. Why do we sense that it is not ours?”
things we learn in college
During my first year of architecture school I was headstrong and didn’t know enough about architecture to understand that I didn’t know anything about architecture. Two classmates and I created a series of angular wood-and-glass sculptural pieces that were strewn between balconies using wire rope. A professor told us it reminded him of I.M. Pei’s Stars. We wrote down the reference in our Moleskines, brand new and still clean, and never thought about it again.
in memory, throughout, all at once
It was the wide-open windows of summer drives that I started to miss. The evening sun hiding behind a hillside, waiting to reveal exploding reds and oranges when the car finally finishes the bend. Warm skin. Lighter eyes. Aching legs. It blends together, you know, all of those good moments.
—
He asked me once where I’d like to live and I said I didn’t know, anywhere really, so long as it was an old stone cottage, with a room for reading, a studio for making, on an ocean cliff, beside a lighthouse, overlooking fjords, Mediterranean breezes, northern lights, gardens of vegetables and flowers, a field of lavender, the Redwoods close, my sister next door, and some place to play my piano.
—
The morning commute, the afternoon commute, miles of tunnels, waiting at the same spot on the platform everyday.