A painting I’d been looking at on a wall in a museum in a city in which I do not live, but to which I’d traveled, by plane, so I could stay in a hotel, and sleep late, and do things I don’t ordinarily do, was said, by the voice of a woman who was speaking through an audio device that had been handed to me, upon my admittance, and that contained descriptions of all the artwork on display, not only in this room, but also in the others, to be this artist’s least favorite, among his own canvases, though it happened to be his most popular and well-known.
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When I’m at the pearly gates, this’ll be on my videotape.
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An old woman who was stationed at the circulation desk at the library, when I happened to be checking out a book that was not about angels, but that had the word angel in the title, told me, when she saw the cover, as she scanned the barcode and printed a receipt to hand to me, that once, when she’d been going through a difficult time, she’d had an encounter with an angel, though she had not realized that’s what the being had been until many years later, when she’d recalled it.
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Someone asked me whether the entries in my diary are true, and when I said that essentially the entries are true, they asked me what did I mean by essentially, to which I replied that even when the entries are not recollections of events that have occurred, they are recollections of how those events would have occurred if they in fact had occurred. Though when this person then asked me how could I be certain that an event that had not occurred would occur the way I imagined it would, I told them I could not be certain, but that nevertheless I was.
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I’d spent a few hours in a bar that isn’t in my neighborhood, and into which I’d never before gone, so that I was unfamiliar with the regulars, and probably didn’t need to have been there at all, when, afterward, I found myself on the sidewalk outside with a handful of men and women who were about my age, but whose names I didn’t know, and who seemed, without having said anything, to have admitted me into their company, which, in a disorderly way, and yet as if of one mind, began to move in a direction along the block, until we reached a street down which we turned, and proceeded until we arrived at a building in which was an apartment that belonged to one of their number, and in whose kitchen, once we’d climbed the stairs and had let ourselves in and were gathered in it, was a fridge that, when opened, revealed many cans of beer, though after someone had taken a few and had handed them around, and we’d kept on drinking, I became conscious of the fact that I hadn’t spoken in a while, or made an effort to be social, and I began to worry that I might appear to these people as strange, and cause them to feel uncomfortable, so after a minute, when no one was paying attention, I wandered into the living room, where music was playing from somebody’s phone, placed my beer on a bookshelf, pretended to look at some books, and then left.
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I’d sat down to play chess with an old man who’d set up his board at one of those tables in a corner of the park, near the West 4th Street entrance, so that people like myself, who were wandering past, if they weren’t in a hurry and had a few dollars on them, could take him up, and test their skills against his; and I’d done better than I’d expected, but eventually had lost; although, after the game was over, and he’d shaken my hand and had asked me did I want to go again, to which I’d said thank you, but no, I’d remained where I was, at his prompting, and had talked to him about where I was from, and what had brought me to the city, and how long I’d lived here, and things like that, so that soon enough, on my own, as I realized he might’ve had another person to challenge, or contend with, if I wasn’t still seated in front of him, I volunteered to play him once more, removing from my wallet another few dollars, and placing them on the table, where he arranged the board and invited me to move first, which I did, though on this occasion, as we proceeded, he managed to defeat me very quickly, so that I was amazed at what had happened, and, by the end, could only stare at our pieces, where they now stood, though I myself had participated in their maneuvers, and had seen how they’d arrived there.
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I was drawing a picture, using a pencil and a sheet of paper, of the face of Joan of Arc, not as I have seen it rendered, in paintings and in still frames from movies, though all those have been beautiful, and have moved me, and will remain with me, I think, in my memory, until I die...yes, I was drawing a picture of her face, not as I have seen it in renderings, all of which are dear to me, and which I hope have changed me, if only in the way that they can, but as it suggests itself to me when I am sitting at my desk in my apartment, with my eyes closed, so that I cannot be distracted by any object upon which my gaze might settle, and I try to imagine or evoke it.
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Oh, what can I do? Nothing, my sparrow blue.
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A woman who’d profiled me for a magazine that I’d seen before, in bookstores and on tables in waiting rooms, and places like that, so that I’d been excited to meet her, and in fact had enjoyed the hours we’d spent together, wandering my neighborhood and talking about the themes she said persisted in my work, which I maintain has always been about the same thing, though what that thing is has never been easy to describe, texted me after I’d seen her off, after I’d walked her to the top of a stairwell that leads down into the subway, so she could ride a train back into the city, and told me she’d thought of one more question, though after I’d responded, and had returned to my apartment, so that I’d had time to think about how I’d replied, and to see that it wasn’t what I’d intended, I texted her again, to change or to clarify my answer, which elicited from her a further question, to which I wrote back in such a convoluted way that I decided, having done so, to simply call her and have a conversation on the phone, which I was able to do, though we ending up digressing so far from the subject that I can’t remember now what we said, or if she even used it in what she wrote.
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I told my friend who is writing a book about saints that she herself reminds me of a saint, insofar as the way she has arranged her life, or the way the circumstances of her life have arranged themselves, with or without her intention, has come to resemble, to my mind, that of certain men and women who lived centuries ago, in communities in the desert, engaged in prayer and the study of biblical texts, though of course my friend does not live in the desert, but in an apartment here in the city, in a neighborhood not far from my own, where any number of noises or distractions can beset her, and where, it seems, no one shows an interest in what she is doing, or believes that it will sell, though when I mention this she becomes indignant, and tells me she is neither a saint nor a person who cares about revenue, but is merely a writer, like any other, who will not abuse her talent by producing work based on what the market tells her is valuable, a statement that does little to dissuade me from my impression, though I do not mention it again.
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My friend, who is also a writer, and who has been working on a book about saints, with whom, as a subject, she admits she is obsessed, told me yesterday, while we were walking through the park during a letup in the rain, so that sometimes we’d feel, on the back of our necks, when a breeze would lift the branches of a tree we happened to be passing under, the water that had been sliding from the leaves, and that now and then would come down on us, as if in a shower…yes, my friend told me, as we walked in the park like this, talking about her book, and how the writing of it has been going, and whether she thinks it will end in publication, that, like every person she knows who is in any way close to her, she finds herself on the verge of tears each day, though she doesn’t always understand why, and though, as well, she doesn’t always give in to them, if give in is the right word.
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From the galley at the back of a plane, during a flight that had been in progress for several hours, so that I knew the aircraft was somewhere above an ocean, although, because night had fallen, and because we’d reached such an altitude that we might also have been above clouds, I knew, as well, that I wouldn’t have been able to see the surface of the waves, had I been looking out one of the windows, which I hadn’t been…yes, from the galley at the back of this plane, in the cabin of which the lighting had been dimmed, so that most of the passengers had fallen asleep, though I had been unable to, and instead had gotten up and had wandered toward the lavatories, though I didn’t at that moment need to use one, so that I was, more or less, just standing there, out of a restlessness or boredom that expressed itself physically…yes, from this galley near the lavatories, where I was standing, I heard a flight attendant telling her colleague, as they sat beside each other, on those metal or foldout seats they could pull down from the wall when there were no tasks for them to do, or to attend to, that she was going to close her eyes a minute, but that she wasn’t going to fall asleep, and that, if she did, her colleague shouldn’t be afraid to nudge her, with an elbow, though at this point her colleague laughed, and said something I didn’t catch, but that the first one must have heard, for it caused her to respond in kind, and for their conversation to continue, so that the two of them were still talking, a few minutes later, when another passenger, an older woman, came shuffling down the aisle and stepped past me, or around me, and poked her head into the galley, and asked, in a polite voice, if it would be possible for her to have a cup of water, to which both attendants said yes, of course, and to which the one who was nearest responded further, as she got up to retrieve a bottle from a fridge, and to uncap it, by asking a question that encouraged the old woman to say more, about her trip and about where she was traveling to, so that a new conversation began, and I was able to listen a while longer.
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In college I took a course with an English professor who, among the faculty in his department, was regarded as an expert on Shakespeare, whose plays he’d have us read, and, each meeting, would lecture about with passion and insight, and a breadth of knowledge that was remarkable for how far it could digress from the subject without seeming to lose its relevance, although, what I most remember now, having obtained my degree and moved to a city and found employment in a career that seems to me about as removed from the humanities as one can get, work-wise, without delivering one’s self entirely from the order of social interactions…yes, what I most remember now are not the plays, or what we learned from them, though we might have learned a lot, but a moment of levity toward the end of the semester, when this professor told us, while leaning against his desk, pulling at his beard, and talking more casually than he tended to, that he didn’t, in fact, enjoy teaching Shakespeare, because doing so reminded him of how vast was the gulf that separated him, in terms of achievement, from the bard himself.
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When I arrive, will you come and find me?
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I was talking to an old woman, in the nave of a church, about a stained glass window I’d stopped to look up at after I’d come in a few minutes earlier, so that she’d noticed me as she’d begun to make her way down the aisle, from where she’d been kneeling, in a pew toward the front, and had, on reaching the place where I’d been standing, made a remark, or asked me a question, about the object of my gaze...yes, I was talking to her about this stained glass window, the meaning of which she understood better than I did, when another old woman, with whom she seemed to be friends, though I hadn’t realized anyone else was present, approached us from the side, and joined our conversation, which was quiet and unexciting, and not like conversations I’m used to having, though it was by no means unpleasant, and in fact went a long way to cheer me.
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Or, instead of lying there, doing nothing, waiting to see if sleep was going to arrive, or if I was going to arrive at it, I’d get up and pull on my clothes and grab my keys and leave the apartment, and walk toward the end of the block, at which point I’d turn in one direction or another, based on an impulse whose origin was, to me, unfathomable, and continue until I became tired, and was able to locate the subway, and ride a train back to my neighborhood, where, if morning had begun, people would’ve woken and have started appearing outside, so that I’d feel as though I’d experienced the night in a way that they had not, though I’d also be aware that the reverse was true, and that whatever I might’ve gained from remaining conscious, and I wasn’t sure I’d gained anything at all, had cost me the equilibrium that was evident on these people’s faces.
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When I was in my twenties, and learning to write fiction, I read more novels than I do now, as I wasn’t reading them for entertainment alone, though they did entertain me, but also to absorb, at some level of consciousness, the techniques the authors employed, and the styles that belonged to them, so that I might, once I closed the novels, and turned to my own work, attempt to reproduce what I’d absorbed, in stories of my own invention, until finally I understood that such a method of composition does not result in art, but rather in an approximation of, or an obtaining toward, art, and that what I in fact needed to do, if I wanted to write something worth reading, was to forget about the authors whose novels I’d read, and even about any stories I might want to tell, and instead think only of what word I wanted to begin with, and what word I ought to use next, and then next, and so on, until a dream I had not dreamt, and that perhaps is not a dream at all, began to reveal itself, sentence by sentence, on the page, which is not to say that all those novels I read were for naught, but rather that their effect on me, or their influence, however strong, isn’t easy to describe.
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In my apartment I had some books that I’d already read, and, because there was no room for them on the shelves, or even on my desk, so that I’d begun to pile them on the floor, where now and then I’d spill them when I wasn’t looking where I was walking, or when I slid my chair back too quickly, after deciding to stand up from where I’d been sitting, I realized I ought to get rid of them, or give them away, so one morning I found a cardboard box, and put the books inside it, and carried the box downstairs, and placed it on the sidewalk, close to the building, where people walking past, on their way to wherever they were going, might see them and take them, which is what people seemed to have done, though I never actually saw anyone do this, but only saw evidence of them having done so, when, for instance, later that day, I returned to the building, and observed that the box was empty, except for two or three paperbacks that I felt somehow bad for, and thus retrieved from the box and carried back up the stairwell to my apartment with me.
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My friend, who is also a writer, was trying to tell me last night, while we were drinking at a bar that was empty except for one or two other people, so that the place had assumed a feeling of tranquility, and the bartender, with almost no one to attend to, had taken up her phone, which was charging in an outlet behind the bar, where she was standing, and was scrolling through whatever she could see on its screen…yes, my friend was trying to tell me, while we were sitting there on stools, after he’d asked me what the real subject of my writing was, as opposed to the surface-level, or superficial, and I’d told him that I wasn’t sure I knew...yes, he was trying to tell me that he did know, and that he was going to inform me, but that first I had to finish this shot with him, which, after he’d picked up his, and had handed me mine, from where it had been waiting on a coaster in front of me, I ended up doing, though I needed a moment to gather myself, against the alcohol, before I lifted the glass and tipped it back and drained it.
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I was having coffee, at his request, with the French translator of a volume of my stories, in order to discuss what my intention had been with regard to a usage, or phrase, that is particular to the English language, but which doesn’t seem to have a foreign equivalent, when the server who was waiting on us, at the table at which we were seated, at a café whose doors were open to the sidewalk, along which no one was walking at this hour, on a weekend, when people who live in this city tend to still be asleep…yes, we were having coffee, and talking in this way, trying to find a solution to the problem, when our server said to us, as she’d been standing beside us with a pad and pencil, so that she’d happened to overhear us, while she prepared to take our order, that maybe we should maintain the English in that instance, which didn’t seem to me like a bad idea, though as soon as she’d said it she apologized, as if it had occurred to her that she ought not to have said anything, although, as it turned out, when she wasn’t working here, in this industry, she said, she studied literature at a university, so she couldn’t help but be interested in our conversation, and, anyhow, neither myself nor my translator had minded that she’d spoken, but in fact saw the wisdom in what she’d told us, had wondered ourselves if maybe we should do that, and thus were grateful for her advice, which we went with.