Eulogy
I am going very deeply into Providence. I am glad to live in a city with a divine name because at certain times I am quite caught up in earthly things. In daily, earthly things. The plastic bread bag drying on the dishrack is eyeing me. It is asking me to fulfill it. It has held quite nice bread, my favorite, and now it awaits its next purpose, cat excrement. The bread bag is having a good life assisting my household this week in eating and shitting. And it’s lovely that the water I use to rinse the bag is Providence water. And the truck that will come to take my bin of bagged cat excrement is Providence trash. I don’t always hear it that way but sometimes I do: a warm hand picking us all up in its infinite palm. Ha no. That sounds too pretty and also no—I do not hear that in the word Providence. Though I do feel linked to the people of this city, it is not a palm we sit in. More like we’re crimped together over the same sewer system. I hear in Providence a little ting. A ting that pushes me out of the day. Ting. I hear tomorrow, tomorrow—what? I try to see it. What do I see. I see the word rampageous. That is the word for the life I want to live. I see the word and think the thought and I also hear a laugh—it is the dry, short and not unkind laugh of my friend who also lives in Providence. My friend laughs this way when I begin to have thoughts of greatness. When I, as I regularly do, concoct aloud my plan for trampling over my current life’s choices, for holding a majestic funeral party for this quiet life—a literary party specifically, at which the fulcrum is a famous writer—but not, no, not one of the writers of my most beloved books, because if I were to meet one of those writers, what I would wish for is not a party. In fact I always think about a little beach, a bay beach with a salt marsh and an expanse of tidal flats, and this one time when I was mucking around with kids and with my sister and brother-in-law. The sand was wet and sulphury. Then the tide started coming in—abruptly and fast—and our legs sank down further into the sand and our feet were really stuck and it was difficult to extract ourselves. We were all wearing shoes because that particular bay had broken oyster shells and live razor clams and the shoes made extraction much more difficult. I don’t remember what happened next, exactly. I do remember us, about 20 minutes later, walking back into town with mud up nearly to our waists, and that I had had to leave a shoe behind. And I remember thinking: I like these people. I meant my sister and brother-in-law. I thought, even if they had been strangers to me there on the little beach, I would have liked them. There was the tide unexpectedly flooding the sand flat where we were all playing, us three and several non-swimming kids. And they, my sister and brother-in-law, were displaying such a talent for lightness. They saw the danger and barked at the kids to move and I could see the tragic scenarios streaming through their minds, they are excellent at anticipating tragedy, and yet also, the whole time, they carried the danger as if it were the lightest of things. And afterwards walking back to town wet and muddy, the pavement burning the skin on the bottom of my one shoeless foot, we told each other the story of the mud and the tide and these two were holding the danger—which weighed quite a bit—the kids were young and outnumbered us and even a handful of that mud was very heavy—they held that danger so daintily, like it was a trifling doily, like the whole situation might be fanned away by a lacy bit of paper. I love when serious, anxious people—that is they—hold heavy things so lightly. At that very hour, I regretted—though did not at that point learn to avoid—each heavy sentence I had ever uttered. The pavement that day oh my god it was so hot, I kept searching for a piece of shade to land my left foot in, but also I was happy to be searing the dry ugly flesh of my foot bottom. It was my punishment for taking the easy way and letting some things be so heavy. Not all the time. Sometimes I can carry things lightly, but it’s an ongoing education and that’s why I would like to be in semi-danger alongside my most beloved writers, and then afterwards speak with them about the dangerous situation we had just survived, a conversation I will only partly be present for, as I will actually be studying how they achieve, in their recounting, lightness, a quality which of course each of these beloved writers possesses. A supplementary benefit of the danger element: it will act as an equalizer in my self-conscious brain so that I don’t drench every casual remark with the word beloved. But they, the beloved, are not the writers I want to invite to my literary party in my apartment in Providence. The literary party ones are writers like Susan Sontag and Hilton Als—writers who have greatness, which I don’t proclaim lightly, and yet do not have the greatness of lightness, which is the greatest greatness of all. As the host I will be too busy washing wine glasses and taking coats to interact much and that’s fine. It’s just that I need to closely observe greatness. This is not the point at which my friend laughs. That need is something she understands. It’s when I speak of greatness as if I did not and likely always will live in Providence, for example when I say things like, Oh someday I too would like to have a pied a terre in Milan like that poet we know. When I talk as if living the literary life and writing were the same thing—that’s when she laughs. The gods have put me in Providence, but I must have greatness. And yet not, though tempting, as a condition I bestow upon myself, no I am not ready. No, greatness as a quality of my teachers. I must be among great writers and artists so that I can listen, and only rarely talk. It matters not how old one is when one is a bit of a naif, and that I surely am. Even well into senescence, I will always be a bright-faced little student. With each book I read I’m only half a micrometer taller. Taller and lighter I am growing. I must. Thus, deeply into Providence I go. I am going. It is a question of working within the constraint, yes. The form of my life is this city. I do not know if I will be able to grow as tall as I’d like here, but I do bask in the sun of a rather royal poet couple who live six blocks away. When I see them on walks, I go and breathe in the air that trails behind them. And I have friends here, friends who smack of greatness. Who are en route, I would say. There are many within the Providence borders who have an understated en route greatness. That is what I think, on some days. Ting! Ahh my rampageous life will be very possible here in Providence among all of these friends en route. I fall asleep with the tinging… And then the next day I wake up and sniff the air. It has a suspicious smell. The air is wet today in Providence, unseasonably warm for winter. It has the smell of the desquamated leafy matter one unearths in the playground sandbox on the first day of spring. The smell of an angled, early morning sun on eucalyptus trees in Silver Lake means exaltedness. The smell of snow mixed with car exhaust and marijuana in Tompkins Square Park means possibility. This smell today in Providence though? I worry it is the smell of good enough. Of quality of life. Of other priorities. Of wistfulness, of a shrug. What if Providence is mediocrity? Yes, Providence was founded with a vision—it was a city with seven hills—like Rome!—that is a fact my grandfather loved to intone. But, for practical reasons, we, the municipality, have razed two of them. Practical reasons should no, not ever, take precedence over greatness.
—I had to pretend to be a man in order to say that last sentence but I did say it. I did, and now it is a new day, a new week in fact, and there is another bread bag awaiting its reincarnation. To the cat litter box I go, and I take up Providence again. I am in my chair by the window and I notice that each edifice on my block has been allotted exactly one tree. What if it is a question of modesty? What if the ting! Tomorrow, tomorrow! Is a sober reminder? —All the tall buildings will someday fall. But my fixed point is books, books or I will float away, nothing has meaning, the days are a pantomime, let the buildings fall but books? And Wittgenstein’s Mistress? In that book, the world is gone, fallen, and by world I mean only the people, people great & small, and the museums are afire and yet the great art is still all around. There is art and there are books and the woman, maybe the last left, she is there to see and read. She is there to continue the great chain, and so what if the critics and the book reviews and the servers powering the online chatter are ash—great things, once made, will not disappear. Of great things, once made, even if then lost, burned in a fire, something remains. This is the thought I have frequently, too often, about Margites, the comedy they say Homer wrote. Of course it was the absurd comedy that was lost…How much different would this world be if we’d lost the Iliad instead? I feel to this day something of the Margites in the air… Certainly I’m always cheered by thinking that Homer’s first poem was likely ridiculous. Wittgenstein’s Mistress might be a rather callow example of how art does not die seeing as I’ve not read it in nearly 20 years and here I am oh in Wittgenstein’s Mistress in Wittgenstein’s Mistress, when I still haven’t completely grasped why he called the book that. Or once, once, I did grasp it. I grasped “the feeling of the world as a bounded whole is the mystical” and I saw all the white space in WM as Elmer’s glue, a sea of glue, or glue setting afloat the fragments of text into one sea, one bounded sea… But to this question of modesty. And to Providence, its ting: What if the modesty of this city is not about the ephemeral nature of greatness? For here we are, most of us understanding ephemerality, knowing that our culture, our way of life, may soon be—irrelevant—while other cities and neighborhoods may be or are now flooded or flamed, I am certain, if irrationally so, that this modest little mid-sized city, its roads and sewers and trash—all the municipal services—and the banks—and the parks service—they, and consequently Providence, will chug along well past the time that it matters. What is the it? I think it’s greatness. But I am a mystery to myself. Sometimes I think there is a satisfied and commonplace person inside me. The modesty here in Providence is the quiet. Your greatness is your own business. By greatness, do I mean, do I just mean one’s art? Last week I was ordering a book at the library reference desk while holding my two-year-old nephew. He and I were bedecked in winter gear and sweating. The reference librarian, who also facilitates the library’s death cafe, held my card and looked at her screen and said my name aloud and then said, “Aren’t you the poet?” Ahh what a dream—not even “a” poet but “the” poet. And a lady was behind me in line to hear it all. Did she hear? Does she know she’s behind “the poet” in line? Only Providence would have afforded me the definite article. No, that lady is more interested in my nephew. As a matter of fact so is the librarian. Should I have kept talking about poetry? I am always so eager to. I wanted to ask the librarian, who must have been—Are you also a poet? But I have been trained to be quiet in the library. And in the Providence library, even quieter. No poetry talk, but babies. Babies, babies are the kind of greatness we can care about today. Seeing a baby is a mini spasm of the soul. We will and are talking about the baby. And shouldn’t we? My sister's child is like she is—very quiet. It will move you to witness how quiet he is. It is so good to be quiet! Who has ever been better for being loud? —Maybe that is not exactly what I mean by greatness. Whoever can feel right if he places value on the tokens of respect and the distinctions conferred by the world? That is what Jakob von Gunten, someone who does not exist except in a book I carry everywhere, says. It is without much difficulty that I go about my days with kids and cats, fairly easily do I walk around Providence. It’s only for the resolve of greatness that I also carry—gingerly—in my left coat pocket, the one without the hole, the Jakob von Gunten book. Thus I feel heavier than I should. Or do I feel lighter? Last night the snow plow pushed the cover off the sewer grate. The municipality was in danger! Anyone could have fallen in. I crouched in the snow and heaved the cover. Heaved is not the right word. Well, from here the story gets less exciting. I had to call down the street for a midnight dogwalker to help. Together, we re-covered the hole. I told a lot of people today this story of how I saved the city. The incident lasted approximately 12 minutes. I write every day for much longer but would never dare say so. If pressed, I lie. What did you do this morning? Meetings oh many meetings. It happened that for dinner on the sewer cover night I had eaten an enormous amount of garlic. I almost didn’t call on the dogwalker to help. I almost walked away. The garlic was embarrassing and leaking out of me into the cold air. Eat what becomes you and stay silent. I did not breathe while we moved the cover. Providence really is the ideal city to pursue, always pursue and never possess, greatness. We are much luckier here because it is quieter and no one cares about our work. There are no grand cocktail parties in my apartment and when great people do pass through the city and someone hosts them, I am thankfully not invited. If someone here were to host a party for, say, Hilton Als, I would beg not for an invitation but to be a, no the, coatcheck girl. The poet. There is no age limit for coatcheck girls, and the right kind of lipstick against my whitening hair will instill me with an aura of bathos—perhaps a kind of daffy Bette Davis vibe?—and that will draw Hilton to me, and we will meet not as equals, which would not nurture the secret greatness in my own coat pocket, but as teacher and student. I will always be the student and I will always live so deeply in Providence that if a rare, stray young person wants to seek me out they will likely not ever find me. I have one last thing to say. It is silly and deeply serious. How does anyone know how to begin. Or if! Small, then. I will begin with lichen. The crustose lichen that grows on cemetery gates. Up close, yes, let’s go very close to the Providence cemetery gates, where this lichen looks like flakes of snow. When I say I am going deeply into Providence, I also mean into the ground, into a grave. Very definitely the body there is bone by now. Or less. And here he is, my great love. His name is Brian, which is not the name I would have chosen for a great love but perhaps that proves that he is real. He was real. I am not saying he is a Margites, but he is gone, and also still in the air. Brian was the first great person I met, a meeting that happened when I was a teenager and he was a teenager, a meeting that I don’t remember much of, but at which he became the first living person to speak to me of greatness, of providence in the divine sense. And then he became the first great person I had met who died. His voice when he spoke—it was like someone feathering the fur on a bear’s back. If that gesture made a sound, that sound would be Brian’s voice. Only maybe not a bear—a wolf. He has been dead for 30 years. Exactly 30 years and when I want to I can still hear his voice. It’s voices I miss the most from all my dead. When he was alive and 17 or 18 and I 14 or 15, I was frightened of him. I loved his voice and to be near it, but not too near. I wrote a catalog of great things he did here, and now I have erased it.
•
What I mean is that Brian lived in a small town near Providence—not even in this middling city—and he worked at a fast food fried chicken shop, and one day with no help he got into this very good college and they gave him all the money he needed to go. After college he would be in New York, a greatness among greatnesses, and that would be that, no more Brian and his gregariousness, no more gatherings in his classic basement bedroom at 31 Thacher Street. We all knew the address. His dad and his brother did not seem to mind that we all streamed in. His mother had died a year ago, or two. After her funeral, we had streamed into her kitchen for cold cuts. His dad and his brother stayed at 31 Thacher Street, we knew they always would stay there and that Brian would not, no, he would go on to his very good college, and then on and on, and maybe he would not even visit the house on Thacher Street, but it would remain for us a kind of landmark, his basement bedroom window bearing an invisible plaque to greatness. Except a few months ago there was a fire. A few months ago I started thinking about greatness, and about Brian, and I wanted to track down Brian’s brother and ask him a question. One week before I went to pick up the phone, 31 Thacher Street had burned down. I went to look up the phone number and there was the article: “Fire destroys…” What the fire destroyed of Brian, I don’t know. I do not believe in juvenilia for some, for myself, yes, I am immature, but Brian was ready, and if there were writings there are not any now. Worse, if there were any tapes of Brian’s plays, the ones he had acted in but more importantly the ones he had directed, would they be good now? were they ever good?—they were, I think they were, and now they’re over and if there were tapes, they’re gone, but something is still here… Not his family, who now are, after 30 years, suddenly untraceable and what would I have asked? At his funeral, which some of his college friends came to—he died one night at college—I wanted to ask his college friends what he was making and working on. It was easy to know the college friends, their mourning clothes were all velvet, they were all in black velvet and we, Brian’s townie friends, all in black polyester. I did not ask. In fact I was busy at the funeral service—one of the nuns from high school asked me to do a reading. There I am again at the pulpit. It’s not that I am a good public speaker, it’s just that I had the air of someone who was emphatically not going to cry. I will not cry. The person who should have been at the pulpit was his best friend or his high school girlfriend. The former was there and hunched over. The latter had not been told of his death. Even at his funeral, I had a feeling that I would see Brian again. It was linked to wanting greatness. In a vague way. Wanting greatness and linking it with men in this dangerously vague way has enabled me to be both inspired and derailed by them. I stood at the pulpit and gave the reading. The priest did not cry and I did not cry and all else did. The nun, generally a physically commanding person, looked very small as she cried. Brian was buried. I did not speak much about him again. And now it is funny because lately, 30 years afterwards, I cannot bear his death. When he died I was bewildered but mostly vindicated. I had been right to be frightened of him. It was his greatness. One day he left me flowers on my porch. I placed them on the windowsill of my bedroom. Like Brian, I had a basement bedroom. The flowers came with a florist’s card. They were from the shop by the train station. On the windowsill I also kept the florist’s envelope on which he had scrawled and misspelled my name. I looked at the scrawl all summer because when I did I could hear him saying my name and I loved the way he said my name. That September he died. I don’t remember what the card said inside. Oh yes, I do. It didn’t say anything. Just my name and his initials. I made it a point never to be alone with him. He lived near the railroad tracks and we would sit, a group of us, on the rocks by the track—and he would ask us, each of us present, what we would be, what we would do—ting!—and the words came out of my mouth, likely high and soft, maybe not, but they came out of my mouth and that was the first time. And I looked at him—he was not looking at me and so I could do that—and I thought, I’ll meet you in NY, Brian. I’ll meet you there. Now I’m ready. I’m ready now but I’m stuck in Providence and Brian is not alive. If he were, I’d take the train and skulk around his neighborhood. Or show up to whatever he was doing and say, Hey. But as a question—Hey, Brian? It’s more like me to show up. When it comes to greatness, I usually skip the more appropriate gesture. When my most beloved poet died, I did send a condolence to her family. But then I sent another card begging to know where the body was buried. It was terrible of me to ask and I don’t regret it. I would show up to wherever Brian was—you see how I have not one doubt that it would not be here—and probably with a gift, a thoughtful gift borne of a trail of thought only I could follow. For instance, a horse’s head. What if I brought him a horse’s head from a production of Equus? He really liked that play. Well he was 18. I’d show up with some gift that would only suddenly seem strange and embarrassing to me at the moment I was already handing it off and say, Hey Brian. I’d have the temerity to approach him only because we were once teenagers in the same place, because we’d both had mildewy basement bedrooms and because he was the first person, and the only person for years and years, to whom I said, I am going to be a writer. It is somewhat predictable and boring that I think of him now. Is it only because I am at the part of life at which people turn back for a moment? That could be it. That could be only it. Yes, I do have to admit that. Also perhaps it is simply convenience. I want a great love and there is one here. He is dead, he is so dead, but at times I think myself a good enough writer, so good that Brian being dead does not matter. I was turning the lichen in the cemetery into a meal, I was delicately harvesting the lichen that covers his mother’s gravestone and I was going to make a salad with it. Brian doesn’t have a stone, Brian doesn’t have a stone and that is part of our romance, that I know where he is buried but that few others do, and it’s only me making him a lichen salad, only me caressing the skull where his feathered hair once was. I did touch his hair once. I was standing behind him backstage and touched his hair. The dirt in this cemetery is of rather poor quality, and its dryness and nutrient-poorness make it nice and light, easy to shovel. Each shovelful is not heavy at all. Or maybe I’ve read more poems— An actual suffering strengthens As sinews do, with age. My voice is still way too high but I’m ready to speak, though he be dead, with someone great. I took a picture of the flowers Brian gave me. It must have been the day he gave them to me because they are on my windowsill, not in water, and yet they look new and alive. I still have the photo in an album. I did not thank Brian for the flowers but I took a picture of them and had the film developed and put the photo into an album. Then he died.