After the performance, at a dinner for cast and guests I told one of the singers seated at my table that Oedipus receiving sanctuary was what moved me most about the play. I told him I’d stopped expecting anyone to find sanctuary on this earth, but the song he’d helped sing caused me to believe, for a moment anyway, sanctuary might be possible in spite of whatever evil and calamity a man brought down on himself.
The singer said, God’s grace is a gift you can’t earn, but you can’t throw it away either.
He pushed back from the table, rubbing his heavy hands on a blazing white linen cloth. He was fat and the work of eating caused him to sweat profusely. Sanctuary. He beams. Yes, he understands. He sang the song, didn’t he, onstage with the others, gospel chorus and close-harmony quartets and rocking brass combo and African drums and didn’t they make a mighty noise. Sanctuary. No indeed. The world is not a stroll on a sunny day. Huh uh. No, sirree. You need grace to be saved. That’s why they call it Amazing. Grace, that is. Cause it’s like God’s voice in your heart saying he knows you’re tired, and knows you couldn’t bear your cross like you wanted to but he understands and says well done. You see, my friend, I’ve been singing the good news thirty-five years, hard times and harder all over this world and let me tell you, based on what I’ve seen, the spirit can reach down and touch you, don’t matter how low you go. Without the spirit you got nothing. But with it, my, my. Ain’t no telling what you can do.
It is a cause for wonder, isn’t it? That old blind king dragging around a tail of sorrows long enough to wrap three or four times around the earth. Then, on the very doorstep of his tomb, one quarter inch from extinction, there’s time for forgiveness, peace and understanding, time for the cities of his grief to be dismantled brick by brick, time for green grass to start pushing up through the broken stones.
Anyway, we enjoyed the show immensely. Don’t know yet when our ongoing troubles will force us west again but when they do, and if we survive them, hope to be in touch.
This thing of darkness / I acknowledge mine.
—THE TEMPEST
As he drove he considered all the moments of his life that had brought him to this particular moment on a winding, divided street in the year 1987, Amherst, Massachusetts, on his way to do whatever it was he’d set out to do. Thinking such thoughts, as if such thinking really was thought, was ridiculous. Even worse it dizzied him. The steering wheel feels arbitrary in his gloved fists. Black leather gloves. Black leather wheel. Arbitrary black skin inside black gloves. A tug right and the car would crumple against a concrete embankment. If he dropped his hands into his lap and let nature take its course, the course would be a parabola with no relation to the curve of the road, a tighter swerve accelerating as he floors the gas pedal, rear tires following front tires for a while, then impatient, climbing their backs. No urge to change the course of his history, however, was part of this moment. Rather, he sat in the driver’s padded lumbar-supporting seat in awe. Astounded by the concatenation of accidents, of minute turnings, of one thing after another after another that had brought him to this moment. Choice, will, intent. How could he ever have imagined what the outcome would be that day, any day in his distant, distant past when he decided yes, I’ll take another deep breath and after that another one because one day I wish to be negotiating a curve on a cold bright winter afternoon on Larkspur Drive in Amherst, Massachusetts, a middle-aged, middlingly successful writer, teacher, father, husband and all the rest, which for a moment is a marvel, just because it’s what it is after all and could have been almost anything else.
For a split second he actually sees the moments of his life. Like a flock of sheep milling beside the road, they are gathered together and he can see them, the collectivity of them that suggests how many, how countless they are. Visible as an idea is visible. Visible as sheep in a dream. The stalled, restless mass of them unresolvable into individuals, just a woolly blur in the comer of his eye. He knows they are there. Not there. He thinks their presence. Does not need to look away from what he’s doing because he’s seen enough to know they’re there. And he can proceed. Can hold the idea of them in his mind for as long as he wishes while he’s doing something else. My life was all those times. Every single little twitch. Every nerve end firing. Every scream. Every turning away. He luxuriates in the abundance. Could weep at the notion that somehow all of it happened, happened once to him, was him and would never happen again, never had before. Oh. He was precious. Oh. How did the shit get piled so high? And here he was responsible for it. Knowing no other god. No good reason not to rip the wheel off the steering post. Except he’s not strong enough for that. The moments put together did not equal that power in his hands. Black hands. Black gloves. He follows the curving road to the T junction, stops, looks both ways and takes the left fork. Another choice. Another piece of himself he’ll quickly forget until one day, at another intersection he’ll fall prey to whatever it is making him giddy, nearly sick at the stomach today. He’ll be remembering. It will all come back. None of it.
* * *
Tempestas also means time. When the play opens, ship sinking, society dissolving. Thunder and lightning. Judgment Day the opposite of sanctuary. Gonzalo says of the boatswain: man fated to hang cannot drown. In Michael’s book about Jamaica I learn Rastafarians privilege the same belief in a proverb, in almost exactly the same words.
But it was so hard to write. I’d get an idea of how to describe the moment I was wounded and the period right afterward when my illness began. At last I’d turned up a good idea. So I began to hunt for words to describe it and finally I thought up two. But by the time I got to the third word, I was stuck. I’d rack my brain trying to remember. Hold on, I’d think. I’ve got it. But before I could manage to write it down, it was gone, along with the other two words I’d had such a hard time remembering. I’d try to dig up another idea and find suitable words for it, and I’d write these down on various scraps of paper before including them in my writing. I’d try to clamp the words to the idea as much as I could. But what a torture it was. I’d always forget what I wanted to write, what I had just been thinking of the moment before. Minutes would pass and I wouldn’t be able to remember how far I’d gotten.
So, before I could go on and write my story, I had to jot down various words for the names of objects, things, phenomena, ideas. I’d write these down whenever they came to me. Then I’d take the words, sentences, and ideas I’d collected in this way and begin to write my story in a notebook, regrouping the words and sentences, comparing them with others I’d seen in books. Finally I managed to write a sentence expressing an idea I had for this story of my illness.
—L. ZASETSKY RECORDED BY A. R. LURIA IN THE MAN WITH A SHATTERED WORLD
* * *
Arrived Maine Friday. Yesterday and today at old station on dock. Page proofs of Reuben to finish. Awake early. Try the old routines. An orderly beginning—succession of tasks, motions, priorities. Gradually give a shape to the morning, a shape to self simultaneously. Stretching exercises while coffee brews. Quiet gathering of things laid out the night before, quiet so I do not wake Judy. All thought, effort directed toward the possibility of sitting in my chair on the boat dock. One step at a time—a discipline, but also letting it happen—rediscovering the routine’s logic, appropriateness, rather than simply repeating by rote something that’s worked before—a question must be answered—is it possible this morning to begin again, to find within myself what it takes to meet and be met by whatever will be out there when I have the mug of coffee in my hand, the papers and pens spread on the arm of the chair, my eyes opening to the lake’s stillness and quiet.
Jackie Robinson broke into the major leagues on April 15, 1947, at Ebbets Field. I read in Sports Illustrated that his first time at bat he faced the pitcher Johnny Sain and hit a grounder to third. When Robinson’s team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, made their first road trip with him on the roster, they were turned away from a hotel in Philadelphia because Robinson, number 42, was bla
ck. Was that the beginning of the fire? I was about six years old then. Two or three years later my family would move from Homewood, a community predominantly black, to Shadyside, a white community with a few streets where Blacks clustered. The move was considered progress. Summer nights on our black end of Copeland Street in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, meant scratchy, booming and fading broadcasts of Dodger games from Mr. Conolly’s radio set on the sill of his always open third-floor window. My father rooted for the Yankees and nearly always had the last the word in October, shouting up at Mr. Conolly, wagging his finger, Uh huh, uh huh, I told you so, old man. Those bums will never win.
* * *
Our love must survive through the ancient flames. / We must congregate here around the sitting mat, / To narrate endlessly the stories of distant worlds. / It is enough to do so, / To give our tale the grandeur of an ancient heritage / And then to clap our hands for those who are younger . . .
—MAZISI KUNENE, ANCIENT BONDS
Every day you get more of what you’re going to get and less of it . . . aging and its discontents, or the uneasiness of aging as the span of life increases and the time for it recedes.
—HERBERT BLAU, MEMORY AND DESIRE
I must not look on reality as being like myself.
—PAUL ÉLUARD
At all times and in all fields the explanation by fire is a rich explanation.
—GASTON BACHELARD, THE
PSYCHOANALYSIS OF FIRE
The name Wagudu signified “infinitely deep” and it was in fact such a city, complex and profound in its variety and wonders. Whatever men sought after, they went to Wagudu to find.
—HAROLD COURLANDER, THE
HEART OF THE NGONI
Ramona Johnson Africa gave policemen a letter addressed to Mayor Goode, Saturday, May 11, 1985: The raid will not be swift and it will not be clean. It’s gone to be a mess. If Move go down, not only will everybody in this block go down, the knee joints of America will break and the body of America soon fall. We going to burn them with smoke, gas, fire, bullets . . . We will burn this house down and burn you up with us.
How does it feel to be inhabited by more than one self? Clearer and clearer, in my son’s case, that he is more and less than one. Perhaps his worst times are those when he’s aware, in whatever horrifying form that awareness takes, that he must live many lives at once, yet have no life except the chaos produced by divided, warring selves. The utter frustration, loneliness and fear accompanying such an awareness are incomprehensible. If there ever is an I, a me beyond the separate roles he must play, its burden would be to register the damage, the confusion wrought by his condition. To take stock, to make sense, to attempt to control or to write a narrative of self—how hopeless any of these tasks must seem when the self attempting this harrowing business is no more reliable than a shadow, a chimera coming and going with a will or will-lessness of its own, perverse, delusive as the other shadow selves that vie for ascendancy. Is he doomed to fail? Doomed to come apart no matter how hard he struggles at constructing an identity, an ego, a life, an intimacy with who and what he is? Is madness the inevitable result? A part of himself, a self exploding with pent-up rage, another part numb and bewildered, approaching catatonia as it beholds its predicament. Helpless, appalled, avoiding any motion, any act that might aid and abet the furies. Waiting. Playing mindless, repetitive games, locked in but also grateful for the cage of inactivity, the stasis that for a while can pass for peace, control, coherence. Sanctuary. A blessed oblivion consciously sought, an oasis between wrenching, explosive takeovers. He must learn in periods of calm to repeat a story endlessly to himself: there is a good boy, someone who loves and is loved, who can fend off the devils, who can survive in spite of shifting, unstable combinations of good and evil, being and nothingness. Can this story he must never stop singing become a substitute for an integrated sense of self, of oneness, the personality he can never achieve? The son’s father. Father’s son.
* * *
He is sad almost all the time and wonders if it shows in his face. In the course of a day his face is required to take on many different expressions, but no matter what emotion his features mime, the sadness is there, somewhere, because he feels it, burning like a rash, always. In front of a mirror, he bisects his face on the vertical axis with a towel and studies first one, then the other naked half. He believes he’ll discover that half his face is frozen by sorrow. That it is raw and sore from the other half pulling it, worrying it to accommodate the mirrors in other people’s eyes. Half his face obliged to go on about the business of living, half as if asleep, dreaming over and over again the nightmare of his son’s pain.
Just yesterday I returned the call of an old friend, a colleague at the University in Philadelphia when I’d taught there fifteen years before. He’s retired from teaching but still active. He’d seen the review I’d written of a book about the fire in Philadelphia. Hadn’t been in touch for years so decided he’d call. Just to say hello, touch base. By coincidence he was leading a study group and the object of their inquiry and research was the fire on Osage Avenue. October at a memorial service for victims of the fire, if we both live that long, might be a time we can get together. Yes, he’d stayed on, hung on. After his wife died, he’d sold the big house in Germantown and moved to an apartment in City Center. Plenty of room. I was welcome to stay with him, he said. The University had treated him poorly. His department was deemed superfluous to what the University conceived as its central mission. The School of Social Work was traditionally a hands-on operation, pragmatic, problem oriented, a direct link to city agencies and institutions. A training program and lab with emphasis on practical outcomes, it produced graduates equipped intellectually, technically and emotionally to deal with the everyday runaway chaos of an ailing urban landscape. A commission whose announced goals were academic but whose actual agendas were political and economic declared that the University’s responsibility was international, not local, theory a higher priority than practice, research and publication worthier measures of success than ministering to the immediate needs of the dispossessed urban proletariat surrounding the island of University. It was generally understood that the committee’s charge was to lay to rest once and for all, for anyone still confused in the late seventies, certain misconceptions about a university’s role that had arisen in the sixties.
My friend had served as an example of how far the University was willing to go to prove its point. No other professor in the handful of black faculty members was so deeply rooted in the tradition of service to the community or had labored so long and effectively in a position where scholarship was secondary to professional know-how, experience, courage and skill. You must be anticipating where all this is going. Yes. He was not rehired. What had been for decades a unique and seemingly permanent part of the University was dismantled. Not cost-effective. Not representative of the academic standards maintained in other schools and departments. Some dissenting hue and cry. Letters to the school paper, the provost and president. A little picketing. A strike threatened by black grad students. An attempt to hook up the large number of black workers on campus—cooks, janitors, garbagemen, buildings and grounds—with the scarce black students, administrators and faculty. But these minor storms blew over and the blithe, gray weather of the University prevailed. In a year or so very few people seemed to miss what was lost. Fewer remembered denials of tenure, the wholesale sacking of what had constituted the largest enclave of black professionals on campus.
The whole ugly episode returned in the first sentence my friend spoke. Of course a university has the privilege of undergoing periodic identity crises, and yes, financial retrenchment was necessary when it became clear that the wartime boom of the sixties couldn’t last forever, that the University could not attempt to be all things to all people, that its survival as a viable institution demanded clarification of purpose, that it should concentrate on doing well what it had traditionally done best. But should all the above mean simply servin
g the powerful, legitimizing an elite? Fiscal responsibility became a battle cry, the license to cut back, turn back, cut down. The forces at work in the University mirrored those in the larger society. And the University acted as icily, pragmatically as the federal government. Hunker down. Clarify priorities. Whose University is it, after all? Whom is it meant to serve? Which constituencies laying claims on its resources were qualified petitioners? Who could the University afford to ignore?
In my friend’s voice I was hearing the history of an intricate hurt. Objective decisions, policy formulations from hardworking, well-intentioned committees studying and fact finding, a democratic, collegial process, and responsible management by the upper administration, all those neat, clean means that can be trotted out to accomplish the most vicious ends. I heard that hollow, righteous clamor, the weight of arbitrary power rationalizing itself, justifying itself by turning this man away. Of course I also heard echoing in his voice the corrosive emptiness of a house he’d shared twenty years with a woman, the house whose rooms he still haunted even though he’d sold it and driven past it only once in the two years since his wife’s death. No one gets by without loss. I heard that too. The reality, inevitability of personal grief. And racial insult’s double-whammy, that’s always collective and personal. The School of Social Work had to go. Nothing personal about the committee’s finding. Incidentally, in the working out of the committee’s timetables, conclusions, proposals, directives, certain individuals, most of them black, would suffer, but the harm was not intended personally or racially; the whole business of shoring up the University, the country, was about ensuring the best deal for everyone, in the long run. Clearly the ax had to fall. Better that it fall systematically, according to a master plan designed to maximize profit derivable from losses. My friend could think of himself as one who’d drawn an unlucky ticket in this lottery. Something’s got to go. Too bad it’s you and yours. The news wasn’t really news, was it? Last hired, first fired. Hadn’t he heard words to that effect before? Another reason not to take it personally. Right.
Philadelphia Fire Page 12
