Too Much and Not the Mood Read online

  There were the characters too. Like Leo’s Romeo, lovesick in a split second. His nose pushed against that fish tank like he’d never seen a real-life Claire Danes.

  There was Marisa Tomei’s squeak. Her stomp. Her invention. In My Cousin Vinny, as if contriving a new hybrid of Bambi from Brooklyn, she pronounced deer as dia. Tomei as Mona Lisa Vito was a woman with demands who could disqualify you by merely raising the ridge of her brow. Her eyes semaphore. I was mesmerized.

  There was the rattling, rotisserie cook of reentry scenes in space movies. There was the Empire State Building: decisive to Romance. Diners: decisive to killers, insomniacs, to fugitives, to prom dates. To Jack Nicholson and his plain omelet, no potatoes on the plate, a cup of coffee, and a side order of wheat toast.

  There was sex before the camera panned away. Or when the camera panned away: sex.

  I’d heard talk of Sharon Stone uncrossing her legs in that infamous interrogation scene, but when I finally saw Basic Instinct, it was her shoulders pushed back on the chair that totally stunned me. I’d never experienced shoulders accelerating my pulse. I’d never seen a pair of shoulders communicate point of view. Liquidate a room of all its men and their presumption. Sharon Stone’s shoulders pushed back were like Whoa.

  There was Robin Williams’s radius of funny; of voices; of titan warmth. He seemed to outperform humankind. Somehow anthropomorphic, though that makes no sense. As a kid, I believed he was the only person who could be in two places at once. Who, like Genie, could balloon into hot air, float above us, convulse into the cosmos.

  Watching movies was consonant to those scenes where the underdog team walks through a stadium tunnel—where their cleats click as light approaches; the blinding pull of sky and turf, and the phenomenon of soon feeling telescoped and giant, both. Watching movies was, and still is, an opportunity for my heart to rush irregularly while the cost, for me, remains low. Because no matter how afflictive, heartbreak on-screen pales in comparison to that first night of a breakup where one’s only thought is not When I wake, I’ll be alone, but How? How will I wake up?

  There’s strength in observing one’s miniaturization. That you are insignificant and prone to, and God knows, dumb about a lot. Because doesn’t smallness prime us to eventually take up space? For instance, the momentum gained from reading a great book. After after, sitting, sleeping, living in its consequence. A book that makes you feel, finally, latched on. Or after after we recover from a hike. From seeing fifteenth-century ruins and wondering how Machu Picchu was built when Incans had zero knowledge of the wheel. Smallness can make you feel extra porous. Extra ambitious. Like a small dog carrying an enormous branch clenched in its teeth, as if intimating to the world: Okay. Where to?

  I remember seeing Etta James live at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier during the Montreal Jazz Festival, seven or so years before she died. She performed much of the show sitting on a stool, and even then the stage and the theater could not contain her. We the audience, at capacity, fit into her palm. That was the sentiment. Like still air before it becomes a gust of wind. Like water behind a dam; a snowpack before it avalanches. Like Monica Vitti before she sucks on a cigarette, a kettle before it whistles, Etta James, before she performed “At Last,” was possibly the most compelling example of potential energy. Ever.

  There’s might too in the incomplete. In feeling fractional. A failure to carry out is perhaps no failure at all, but rather a minced metric of splendor. The ongoing. The outlawed. The no-patrol. The act of making loose. Of not doing as you’ve been told. Of betting on miscalculations and cul-de-sacs. Why force conciliation when, from time to time, long-held deep breaths follow what we consider defeat? Why not want a little mania? The shrill of chance, of what’s weird. Of purple hats and hiccups. Endurance is a talent that seldom worries about looking good, and abiding has its virtues even when the tongue dries. The intention shouldn’t only be to polish what we start but to acknowledge that beginning again and again can possess the acquisitive thrill of a countdown that never reaches zero.

  Groping through the dark is, in large part, what writing consists of anyway. Working through and feeling around the shadows of an idea. Getting pricked. Cursing purity. Threshing out. Scuffing up and peeling away. Feral rearranging. Letting form ferment. Letting form pass through you. Observing writing’s alp and honoring it by scribbling a whole lot of garbage and then clicking in agreement: Don’t save. Exaggerating until it hurts. Until you limp and are forced to rest, and then say what you mean to the sound of thunder’s cannonade; to the lilting hum of ghosts that only haunt the sea, or of Debussy in your earbuds, and the sometimes-style of piano that sounds pleasantly soiree-drunk and stumbly.

  Until you write what is detectable but dislodges you. Like the smell of cinnamon. Like sex with someone where your bodies conform, and your hands and legs fold into each other, even if it’s been years. Even if there’s been hate and pitiless hurt.

  Thinking of someone the way he was is really just another way of writing. Thinking about someone I was once in love with—how he’d peel an orange and hand me a slice or how his white T-shirt would peek out from under his gray sweatshirt. The way it would curve around his neck somehow made me disposed to him. Thinking about that crescent of white cotton is a version of writing. Thinking about how, once, to make me less nervous before an interview I was preparing for, he pulled his pants down in public. Remembering his smile as my nerves relaxed, and as he pulled his pants up and looked around, is how I write and what I write about, even if it’s nothing I’ve ever written about.

  My quick-summoned first love—how everything was enough because I knew so little but felt cramped with certainty—is, I’m afraid, just like writing. That is to say, what can transpire if writing becomes a reason for living outside the real without prying it open. How, like first love, writing can be foiling, agitated, totally addictive. Sweet, insistent, jeweled. Consuming though rarely nourishing. A new tactility.

  First love fools you into thinking about nothing else. Into believing a whole city belongs to you; that you can conquer … it doesn’t matter what. Which is, experientially speaking, furthest from finding yourself. Which, let’s face it: can be temporarily curative. Time off. Rescue. A beer. Its froth. Thinking maybe it’d be good to travel. To go to Budapest and pick fights in Budapest, and then make up over a game of Twenty Questions on the bus from Budapest to Vienna.

  First love is all sensation and ambient zooms, and letting the world ebb. Like writing, occasionally, it feels combustive. Greedy. It’s unsophisticated and coaxes you into making promises about the far future and imbibing the moment. Into growing gullible fast, frantically so, and forgetting about yourself—about your exception. Writing does the same. It lays siege.

  Because writing is, off and on, running smack into Aha! and staring down Duh. Is my function to reach zero and leave nothing in the way of obstructing truth? Or to tender what’s still shapeless? The baggy fit of feelings before they’ve found their purpose. How can I present what’s, for now, finished, while also taking comfort in knowing it will evolve? That these words are only materials; provisions for keeping me observant and hopefully light-footed enough to plan my next project. My next many.

  Which is why the mode for labeling a visual artist’s work, when exhibited, has always appealed to me. How the artist’s name and the title of the piece are followed by the medium.

  • Oil on canvas

  • Tape and acrylic on panel

  • Plywood, forged iron, plaster, latex paint, twine

  • Wood, beeswax, leather, fabric, and human hair

  • Living artist, glass, steel, mattress, pillow, linen, water, and spectacles

  • Fat, felt, and cardboard box in metal and glass display case

  • Bronze

  • Metal and plastic

  • Hand-spun wool

  • Fabric collage

  • Carrara marble and teakwood base

  • Red pigment and varnish on paper

  • V
ideo, black-and-white, sound

  • Dyed cotton, grommets, rope, and thread, in two parts

  I find the plainness and economizing record of materials handled calming. Realistic yet not austere, because what corresponds—the words oil on canvas—has everything and nothing to do with what I’m looking at. The disconnect wakes me up. The words plywood, plaster, and twine are deadpan and even grim. Bronze is bodily and somehow lewd. Characterizing a video installation as having “sound” seems like, for whatever reason, a breakthrough. That a glass display case or teakwood base is principle to the piece feels hospitable. “Fabric collage” is pseudonymous.

  Too bad this sort of reduction cannot be achieved with books. Tables of contents don’t even come close. Indexes, maybe.

  Because writing is a grunt, and when it’s good, writing is body language. It’s a woman narrowing her eyes to express incredulity. It’s an elbow propped on the edge of a table when you’re wrapping up an argument, or to signify you’re just getting started. An elbow propped on the edge of a table is an adverb.

  I’ve heard rumors that writing can feel glamorous. But only glamorous, I’d guess, in the way a stretch limo might feel glamorous. No matter the pomp, one still has to crouch inside. Like skulking through a low-lit leather tunnel. An uncooperative space. Writing is awkward work and it’s become clearer to me why friends of mine have relinquished their desks and write instead from the comfort of their beds. Not in bed. From bed. Like sea otters floating on their backs, double-chinned and banging their front paws on a keyboard.

  It’s imperative that writing consists of not living up to your own taste. Of leaving the world behind so you can hold fast to what’s strange inside; what’s unlit. A soreness. A neglected joy. The way forward is perhaps not maintaining a standard for accuracy but appraising what naturally heaps.

  Writing is losing focus and winning it back, only to lose it once more. Hanging on despite the nausea of producing nothing good by noon, despite the Sisyphean task of arriving at a conclusion that pleases. The spiteful blink of my cursor: how it mocks. The rude temptation of a crisp day: how it bullies. Writing will never be as satisfying as observing someone whom I knew was terrible get caught in an embarrassing lie; as satisfying as the pop! I anticipate when twisting open a Martinelli’s apple juice or when I pour hot coffee over ice come summer or lace up skates in the winter—the firm tug of hooking the top part of the boot. Writing is a closed pistachio shell.

  And yet, despite claims, no writer hopes for ideas to take complete shape. Approximation is the mark. Many times, writing that clinches lacks incandescence—the embers have cooled. A need for completeness can, off and on, squander cadence. Isn’t it fun to read a sentence that races ahead of itself? That has the effect of stopping short—of dirt and cutaway rocks tumbling down the edge of a cliff, alerting you to the drop. As the critic, author, and poet Clive James wrote of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu: “It reminds me of a sandcastle that the tide reached before its obsessed constructor could finish it; but he knew that would happen, or else why build it on a beach?”

  What I enjoy is this. Responding to an artist’s work as if it were a missive. A film can be a fling I’ll cool with sentences I address to the director but that I’ll tuck into this essay instead. I’ve written to Akerman, Leos Carax, Antonioni, to Douglas Sirk’s Technicolor; his sylvan winters and obscene display of periwinkle. Love letters, generally. Essays that do not concern these directors’ works but are addressed to them—in spirit, tone, wash—because these directors have, over time, caused me to bend into shape visions that were long hibernating. How Agnès Varda, for example, introduced me to women with implication. How Varda portrays the defamed—often women—as irrepressible and in control of a mind built for maneuvering beyond convention. These women who perhaps even balk at the word survival and favor instead a far more fluctuant current: continuance.

  I’ve written as well to Bresson, Bergman, Rohmer’s girls, Rivette, John Huston because I’ll never get over Susan Tyrrell’s Oma in Fat City. Her boozy pout is a wreck no one recuperates from. She is unconcealed. Her dress’s back zipper unzipping. Her wail: both mother and child in labor.

  There’s no use in trying to bounce back from first seeing Giulietta Masina in La Strada. Her globe face is somehow panoramic: a pendant, the highest wattage, “an artichoke.” The sort of face one writes to because Masina was the queen of the encounter. Watching her means paying attention.

  I’ve written to Mazursky and Cassavetes and their women sick with an itch, dissatisfied to the point of dancing alone in their homes to music that isn’t so much music but dull pain with a tune. Women with demands that are mysterious even to themselves. Women who are runaways in their own kitchens. Women who are in no rush to respond to a world that’s only conceived them as its consequence. Who experience deep movement by playing air piano. Who are wind-oriented. Who are Gena Rowlands. Who are Jill Clayburgh—bearably, unbearably, lugging a big canvas down the street, alone. These women who brilliantly source endings for takeoff.

  I’ve written to Claire Denis, Maren Ade, to James Gray’s New York, to Mia Hansen-Løve’s yearning boyish-girlish unease. To her films as photo albums. To her regard for a person’s things. I’ve written to Abbas Kiarostami’s ballads. His least possible, spare approach to poetry and splayed views that above all are an indication of the times as they weigh on country and personhood, and how the two are prodigiously connected. I’ll send notes, again and again, to Wong Kar-wai. To Wim Wenders and his roads, and those questions that can only occur in cars. To Maya Deren! To Jane Campion! Andrea Arnold! Desplechin! I write to him a lot. To Satyajit Ray, whose character Durga, the mischievous daughter and Apu’s sister in Pather Panchali, is my namesake. Ray once said in an interview that he directs his films “in harmony with the rhythm of human breathing.” I’ve tried writing with that belief in mind, discovering instead how deep inhales and the release of a strong exhale are furthest from writing’s doubled-up glove. Moving pictures are a better match for that kind of subliminal flight.

  There are days when I can’t push through my frustrations unless I write to Barbara Loden’s Wanda. To that last shot when the camera freezes on the wilt of her face. She is all at once unused but oh, so used up. Or very used to. Why is it that when a woman is occupied by the voice in her head, or the wear of her day, or the landscape that passes through her eyes like windows on a train, the world assumes she is up for grabs? A vacant stare does not mean vacancy. It’s the inverse of invitation, and yet.

  Other times, the art becomes a condition—incredibly fitting. At first glance, my friend Sarah is a Cy Twombly; her favorite painter. She speaks in scratches, keeps dead flowers for weeks. Her thoughts are erratic, sarcastic, rascally. Her lips dark amaranth. Ordinarily, her makeup appears out of focus and, as a matter of course, slightly marked up. Rose-ish. Soft with contempt, as if she’d rather her blush stain than blush. Mid-consideration, Sarah will pause, shake her head, and smudge two ideas. To punctuate what she believes to be true, she’ll raise her index finger as if penciling the air with her talon nail. In her wake, the room drips. Like Cy, there is a touch of the unfinished with Sarah: what’s fraying could be trimmings. Like Cy, where crayon on canvas is so much more than “scrawl”—twenty-one feet of it that requires two hydraulic lifts to install—there are times when my friendship with Sarah invites remove. Stand too close, for too long, and the lines muddy. At any rate, isn’t it lovely to, once in a while, feel small in the presence of your friend? Awed. Fortunate to experience nearness that calls upon space.

  Because there is trust too, in feeling small. The letting-in that comes from letting go. Gazing up at the taut tract of cables on a suspension bridge and never worrying Will this hold? Or shooting up an elevator, seventy-four stories high, without feeling much until the doors slide open and you encounter a south-facing view and the precarious pull of a pane of glass.

  Nudging my mother’s eldest sister for details while she tells me a story a
bout my grandparents. This too gauges smallness. The muscle that builds from yielding to my aunt Jennifer’s decades, to the scalloped edges of her memory, reacquaints me to my most atomic self: where I come from. Even when I was nothing, I was arriving.

  This Christmas, Jennifer recorded a story about her parents for all the grandchildren on my mom’s side to keep forever. She titled it “Such Fine Parents.” The insistence of “Such” is not merely avowal, but love distinguished. She typed out the story and printed copies. She punched holes in each page and placed them one by one in red folders. I received mine in the mail and hurried to read it, only to be slowed down by tears every few sentences. The pull of ancestry. How without stint I could love someone I will never meet: my maternal grandmother. She died when my mother was fourteen years old. I was born sixteen years later, to the day.

  Reading about my grandfather Felix, courting my grandmother Dulcie, how he’d ride his Harley-Davidson—“sold off by the departing foreign troops,” Jennifer noted—from Calcutta to the French-colonized Chandannagar, where Dulcie was teaching at St. Joseph’s Convent, was like reading my past, the fiction of those years before I was born, before my mother and her two sisters were born, and have it beam bright and, more critically, become document. I’ve heard the stories. I’ve read my mother’s words too, about Felix’s furniture business, about Dulcie’s fondness for dancing despite being considered a prudish young woman, but for some reason now—as it can only happen in time—my aunt Jennifer’s telling of it flickered on the page. Like the Hooghly River’s “silvering” moonlight that accompanied Dulcie and Felix on their walks before they were husband and wife, never holding hands but prolonging their time spent together on the way back to the convent by “slowing their steps,” my aunt wrote, “as the gates to the school loomed large.” Romance’s silhouette as it’s been recounted to me, the stalling tactics of courtship between Felix and Dulcie, resides in my circuitry.