Trying my hand at condoms

For my writing group I'm supposed to write about "cast-off condoms" or "what makes a writer."

Annie Dillard wrote an essay about talent that begins with a couple paradoxes I haven't yet figured out. She says there is no such thing as talent; and if there is, it is in fields such as math and music and chess. She says that apart from Mozart and a few others, there have never been and never will be any truly gifted children. I suppose her use of absolute contradictions rankles me because I am so fond of the way of the gray, that happy watery world where nothing quite is or isn't.

Two things from her essay speak the truth to me. The first is that all of us are uninspired lumps of clay. The second is that we all have an equal capacity for creating and are called to create.

Annie describes people asking her about how she writes: their eyes are wide open as if they are addressing a majestic glacier or some other singular natural wonder. They cannot imagine that she simply sits down and does it; they think she must have a trick, a muse they have never known, a calling they have never heard. "Obviously this is your special gift. You have to write. I wish something in my life compelled and inspired me so directly." By making her into an anomaly, they give themselves permission to remain ordinary.

I met with a sweet soul (strong but brittle plastic like me) this weekend. We talked about the importance of courageous living, and we talked about writing. She asked me about how I structured writing time, and I told her I had to place it first thing in the morning, and that I had to treat it as I do my flute and piano practice: "This is something I want to do and like to do, and I've got to set aside time for it." "Ah," she said, "so you have learned how to discipline yourself through your musical background." I decided to agree but tried to downplay any feeling that dedicating thirty minutes each morning was an accomplishment.

Later I had to disagree directly, though gently. A couple years ago, when we were just getting to be friendly, she invited me to a Christmas party that she was throwing at her home for her writing group. At the time, I was not an artist or a poet or a writer or a pianist; I was a video store clerk. I was He Who Flees His Home and Wanders Wide Eyed at the Edge of the World. She introduced me to everyone as a "sensitive local." I sat and watched as the meeting progressed, enjoying these people talk about their creative art (though disturbed by how many people used the same line for praise for their prose: "I found it very engaging), but feeling completely foreign to them, as if they had been discussing the Balinese art of legong. I had written a few love- and lust-inspired demipoems in a notebook—hell, I'd written poems and stories as a youngster and had been in grad school in English for a semester and a half—but I still felt fundamentally different from the people gathered together here as writers.

But these were not true writers, as my friend discovered. She found a new literary community, and unlike the folks at the Christmas party, these new people are not simply "trying their hand at writing" but are different: they are "deeply in love with the word." There is some truth, surely. The first group consisted of people who came together by taking a class for beginning writers; the second group consists of people who publish small and rub elbows with people who publish large.

But the danger is too great: What happens is that we begin to think that we either are or are not something or other, and that doing things does not change us. The first group consisted of accountants who do a bit of writing, and the second group consists of writers who do a bit of real estate (or what have you).

In fact, doing things does change us. It makes lines on our bodies, builds furrows in our brains, and changes the beating of our hearts. Over beer in a hidden dive, a new friend asked, "Do you paint?" I laughed. It was a preposterous but fateful question. "No! Why? Do you?" And his face came alive as he told me his wife had just bought him a kit with canvases and acrylics, and he had watched in amazement as his body responded to the medium and made what he could never have anticipated and what was never there before. And how already he could not wait to begin the second painting of his life the next day.

"It is not good," he says. "But it's fun."

You're creating something that never was; you do it with joy. It is good. How could it not be?

Ballet birthday

For my 30th birthday I went to the San Francisco Ballet to see Balanchine's Apollo and two other short ballets. It was my first trip to the War Memorial Opera House, and I was surprised at its size and opulence. Although I did not feel excluded, I felt that this was a place for the few. On my walk down the marble steps to the bathroom, I passed a fancy restaurant-lounge where the wealthy were having brunch and champagne. On my walk up the marble steps to my seat, I passed two of three more fancy cafes were people were sipping wine.

I found my seat and looked around: a healthy, wealthy, well-cared-for hall. I admired and feared the gold detailing, the silver sunburst chandelier, the tasseled curtains. I decided this was a strange but necessary institution: the great cities of the world need these ostentatious theaters to draw out the aspirations and strivings of the world's artists.

I was flanked by a middle-aged woman and an older man. They spoke to me briefly; they held season tickets, and I was a stranger. Although I suspected they were somehow relieved that I was "one of them"—despite my jeans, I could have been much more "other"—I decided to put aside my own fears and be friendly and honest. I told them this was my first visit to the SF Ballet, and I had recently seen some video footage of Apollo and looked forward to seeing it live.

People piled in. I couldn't believe that so many people could actually like the ballet. I'm still searching for an explanation. Is it simply numbers? That is, in a city this large, is it simply probable that a few thousand will be at the ballet on a given Sunday?

The lights dimmed. There was applause for a conductor I could not see, and the small orchestra began playing Stravinsky's score, once so rebellious, now melodious, and made even more gentle by the enormous space of the hall. Leto gave birth, and Apollo, unwrapped from swaddling, took the stumbling but beautiful first steps of a child god. It was beautiful, and I was sad when I saw the steps and platform representing Olympus lit and Apollo and the muses slowly stepping toward it: Apollo would climb the mountain of the gods and the ballet would be over.

The next ballet was deeply dissatisfying. It was the world premiere (they were eager to say) of Blue Rose. A pianist and a violinist took the back stage and played ragtime music, the pianist with slipping fingers crunching chords and a right hand barely daring to flourish, and the violin weakly doubling the melody in places. Also unusual, the violinist's bow fell into the piano and there was a wooden racket as he tried to pull it out in time to play. A few fast dances in the ballet were exhilarating, but the rest was uninspired ballroom dances. I was surprised to discover that the choreographer was none other than the artistic director of the SF Ballet. What, I wonder, possessed him to create something so lukewarm?

The last ballet, Quaternary, was a ballet of the seasons. A ridiculously self-aware gimmick formed the background: an outline of a rectangle created by two or three rows of fluorescent tubes. At curtain rise, the whole thing flashed on for a second, and then some of the tubes went out, leaving only some sides of the rectangle visible. As winter turned to spring, the inside of the rectangle lifted from black to a dull green-screen green, and the lights shifted so that other sides of the rectangle were visible. At the end of the ballet, though I didn't notice for a while because there were so many goddamn dancers on the stage, the sides of the rectangle began to separate and float apart. Their silly destinations were lost behind the fall of the curtain, and when it rose again the dumb thing was put back together and seemed to want applause.

What use criticism? None, maybe.

Presidents

Last week I passed the most gorgeous blue condom. The ground was still wet from a morning rain, and the condom was fresh and buoyant and seemed to be lit from within. I went for a walk on President's Day, and all I saw was this tired old thing making its way toward the drain.

Chopin piano concerto

I got to the Conservatory an hour early, and as before I was drawn by those straight streets leading from east to west. They are so straight and flat, and tonight they dipped down slowly into the evening dark. I followed, passing 20th Avenue, 25th, 30th. Because I'm used to the big city, I think of this as Sleepy Town. Though there are houses and flats crammed in every inch of these blocks, the streets are quiet and offer ample parking. There is hardly a corner market to be seen.

After I few miles I found it—the ocean. The sun had already set. In the distance, down on the sand, someone twirled fiery batons. Elsewhere a small campfire was already burning out.

I walked down the stairs and landed in the sand. My work shoes, my nice shoes, which I was wearing to the concert, have holes in their heels and make a rattle as I walk on carpet or wood, as if small stones have gotten in. Here, I worry that they will fill with sand. How will I explain? How will I explain that I was drawn here, to walk out to the water, test my resolve, for ten minutes? Well, I will stomp and shake.

I always say, "There's China," whenever the ocean is spread out in front of me. It can be from a hill in West Portal, from the Golden Gate, from the rim of Embarcadero. But now I truly am at China. In the mostly dark there is still white of the cresting waves, whose sound is no more rhythmic than the wind here. The whitish layers of the coming waves seem to raise up; the ocean lifts away from me. It is falling toward me. It is only water, but somehow less stubborn than the rocks I'm standing on, and more mysterious than the air that is above all of us.

I went to the ocean because I could
and left the ocean because I could.
Everything is parallel or perpendicular
here. It is impossible to get lost.

The conservatory was full of suited young musicians and what looked like parents and old piano teachers. I was scared.

But I came for the Chopin, to hear a girl born in 1984 chisel thousands of notes into time.

Cafe

For my writing group, I must write about Espresso Royale Cafe, or ERC, in Athens, Georgia.

I would like to get beyond my obvious memories, such as my often-told story about how I discretely put away Children of Dune and picked up Malinowski's Sexual Life of Savages when I noticed that Michael Stipe and his entourage had come in and were sipping tea. (In the fantasy of our first date, I told him that I couldn't name even one of his songs, and he loved me still.)

I don't remember meeting with Ward (who preferred his own home and office, and may have been a turtle, for that matter), but I did meet with a seventies-haired German professor. I translated the libretto of The Magic Flute into English aloud, which his help. (I'd approached him in hopes of discovering ways I might improve my German outside of class; like most of the German professors there, he avoided the most direct route: real conversation in the language, slow, stumbling, broken, until both students and teachers were comfortable.) But I remember learning that allein means both "alone" and "however."

How strange it now seems that he would do something work-related outside of work with no compensation whatever. One day I'll have that kind of joy in what I do (and the financial security to consider doing "something for nothing"). I did turn pages for him as he accompanied a linguistics professor performing Schubert in a casual recital at his home. Gratis.

Later, I would spend hours and hours at ERC, mostly alone in the smoking section downstairs. What insanity—I was immensely productive yet so destructive. I smoked Kents and Marlboro Light 100s and Marlboro Reds and Camel Unfiltereds like a madman, twitching and shaking, anxiously watching the ash grow, the cigarette shrink, and lighting the next one with ecstatic relief at its beginning and mortal dread for its ending. Insane consumption. Embarrassing excess.

And read, read for class and read from where class led: Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, Foucault, and a number of early anthropologists: Durkheim, Mauss, Boas, Malinowski. Eventually I would begin reading about Thomas Mann and Benjamin Britten, though most of my progress with that project came at another cafe, Blue Sky, and was completed in a delirium of delight at another, Jittery Joe's (downtown).

Ah, yes, and I first studied with the irresolute straight boy, Matthew, who would cause several of us to swirl about (Andrea, Jackie) until a trip to Europe brought out his mania and he walked the streets like a prophet in a knee-length fur-lined coat until the plastic chair he tried to smash through an ex-girlfriend's sliding glass door landed him in jail and forced him into exile.

One week the art hung on the walls of the cafe caught my eye. The works were frightfully cold, almost invisible. Geometric designs, a square, a bisected circle, shallowly embossed on white paper. The figure of a man standing on a circle in gold dust on black, visible only from a few angles. I contacted the artist and bought two of the works, hating them when my life had settled into its own emptiness.

The artworks were in a truckload of things I took to the dump before moving to a one-bedroom apartment. They were saved by a man raking through the trash, though he seemed most interested in the glass frames, and no doubt had something to fill them with.

Oh, the pianos.

Oh, the pianos. Just wooden typewriters with pingety-pangs for clickety-clacks, but I remember the old Chickering, its three legs and the dropping fruit of its three pedals, which creaked sometimes like a tree in summer. It was cherry maroon where it shined, and dark where it had wrinkled in its ninety years of air and heat. The strings were to be touched and explored, and guarded the friendly dust on the sound board.

And once the doorbell rang and my mother let in Rocky, and I continued to play, as if I were a Great Artist, and Rocky sat in a wingback and crossed his legs as if he were a Great Audience.