Roman à clef

Yes, this is the joke of life, the big one: you’re not always fully alive, just like poems and paintings are not always beautiful, the bars not always full, friends not always in touch. When you go climbing out of your bedroom Rachmaninov is not always there, kneading aloft to the sunrise, cartwheeling round with the beat.

Sometimes you’re tired. Sometimes, yes, you’re not at you’re best, you’ve had a little to drink—not too much—but yes, you’re chasing taillights in the distance loping down an abandoned rural highway, barely feeling, barely existing, the headlights like guiding themselves through every gentle curve. The radio is on but you don’t hear it this time, you’re not drunk, still, drunk driving is wrong, and yet at this moment you are morally impregnable in the worst possible way, as if you find it simply hard to believe there’s a law or a court in the country that would even find you human.

There are extraordinary periods of time where we simply cease to be... alive. And yet there we are.

This is the big joke. The big laugh. We are never completely complete.

So there’s a worry about writing too much down in the spirit of documentation, preservation. The problem is this: memory must be protected against memory, its family of happenstance stacking atop itself like an endless accumulation of Harvard Classics whose weight slowly converts the volumes beneath into a voluble fossil fuel, leaving only a firm word there and a moment here uncorrupted: love. fear. the view off the family veranda. It’s carrying a roadmap to a foreign city folded and refolded over itself endlessly. Street names dissolving in the bleach of the creases. Entire blocks collapsing into the widening holes where folds collide. And yet even after writing you’ve lost the city of your visit, having counted on your map to remember for you. The only thing left a shadow of a reflection. The memory of a name like faded graffiti. The signified already laughing in the furnace, facelessly warming the rest of your life for the rest of your life.

And then it happens. A January afternoon, trees casually bleak, the sun strong enough to run the A/C in the car, I was thinking about an old girlfriend on this day #243 of living in the city everyone leaves, a rolling treeline, a line of schools, and then a burst, suddenly, of Cuban music—sax and guitar and trombone and, now I don’t believe in a god but if I did I’d be on hands and knees thanking him for the radio, the closest thing to magic I’ll get in this life, bop bop bop badop-bah, in school we fancied ourselves young Kerouacs Kerouacking all about the place, very hard to write this, of course, but we are now only part-time astonishments, throwing up our hands in our suburbs and saying “it ain’t me, man” as if this would send us flipping over the handlebars of our day jobs...

And then it’s gone.

There’s a problem inherent with having a personal philosophy: reason demands perfect attendance. And we can’t deliver. The atoms of the universe tremble and collide in the absence of consent as well as its presence. When you drive on the highway and miraculously find a way to somehow lose all agency, your body still finds the way home whether you’re asking it to or not. Words on a page exist whether you understand them the first time or the third time or never at all.

As if we exist as this nebulous mass of feeling and understanding and remembering, existence taking shape at random, interacting with the world with chaos-levels of coherency and interest and diplomacy. A perfect imperfection.

Almost sounds like a novel.