Gloomy Days Continue

Ain’t that an ugly shot?

But that’s what it’s been looking like outside the window lately. We’ve had days and days of rain, which is to be expected in April.

I’m not saying I’m a sunny day/summer person. Far from it. I don’t look forward to the mornings where I’ll have to take an extra 15 minutes to blanket my pasty skin in 65+ sunblock.

But I used to like rainy days. I was just saying that to Julius yesterday when he was complaining about the weather and I said rainy days give us a chance to go inside and reflect. Hours later, I found I was doing nothing but falling asleep over any of five books I’ve been trying to get myself to read. Then I got mad at myself for not accomplishing more. Now I see what he’s saying about hating rainy days.

On Saturday night, it rained too but we went and saw The Secret in Their Eyes, the Argentinian film that won Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards this year. It was captivating from first to last and we talked about it for hours at Fiorello’s afterwards. Julius said that the movie teetered on the brink of becoming too many things at once – a comedy, a detective story, a heartrending love story, a polemic on 1970s Argentina, where the right-wing had fabricated a government takeover by the left like the right is doing in America today – but the movie knew when to pull back to its central narrative.  These are the kinds of stories I like best: ones where there’s a specific focal point – in this case, the thwarted sentencing of a rapist/murderer – that somehow also binds in a multitude of other subjects. And the film psyched us up for our trip to Buenos Aires the week after next, where I’ll be celebrating my 36th birthday.

We also discussed Flannery O’Connor. I said I’ve had a hard time reading her these days. She was a force of nature, one of the greatest writers in American literature and her stories are so demonically possessive. Even though she was a hard-core Catholic, she grew up in the Bible belt and she peoples her stories mostly with Pentecostals, unhinged white trash and unromanticized poor black characters. She had no trouble being violent and graphic in her narration since she began from the premise that man is in an unredeemed state and she made it her mission to show just how wretched that state of being is. In an essay on O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Harold Bloom says, “We would be good, O’Connor thinks, if someone were there to shoot us every minute of our lives…[She's] someone who can entertain us so profoundly [that she] can damn us pretty much as she pleases.”

True, but, see, this is exactly what I don’t like about her. Her talent is so seductive that we’re willing to take her scourge, much in the way people find so much fascination in Jonathan Edwards’ Calvanist sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” that it’s now a central piece of the American literary canon. We should also note that O’Connor was infected with lupus and died at the age of 39. For fourteen years, she felt the Hand of God ready to pluck her from the earth at any moment. In the meantime, she left these Southern Gothic morality tales, maybe as a way of frightening us into our rightful subjugation. But what good does it do anyone to live that way? Could it be that her degenerating health had left her feeling condemned to such an extent that she, in a religious fervor, saw fit to condemn all humanity in a misery-loves-company kind of way?

And she was a racist! People don’t like to admit this about her. They say she uses the n-word as a way of satirizing the south and its limited assumptions about class and race. This is a pleasant theory and it lets a great writer off the hook, but it’s debunked when you read her correspondence, which shows that she uses these epithets without the slightest irony.

I told all this to Julius and he said I should write fiction from a Buddhist standpoint. “What would a good Buddhist do if he or she were mugged on the street?” I told him that, in theory, the ideal reaction would be to take it on the chin – get up, dust yourself off and recognize that we’ve somehow created this karma in this or another lifetime and now a karmic debt has been erased. That’s the theory anyway.

He said, “You should write a story about that!”

I said I’m afraid. I believe in the laws of attraction. If I focus on such a situation, I fear I might attract such a situation. I’ve lived in big cities all my life and, while I’ve been attacked on the streets, I’ve only had actual money stolen from me once. It was in Barcelona. It was a setup. A guy asked me for directions and, while I was explaining that I was a foreigner, his Spanish friend came up, flashed a fake police badge, went into my wallet and took out all the American dollars and Spanish pesos he could before shoving the wallet back into my chest and pushing me away. It all happened so fast, I didn’t know how to react. I tried reporting it at the hostel but they all but laughed at me for thinking you can catch a petty thief in plazas that crawl with petty thieves. It turns out I got off easy too. The next day I saw the typical American tourist walking through the Plaza del Sol in a sunhat and golf shirt with his expensive camera dangling from a strap on his shoulder. A guy ran up out of nowhere, busted his nose, grabbed the camera and tore away, leaving the tourist gushing blood while the wife screamed like she had bats in her hair.

These things can happen in Brooklyn too and I’d rather not imagine them into existence. Call me superstitious but lots of people have stories of focusing these instances into being. But Julius also told me that I seem to stay within a certain comfort zone as a writer. I don’t want to move into the terrible, lest it become the actual. And I have to admit that I’ve come to the point in my life where, if I had to choose, I’d take happiness over writing. Fortunately, I don’t have to make that choice.

But the weather forecast says it’s going to be gray all day. Half an hour ago, Mom gave me a call and told me a lot of news about a lot of funerals that are either taking place or are about to take place any month now back home – one of them being of a girl my age whom I went to school with and who caught a lupus-like disease years ago and now has only five months to live. My father, whom my mother has been married to for 52 years and whom I have no real relationship with anymore, has a melanoma now that looks to be advancing. One of my sisters and my brother-in-law have been living together in hate for over a decade but haven’t divorced for fear that the other would get the sons and the property – and one fallout of this has been that one of my nephews, a former straight-A student, has been acting out and has been kicked out of school. And I read Flannery O’Connor’s “The Geranium” today and liked it…

And I can’t wait to head to my meditation cushion and come back to a peaceful center.

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