The sky changed, and the stars turned into specks. Chilled, I stood from the ledge. At sunrise, I left the building through an internal fire escape and stepped out into the sunlight carrying only my journal under my arm like a newspaper. I was cheerful about having succeeded on my journey that night. My uncle had spoken. There was a reason for writing and a reason for not writing. They both said something.
When the stores opened on Collins Avenue that morning, I stepped into a dusty used bookstore as the shopkeeper was opening the door. I went down the aisles and started thumbing through the pages of bird-watching books, history books, and novels. I kept browsing the dusty shelves until I came upon a small red paperback in the philosophy section called The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society. It was a sociology text whose first chapter dealt with the theory of organization. Immediately, I had a number of ideas, strange and mundane alike.
I read the first page of the book, and then I read another. I read a third page, and a fourth; and I was amazed to find that I understood what this writer was trying to tell me—four decades later. Each sentence seemed to take me closer to his worldview:
The meaning of a message is the change which it produces in the image.
I bought the book for $1.75, and I set it down on the table in my apartment. How was the world organized? I had to force myself to find the answer, to search for the word for the answer. When it seemed that I had reached the heart of the theory, ideas balanced themselves and opened up gracefully. Each sentence led to a new conclusion. It seemed I could stand within the spaces it created. There were folds and faults that opened up to fissures, which fell on forever. I could walk through a sentence looking down, and then step around the bends of its construction. When I stopped I felt like I was spinning. I started writing in the margins, asking questions, confessing, at every point, my ignorance, my disorganization.
If one idea was explained through the use of another, I found another book. I’d buy it, steal it, or borrow it from someone else’s shelf, and even if I read only part of it, I kept it. I would soon find myself sprawled out on the floor, caught between the pages of ten or more books. I would leave the books open around me so I could compare the writers’ contexts, hear their voices, and weigh their arguments.
A library began to grow in my room. For bookshelves, I piled together plastic milk crates that I had stolen from the loading docks of nearby grocery stores. For every twelve or fifteen books, I needed another crate. Consumed with questions and new ideas, I began to take long walks. If it was late at night, I sat at a table in the corner of a twenty-four-hour coffee shop and kept working, reading and writing.
Within only a few weeks of living alone, I had begun working on essays, poems, and an outline for a play. If my hand was tired, I opened the book by Kenneth Boulding and continued his lesson on the image. Then I found the Dhammapada, a collection of the Buddha’s teachings. There was a chapter about the control of the mind, which I read about a thousand times. At the twenty-four-hour coffee shop I would read one of these books and write myself into exhaustion. All kinds of people would come through there: partygoers of every stripe, club kids, drag queens, tourists, cabdrivers, herbal medicine doctors. I found that the element of distraction tested my perception of what I was reading. If the authors were right, their sentences would prove true both in the context of their arguments and right there in the coffee shop, or wherever I had gone that night. Reading and writing for hours, sometimes until morning, I came to treasure my time living on the beach.
If I stayed in, I would turn all my lamps on until a warm glow surrounded me. I sat on the floor, books open, looking into myself as though I were only the contour of a cloud alive with eidos. When I became too tired to read, I curled up on the floor, listening to old philosophers surmise conclusions in the back of my mind. Closing my eyes, I let myself sprawl out on the open books, arms and legs creasing their yellowed pages, tearing their jackets, and bending their spines.
In the morning before classes, I kept writing. During my break at work, I kept writing. Backstage, between scenes, the same. I didn’t have the four-colored ballpoint pen any longer, so I used better pens with finer points, and I bought them by the dozen: red, green, blue, and black. My entries became smaller. I thought this way I could ensure that they remained private. I would take efforts to make them impossible to read. Soon, the pages of my journals were saturated with tiny manuscript blocks of micrographic reflections. In them, I delighted that I would prove the mortality of countless ballpoint pens.
One night, I stepped into a beatnik coffee shop on Drexel Avenue and set my two books on a table. I nursed a cup of coffee and kept to myself, reading. Then I was interrupted by a strange-looking man with curly red hair and an unlit cigar hanging out of his mouth.
“What are you reading?”
“Learning to read.”
“What are you learning to read?”
I slid the book across the table.
“Hegel? Silly self-consciousness! How did you get in there, my boy?”
Behind him, I saw a tall rabbi with a white beard. “Simcha, this young man is learning to read Hegel, and I think he has a question. Don’t you have a question?”
The rabbi cast a long shadow over my journal, smiling. “Yes?”
How could I be so frank? “What does this word mean?” I pointed to the word—phenomenology—and Simcha stepped back.
“That’s his domain.”
The man with the red hair said, “Pheno means feeling, and this is a phenomenon because the feeling part of being is not particular; that is, it is transcendent. We are all feeling. It is a different question than what you are feeling, and it is still another question whether we all feel the same way. Phenomenology, after Hegel, is different from the phenomenology of Hegel because he was the first to bring this term into the discourse of philosophy. Spirit is a mistranslation, because the original German uses the word Geist, and Geist means ‘mind.’ So, the phenomenology of spirit is also the phenomenology of Geist, or mind, don’t you see? And it would be a similarly fair question to ask whether or not the pheno of our thought—that is, the structure of our cognition—is alike. If it is, well then, my mind feels like your mind, and his mind feels like her mind, and through these deductive analyses we may arrive at the apperception that our experience is a universal experience, known as the truth: self-consciousness.” He peeked at the other open book on the table. “What do you have here?”
“That’s my journal.”
“You write awfully small. How can you read this? Simcha, have you seen this?”
“I can read it because I wrote it.”
The weird guy broke into laughter and walked up to the counter for a refill. I looked up at the rabbi. “Is he a professor?”
“Used to be. Now that’s what people call him.”
“What’s your name?”
“Simcha Zev.”
“And what’s with the robes?”
He smiled. “You have done a lot of writing, haven’t you?”
“Not really. This is only the beginning.”
“You’re almost done with that book.”
“This is the beginning of a much larger project—”
“Coffee, Nick?” The Professor asked.
From a table in the corner, a man with long hair and Indian robes said in a thick New York accent, “Sure, fuck it.” More laughter. These three were too fast for any average society to know what to do with them.
Over the holiday season, which otherwise held little cheer for me, I sat and read at this little café quite a lot. I came to look forward to my next conversation with Simcha, Nicky Nicholas, and The Professor. They called themselves the Misfits, Simcha told me, and laughed about the levels on which the name rang true. Again, The Professor brought a cup of coffee to the Krishna devotee, then sat down at the weathered piano in the back of the room and started banging away at some classical tune.
“Rachmaninoff,” I said. I recognized it from Jorge’s fal
l recital.
Nicky looked up at me. “And he’s trashing it.”
“It’s a lousy piano!” The Professor yelled across the room, over his own commotion. The wooden sides were splitting. The pedals could be heard pumping through the music. The Professor had to thump at the keys because a number of them were sticking.
“He’s a madman!” I exclaimed.
“You should write that in your book,” Simcha said.
The Misfits were older. They were on disability. They survived on Social Security. They ate at the same food banks. They were not wealthy or successful. All three of them seemed to be on their last few dollars, always saving plastic spoons and napkins. I was also living under less than ideal terms, and so I fit in naturally among them.
Some days, The Professor would describe the fallacies of various philosophies and schools of philosophy, including Gestalt psychology and behaviorism. He’d say things off the top of his head like “The solution to the riddle of the origin is the phoenix!” The Professor had come up with a theory about nongrammatical babble. The idea was that you could write down all the associations your mind makes when you concentrate on a certain letter or sound, and enlighten yourself.
“Like Rorschach?” I asked.
He trumpeted, spraying water.
Simcha was also a visionary. He would walk the streets of South Beach with a sign around his neck reading ADVICE $1. He would stop and talk with anyone who had a question. I bought him many coffees on this basis. At a point before the end of school, our conversations had become so worthwhile that he suggested we find a carpet and set it out at Lincoln Road Mall. With a simple sign, we began inviting people to sit and talk with us. We called it the advice corner, and people put dollars in our cup as we spoke with them, offering our advice.
“All we need is the invitation,” I’d say.
“All we have,” he’d say.
On Waking
I blocked out all of the light to my room so that I could bring the room to absolute darkness—even in the daytime. There was a metal shelf. It went on top of the dresser by the window. I added a hot plate and an electric kettle to the refrigerator in the corner. Seeing in a glance all of the objects in my room gave me a sense of confidence in my position. It gave me the decisive ability to focus. I could now read for hours without a single interruption. Of course, I enjoyed it. Reading was pleasurable to me because I was assigning authors to my voices, the same ones sometimes who would otherwise interrupt my teachers. Instead of getting distracted, I told the voices that I was reading about them. Suddenly they grew very quiet and began to pay closer attention. I was in control of the process now. I had enough money to keep from going hungry and some chance every other weekend of being able to fill up a shopping cart with groceries when my mom, now doting, would come by. Anyway, I had a job and a lunch card. I was guaranteed at least one meal a day. After work, I was tipped out by waiters and bartenders. I brought home forty to sixty dollars a night, much of which I spent on books.
Liz came to visit during winter break. She stayed a few nights. I showed her my favorite rooftops in South Beach. I had come to learn all of the best hangouts, sandwich shops, and parks that hid within the nightlife enclave. She brought me a few books she had picked up cheap at the university bookstore, including The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche. I set it next to Rimbaud on my bookshelf.
Mom brought me Dad’s old electric typewriter and gave me a radio. I set the typewriter on a desk that I had made with two bedside tables and a found piece of wood. I started writing little paradoxical poems, and short plays. Sometimes I broke into nongrammatical babble to merely practice typing, and to hear the sound of my typewriter.
The first thing I did when I went back to school was visit Dr. J. I told him I was depressed and I wasn’t sure exactly why.
“Are you able to concentrate?”
“Yes, like never before.”
“So, you really did need to get out of your situation?”
“Yes, but now I need to get out of the apartment.” Dr. J found this amusing. I told him about the books I had been reading. I checked out The Use and Misuse of Language by S. I. Hayakawa.
I had even found a book that Dr. J had written called Identity Through Prose. I showed it to him, curled at the edges, annotated and underlined.
“Do you have a job right now? Are you working?”
“Yep. Five nights a week.”
“You know that we’re auditioning for the main stage production soon. Are you going to be too busy to participate?”
“Probably.”
“Can I give you something to look over?” He didn’t say read.
“Sure, what is it?”
Dr. J handed me a piece of paper. On it was the monologue of a beastly prince named Segismundo who had been locked away in a cave and raised by animals, all because of one bad omen. A seer had foretold that Segismundo would become a tyrant, and so the king sequestered his son, keeping him in a remote cave. He kept his son secret so that he could find another heir. The only person to communicate with Segismundo was a general who fed the unfortunate prince, and taught him to speak human language. He was given no comforts, no literacy, and so little contact with human beings that he could only briefly learn from them. Dr. J said he was a Spanish Renaissance version of Tarzan, who learns from his circumstances, and in so doing teaches. The play was called Life Is a Dream. “Maybe you’ll find it,” he said, “interesting.”
At first, I thought it was a bit overdramatic: “Heavens above, I cry to you in misery and wretchedness!” As the speech went on, Segismundo compared himself to a bird, a beast, a fish, and a river, asking why they were free when he, a man, was not.
That day, I took a nap under the table in the library, curled up on a pile of costumes, the script open in front of me. I repeated the lines over and over again: “Heavens above, I cry to you…” “Heavens above…”
“Mr. Culley?”
I woke up in fifth period with Segismundo’s speech crumpled up on my desk. “I’m sorry, Mr. Remis.”
“It’s time we talk about your research paper.”
“I didn’t write a research paper, Mr. Remis.”
“That’s good, I haven’t assigned one yet.”
The class laughed.
“You are to write a paper. It can be about anything you have read in class thus far.” Then Mr. Remis went into a deeper voice: “Seventy percent of your grade will be based on what you turn in. You must take it seriously.”
I folded up my monologue, trying to make this problem appear simpler. Mr. Remis threw his scarf over his shoulder and described what he wanted to see in our papers. “Only your best writing,” he said, “and, Mr. Culley—something I can read.”
In my little room on West Avenue, I did not work on my paper. Instead I continued looking at Segismundo’s speech, counting the rhymes and beats, breaking down the monologue. I made dinner with the text next to me, opening cans of tuna and mixing it into a bowl of rice. The more I got used to the emotions in his speech, the more I knew I would become able to voice my own: “Oh, Misery and Wretchedness!” Late at night, I walked up to the golf course on Twenty-first Street and I climbed trees, reciting the most difficult lines: a bird, a fish. I perched atop the roof of the Cameo Theater and read from Life Is a Dream.
At the audition, I held it crumpled and folded, still unsure if I had any idea of what Segismundo was supposed to look like or act like. Suddenly I looked out at the room of students. Who were these people? And why were they here? Why were the lights on? The class grew quiet. The words weren’t coming. I turned to the piano in the corner of the acting area and pulled up the key guard. Then I made it howl, pressing down on all the keys I could cover with one hand. I turned the piano on its wheels to make a cave, an organ-like cave that moaned and croaked with octaves as far apart as I could reach from underneath. Pressing on one pedal, I began reading: A bird, a beast, a fish, a river…At the end of the piece I stood up from behind the humming
piano, and the whole room sat back. I had grasped the essence of this heart-wrenching, enigmatic soliloquy.
A month later, I looked around to see that everyone had changed. Nerdy kids had turned into gothic punks. Preppy kids had turned into hippies. Half of the school had come out of the closet. All of the students, in one way or another, had embraced the idea that life was art if that’s how you lived it, and that learning depended most on playing, on having your own approach to the material. It does not matter where the journey began, or where it leads.
“Mr. Culley?”
Oh no. “Yes, Mr. Remis?”
“What do you think of what we’ve been discussing?”
“Not much, Mr. Remis. Sorry I…”
“Michael, how about you?”
“Well, it’s like Travis was saying, I think. The story ends without any promises.”
“That’s right. It’s Hemingway.”
“And it means that this is the world, at times abruptly cut off or…” Michael went on.
“Truncated,” I added, helping.
“Yeah, that’s it. The ending is truncated.”
“Okay, nice. So by next week let’s read the assigned pages of Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings. The handouts are up on my desk; please take one as you leave today. Class dismissed.” I left without my copy.
The year was winding down now. Opening night was getting close, and all of my class assignments were due. Finals were being scheduled, and still there were performances to see, and recitals to attend. Again, I asked Jorge if I could come by so that I could use his computer. I liked hanging out there because his mom was in publishing and had a wall of fascinating books.
After rehearsal, he helped me chop out nine and a half pages on the education of Segismundo. I wasn’t exactly fulfilling the assignment. I wasn’t writing about James Baldwin, or Ernest Hemingway, or Borges. I wrote my paper on what I had been doing in class. Between this play and my journal, could Mr. Remis say it wasn’t true? I turned my paper in on time with the other students, knowing that I was only accomplishing the assignment. It had the right number of pages, enough words, a handful of footnotes, and a bibliography.
A Comedy & a Tragedy Page 18