The Futilitarians

  This idea of life as a series of mitigations and mediations was something Sara had been especially interested in the month before when she chose those seasonal poems for us to read, particularly Elizabeth Bishop’s wintry “In the Waiting Room.” The soon-to-be-seven-year-old speaker has an epiphany about selfhood, that she was a human, a female, living on this earth like other human females, different, but also one of them. She is in the waiting room of a dentist’s office surrounded by “arctics and overcoats, lamps and magazines.” For Sara, that line in particular and the poem in general were about a moment of breaking through the mediating elements that keep us from experiencing the metaphysical, the natural world. Months after that meeting, Sara said she almost got that Bishop line tattooed on her wrist but she couldn’t commit to a font. Bishop lived in Brazil, briefly befriended Lispector, a notoriously difficult task, and translated some of her short stories, though she wrote exasperatedly to Robert Lowell that the combination of Lispector’s “Russian massive inertia and Brazilian does pile up.”

  The Lispector crônica we spent a lot of time discussing at the December ECRG, “Sharing Bread,” was also about an unexpected moment of unmediated existence, and was my personal favorite of the evening:

  It was Saturday and we had been forced into accepting an invitation to dinner. But each of us valued our Saturday evening far too much to waste it on a couple whom we found rather boring. Each of us had experienced happiness at some time or another and had been left with the mark of desire. As for me, I desired everything.

  For a couple of paragraphs Lispector goes on about how much she and the other guests do not want to be there, languishing in the living room without hunger or anticipation. “Waiting for dinner to be served, we drank dispiritedly, toasting resentment.” Then they are led to the dining room, where they are stunned:

  The table was covered with solemn abundance. Sheaves of corn had been piled up on the white tablecloth. And there were red apples, enormous yellow carrots, round tomatoes with skins ready to burst, juicy green courgettes, pineapples of a malign ferocity, tranquil, golden oranges, gherkins bristling like porcupines, cucumbers stretched tight over watery flesh, hollow red peppers that made our eyes smart—were all entangled in moist whiskers of maize, tinged with crimson like outlined lips. And bunches of grapes. The purplest of black grapes anxiously awaiting the moment to be crushed. Nor did they mind who should crush them—like the mistress of the household in times gone by. The tomatoes were not round for anyone: for the atmosphere, the circular atmosphere. Saturday was for anyone who might turn up. And the orange would sweeten the tongues of the first to arrive. Beside the plate of each unwanted guest, the woman who washed the feet of strangers had placed—without choosing or loving us—a sheaf of wheat, a bunch of fiery radishes or a red slice of watermelon with its glossy seeds. All broken up by the Spanish acidity of green lemons. In the earthenware jugs there was milk, as if it had been transported across a rocky desert with the goats. Wine that was almost black after all of the pressing, shuddered in earthenware bowls. Everything cleansed of perverse human desire. Everything as it is and not as we wished it would be. Simply existing and intact. Just as a field exists. Just as mountains exist. Just as men and women exist, but not us with our greed. Just as Saturday exists. Simply existing. It exists.

  After I read that passage aloud (I couldn’t help myself), Michael L. said one of the reasons he chose this crônica was that it seemed to him a hopeful, exquisite act of using language to try to describe an experience that’s in some ways beyond language. I was surprised by his invocation of hope. In his own life and writing and music, Michael L. lists toward the disturbing and the spare, and I wouldn’t have thought he’d be attracted to the dynamic opulence of this piece. Then again, that was my own blind spot. Even in my admiration of his work, I often missed the tenderness that existed within the difficulty, and besides, he had to be somewhat in love with life to create at all. Lispector certainly was. We grabbed the sensual and spiritual richness of her writing in handfuls. Discussed her curious, almost cruel ambivalence toward the Christ-like hostess, her Spinozan fusing of essence and existence.

  “Was that a real table? A metaphor? Both?”

  “Milk and wine—intoxication and nourishment at the same time—an ideal state.”

  “Here we are complaining all the time, and here is all this bounty, right in front of us.”

  “Our expectations are diminishing us and how we experience the world. We miss too much when clouded by expectations.”

  “Being beyond desire is a kind of freedom, a transcendence.”

  The word “transcendence” drove me once more to A Concise Dictionary of Existentialism, where I found this from Simone de Beauvoir: “It is the existence of other men that tears each man out of his immanence and enables him to fulfill the truth of his being, to complete himself through transcendence, through escape towards some objective, through enterprise.” (See also: Americanism; Being.) Though it was the lack of objective and lack of enterprise that brought about Lispector’s transcendent experience of the meal, the quote did speak to the core of the ECRG project: the necessity of others in our search to find meaning in ourselves, of entering the unwalled city as individuals and receiving communal acceptance and succor. Lispector takes it further—her dissolution into a divine state is made possible not only through the presence of other people, but also through the presence of other beasts and flora and all of the gifts of nature. She ends this crônica:

  We ate. Like a horde of locusts, we gradually covered the earth. As absorbed as those who cultivate existence, by planting and harvesting, by living and dying and eating. I ate with the honesty of someone who does not belie what he is eating. I ate that food and not its name. God was never possessed by what He is. Brusque, contented and austere, the food was saying: eat, eat and share among you. Everything there was mine. This was the father’s table. I ate without affection. I ate without any feelings of compassion. And without giving way to hope. I ate without any trace of regret. And I was wholly deserving of that food. For I cannot always be my brother’s keeper, nor can I be my own keeper. Alas, I no longer love myself. I have no desire to forge life because existence already exists. It exists like the ground we tread. Without a word of love. In total silence. But your satisfaction is akin to mine. We are strong and we eat. Bread is love between strangers.

  I’d spent much of the morning of the December ECRG shopping, trying to echo the magnificence of the spread in “Sharing Bread.” But it’s nearly impossible in a typical American supermarket, where the fruit often has tiny stickers on it, printed with corporate logos, bar codes, and, most depressingly, websites. I searched for a pineapple of “malign ferocity” but the supermarket was like what Lispector wrote to a friend about Switzerland: “There are no demons here.” The pineapples were all collared and tagged DOLE. The tomatoes were pale and bland or organic and overpriced, the grapes tidy and unsensual. But I did my best, which was also the opposite of the point of “Sharing Bread.” I made the mistake of going to the supermarket with expectations, when it was the lack of expectation and desire that made such an extraordinary experience for Lispector at the dinner party. Even Lispector’s hostess, when browsing the market stalls of Rio de Janeiro, probably did not have the expectation of creating a metaphysical experience for her dinner guests. I cobbled together a lame simulation, but passable among a group of friends who appreciated the effort, and the spread was bettered and enlivened by what everyone else brought—the wine, mini-cannoli from an Italian bakery, Christine’s casserole, Ellen’s rosemary cookies, Sara’s elaborately frosted brownies. Our sons begged off bedtime so they could make multiple incursions on the special holiday bounty. As we talked, the food on the table diminished, but the real abundance lasted late into the night and we edged closer to the end of the year together.

  Six months later, though, I did finally find that ferocious pineapple, in a large covered market in central Mexico among hundreds of assiduously arrange
d pyramids of fruits and vegetables and incessant, melodic hawking. A fierce, spiky row of pineapples lined the top of one stall like a crude battlement. The recognition was immediate. I chose the most malign-looking one to bring back to Brad and the boys, its rangy crown taking up too much space in my market bag, threatening the overripe mangoes and thin-skinned tomatoes.

  The day after I found the ferocious pineapple, we all took a long, steep walk high up on the mirador over the five-hundred-year-old town of San Miguel de Allende where old stone houses are built into an ancient stone hillside, took in the panorama of lakes and hills and blunt new developments on the outskirts, and then made our way back down through the untended beauty of the winding and plunging alleys and stairways with draping ivy and ankle-twisting cobbles. I was annoyed because Otto had chosen some kind of awful Cheetos “extremos” as a snack from a little store by the mirador, and his fingers and mouth blazed life-jacket orange. Was even more annoyed at myself because I’d let him, and had nothing to clean him up with. Then, turning a stairway where a large wedge of sky opened up between rooftops and walls, I saw some big snowy egrets swoop and dive. A little farther down, at the stairway’s landing, was an enormous tree rising out of a small plaza below, filled with dozens of these egrets, branches clotted with their nests. Though egrets are common enough in south Louisiana, I’d never seen this before, in the middle of a town, so many high up in a tree. But I did recognize the sharp odor of their nesting. Two years earlier, during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico with some biologists and my photographer friend, skirting rings of soiled boom laid down to protect the flat barrier islands where birds nest, I had commented on what I thought was the hot, rank smell of the oil glimmering in sheets on the water around us. One of the biologists corrected me—it was from the birds. “I love that smell,” she said. “That means they’re nesting.”

  When we got closer to the plaza, we saw that the walkways with red curved balustrades and the street below were all splattered, layered, covered white with bird shit. The squawking commotion in the tree was constant, loud, and impressive, and as we continued down the stairs, the sound mingled with the familiar tonal drone of a Mass coming from a church, the Santa Cruz del Chorro, built onto the side of the hill in the seventeenth century. In the side courtyard stood a large wooden santa cruz (holy cross) painted with symbols of Christ’s Passion, three dice that the Roman soldiers used to gamble for his garments, the fiery corazón, the spear. The church’s façade was level with the assembly of egrets, its heavy wooden doors open toward it. On a small stone terrace in front of the church were a few benches where some older women watched kids too restless for the pews and a couple of young people sitting on the ground with their backs against the church, laptops open, absorbed in a different sort of congress. Did the church have Wi-Fi?

  I stood on the terrace, my heart filling, my eyes stinging from emotion. All the world wordlessly, deeply connected through just—being. It was a Lispector moment, a felt accumulation of an intense year of loss, reading, thinking, talking, listening, a gift of the ECRG. At the Chorro, all these signs and all this activity were arranged into this one unexpected moment. Each one necessary, each one accepted into a wild harmony.

  The people in the barrio could easily have gotten rid of the nesting colony, and I wondered what they thought of it, especially the person whose car was still parked (maybe broken down?) below the tree, guano-glazed from hood to trunk. But for now they tolerated the din and shit and the smell, and were rewarded with this spectacular vision, an auxiliary congregation of beautiful white egrets. During a quiet moment, maybe kneeling after receiving Communion, could the parishioners hear the birds behind them? When the priest raised his arms in benediction, could he see the birds framed in the threshold, messing with their nests in noisy pairs?

  We hung around marveling for a bit, Otto and I in the side courtyard of the church with the santa cruz, strung with faded cut-paper decorations from a long-past feast day and lined with potted bougainvillea, as Brad and Silas wandered the shady terraces and porticos. When they signaled to us that it was time to move on, I knelt down, spit on my thumbs, and tried to wipe the awful orange from Otto’s wincing face. We continued down, avoiding the shit-covered paths below the cathedral of egrets, which wasn’t difficult, because there were lots of other paths to take.

  NEW YEAR’S EVE

  Tanks Versus Chickens

  On the last day of 2012, I was a little hungover from a New Year’s Eve’s Eve party, having failed the Test of the Open Bar for about the hundredth time in my life. I was disappointed in myself, and it seemed that this year was going to end as it had begun, in a cloud of dull confusion. Was I ever going to learn my limit? Learn that just because there’s so much being offered, I don’t have to keep consuming? In a bid for productivity, I drove downriver through the lower Ninth Ward across the Industrial Canal, once breached and murderous, now repaired and functioning, to St. Bernard Parish to buy fireworks, because like a lot of things in Orleans Parish, fireworks are illegal but ubiquitous. When we were kids, Dad would drive across the parish line to buy fireworks twice a year, New Year’s and Fourth of July, and return with big paper bags laden with lurid and exciting little packages, just waiting to be exploded. My excitement over fireworks has remained undiminished since childhood, and when those striped tents start appearing just outside of town, it makes me giddy to be an adult, with my own car and money and enthusiasms. Now I get to come home with the bags full of fun, rationing out the black snakes and smoke bombs over the afternoon until the sun goes down and anarchy takes over.

  When I arrived home, I asked the boys for a little alone time, and shut the bedroom door, so I could at least dose myself with some reading, try to redeem a tiny rational part of my soul since I’d once again poisoned my body. Fugitive Essays, by Josiah Royce, had been mute on my bedside table for days now, and I thought I’d crack it open. I’d bought it the week before, after a holiday lunch gone bad.

  Every year around Christmas, my sisters and I take Rachel’s son, our nephew, to lunch at a nice white-tablecloth restaurant in the French Quarter. Our dad had been an imperfect father figure to him, by turns indulgent and overly strict. His steadiest, enduring father figure was the boyfriend whom Rachel broke up with before she killed herself, the generous and kind man who’d helped rear him since he was a toddler and has never left his life. Still, having been raised mostly by about a dozen auxiliary parents—aunts, uncles, grandparents—he must’ve felt like he was growing up in a swarm of opinions and judgment with no real authority.

  I arrived at the Aunts’ Lunch late and irritable because of traffic from some stupid bowl game being played in town and all the stupid tourists. We had a bad table, next to the service area, the nexus of tension in most restaurants, where harried back-of-the-house meets impatient front-of-the-house. And the scene was already strained when I sat down to the tepid Beefeater martini waiting for me. Apparently I’d missed some heavy exchange about responsibility. Since Dad had died months before our nephew’s high school graduation, I imagine, we’d been overbearing in our concern. He was foundering, with school, with work, and we all hurried to right him. Soon, after the food arrived, a minor argument escalated effortlessly, and before you knew it, there was a dramatic exit from the restaurant by my nephew that caused head turning by the other dressed-up holiday diners.

  Like my nephew, I was so over the holiday crush of family, the life-time of associations activated each time we pull up a chair to the table. But my exit was more low-key. I threw down some money for the bill and left the others still seated, mid-entrée, mid-entreaty for me to stay. Alone in the French Quarter, early afternoon, I didn’t want to go to a bar, didn’t want to shop, already holiday-sick of consumption. Instead I went to an old used-book store nearby, with Parisian-high ceilings and shelves that require a sliding ladder on a rail to access. When I was younger, the store used to feel timeless and eternal, but that afternoon, older and feeling over
whelmed by how fast everything in the world was changing, I saw the cypress cabinets and shelves and the vellum, leather, cardboard hardbacks and pulpy paperbacks as achingly vulnerable, a match strike away from obliteration, fuel for an inferno.

  Near the top of the narrow stairs, I was searching the philosophy section for potential ECRG material when I came across the essays by Josiah Royce, an American philosopher I’d never heard of but guessed I should have, given the amount of shelf space his books took up. The book was printed in 1920, its title embossed in thin faint gold on black. The table of contents held irresistible chapter titles like “The Decay of Earnestness,” “Doubting and Working,” “The Practical Significance of Pessimism.” I randomly flipped to an essay, “George Eliot as a Religious Teacher,” from 1881, and read:

  I have tried to show that George Eliot’s effort to express the religious consciousness in terms of natural, not of supernatural, facts is, in part, a sequence from the philosophical movement of her age.… She was an appreciative student of many systems, but she let none of them rule her. She heard what they had to say, and then went to actual human life to see whether the theory held good.… Thus in her writings the best power of analytic vision is joined with depth of emotion.

  I brought the book down to the register, one of the few reasonable post-martini purchases I’ve ever made.

  In bed a week later, the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, weighed down by lack of sleep and a little self-loathing, I chose one of the shorter essays, “Doubting and Working.” The edges of the pages were deckled, blade-cut near the beginning of the previous century. The margins were nice and roomy, but the typeface a little tight. Royce begins with the basic problem of individual perception, from the physiological, like color blindness, to the psychological, like the “ghostly” projections of our public selves, and how that complicates even the simplest human interaction. For Royce, our inherent, myriad imperfections combined with our penchant for conviction is a real problem. “Exposed to the largest errors of observation, to the greatest defects of memory, to the incalculable interference of passion and prejudice, to the disadvantage of being surrounded by numberless obscure associations, we, thinking beings, live in this amusing chaos of our fleeting conscious states and spend our time in making assertions about the universe.”