by W. E. Gutman
Begun in 1992, A PALER SHADE OF RED went through several permutations, incarnations and title changes. First called MEANDER-INGS, then ADRIFT, to describe a near-lifetime of nomadism, it also took on a life as THE ESTUARY. An estuary is where a river meets the open sea. The confluence of two bodies of water marks both the culmination of a journey -- an end of sorts -- and the beginning of another. The river is life elapsed. The sea, the mighty sea, is the great unknown that lies ahead. An early avatar of this straggling memoir was NEVER FAR FROM THE TREE as it best summed up what I am: the aggregate of my ancestral parts. In me are bonded the recombined atoms of my parents and grandparents and the genes of their forbears. Ultimately, my self-view, ideologically and politically, and the need to proclaim and defend the values this work propounds would dictate one final change. Under its present title, I’ve said everything I had to say about a multitude of things and, heeding to grudging civility, refrained from saying infinitely more. I hope readers find my work stirring, if not disquieting. If I left you unmoved, I failed. If I echoed some of your innermost and unspoken sentiments, stimulated you, enlightened you, challenged you, exasperated you, I will have in some great measure succeeded. What I left unsaid was often the heart of the story and the icing on the cake.
*
There exists midway between reason and delirium a narrow space when the hour is still very young. Time suspends its flight and melts, mellifluous and sweet like a star-studded kiss. When my lips brush past it, its nectar transforms me. I find myself at the center of an eternal spring, knee-high in jonquils and crowfoot, fairy tales dancing in my ears, my eyes filled with rainbows. I am child again. I see myself playing hide-and-seek with my shadow. Enraptured by the sudden absence of my other self, liberated from the shackles of reasoned consciousness, I do cartwheels and gambol breathlessly. But childhood is a state of mind that the mind betrays. The illusion is short-lived. Barely hatched from the darkness, I feel myself being transported backwards. Everything flees before me like a movie projected in reverse. Clouds quiver, devour one-another and vanish only to regroup a blink later into billowing and ever-dividing giant masses of white. The sky paints itself with convulsive strokes, now dusky, now fair, here frosty, there ablaze. The momentum that this inverse force generates sucks me within it and lays me to rest in this fragile cocoon woven with dreams where beginnings are born. It is through the eyes of remembrance that I scrutinize myself.
Farther away, I witness my own birth. All is awash in white -- the doctor, whose huge hairy hands yank me out of my uterine abode, the midwife, the ceiling, the walls, the large clock ticking mindlessly, the big swinging doors, the bonneted nurses, the nauseating milk a white teat insists on pumping into my mouth. Even my very first breath seems impregnated with whiteness. I choke on it. White is the light that surrounds me like a shroud. I close my eyes to escape its oppressive monotony. My senses are raw, my thoughts untamable.
“Fetus!” I summon myself. “What are you waiting for? There’s no turning back. Dive in. The current will do the rest.”
I watch myself pondering the challenge.
“No matter,” I answer at last. “I’m the product of my own optic. There can be no order without chaos, beauty without ugliness, silence without din, peace without torment.”
I cling to this argument as to a life preserver, fearing all the while that I might sink under the weight of its own irrelevance. I close my eyes. The crossing is coming to an end. The metamorphosis is complete. I submit to it time and again in the bosom of night the better to see it clearly, to flee day.
When I reopen my eyes in the morning, after the dreaming, reality dawns. Things take shape around me. I become conscious of time. Weightless in the void of slumber, now awake and knowing, my body yields to gravity. I feel myself being. Inner voices, all vying to be heard, are soon hushed by the sounds of day. Life begins anew.
To ease the discomfort, I weave myself into another dream. I rarely know where I’m headed. I often get lost. But the urge to find my way becomes so compelling that I keep spinning dreams until I do. The journey gets tedious at times and many a vision once indelibly etched in my mind shrivels up and dies a thousand deaths as I uncap my pen. Then night returns to deliver me from day and I reenter the dreamtime. I may be dreaming now even as I tell you this.
*
Before me is the open sea.
“Come hither,” it beckons.
I can feel the salty air on my lips. An invisible tide tugs at my being.
“Come. You know who you are. It’s time to take the plunge,” the sea murmurs as the surf laps at my feet. “What are you waiting for?”
I look over my shoulder. Great rivers spring from humble origins. Like the Nile, the Ganges, the Amazon, the Yangtze, the Mississippi, I know from whence I came but I no longer remember where I’m headed.
Those who have never been anywhere, don’t understand nostalgia or live by meaningless clichés remind me with galling smugness, “You can’t go back.”
“Why not?”
“Well, what you left behind is no longer there. Things change. Entropy, you know.”
“But I haven’t changed. What I hope to find, should good fortune bring me back to the source, is still there, untouched by time, unedited by memory. I’m not chasing after ghosts.”
Am I lying, conning myself? Surely, the people I once knew are gone. It’s not them that I long for. It’s Paris. Paris is still Paris, the City of Light, of stately museums and quaint neighborhood cafés, of timeless monuments and intimate bistros, of majestic plazas and tree-lined boulevards and narrow, winding alleys from which waft the coalescing aromas of exotic cuisines. The neighborhood commons, the playgrounds, flower gardens and sprawling forested parks where I used to gambol as a boy, have not moved an inch. Nor have the small bookstores redolent of aged leather and yellowed vellum paper, the bouquinistes selling lithographs and out-of-print periodicals from their stalls along the banks of the Seine. The old-world art galleries and antique shops and inviting patisseries and open-air food markets are still there. So are the Romanesque churches and Notre Dame Cathedral, in whose shadow I took my first steps, still gazing at the ageless river below where are reflected its spires and flying buttresses. I can still smell in my mind’s nostrils the indescribable scent of the Metro, the aroma of rain-slick slate roofs and sun-drenched chestnut trees. Forged iron balconies festooned with potted rhododendrons still adorn the cut stone façades of trendy fin de siècle town houses. And when I revisit the modest cemeteries and historic necropolises, I find the headstones, simple markers and elaborate mausoleums of Balzac and Baudelaire, Chopin and Debussy, Heloise and Abelard, Eugene Ionesco and Molière, Picasso and Man Ray, Proust, Ravel and Rossini, Sartre and Gertrude Stein, Brancusi and Van Gogh, just to name a few.
Even Samuel Beckett had the presence of mind to die and be buried in Paris.
I still hear the crooners of my youth, their songs embedded in, resonating from, the cobbled streets and stylish avenues in which I once meandered in enchanted fascination. They’re all dead and their passing left a gaping hole in France’s soul but their music, their poetry, their lifelong love affair with Paris lives after them. They will never be forgotten. Had I dared distract him as he strolled on the Champs Élysées arm-in-arm with a much younger woman, Erich von Stroheim, the enigmatic actor and director now resting at the Maurepas cemetery outside Paris, would surely have reminded me that,
“In France, if you write one good book, compose one beautiful song, paint one great picture, direct one outstanding film and nothing else, you are still recognized as an artist and honored accordingly. In Hollywood you're only as good as your last picture. If you didn't have one in production within the last three months you're forgotten, no matter what you have achieved before.”
*
It’s April and the poppies are now in bloom. I think of Mouloudji. I scan the high desert mountains that surround me, dwarf me, fence me in and deny me the privilege of a horizon line beyond which deliver
ance, I tell myself, looms. There are no vultures circling above but predation never takes a rest.
Somewhere in the distance, a car outfitted with monster speakers zooms by like a great booming wall of sound, inflicting an inane song about beer, guitars and sex in the back of a pickup truck on all who share the roadway.
I turn my gaze heavenward at a searing, implacable sun.
Then I look at my shoes, caked with brown desert dust.
Like Vladimir and Estragon, I’m waiting for Godot.
Waiting extinguishes will and freezes motion. So I just
POSTSCRIPT
THE NAME OF THE GAME
Learn your lines
“ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE.”
Fathers and mothers play the parenting game. Wives and husbands act out roles for which they’re mutually unsuited. Children play at being sons and daughters. My teachers played educators. Moses played lawgiver. Jesus played anointed “Savior;” Pontius Pilate played governor of Judea while Tiberius played Roman emperor. Crusaders and inquisitors staged massacres and their victims, mere extras in a cast of thousands, acted as martyrs. Popes and prophets and mystics play at being in a world apart from the human sphere. Kings and queens play at being monarchs; their subjects at being vassals. While Vincent Ferrer and the apostate Solomon Halevy played pious Christians, the Burgos Guzmán clan playacted Christian converts and their Worms descendants played the devout Jews they had never ceased to be. Hitler played Hitler and Mussolini played Mussolini. Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and Ceausescu and Saddam Hussein played themselves. Joseph McCarthy, a drunkard and a liar consumed with hatred, impersonated a senator. Marylyn Monroe, the beautiful, adorable damaged child assumed any role in which she was cast, except her own. Historians play with the past; soldiers play war; cops and robbers play cops and robbers. Politicians pass for the common man and sell themselves to the highest bidder; they just don’t call it prostitution. Bankers play monopoly with other people’s money; they just don’t call it usury. Clerics play the soul-saving game and their congregants play the salvaged spirits infused with a deaf, dumb and blind God who plays hide and seek from the pinnacles of his nonexistence. Papa played doctor and Maman played homemaker. People at my father’s funeral played mourners. The mourners went home, ate, slept, defecated, copulated and played at life until they too died and grievers attended their funerals. We’ve honed the art of killing and the angry beast in us roars with greater ferocity than ever. The human race is a multi-headed hydra whose sole function, it seems, is to multiply and, at some distant point in time, to devour itself to extinction.
It’s all one big hilarious, heartbreaking, sordid, ghastly act.
*
In the crypt of the Riverside Memorial Chapel on Manhattan’s upper West Side, I looked at my father’s shroud-wrapped naked body resting in a simple pine casket. His face beamed with the serenity of a sleeping child. The furrows of age, suffering and disillusionment were gone from his brow. A vague impish smile seemed to lift the corners of his mouth. I could almost hear him whisper:
“Don’t fret. Take it in stride. It’s all just a fucking game.”
“It’s not fair, papa, not fair,” I heard myself muttering.”
“Fairness? You’re looking for fairness? Don’t make me laugh. Life isn’t fair. Learn your lines and play the game, son! Or else you’ll be ignored, stomped on, scorned, trivialized, ostracized, crucified.”
I was fifty.
After his interment in the Jewish section of a sprawling Long Island cemetery where the dead forego their sectarian affectations, and for the next twenty years, I went back to playing journalist because I was unfit to play doctor like my father, lawyer like my uncle or even candle maker like my paternal grandfather whose tallow would be turned into soap and his skin into lampshades in one of Hitler’s slaughterhouses.
He who walks backwards risks tripping on his future. So I walk forward and keep looking for myself, so great is my fear of getting lost.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to my parents, learned, urbane, fair-minded and liberal, for instilling a love of books and an appreciation for music, art and philosophy, for sparing me the enslavement of religious indoctrination and for enduring, if not always endorsing, my wildest antics. To my mother, a selfless, unassuming woman of great culture and refinement, I owe my fondness for beauty and symmetry. From my father, a loving, iron-willed and incorruptible man who abhorred ostentation and pretense, I learned that self-esteem and a respect for truth bestow infinitely greater rewards than money or a good reputation.
I salute my teachers, those I pleased when I applied myself and those I exasperated when I didn’t. Their erudition, pedagogical skills and saintly patience for the lazy, unfocused, mercurial and rebellious student I was helped lay the foundations on which I would erect a lifetime career of endless beginnings.
I can never sufficiently acknowledge the immense influence a number of prominent writers, poets and philosophers had on the constantly evolving person I would become and, by extension, on the ideas I would champion. Their prose, verses, insights and eye-opening reflections resonate as intensely today as they did in the days of my youth. Most were French. Of these, one was denied a Christian funeral for penning vitriolic anti-religious polemics; five were imprisoned: one for denouncing the brutality of colonialism; the other for suggesting that the blind can be taught to read through the sense of touch; the third, the son of a prostitute, for vagabondage, lewd acts and “other offenses against public decency;” the fourth, for stretching the limits of literary freedom in tracts that mixed raw eroticism with civil disobedience. The fifth spoke for the common man and rose with uncommon bravery against government and military corruption.
My other mentors wrote in Arabic, English, Dutch, German, Russian, Sanskrit and Spanish. Three hailed from England; one of them did not survive the spurious puritanism of his Victorian milieu. One died insane -- as do many who seek shelter from the battering storm of reality in the haven of delirium. All were freethinkers, rebels and iconoclasts, now long dead, but whose works and the reformist ideas they impart still inspire new generations of radicals-in-training.