Prelude

I've begun writing again; the paperweight has shifted, sending fritters of dead pulp flying -this time in new and revised directions. I'm speaking in terms of new mediums and forms -the harnessing, sorting and packaging of a consciousness in the writing of fiction as opposed to the self-surgery involved in personal responses and criticism, and the breaking down of loaded prose into vignettes, poetry and lyric, a condensation and distillation alongside the summation of thought. I'm also speaking in terms of new subject matter -more literature, art history, films, and maybe even music, if my senses permit. Picking myself up from where I had last left it lying and seeking to regain both memory and muscle, I have also come to terms with the need to grant my self sufficient time and space for the ripening of feelings and revelations. Hopefully this fresh bout of labour will be blessed with a less tortured access to the intuition and more wholesome creative experiences.

To grease the wheels of the new start here is a piece of prose I wrote last week. I feel like its reproduction has run its course -it has slit through a gaze too many, both during its construction and in its supposed final form, I've typed and re-typed it, written and re-written it, so much so that the piece seemed to have been flayed inside out, no more substantial than a scattering of pencil shavings. Nevertheless I'm sending it out to make one more clumsy pirouette in cyberspace; because in many ways it was a development for me, to have what started out as a personal reflection turned into a work of fiction, and to realize that I was comfortable and happy with this treatment of material.

 As I wrote it for school, the title was prescribed: "The next time a stranger talks to me". Now before the curtain of shame cascades:

The next time a stranger talks to me…

Now apparently I’m supposed to consider this stranger project with the utmost gravity, because of the great stakes at hand –by stakes they really mean 7 billion human beings (“sentient creatures”), each with “a heart and mind teeming with consciousness”, bearing the vague promise of some yet-to-be-unearthed key to fortuitous affinity. Yes, this is what the all too chirpy facilitator at today’s book club session meant to impart to us –that we could do ourselves good by injecting serendipity into our solitary existences, and that the art behind this raid lies in “actively engaging the stranger”. By the last minute of the hour everyone appeared to be dreadfully alarmed at the thought of having “everything passing us by”, as put by Mrs. Pinkerfield, whose shrilly lamentations stirred up considerable unease among the other ladies. (She has since set up camp in a café downtown, bent on passing the week in the caffeine-stained company of unknowns.) Everybody seemed unfazed by the fact that their actions deflated the very essence of serendipity –for suddenly it became a matter of responsibility, of heroism even, to crack down the six degrees of separation (was it seven?) and reconstruct it for ourselves. So out to the streets we have to go, condemned to a futile hunt by the sidewalks until the elusive strikes.

I was very easily left behind in the tumult of light-headed excitement and brow-furrowing determination that exited the room. By the time I managed to get out into open air the bunch of them had long since dissolved, swept up by the millions of diverging currents that ripple through the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one not to meet another for yet another fourteen roundabouts the clock’s face. It’s easy to get left behind in New York City; sometimes I feel like it’s a huge touch-and-go game, with everyone etched in a perpetual crouch, ready to spring for the home-run. It began to rain with a vengeance –like how it can only do in New York– and at once a lurid army of glossy umbrellas began to bloom, swarming over the sidewalks, earnest and unrelenting. Whatever Maya Angelou said about a friend waiting behind a stranger’s face probably does not apply on a rainy day in this city. Besides, the vividity is nauseating –I cannot bear to find out the myriad of contours and yarn and pits and scars lurking behind each gait, each intonation of speech, each collage of a face (“each person is a living mythology”). The looking glass will make it absolutely impossible for me to be anywhere near people. I’d much rather the city remain a large Impressionist painting, stroke after stroke, slab after slab, a wet and comforting mess.

A large Impressionist painting. That’s almost exactly what Bill would have said, had he been in the rain with me. It was in his nature to turn an aesthetic eye to just about everything. That vase sits like a Matisse nude. Do you hear that song from the street? The Mariachis are heroes who sing of home and tragedy. But his favorite quip only came as he worked on his own paintings. See that gradient at the water’s edge? I worked hard to achieve that mélange parfait between the elements. Light, color, composition. It was a battle against chance –but alas the vision prevails. I would have said –But there are infinite opportunities of blue that lie in each new blend, in each drop and possibly the constituents of that drop. Even the sun’s rays will never find the perfect entry into the heart of a diamond. And you would give your familiar laugh and remind me that I’ve forgotten the intuition, the intuition of the artist and human being. For that dash of cobalt that did it? It was an intersection of intuition and technique, half-hazard, half-practice. Us meeting was like that decisive stroke –a new beginning with an ancient soul. Beautiful mistakes, artful accidents. Serendipity with an ancient soul. I had known and believed it all along. Ever since Bill’s death I start conversations by asking the stranger if he or she enjoyed Manet, or Cézanne, or any fine art at all? Lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice, but our heart’s memory keeps the search alive.

Thinking about this stranger project has occupied more time than I thought it would. Perhaps talking to one or two wouldn’t be so bad. A good conversation and a cup of tea might just pull me through this afternoon.