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Midwinter, standing elbow to elbow on a rush hour El, the sniffle sounds rise like crickets in a meadow at sundown. Train your ears to hear it and immediately they surround you, at every possible distance, in every possible direction.
I’ve always wanted to do brown paintings, because when I was in school I realised in that great room at The Frick Collection in New York, with all those incredible paintings, that the secret to great paintings is brown. And that is one of my great ambitions, to strive to do a brown painting.
Cy Twombly to Kristin Lister, 2008. In the catalogue for The Natural World.
The other option was “a self-styled curriculum and a library card.” But let’s be frank: you don’t pass up a shot at grad school when you’ve got the time and the savings. And when the school is only twelve miles down the road, it’s almost a no-brainer, regardless how prestigious or formidable the place is — and make no mistake, the place is prestigious and formidable. When you knock on the door and they hold it open to you, you go in.
Once inside, though, there were times — weeks, months — when psychosis seemed a reasonable, if not the most reasonable explanation for some of the feedback I got. On the other hand, there was something off about the place, something that I picked up just by being around the other people it attracted, or by mentally stepping back from a class discussion and listening to the way they talked to each other.
Takes all types, right?
Some people thrive there and never want to leave; some feel outmatched from the start and barely make it through; some learn after striking a few broken keys how to coax something like a melody out of the place.
Ultimately I worked my way into the last group and got out of grad school something near the exact thing I wanted. This, plus a few more white whiskers than mother nature might have painted in my beard had I spent those years at a less antagonistic institution.
When it was done I thought over those three long and agonizing years, and I asked myself the same questions people were asking me. Was it worth it? Looking back, would I go through it again?
What hit the hardest, reflecting on those three slow-crawling years that I came to measure by the week, was recognizing I hadn’t needed to be there to learn what I’d set out to learn. Don’t get me wrong; I feel nothing but respect and gratitude for some of my professors. And the certificate they gave me is beautifully typeset, I grant. But I could have traced influences through footnotes, followed my hunches when and where they led me, and made intelligent judgments to many of the same results, all without riffling through a minimum three hundred pages a week all for a few talking points to raise in the next seminar. Behind all that work I think there was a deeper lesson about, let’s say, society. But if the measure of a quality education is happiness — and that’s as reasonable a measure as any — then I could have been as happy with that other option.
What hit almost as hard was realizing that the card that enabled my pursuit of that notional “self-styled curriculum” could have been a credit card. Because, if not a library card, specifically tied to an academic library, I could have been anywhere in the world I wanted to be and pursued the same research wherever I went. Here a possibility emerged that hadn’t seemed a genuine possibility before. I realized I could have left Chicago … and at any time still can leave.
Coming again to see a wide-open future was strange. Relative to the constraints of my academic commitment, sure, it was no great wonder. But cut me some slack — my head was still in the quarter system. Yet here it was before me: I could leave this town and start clean, or as clean as you can get in this never-forgetting internet age. I could make another go at the life this often stubborn and adolescent city can make so hard to live. I could do my thing in whatever place I found most receptive to the thing I do. And if I decided to stay in Chicago — a bigger if than some would believe — it wouldn’t be without a serious hashing out of new conditions for staying.
When you live long enough in a place it grows on you, makes itself a part of what you are, the same as in any relationship. Freed from my last obligation to be here, voluntary as the obligation was in the first place, I conscientiously closed a phase in my relationship with Chicago that I’d characterize as alternately cold and batshit. That’s not to say there weren’t good times. But if I was staying the relationship had to change. True to the advice of the relationally battle-weary, if there was going to be a change, it was all on me.
My new year started in June. Part thought experiment, part goal-setting, I laid out the following resolutions.
Halfway through the arbitrary one-year term of new year’s resolutions things aren’t going too bad.
She insisted I had ordered five tacos. I insisted I’d only ordered one.
Imagine my surprise when she came back from the kitchen with a five-tacoed platter. When I walked the long city blocks to her taquería I had a single taco in mind. I was hauling groceries around town in the cold air; home was another hour of errands away. One taco was enough to tide me over until I was home to cook.
That I had groceries in my backpack was more than the waitress needed to know. My case opened and shut with the order I knew I’d placed. Still, she was sure she was right and I mistaken — she said as much and in as many words. She showed me the handwritten check as evidence, and maintained the evidence as if what she herself wrote were proof, and she looked at me askance while I ate one taco and then, in a spirit of compromise, ate a second.
Her look was the look of one who suspects the other has not only misled her but who lies to conceal the misleading. The suspicious look implicated me as someone who misled her and was lying about it, and the look contained the threat that the trust on which our transaction was built teetered on the brink of revocation.
The look struck me because there wasn’t a lie, and there wasn’t any misleading. I wanted one taco, and one is the exact number of tacos I ordered. Had I wanted five, and ordered five (a larger number of tacos than I have ever ordered for myself) I’d have done something my friends know I do when talking about particular quantities of things: I’d have used my fingers to illustrate the number.
The woman couldn’t have known this about me, because she doesn’t know me.
She’s not likely to come to know me, nor the way I use my fingers to illustrate numbers. To judge by her response, she’s now less likely to want to know me. The response implied something about me.
There’s a certain trust people need if they want to know one another, a trust that other people are acting in an honest and reliable way. It’s a trust that precedes knowing other people — it prepares the ground for knowing people. The trust that people extend each other has to be mutual if real knowledge is to emerge between them.
Trust was conspicuously absent from her look of suspicion, and it was also missing from the handwritten evidence she held out for my inspection. Once again, I didn’t do anything to earn her mistrust. But in this instance, as in every instance involving people, the trust was hers to extend, to adjust, or to revoke, just as her criteria for extending, adjusting, and revoking trust are privately her own and not open to debate.
I don’t hold out hope that she has any interest in knowing me: her suspicious look and the lack of trust it implies conveyed an unfavorable evaluation of my character. A false evaluation, true, but perspective has a way of rendering falsehoods effectively true. As I said, untrusting knowledge is not true knowledge but a projection. She’d made an image of me, painted in the material of her mistrust. That’s an altogether different kind of knowledge of me — not an accurate kind, but still a very, very real one. And in light of that lie that was never a lie, except as it was painted in her self-protective imagination, the image of my untrustworthy character became something almost impossible for me to contest.
For all she knew, every word out of my mouth could be misleading. Of course, that’s not true, but I couldn’t argue that. Cast in the shade of mistrust, she could take any argument I offer to be misleading. To take an argument of mine in earnest, as a trustworthy argument, she’d have to trust me. And trust is a private, arbitrary, circular, and wholly unreasonable thing. So there was and would be no arguing.
I placed my order in good faith and I stood my ground, while she defended her honest mistake as if it were truth (her hand-scrawled check as proof). I ordered a taco; she transcribed a five.
When I left her taquería, the wintery air of the city outside felt colder on my skin than it had when I arrived, because it was, and not just because the temperature had fallen.
I read that, and I thought, “This is just wacky enough, it has to be true!” And I take it to be true.
What it means is that if you have any fact, which you think is really sinister, right — is really, obviously a fact, which can only point to some sinister underpinning — hey, forget it, man, because you can never, on your own, think up all the non-sinister, perfectly valid explanations for that fact.
Errol Morris, on "The Umbrella Man"
Traffic is all flow, bidirectional flow, a river of Audis, cabs, delivery trucks, bicycles, hastening, hastening. I train my eyes on the median for trash eddies.
She surveys the movement and is unmoved, adopting that great rolling mass as a constituency, addressing the never-standing glass and metal shapes, emitting her platform in resonant bellows.
“I ain’t payin no tickets. I ain’t payin no tickets.” Her fingers fling air into the air. “I said I ain’t payin no tickets.” Guffaw. “Ain’t payin. I ain’t payin no tickets.”
Atop the sculpted hump of a riverside park, the grass cool and the soil moist, I unwrap a sandwich.
Several yards below, a blonde pipsqueak (pink pants, twirling pigtails) flees a mother-figure to study a homely pair of sunbathers. Fully clothed so late in the season, they’ve managed by slow negotiation to intertwine their bodies. The unexposed portion of his gut-mound tests the integrity of his sweatshirt; the sheer of her petrol-black tighted thighs reflects the sharp, white hot high noon light. They lay catatonic, neither particularly interesting, and rapidly exhaust the little gaper’s interest. In a blink she’s dashing toward the playground. The mother type picks up her grudging pursuit.
Helicopters flutter overhead.
The glance yielded nothing audible from his dour gumdrop of a mother, on whom humor and good feelings were lost and gone, fully gone. But there was acknowledgment, and then a half-nod of permission, and this was enough to cost the boy all control over his tiny face — the mouth of this face stretching itself as wide as the flesh would let. He launched himself upwards with one hand fixed to claw the cable downward.
Ding!
The heavy machinery of the city bus — the solid integrated mobile system of steel and fiberglass — gave immediate signs of giving way to his will. We would stop because he and he alone had acted. The grin spread itself over his body with such ferocity that his small figure was wholly possessed by it.
His mother gave no comparable indication of possession. This can be explained by means of simple scientific reasoning. Smaller, younger, more malleable materials like his body are much easier to overtake than larger, older, and denser objects like his mother’s. By affecting the movement of a object even larger than his mother — the bus — he had effectively willed an extraordinary natural event.
But the reasoning isn’t exactly so scientific or simple. I was aware in that moment, as I’m mindful of it today, that what his great act might imply about strength of will is no uncomplicated thing. Nor was the matter simplified by his evident feeling in the moment than it is today when I reflect on it. And this is the case no matter how deep or methodical I intend to reflect on it.
When his eyes found my uncontrollably curious gaze, that muscular virus leapt a row of seats from his face to mine. To put it plain, the low immunity of my nearly thirty-one years — with my own still-young spirit worn thin in the cycling of idealism, disappointment, grievance, despair, cynicism, concession, and finally humble hope — left me too weak to resist.