John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher

So much farther left to climb. Not one inch has been secure.¹

I’ve spent and will spend this weekend in the studio, pushing against the limits of what I can do. And all that comes to mind are those words.

1. With Honor : This Is Our Revenge : Elevens↩

It’s now official: I’m trying out for Marigold. If, after the audition, they want to take me and I decide that I want to join, I’m going to have leave Spain indefinitely. I’ll move back in with my parents in New Jersey.

It’s partly a wonderful situation. It’s partly an awful situation. There’s no doubt about the fact that what I’m doing is selfish. We can try to use another term to indicate it’s a form of selfishness we all have and perhaps even need to encourage, but it’s selfish none the less. I’m looking out for my own interests.

And that’s a remarkable thing to consider since I would have so hated anyone who would do something like that once. But my attitude on so many things keeps getting more embracing of necessity. I’m happier than I was as a teenager and a young man for a simple reason: I’m less opposed to the existence of evil — or at least those things that could be labelled evil and stem from the same sources of character from which so much that is evil comes. I find myself less repulsed by people because I’ve done more wrong things myself and can’t blame people with sincerity anymore.

It reminds me of a conversation I had with Fox in March or April last year before I moved to Poughkeepsie. It was a conversation about trust and those words “trust no one” of his. And I said that what I wanted was a world where there was someone to trust. And Fox said the first thing that truly was a defeat for me — but later a liberation. While everyone else had just focused on relaxing and giving selfish reasons — using reason as a tranquilizer –, Fox instead said that you just can’t trust people and when I complained he said the wisest thing of all: “haven’t you ever lied? Haven’t you deceived people? Haven’t you abandoned people?” And that was what I needed to hear to change my attitude. Because what he said was right: nothing lasts forever and that is just “the weakness of flesh”.

As I get older, I reconcile myself more and more to the absence of eternity in our lives. It is perhaps the most difficult thing for me to accept given that I have felt it necessary to fight against the maddening ephemerality of all things in our culture since I was a boy.

A good friend in college was a brilliant and driven mathematician and had many similarities with me. He was that sort of person so similar to me that I focused on the differences and could really get to understand them because we shared enough to spend hours talking every day. One thing he said that struck me was that he had once wanted to be a pianist (and given his ability to focus and work, I imagine he had been a very good pianist), but that he ultimately decided the work you do as an artist doesn’t last forever. And it was a line of reasoning I knew and had felt and yet there was no way around it: I could not leave music just because it would not lost one day.

I tried once. The result was that I gave away nearly my entire CD collection and all of the CD’s are now in a garbage heap somewhere. It was a piece of idiocy in retrospect. At the same time, it was one of those marks of excess force that I think define the lives of those who will do a great deal with their time on Earth. Humans are disposed to inertia: without this absurd excess of energy and resolve, we may not be able to accomplish anything. Sickness and greatness may be inseparable in humans.

And I feel the same way about love. Love, quite possibly, cannot last forever. Quite possibly the force of romantic love cannot even last a lifetime.

You cannot truly guarantee anything. Marriage is not a guarantee of eternal love. We are not capable of guaranteeing what we cannot control. We control our actions and not our feelings — and scarcely control the actions.

But, in spite of that, we have to give our all. And I have always done that. Despite the seeming madness of it to others, despite the over-emotionality others have condemned, despite the excess, the sturm und drang of it all, I have given my all with everything. I have always treated everything I did as if it might last forever. I have never given it a predefined end from the start. From the first day, I have given my all.

That, though, is the source of my regrets since others get caught up in it and expect forever and I so often fail to provide it.

Still, it is better. Of all the things I have seen lately that stopped those who should be beautiful people, it has been fear. When I was younger, the vices were more repellent and simpler. I don’t even get involved with those people any longer. Now the only issue is fear. I meet people who need time to feel comfortable with a thing before they can feel it to be permanent and to begin to give their all. This seems like nothing more than confusion and an absence of knowledge of how life works. And, to quote something I said before, it seems like a crime against the present.

It gets so complicated if you live enough.
You turn into what you hated.¹

1. Further Seems Forever : Hide Nothing : Light Up Ahead↩

One of the more remarkable experiences of the weekend: having a man walk up to me, ask me for rolling papers, ask me to ask my friends for them when I suggest they might have some, ask me where I’m from, find out I’m from the United States, say to my face, “you all are bad people. You vote for Bush,” and then walk away from me to tell his friends that there are bad people standing on the other side of the street.

If the absurdity of being told I am a bad person wasn’t severe enough — and it was –, the hypocrisy of being condemned by a man too cowardly to ask others for what he was begging for and hoping to manipulate them by having me ask them instead was enough to make the experience forever memorable.

As I checked out today from the Hotel Cervia, I came upon the most disgusting woman I have ever encountered. She was the mother of the two women I had come to think of as the proprietors of the hotel and she it was who awaited impatiently my money. As I stood there counting out the money, she stood to my right, old, stout and stunted by age — remarkably in appearance like a troll — or an ogre. These things, though, should only have put her in the class of those many ugly old women I have met. She was set apart by her bouncing step synchronized with snorts over the obbligato of the sound of water sloshing, as of the sound of water moving back and forth in a ship that had begun to sink, in some horrible internal organ that surely she alone possesses. This sound insures her position as the most repulsive human being I have ever encountered. Even reconsidering the sound she produced, I stifle the urge to vomit while I shudder.

Without anticipation, Morris and I wondered into La Notte Bianca, during which the vast majority of Rome was shut down and the city set upon itself the task of carrying out a sort of Roman Mardi Gras. It was a remarkable experience: especially for the on-and-off rainstorms through the night, of which the arrival elicited screaming and shouting from all over as literally the entire population of Rome took shelter in doorways and under archways. And then there were the plastic horns being sold in the streets, which seemingly everyone was able to acquire and play incompetently — making up for their inability to play more than one note by playing that one note twice as loud. Walking along the Imperial Forum towards the Collisseum in the rain, surrounded by tens of thousands of people and the bellowing of those horns was the closest I have come to what I imagine the storming of Bastille was like. I repeatedly had the desire to shout “to the Collisseum, the city is ours!”

A perfect last night in Rome.

Today I had the pleasure to climb five hundred some steps to the dome at the top of Saint Peter’s Basilica, walk to Colliseum (to find that it was closed), drink absinthe, eat dinner with an Italian man and his Spanish love whom he was trying to convince to move to Rome permanently and take photographs of 10 year-old Italian skaters.

What a sight the Collisseum is against the open sky. It is a place that talks of eternal things and reminds one of everything that is best in the world.

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

I came this close (possibly not that close to be honest) to getting arrested last night because of Ale. We walked into the Metro at Diego de Leon. Ale and Victor went through the turnstiles and I said I had to buy a ticket, which I did. By the time I noticed Ale saying I could use his ticket, I had my ticket, but figured, “well, I’ll just use this ticket tomorrow.” So I walked through and used Ale’s ticket. We walked down to the Line 4 platform and as we stood there, a rent-a-cop walked down the stairs saying to us that he needed to see “your ticket.” After it became clear to me that he might my ticket, I said that I hadn’t used the one I bought, but Ale’s. He looked at Ale’s and confirmed that only one of us had paid, which was new information to me since clearly I had passed through and used the ticket’s value. Ale then began to apologize to the security officer, who said he wouldn’t have cared about it except that his supervisor was watching him and told him to chase down the farethieves. We then went through and I used my ticket as Ale apologized to the officer more, who very nicely let us walk away without anything more than paying properly. As we walked back to the platform Ale apologized over and over again in typical Ale fashion for being a disaster and not thinking I could get in trouble.

Yeah. That’s Ale.

1300 miles of driving, 12 days and 1 cancelled festival later, I am sitting on the ground at JFK airport. It’s 7:17 PM here in New York City. I am happy.

To say that I am happy might seem trite, but I think it is anything but trite given how much has been required to bring me to this point — a point at which I am sitting in an airport in Queens, New York waiting for an Iberia flight that will bring me home to Madrid. “Home to Madrid”, now there is a phrase with power in it, derived from the surprise that Madrid is home.

I met with a friend today who reminded me of one thing: I live a life basically unlike the lives nearly all of the people my age live. There are quite a few (though still but a few) who leave the States to live in Europe for a few years, but far fewer who left the States with every intention of placing oneself into perpetual exile, with the intention to never return to the States as a longterm home again. That is but a part of it. I live a life with many, many plans for the year, but plans of adventure. My life has no rhythm. I asked my friend Howie what his plans for the year were and he said, “for the year?” as if the question were strange. His plans were to go on doing as he was doing today: working and studying for a higher level job. Once plans like that were the only thing I had, but hearing them from him, I could only think:

I wonder how you can stand knowing what each new day will bring.

Once those words made sense to me, but seemed somehow not to apply to my life. I was happy enough. That, though, is why I am writing right now: I was happy enough. I think the truth is that I was not happy. I remember beautiful moments from those days, but they seem almost trite now — like a shadow of my current existence. I think they were simply necessary preparations for this.

For all of the pain I have felt in my life, I would like to say that I am grateful for what it has made of me. I do not think I should be where I am right now without it. I have no interest in more pains, though I am sure they will come regardless, but the pains thus far have brought me somewhere wonderful.

For that is what this life of mine is: wonderful. Many of my friends say they would love to live my life and they are not wrong to think it is a life one should be glad to live. I am becoming a destiny — and that is something neither age nor comparison can ever diminish.

While eating dinner at Swagat with Fox, Fletch and Canning, Fox pointed out that the waterpourer was obsessive about filling the glasses. As we all noticed it, we became interested in testing the boundaries of his filling. After seeing that anything more than a deciliter of water being removed from the cup merited refilling it, I decided to see what would happen if the cup were in my hand when he passed by. I picked up the glass as we walked towards me, drank a bit and held it near my mouth about to drink some more. While holding it near my mouth, I watched his hand head towards my cup, touch it, pause a millisecond and then peel a piece of plastic that was stuck to the bottom off. He then moved on to next person as I went on laughing in spite of all my attempts to hold my laughter in. Everyone else around the table had more luck in holding in their laughter, though it erupted as soon as the waterpourer walked away. Every one of us was sure when they saw his hand touch the glass that he was going to take out of my hand to fill it.

The following is as close as I can recall to the conversation I had at the Spanish Consulate in Manhattan the other day when I went to make sure that there was no paperwork I needed to complete.

“Hi. I’m an Irish citizen and I’ve been planning on moving to Spain. The Irish Consulate told me I should come here to see if there was any paperwork I need to complete.”

“Why do you want to come to Spain?”

“Why do I want to come to Spain?”

“Do you have a lot of money and want to just go and not work?”

“No, I was planning on working eventually.”

“You can’t work. You need a sponsor for that.”

“But I’m a EU citizen.”

“Huh?”

“I’m a European Union citizen.”

“Ooooooh. European… Here’s what you have to do. Go buy your tickets, get on the plane and go.”

“That’s all?”

“When you get there go to the Ayuntamiento - the City Hall - and register with them.”

“Ok, so I just go register?”

“Yeah. And when you go, you have to prove you’ve been living out of the European Union for at least year. Can you do that?”

“Yes.”

“Then you won’t have to pay any importation taxes. You can bring all of your stuff, your car, whatever and not pay anything.”

“Ok, great. Thank you.”