Paul Auster Tells It Like It Is

Head Space Part 2

Something I found in my notebook today, forgotten in the earliest pages:

The thing I found most endearing about Jonathan was not his forever rumpled suits, nor his stammering over difficult words, nor the rather helpless trajectory his life had taken--no, most affecting was his skull, the whole contraption resting warily atop his shoulders. If you didn't know him, you might have thought his head and body ill-suited; Jonathan's skull was so like a full-scale helmet missing its suit of armor. I once asked him, untactfully if there had been an accident (imagining some mishap with birthing tongs), though he was so offended when I put this to him, he merely swung that brooding, beautiful, bust-like feature of his from side to side and wandered away. Whenever I saw him crossing the room, like this, in one of his grey and unkempt suits, I always thought he looked rather dramatic, like some sublime weather formation, luring the eye skywards. A cloud as perfect as an egg.




The speaker's a woman, I think. Played by Ingrid Bergman, maybe, in the film version. Here's the real-life Jonathan helping her with her zip...

Rooftops

He met the first of his wives--a school teacher--while she was sitting, bored and beautiful, amidst a group of adolescent boys, all of them uniformed, all of them eating from bag lunches. It had been a field trip, he guessed. Her students were amassed around her, crosslegged, making her look like some stoical Indian chief, or a guru waiting to impart the secret of enlightenment. She was pretty, statuesque, blonde. It was her blank stare though, her melancholy look, which caught him off guard. Yes, it was her loneliness as she sat there in the middle of these quiet, unobservant boys, that got him, that clinched his heart.

The Man I Love

Just some of the talismanic Men in my life. Masculine touchstones, if you will. All inspiring, all representative of a potential maturity which I have yet to establish entirely within myself. Not just the artistry but the faces, and the stories they tell. Strangely, to varying degress, I see glimpses of my father in each of them (particularly Herzog and Hopkins and Von Sydow). It's these guys who help make up the male side of my ongoing creative pantheon:


Von Sydow

Updike

Herzog

Auster

Roth

Hopkins

Irons (I love the little window you get on early-eighties New York life in this little interview with the man in question: 'I can't! I have a phone call coming through. I've got to go and talk about Liv Ullman!')

Play, Part I

Once the realization is accepted
That even between the closest human beings
Infinite distances continue to exist
A wonderful living side by side can grow up
If they succeed in loving the distance between them
Which makes it possible for each to see the other
Whole against a wide sky--Rainer Maria Rilke

I don't want a lover, I just want to be seen

He could still remember the day he'd scrawled on a hazy, sepia-scorched polaroid of the two of them together on the West Coast in 1975: 'Jane, thanks for the note and keep on the lookout for me'.


This sublime photo comes courtesy of John Harding at Half Moon Bay Memories

Of course, he knew Jane from years ago, but he didn’t admit as much to his wife. When Heather asked him if he’d seen the woman in the cream dress, and whether or not he had thought she looked pretty, he only shrugged, nodded, and clenched his lips around the last of his cocktail. Meanwhile, Jane's Scandinavian-inflected accent was tickling his ears from the next room, from thirty year's distance up the hall.

Bow Spirits

"Boy and Seagulls" Courtesy of Peter Jones in Taschen's Polaroid Book

I heard this today courtesy of Aquarium Drunkard: Strange Overtones, by David Byrne and Brian Eno. I can't stop playing it and taking deep luxurient breaths.



Tonight's Television, or my ongoing Poirot Obsession