On the train downtown last night my mostly vacant car was boarded by a somewhat cruddy-looking man. He was relatively young, perhaps forty, had large, lucid eyes, and his thrift-store suit fit him well. He had a plastic shopping bag with a few aluminum cans in it, and began to look around the car for more. A few rows down from me he found another bag. There were a couple more cans which he moved to his own bag, and there was a deli-style clamshell salad container. It was smeared with dressing to which stuck fragments of browning lettuce, and there were a couple wedges of pineapple. I watched with disconnected disgust as he licked the dressing off of the inside of the container and then popped the pineapple into his mouth.
The most distressing thing to me was the shamelessness with which he did it. He looked right at me afterwards, still chewing, with the indifference of someone opening a package of gum, and I was stuck with how comfortable he was with himself and his situation. Shortly he began to watch the streets pass through the window, and I considered him for several more moments.
But there was something about his suit. It did fit him really nicely, and I realized that it was not thrift-store suit at all; it was an expensive suit, tailored to fit him, but it appeared that he had been wearing it nonstop for perhaps a week. It was by no means filthy– he must have taken some care to keep it as clean as it still was. It was clear that he had not been his present straits for long, his hair was still short, his face was scruffy but not bearded.
I marveled at how quickly he seemed to have adapted to the changes in his life. There was no denial, no flailing, in fact, it seemed as though he had some plan he was carrying out, as though he knew some way to turn his life back around. I imagined he had a wife and kids. Perhaps he did. I hope he had a plan, and as clear and bright as his eyes were, I trust he did.
Quite naturally, I thought of what sort of plan he might have beyond collecting cans. I wondered what kind of plan I might devise, but I found I was unable to get past the shock of imagining what that man’s change of circumstance must have been like for him.
But I cannot believe that I would not adapt easily to such a change. I’m sure that if everything that happened to that man had happened to me I would be exactly where he was, doing just what he was doing. Indeed, it seems I take well to change, as the last three years of my life can attest. In that time I have been a married man, single, a vegetarian, a college student, a department head for an equipment corporation, unemployed, an agnostic, a heavy drinker, a volunteer, a regular church-goer, a recipient of charity, a widower, a traveler, a hermit, a pedestrian, a cyclist, a public transit advocate, and an automobile driver. Not necessarily in that order.
The differences between my life in Alaska just a few months ago and my life now are striking. There I had to live on the barest. I ate cans of beets, cold, because I was hungry, broke and snowed in. Here I spend my evenings with someone who can really cook. There, weeks passed without my uttering a single word or hearing another person speak. Here, my job requires that I speak with scores of people a day. There my internal dialog was careful and meditative as can be–here, almost no one knows what they’re saying and fewer still understand what I mean. There I went for months without seeing a television in operation; without hearing a radio broadcast. Here the radio plays all the hours I work. Five mornings a week, quite against my will, I listen to the Dr. Doug and Skippy Show on CharlieFM.
There I was able to write almost all the time, here I can hardly find the time. Here I find I am so often void of both ideas and inclination. I wonder if that part of me that was given voice in those Alaskan essays has stilled, if I do not have the time to resolve its murmurs into something understandable, or if its shouting simply cannot be heard above the din of my days.
I find it difficult to find the line that divides me from the things I have done. Each event in my life is a part of me that cannot be separated, but just the same that inscrutable me cannot be separated from those events and circumstances. My life, my genes, they are a suit of clothes that could be hung on anyone and no one could tell them apart from me. If someone else were to have worn a suit like that worn by the man on the train and to have behaved like him, they would have been indistinguishable from him to me.
Yet, I have the sense that this, writing, is the thing I am supposed to do, or at least, the thing I want to do. I feel driven to write, but far too often when I sit down at the notebook or the keyboard I find I cannot shape my thoughts well enough to record them; I am distracted, and about that I feel both guilt and shame. Something in me says, “Is this or is it not the thing you do? Isn’t it who you are?” as though there were something innate in me which that impetus belongs to.
But identity changes just as surroundings do, and sometimes more readily. Indeed, because I cannot adequately assure myself that my life is my own; that I am not wearing someone else’s life, I cannot be sure that I am really myself. I have to worry, then, that I am only pretending to be someone I only imagined, and I have face the possibility of somehow, horrifyingly, being discovered as an impostor.
If the events of my life created me I cannot help being unsure of and dissatisfied with comfortable times such as these. I fear that they do not foster artistic growth. After all, Wilde wasn’t on vacation when he wrote De Profundis, he was in exile.
In many ways when I come to write, I come naked, and the page can be a mirror that reflects nothing back. When I look on that great portion of myself that I deem to be caused by nothing but events and circumstance, I cannot ignore how little room that leaves for anything else. One way of thought says that those other elements of this suit of self are so insignificant that they can be safely disregarded, while another says that those elements are the very self that wears the suit.
And so it becomes ever clearer to me that the only worthwhile way I can conceive of to both be and not be, to be myself and to be whichever self is me, is to act–to manufacture event and circumstance instead of being at their whim; to write and invent the details of the writer; to act as though I know myself and have a plan and trust that in the end it will seem, somehow, that I always did.
A few stops later the man in the crumpled suit grabbed his bag of cans and stood up to disembark. With an instinctive and practiced motion, he pulled his suit coat closed with one hand and fastened the button. When he left the car I was the only one on board, and I was very glad that the next stop was mine.
Wow…what an incredible entry. I think I must’ve stopped breathing for a moment there.
“One way of thought says that those other elements of this suit of self are so insignificant that they can be safely disregarded, while another says that those elements are the very self that wears the suit.”
Wow. Yes you are a writer. and a provocative one at that.
I read this post and it stuck with me for a few days. the scene on the train, what you said about how quickly the man had adapted. running his finger around the inside of the clamshell container shamelessly like Wile E. Coyote looking for a morsel and then the dignfied way the man buttoned his taylored suit as he got off the train.
I thought of the Fat man, thin man and collared man in Dylan’s “Dignity” and wondered if dignity was something you could find or acquire or if it was some part of your own personal essence.
I thought of this man’s taylored suit. and like you, the changes in his life that quickly chopped him down and if I could wear the suit of a homeless person if it were taylored to fit me.
I thought of Nicolas Cage playing Charlie Kaufman, a screenwriter overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy struggling to adapt ‘The Orchid Thief’
I thought about adaptation… my own to circumstances both in and completely out of my control and coincidently… this film by the same name.
I thought of Meryl Streeps Character and her fall from grace and priveledge. then in the end, the one line of dialog that haunts me since I first saw that film; Meryl streeps charactor crying out in desparation;
“I want my life back before it got all fucked up!”
Nobody but a writer can write so beautifully about the pain of not knowing whether one is a writer.
I wouldn’t recommend that you land yourself in jail for unnatural acts in order to tame your Muse; but if you do, I hope you come up with something less drama-queen-esque than “De Profundis.” Not that I don’t love Wilde. *ahem*
There is so much here that stops my heart - so much that my responses to each would be an essay in itself, only my echoes could not be nearly as beautiful as your words.
I am sure that we are made both by our experiences and by the genetic maps that turned my eyes green and your eyes blue. I am sure that any one piece in either category could have been different, and that any difference would make us different people. Inconsequentially, perhaps, but different. We are what we have been and been through, certainly, but is there some unchangeable part underneath? When you were all of those things - the student, the vegetarian, the drinker, the church-goer - weren’t you still you, the same man you are this very minute? Were you tapping into different flavors of yourself, or were there fundamental changes of the sort I evidently cannot (yet) understand?
I, too, am finding it challenging to be so many different versions of myself at once. In the dark last winter I made art better than I am making it now. My thoughts were clearer, I wrote better, I felt compelled to put paint to paper and now - - now I have to schedule time at my desk, have to force myself to sit still with scissors or pen in hand until something comes. Often, it doesn’t. Since identifying myself as an artist, I feel obligated - from a sense of personal authenticity, maybe? - to create, to be who I think I am according to this label. But times like these - comfortable ones when I am more interested active living (a strange phrase I had not intended to write…but apropos perhaps, though I am uncomfortable with the implication that writing and the rest are a passive activities) than than I am in sitting down to write or knit or craft - I worry that my commitment to art is superficial, that I have not discovered myself after all, that I have allowed my priorities to warp so much that I am getting in the way of myself.
But if I have learned anything in the past years (and doubtless you will agree), it is that all of this will change.
The change I like, I think, is slow and easy, like tides. The difference from beginning to end is significant, but the pull of the moon is so subtle, you hardly know you’re being tugged on unless you stop everything and listen.