Eat, Pray, Love

This blog post is not actually about "Eat, Pray, Love" the book or the movie or the cultural phenomenon -- I have many things to say about all three and all of those things would fall under the heading of "vile invective" and all of them have been sad much more artfully by Stephen Metcalf (@ minute 7:10).

This is, instead, a pure joyrant about my city, San Francisco. If I were with it enough to tag my blog entries, I would tag this one with words like "joy," "wonder," and, yes, "love." I will attempt to cut the sweetness of the subject matter with the cold, brittleness of bullet points by simply recounting the series of interactions I have had since leaving the office at 5:00 and arriving in the Mission to run errands on my way home.

-purchased plump triangular carrots (a kind I have never tried before), arugula, and three pints of strawberries at the Mission Community Market from a pure charmer

-while looking for asparagus, ran into someone from the SF Environment organization (I think this is a city organization -- not sure what part of government it fits into) who gave me a FREE TOTEBAG MADE OUT OF SCRAP CLOTH in exchange for MY IDEAS OF HOW TO MAKE THE CITY GREENER. really. this happened. to contribute your ideas, go to www.ideas4sf.org.

-went to buy fish at the market where L buys fish every day; the man who works there asked why i wasn't getting what luke always gets and smiled -- because he knows us! this still amazes me.

-went to Mission Pie to buy bread from Josey who remembered me from when i bought bread yesterday (there are reasons i need a lot of bread, i'm not going into it) and he is ALSO a pure and total charmer

-went to Rose's market to buy asparagus; Rose told me, in confidence, that i should have a baby to keep L -- maybe not the best advice, but it came from a place of love

-in my stairway, ran into a neighbor who has lived in this building for THIRTY YEARS and had a lovely talk, really lovely, and i am going to go visit her to hear all about the history of the building

It is not about the amazing food, although, yes, the food is amazing. Food is a part of it, though, because we have to eat, every day, and so eating becomes part of our routine and eating is also about nourishment, sustenance -- one of the clearest ways to receive and express love. And so eating feeds connections between people and connected people reach out, radiate warmth, laugh with kindness, and wear the sunshine on their faces. I live somewhere, in a place, where people know me, and L, and we see them every day or every week and they make us smile. What else is there in this world other than that?

Facebook Fail

It is not unusual to complain that facebook profiles are disingenuous, boring, hip, preening, or vain. But what offends me about them is that they are wasteful -- in their current form, facebook profiles are a pure and effortful waste of clean, high-quality data. With scads of talented developers and more money than, if not God, certainly Saint Peter, why can't they take the information that we have so lovingly and trustingly offered up and do something interesting with it?

For example, why not plug people's work & school info into a timeline? The NY Times has amazing timelines with images that blow out when you scroll over them and detailed captions. Wouldn't that make it easier to understand the trajectories our friends have taken? Wouldn't that be more fun to look at?

Or, why not let people drop photos into some sort of e-scrapbook interface? Facebook has borrowed the "album" metaphor without using any of the visual benefits. Why not let people make digital collages, combining images and text?

Why not link up with the Amazon feature that lets you look inside books so that you could page through your friends' favorites? Why not play samples of people's favorite music? Why hide the quotations I have so lovingly chosen at the freaking bottom of all the other info? Why not let people put their favorites into some sort of hierarchy or flow chart or web, showing how their love of folk emerged from their love of classical guitar? Why an ugly, useless, flat, unimaginative list?

By presenting information this way, facebook deflates it. Facebook deflates us. We flatten and sadden into flat, paratactic screen-people, just collections of unaffiliated and disorganized likes and dislikes, wants and diswants, a shuffle of sheet-thin days. Facebook's cardinal sin is not sharing our information, but stripping so much of the meaning from it and taking from us the chance to make real connections.

Which Was the Son Of

One of my favorite choral text settings ever is Which Was the Son Of, an Arvo Part (pronounced pear-t) setting of the lineage of Christ. I love it for the strangeness of the words (all those names) and the brute repetition of it and the newness of it (not just another ave maria) and the stunning simplicity of the last phrase -- which was the Son of God -- that knocks the wind out of you a little bit. To be clear, this is not about faith for me, but about literature.

Although, is there anything clear at all about where one begins and the other ends?

Harsher Even

"That year a captain got bumped from the lineup...Bam Slokum, til then but a middling six-grade player, had grown four inches taller and ten times as dominant. He came off the bench of the JV B-team to play A-team on varsity as a starting point-guard, and went on to break, in the eight weeks following, three [school] and two conference scoring-records. The captain Bam replaced was called Gregory Gumm, and to get Gummed became slang that for [one clique] was fighting words harsher even than any phrase it might have euphemized."

The Instructions, Adam Levin, p. 237

The insight in this passage is slipped into a stunningly slight clause that weighs a certain kind of word -- a term of art, a piece of jargon, an inside joke -- that is to say a word tethered to the felt world only by the most accidental and anarchic bridge of shared experience -- against another kind of word, a word whose bare sounds are so brutal, so evocative of some brutal fact out in the world, that they must be sanded down somehow or cloaked in other, unrelated sounds. Euphemism is the sand-paper, the cloak.

But Levin's passage reminds us that words are not airtight containers in which we store little bits of the world, but rather soaking strips of plaster that we layer over it trying to capture its hollows and contours. A word will eventually, inevitably take on the shape of what it means. And if it means something mean enough, then over time its consonants will come to prick like pins and its vowels seep like acid.

Failure to Communicate

I knew Blue Valentine would be hard to watch but I didn't realize why. Yes, the tang of the characters' disappointment -- in themselves, in their lives, in the world -- was sour like a mid-morning coating of early morning coffee on the tongue, and their efforts to break even each month without being broken were sobering. Yes, there were a few punches thrown and a few scenes in which a woman's body was treated with utter disregard.

But what made me turn away, what made me turn to Luke and say "Let's not watch this, I think I'm done for the night," was when the two fought not with but at one another. It takes courage to show, on screen, the way that people really talk. And the way they do not listen.

I am thinking in particular of the two climactic moments, the first in the hotel room and the second in the hospital where Cindy works, and the way that the characters apply their voices to each moment in layers, tinted foils accumulating to dim the chance they might actually hear one another. When one of them risks saying something that might possibly convey what they are feeling, the threat of the truth scares the other into disengaging completely. There are no devastating quips, no dead-eyed stares that say more than a quip ever could, no punch-lines. Just two people, increasingly isolated within their moats of sound.