Multum in Parvo

(much in little)

For some while he has realized that things between him and the world are no longer proceeding as they used to; before, they seemed to expect something of each other, he and the world; now he no longer recalls what there was to expect, good or bad, or why this expectation kept him in a perpetually agitated, anxious state.

– Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino

1

Sometimes I wake up still thinking it’s a dream. After all these months I experience wonder and resistance. I dress in a dream. I eat in a daze. I wander room to room. Then I trot outside to pull a weed. Or deadhead a rose. Or thrust my face in the sun. Or smell the dirt. In the garden I get down on my knees to smell what is alive in the ground. Or gaze at the feeders where small creatures gather, oblivious to everything but the exigencies of bird life: seed and song. Was I ever that oblivious? Yes, of course.

Frank lives across the street. Originally from Sicily, he’s a widower in his eighties. We usually talk while we work in our gardens. Since his wife died, we’ve started to hug. He’s usually gregarious, but now he only waves, his hand rotating overhead. And he never wears a mask. Without Rosaria I know he’s unhappy. I wonder if he doesn’t care if he dies.

Next door are two little girls with a trampoline in the backyard where they bounce and squeal. It’s a big yard with room to run around plus a patio, a shed, a large patch of grass, four hens, and a magnificent chicken coop built by their father. I remember when the chicks arrived a year ago, so small they fit in my palm. Now they bustle around, their licorice and caramel-colored feathers glistening like waxed satin. The clucking, the bouncing, the squealing, the running are reassuring. Of what? Of the future instead of an incessant present.

And what about the incessant present? Living in the Now, isn’t that what the masters of transcendence instruct us to seek? Yet I’ve arrived unprepared. I try to meditate. Daily I try, but my brain is a cyclotron. It takes many minutes to quiet my thoughts, and the effort invariably makes me hungry. Meditation turns to thoughts of lunch and whether to make a sandwich or fry an egg.

On Sunday I sometimes see the girls’ masked grandparents in the garden. Sunday was once its own special day for church and family visits. I grew up in the Bible Belt where everything was closed. Almost no one worked on Sunday. At home it meant the New York Times (a sign of sophistication in the provinces), bagels and lox (another sign), and my parents’ violent arguments. As long as I could hide, I liked the day’s empty feeling of nothing to do. For some of us it has been month after month of Sunday: hours of amusing distractions and depressing thoughts.

I rarely leave the house. I have a condition that prevents me from mingling. However, I take a daily walk. Walking was first a liberation, wild and free. Then shifted to a yardstick that I calculated to ensure good health. Lately I put off the walk as long as possible, begrudgingly exchange my slippers for Adidas, and stumble out the door.

Depending on my energy, which I measure like a meter reader for water, oil, and gas, I choose from three routes that vary according to the number and severity of hills. Route 1 is mostly flat, its coordinates four major streets, none of which I have to cross. There is little traffic so I can walk on spongy asphalt instead of cement. But no matter how often I pass the same blocks, the same dozens of houses, the same parked cars and front yards, I find new things to see. Most of all, I wonder what lurks behind every door and drape. A question that has absorbed my entire life.

This is the neighborhood where I have lived for over two decades. A relief after moving every few years with nothing precious but kids and books. In fact, I’ve lived twice in this neighborhood. The first time in a nondescript apartment house modeled after Motel 6, as compact and efficient as a sailboat with two small bedrooms for three people, an ugly facade, and seasonal fleas.

Despite the drawbacks, I loved this apartment. My stucco pueblo. In addition to panoramic views of sky and bay, the landings were filled with potted plants, bikes, hibachis, and delectable aromas that floated from open doors. The neighbors were interesting and genial, plebs like me except the apartment manager. He was not a pleb. He drove a red MX-5 Miata and intended to retire in Paris. When he went about shirtless, showing off his titties and Riviera tan, the kids ogled his nipple rings. Sadly, we witnessed his young lover die of AIDS. While he was dying, I became friends with his mother and grandmother, both from somewhere remote and bearing the heavy stigma of the disease.

When I lived in this apartment, I too had a lover. A modest dwelling for a great passion. Under the circumstances we had to sneak around. Sometimes during lunch hour from my job in west Berkeley, we met there and made love. En route back to the office, I’d stop for an avocado sandwich on wheat toast, cheap and satisfying, to eat at my desk.

We also had Pierre, a parakeet, whose song filled the rooms. After the Loma Prieta earthquake, Pierre suffered from PTSD. He stopped singing. He stopped eating. He lay on the floor of his cage. I took him to the vet who diagnosed beak and feather disease. When he did not improve, I decided on a course of euthanasia inspired by the stories of the Inuit. We put Pierre in the freezer with a little food and handwritten prayers.

Then we moved across town into a brown-shingled cottage next to Ho Chi Minh Park. It and Provo Park in downtown were named for revolutionary thinkers and movements. Now the parks have ordinary names, but out of admiration for heroic ideals, I prefer the old ones. Like the clashes over monuments to white supremacy, names matter.

From Albert Camus, “To name things wrongly is to add to the misfortune of the world.”

And Solzhenitsyn: “[T]he word is more sincere than concrete, so words are not trifles. Once noble people mobilize, their words will crush concrete.”

Lo and behold! I see you noble people mobilizing in the streets, crushing the fabrications of the past.

2

The people on the terrace played on drums and lutes, except for some score or so (who wore crimson masks) who were praying, singing, and conversing. They suffered imprisonment, but no one could see the prison: they rode on horseback, but no one saw the horse; they fought in combat, but their swords were reeds; they died and then stood up again.

– “Averroes’ Search” by Jorge Luis Borges

After a few years in the cottage by Ho Chi Minh Park, I moved back to Addison Street into a house that M. and I were able to buy. The last bargain, we joked. Neither of us ever expected to buy a house, but when its owner suddenly died of a brain aneurism, her father put it on the market. Although there was a higher bid by a speculator-realtor, he did the decent thing and sold it to M. who’d lived there, or rather between there and New York, and dutifully paid rent for years. With the help of an architect and a hair-raising bank loan, we converted the 1896 house from three units back to its original plan as a single-family dwelling. My son was already in college. But before my daughter and I moved in, M. and I spent every weekend doggedly sanding, painting, sawing, patching, and inevitably fighting for which we had a pact that after long, stressful hours doing things badly because we couldn’t afford to hire someone to do them well, we shed our work clothes, showered, and never mentioned another word about the biting curses and critiques that had transpired during the day. However, we did pay dearly. I suffered a painful herniated disk (L5). M. suffered a stroke at age 48.

My second walking route leads me across one of the town’s major streets, “arterials” they’re called, where vehicles speed east and west between the freeway and university. If it’s near sunset, there’s a strong glare in the westbound drivers’ eyes so I proceed cautiously. On the far side is a residential neighborhood, similar to my own but slightly more affluent, and a large park built over the old Key Route system where dozens of trolleys once ran in all directions. This neighborhood has more trees, more cul-de-sacs, and generally more folks, little and big, playing and walking in the streets. I go as far as Monterey Market, the town’s premier fruit and vegetable emporium. On this route I try to maintain a brisk pace up and down four short steep hills, but sometimes I bump into a friend. Despite months of isolation, I’m not so keen to stop and talk. I grew up in Georgia where most folks are garrulous and friendly. But now find that a solitary walk, lost in thought, or more likely oblivion, takes precedent over conversation. All of it contradicting the nature I once thought I possessed.

The third route is the most difficult, up an incline that starts at the corner of Virginia Street and builds into a very steep grade, taking me to the eastern edge of the university. I’m panting by the time I reach the top. Although the prettiest route, almost sylvan, the hill exhausts me.

I used to do much with energy to do more. But I’ve fallen into a stupor where I experience a state of hebetude, alien to my busy self. Again, I sense that my nature has changed. Whether from the unusual circumstances beyond my control, or moodiness I recognize from a lonely childhood, I can’t say. At first, I welcomed it. I’d lived too much like a beaver. Always doing, always busy, often to the point of collapse, especially at the full moon. Now was the time to embrace the sloth. Nonetheless, the days fly even if I barely do anything. Time is both faster and slower than I ever remember. Outside me, I can’t catch it. I can’t capture or compartmentalize anything. Time rolls over me, simultaneously something and nothing. Vague and elusive.

Here is when I ask about Time, the colossal subject of debate for philosophers and physicists. I can accept it as an invention. I can almost accept its non-existence. Or its existence inside my body trained by clocks to coincide with other bodies. After all, timetables were only invented in 1840 to ensure the successful operation of trains. Traveling by foot or horse or wagon couldn’t ensure anything. Yes, we’ve mutually agreed to depend on a sustained illusion. And unless rocked by an earthquake, an accident, a shock, an orgasm, obviously a dream, and the occasional vision, we adhere to a common measurement. It feels as if I’ve entered a time warp. That it’s time-consuming doesn’t invalidate the mystery of Time.

I watch lots of movies. I watched 72 hours of “A French Village,” longer than it took to read War and Peace. It was quite a commitment, one I was both glad and sad to finish. Not unlike most commitments. For a few days I got hooked on TwinsthenewTrend on YouTube, which features young brothers Tim and Fred in Indiana, who review music videos. It’s fun to see them discover famous but unfamiliar artists. Their enthusiasm is contagious, and since much of the music is part of my own past, it calls up memories at parties, in clubs, on the radio, with various people in various places, when I too first heard these songs. Like the twins I’m amazed at what I don’t know. Or what I missed. I’ll read a wonderful book or look at a wonderful painting, and think what if I died without seeing that. But what difference does it make? That’s one of the fundamental ways my thinking has changed after months of confinement. I used to think everything made a difference.

The keyboard is my altar. It’s there I cry over the victims of plague, war, hate, eviction, and the government. On the same keyboard I compulsively send out emails: links to podcasts, petitions, news items, interviews, health notices, and miscellany. I’m a veritable clipping service—and a pest. Many have political content which I forward to friends, family, comrades, and near strangers who might care about such things. It takes time to organize. I don’t have a set list. I deliberate over who’ll respond to prison issues versus who might donate to food banks. I have no idea if these cyber missives are meaningful, but they make me feel less helpless (my life less futile) so I persist. And here is where I admit that some things do make a difference.

As a child, I often cried. Whether I had to go or had to leave, I cried. My mother called me cry baby. But then at 19 after my father died, my tear ducts froze. I used to say I was cried out, his death marking me for life. But more than marked, it altered my future entirely. Security was already shaky in almost every form, but his death totally annihilated it. And set me on a course of trying to free myself from suffering, an effort destined to fail. But what, in fact, is a course? A road, a race, an obsession, a folly. Yet I’m relieved that such a personal tragedy happened near the beginning of my life, preparing me for future loss.

Nevertheless, I look forward to living. Day and night, I am grateful to be alive. As for death, I count Rilke’s Duino Elegies as an early tutor on the subject. However, in contrast to life, death remains inanimate, hanging like an unworn coat in the back of the closet, the price tag still attached. Until moments when I am gripped by fear and rumination and remember, O, that ugly rag! which someday, possibly without warning, or by unpleasant and resolute dispatch, will leap from its obscure darkness and strangle me.

3

Little events in the house drew the attention

but not for long, and it was as though rose leaves

on the paper were really leaves. There’s no time

to keep this, not too much anyway. There’s time

you were owed, and the time you owned, and between them

the match that was called. You slid down

into a chair and it was like so much that happens

every day and no one is wiser for it, nor wiser

before it happened, on someone’s day off:

Cashier the jerks, kiss the bald head

and we’ll be on our way, not being proud

nor ashamed either. That would be it.

“Poem Beginning with a Line

from Gammer Gurton’s Needle”

by John Ashbery

The Beginning is lost;

the End stretches into eternity.

Don’t bother with them, they’re irrelevant.

And since all is really nothing,

then nothing is everything.

The Conference of the Birds–Valley of Unity

Attar, Sheikh Farid-Ud-Din (1145-1220 CE)

translated by Sholeh Wolpé

I don’t go to grocery stores or farmer’s markets, the bakery or cheese shops. Like others I order food online. Occasionally, I eat Chinese takeout, invariably unsatisfying with mingy portions. My kind husband mostly shops on my behalf. Thus, I have to plan what I eat more carefully. A chore and a bore. For some time (haha!) I haven’t been able to properly digest many foods (dairy, gluten, legumes, sugar), but in June I started a new medication and things have greatly improved. They’ve improved to the degree that I’m giddy over what I now consume: slices of pizza chased by a strawberry yogurt popsicle. Kids’ food. That’s because my children and their children were recently in the garden. Mostly wearing masks except when they ate and crowded around an outdoor table while I sat at a distance, eating and grinning like a religious ecstatic. I no longer walk at night, to and fro from the movies or campus or dinners in downtown restaurants. No matter how often I’ve made this walk, at night it’s all unfamiliar. Not exactly eerie but mysterious and empty, it exudes emptiness with tall globular street lamps like distant moons, matte trees casting gray shades of gray shadows, houses draped and locked like tombs, the lawns and gardens as opaque as molded plastic, stars dimmed by the electric city, a dark jaundiced sky like a ceiling rather than a gateway to the universe, and the occasional pedestrian, car, dog, all phantoms. Certain kinds of life live only at night, but in the city they’re hard to locate: a possum lumbering in the yard, a woeful bark, a random shriek. Night is where the future is most pronounced. The nocturnal sacrament we negotiate to reach the morning.

Sleeping, I can’t describe. Sleep is another planet. Like most people, I have rituals. I usually read before I sleep. Even if I’m exhausted, I read, but then I have to reread the same pages in bed in the morning, a luxury I had to forego for years. Instead, mornings used to be a blitz. Hustling kids to school and myself to work at some drab job, commuting to Hayward or Walnut Creek where I’d flee midday from a gray cubicle and make my way to the closest pool. First the Hayward Plunge, later the glorious Heather Farms, my get-out-of-jail ticket that converted me to a lifelong swimmer.

By the bed is an illuminated clock radio. A small white cube made by Sony, which I first saw in an Airbnb in Quebec City. I like the shape of squares and cubes. I think such preferences reveal how our brains are organized. However, the clock radio light, even on the dimmest setting, is shockingly bright. At night before I turn off the bedside lamp, I cover it with a scarf with a geometric design in mauve and mint evoking a sultan’s garden, silk-screened by my daughter, and providing a piece of her who protects me as I sleep.

In the bedroom there is also one window, half-covered by a piece of cloth, also from my daughter. I love looking out at the magnolia branches. Such a silhouette suggests both a thing very small and very large, close and far. At hours of day and night, the branches are black twisting between wires overhead that run like industrial tracks through the sky. I wake while sleeping and drunk on fatigue, stagger to the bathroom. By dawn I’ve covered my eyes with a mask.

By the bed I keep a pad and pen to jot down things before I go to sleep. Perhaps a word I want to look up or a reference mentioned in a book. Or an inspiration for what I want to write the next day. But I have a terrible handwriting, almost illegible so it’s not unusual for me to be completely baffled when I try to read my scribble. Even if I print, I’m stumped.

Every night is an adventure in Dreamland. Last week I dreamed I was at the postoffice. Inside and out the walls were chalked, and if you touched them, the surface streaked your hands. The building had Palladium windows and signs of the zodiac painted in gold leaf on the ceiling. All the postal clerks were angels with coal-black faces, white robes, and giant gauzy wings. They told me I could write a letter to a dead person. I have a few close friends who have died plus my brother and parents and a stepson, but I wrote to my grandmother to tell her I was sorry I didn’t come to her funeral. I had excuses like money and a sick toddler, but mainly I knew my mother and aunt would be fighting over their inheritance. It was forty years ago and still a thing I regret. Of course, I regret other things, but I’m mostly not sorry they happened. That’s the difference. They’re part of me, essential parts. They made me, and if you removed one, I might lose others, suggesting a life is a chain reaction. But my grandmother’s funeral is truly a missing piece. After I wrote the letter to her, I stood in line. When it was my turn, I asked one of the angels how much it cost to mail. I was curious to see a stamp that went to heaven. But the angel said it was a free service and flew off. Special delivery.

Last night I dreamed of five-gallon glass jars like the ones where I mixed yogurt and set in a bathtub of warm water calibrated to a certain temperature. That was when I lived in a roomy upstairs flat on Alcatraz Avenue, the border that divides Berkeley and Oakland, my first home in California. I exchanged jars of yogurt for my son’s nursery school tuition. It was a moment, a marvelous moment when the barter system was in full swing. My friend Amelie and I also mixed yogurt with frozen concentrate orange juice and made popsicles in cups with wooden tongue depressors. Amelie is an artist, a healer, a sybil, and an expert in Tarot. To advertise our wares, she made a sign of a bedizened Buddhist divinity holding a Yoga-sicle (sic). There’s also a photo of us in exotic garb at a local festival, carrying Amelie’s sign and a Styrofoam cooler, our babies balanced on our hips, looking like we flew in from another planet. We didn’t have certification from the Health Department to sell yogurt, but like bartering we lived outside certain norms. In the dream, instead of creamy white yogurt, there are tiny babies in the jars, dozens of them, not embryos, but fully formed infants, the size of a pinkie, lying about, jostling each other, pumping their tiny legs and arms. I can lift and hold them without doing any harm.

I don’t spend much time trying to understand dreams although I’m not adverse to dream interpretation. I have a friend who has studied them, and if she cares to comment, I don’t mind. On the contrary, I’m intrigued. But if I try, I feel like I’m fabricating an arbitrary thing. And since I spend many hours in my waking life writing fiction, which is already a fabrication of arbitrary things, it’s quite enough.

I contact people I haven’t talked to in years. And they contact me. It’s surprising who calls and who doesn’t. Perhaps we are trying to solidify memories of life different than this. The past is suddenly animated with reminisces: humorous, amorous, ridiculous, troubling, or not. Remember?

August 2020

Summer Brenner is the author of a dozen books of fiction and poetry. Her story “Identity Theft” can be found in the recent anthology Berkeley Noir, Akashic Books, 2020. In 2021 The Missing Lover will be published by Spuyten Duyvil Press and Do You Ever Think of Me? a chapbook from Above / Ground.