By Eric Le Roy
I have seen my life move like an arrow from one point to the next, its tail feathers fluttering like lost breath, a jet stream of spit. It’s hard to believe I was once a baby. Harder still to comprehend this mysterious, though inevitable, failure of the physical instruments of life that have propelled me this far. I rose, I arched, I flattened, I headed earthward (imperceptibly at first), now at an angle, not yet a nosedive. If this sounds ludicrously priapic (virility to impotence) – well, not quite. And, counterintuitively, I suppose, I am starting to capture the thrill of the descent. Horrendously uncomplicated. I mean, who the fuck was I? Nobody. Just a guy made of shadows. Am I an arrow or a circle?
I seem to be an arrow. Launched from some kind of bow, I have sped through the air, parting cobwebs and stabbing at space. Yet, in some ways, I feel more like a circle than an arrow. I may have always been so inclined, but I just didn’t recognize it until later on. Or is it somehow simply comforting, cajoling myself into an illusion of the end amounting to a beginning? This would not be the hope for some heaven waiting like a golden chariot at the end of the dusty road; that being the case, I would still be riding astride a javelin, wouldn’t I, because heaven would be a destination, a place to get to? Among the deserving passengers on God’s rocket, I would join the jostle for a seat.
The more that I consider it, the more I believe that the nature of all perceived tragedy deserves to be buried in the divine comedy of nature itself. While we, the human arrows, appear to pierce the sky-walls of Time, shedding exhaust emissions that fade like wallpaper skimmed from the sky and shredded, everything else seems to revolve like a hoop; the atmosphere just beyond us on all sides is turning on an axis, and down below, things seem in flux, showing a seasonal face of green or gold or orange-yellow-brown or gray, depending on where you live and when it is. An impression of a wobbly symmetry, a child’s spinning toy, the revolutions of a toddler’s top, or a carnival carousel.
The seasons. I have known them, I can even count them: spring, summer, autumn, and winter, 76 times. How many more? But even as every year begins to show its age, it’s only leading me on, like actors in a play, for after Winter and I endure the cold together, the time comes when winter takes off its mask; it’s spring again, but, when I try to pull winter’s mask away too, for the relief of my face, it no longer comes off.
For a moment, I feel betrayed, but then the spring says, “Old man, don’t be silly. You’ll come with us when it’s time.” It’s when the circle impulse revives, and I try to be less afraid, convincing myself that all is well and it’s okay. I suspect it’s true that my fears are groundless. Watching the birds in the evening, curving in unison across the sphinxlike sky, heading seaward, back toward the rooftops, I am struck by how they never display any doubt. I think: if I let them guide me, whatever the mire and gravel of their tiny brains, I would not be afraid. But there seems to be a divide, a severing, of bright and dark matter, between their circle and my arrow. I, fleeting and panting, sing songs and write poems to them; they swirl and glide above me with the indifference that only people who died centuries ago could emulate. There they are, the birds, you see; they come again in the evening gyre.
I have a lot of young students, and for the more mature, I sometimes acknowledge my private concerns and, yes, anxieties that it’s now the custom to call ‘existential’. This aspect of my classroom is not a confessional, but rather my attempt to show them what becomes of an ‘arrow’. I tell them that one of the differences between us is that their past is small and their future large, while for me, it is the other way around. Putting aside all contemporary exhortations about how we ‘only have today’ and should always ‘move forward, don’t look back’, well, maybe it’s like that on Wall Street or in the Corridors of the Corporation. But my life is more like a book whose plot marches on but whose central theme needs constant reexamination and revision. It seems a case of endless circles forming around the flight of the narrative spear.
And so has gone my life. I grow saltier, more acerbic. I am aware that sometimes I seem to go out of my way to make myself dislikeable. No doubt it is a defense mechanism of some sort, but I can not help it. By rejecting what I can’t control, the sleek jets flying by me at top speed, choking me with the cloudy foam of their waste, I try to swerve from the abyss that I imagine them unwittingly heading towards, and wing back to days of my own life which the future can not touch or ruin. Yes, I bend the arrow and circle back.
I am always amazed by the amount of stuff that has never been resolved. Boldly, I reenter old arguments, restate the confused or rejected points in better words, and set about reordering the often grubby, grotty outcomes from what they became. The ball games won or lost come back to life; the exam scores still hang in the balance as the teacher hands out the papers, and the phone is still ringing: will she pick up? On dream streets, I find the distant bedrooms of women now old or dead, and suddenly they are young again (would they be pleased by such archaic stirring of my mind; do they ever think of me?), and I understand how to be with them, how to speak to them, what I should have said, should have done, should have been….Just as Nefertiti and Theodora were real once, so were Jackie and Francine, and Celia. Oh, how I wish I could circle and explain to them how fine they were and what should have been done.
Sitting in a bar along Broadway between 80th and 70th street with Mike Boyle, watching O.J. Simpson run for a USC Trojan touchdown against UCLA, and then Gary Beban, at quarterback, bringing the Bruins back. The draft beer of those days in New York City: Shaeffer, Ballentine, and Lowenbrau. That Puerto Rican woman who entered and announced to the bar that she had two underage daughters going ‘for a song’ (no takers, the game was too exciting). The porn houses, junkies, and ultra-aggressive gays around Times Square. The subway to Harlem or the Village. That was 1966-67. The best way to find that old Manhattan again is in the film “Midnight Cowboy.” It’s there. I was there.
London in 1970. Wandering around South Kensington, early Sunday morning. Misty, not many people about. That first morning in the tube station, a young English lass – ordinary in the eyes of most, I’m sure, just out of her teens (I guess), sweeping the floor in the cafe adjoined to the stairway to the Underground, and I, callow and in a romantic stupor from just being in England (the England and London of that time and place) looking at her, wishing I could claim her, warm myself – like a homeless man against a fire in a vacant lot – amid her chilly aura, and pinion myself against the translucence and the paste of her passing body, as I blindly asked “How are you?” And she replied “So-So” – after probably a late night with friends or a lover.
Why have I never forgotten her saying that? “So-So”. My mind has dismissed speeches, dialogues, discussions and arguments that rambled or raged long ago, but never “So-So.” I can’t remember her face; it has become part of the distance, but her voice is with me, and even now as I write this, the years circle back to South Kensington.
John Walsh and Mick Schwartz, the two roommates who had met in an orphanage and let me stay with them, crashing on their floor. Nikki Lehtinen, the Finnish woman whom I madly loved. The Hoop & Toy, where I drank. It’s all there. They are all waiting for me, even the ‘So-So’ girl. Just waiting for me to circle back. They are the birds of the evening, but human, not indifferent. And imagine having to die just to meet a certain face again. It was pretty, that’s all I know: She was London-pretty – and of the social ‘station’ of the working class, I have decided – in that Olde Town where there have been so many.
Now, where I live and mind my business (so to speak), I extend a little more each day, even though my life is regulated, disciplined, and, yes – I must allow it – productive as never before. I try to ‘keep my nose in front’, as they say. So much is done now on the computer. Otherwise, it’s down to wife, dogs, cats, the family circle of flesh, fur, and blood companionship. Neighbors nod.
Each day, I see to my allotment of online students, sometimes just a handful, sometimes as many as a dozen. And, one by one, they come to life, one by one, they are the ripe fruit of my workdays. One after another, they depart. Souls of a screen, though not in this room or country, they seem to be real as they flicker, heads atop necks, I swear it, as real, almost as you can get without being real. With a click as common as a doorkey, they go their own way and, unlike the past where I felt compelled to hold on for dear life to vanishing things, protesting to shadows, pleading my case to apparitions with hastily packed suitcases, angry, heartbreaking goodbyes after the picnic, now I smile and click back at them all.
My mom, in her last years, would look at the clock and say, “I’ll be glad when it’s time to go to bed.” I thought it sad, a longing for oblivion to erase the melancholy boredom of her days after her husband died, and she formed a late-afternoon-through-evening partnership with a sweet-talking gentleman called Mr. James Beam. Jim, for short. But I understand now that it wasn’t what I thought. Every evening, long about 9 pm, she would buy a ticket from the Sandman, admittance to the same places I suspect kids now look for in video games – somewhere the adventures never stop, past the popcorn stand and where you buy the Milky Ways and Good ‘n Plenty, past the usher and into the dark where the ‘silver’ screen awaits, suddenly lit, afire with hosts who talk constantly to others in the mansions of the celluloid, seeming at times to turn to you.
They are delicious indeed, these early morning dreams I have now, for in them I circle back: my youth, you see, has many hometowns. And just as I used to castigate the kids with their Minecraft – and even the adults – as cowards trying to flee from ‘reality’, I think now that I have been wrong. No, what they are doing, at least sometimes, is trying to find the formula for a better world and life.
They are not running away, but running towards… for, though people say that Hope is the last thing to go, I think better of it; I think that even when a dying old person feels the stiffening of their organs and the deadening of their blood, they still have the flocks that circle through their minds, the visions the reclaim everything, now with affectionate meanings and the fading of most of the malice. Thus, the arrow of life is redeemed by the circle of a vision of life. I call it the Imagination of Action. It is better than Hope. For in the action of dreams, hope is superfluous.
This is when the arrow bends and forms a circle, and we can meet again, freely, those Ballentine days in New York City, and the So-So girls of all the South Kensingtons the Great Cosmos has ever imagined. These are the dressing rooms of the soul, and the half-dressed people look at you from out of the naked dark.
