Friday, August 01, 2008
Mentation Pair the Third: My Goodness
Let’s be honest, people - it’s late and I’m not sure why I feel compelled to dump more words up here, but it’s been a long night of carousing, sake, beer, burgers, chili fries, laughing with many friends - old, newer, and brand new - and what the hell, I’m actually not that tired yet. I’ve been thinking all day - a day that has been a challenging capstone to a challenging week up till the moment that the whistle finally blew and I left my protective cube for the fabulosity of the outside world - that it’s been a whole week since two particular good things happened in the same day. Certainly, more good things happened to me since then and even today, but the goodness that was last Thursday sticks with me and Ima gonna bloggit, if for no better reason than that it’ll cheer me up when I realize tomorrow this wasn’t all some sake-induced, chili-fries-exacerbated dream. Reality can sometimes be a nice change from the world in my head, and to prove the point, here is a final pair of mentations on the subject of Remembering the Good Things:
* It was lunchtime and I was having the kind of day where my jaws were clenched so hard I could brush my molars by putting a toothbrush in my ear. (Not that I actually was doing this, but I could have.) I glanced up from my desk and saw a sliver of window gleaming at the end of the hallway - the sky, which had been grey and overcast when I’d arrived in the morning, had totally cleared. I’d already eaten my healthful, boring lunch at my desk. My options were to keep working, to sit at my desk and read blogs, or to go outside and take a goddamn walk. I took the goddamn walk.
As soon as the outside air hit my face I knew I’d made a good choice - warm, soft breezes instantly blew the cobwebs (metaphorical) from my mind (alleged). I walked a block and a half to the waterfront; I turned left and headed toward the Ferry Building, where I figured I’d see the most interesting people and smell the most delicious food. As I walked the east promenade where the ferries actually dock, I noticed a fair number of boats on the water - and they were moving fast. Something, I advised myself in a fit of genius, must be happening. Then I saw the flag. It was the famous old Stars and Stripes, but with radically fewer stars than I was used to seeing - maybe 20 or so. Plus, the flag was up pretty darn high - on a wooden mast. In a blinding flash of realization I had my epiphany: this was some kind of olde-style boat. And I wanted a closer look.
I picked up the pace a little and walked around the waterfront decks to the newly-renovated pier 1-1/2, where a gorgeous two-mast wooden ship was already tied up, crawling with crewmembers, mostly in t-shirts, a few in waistcoats with impractically excessive numbers of buttons on them. As I stood there and listened to them calling out to each other in nautical unintelligibilities as the calm bay waters lapped at the pier pilings under my feet, a second boat came around the bend and into view - another two-master, also wood, also flying the flag of an America long since passed, proceeding under propeller power into the same docking slip. What were they, schooners? Yachts? Big-ass beautiful boats, that’s what they were. As the second one came backing in toward the pier with a minimum of effort like a bodybuilder fitting into a tight seat on the bus, the crowd around me grew in size and enthusiasm.
I struck up a conversation with a bike rider next to me, clad in bright blue spandex, his eyes aglow with visions of the past. We talked about the canon on the ships’ decks, how they were used for navigation by timing echoes from known landmarks. We talked about the hundreds of ships lying under landfill next to the shoreline, that laid the foundation for so much of the city’s expansion into the baywaters. We talked and watched as the crew scampered ashore like pirate monkeys and made fast to the huge cleats. The ship having come to rest, it was time for me to go back again to work. I bade my leave of the ships, the spectators, the pier, the bayside, the outdoors. I went back to my cube. But though I’d eaten my lunch at my desk more than an hour previously, I felt as if I had really given myself some serious nourishment on my afternoon break.
* It was back in January that I provided a column for a website for authors, editors, publishers, and the benighted souls who love them. The site is cool - it’s linked at my links page as LitPark, feel free to check’em out. Meantime, the next guest poster at that site was a guy who seemed like he had a lot on the ball, a college English prof who’d been published at McSweeney’s among other important and relevant places. I enjoyed his article and also appreciated a photo he’d posted there of himself in an Aquaman shirt. I even commented on his column to that effect. To my surprise, the author commented back: “I liked the old Aquaman. He had confidence, which could only stem from knowing he belonged to another world the others didn’t know well. Because didn’t he always have to ride in Wonder Woman’s plane when they went anywhere? The new Aquaman is a brute, too obvious.” This got me to thinking, which is usually a sign of impending trouble. Before I’d really made a conscious decision, I e-mailed him back:
“Your ruminations on Aquaman got me thinking. First, I’m thinking that I’m not sufficiently familiar with the character, in either his original or renewed iterations, to discuss him intelligently. Then I’m thinking, that’s never stopped me before. And so:
“Superman is from a world that’s entirely alien to every terrestrial being, and is equally comfortable under water, on land, in the air or powering through a mountain like Buckaroo Banzai if he so wishes. Yet his received persona, despite a spate of “superman is an asshole” websites, is the guy who’s too nice to be interesting. Batman, on the other hand, is one who is a product of contemporary cosmopolitan life – yet he’s always the outsider, scowling through his cowl at ostensible allies with whom he shares no superpowers beside an insatiable craving for justice that has seared his personality to cinders.
“So what about Aquaman? I have always considered him (despite not having read much about him) to be more of a loner, more of a “batman” type. He lives where others don’t; his closest allies cannot communicate with any other hominid. He had to fly with Wonder Woman – humiliating, wouldn’t it be, for a superhero to be so dependent on another, and to be paired (triaded?) with the “wonder twins” for such degradation? Add to this that Aquaman had his own main squeeze(s), which I think was unusual for members of the J. League… how uncomfortable for him to be aloft with the buxom Amazonian, stranded high above the seat of his powers. His wife’s death, and his strained relationship (as I understand it to be) with his son, only intensifies what I sense to be a portrait of a man estranged against himself as well as the rest of the world.
“Aquaman is a king, and with that status goes a noblesse oblige, an aristocratic self-separation from a society which depends on his guidance and support but in which he cannot fully immerse himself, if I may be allowed the figure of speech. It only makes sense to me that he would be taciturn – briny, crustaceous, submerged within himself as well as in his environment. He is more of an enigma than most of the other superheros, most closely aligned, in my view, with the Silver Surfer, who – unlike Superman – never adopted his new world but just decided to protect it as a resident alien. Aquaman, too, is alien, but an alien on his home planet. I think I’m going to cry.”
I got an email back along the lines of “let’s party, dude,” and we moved along on our respective paths, away into our respective futures, which are in fact now the present, or so it was a week ago when I got another e-mail from the author telling me that his novel was about to be published, and he was considering a volume of contributed essays on the semiotics of everyday objects, in the manner of Umberto Eco. As to which, would I mind his using my Aquaman rant as an example of exactly what he has in mind? He then had the audacity to opine that I might be a pro writer or pro-fessor thereof. I then had the audacity to say “sure, dude, use whatever I got if it sounds like Eco to ya.” I spent most of the rest of the day thinking, damn dude, you wrote something that a guy who writes novels and teaches writing, who has words cascading over his head and out of his fingertips and off his tongue every waking minute of the day, that that guy actually liked enough to remember and to think of when he was looking for exemplars for his new project half a year later. And honestly, after six years of blogging and damn little to show for it, that felt good.
So there’s my third pair of mentations, and I think I’m ready to move off this theme. This feels like a good place to let things go - a place of goodness. Let’s see where it left me, eh? I have some fiction stored up for you… maybe that’ll be next? Whatever. It’s late. Now I’m tired. Goodnight.
