Still Sundays

December 18, 2011.

Herman Hesse’s Demian.  “Tug on Anything at all…”  A fortune-teller who could tell all but one thing.

It’s not easy to leave New York City. A stranger-friend, an Italian Ph.D. student, must return to Italy tomorrow as her yearlong fellowship is finally over. And she is not ready.  I don’t think those who come to New York City for anything but an idea can ever leave that idea behind. At worst we carry that idea that is New York City with us wherever we go. At best, we return again.  And again.

Love is a hard idea to give up.

What will she miss the most, I asked her? She held back tears and replied, The freedom. The freedom to be anything, to do anything, to be anyone. It’s never too late in New York City.

I assure her that New York City is that living, breathing paradox which never leaves us once we realize the value in the question that is New York, not the answers we get by being here. That anyone who can’t let go of New York City always finds his or her way back…somehow, someway, so she will be back too.

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Sunday is almost over here in New York City and I am just beginning to write. In some parts of the world it is another day already. Some Sundays Stillness feels like a chair made of sharp darts and there is no cushion to sit through the sharpness that refines your understanding of what you thought you understood.

Maybe the dead borrow Stillness from Earth in the month of December? The past is ever-present, fear is a seductive shape-shifter with too many faces to count.

I believe it was Mark Twain who said, “Although the past may not repeat itself, it does rhyme.”

December is an orchestra of rhymes I haven’t memorized good enough to try forgetting.

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I just finished Demian by Hermann Hesse. I just want to quote passages from the book. I want to type every word.

“Only the ideas we actually live are of any value.”

“That is why each of us has to find out for himself what is permitted and what is forbidden—forbidden for him. It’s possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard. And vice versa.”

“There was only one thing I could not do: wrest the dark secret goal from myself and keep it before me as others did who knew exactly what they wanted to be—professors, lawyers, doctors, artists, however long this would take them and whatever difficulties and advantages this decision would bear in its wake. […] I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings, which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?”

Hermann Hesse wrote Demian in 1917 in a few months while not only dealing with the continuing horror of World War I, but also with the personal crises of his father’s death, his younger son’s serious illness, and his wife’s mental collapse.

What’s your excuse? What’s my excuse? Maybe we just don’t have an urgency. We are living in a time of an invisible perpetual war and yet…

I can’t finish a short story that I have been working on for months despite a four-day weekend. But I don’t feel bad. I have never called myself a writer to this day. I don’t assert being anyone I am not.

People eat, sleep, get rid of bodily waste, may engage in intercourse with or without desire, go to work, complain about work even if they may like what they are doing given once they were passionate about an ideal, go on vacations every few years with money they do and don’t have, and experience joy and conflict by connecting with friends of habit over dinner and drinks in the spare time.

I am no different.

I eat stories, get rid of pedantic waste, may engage in moral discourse with or without desire, go to work, complain about feeling doubts about making a difference within the system, go on vacations every minute without ever getting on a plane, find an adventure with or without money, and experience joy by connecting with friends whose energy is life-affirming.

The aforementioned doesn’t make me a writer. Those are just the terms on which I have decided to live.

Demian was Hesse’s fifth novel and he decided to have it appear under a name other than his own. He felt his name was too strongly associated with a kind of fiction that he had outgrown.

Where is Hesse’s “Retweet”, facebook like, posterous heart, google hit, or pride at the joy that friends have some work in their living room?

He did not want expectations based upon his previous novels to interfere with readers’ experience of this new novel. Hesse’s ploy worked. Upon its publication in 1919 (the book did not appear in the United States until 1948) it was an immediate success and readers, critics, and other writers clamored to learn who was the ‘author’, the remarkable mysterious Emil Sinclair, the first person narrator in the novel. The novel was even awarded the Fontane Prize, a prestigious award for the year’s outstanding first novel, but Hessee and his publisher returned the prize without revealing anything about the real identity of the author.

In the end the more we know the more alone we are. Lone wolves howling to find other lone wolves.  The howling subsides when we come across words that have stood the test of time. Someone else understood too. Thank you, Hermann Hesse.

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Someone once asked me if I believe the verse below, quote it so readily, and teach it repeatedly to my students, how come I still come across as judgmental.

There is so much good in the worst of us

And so much bad in the best of us

That it hardly behooves any of us

To talk about the rest of us.

The spiritually superior assertion of discernment aside, I told her compassion doesn’t always look or feel nice, ignoring doesn’t always work, and talking about others is not the same as talking TO them about them.  It may not gain one many friends, friends by habit, association, or time, but you have to honor the energy with which you want to associate.

“Tug on anything at all and you’ll find it connected to everything else in the universe.” ~ John Muir

With whom do you want to be connected and why?

We all possess the potential to live life on our terms. I think most people, at least in the so called “developed” countries, are indeed living life on their terms. Those of us who think otherwise do so only because we can’t fathom the why.

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There is a story I know of this man who was a great fortune-teller. He could predict when someone was going to die, he could predict when someone was getting a divorce or when there was betrayal in a relationship, what people were thinking and feeling. He would stand in the middle of Town Square and offer these predictions for small donations and food and fruit baskets. He was honest, dedicated and accurate. However, he was so focused on offering what he saw for others that one day he didn’t see a bus coming his way that almost led to his death. The only reason he didn’t die that moment was because he had moved from his usual spot to go after a young woman to tell her, “I have something to tell you.” And it wasn’t a prediction but to tell her that he was in love with her. Love saves us again and again. And we can’t predict the full impact of real love.

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I asked my Italian stranger-friend what is the last thing she wants to do tonight in the City?

She replied, “Go see the Empire State Building. It really is something. Every time.”

In 2009 when I took my year long hiatus from New York City the last thing I did was grab a coffee at my favorite coffee shop. But I also knew I would be back.

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Love, like New York City, is an Idea… Still Sundays A Still Sunday, particularly today.