Some Thoughts
– June 20, 2011
About Author: Hilton Als
Posts by Hilton Als
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The Leaving
– June 19, 2011
How many last days one must live before it’s all over at last? There are so many endings. We “move on,” but the next occasion is ultimately defined by leaving as well. I am leaving: hard words for both the lover and the beloved, who live in different countries to start with and for a moment at least co-exist without passports until the departure gate is in view. No, no. Not another moment waving the white handkerchief as the train pulls out of the station, steam enveloping the sad left behind people. Just now I am the sojourner and the person being left behind. I am leaving a place I have lived in for three years now; I am seeing my old self off at the station. My hands shake. I want to embrace myself, but a clean break is preferable; affection would only prevent my walking out the door. The boxes are almost packed, the liquor and food given away. Looking out at the world instead of in at myself, I turned to John Huston’s shattering 1946 documentary, “Let There Be Light,” about shell-shocked soldiers returning to the US after the trauma of war in Japan, in Germany. I can’t explain why I chose to watch this film; I chalk it up to my shattered concentration–it’s only an hour–and it was something to identify with: I knew something about the brutal spiritual break those men were going through as they tried to recall their whole, previous self. Later, in the next biggest town, the bus station, the quiet streets. A memory: my brother and I living with our aunt in Central Islip, “the country,” streets with trees our Brooklyn selves did not understand: the loneliest streets in the world because they’re motherless. Our mother is ill; we have to stay here with relatives we barely know. Arriving at the storage facility, the unintentionally surly woman who wants to quit early; I’m holding her up. But I’ve come so far, on the bus, can’t she help me. She does. My kindness isn’t helping her; she’s a single mother, her daughter’s day care people are annoyed with her for always being late. My kindness is not what she needs but I say it anyway: I know other single mothers. I’m sorry. “It’s hard,” she says, looking away, blood coloring her neck, and maybe her small hands where she sports on each pinky a fake bejeweled nail–the only festive moment in her love-filled and exhausted life, which includes another shift somewhere else, she says. Not feeling alone in the moment she cashes me out is maybe not what she wants to experience as she tries to get through another day for the love of her daughter, the child she must be hard and capable for out in the world, the child she cannot and will never leave, no matter how difficult the circumstances
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Hutz
– June 19, 2011
In those days, we had dinner with the salt still on us. At Lundy’s, in Sheepshead Bay. We were the only colored family there. Salty and sleepy and unmindful of our difference in a world defined by Russianness. Outside, we could smell the air; it was thick, and smelled of sea, suntan lotion, and some other indefinable (to my child self) odor from under the boardwalk where older people, teenagers mostly, went. We could still feel the sun in our lungs as we ordered shrimp, and other “delicacies,” our father at the head of the table, in his element in a restaurant that housed our difference. It was the only world he cared to know–a world not like his own. He loved to eat German food in Yorktown, and Chinese food in Chinatown, and at Lundy’s, food from the sea served by Russian waiters whose thick tongue was difficult to understand, and whose skepticism about our curly hair, and brown-red backs (baked by the sun) disappeared once our usually taciturn father, pulled out his emotional Thesarus and found many synonyms for his brand of charm. His hands were large. We could order what we wanted, which our Mother would never allow, but we saw him, at most, twice a week, while she was our everyday love and, as such, intimate and remarkable. For us–my little brother, and myself–our father was cruel and far away in his remarkableness. We found solace in one another, I’m sure, my little brother and I, as we tried not to gag on the too rich food, and the bonhomie our father shared with the wait staff, but denied us, his own flesh and blood. Looking around, I saw another world–of beautiful Russian men who looked like my uncle, somehow, even as my father looked like Trevor Howard. The Russian men eyed us with their suspicious eyes, and turned back to their meal of–was it soup? Red, with a splotch of something white on top? They had big hands, too, and different eyes: round and full of mirth and sadness, all at once. Years passed, and I fell for a number of Russian men, never associating them with food I wanted to eat or, rather, with the faces that helped me get that rich food down until I saw, just this afternoon, the Ukranian-born beauty, Eugene Hutz, in the 2005 film, “Everything is Illuminated.” In that film, based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel of the same name (directed by Liev Shrieber) Hutz is a Russian-speaking English translator, a guide who sports those elements of black sartorial style he loves and makes his own: a fuzzy kangol, a running suit. With his his gold tooth alternately flashing hope or contempt, or sometimes looking dull as he’s forced to consider another bit of ridiculous Americanism from his charge (played by Elijah Wood), Hutz has a scene where he must explain that his American friend doesn’t eat meat. “Not even a sausage?” Sharing a potato with Wood, Hutz’s mouth stared at my mouth as he munched away, my imagination throwing bits of myself into his mouth as he did so.
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Black Swans
– June 17, 2011
Sometimes he would go to the library and dream. His body was not divisible from the aura of books. Without knowing how, the books came to him, not their contents, exactly, but the ideas they strove so hard to contain. It had always felt that way. But instead of feeling “overwhelmed,” by these literary ghosts, he was comforted by them, even when he didn’t speak their language. (He was attracted to French literature, but could only enjoy it in translation.) In the world of books was the world: Europe, Asia, Africa. He would never get to it all, but that thought didn’t overwhelm him, either: not knowing was part of who he was, and liked being. People he knew were not separate from him, and he assumed that they, too, lived with the ghosts–vapors of words. And so they did at times. A year or two years ago, sitting in the beautiful old library far from the city where he had grown up, there was his own thought, about the design team that goes under the name Rodarte. In their e-mails to him there were many images–images as words–that conveyed their feeling about a given event, like Thanksgiving, or Spring. A recent image they sent was of a swan. He thought: Perhaps they would like to read the poet Marianne Moore’s essay about photographs of the prima ballerina Anna Pavlova, the sleek-haired Russian star and legend whose projection of perfection was not inhumane. So, he found a copy of the essay in that library–unread for many years, apparently, pages yellowed, but it’s ideas not forgotten. He xeroxed it and sent it off. The Rodarte design team–Laura and Kate Mulleavy, sisters–did not respond. Months passed, and he attended a party for the designers at the close of one of their seasons. In the dark, wearing dark clothes, Laura said: When you sent us that beautiful piece about Pavlova and the swans and her dance, we were working on “Black Swan,” and couldn’t talk about it, but it was so spooky, you sending us that beautiful piece then. Particles of ideas connected the designer to him, and he to her. Library-based ideas as a source of inspiration for a project he did not know about until he was involved with it, too. The summer before, at Telluride, he had interviewed the director, Darren Aronofsky. And he knew that if he was open enough and patient enough, channels would and could open further, too. Some months after that conversation about “Black Swan,” he met someone who could pass as another. It was winter, 2011. At the Studio Museum in Harlem, he was on a panel devoted to the work of James Baldwin, an early and forever influence. After the event he talked to a young man who was interested in talking to him. As he listened, he could not place the young man, but he looked so familiar, and then the young man shared his name: Trevor Baldwin. He was the great author’s nephew, whose long neck and calm-eyed vision resembled nothing so much as a black swan floating “with gondolier legs” (Marianne Moore) on a body of black water, which can sometimes be the color of remembrance.
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Amazement (for Kevin)
– June 12, 2011
Today, I was visiting friends in the West Village. One friend in particular. The windows were open. Gray mist, happy thoughts, transitioning from one home to another. Suddenly, the sound of cymbals and chanting on Fifth Avenue, we poked our heads out the window, and then a memory: Kevin following the Hare Krishna parade every year. He went on his own. Sometimes the weather was mist. He’d smoke pot in Washington Square Park, where free food was given out, and look on in amazement as the dance of life danced. Sometimes he joined in.
