Friday, July 31, 2009

You Must Change Your Life

I need to change my life. I think about this problem as the day approaches for me and my wife to leave for Hong Kong, where I’ll be on a Fulbright Fellowship for a year. It’s the classic midlife thing; I’m increasingly dissatisfied with myself. Will one year in a completely new place offer me opportunity to change? And what do I want to change? I should eat better, for instance, and get more exercise. I should be more disciplined in my work habits and in my sleep habits. In my new environment I’ll have the chance to establish new routines. But these corrections don’t quite reach to the heart of the problem. What I really want is not an external discipline but an internal motivation. Where does that come from?

At the end of a poem called “Archaic Torso of Apollo” by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, the speaker tells himself, “You must change your life.” The realization hits him while he’s in the midst of admiring an ancient Greek sculpture, a fragment, but a work so intensely alive that, even without eyes, it seems to look at him and to see through him. If you’re lucky enough to have been almost destroyed by a great work of art, you’ll know something about the experience the poet touches on. The conviction of the need to change is common, I believe. But in Rilke’s poem, the admonition comes from something external; the work of art judges him. It’s really the statue that demands the change, the statue that insists, “You must.” The poem is not a confession. It’s hardly even personal.

I must change my life: normally such a thought follows from an admission of personal inadequacy or unhappiness. You might say to yourself, I can’t stand my job or, I just can’t take living in Michiana anymore; but even if you’re consciously focused on external circumstances, you’re actually confessing disappointment with yourself. Privately we’re often blunt in our expressions of self-hatred. We wallow in regret. We say to ourselves, “I’m such an idiot!” or “Why did I do that?” We suspect that merely changing jobs or moving to a new region may not do the trick. We would, after all, drag our old self with us, the disappointing story of our life. We can’t escape ourselves.

Rilke’s poem hints at a different way, not focused on the self. It is possible that we only ever change against our will, not out of a desire for change. In fact, we don’t want to change. We do, but we don’t. I don’t want to hear the voice that cancels my self, to see the eyes that see through me. This isn’t to say that we’re helpless in our pursuit of change, because life – and especially art – presents us with infinite opportunities to open ourselves to something radically “other.” It’s just that the change given to us by the radically other, sometimes by force, always in some sense by force, is unpredictable. It isn’t the escape fantasy we’ve wished for all along.

You must change your life. The demand is persistent and inescapable, even if we’re mostly deaf to it, fleeing it. We’re crowded round by otherness, battered by the promising threat of change. In the midst of the storm we clutch to the sinking ship of what we’ve always known, which is, after all, nothing. So let me, in Asia, open myself to change.

The voice of otherness answers, Begin here. Today.

Broadcast by Joe Chaney on July 31, 2009 • WVPE's Audio Archive
Arts & Entertainment • Customs & Rituals • Travel • Permalink • Printer Friendly

Friday, July 24, 2009

Walking In the Middle of the Street

It’s summertime in the inner city. High season on the potholed theatrical stage of our asphalt streets.  When I first moved to my neighborhood over a decade ago, I didn’t understand street dynamics.  Why people would walk down the middle of the street, leaning into cars and slowing down traffic when there were two perfectly good sidewalks on either side of the road.  Where I grew up, a tidy, well-insured, all-white neighborhood in Minnesota, it was considered law-abiding good citizenry to walk on the sidewalk.  Back there, one person of color walking in the street was considered suspicious; two persons a conspiracy; three surely a gang up to no good.  I’m embarrassed by all that now.  Now that I live in the inner city and experience the forces that lead you off the sidewalk, into the street.

The first thing that forces you off the sidewalk in the inner city is the sidewalk.  A lot of these sidewalks are impassable, fractured, heaved-up concrete slabs covered with everything from broken glass to matted hair inserts to fallen tree limbs.  The second thing is the dogs.  Not the cute, family pet breeds but the muscular, fur-covered terminators that can explode off a porch uninterested in your education, your community service, or pacifist temperament. Third, sidewalks guide you close to neighbors’ front porches: a fine thing unless it belongs to that one guy who’s always screaming at his girlfriend, attracting police cars and exercising his god-given right to celebrate national holidays with semiautomatic handgun fire.  Finally, there’s the libertarian argument.  Who says we have to walk on sidewalks?  What’s that all about?  Particularly here, where the people are not all that convinced they enjoy the equal protection of the non-criminal laws.

But the street, now that’s the place to walk.  The street is the social forum.  In the inner city, people are highly aware of who’s in the street, revealed by the nonchalant backwards glance as you drive up from behind.  People will move, or not move, out of your way based on a sophisticated equation of recognition and respect, controlling vehicle access as effectively as a security checkpoint in Bagdhad.  This is not hubris, it’s politics.  Real power based not on social or financial status but on the other thing: knowing the cultural odds and the racial angles.  Street walking is performance art: self-created characters laughing and cursing on asphalt Shakespearean stages with free admission and stage lights high on street poles.  All life’s narratives right there in full R-rated candor without the self-conscious editing of my own tribe. Teenage courtship rituals, social clans, team sports, new clothes, old addictions, marital strife, booming rides, and wailing police cars.  It’s damn good entertainment, a now-time drama of energy and people.

I drive up our street the other day and see my daughter’s friend Nikki, walking aimless in the road.  I hang my elbow out my car window, stop in the middle of the street, give her a fist bump.  “What’s up?” I ask.  She leans on my door, looking inside.  “Not much.  Where you going?” We talk a while, then I pull away.

Driving east across Portage and up toward the big university, I notice things you don’t see much of in my neighborhood: white folks on ladders scraping furiously at peeling paint, a woman with hands on her hips glaring down at a piece of litter, a man armed with a spade, bent over a gang of 3 dandelions.  All doing their best to hold off the uncertainty and the wildness that leaps and dances just beyond the perimeter the known world.  Out there, where people walk in the middle of the street.

Broadcast by Jeff Nixa on July 24, 2009 • WVPE's Audio Archive
Community • Customs & Rituals • Permalink • Printer Friendly

Friday, July 17, 2009

Following the Ambulance Through the Night

There are teens in the house these days, alien creatures living in the altered bodies of people I once knew. One day one of them scrutinized me and asked what I was like when I was young. I guess time has turned us parents into alien creatures too. But the question is a fair one–what were we like as teens? Apart from well-worn stories that have hardened into family myth, where are the clues? For me, perhaps, in a little-told episode that never quite made sense until now.

At 18 I was a short-order cook at Howard Johnson’s in St. Louis, knocking down $1.65 an hour on the evening shift. When the restaurant closed at 1:00 a.m., I’d scrape the grill, take off my filthy apron, and drive to my parents’ house. In the morning, my father would already be at his downtown office, making sure the company’s numbers added up. I was off duty until 5:00 p.m.

I spent each work shift filling orders–flipping burgers and dropping baskets of fries–but that long drive home belonged to me. The stores on the boulevard, even the gas station, would be closed. I’d turn onto the empty highway and roll down the windows and play the car radio any old way I pleased. The green and white highway signs glowed like animal eyes as I followed my headlights through the dark. One night an ambulance passed me, no siren, just flashing lights. I sped up a little and followed it toward the edge of town.

Three exits remained before the highway crossed the county line. I let a thought form more completely in my head; this ambulance could be coming to my house. No, I reasoned, there are hundreds of houses out this way. Everyone was young and healthy at our house.

The first exit came into view. Sure, I thought, you sometimes hear of a desk-bound worker like my father having a heart attack in his early forties, but what were the odds of that? I matched the ambulance’s speed as the pulsing lights glided past the ramp. Driving through the valley to the second exit, I considered each member of the family. There was no reason any of us would die young, but no reason not, and the throbbing lights whispered, “Heart attack, heart attack.” Both of us passed the second ramp. We were going to take the third exit together. I turned off the silly music. There was still time to think.

I could not help but imagine the sorrows that might come and my mother’s great loss. I wondered who could feed the six of us. I was the oldest son, the only one working, but at that wage I might as well have been a child. I was flipping burgers and driving a car my father bought me. I had no clue what our mortgage payment was.

At the bottom of the final ramp, I selfishly hoped the ambulance would turn away, but it did not. Still, there were dozens of houses up ahead; my father probably was not dying. But I flipped through a catalog of predictable conflicts and regrets, when parent and child outgrow the easy common ground of baseball and camping trips and the adult bonds have not yet formed. In another mile, I would turn onto my own street; unbelievably, the ambulance turned there first.

The suspense grew as large as the dark of night. I could see our house ahead, and the bloody ambulance began to slow. My heart was throbbing like the lights, and that monster stopped five doors away from us. A new neighbor we hadn’t met. And that was that. On one particular night, we were lucky and someone else was not. So, what was I like when I was young? I was competent, I could hold down a job, I smelled like French fries, I made $1.65 an hour, and I admitted briefly once, while the red light flashed across the neighborhood, that I loved what passed for freedom but wasn’t strong enough yet to call myself adult.

Broadcast by Ken Smith on July 17, 2009 • WVPE's Audio Archive
Family & Friends • Work • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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A random pick from more than 400 Michiana Chronicles -- refresh the browser to see another set:

April Lidinsky -- A Toddler Abroad / More essays by April

Jeff Nixa -- Walking In the Middle of the Street / More essays by Jeff

Ken Smith -- Following the Ambulance Through the Night / More essays by Ken

Jeanette Saddler Taylor -- One Thing A Day / More essays by Jeanette

Heather Curlee Novak -- More essays by Heather

David James -- More essays by David

Elizabeth Van Jacob -- More essays by Elizabeth

Joe Chaney -- You Must Change Your Life / More essays by Joe

Louise Collins -- More essays by Louise

Jonathan Nashel -- More essays by Jonathan