Renunciation

I haven’t returned M’s phone call. It’s wrong not to return calls—the best people do and the worst don’t. I remember now why I haven’t—that I lack anything interesting to say. It is this fear that keeps me from it. I must investigate! Pitch my battle there, not with M, the person I haven’t called back, but with my fear, while at the same time cancel this comforting pretense of having to be interesting, having to know something M doesn’t know, having to possess information he doesn’t possess so that it can be passed along.

I’ve had a rough couple of weeks. The neighborhood is changing. Cockroaches between the ages of 18 and 21 have taken up occupancy in the apartment across the street. The shrieker next door has returned from a visit to her parents in England. She likes to sit outdoors drinking wine until 2 a.m. and complaining about her mother who runs a sheep ranch in the Cotswolds. Last night, Sunday, some guy—it had to be a man—was using a pneumatic drill at 11 p.m., an hour after curfew! Deer have moved into the neighborhood too. They’re eating all the plants; it seems there’s nothing they won’t eat. We have no idea where the deer came from? Perhaps the homeless shelter on Geary that doesn’t allow drunken residents, maintaining a policy that denies a homeless person shelter if he or she is drunk, a policy I agree with in concept though I wish didn’t apply to the deer who take advantage of it and stumble around the dark streets of my neighborhood yelling obscenities..

Sleepless, I have a dream for the future—just let it be what it is. I know this might surprise you who think of me as progressive—it surprises me too—but what is or was wrong with the world we were living in? It seems to me we were making great progress. Democracy was on the march! We’d upgraded from the NAZI model of the re-distribution of aliens carried out in railroad freight cars to stashing our ‘undocumented’ aliens and their children in chain hotels such as Hampton Inns, Best Westerns; in fact, children as young as 2 are given their own private rooms.

Looking out the window I cast a sleepless eye, not charitably but critically. One can become quite rigid in condemnation, and I fear becoming rigid, so I sit in the black chair and listen to the siren wail in the distance, grateful it’s not headed toward our house, yet. Little gratitudes I’ve taken out of a book I’m reading slowly build a foundation : one is German, Schiller, “a form is beautiful, one might say, if it demands no explanation, or if it explains itself without a concept”; and one is American, Ad Reinhart, “the task is of making a painting that can’t be seen.” The book is “Renunciation” by Ross Posnock (Harvard U Press, 2016).

By 3 a.m. or so the neighborhood is quiet. I’ve made a note to call M in the morning.