"As long as I live"

I’m taking the final exam in a drawing course. Drawing is a requirement because this is an engineering school. Drawing here means technical drawing. The other students and I are in the lecture hall and the proctor goes on and on in a grating voice. Behind me, an intruder is speaking loudly into a cell phone. “You don’t belong here. Please leave!” he is told, and he does.

The exam is in the form of two large sheets of paper folded like maps. Most of their surfaces are covered with various sorts of information. One of them, as a matter of fact contains a number of highly detailed maps on several scales of a certain city.

Each sheet also has a couple of gridded areas on which we are to draw. There’s a practice grid and a grid for the finished drawing. We must stick rigorously to the grid, putting down a single mark in each grid square. This is difficult for several reasons. First of all, the lecture hall seats have very little desktop space and the sheets of paper are very large when unfolded. Second, we are in a hurry because we have to do a practice drawing first, then copy it neatly onto the second grid. No one has told us how much time we have. Finally, in my case, my hands aren’t steady enough to draw the kind of confident lines desired. It’s stressful.

I begin drawing weak squiggly lines on one sheet of paper but then discover that the drawing that actually counts is the other one, the one with the maps. I begin work on that but become exasperated and impulsively get up and leave without finishing, even if it means failing.

I wander off campus along the streets of a rundown industrial city. It has a timeless quality and the sense of a history that may be as ancient as Athens or Rome or as modern as a New England mill town.

I come across a desolate dead-end street that looks like the roofless interior of a ruined or never-completed building on a monumental scale, made of worn and crumbling red sandstone. I walk toward the dead end and see an iron gate in the corner at the end of the wall on my left.

Going through the gate I find myself back on the campus, which is hilly and rocky here and there. The buildings are like those of an Ivy League school. Crowds of students are milling around and waiting anxiously to see if they passed that accursed, but crucial drawing exam. Some of them wait on line and present their IDs to an official who checks a list like those election workers check when you vote. When my turn comes I present my ID but, though there are a couple of names on the list that are suspiciously similar to mine, my correct name isn’t there.

I enter the philosophy building, then find myself in the museum. I wander from gallery to gallery. It’s dark and many objects on display are monumental in size. Only a couple of other people are there. One of them handles several objects, which I’m sure isn’t permitted. He tries to fit his body along the curves of a statue, not in a particularly erotic way, but as if he and the statue were characters performing in a play.

In another gallery, an ethnographic one, two men in gorilla suits jump up and down as part of the exhibition.

Finally, I find my way to a colonnaded garden, through the center of which a stream is flowing. Between two of the columns a tiny branch of the stream trickles across a broken sandstone floor. This is a deliberate element in the landscaping, a toy stream small enough to jump across without wetting your feet.

I hear clarinet trills beneath a piano introduction. It’s Benny Goodman and Count Basie playing Harold Arlen’s “As long as I live.”

La source

Out of words, out of tea leaves
out of an autumn stew
of currents, out of the enigmatic
behavior of extraterrestrials

I have come, with sandwiches,
with adjacencies, with territoriality,
with fragments of patterns,
with Eros, with grease and with dirt.

I possibly have to look up a word
I possibly have to cross one out
I’m looking for two good words,
masking tape, and crayons to color them in with

I live in a cave, drums beat
smoke from fire finds fissures
A fawn frees its head
from a drawing of a fawn

The world’s timid hum is always present
as I do something absentmindedly
smart or elegant, classically trained
or detachable, like metallic embroidery

In a jar of preserved sanity
a version is stabilized, exact
At this point in the score
trilling turns into trembling

Tree stairs

The workers are busy. They are renovating the garage that juts out like a bay from a rear corner of the house. On the same side, they are terracing the driveway with bricks, as if it was a sort of civic plaza. I discovered this activity only when I got up this morning. I don’t know who ordered it or why.

When I arrive in front I notice more developments. On the large area in front of the house a Wal-Mart-like big box has been built with numerous aisles stocked with products packaged in colorfully illustrated cardboard and molded plastic. The products themselves look alike. They could be cell phones or toothbrushes or coffee makers.

In back of the house there used to be an acre or two of scrub land, in one part of which we once tried to plant a kitchen garden that was soon overtaken by weeds. Beyond that, there was a marshy region that could be crossed on wooden planks. Even further were the shacks built by people who had migrated from the hills, which were visible in the distance. These were later replaced by new houses. The people who lived there were suspicious of outsiders.

Now all of this is gone. In its place is a sea below a long curving wall, and on the land side we find ourselves in the middle of the downtown of a good-sized city, whose streets go off in all directions. Each one is lined with fancy shops with custom-made signs. I expect to recognize a store or restaurant, but I’m disappointed.

I am now accompanied by my dream self, who seems to know his way around. Maybe, instead, “I” am my dream self and my companion is a second dream self. In any case, the two of us navigate this city together.

We next find ourselves inside a colossal mall, or perhaps an airport terminal. Its interior is nearly empty and its roof is skylit. Whatever shops, restaurants, or offices there are are concealed within its walls. They are either invisible or disguised as architectural nuances.

We do discover a restaurant, I don’t know how. It is disguised as a delicate paper funnel or lampshade suspended by a wire from the roof. You enter by allowing yourself to be vacuumed up by this funnel. We see this happen to someone, but choose warily to search for a conventional entrance.

We find it on another floor. Its modernist décor features chrome seating with thick cushions of black leather that recall Le Corbusier. Tables are mostly enclosed within these black blocks giving the diners a small and walled-in appearance. There is little room to maneuver between these cubes. The lighting is bright and yellowish.

The diners don’t have much to eat. Hardly anything is on their plates. They pick at crusts and crumbs. We intuitively appreciate the price they paid to get in. We see the man who’d been sucked into the funnel. He is eating, if you could call it that, in a niche by himself, bending to his plate like a mechanical statue. He has grown a reddish beard several inches long.

We then return to the vast mall “street.”

Walking aimlessly yet purposefully, we pass a tree. It’s a small, grayish brown, almost leafless tree. The curious thing is that against it leans a curving staircase that seems to have its arm around the tree’s shoulders. The steps of the staircase—foil-like brushed-steel accordion pleats (since there are no railings)—grow narrower as they rise and end in a point among the tree’s lower branches.

I look back with an impulse to climb it, then move on.

Fog and rain (Brumes et pluies)

Autumn, winter, and spring go by like boats.
I love these sleepy days, living undersea
as I do, my heart and brain adrift in vapors,
in linoleum fumes of rooms dimly entombed.

Across this bare plain play freezing winds,
gyring and debris-filled vortices end to end nightly.
I think of nothing better to do than listen
to crows open their wings wide and flap them like sheets.

Nothing is more soothing, in this funereal mood,
with thoughts so dead they begin to form floes
that clog the bleak months—the queens of these latitudes—

than the inspired sense of permanent shadow
in which moonlessly and side by side
we sleep in the first bed we come to.


(after Baudelaire)