(no subject)
A really fine evening, the other evening. This is not a story. It's that jamais vecu thing I think I mentioned here once. Sometimes lately I enjoy people tremendously, and this also seems new to me, the pleasure I take in their proximity. Not any and all people, I mean particular moments come to pass between myself and a near stranger. I don't know, oh, here's my orotundity cropping up again, though I cautiously only half-dosed tonight.
-- Oliver Sacks's lover wrote a memoir of his life with Sacks. It's relentlessly insipid. I think it must have been a beautiful life they had together, but this was not the man to tell it. He has these obstinately shallow vignettes of New York City life, definitely with "City" appended to the name. He speaks to weeping strangers on the subway, it is all scenes like that, poignant, transitory, deep. This is the kind of thing I would not like to write. Too late, though. Hence the venom.
The other night I went to ecstatic dancing for the fourth time in a week. The oceanic feeling that comes from all that entrained whirling, it's not nothing, even if it's also not as much as the ecstatic dancers make it out to be. (Belief, I guess, is always the other person's affliction. Can't remember who said that. One's classics.)
Yah so after the dance I took a Lyft, and the guy was so relaxed, he was the best part of the evening. I like Lyft. The drivers are nearly always men, and they take me for one too. The darkness helps. This one talked on the phone for a good while, then hung up and was just solicitous enough that we could lapse again into silence, and this silence felt companionable rather than wary. I'd said I'd been dancing, and his ears had pricked up at that. Which maybe is what gave me permission to do a little head-bobbing, a little seated dancing, though I was cautious with it. I didn't say it to myself this way at the time, but I didn't want to be that kind of white person, who must make a show of being down with the underground when in the proximity of a black person. Anyway I caught, barely, a different vocal track, and then realized the driver was singing. Easy, under his breath, surprisingly high.
It was nothing like, you know, La La Land or car karaoke with James Corden, nothing boisterous or hilarious. We kept a certain decorous indifference to our two separate manners of being carried away with the passion of song, which included periodically lapsing into stillness (I) or silence (he).
I won't give the blow by blow, but there had been a mix-up with the app, we'd been heading to the wrong destination. This was before our musical interlude, but I didn't want to start by recounting this. He could have been an asshole about it, and not only was he not that, he was a really good, really competent driver who knew the city well, and this too was part of what relaxed me so about him. We were never not driver and passenger, gig worker and client, but he was so calm and competent and unhurried, it was a pleasure to have lived long enough for this to be part of it too.
Thomas Browne: (I haven't read Religio Medici and so don't deserve to quote it, but anyway, farcing it with this): Tis not onely the mischiefe of diseases, and the villanie of poysons that make an end of us, we vainly accuse the fury of Gunnes, and the new inventions of death; 'tis in the power of every hand to destroy us, and wee are beholding unto every one wee meete hee doth not kill us.
Is that what made his company sweet to me? (Sorry, I don't know Browne's essay, so am probably misunderstanding.) I guess that seems a low bar: not lethally hostile, not just now. (But I have been shown a knife and threatened with an unseen gun on the bus, so, it's not such an abstract notion to me.) Not hostile, not just now, but he was that in overplus, he was kind, and he had the gift too of letting a stranger know this about him.
-- Oliver Sacks's lover wrote a memoir of his life with Sacks. It's relentlessly insipid. I think it must have been a beautiful life they had together, but this was not the man to tell it. He has these obstinately shallow vignettes of New York City life, definitely with "City" appended to the name. He speaks to weeping strangers on the subway, it is all scenes like that, poignant, transitory, deep. This is the kind of thing I would not like to write. Too late, though. Hence the venom.
The other night I went to ecstatic dancing for the fourth time in a week. The oceanic feeling that comes from all that entrained whirling, it's not nothing, even if it's also not as much as the ecstatic dancers make it out to be. (Belief, I guess, is always the other person's affliction. Can't remember who said that. One's classics.)
Yah so after the dance I took a Lyft, and the guy was so relaxed, he was the best part of the evening. I like Lyft. The drivers are nearly always men, and they take me for one too. The darkness helps. This one talked on the phone for a good while, then hung up and was just solicitous enough that we could lapse again into silence, and this silence felt companionable rather than wary. I'd said I'd been dancing, and his ears had pricked up at that. Which maybe is what gave me permission to do a little head-bobbing, a little seated dancing, though I was cautious with it. I didn't say it to myself this way at the time, but I didn't want to be that kind of white person, who must make a show of being down with the underground when in the proximity of a black person. Anyway I caught, barely, a different vocal track, and then realized the driver was singing. Easy, under his breath, surprisingly high.
It was nothing like, you know, La La Land or car karaoke with James Corden, nothing boisterous or hilarious. We kept a certain decorous indifference to our two separate manners of being carried away with the passion of song, which included periodically lapsing into stillness (I) or silence (he).
I won't give the blow by blow, but there had been a mix-up with the app, we'd been heading to the wrong destination. This was before our musical interlude, but I didn't want to start by recounting this. He could have been an asshole about it, and not only was he not that, he was a really good, really competent driver who knew the city well, and this too was part of what relaxed me so about him. We were never not driver and passenger, gig worker and client, but he was so calm and competent and unhurried, it was a pleasure to have lived long enough for this to be part of it too.
Thomas Browne: (I haven't read Religio Medici and so don't deserve to quote it, but anyway, farcing it with this): Tis not onely the mischiefe of diseases, and the villanie of poysons that make an end of us, we vainly accuse the fury of Gunnes, and the new inventions of death; 'tis in the power of every hand to destroy us, and wee are beholding unto every one wee meete hee doth not kill us.
Is that what made his company sweet to me? (Sorry, I don't know Browne's essay, so am probably misunderstanding.) I guess that seems a low bar: not lethally hostile, not just now. (But I have been shown a knife and threatened with an unseen gun on the bus, so, it's not such an abstract notion to me.) Not hostile, not just now, but he was that in overplus, he was kind, and he had the gift too of letting a stranger know this about him.