"And I wouldn't even mind if folks forgot how pretty I was."
I've spent the last 45 minutes with a dear friend mourning the death of Muhammad Ali. With this particular friend, I learned about and learned to love the sport of boxing. We live-tweeted during fights and texted each other asides in-between rounds when we were a country apart. We griped and we groaned and we cheered and now we've cried. With this friend, I wrote and read stage plays and screenplays and I've watched her find success in television, and always we were linked by our love of the sport and our speculation as to which fights would be worth watching in the future and which would collapse under the increasingly dysfunctional weight of the sport as it existed now. We never talked much about Ali because we never really needed to. His greatness was assumed. His impact. The beauty he bestowed upon the sport, how wondrously he moved and how much like a damned Adonis he looked. He stood like a demigod over others, yet like those angels or deities that roll in the muck of the thoroughfare with humans, he was like us, and treated like us. He was an activist. Perhaps the most popular anti-war protestor ever. It could be argued that John Lennon stands in his shadow. Much has been and will continue to be written about the pro-black, defiantly Muslim grandson of a slave who went to prison in his prime to protest a war he didn't believe in. For now, it is enough that I've found this friend and she has found me and that our grief, in its sharing, can be lessened.
After work, I went to Parkside Ave. to see another companion from my Tisch days, the other half of our superhero group The Perambulators. He had recently finished moving to a new place, only a few doors down from his old one, but this one had a roof that, on two occasions in one night, we set foot upon. I remarked on how I could envision a chase scene form a Jason Bourne movie passing through her, shot by shot, and he regaled me with quotes from that rooftop scene in The Departed that was filled with its own particular brand of violence.
As the sun had dipped below the tops of apartment buildings in the distance, we spoke, interspersed with rumination about theater and geopolitics, about futures, hypothetical and actual, and what we envisioned for ourselves, and I lamented that I saw no possible future where I was in the city and growing old on a foundation of financial stability. It was an impossible proposition, and we spoke of the larger demographic trends, of amalgamation and capital, of how much the city was beginning to resemble New York, and how I might simply be exhibit A, on a smaller scale, of a larger trend, a small fish in the midst of a teeming school.
At one point in the evening, it might have been after a bountiful dinner at an Indian restaurant a few blocks down, we stood by the ledge and caught the view and I recounted a story Peter Matthiessen once told in an interview with The Paris Review.
Here, an excerpt:
George and I were-and are-content in our own company. We had no compulsion to be sociable beyond a point. A few friendly words over coffee and breakfast, then go our way. Even on the way to the Crystal Mountain-and in the end, we walked up and down mountains for 250 miles to get where we were going-we would often be several hundred yards apart, even a half mile. We rarely talked except at meals, and even then it wasn’t very noisy. Neither of us like to chatter very much. There’s a wonderful Zen story about a young monk who has had an enlightenment experience. To celebrate, his teacher takes him up Mount Fuji. All the way up this snow volcano, this young monk is crying out, “Oh, Roshi! Do you hear the birds? I’ve never heard the birds before! How beautiful!” The teacher scarcely grunts, won’t say a word, just thumps his stave. On and on the fellow goes, ecstatic. “Oh, the snow, the clouds!” Finally they near the top of the mountain. “Oh, Roshi,” he cries. “Do you see how the wind blows snow across the cone of the volcano? How the clouds drift past on the wind? There is no separation between us and the wind and the great earth!” The roshi hisses, “Yes! Yes, true! But what a pity to say so!”
Schaller and I felt a bit like that old roshi. Both of us had this lifelong love of animals and remote landscapes. Yes, we had walked away from civilization through mythic mountains and ancient villages in clear October light-but what a pity to say that to each other! What I did say was, “If I can’t write an interesting book about an experience like this, I ought to be taken out and shot.”
I detailed the excerpt to my comrade then confessed to being just like Matthiessen in the end, ever the plight of the novelist and wordsmith. There's solace in learning how to say things.
As much as lamentation flavored that last bit of time spent on the roof (the door propped open, in a bit of hilarity, by a tome written by Bill Bryson), the company made the time magical and I look back on it now, and suspect I will for some time, smiling.
Thank God for friends.
After work, I went to Parkside Ave. to see another companion from my Tisch days, the other half of our superhero group The Perambulators. He had recently finished moving to a new place, only a few doors down from his old one, but this one had a roof that, on two occasions in one night, we set foot upon. I remarked on how I could envision a chase scene form a Jason Bourne movie passing through her, shot by shot, and he regaled me with quotes from that rooftop scene in The Departed that was filled with its own particular brand of violence.
As the sun had dipped below the tops of apartment buildings in the distance, we spoke, interspersed with rumination about theater and geopolitics, about futures, hypothetical and actual, and what we envisioned for ourselves, and I lamented that I saw no possible future where I was in the city and growing old on a foundation of financial stability. It was an impossible proposition, and we spoke of the larger demographic trends, of amalgamation and capital, of how much the city was beginning to resemble New York, and how I might simply be exhibit A, on a smaller scale, of a larger trend, a small fish in the midst of a teeming school.
At one point in the evening, it might have been after a bountiful dinner at an Indian restaurant a few blocks down, we stood by the ledge and caught the view and I recounted a story Peter Matthiessen once told in an interview with The Paris Review.
Here, an excerpt:
George and I were-and are-content in our own company. We had no compulsion to be sociable beyond a point. A few friendly words over coffee and breakfast, then go our way. Even on the way to the Crystal Mountain-and in the end, we walked up and down mountains for 250 miles to get where we were going-we would often be several hundred yards apart, even a half mile. We rarely talked except at meals, and even then it wasn’t very noisy. Neither of us like to chatter very much. There’s a wonderful Zen story about a young monk who has had an enlightenment experience. To celebrate, his teacher takes him up Mount Fuji. All the way up this snow volcano, this young monk is crying out, “Oh, Roshi! Do you hear the birds? I’ve never heard the birds before! How beautiful!” The teacher scarcely grunts, won’t say a word, just thumps his stave. On and on the fellow goes, ecstatic. “Oh, the snow, the clouds!” Finally they near the top of the mountain. “Oh, Roshi,” he cries. “Do you see how the wind blows snow across the cone of the volcano? How the clouds drift past on the wind? There is no separation between us and the wind and the great earth!” The roshi hisses, “Yes! Yes, true! But what a pity to say so!”
Schaller and I felt a bit like that old roshi. Both of us had this lifelong love of animals and remote landscapes. Yes, we had walked away from civilization through mythic mountains and ancient villages in clear October light-but what a pity to say that to each other! What I did say was, “If I can’t write an interesting book about an experience like this, I ought to be taken out and shot.”
I detailed the excerpt to my comrade then confessed to being just like Matthiessen in the end, ever the plight of the novelist and wordsmith. There's solace in learning how to say things.
As much as lamentation flavored that last bit of time spent on the roof (the door propped open, in a bit of hilarity, by a tome written by Bill Bryson), the company made the time magical and I look back on it now, and suspect I will for some time, smiling.
Thank God for friends.