April Fooled

March 32, 2015
Sweet bird of  

We’re in New York City, Roz and I – though why we’re here instead of home (where we belong) is for another time. Looking on her son’s shelves for a book to read on the subway, something that would fit in my back pocket, I found this, a 60¢ Signet paperback of Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth. In the middle photographs from “the MGM motion picture release, starring Paul Newman and Geraldine Page” and before the play, a foreword by the author, “written prior to the Broadway opening . . . and published in the New York Times on Sunday, March 8, 1959.” Williams begins as follows:

When I came to my writing desk on a recent morning I found lying on my desk top an unmailed letter that I had written. I began reading it and found this sentence: "We are all civilized people, which means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behavior." Then I went on to say: "I am afraid that I observe fewer of these amenities than you do. Reason? My back is to the wall and has been to the wall for so long that the pressure of my back on the wall has started to crumble the plaster that covers the brick and mortar."
     Isn't it odd that I said the wall was giving way, not my back? I think so.

I don’t. Nothing seems to me as porous, as filled with nicks, cuts, holes, and cracks as the walls on every side of us. And I am not referring to the psychological walls but the walls of clothing, air, wood, steel, bricks-and-mortar.

          I think we will learn, and before too long, not just how to see – we can do that already – but also how to pass through walls, however rough or thick. It will be a marvelous experience, I think, and an uncomfortable one.

Consider Star Trek’s transporter.

          It is a symbol of lives that are not only desperate – we wouldn’t be hurtling around the universe if we were comfortable at home – but disparate. We enter the transporter; it is energized, and we are scrambled like eggs, cracked into a metal bowl and stirred with a fork until translucence and yellow begin to run together. Then, then we are reassembled, the white and the yolk divided, decanted into the shell, and the shell glued back together. The reassembly may be clever and as fine as if by Fabergé; but we are different. The difference is slight – it may be negligible, even invisible - but we feel it, and we feel off. We know who we are, all our right things seem to be in all the right places, but we think we may be getting the flu. Or, we’re aware that we are about to realize we are lost.

          This happens, this feeling of being lost, a recent study has shown, every time we go through a doorway. It’s why when we leave one room to get something, we forget in the next room the something we have come for. This repeats itself several times a day. We walk through doorway after doorway until we’ve lost count, and account: we can no longer describe the process that brought us from the beds we woke in to the place we are standing.

With the walls all around.