Having Fun All The Time

Sit down at the piano. Notice the keys spread out before you, black and interstices of white. If you don’t know how to play piano, you see a meaning that is hidden by foreignness. Your eyes discern nothing among the keys; but your hands long to reach out to them, to coax some melody from the percussive depths of the instrument before you as easily as you hear it in your mind. You long infinitely for that talent, for that mysterious ability which you know will in all likelihood forever remain hidden from you.

And that gap between you and the person who can sit down, who you see sit down before the piano and place her hands on it, depress one key and then another, open a river of metered sounds, harmonic, rhythmic layers of fifths and half-steps without any evident thought or effort or hesitation, you wonder privately what is the difference between that person and you.

Now you are the piano player. Someone you know sits down at your piano and reaches out tentatively to the keys that are so familiar to you. She presses one key timidly, and then another, and familiar sounds rise to you, and you hear the song that you once played, the one with no chorus, no tempo, no tune at all; the lost song of the hands that long to play but cannot, the hands that are strange to the piano. This person is close to you, knows you, but in this way she does not. And in this way the person in you who knows her does not know the person in you who can sit before the piano and play beautiful music. They are not the same. They cannot be the same. They cannot even know each other.

Why did you sit at the piano all those hours, practicing? What did you want to learn? What did you want to see or experience that you could not experience any other way, except to do this, to become a stranger, in some way, to yourself? Why else would you have sat there for so long, bent in sweet labor over the worn keys, sometimes playing sweet music and yet sometimes only practicing, producing sounds so that your hands would know, so that your hands and some deep part of your mind would understand where to go, so that they would forget that person who was a stranger to the keys, so that person would in fact disappear, so that even if you never played the piano again after this day you would always look at the keys and know, that part of you would always remain.

Why else did you bend over the keys and play alone for all those days and years, except to lose yourself, to become unknown, to change and become a stranger to your former life, so that life could be clearer, could be more easily understood, could be new, in some way? And who is that person who sits down before the piano and looks strangely at it, and produces the music of someone who doesn’t understand, who is only groping in the dark for a song that she can hear in her mind but never bring into the world? What does she see and what does she feel when she looks at the keys before her?

I am sitting on a porch in Vermont. The crickets are fizzing in the dry grass blades. The sun is out hot. There’s also the distant sound of a lawnmower somewhere but otherwise it is quiet. The air sort of bends and shimmers with the heat, creates waves over the pan-fried back field. The trees are a dream-like green, bending and waving with the breeze. I feel my brain has maybe been left on a rock to sizzle. My thoughts are not coming out straight. I realize it has been too long since I have talked to a human. I go running out on the Vermont country roads and come home and eat salads made from vegetables I picked in the garden. My shit is a nori-like rich earthy green. I sweat pure droplets of saltless water. My skin is tanned and I read six hours a day. But I don’t talk to anyone.

Out here, in this countryside, I still think of you. You are in San Diego, which is across the country from me and down all the way almost to Mexico. I’d like to be there with you, drinking tequila on a beach and reading six hours a day, going with you down to Mexico to work with orphan kids, or whatever. I could do that, I think. I’m a good person, or at least I used to be before I started doing this. Before I stopped talking to people.

Now I’m not so sure.

The first rule of love is: There are no rules.

I didn’t learn that from you. I learned it from everybody else. Maybe the first rule of life is there are no rules. Anyway, anyone will do anything in love. You never can predict it. And therefore you can never really feel bad for anything you did out of love. As long as it was out of love.

Like if you leave someone, for instance, even if you promised them a lot.

Have you ever seen that movie Forrest Gump? I know you hate it; everyone does. But there’s something you should know about me. I treat every woman who passes through my life like Jenny; I don’t touch her, I don’t push her. I just do everything for her. So I never get those ones. Then I only touch the ones, I only push the ones, who could never be Jennies. Not even in a million years. Because I don’t have to honor them anyway; I don’t have to invent any rules with them. So I always get the ones who could never be anything like you; meanwhile, I only love you.

So you are my Jenny. It doesn’t mean anything; don’t worry. It’s pointless. You have nothing to worry about.

There are no rules, except when you’re leaving.

You taught me that when I had to leave you back at home, when I left and came out here. You knew I had to go, and I knew I had to go. But we both wanted the other thing, the thing we couldn’t have.

–If you wanted to bring me with you, you would, you said.

–I do want to bring you with me, but I can’t.

–That’s not true. It’s only what you say. I wish I could make you understand how different it is. If you just stayed here—

–But I can’t stay here.

–I know you can’t.

And round and round like that. Till I finally left. And when I did, I got nothing from you; no consolation prize for all the hours consoling you, the nights on the phone, the flowers, the cards, the waffles in bed. Nothing for anything of that.

That’s because the rule about leaving is, if you want to leave someone, you have to show them that you meant it, everything you said, before you really leave them completely.

The second rule of love is: You can have more than one at a time (except in the case of the third rule of love).

That one I learned when I fell in love with you, or thought I did, but didn’t pay attention to what you were saying. Didn’t pay attention to the amount of time you spent at the gym, for instance, or the amount you drank when I was with you. Then the nights when I had to drive you home blacked out because I was soberer than you, and I realized there hadn’t been a night together in a month when I had felt better after seeing you.

You are the most self-absorbed person I know. I remember that about you now. At the time I just thought I had nothing to say and that is why you did all the talking.

And then when I met someone who wanted me, who begged me to sleep in her bed with her, and I said no, because of you, and then the next day you said you weren’t serious about us. That’s when I learned that.

She had sat up and looked at me and asked me to come to bed.

–I can’t. I would feel terrible about her.

–She’s not here. She doesn’t care.

–Maybe she doesn’t. But I just can’t. I want to, trust me, but I can’t.

–Don’t go. Please.

And then I closed the door and went to the couch.

And then the sun on your face, your eyes behind the sunglasses, the next day, as I squinted while I tried to look at you. I wanted to tear the sunglasses off of your face and look directly into your eyes to see if anything was there except desert blue.

The third rule of love is: You can’t have more than one at a time if one of those people really loves you.

The fourth rule of love is: You don’t need money to have it, unless you love someone who loves money.

I am sitting on a roof in China at night. It is some Chinese holiday, sometime around the New Year, and somebody has lit a flying candle and sent it soaring off into the night sky to ride the breeze over the line of mountains. Then another one. They appear to race for a while. They are reddish flecks on a quiet night sky. There are no real stars. The sight is so solemn; it reminds me of a gray hawk flying in a snowstorm. Pinwheeling and searching for prey in all that snowy blight. And maybe finding it, and the silent quick death amid the fast accumulating snow. The blood trickling down into invisibility.The candle rising into the sky.

I think of you here, too, for no reason. Why are you still in my head? I think. I should be rid of you by now.

But I know you won’t go away, not ever. And I will always be angry and sad and ashamed of that. That I can’t forget you.

The fifth rule of love is: You must be willing to lie to have it, even if the lie turns out to be true.

I am falling asleep on a futon in San Francisco, and I feel a bit of a cold. I am all alone now, I have sold everything I owned and struck out on the road to visit people I know all over the country. I am worried to the core of my being; the thing I’ve done is foolish, given up my job, my apartment, my car, my clothes, and left with a backpack on a bus. All the way out to San Francisco. In about a week I will see you. I feel completely honest. I feel that I could go walk around just to see the world with my naïve, honest eyes. A few days ago I fell asleep in a friend’s house in Colorado listening to at least six other people having sex. Some of them were honest lovers, and some were just intoxicated. But I had been honest to all of them. And I was alone. And now I was in San Francisco alone. And soon I would see you and still be alone.

If you are too honest, you are always alone.

The sixth rule of love is: You won’t follow any of the rules.

The seventh rule of love is: If you have to leave someone, you shouldn’t say anything nice to them.

That will only hurt them more, you see. I learned that when I talked to you on the phone and you told me that you were attracted to me, but not enough.

If you are honest with them and tell them something good about themselves, they will only regret it later. Because they will think of you sickly, with a kind of confusion and hopelessness that won’t go away. It’s better just to tell them the truth; tell them what you think, and spare them the compliments, even if it feels impossible for you to say it.

The eighth rule of love is: You sometimes have to ignore the truth.

The reason for that is because there is no such thing as honesty. You will see that when you look into yourself and try to find out what it is you really want. You will peel back yourself and discover that there are many yous, and they all want different things. And the only honest answer will be to say that you don’t know.

I learned that when I discovered that you wanted me to lie, that part of life was lying just to enjoy it. Just to be in it.

The ninth rule of love is: It is like a shark, or the American economy.

If it stops moving it dies, if it stops growing it collapses. I learned that when I asked you to live with me and you said it was too soon. And I realized it wasn’t a choice for me to ask you: I had to. If I hadn’t you would have thought I was indifferent, and would have chosen someone else who was willing to keep swimming for the sake of staying alive.

And then, months later, when I had to leave the country, you said you remembered when I asked you to live with me on the same day that I said I was thinking about joining the Peace Corps. And when you said it, it sounded like an accusation, but maybe you didn’t mean it that way, right?

Sometimes the things you don’t want to hear just sound like accusations no matter how they come out.

And then, when Robin’s wife got pregnant right around the time he was sure he wanted to leave her, that’s when I knew. And when I saw them months later in the backyard, surrounded by other peoples’ yard-sale items, with nothing but thrift-store clothes to wear and his adjunct job at the college, and them looking so happy in the late-afternoon sunshine, her barefoot on the porch and him in the den surrounded by his paintings and talking about the baby. That’s when I knew.

It drowns if you let it stop moving even for a second.

I realized something today while watching a video on the New York Times web site called “The Continental Picture Show Series”.

The video is mostly silent, with written narration inserted in frames ala old-time-stilent movies.

It’s about birds, and visiting the oldest woman in America, or something like that.

It reminded me of W.G. Sebald’s novels, where he splices his stories with random photographs that seem to have no explanation, or only connect tangentially to the story.

The video, however, should have some connection to reality. But it has a surreal mood. Things definitely don’t connect to each other logically but obviously relate visually, emotionally, symbolically.

This is very much the case with Sebald’s books. And Kafka’s. And what I think that does is it makes the distinction between fiction and nonfiction less important. Kafka’s and Sebald’s books were fiction but there was a great deal of the author visible in each work. Just not literally — only symbolically, emotionally, intellectually. Everything connected but nothing connected.

This is extremely hard to do, I think. It’s much easier to write a story that has nothing real in it (surral needs real in order to be surreal, I guess, because it turns real on its head) and is pure fiction, or to write a story that is essentially autobiographical. Sebald and Kafka, and the creator of this video, I think, did both. They seem to inquire into reality deeply enough as to make the question of what is reality their real inquiry. In a way that you almost can’t detect or touch or rationalize.

I think this is important because we must accept that life is not simply a mediated form…everything we do is both fact and fiction; life is both a construct of our wills, an active narrative that we construct in the moment and in retrospect and looking forward; and it is also a series of random events with no meaning, no future intent or history or significance; it is both of those things at the same time. It is useful, I think, to inquire into that divide sufficiently enough to understand the ways that reality stands on its head.

It isn’t strictly surreal…I think “surrealism” is a much broader category. It’s just so inquisitive that we can understand it without understanding it. Like Kafka narrating, in the Castle, how time speeds up and slows down like an elastic plane; or like Sebald in the Emigrants narrating as a young man describing his uncle standing on the seashore and explaining that it is the edge of the darkness, with an underexposed black-and-white picture of a man standing on the seashore on the opposite page.

Or it’s like theses weird birds in this video flying across the road in Iowa.

My name is Ivan Kowalski. I am 42 years old, a fourth generation American whose parents named him in honor of their Polish heritage. My name is Polish, but my great- great-grandparents moved to the United States from what is now the Ukraine in the 1920s. I have lived a normal life, with no harsh or dramatic experiences. Until recently, I worked as an academic at a negligible university in the American Midwest. I still remember the red bicycle I stole from another boy as a child, and the place along the dirt road to my home where I hid the bike in the brush, but soon that memory will not matter to me, for I will have for all purposes ceased to exist.

I remember the gray color of my grandfather’s eyes as he looked down at me when I was a young boy and he sat in his easy chair in his living room in Philadelphia. His eyes, like all eyes, were kind, filled with the impulsive curiosity of all men; but soon the image of my grandfather’s eyes will be as meaningless to me as the eyes of an unfamiliar animal. Beyond that, his identity will mean nothing to me. But it will not be strictly me for whom the memory will have no meaning, for I will have joined what I can only refer to indirectly (for so little is known about it, although it has been given many names), and only by the imperfect name the “stream”.

I must attest that I have done nothing to earn the right to join the stream. No particular merit, beyond good health and a baseline level of intelligence, is required to join it. One need only be, as I am, of at least middle age, and in a position to no longer fulfill one’s worldly duties. I have no wife, no family, no reason to remain attached to the constraints of modern life, except that, of course, I have no direct knowledge of an alternative. Nor can I know what alternative the stream represents, except that, within it, I will no longer be what I am. The stream will erase what I was, and leave only some other thing, some raw faculty of human consciousness that will be my offering to the future. I will surely be forgotten, except to the extent that I will be recorded as having given myself up to the stream.

It occurs to me now, as I recollect my life, that those things I believe I will miss are the things that I have only the vaguest recollection of: the sound of my mother’s voice over the telephone when I spoke to her on summer afternoons as a small boy, for instance; or the hum of the clothes dryer as she folded laundry in the room next door; the thickness of my father’s hands as he taught me to tie my boots, or the smell of the blanket he wrapped himself in on the cold evenings of the far-away past. These memories seem arbitrary to me now, the product of a frail and limited mind: I recall the color of the sweater of the first girl I ever came to love, for instance, but I cannot trace the picture of her face in my mind; I remember the fear and violence of my first car crash, but I do not remember the color or the car, nor do I know the names of the people who were in the car with me. I recall the emotional sensations of some drugs—painkillers, alcohol, nicotine, and the rarer encounters with marijuana and cocaine—but I no longer remember nearly all of the places where I tried them. I remember the snowflakes on my first dog’s ears, when he was only a puppy, the night my family and I brought him home from his litter and I was allowed to walk him; I remember the feeling of panic I felt upon gaining the duty of care for another living creature, and the accompanying wave of love I felt for the dog as he grew; but those memories, now, are incomplete, imperfect, subject to the wear of time and the limited grasp of my mind.

Nonetheless, they matter to me now; but soon those memories and all other sundry memories I have collected in my 42 years as a man will be meaningless, or so close to meaningless that the difference will be entirely negligible. I will have joined what is now ubiquitously known as the stream, but what is really an amalgam of the minds of many former people, bound inseparably, in a feat of human consciousness that has ended the era of human invention; and led to the revolution of human knowledge, to the answers to all the greatest myths and mysteries that have plagued the intellect of humankind for millennia.

I did not make the decision to join the stream in any light form; the Entry Committee made certain that I had fully considered the ramifications of my choice before I was approved, as they did with the hundreds of others before me. I understand that it will not be me who will enter the stream, but only some elemental version of myself; and yet the truth of this knowledge eludes me; I cannot imagine that which is defined strictly by the world outside myself. What little direct knowledge exists of joining the stream is now broadly and publicly distributed. The truth it outlines is simply this: I will no longer be myself, nor will I even, in the sense of my consciousness, be recognizably human. All my personal thoughts and preferences will be eradicated. Perhaps more significantly, all my prior memory of life and of the world will have become irrelevant, even to myself. I will become merely a part of a whole. In two months’ time, I, Ivan Kowalski, will have joined the stream, which is to say that every last meaningful shard of my personality, my memory, or my identity will be gone, except that I will continue to exist in a more abstract form, which I will achieve by surrendering every piece of myself to the greater flow, the interminable stream, or what was once mistakenly referred to as the singularity.

It is impossible in my present state to apprehend what my experience will be then. (Or, more accurately, what the experience will be, since I will no longer be limited to the presence of a single mind.) But it is almost certain that I will no longer consider the rest of humankind, or even my former self, as in any way interesting, or complex, or worthy of attention beyond speculative thought. It is theorized that in that elevated state, I will no longer perceive any other solitary mind as in any way capable of purveying meaning. I will view all preceding human thought as a sort of crude imitation of thought, such that the life’s work of a thousand geniuses—all those greatest feats of human agency throughout history (until the present)—will seem hasty, rough-hewed, incomplete, like the writing of a disabled or a cave man. The greatest and most complex ideas that have trickled through the human mind will be easily accessible to me (as the stream); and upon those ideas I (within the stream) will build complete thoughts that will be infinitely more complex than all the compiled thoughts of all humankind since the first.

I have recorded all this not to boast. It was not my choice to be born in this age, just as it is not the choice of a bird to be born a bird, or of the world to have ever shimmered into existence. To boast would be meaningless, for I now see very clearly the end of me; I am confident that after joining the stream all my past associations with self-conscious being will abruptly end.

It will be, I am sure, very similar to death, excepting that some fragment of my mind, some ribbon or trace of my consciousness, will proceed on the arc of time. I believe that it will be like death, except that instead of complete darkness, it will shed complete light. When I, Ivan Kowalski, join the stream, all consciousness will abruptly end at the moment that a ceaseless and riveting current of thought will begin. I will go from being merely a man to participating in the construction of a new mind for the benefit of all men. That which I formerly knew as thought will be completely overwhelmed by an infinitely greater deluge of the stream. Time will be suddenly malleable. I will be able to exist within an infinitely small fraction of a second, on an infinite plane of time, a state that is indistinguishable from immortality.

I will go, in one moment, from being merely a man to being nearly all men. I will join the never-ending stream. I will become whole. I will disappear. My name is Ivan Kowalski and soon I will no longer exist.