Galatea East and West

I live in a rear apartment of a 1920's New York style apartment building, behind which is an elementary school. At 10:30 in the morning, children are screaming in the courtyard. I remember recess. Today, I realized it was raining (rain in Los Angeles! pure magic) because the pitch of the screaming suddenly jumped a few decibels. I heard that first, and then I heard the rain drops. In the past, I've mistaken certain sounds for rain drops, but it always turns out to be something else, window fans, someone rummaging through plastic bottles in the alley; I'd given up on rain, but the heightened screaming in the schoolyard could mean no other thing. It must be exciting to be a child in sudden rain during recess at a grade school in Los Angeles.

I know the kind of stubbornness required here, plodding forward without considering whether it is any good. Bulldoggedness. The rest is vanity. Who is waiting at the other end of this line, tapping her fingers...? I am.

The atmosphere of this place that feels closest to home than anywhere I've lived before is made up of these things: the schoolyard screamers in the late morning -- and this is why they make their way into the textured folds of daydreaming -- the chatter of the birds in the afternoon, the chatter and bad music of the Italian guy whenever he is home, the cricket frogs at night. It's the rumbling and the smell of laundry from below, the flat light peeling off the brick face opposite my window. I could use another window. One curtain hangs in the window; a matching one hangs from the heating pipe, where a window should be, if not for earthquake reinforcements. I can't stand to see that wall from outside, my phantom second window bricked up as if to keep the gypsies of Madrid from squatting. I would have welcomed that gypsy sun every afternoon and would have bought whatever it was selling. Ack! Afternoon to late afternoon, my favorite light, my favorite time, save Sundays, all day, and I want to be back in the New York City of my brain, standing on the sidewalk outside Bar 6, smoking with a girl named Aiden. That hour, that city, that sidewalk, that girl, unbeknownst to all of them, have come to represent a minor paradise before a minor fall.

I spent the afternoon banging away on my powder blue Webster XL-500 -- grace be to the proliferation of makes and models -- bounding back and forth between it and the electric robot, checking facts, definitions, spellings, checking my temperature and the temperature in Bakersfield. It is a worthwhile experiment, alternating between the two machines; I can actually feel the doors to the other world closing, to the sound of sand draining through the waistline of an hourglass. Quickly! Leave the robot and resume the tapping, return to the impression of ink as a consequence of tapping. Is it the action of the keys? Is it the sound? That sound is like a zip code 90027 YOU ARE TYPING IN LOS FELIZ.

What is relevant to LA, to elections and financial crises? We could start with definitions. Or the correct pronunciation of Aeschylus. Or favorite aphorisms by Sam. Let's do it backwards: "Poetry is an amazingly courageous thing. To be sitting down at a table, still as engaged as you'd be in bed with your muse -- very hard." ES-kyuh-luss. Haptic: adj. 1. relating to or based on the sense of touch 2. characterized by a predilection for the sense of touch.

I pulled off the covers and moved into the pathway of the sun. The books in my friend's room were stacked, it seemed, in no particular order, and yet their order had the effect of a kind of meditation. Gogol resting on a volume of Richard Feynman lectures. Rachel Carson and Chico Buarque -- who knew he writes fiction -- Italo Calvino and Alexis de Tocqueville. One gets the point. Since I can't endow the sun with fingers, much less curiosity, I'll say that other fingers in their haptic curiosity ran coolly from a shoulder to the back of a thigh, a line that, had it been drawn in graphite, would have been a soft, even-weighted contour of human topography. Shoulder, spine, buttock, thigh. I felt like Galatea. Not the original, loved by Pygmalion, who lost her name among the rubble. The Galatea who claimed her milkwhite definition, rewriting her own story: her name has always been there, alongside Pygmalion's. Sunlight traced a continuous vein in the marble; the touch quickened the stone, which arched like a spring-pole, snapped and came to. Voila. Good morning. Santa Monica.

I like those stacked books, that light, that room on 10th St., free of complication, chantage and cliche, free of little notes on mirrors saying, "The truth is we're afraid to look into the pools of each others' beings." Bah.

I asked Jacob, "Are you afraid to look into the pool of my being?"

"You don't scare ME," he said.