little hunches

...that spark big ideas

[littlehunches]

I have a typewriter now, and it’s a clickety old charcoal-colored Smith Corona that I bought from a peaceful old woman on a sunny Brooklyn Saturday morning. She was sitting alone on her stoop two-handing a cup of coffee, a few steps up from a handmade sign that was quite clear in its purpose: THIS TYPEWRITER IS FOR SALE. She had then drawn an arrow, one pointing squarely to the typewriter. So I stopped, we chatted, she told me it needed a new ribbon, I gave her some money, and as I was leaving, she said, "It’s been a good friend,” almost as though she owed it some parting words before letting it go forever -- a small reminder of finitude, a little death: the goodbye.

When I turned around to respond, she had taken her coffee to the garden, one-handing it now so she could use the other to draw a bright pink flower to her nose. The sun was behind her, birds the only soundtrack, so I let her be and walked home.

I later took it to the fourth floor of a building in Gramercy, where a gray-haired man named Mr. Schweitzer sat in a windowless room surrounded by typewriters and told me it was in great condition. “Could use some oil and a few new springs,” he said, and had it back to me a week later. "Here,” he said, opening the case, “give it a spin.” I wrote a few words before it was his turn. I kept what he wrote, using it and the receipt he typed as a bookmark, leaving them both, as I do, in whichever book I needed to mark at the time. The first Harry Potter, I believe.

This past Sunday, I found myself near Fort Greene Park as it started to drizzle. My shoulder bag is always full of books, so I ducked into a little cafe, ordered my favorite biscuit with honey butter, and dug out my good friend, Mary Oliver. She has been around the world with me, taken me through difficult evenings on the hotline, and shared quiet mornings with me where poem-by-poem I hear my neighborhood come to life: the thrum of Bedford Avenue, the sun angling it’s way through my curtain, some gentle music coming from my speaker. All while she writes things like:

good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.

(Ah, how much better it is to hear Garrison Keillor read it.)

This weekend, though, it was part of a poem in Blue Horses that had me scribbling in the margins. This:

THE FOURTH SIGN OF THE ZODIAC (PART 3)

I know, you never intended to be in this world. But you’re in it all the same.

So why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it. There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro. Bless the eyes and the listening ears. Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste. Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it’s happened. Or not. I am speaking from the fortunate platform of many years, none of which, I think, I ever wasted. Do you need a prod? Do you need a little darkness to get you going? Let me be as urgent as a knife, then, and remind you of Keats, so single of purpose and thinking, for a while, he had a lifetime.

Soon after, I found two other lines that caught me, so I paid and left, hands-in-pockets, slowly through the rain and back to my typewriter. They’re what you see in the photo above, typed on some lovely textured paper I must have spent hours choosing from a nearby shop that Mr. Schweitzer recommended. I think I’ll pin them to my wall. Not yet, but soon.

I don’t know what it is about mindfulness -- kindness and thoughtfulness, too -- that seem to always resonate. Maybe I believe the world to be short on them. Maybe I try and truly admire their presence, their happening. Maybe I believe that they’re not just words or ideas, that they actually breathe, and the very fact that they exist -- that we have the chance to actually bring them to life as much as we like -- is one of the greatest privileges of living. Maybe I believe them to be inextricably linked to love, the world’s most precious commodity, so immensely sacred. To George Saunders, their lack is his biggest regret (”failures of kindness,” he calls them), and to Ben Lerner, they’re “risks” -- ones certainly worth taking, because, well, why not?

A sentence from my new favorite sage, one who talks about risk and purpose and legacy often. It was nighttime when I read it first -- a moment that cemented my love for him -- and I closed the book to scrawl the words onto a small scrap of paper, one that I did pin to my wall: 

“And now, Harry, let us step out into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure.”

Put differently -- though nicely extending the nighttime imagery used a moment ago by Dumbledore, and before that by Mary Oliver -- with the blue-collar tinge you might expect from Bruce Springsteen (ellipses are his):

“Then...if you want to take it all the way out to the end of the night, a furious fire in the hole that just...don’t...quit...burning.”

Together -- the odd grouping of Bruce Springsteen, Dumbledore, Mary Oliver and George Saunders -- I think I have a rather complete idea of what I want my purpose to be: inexhaustible mindfulness, greeting each day in happiness, trying not to fail with kindness, allowing darkness to prod me, though no matter how dark, forever stepping out into the night, pursuing chance and risk and hope and adventure endlessly endlessly endlessly.

[littlehunches]

While living in Berlin, Vladimir Nabokov wrote his final novel in Russian -- The Gift -- about (and partly by) his main character, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, also a Russian writer living in Berlin. He's a wonderfully complex and irritating figure to me (though such is the way it is with my relationship to Nabokov, an author I want to hug and slap at the same time) whose interests range quite wildly. So much so, in fact, that at one point Nabokov remarks about their "genuine quiddity."

Quiddity has two meanings, and stack them together as you like: the first is the essential quality of a thing, the second is that thing's trifling, inessential, and trivial nature. Better, the first is its essence, the second its in-essence. Each is interesting on its own, but together they appear somewhat contradictory. Which then means, what are Fyodor's interests? Definition one or two? All things essential and meaningful, or the opposite, a mix of so much trivia and inconsequence that you're afforded the rare chance to describe one q-word with another: where their genuine quiddity actually reduces them to nothing more than an insignificant jumble of quibbles.

Act V, Scene i. Hamlet -- one of literature's greatest wonderers -- in a churchyard, standing with Horatio, watching afar as gravediggers exhume bodies, and questioning aloud the lives they once held: "Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures?" And should you ask, like I did, about the definition of quillets, the answer is easy: one might just as easily say quibbles.

Back to the question, then: what are Hamlet's interests? Definition one or two? Quiddities or quillets? Essential or trifling? What I've done, I suppose, is arrive at a potentially meaningless question after miles of roaming. Like don Quixote (the world's most famous Q-character, and origin of one of the most potentially lucrative scrabble words: "quixotic") -- one of literature's greatest wanderers -- might have done: what really is the difference between both definitions? And though there's an element of truth to it, I think it would be wasteful to travel all this way to simply arrive at the idea that what's important to you may be insignificant to me, so let's sidestep that. 

Instead, what I'd prefer to do is finally mention the video above. It's about four o'clock in the morning, and to me it's one of the best examples of how there really isn't a distinction between the two, of how something can plausibly be at once profoundly shallow and deeply profound. And, you could also say, depending on how you much you want to explore something -- be it quidditch or lunch -- you can find both definitions in everything. A step further, and how about this: the beauty of everything can depend on the proportion of one definition to the other.

Perhaps the nicest example of this is the lovely Zen Buddhist story:

Before studying Zen, men are men and mountains are mountains. While studying Zen, things become confused. After studying Zen, men are men and mountains are mountains. After telling this, Dr. Suzuki was asked, “What is the difference between before and after?” He said, “No difference, only the feet are a little bit off the ground.”

Or, things just are. Then something affects them and they no longer are just those things. And then, they just are again -- their angles maybe a degree or two softer.

I recently read an essay where a woman was reading a book where a giraffe started talking and in the margin, she wrote, "The giraffe speaks!" How simple, and yet, how incredibly profound! A giraffe speaking? But here they are again, we have the two definitions of quiddity, side-by-side. The significance of a talking giraffe right up against the absurdity of it. It’s essence and inconsequence. How we should always clap for these moments, noting them proudly and with much exclamation wherever we find them.

She went on to explain why she wrote what she did: "In our marginal existence, what else is there but this voice within us, this great weirdness we are always leaning forward to listen to?" And, if pressed on what she was trying to hear, might it be that the “great weirdness” is no more than a beautifully individual mark in the ground -- somewhere between definition one and two -- where we look and hope and smile and wonder and ask about the world? Perhaps sitting somewhere aloft, our feet a little bit off the ground.

I’m not sure, so I did what seemed most fitting: I reached for a pen and wrote in my margin, "Yes!"

[littlehunches]

Dear God, she prayed, let me be something every minute of every hour of my life...let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.

Said little Francie Nolan, the wonderfully dreamy and discovering main character in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I respond so deeply to the connection between books and place, and reading this book while living in Brooklyn made it better -- the wanderings through Williamsburg, the shops and the neighborhoods of Greenpoint, and the intrigue around Bushwick felt a great deal more relatable. And Francie, in all her exploration, solitude, and curiosity -- “she played her favorite game, figuring out about people” -- was easy to love. 

[littlehunches]

This is from Mary Oliver’s newest collection, Felicity, which feels like the closest she’s come to Rumi. Indeed, the epigraphs throughout belong to him, my favorite of which begins everything: You broke the cage and flew. It really is like reading a collection of little meditations.

She scatters a few similar sentiments throughout, most notably in Moments:

There is nothing more pathetic than caution / when headlong might save a life, / even, possibly, your own.

In this incredible interview (and you need to hear her read one of my favorite poems of hers, Wild Geese), you get the sense that Oliver is shifting towards even greater simplicity as she ages. Or perhaps these lines from Storage are more directly informative:

Things! / Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful / fire! More room in your heart for love, / for the trees! For the birds who own / nothing -- the reason they can fly.

Simplicity. 

My room snugly holds my bed and there are two stacks of books on the floor. On a furnace that acts as a shelf, a buddha sits next to a candle with his hand on the ground and it’s the first thing I see if I wake up on my right side. There’s a Mets calendar pinned to one of the walls and a few race numbers on another. Much more than this -- though I do love my portable little speaker -- gets to be too noisy for me. 

The last few years have been about reduction, and in turn, I truly think I’ve become more and more happy, calm, and peaceful. The less clutter I have, the more I can see, and the more I become convinced that Oliver is right -- holiness is visible.

[littlehunches]

I am I, said I I am me, said me I am exactly who I am supposed to be.

This is part of a song that Monique sings -- some of her earliest English words -- in an East Baltimore classroom. For a thousand reasons, you should read this stunning series (along with the first two parts). It profiles some of Baltimore’s many immigrant students, and oh my, the stories. There is a beautiful Japanese word that seems built for emotions that tend to defy description (Kerouac has his own take on this), and it feels a very fitting way to describe my reaction. And this, too: how lucky I have been in my life.

[littlehunches]

It’s been a long while, and I’ve spent a lot of that time with Simon & Garnfunkel. These lyrics are from “The 59th Street Bridge Song” and every time I hear them, they stick in my head -- simple, poppy, happy, completely 1960s. Life (especially life in New York City) continues to make me smile, and sometimes it’s easy little phrases like these that seem to explain it all perfectly.

[littlehunches]

They know so much more now about the heart we are told but the world still seems to come one at a time one day one year one season and here it is spring once more with its birds nesting in the holes in the walls its morning finding the first time its light pretending not to move always beginning as it goes

One of the greatest human wonders, I think, is how everything will look after the final flourish knots our bow. What it will all feel like when the last stone has been laid, when we put our pens down, look at what we’ve authored, and say, “there, that’s it.” It’s not necessarily about death, but about the many things we strive to create while we’re alive: how do we get there? Uncertainty is an inescapable reality -- a subtle form of suffering -- that is as timeless as humanity. These are the lines of W.S. Merwin’s To This May, and they are as calming as other similar passages: the best bluesmen don’t follow a discrete series of steps and the most beautiful cypresses aren’t all painted identically. The getting there, though, is the same: a ceaseless process of trusting. Hours, days, years, and seasons. All one at a time.

[littlehunches]

The idea of creating something lasting, of doing something you believe to be the fullest expression of yourself, can often come with a heavy dose of hesitation. It’s a simple concept, really: this is what I want to do, but this is why I’m excusing myself from doing it. History seems to offer thousands of years of singular advice: don’t do that.

[littlehunches]

You've got to be good or bad as the devil.

In 1964, after a show in Highland Park, Illinois, Louis Armstrong was interviewed by a couple of high school kids. The questions were not particularly brilliant, but the answers (and Louis’ gravelly voice) were wonderful. As in, “You either have it or you don’t. You play your horn just like you sing a song or a hymn. If it’s in your heart, you express yourself in the tune.” It reminds me a bit of Duke Ellington and Elvis, or the brash Miles Davis -- three other musicians who seemed aware of their skill and their uniqueness, each leaving a rather firm mark on their art.

[littlehunches]

Of everything I read, there may be nothing better than the emails I get from my Mother. In the last year, she turned 60, spent time in a dozen countries, moved from Singapore to Italy (by way of New York, a train-trip across the United States, and an extended month roadtripping in Arizona, Utah, and California), began taking Italian classes, and is about to welcome her fourth grandchild into the world. She does more than most anyone half her age.

She’s the absolute embodiment of peacefulness and is so full of love and selflessness and care that it affects almost every human interaction I have. I want to take care of the people around me because that’s all I’ve ever seen her do, from the first time we met. She has taught me patience and calm, how to enjoy slow walks through gardens, that prosecco matches with most any meal at most any time of day, that the most special things are hand-knit, and how it is to grow -- with every passing year -- into an inexplicably more beautiful version of yourself. 

Last year we read Gone With the Wind at the same time, Mum by the pool in Thailand, me nomadically existing in Austin. Sometimes I’d wake up to a text message where she’d softly rebuke Scarlett, want to “slap” Melanie, or talk about the wonder and tragedy of Rhett. I loved that book, and those characters, because of their connection to her.

And so I’m posting this, a few days after Mother’s Day. Because what do you say when you get such a beautiful collection of words from someone, when you close your eyes and picture a lovely little garden in Italy created by her hands? My hope is that those last words -- “There is so much creating I could do here” -- will always be followed in my life by three exclamation points. Now, when I’m her age, and forever.

[littlehunches]

The sheer tug through his body. The exhaustion of the mind. Always avoiding cloud. Always looking for a line of sight. Creating any horizon possible. The brain inventing phantom turns. The inner ear balancing the angles until the only thing that can truly be trusted is the dream of getting there.

This is from Colum McCann’s Transatlantic, taken from a passage written about a pilot. How is it that the world’s most creative people -- little hunches is nothing more than a sampling of some of the more brilliant minds that span history -- always seem to find their way to a spot where they see beauty in accepting uncertainty? And so it re-surfaces, the wonderfully lingering idea of Mary Oliver: “I don’t know why. And yet, why not.”

[littlehunches]

Iggy Pop is an interesting musician, and this is a wonderful line from a 2008 Rolling Stone interview. He was speaking about the most important thing James Brown taught him.

To me, the joy of this quote is in the initiative -- there really should be no reason to wait for someone’s permission to go after the things you want. Nor should there be any hesitation. A good improv scene doesn’t begin timidly, nor does it know where it’s headed. But with a little bit of patience and trust, it finds its way.

My personal challenge -- and my personal commitment -- is to take the idea of deciding “to go out in front of people and start moving around” and applying it to the deepest part of me. It means opening myself up to the things I’ve always wanted to try, it means being vulnerable, it means readying myself for failures, coming to terms with uncertainty, and so much more. But it also means preparing for quiet moments of accomplishment, where the victory is in the doing, in the happy answering of the inevitable question, “Why did it take me so long?” And then waking up and doing it all again.

[littlehunches]

Something of this simple trust we too should have.

Another wonderful line from Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and in these nine words, there’s an answer to a question I’ve spent years wrestling: when the world starts to rattle your foundation a bit, how can you make the best decisions for you? The answer, to me, is to trust. One of my least favorite behaviors is the acceptance of something stable and predictable merely for the sake of avoiding uncertainty. In the past couple of months, I’ve started doing more and more standup comedy, and the risk and the fear and the joy and the reward are all the same: you have absolutely no idea how your audience will respond. At first you care, and then you sort of don’t. Because early on, it’s not about that. It’s not about measuring your success by applause -- though that may certainly be true later. Quite differently, it’s about putting your name in a hat, having your name called, walking to the stage, taking the microphone, and exhaling one last time before you begin. And the only way that happens is with a little bit of simple trust.

[littlehunches]

Some street art found on a sunny stroll through Brooklyn a few days ago. I was listening to Abbey Road at the time, and those rhythmic (and confusing) closing lyrics to The End came through: “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”

Kindness, to me, is a word I immediately associate with the writing of George Saunders and the lives of my parents. And when I think of why, the phrase “a kind of dangerous unselfishness” -- taken from Martin Luther King’s final speech -- comes quickly to the front of my mind. Is there a better way to be, than to be driven by kindness?

At a book reading I went to recently, I asked the author about beginnings and endings. It may not be the most novel question, but I’m intrigued at how people deal with beginnings and endings of all sorts, from books to baseball seasons, relationships to lives. And yesterday I stumbled across another story about finitude, where beneath a photo of a white-bearded old man, his eyes watery and looking somewhere off camera, there was this caption:

At first we kept saying: ‘We’re going to beat it. We’re going to beat it.’ Then after awhile we began to realize that we might not beat it. Then toward the end, it became clear that we definitely weren’t going to beat it. That’s when she started telling me that she wanted me to move on and find happiness with somebody else. But I’m not quite there yet. Not long ago a noise woke me up in the middle of the night, and I rolled over to ask if she needed anything.

In a string of moments like these -- where a sunny walk past some graffiti in Brooklyn connects to a Beatles song, one of my favorite authors, my two wonderful parents, a Martin Luther King speech, a book reading and story about ending -- I feel happy today with a single guiding word dancing in my head: kindness.

[littlehunches]

I think she always nursed a small mad hope.

From Vladimir Nabokov’s intricate and wonderful Pale Fire. And to this, I would ask one thing: don’t we all? May each of us live -- in all of its difficulty and beauty and wonder -- our inescapable story, wholeheartedly encouraging those mad hopes.

[littlehunches]

It’s a question that Socrates then promptly dismissed, but one which lingers in my life. Every day. Repeatedly.

 In her essay called Open Door, Rebecca Solnit asks something similar:

How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control.

Whether it’s in a Socratic dialogue, Ancient Rome, Buddhism, or the coded language of hobos, uncertainty pervades the entire history of humanity. And each of us walk with it to varying degrees: the wonder of what’s next, the how-is-it-all-going-to-unfold-ness, the paralyzing anticipated response of someone you want to share something true with, the unending “what ifs” around everything. These are not incorrect thoughts or questions, and so they ought not be buried. They should be turned towards and faced. They should be met. 

I suppose I’m writing this as a way of recording advice I should consider less and take more. Because in the world that swirls around me, one I’m still very much sifting through and getting lost in, the only thing I can truly say I want out of my own life is to take the things I have and do as much as I can with them.

[littlehunches]

'Please keep,' it said. 'The man did so much for me.'

Once again, the absolute brilliance of George Saunders is on full display, page after page. This is from Pastoralia. It was one of those randomly perfect times to be reading something, because a theme that runs throughout these stories is legacy. More directly, how (if at all) our youthful ambitions line up with the version of ourselves that we live our way into. Old men looking back on their younger selves and wondering what happened. Money struggles. Absurd, menial jobs. Bizarre living arrangements. His dialogue is some of the best I have ever read, his characters are as vivid as can be, and he makes you truly feel. And then there are fleeting moments -- like the line above -- which are so simply beautiful. A man dies and his wife receives a letter with a small amount of money in it from someone she never met, someone she’d never heard of. In a different forum, Saunders spoke about his biggest personal regrets being “failures of kindness” -- and it makes me happy to see his characters think similarly. Amidst all the world’s wild unpredictability, irrespective of how your older self views its younger counterpart, there is no better way to spend your time than by being quietly kind.