of it as curiosity.
“Anna! Where are you?”
“On my way to Rome. Just for a few days, I’m opening for—”
“Tell me where you’ll be.”
That was the first time we were in Rome.
Tilting
T HE PLACE WHERE it tips. There. You feel it within first, the fulcrum of the seesaw as it shifts. A sliding that isn’t falling. If someone says to you, “I want to be in your dreams,” what does that mean? Dream of me. Let me in. Write about me, think about me, sing about me. It’s the Orpheus problem—once she turned away, she wrote the songs he would sing for the next billion years. But it was he who turned, he turned first, he knew what would happen, so can’t it also be said that he decided his own fate in that moment? Maybe he turned into the motion that was already happening within, he had already decided. Turning—in my imagination, he is higher up than she on the dim path as it slopes upward to the surface. He feels it before he sees it, the pull backward. He knew it would happen before it happened, the motion had already begun. You don’t know where it begins, not really, but you know where it tips, where the tilt starts. The air seems to grow heavier on one side, lighter on the other. The problem for my father of upending that rotting pier in Trondheim was that, small as it was, it wouldn’t stay upended. It kept tilting to one side or the other, it fell, and each time it fell it cracked in a new place, and the question of bracing became massive and, ultimately, insoluble. The Trondheim pier had to express a preference; it had to lean, to tilt, to fall. “I want to be in your dreams,” a woman said to me at a party once. As if, once requested, it was a thing that could be done. As if the motion could be inserted. She wasn’t in my dreams, not ever, lovely though she was. I don’t know where the tilt begins. They didn’t either, in Trondheim, so to everyone’s vast disappointment they lowered the pier back down. Bent from its recent struggles, it tilted and twisted and sagged into the sea. The Trondheim Arts Council paid the commission in full anyway, but they dismantled the pier, because it had long since rusted; now that it was bent, it was a public-safety hazard. As both art and commerce, it failed. It wouldn’t be used. It didn’t want to be part of anyone’s dreams. Maybe the dismantling is what it wanted all along, who knows?
Trenčín, Slovakia
T HE HAY BALES everywhere, why are there hay bales? Don’t make this venue feel any less like the airstrip that it is. The festival is enormous, it goes on for acres, guarded at the many gates by big, blond Slovak men who look as if they got out of the secret police yesterday, or might still be in it. I walk the hot tarmac road beside the tents devoted to beer, books, food, Greenpeace, body painting, and hookahs, or simply filled with people lying around on enormous, pouffy, multicolored cushions. I walk out to the edge, to a chainlink fence. A young Asian man with a ring on each thumb is standing there. The noise of the festival is behind us. The afternoon sun has a brute Slovak strength.
I nod hello.
The young man says, “What band are you with?”
“Mine.”
“Cool.”
“You?”
“I crew for Jason.”
I nod as if I know who this is. Together, the young man and I watch a small plane land and taxi in, growing larger, louder, coming to rest fifty yards from us.
“I love that,” says the young man. “It looks like a dragonfly, doesn’t it?”
The Music in His Head
C LASSICAL, ESPECIALLY CHOPIN . And folk, the kind of songs that are so worn, so ancient, that they no longer have an author, if they ever did. Songs of deaths and drownings, miners lost in the mines, true loves never to be seen again, oceans and rivers and sailing ships. Hymns, though he has never been a religious man. I think he likes their heavy, regular thumping toward Jesus. Ever since he lost the hearing in his right ear, he holds half of a set of big headphones to
“Anna! Where are you?”
“On my way to Rome. Just for a few days, I’m opening for—”
“Tell me where you’ll be.”
That was the first time we were in Rome.
Tilting
T HE PLACE WHERE it tips. There. You feel it within first, the fulcrum of the seesaw as it shifts. A sliding that isn’t falling. If someone says to you, “I want to be in your dreams,” what does that mean? Dream of me. Let me in. Write about me, think about me, sing about me. It’s the Orpheus problem—once she turned away, she wrote the songs he would sing for the next billion years. But it was he who turned, he turned first, he knew what would happen, so can’t it also be said that he decided his own fate in that moment? Maybe he turned into the motion that was already happening within, he had already decided. Turning—in my imagination, he is higher up than she on the dim path as it slopes upward to the surface. He feels it before he sees it, the pull backward. He knew it would happen before it happened, the motion had already begun. You don’t know where it begins, not really, but you know where it tips, where the tilt starts. The air seems to grow heavier on one side, lighter on the other. The problem for my father of upending that rotting pier in Trondheim was that, small as it was, it wouldn’t stay upended. It kept tilting to one side or the other, it fell, and each time it fell it cracked in a new place, and the question of bracing became massive and, ultimately, insoluble. The Trondheim pier had to express a preference; it had to lean, to tilt, to fall. “I want to be in your dreams,” a woman said to me at a party once. As if, once requested, it was a thing that could be done. As if the motion could be inserted. She wasn’t in my dreams, not ever, lovely though she was. I don’t know where the tilt begins. They didn’t either, in Trondheim, so to everyone’s vast disappointment they lowered the pier back down. Bent from its recent struggles, it tilted and twisted and sagged into the sea. The Trondheim Arts Council paid the commission in full anyway, but they dismantled the pier, because it had long since rusted; now that it was bent, it was a public-safety hazard. As both art and commerce, it failed. It wouldn’t be used. It didn’t want to be part of anyone’s dreams. Maybe the dismantling is what it wanted all along, who knows?
Trenčín, Slovakia
T HE HAY BALES everywhere, why are there hay bales? Don’t make this venue feel any less like the airstrip that it is. The festival is enormous, it goes on for acres, guarded at the many gates by big, blond Slovak men who look as if they got out of the secret police yesterday, or might still be in it. I walk the hot tarmac road beside the tents devoted to beer, books, food, Greenpeace, body painting, and hookahs, or simply filled with people lying around on enormous, pouffy, multicolored cushions. I walk out to the edge, to a chainlink fence. A young Asian man with a ring on each thumb is standing there. The noise of the festival is behind us. The afternoon sun has a brute Slovak strength.
I nod hello.
The young man says, “What band are you with?”
“Mine.”
“Cool.”
“You?”
“I crew for Jason.”
I nod as if I know who this is. Together, the young man and I watch a small plane land and taxi in, growing larger, louder, coming to rest fifty yards from us.
“I love that,” says the young man. “It looks like a dragonfly, doesn’t it?”
The Music in His Head
C LASSICAL, ESPECIALLY CHOPIN . And folk, the kind of songs that are so worn, so ancient, that they no longer have an author, if they ever did. Songs of deaths and drownings, miners lost in the mines, true loves never to be seen again, oceans and rivers and sailing ships. Hymns, though he has never been a religious man. I think he likes their heavy, regular thumping toward Jesus. Ever since he lost the hearing in his right ear, he holds half of a set of big headphones to
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