Dear Lou,
This morning I saw a dog that looked like your landlord. It was a Pomeranian. It looked so much like your landlord that I did a double-take. Same hair, same eyes. Same face, basically. Same attitude. I remember when I met him. Your landlord. We were making dinner and he rang the doorbell and asked if all the radiators were working. While you went to check he stood there waiting, like a Pomeranian. I considered giving him a treat. A cookie, a little piece of apple. You came back and said, “They’re fine.” Your landlord shook our hands.
The dog that looked like your landlord was sitting outside the subway. Not tied to anything, just sitting, as if he were waiting for a friend. Then they’d wander uptown, catch a movie, talk about it over drinks. “I preferred his earlier work,” the dog would say, “but the cinematography’s still first-rate.”
I like to think that the dog is a landlord and he manages a dog-scale triplex. He takes care of the lawn. He picks up the rent cheques. He makes sure the radiators are working. He chases squirrels sometimes but only if his tenants aren’t waiting on anything, if he’s fulfilled all his obligations.
I wonder if a dog has ever seen your landlord and thought: That guy looks just like my friend the Pomeranian.
Pomeranian, from the Old Slavic for “by the sea.” Which you aren’t, and I’m not, but we could be, some day.
Dear Theo,
It’s strange what comes back to you while you’re sitting in a yurt. Song lyrics. Magazine headlines. Poetry. TED Talks. But mostly song lyrics. “Your glasses / your hideous glasses!” I can’t control what comes fluttering up.
How much of meditating is about trying to stop remembering the words to “Beez in the Trap”?
Sometimes it’s music I miss more than nearly anything. Other times it’s banana bread. Or the Nicolai Astrup print in my bedroom. My memory-foam mattress topper. My Zojirushi water boiler, for tea on demand. Mom’s jade plant, the one you nicknamed Gordon.
They say the missing will change as the retreat goes on. At first it’s acute: I want this or that particular thing, from home. Pure desire. But eventually the missing becomes remembrance. “Remembrance is sustaining,” our teacher said today. “A memory’s as good as having.”
Is it really? I wonder. Can you curl your body against a memory at night? Can a memory make you tea?
Do Tibetan monks just give everything away?
Do they throw incredible garage sales?
Are you doing okay, Theo? I think about your mom every day. She was remarkable, she loved you so much. I don’t think grief is the same as missing somebody: it’s not just wanting them back but wanting them to be. I wish I had had the chance to know her better. I know she lived an extraordinary life. Self-taught Egyptologist. Undefeated backgammon player. Supermarket maven. Any of us should hope to have one-tenth the life she did, the smallest measure of Minerva. We can be aspirants. (I am.)
Dear Lou,
Thank you. I’m well. In the immortal words of the Provisions K flyer: “Now on sale: grapes!”
I’m still not accustomed to the time-lapse of this correspondence. Our letters are out of sequence. At first I felt like we were two blizzards snowing at each other, all these mismatched tumbling pages. That pace has slowed. It’s hard to remember what I’ve already said, what I’ve already answered, what I’ve already forgotten. Four months you’ll be gone. The lifespan of a dragonfly.
I have always been frightened of one-sided conversations. My greatest fear is that I am a punisher. That’s what my friend Reema calls them – the people at bars or parties or comedy clubs who just talk and talk and talk at you, leaving no chance for escape. No exit or reprieve, not a word in edgewise. You stand there gulping your drink, draining it so you can squeak, “Time for a refill!” It’s the only method for escaping a punisher: the refill. Of course it can go wrong. Mistime your move and the punisher puffs, “Good idea!” And then you are drunk and your companion is a punisher and I daresay this is Hell, Lou.
My brother has officially proposed we sell the store. Mom’s barely cold in her urn. Mireille feigns horror but I can tell she’s thinking about it. Provisions K’s too old, too crowded. Too stuck in its inefficiencies. “Let it become somebody else’s problem,” Peter says. Or, he concedes, if the rest of us want to carry on, we sell the building and buy something new. A shiny modern supermarket, with automated cashiers and closed-circuit cameras. A stock elevator. Wi-fi. The older generations would never have allowed it. But us? We could be moguls.
I wonder what would happen if the store was reinvented. Would I be reinvented too? The first time I brought you there, I remember I said, “Here it is, my true self.” I was only half kidding. I am a beloved, ramshackle grocery store. My ramshackliness is part of my charm. I think. Unless the ram & shackle’s the problem. I used to tease you about your gratitude lists. You said you were just trying to keep track.
“Keep track of what?” I remember asking you.
“Of my shit.”
Do you have any answers for me? What wisdom has drifted down onto your desert plateau? Onto your “wine-black steppe”? Do you take entrepreneurial workshops with Z. Largo? Lessons on spinning one invention into an industry, one industry into another? He pivoted from superior lightbulbs to superior movie projectors, to agriculture, biotech, publishing, film. Can I at last graduate from groceries to headlining shows? Give me some advice and I’ll give you some back. Two weeks, three weeks, five weeks for this letter to reach you. Two, three, five weeks to receive your reply. By that time probably Peter will have convinced us to liquidate the premises and I’ll be out on my ass. Then where will I be? Working at a chain grocery store, selling lottery tickets at the cash.
Dear Lou,
How are you? How’s all that sand? I imagine you with sand everywhere, sand in your shoes, sand in your socks, sand under your fingernails, sand in your hair. Sand between the pages of your magazines. A few days ago I realized none of your letters have mentioned the sand and now it’s all I can think about, your desert and all that sand, so much sand it becomes an afterthought, a redundancy. Sand on the ground. Sand in the air. Does it collect at the edges of your tent? Do you track it inside? Are there sand dunes in your dreams?
Thank you for the story of the cactus. Did the flowers grow back? The campus sounds cool. They should let you sleep there, basking in the A/C. Or is it part of the retreat’s philosophy? Steam them lightly in their yurts.
I miss you. If you were around we could go meandering by the tracks or through the market, scatter seeds, loose change, not really doing or buying anything, looking at ferns and squashes, all the weird birds blowing in, gazing at separate things, in opposite directions, but talking. Letters don’t feel like a conversation. Each of them is a dedicated, uninterrupted telling, sand pouring through an hourglass. And each is a dedicated listening, I guess. Everything seems like a pronouncement. I’d rather just go for a walk.
The walls are all still standing but something’s not right. I keep expecting to come across Mom – counting blue receipts, chatting with a customer, inspecting the rye or the ricotta. Doting on her grandkids. But she isn’t anywhere. She isn’t even in her apartment. The absence itself feels like a presence – as if her absence is sitting in her chair, playing backgammon with Hanna, dabbing some crazy painting of a cat on a leash. Or hovering in the aisles beside me. I keep noticing the things she will never have a chance to see. I keep thinking about how we’ll never have another conversation. We just can’t, it’s impossible, literally impossible, like wanting to talk to Heroditus or Leonard Cohen. The night she died she said she wanted to show me something. Never, she won’t. All I can do is look at what she left behind and try to make up what she’d say.
Eric and Mireille are hammer and tongs. Like always, I guess, but now every day is pouring quarrels. You can hear their voices through the walls, under doors. Sometimes an argument’s like siege warfare, catapults and battering rams. Raised voices, attrition, attempts to appease. Then they make up and for a few hours they’re both on this beautiful, eerie high. In those moments Mireille tells me she loves me. I take the compliment and I lock it away; I try to keep stacking the canned corn or whatever. They relish their fights, in a way. This is how they carry out whatever it is they’re carrying out: advancing the store’s interests, managing their family finances, parenting. The business is only so big; the profits split among us. Inflation and debt, overdue repairs. Until we modernize everything, raise prices, all of us suddenly millionaires.
But I’m making do. I’m quote-unquote practising self-care. Exercise! Fluids! Two bananas a day! Reading Just Kids before bed. I keep skipping the track but at least I hit the club on Fridays, do the work. I did a bit about Mom’s funeral. Clumsy therapy, you called it once, my comedy. But it’s more than that: it’s a craft, a process, the only progress in my life. Except that high never lasts, even after my best sets. No matter how at home I feel up there – ready, alert, alive – everything evanesces after I step off the stage, into the blank night. I stew in my gumbo remembering the mistakes, all the ways I regret and resent whoever’s doing better.
The most popular comic right now is a guy called Commander Big Hands. I don’t remember if you ever saw him. The stage name’s the whole point. He was an astronaut for real. In the mid-aughts he spent four months aboard the International Space Station – conducting experiments, liaising with the Russians, floating in mid-air. He grew a moustache. When he came back to Earth he spent a few more years at NASA then went civilian. As a civilian he became a comic. And he moon-walked to the club.
That’s his shtick – he has been to space. Everything he says on stage connects back to being afloat. Eating sandwiches in space. Drinking India pale ale in space. Farting in space. Guilt trips from his fiancée while in space, interactions between men and women in space, you get the picture. He’ll start a joke and you’ll think he’s going somewhere different, but no, he brings it right back into geosynchronous orbit (har har) and the crowd just eats it up. They go insane. Does our species admire any trait more than the trait of having gone to space? The ability to transmit space-related facts from space-related experience? It’s as if he’s still got moon dust on him. He could give a space-related sneeze and the audience would weep with laughter. When he gets up the other comics just despair. None of us are rivals. None of us contend. There is nothing in all our gifts that approximates the virtue of the space-man. We console ourselves with the thought that his adulation is unearned, illegitimate, but it doesn’t really help. We’re comedians. Our job’s simple. Success isn’t measured in integrity or authenticity or kindness or charm, but in pleasure, rippling across a crowd. And everybody busts a gut laughing at the astronaut’s merest bit.
I hope I’m not bitter. More bittersweet.
Dear Theo,
Lately I’ve been trying to retrain my fingers. I can still feel the habits when I lay them flat on the table: scroll, swipe. CTRL-C, CTRL-V. Open new tab. All this high-tech muscle memory, and none of it relevant to my yurt. It’s useful knowledge, you’d say. Utility isn’t everything, Theo. These days I ask myself questions like: Is this what I want to be carrying in my body? The itch to manipulate a web browser? To scroll and tap on a screen? I’d rather my body carried worthier impulses. What else could I carry in the places I carry smartphone swipes and copy-paste? How much more patience, self-knowledge, compassion?
So I’m retraining. You could do it too. Try. Lay your hands flat on the table, feel your fingers stretch. Palm. Knuckles. Skin. I tell my hands to forget what they aren’t, and to feel what they are. To feel what I am. Aches and scars, blood pulse, tremor. Fascia tautening with age. Our hands hold traces of everything we’ve ever touched, a thousand handshakes and caresses. Sometimes I think about my grandmother’s hands. The way they felt when she clasped my hands in hers, the strength. Our bodies aren’t just shapes we’re wearing, clothes we put on. They’re chronicles. They’re wiser than we are.
To answer the question at the end of your latest letter: no, there aren’t any camels here. I mean there are camels around – Merzouga’s full of them, camels for tourists and camels for function and maybe even stray camels. (I saw some milling around when we drove in – “milling,” is that the right word? Loafing? Humping?) But they don’t have any on the property. I think it’s an animal welfare thing – see also the retreat’s famous coconut bacon and cauliflower “steaks.” Nobody to help us lazy humans: we do the locomoting by ourselves. When I got here I thought of it as trudging, all this trudging through the desert. But it’s dunewalking now. That sounds cooler. Rarefied and meditative. A woman silhouetted in the distance, shimmering in the heat, out of focus.
Places I dunewalk to:
1) The campus.
2) My yurt.
3) An empty clearing in the sand.
Dear Lou,
This morning Hanna knocks on my door after breakfast. She says, “Is there a limit on how much you can bet on one horse?” And I say “No,” and Hanna says, “Good, just checking.”
And I say, “How much are you planning to bet?”
She says, “A lot.”
“Remember,” I say, “the thing with bets is that you usually lose the money.”
“I know,” she says. “Except sometimes you win.”
“But usually you lose.”
“Unless you’re lucky.”
“Even if you’re lucky you usually lose. It’s really a dumb pastime.”
“It’s intriguing,” she says. She has a skateboard under one arm and a book under the other. The Braithwaite Guide to Thoroughbreds.
“Doing some research?”
“It’s intriguing,” she repeats, “that a totally random thing can still seem like a reward. As if there’s a reason you won, or a reason you lost. When often there isn’t.”
“It’s what’s known as a ‘crapshoot,’ ” I say.
“It will be my first crapshoot,” Hanna says.
The crapshoot’s scheduled for Friday. I promised her a bet on her thirteenth birthday. Sometimes I have regrets about this promise. Should I really be encouraging this? Should I really be helping her lose win money at the racecourse? Wouldn’t it be better to teach her about savings accounts or compound interest? It’d be a broken promise if I backed out – but that’s a kind of lesson too.
But my pop did it with me. That single bet, at thirteen, seemed like the greatest gift – a chance to stake myself against the universe. I lost, and Pop lost, and we were both in it together. So I’ll take Hanna to the track. She’ll lay her bet. We’ll make a day of it – lunch, gambling, skate-park, ice cream sundae.
You wanna come? Cut your retreat a little short. Dig up your cell phone. Ditch Z. Largo. Slash your tent to ribbons and set the campus on fire. Lace up a camel or dunewalk to town, board a plane direct from Marrakesh to here. You’ll be radiant with clarity as you step off the plane and I promise you a bouquet of something that rhymes with “decomposes.”
Dear Lou,
How are you? Have you stopped writing or has the Moroccan postal service just stopped delivering? I imagine a caravan languishing in the dunes. Sandlogged mailbags, paystubs, bubblepaks.
Are my letters as slow to reach you?
Are they out of order?
I admit I have not written as many as I should.
Dear Theo,
I saw a desert fox today. It came right up to my tent flap, twitched its nose like a mouse. Reinforcements, I thought. Emotional support.
Sometimes being here feels like an experiment and sometimes it feels like a test and sometimes it feels like an invitation and other times I don’t know what it feels like, just pure experience, see-through, like a sheet of plate glass.
Is it still a retreat when you keep advancing forward into it?
Writing to you, even wishful sentences seem like bad one-liners.
Three times I have picked up and put down this letter.
Maybe I can tell you about mountain pose. I remember I used to think it was so silly. “Conscientious objector pose,” you called it – a yogi just standing with their hands at their sides. But I get it now. I stand and do it properly and I get it, I feel it in my body; conscientious accepter.
Dark chocolate. When you’re on a clarity retreat, abstaining from the world, your tolerance goes up. The chocolate gets darker and darker. I eat 90 percent now. Two squares at a time, like an ogre.
A joke Z told me:
Why did the Zen nun fall out of the tree?
She was practising non-attachment.
Let me tell you about the conservatory, where we sit on rugs and sometimes James plays some guitar or Areta sings lieder or Z takes out his oud. I didn’t know what an oud was; now I do. While all of us listen, Nikita dances a solo.
Let me tell you about makeup. I almost didn’t bring any – “It’s a retreat,” I thought – but in the end I spend more time putting it on here than I have at any other time in my life. At my tent’s little washbasin, staring into the circle mirror.
I started wearing eyeliner when I noticed one of the other women had put some on. Eyeliner and a tiny bit of lipstick, a smudge. It wasn’t that I wanted to compete with her. I wasn’t trying to show her up (as if I could – she’s beautiful). It was like when you see someone else is wearing sunglasses, or heels, maybe carrying an umbrella, and you think, “Maybe I should too.” Or could. So a little eyeliner, a little lipstick, but for a few days I worried I had started an arms race: suddenly all the women were doing their faces, concealer and mascara, contoured everything. It wasn’t what I wanted, to be here in the Sahara and worrying about my eyebrows, but the others seemed to realize that too, and just as abruptly as everything had escalated the tournament wound down. Through all of this, we never talked about it. We never acknowledged it. Maybe it was right that we didn’t, or maybe we should have – I don’t know what would be better, from a clarity retreat perspective. I don’t think the leaders even noticed. But the point is – at the end of the day I found that I wanted to put something on. At least most days I did. Even if I wasn’t planning to go out to a group sit or a lecture or an activity. Even if I was just sitting alone. I’ve always told myself that makeup isn’t about other people, but here finally that notion isn’t just a concept. I am putting it into practice. I’m not attempting to dazzle a stranger or to attract a lover or to offset my ever-multiplying crows’ feet. I’m just presenting myself, Theo. Playing, painting, using these old old tools and brushes and tinctures and powders to draw my face in a different way, a new way, wherever or whatever or whoever I am today. Like telling a joke, maybe, whether or not anybody laughs. I’m using my body to say something about myself – about what’s inside of me, invisible, unshown. What I mean to say is: it suits me.