Being Present

I am thinking these days about presence. About what creates it. About what makes it real, or maybe palpable, since what is real and what is unreal, these days, I find difficult to decipher. (And, of course, the other huge question here is: Does real matter?) More specifically, I am thinking about how much energy it takes to be present. To respect another person's presence by showing up, by becoming present yourself.

I am first thinking of how being present can take everything out of you. As evidence: me standing on South 4th Street and Bedford Avenue, waiting on the blessed B62 (which, by the way, hasn't gotten better since the restructuring.) There was a man standing there as well, mid 50s maybe, something slightly off-kilter about his clothing. (But this is New York, and you never know anything about anyone, really.) I notice that he's looking at me. Not looking at me like one New Yorker looks at another New Yorker. He's trying to make eye contact. I get the feeling that he wants to ask me something. (This is natural at the bus stop. People often have logistical or directional questions at bus stops, and I, apparently, look like the kind of person who has the answers.) So, I take the bait, and look back at him.

"My wife died," he said. "Two weeks ago. She was 62 years old." "I'm sorry," I said. He said thank you, and we stood there a minute, quietly, waiting on the bus, with this fact suddenly between us.

For the rest of the day I carried all that around with me, and before I crawled into bed, I spent an hour playing thrashy folk songs on the guitar, maybe annoying the neighbors, until all that was out of me and I felt like myself again. He needed to say it out loud. He needed to give some of the weight to someone else so that he could go on with the motion of living. This makes sense to me. Sometimes saying something out loud can make it real. Or sometimes we say things out loud that aren't true at all, and it's a way of feeling the realness of them, if only an instant, like trying on a new pair of strange glasses, or like sliding your feet into a pair of your father's shoes. That guy just needed me to be present. Or, by default, my presence contributed his relief. Even if he made it all up, I was there, and we shared that weird, horrible, tragic conversation. And there was nothing to say afterward.

Second, I went to MoMA to see the Marina Abromovic retrospective. In addition to filling the 6th floor with lots of photos and videos, there are several recreations, or "reperformances" as Abromovic is calling them, by actors, dancers and other performance artists, of her previous work. Meanwhile, for the duration of the exhibit--about 700 hours that is--Abromovic herself will be seated at a table in the main atrium. Museum guests are invited to sit across from her for a duration of their choosing and do nothing but meet her gaze and feel whatever you feel, in a piece called "The Artist is Present." This is what it looks like, from the outside:



Sitting in a chair for an hour is difficult. Try it for 700 hours, all the while under the gaze of lights, viewers, the art world, critics, fans, people who hate you, etc. Marina ain't kidding, y'all. I've been thinking so much about presence after seeing this piece because of the way the reperformances failed to create the kind of excitement, mystery, emotion, verve--any of the things you feel when you see "The Artist is Present" in the Atrium.

So then what is creating that feeling? The situation is so simple, and other than blinking and the slight movement from her breathing, she didn't move at all for the half hour I stood watching her. So how can it be that the reperformances don't carry the same weight, if the actions are the same as in the original pieces? And Abromovic herself has been coaching and training the performers for the past several weeks. It begs the question, what is performance? Is it the sum of the actions, or is it the intention behind the actions? (I recall Yeats here and "how can we know the dancer from the dance?") And if the reperformers are supposed to be truly in the moment, and truly present, then why not call them performers? Why divide the past from the present, if what you are looking for--I think--is the magic of the moment?

In the new piece, Abromovic is basically doing everything at once, controlling every aspect, either directly or indirectly, by just being present. One museum-goer opted to sit across from her for about two hours. This made me angry--this person was taking up so much time, other people were waiting, how selfish! But what does that say about my sense of time? What does that say about my own selfishness? What does it say about what I think about the act of being present, and the limits, or extensions of it?

One of the things I like most about "The Artist is Present" is that the catalog copy calls the piece "generous." Such a rarity in art, I think. A kind of slow, meaningful present generosity.

News of the Week

--Sometimes I find myself standing in my living room, looking over the shelves, reaching for a book I've read ten times, twenty times. This week, I pulled down Oyster by Janette Turner Hospital, which I first heard about from a Booksense76 newsletter--do those still exist? I wrote this post a while back about her, which popped into my brain when I decided that I had already said all the things I was about to say again. One of the things I wrote then was that her work is: "a response, a reaction, a dialogue with the entire scope of art and artforms: music, opera, poetry, painting." This is true, even more than I remember it. Oyster is complicated, difficult, incredibly rich with language and room and intellect. And I love it.

--I hate teenagers on the bus. I realize that the only time they have to be themselves is the short, unsupervised hour between when school ends and when they arrive at home. So, in a way, the bus is the pinnacle of their real experience with each other. I'm just depressed that the way they talk to each other is so cruel, so destructive. (I do not remember my teenage years being like this. Were they? Was it because I had a group of weirdo friends who made theater together and drank wine at the teacher's house?) Everything to them is about saving face, about being in the middle, not too much of anything. They don't even listen to each other, they just talk, make grand statements about the lesserness of each other. It's disguised by the talk of phones and shoes and what she or he said, and how they said it. Am I a grumpy old person cursing the kids for stepping on the lawn? All of it makes me feel very alone. And I hate it.

--Charles Busch and Julie Halston, and a victorious cavalcade of other fantastically talented people are performing in "The Divine Sister," down at Theater for the New City. They say it's totally sold out, but you can get on the wait list. Do try. It's extraordinary. I think what I find most refreshing about Charles's work is that every one of his plays, when you take away everything, all the references and laughs and over-the-top everything, his work is about finding who you are, and loving who you are, and making the past right, and owning yourself in whatever way you have to. It's theater like nobody else is doing right now, or has ever maybe, and I don't know how the walls of that little theater can ever contain all the joy that they create together. And I love it.

Two Things

1.
I'm not really a skier. Too much equipment, too much boots and poles and gloves. Too many layers. I like all the things that surround skiing. The whooshing sounds the other skiers make in the powder. The slow, swaying ascent to the top of the lifts. The warm fires in the lodge--though I've really only been skiing in places where the lodge looks like a cafeteria. I like the way your body feels spent and accomplished at the end of the day, and the hot shower that accompanies the exhaustion when you arrive back home. The Frito-Chili Pie that you eat to replenish the energy that you spent, the wine you drink and the champagne bottle you put out on the porch to chill and forget to open.

But the skiing itself--ostensibly the point--is another story. I'm scared of it. I'm afraid that if I start down the hill then I'll never stop. I'm afraid of the uncertain motions that the earth feels like its making underneath you. I don't like that the green circle trails at one mountain have no resemblance to the green circle trails on other mountains, and that you don't get to see the elevation changes in the trails when you study the map they give you. I don't like that your friends tell you that you can "do it," and you believe them, and then you nearly expire of frigid disbelief in what your body can accomplish on its own.

I think to really enjoy skiing, you have to be a little bit outside of your body, or, rather, you get the most benefit, the most pleasure from the skiing experience when you are willing to let go enough that you feel like you're flying. You want it to feel effortless. And so, paradoxically, in order to feel those real moments of effortlessness, you have to really be grounded in your body--you have to let your body make thousands of tiny movements and adjustments as fast as your body can make them. The movements have to be totally instinctual, unconscious.

Earlier this week, while I was at the top of the second section of a blue square trail--Fox Tail at Mountain Creek, in Vernon, New Jersey--I started thinking that maybe the only way to be outside of your body, is to really become it.


2.
The B61 bus is now the B62. Well, actually, they have split the line into two lines--the B61 now runs from Red Hook to Downtown Brooklyn, and the B62 runs from Downtown Brooklyn to Long Island City. Apparently, the Red Hook section of the line kept making the buses late, and then they would all stack up and make for a line of five or six buses all hitting a single stop at once. Or, they would all sit around at stops waiting to get back on schedule--and this makes the riders late.

I'm not sure where a person finds out about this before it happens. I found out when I was standing on Bedford and South 4th Street and the B62 arrived, which was a bus I'd never heard of. And I take buses a lot. There was a sign inside the bus that explained their thinking. I'm on board with this--ON BOARD, get it!--but I'm curious to see if it actually changes anything about how long it takes to get from one end of town to another, or if it actually makes the buses less late. What they should really do is stop that dumb curb installation at the intersection of Classon and Flushing Avenue--THAT'S why the bus uptown from there is always so dang late, because to squeeze all those lanes of traffic into the one within a single block is absurd. But I know why they do what they do. They do studies, right?

All this is to say: changes are happening.