Ghosts

Tonight I'm thinking of ghosts. Not the kind you see, pale or white or looking as though they are draped in sheets. Not those of the low-pitched moan or the occasional shriek tearing through the night. The ghosts that I encounter most are aural, residing inside my skull.

What do I hear? Always I listen. Always trying to find something clear through the constant chatter and buzz playing like a radio tuned to several stations at once. The overlapping dialogue, the multiple tuggings at the sleeve like too many children calling for my attention. I don't mind so much sorting those out, though. What troubles me more is the steady whisper of defeat, of discouragement always hissing in my internal ear.

What do I hear? Before I sat down at the computer tonight, I looked at the CD shelf in our study. I hoped that music instrumental would prove instrumental, would feed something, silence something, lift something to the surface. But I still hear the hissing, the steady whisper so common I don't really distinguish it most of the time from the sound of the wind outside or the hum of the refrigerator or the burble of the television in the other room.

Two impulses have pulled me as long as I can remember in opposite directions. The first is the desire to explore the sensations I sort through constantly in my head. As far back as I can remember, the world has seemed to speak to me in its surfaces and its depths, in shadows and colors and blinding lights. Whenever I sit still long and don't let myself be distracted, the ordinariness of life slips away and I find a gleaming melody of experience to immerse myself within. If I only let it happen, if I only turn everything off for a minute or two, a shimmer rises like a tide and I can float or dive or roll in it for hours.

But the other impulse does distract me. It pushes and shoves and chastises me about letting my mind and heart explore. Its chief accusation is that I'm wasting time. No one, it says, has any real interest in my desire to drift and play through what I see and hear and feel and taste each day, each moment. This other voice points me to productive work like my job or chores about the house or socially acceptable interactions with friends and family and the thousand obligations of being human with other people, going out to dinner, catching a movie with friends, making sure I see this week's big game or the must-see episode of my favorite night time drama. My only value to the world, it tells me, is to be normal and interesting and entertaining in the ways most other people seem to seek to be. And these strange thoughts that pass through my mind deserve no more than a small corner every now then so long as they promise to behave, so long as I don't follow them too far or try to spread them or share them with others, so long as I don't devote any real time to them.

I wonder if every artist feels, as I do, like a criminal sometimes, like a pervert? I wonder if we all carry the guilt of our deviance? Maybe some get used to it. Maybe some learn to embrace it. I only know that for myself that until I find a way to embrace this strangeness, I'll always be a little crazy. I'll always be refereeing this wrestling match between demon and angel, never quite sure which is which, or whether they will both turn out to be me. These two ghosts that haunt me and won't let me sleep.

Thanksgiving

I'm thinking about another Thanksgiving a long time ago, 22 years to be exact, an eon in football time, when I sat in a friend's empty apartment, staring at the television all day. It was sunny outside, but cold, the light falling through east-facing windows in the morning, but slipping behind the shadow of the hill the apartment house sat on by mid afternoon. I was deeply depressed and didn't know it clearly yet, but I was just about to drop out of college and leave town.

Everyone else was gone for the holiday, so I was alone, which was what I preferred to be. But it also terrified me because I realized that I could just step out of life, could just stop working, talking, doing, thinking, maybe even feeling. I didn't want to die exactly, but I realized that you can live your life in such a way that you've reached the next best thing: nothing. And I wasn't sure that if I tasted that I would ever have the energy to go back to living again. Thankfully, as it turned out, I did.

Yesterday, my wife asked me if I could point to any accomplishments I was proud of. I know she would name to several things she believes I have achieved. I know she considers me accomplished. My mind clicked through events and goals I've set for myself and completed, honors or awards I've earned, diplomas, acknowledgments. But I'm not being modest when I say that I don't generally take any particular pride in them. I'm an educated man; I earn a decent living; I am doing a more than acceptable job of helping to raise two sons. My wife and I have even recently to purchase a house. All of these are notable milestones. I appreciate that I've managed to reach them.

I can't help thinking, though, of achievements in terms of what I leave behind when I'm gone. A few days ago, the director Robert Altman died. He was 81. His obituaries each listed a string of films--some successful, others not so much--than he completed. Ten years from now, or twenty years from now, I can walk into a video store (or a store for whatever medium they'll be putting movies on then) and see copies of the films he made and watch his handiwork.

When the journalist Ed Bradley died a couple of weeks ago, I had the same thought. I can see old videos of his stories, read about the events he covered and the people he interviewed, listen to his broadcasts as host of "Jazz at Lincoln Center." Whatever happens to his body, he has left behind a body of work.

But the only body I have is the one I inhabit right now, this container of flesh and organs and blood that will, in time, cease to function, decay, and eventually disappear. My name sits atop a few dozen stories that I wrote years ago when I was a journalist, stories buried in the archives of newspapers in a handful of cities where absolutely no one remembers me. Two or three columns, the same number of book reviews, a couple of short stories, a few pieces in academic anthologies, this is the sum total of my productivity over 45 and a half years of life. It's less than many have published but more than most. That isn't the problem.

The problem is that I know neither of those bodies really counts: the physical one or the textual one. The body that counts most is even more ephemeral. It consists of the choices that make up my life itself. It consists of what I do each day than can never be captured or recorded. It consists of the moral quality of everything I've said or done and the kind of person I will, in the end, have turned out to be. I could be hit by a bus tomorrow, but I don't believe that I can yet say what the quality of that life is; I can't say whether it is, on balance, commendable or ordinary or a catalog of missed opportunities. The difficulty of my life is the not knowing whether I'm getting it right at all.

On that day 22 years ago, I watched "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World," and I laughed from my toenails to my ears, with my whole self, because I needed to laugh deeply and because there was absolutely nothing in that brief period between me and what I needed to do. And I watched Doug Flutie heave a prayer of a throw into the arms of a leaping teammate 50 yards down a soggy football field. I leapt and screamed and said "Wow." I watched it all in awe.

It's Thanksgiving. I'm thankful for the awe, the bits of it I've felt then and since. Maybe that is what I'm proudest of, that for a few moments in my life, I've been able to erase everything that doesn't matter and give myself a glimpse of just being alive. That's something to shoot for; that's something to achieve.