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Lucienne S. Bloch
Odds and Ends

I think of my essays as walking papers, not those metaphorically handed to people being fired from jobs, but the outcomes of my daily pre-work walk in Central Park, step after step, a rhythmic pace that can and often does prompt a word, a phrase or, better, an idea with juice in it, electricity, the luster of usable. The rest is logistics, demand and supply of verbal vehicles that carry and deliver meaning, one word after another, sentence after sentence, or fail to do the job.

Deliveries I formerly received regularly and still need are now fewer and farther between, or stalled in my supply chain. I did get an unusual suggestion on my walk one morning last month when I reached into the pocket of a jacket I hadn’t worn since the previous spring and found a torn fragment of a handkerchief in it. Could I do a snippet here, a shred there, scraps from the ragbag of my memory stitched side-by-side with current material? Would the bits and pieces hold together? work with each other? Fall apart and scatter like dandelion fluff in a breeze? Label me suspect? Flighty? Desperate for something, anything, to put on paper? 

I have to wonder if I have lost my long-sightedness, or if that suggestion I got is related to the often erroneous snatches of an aging memory, or if some underlying connective logic will be there, elusive perhaps but operational. I also question the sustainability of this approach, and wonder if it will die naturally, gasping for breadth, length, and time. Still, it is doable, if not customary, and worth a try. 

Here are some odds and ends that recently knocked on the door to my attention; new ones may rap spontaneously, in the thick and thin of an irregular essay evolving over several days, weeks more likely, I don’t have deadlines to meet. These pieces are not stitched together. Tailors do what they advertise as invisible mending. Perhaps that may be at work here, the unseen business of gray matter threaded with words.

A friend I was talking with on the phone used a term I never heard before: executive function. This doesn’t refer to CEOs and such, though they likely possess that function, but pertains to a variety of behavioral traits and organizational skills, as my online query revealed. Among those skills and personal attributes are a working memory, emotional control, a planning ability, attentiveness, adaptable thinking, good management of time, self—monitoring. I get borderline grades on a few of those traits and abilities, flunk some. Even so, flunking isn’t necessarily final. Tests can be retaken, scores improved, behaviors practiced. Make—do is also functional.

The air this morning felt heavy, pregnant with tiny inklings of possibility, a gumbo of foggy notions waiting for a passing breeze to do its cloud-lifting job, deliver those inklings waiting to be born, to breathe, to become ideas that toddle across a page in words, or they don’t.

Time to quit for the day, my spine says so; I can only sit for a few hours. I don’t wear a watch on my wrist, or hanging from a fabric or metal chain around my neck, or pinned to a dress or a jacket lapel as my grandmother wore her ornamental but accurate timepiece, now in its original velvet box on a shelf in my closet. There is a small battery-powered clock on my desk, but its face is turned to the wall. I don’t like constant reminders of time’s inexorable passage. I don’t like time passing is more to the point. If I could I would deep-freeze the memorable moments of my life up to the present one, thaw a few occasionally, savor them again. Little green peas can be frozen without losing their shape, color, or taste. Instead, I have to settle for language’s preservative powers, effective at best, more often faint whispers of what was, and when and where, but only seldom why.

I often wish my essays weren’t CliffsNotes, study guides to myself. That’s the self-attention inherent to writing personal essays. Yet I know my work interests other people. That’s the mystery of language.

String theories that attempt to account for our universe’s workings are ever-ongoing brainwork for theoretical physicists. I don’t even pretend to grasp what those theories posit but string, yes, that’s something most people are familiar with, have likely used or encountered its practical attributes in one way or another. Beads, violins, parades, chains, laundry hung outdoors, trains, strip malls, all of those and more are strung in lines of various—

Where this is headed is too obvious, irredeemably banal. I won’t pursue it.

A few of the essays I wrote over the years are tall stories: not wholly false, not entirely true either. Tall stories are wishful sleights of mind, often humorous tales we tell to present better people to others and to ourselves, sparking interest in the life being lived. I matter, tall stories announce. I am more than a sum of days, more than I seem, braver, kinder, smarter, funnier, stronger, happier. I occasionally tell myself a tall story as I tap keys that may or may not open doors for other people. A chancy business. I could amble further on this byway, but will stop while I maybe be somewhere, if not ahead.

Birders, my husband among them, call a bird that has strayed out of its species’ age-old habitat an “accidental visitor.” That avian term speaks volumes to me, an ongoing multi-book history of immigrants and refugees like my parents with their infant, me, who fled their native habitats and landed elsewhere, becoming accidental residents. This is not wordplay, it is a disquieting feeling of contingency that I have lived with since childhood, one that has defied me, common sense, time, authentication, happenstance, and ignoring.

I am breathing, inspiring air, exhaling it, over and over, waiting for inspiration of other sorts, the puff of an idea, a gust of words, whatever blows or wafts my way.

On my usual walk in the park this morning I saw, most unusually, a mirage rising from the pavement circling the Great Lawn. It was a girl roller-skating toward me on that same pavement I used to roller-skate on for hours at a time, around and around repeatedly, flying through the air like a squawky canary sprung from her cage of discipline and routines, regularly yellow, temporarily red-hot headstrong, potentially an intrepid accomplished who-knows-what. I flapped some wings I hadn’t yet grown in the hope that nervy flapping would carry me, eventually firm up my confidence, stretch my reach, reveal my vistas. A misguided hope, I would eventually learn.

I know that mirages are optical illusions, tricks of light that conjure up water in deserts, objects that appear to float in the air, shimmering walls rising from the ground. Are they also memories? lightning strikes in a brainstorm? I often have fleeting memories but they are largely uncommitted to the reality of feet on pavement prompting visions and, an hour later, words that convey a memory to its disclosure. Still, largely is not never.

Failure to thrive: a phrase that is usually applied to newborn infants and children below the age of five. That is too narrow an application, as I see and know it. Many millions of adults all over the world are not thriving physically, emotionally, monetarily, educationally, occupationally, companionably, every which way we fail each other.

Today’s weather in my rooftop workroom that lacks air-conditioning is heat-wave hot. The window is open, the roller shade is halfway down, a fan is whirring, the ice cubes in my coffee are goners. If I concentrate on cold things and conditions, maybe the power of suggestion will do its job of lowering the heat I sit in.

Freezer. Cold snap. Frostbite. Blizzard. Iceberg. Glacier. Icy glaciers. that’s a chilling prospect.

As glaciers move they create changes of several kinds, many detrimental. Arctic glaciers melt into seas, soon to flood coasts and islands as global climate continues to warm, inexorably, it seems these days, with fires raging, heat waves and rainfalls busting records, crops withering in growing fields. Alpine glaciers are presently inching upward into nothingness. Stationary old ice is also melting, exposing to rot and decay what some of it formerly preserved: bodies and DNA of prehistoric people, rudimentary weapons and tools, clothing, marine life, evidence of ancient ecosystems, mastodons, tiny wingless fleas, all once trapped in ancient ice and permafrost. There is a flea biting me these days: the withering of subject matter. The more I write, the less I haven’t already tackled and trapped on paper, or tried to and failed.

I am still sweltering. Time to leave this hotbox. I could have quit an hour ago, but didn’t, ever-hopeful is my workplace rule of thumb.

“Heavily passed the night” wrote Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey that I reread last week. That phrase popped up from the page and struck me as my truth, though not a universal one. I toss and turn most nights, chasing ideas and words that pound the pavements in my head, only occasionally reaching them, tagging them for future use, or not. Eventually, exhausted, I sleep, or don’t.

Every so often I sense my parents peering over my shoulder, whispering in my ear as I type or delete words, compose sentences, finish paragraphs, saying yes, maybe so, but you forgot this, omitted that, ignored a crucially important difference, mistook the particulars of our lives in the places we left, confused the years, misunderstood the way it was, who we were, what we did, why it mattered, how we felt. I want to tell them I can’t know what they never told me or wrote down before they died, I can only guess, feel, approximate, presume, imagine, when I write about the lives that made and shaped mine, like clay, the bowl I was to fill.

The word sprezzatura is buzzing around me now like a bee circling a flower before diving into its nectar. I learned that word many years ago from my piano teacher, who used it constantly, as if repeating it might improve my graceless pounding on the keyboard. I no longer play the piano, I quit decades ago, but that word has stayed with me, alerting me to its presence every once in a while, as it did a minute ago.

I wish sprezzatura were more than an idea for me, an active and constant reality, say, that would lighten what I feel and do, lift me above everyday obstacles, higher than the ground fogs of uncertainties, beyond the confines of cautious. Impossible! I would need a character transplant. Still, at least the word is here, flittering in my air today, dancing on my lips. Fizzy zippy jazzy zingy sprezzatura. I could invoke sprezzatura for an hour, a week, what is left of my life, and never get closer to having what it means. A conga line of other words prances behind sprezzatura, among them panache, aplomb, verve, audacity, finesse, charisma: more qualities missing from my natural and nurtured givens. I am not grousing, just noting a few of the features not found on my personal blueprint. I can simulate some of them, sometimes. Not often enough.

I am shadow-boxing today, sparring with a frequent opponent: my difficulty in finding fresh material to KO on paper.

Civil dawn begins when the sun is six degrees below the horizon, ends at sunrise. Civil dusk begins at sunset, ends when the sun is six degrees below the horizon. l spotted this information in a footnote of a book about 19th century polar exploration that I leafed through last week in my dentist’s waiting room. I know that light is precious in the Arctic region for its brief appearances during the long hard dark winters, but I don’t understand why the word civil, with its polite and non-military meanings, is used about light. Still, it hints at uncivil light: nuclear radiation, out-of-control fires, hot-headed authority, flaring tempers, scorching racism, incendiary politics, flaming brutality, lurid misogyny, flamboyant thrusts emitted by self-boosting rockets: a few of many glaringly uncouth behaviors I wouldn’t think of responding to courteously.

I feel, just now, like what it says about hair on the bottle of shampoo I used earlier today: brittle, dull, dry, flyaway. If hope is “the thing with feathers,” as a deservedly revered poet wrote, then hopeless might be the thatch of tangled shapeless notions I can’t manage without surges of verbal rinses brightening the daily stint of the work I choose to do.

This morning the air was soft and silky on my skin, like the thin floaty negligees my mother wore at home in the evenings when only our immediate family was there, as if she were a gift to us, precious, beautifully packaged, irreplaceable. When fully dressed she lost all hints of silkiness, of being swayable like the leaf-heavy boughs I heard rustling this morning. Today’s walk was a font of suggestions: visual, audible, palpable and, evidently, usable.

I never invited my school friends for sleepovers because I didn’t want to risk their seeing my father’s bedtime attire: a sarong over the lower half of a BVD. The sarongs were evidence of my parents’ four years in the Far East before I was born. They weren’t pretty, like my mother’s robes and silk scarves, but they were strong, not because a man, my father, wore them, but because of the identical interlocked patterns printed on them. Connectedness is the stuff of power, I knew that even then.

This, the above, is the perfidy of language: suggestive subtexts in every word, waiting to surface and snatch attention, usage maybe. I didn’t intend to think about power, and I won’t do it now! 

The ambitious owner of a highly successful website, one that spreads dangerous lies and misinformation along with less toxic content, changed the name of that site to Metaverse. Meta Incognita would be a better descriptor. That’s the name the first Queen Elizabeth gave to the area beyond the known world that Martin Frobisher explored, seeking and mapping a navigable passage through uncharted Arctic waters that would be a shortcut to the ocean on the other side of the world. I often feel that I am in unknown waters when I write, searching for hospitable shores, as Frobisher found on Baffin island. His two ships on the first voyage he made were angelically, perhaps hopefully named the Gabriel and the Michael. I have countless words available, but finding a welcoming place to land them on, a spot where they can do their thing, name this or that, sing their songs, voice their hopes and regrets, dance their jigs, waltzes, tap routines, is difficult, though not yet beyond me. 

I am not an eager conversation-maker, perhaps because I spend so much time talking to myself, silently, the only sound rat-tat-tat taps on a keyboard as what pops to mind evolves on a screen, not exactly intentionally, not haphazardly either. This is a mysterious process, to me it is, but I decided a long time ago to let it happen.

Last night i dusted off my college yearbook and looked through it for the first time since I graduated in what now seems as archaic an epoch as the Pleistocene. I wanted to prepare for going to a big-number reunion, or at least considering it. I never went to a reunion before, and my misgivings about attending the upcoming one were intensified by what I saw in that yearbook yesterday, something I didn’t notice when I got that book a week before commencement.

The soon-to-be graduates were photographed in a head-and-shoulders pose with identical accessories: a chiffon stole baring our shoulders and a pearl necklace, our own or provided by the photographer’s assistant along with the stole; only four of over four hundred seniors are not wearing necklaces. Some strands of pearls are slightly longer or larger, the drape of the chiffon varies, as does the tilt of our heads, the angle of our torsos, our hairdos, the expressions on our unique faces. Even so, we are uniform visions of our era’s near-mandatory ladylikeness.

What I didn’t notice before, or forgot, or didn’t want to remember, is obvious: I am the only person in those photos wearing a double strand of small pearls, choker-length, a gift from my parents when I turned eighteen. I wore it unintentionally, but it strikes me today as the on-target accessory for that photo in the yearbook. Different is what I felt on that campus, choked is how I breathed there, uneasily, at a time in my life when I longed for the bracing oxygen of belonging. On a page in my yearbook, in my memories of those years in that place, I am and remain an oddity, a extraneous, a quota number, an outsider, NOKD, not our kind, dear.

Why go back to that?

I have to question my new fragmentary approach to writing an essay. I don’t foresee a rosy future for picking through the mixed bag of ideas that occur to me nowadays, randomly volunteering for service. That bag may not refill itself, also foreseeable.

The sharply angled elbows of the word zigzag are poking me for attention. I can ignore those jabs without fear of being indicted and demoted for failing to order a zigzag course, as happened to Captain McVay after his ship, the U.S.S. Indianapolis was torpedoed and sunk in the Philippine Sea in July of 1945, soon after delivering its top-secret cargo to an island in that sea. Over 300 lives were lost. I didn’t know about this event or that naval tactic until last week, when I read a magazine article about U. S. Naval tragedies. 

Maybe it is generally safer, better, for people to do what the Navy’s zigzag regulation requires when danger lurks unseen: take erratic routes, capricious and unpredictable, in order to avoid hostile confrontations, leaden mood sinks, and to stay afloat and intact. 

Erratic describes how my work proceeds these days: unpredictably. Who but I would indict me anyhow if I failed to safeguard my job?

My new driver’s license came in yesterday’s mail, a Real-ID compliant document. The Real ID Act is a Federal law, prompted by 9/11, enacted in 2005, soon to finally go into effect. That Act required years—consuming changes in state-issued drivers’ licenses and other documents for acceptable proof of identity with a Real ID-compliant document, such as an enhanced driver’s license, a U.S. passport, a U.S. military card, or a DHS Trusted Traveler card, and other sorts of recognizably official identification.

I understand and appreciate the need for security, but I wish the DHS and Congress had found a better label than Real ID, with its implications of previous and all other IDs being worthless. Are people without Real ID—compliant documents not real Americans? Unacceptable? Left out and left behind? Couldn’t that Act have been labeled less judgmentally? 

I now have two compliant IDs: a valid U.S. passport and my enhanced New York State driver’s license. The enhancement consists of a second identical but smaller photo of my face on the bottom right of the card. The little photo is transparent, literally, printed on see-through plastic. As I see it, that transparency suggests unreality, a phantom image of me, not the person alive and kicking, presently driving words across a screen.

New Real ID or not, phantoms are not a novelty for me. I was always conscious of what happened to people like me in the war I only imagined. Now, those spectral notions have a material presence I will see on the card in my wallet that I carry every day. There will be no possibility, memory or wallet loss apart, of forgetting or failing to routinely acknowledge that what haunts me also identifies me, not really, not wholly, but partly and acceptably. We inhabit what physicists call a charmed and privileged universe, referring to its quarkiness and observability. As I see it, our planet in that universe is far from charming at present, even farther from worldwide privilege as starvation increases, children are shot in their classrooms, mobs riot, big cities choke for air, mayhem is on the rise, as are tyrants and their fanatical minions. I could—

Better by far, a global chorus of lament, trillions of tears that could wash our planet and all of its inhabitants clean, fed, housed, fair-minded, at ease. Wishful, maybe, but not undoable.

Sometimes it feels as though I have been snatched and taken into captivity in English’s vast and varied territory. All these years of speaking and writing English, and I still sense that I am a foreigner in it, seeking a place to settle there, grow roots, call home. I have a home in reality, but not in the language I use. I don’t expect to find that dwelling place in English, not at this point in my journey through the years, but trying is what matters: essays are attempts. My dictionary says so, and so do I. 

An article in The New York Times caught my attention. It was about the fast-growing number of fulfillment centers, a growth fueled by the ever-increasing number of online vendors who warehouse their goods in vast central locations where orders can be fulfilled, packaged and shipped cost-effectively.

Imagine today’s technology on steroids, a future of complete fulfillment on demand. Anything a person might need, want, or dream of—food, shelter, love, fine health, friends, success, knowledge, power, sex, good looks—would be theirs for the asking: voiced commands to artificially intelligent machines linked to warehouses stocked with ready-to-incarnate avatars equipped with humankind’s universal needs, hopes, desires. No charge for the goods. Fast delivery. Satisfaction guaranteed. Trying would vanish, as would failing, longing, and succeeding. On the plus side, nobody would be hungry, homeless, sick or lonely. Except for an end to those and other miseries, it is not a future I would choose to live in.

My choice is irrelevant. With or without me present, futures will arrive, stay for a while, lapse into history. Babies will be born, tears shed, love lost and found, species of animals and plants will become extinct, teeth will rot, bones will break, megacities will multiply, lakes evaporate, the earth will quake, today’s ideas will be scrapped like rusted-out cargo ships, memory banks will fill and fill, ongoing endless streams of coded stuff with minds of their own. I am not sorry about the likelihood of my dying before I have to live in such an end-of-my-world tomorrow.

Viz: from the Latin videlicit: it is permitted to see. This is according to my deskside dictionary, chock-full of helpful and interesting entries. I was leafing through the vees looking for vitreous and viz caught my eye.

Viz is also used for specificity: Namely; That is to say; In other words; To wit; As follows.

I hear viz differently, mispronounced as wiz. When I was a child, I often heard people around me substituting a w for a v. This was common for Mitteleuropeans newly arrived in America. Wiz for wizardly escapes from danger and worse sounds better to me than needing permission to see.

I would like to believe I control my work engine, but I know better. It coughs and sputters, runs slower and slower, stops cold often and randomly, leaving me stalled, here, now. 

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