My own personal girl with a pearl earring

Tracy Chevalier, who wrote "Girl with a Pearl Earring," a historical novel that speculates on how Vermeer's painting of that name came into existence, was only 13 when I stood in front of that extraordinary work of art in the Autumn of 1975 at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.  She wouldn't write that novel for another 24 years, which I might consider fortunate because it enabled me to tell my own story about the painting.

I didn't have to work at it the way Tracy certainly did, however,  because for me the story flowed directly out of the painting in the instant I turned a corner in the halls and galleries of the museum and saw it shimmering in front of me in perfect illumination that separated it from everything else so that it occupied my full view and attention.  It struck me immediately with the full force of real experience as no other painting has ever done.  It did that because it evoked the unbearable grief I had been feeling in my own life due to the breakup of my first (second?) major relationship, which was with a very pretty girl named Pamela.

The proximity of that pain over-determined my perception of Vermeer's painting.  I saw with perfect clarity and total absence of any doubt that the beautiful young girl with a pearl earring was turning away from me forever and was taking a last brief look over her shoulder at the man she no longer loved.

Pam had just broken up with me after a year of pleasurable dalliance and/or love (complicated by ambiguity and regret that I won't go into because it would interferes with my memory of the sensation in that moment). The scene of our falling apart might have been lifted out of an episode from a weekday afternoon soap opera, and it was accompanied by a kind of axiomatic corollary, which was that, in order to make a clean getaway, Pamela felt it was necessary to provide a justification for her departure by telling me why she was leaving.  For me, the girl with a pearl earring had been caught by Vermeer's photographic portrait in the moment immediately after having spoken the thoughtless and hurtful words.

Compared to the agony of separation, maybe it doesn't matter what Pamela actually said though I remember it with keen precision. Her words would have been all the more unreliable since the next customer of her wonderful charms was already waiting in another tent not far away.

I might now look upon this episode as one of the difficult experiences I had to go through that helped me to change and to grow and become a better person.  People often talk about their early heartbreaks as having been painful at the time but constructive ("positively formative") in the long run.

Antonio Machado, who had a talent for coming up with memorable phrases as a leading light of the "Generation of '98," agrees that such experiences are good for people when they happen early in life:

Eran ayer mis dolores como gusanos de seda
que iban labrando capullos.

(They were yesterday my pains like silk worms
that went making cocoons.)

but it's different if they occur later:

Hoy son mariposas negras.

(Today they are black butterflies.)

I believe I can say with reasonable authority that one such experience is enough to last for a lifetime, though I've lived through enough recurrences to have become a connoisseur of failed relationships and could probably assemble a compendium (given a decent publisher advance).

My experience of Vermeer's painting was all my own.  It has nothing to do with Vermeer's actual intention or Tracy Chevalier's historical interpretation of how it came about.  I try now in vain to re-experience what I felt in the autumn of 1975, but I haven't stood in front of the original painting again either.  Maybe if I did that I would dissolve into a puddle on the floor.

I did run into Pamela sometime in the mid-nineties.  It turned out we'd been living near one another on Bedford Street in the village.  She had long since been divorced from my immediate successor, who had thrown her out after only about a year.  Her current husband was a car mechanic and he was in the process of divorcing her too.   We went out for a couple of weeks, during which time I learned enough about her (while also recalling the aforementioned ambiguities and regrets) to be quite content that she'd broken up with me twenty years before., because the truth is that Pam was an outrageous slut. I think I'm more open-minded than most people and I don't make stern judgments about that sort of thing, but I'd rather not get tangled up with someone like that again either.

Home Heaven

I must dismount down in the Home Depot off Hamilton Avenue because they don't let me ride through the aisles any more, singing at the top of my voice like a crazy fool—a jolly good fellow should old acquaintance be forgot—belting it out like a degenerated opera star and nobody even blinks in this part of town where it’s better not to acknowledge the howling whack jobs.

Listen sweetheart, I’m working on my own shack for a change. I'm Handy Guy the Super Guy, this bicycle my Super Truck, a wire basket on the back and items flowing off the shelves like some Goofy cartoon. Me the handy fool with a screw gun, hanging tough with the Guidos, Brooklyn Visigoths, selected by Darwin for dumb-fuckedness to be the Gods of Drywall, "Forget About It."  They should use me for one of those info-mercials, a shopping idiot who buys everything in the store. Let me tell you about electrical, let me tell you about plumbing, this is my own house we’re talking over here so no indulgence goes too far.

I dreamed I carried a four-by-eight sheet of three-quarter A-C plywood naked on my bicycle, howling like a baboon, and I’m not entirely sure it was a dream.  Today we’re after minor items, no industrial-strength stuff and I don’t even need a list. I just close my eyes and something’s calling me over there in Paint, three tubes of caulk for the upstairs bathroom, another quart of polyurethane for the stairs, give me a little of that Gorilla Glue, slide over to the electrical aisles to scoop up seven more boxes—four outlets, two switches and a junction, two three-eighths nipples for each,  I do electrical in my boxers and not one corner shall be cut because it's my own house this time and

I'm on a mission from the holy church of Obsessive Remodeling. I even told them I’m building a synagogue to avoid paying sales tax. Thou shalt not skimp on small items, for thine is the power and the glory of Home Ownership, let nothing slow your progress toward Do It Yourself Heaven. Yet another fifty-foot roll of grounded cable to reach the bedroom from the breaker box, a dozen of those ducky little 50-watt halogen reflector bulbs. Take me to the station and

put me on a train, haul me over to the ventilation aisle to snarf some four-inch elbows, fasten your seat belts and let me recite the gospel of Fresh Air, ventilation for an asthmatic apartment dweller, roaches crawling out of my ears, I’m an expert on this ventilation topic, recirculation of warm air when the frost is on the window, exhaust the stale gases in the hot season, suck it in up here and blow it out down there, air flow is a question of relative pressure, like water running downhill and who wants to lose his eyesight and manhood sitting at a computer? This is a job for a real man, a Handyman, the word the suits use for an insult but it sure beats trudging on the step machine or hitting golf balls until I turn blue. Pour that concrete, boys, I plan to remodel This Old House until my bank account zeroes out and I'm eating cat food.

I'm back, sort of..

I ceased active blogging ten years ago and have hardly glanced at Fluorescent Elephant since then. I'm now considering starting again due entirely to surprising encouragement from an old, old friend who expressed interest in my writing and to whom I had sent a link.
For the first time in ages I've reviewed my old entries here and have remembered how engaged with blogging I was back then.

A number of things have happened since 2006, but I don't remember why I stopped making entries. Writing requires a concentrated effort, obviously, and maybe my attention has become too diffused. What was it that happened in 2006 that might have scattered my focus? I'm not sure, but in August of that year I was diagnosed with a heart problem that was serious enough to require open heart surgery. Was that it? I have no idea, and anyway, reasons are important but in the end they don't matter as much as the effects they produce in our lives.  (Or is that just the current therapeutic trend?)

But maybe there's a clue after all.  Looking at my old blog entries and discovering the changes in the Blogger system, I find some unpublished drafts written back then, one of which goes like this:

It was a dark and stormy night. I was eating cheese and thinking of changing the name of this blog to Choking the Bishop ...but then I thought, Why bother? because it's really just more of the same old bullshit was a dark and stormy night. We were sitting around the campfire when it occurred to me that this blog is the final refuge of my dreams, and what I need to do is get up and leave this dark and stormy night behind.

I'm guessing I wrote that sometime after the surgery when I hit a wall of severe depression that might have been accompanied by a failure of confidence and imagination.

But what's this, a self-obsessed Facebook diary?

Ok, so I became slightly addicted to 1st person perspective (albeit with a certain necessary narrative distance) because it somehow allowed me to feel as though I actually existed in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, but now we're getting into murky territory.  I've spent a good percentage of my life in that country and I'm comfortable there, but this blog is not True Confessions and such raw personal narration is not my thing.

Meanwhile, another old unpublished entry, about the building I live in, also caught my eye. Something about the feeling it expressed about my relations with children took me back a decade to the way things were in those days.

Since I wrote that entry, the character of the building has changed quite a bit. When prices in this part of the city started rocketing upwards as part of the "Brooklyn renaissance" that accelerated the process of gentrification, old residents took advantage of the opportunity to make a killing and sold out to wealthier buyers in the familiar pattern that's quickly reinforced and enhanced by the big realtors like Corcoran, Coldwell Banker, Century 21, etc.

The new population of residents includes a significant percentage of very wealthy people who regard older residents like me as lower class. We seem to have crossed the threshold beyond which Veblen's concept of "conspicuous consumption" predominates. Below that line of demarcation, it's hard to tell who's richer than whom because having money is considered embarrassing and is therefore hidden behind an 'everyman' style of presentation that includes cargo pants, running shoes and baseball caps.

Beyond that boundary, such self-deprecating restraint is overwhelmed by the opportunity to follow the fashions in glossy display ads that feature whatever the merchandise is wearing this year. The difference is sudden and sharp, almost like the phase change where water turns to ice at precisely 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

I just published that old entry STET, only changing the title to 'Gated' because it describes the character of an earlier condition of exclusivity and privilege. Now I will submit this one to the scrutiny of one or two readers who stumble in here looking for an elephant, and then there's a wacky number from my remodeling days...

Gated

I live in an old factory consisting of four separate buildings arranged in a massive square fortress with a large tree-lined courtyard in the center.‭ ‬The courtyard encloses a lawn that provides a protected zone for small children to romp safely in,‭ ‬and this has become a powerful magnet for a well-to-do class of young families who've been moving out here and who now regard this building as their proper domicile.‭ When I bought my one-bedroom unit several years ago,‭ ‬the residents were mostly teachers and the courtyard was quiet,‭ ‬but now the building has been taken over by all these young couples whose families forked over the vastly higher asking prices and whose children play constantly in the courtyard.‭

I feel as though ‬I'm living in a giant nursery.‭ ‬On weekdays,‭ ‬while the parents are away at legal and financial jobs in the city,‭ ‬dark-skinned nannies sit sternly on the courtyard benches watching over their unruly urchins.‭ Returning in the afternoons,‭ ‬the parents change into informal clothes and gather in chatty cliques on the lawn beneath my upstairs window. The proud fathers roll in the grass with their babies while the mothers look on and mingle happily with other parents.‭ It's a family scene, an unusually social setting for a residential building.  (I often hear the word "community" and see it posted in the entrance hallway.)

Weekends are pandemonium.‭ ‬The courtyard is in a continuous uproar,‭ ‬like a public playground.‭ ‬It's a rare moment when I can't hear the excited screams of happy children,‭ ‬a pleasant cacophony that echoes off the courtyard walls and overwhelms my solitude.‭ ‬I wade through swarms of charming toddlers on my way out to the street and on my return home from handyman jobs and grocery errands.‭ ‬On weekends I hold open the exterior door for the endless parade of young mothers with strollers,‭ ‬bowing my head in silent obligation and with no expectation of gratitude,‭ ‬for I'm an outsider here now.‭ ‬A childless and solitary man is a pariah in the nursery,‭ ‬a social anomaly who's obliged to demonstrate unnatural devotion to all these adorable little creatures who are already overindulged and whose tiny hands yet grasp for the reins of the world.‭