It has been difficult to write lately. December has been thick, so abundantly thick with its air, it often seems like a Herculean task merely to lift the pen out of the pocket, to prop the eyelids open with it, to look, to scribble, to look. Everybody seems to be just trying_to_make_it. The weekend, the vacation, the pillow. Some place where you can exhale, feel yourself, breathe. Heads move quietly and obediently in and out of the train. Ties gargle cigarette smoke by the canisters. Electricity replaces sunlight. And one can’t help but ask – where’s the story in that? Where is the story?

So you begin to look. Not at just how the womans’ cheekbones tell you “I’ve seen some shit in my time,” not just at how the street musician wraps the saxophone around his neck like a dance partner, but more. More. Where’s the story? What is it? How is it? Where does it all come from?

Walking home I see always an old man with the flattest stare god has ever slapped across a human face. It’s simply a disk, an empty plate, asking for nothing, saying nothing. He is in a wheelchair by the entrance. The twilight thins over the retirement home, no one pulls him in, no one pulls him out. He sits. His face sits. The chair stands. I wonder time and time again - what is he thinking about?

Here, of course, he is mine, and I can stuff him with anything. The fact is, (I can say) his face is paralyzed. He had fallen asleep with the window open several years ago and had woken up immobile. A freak accident. It happens. He sits now and wonders about the new pool they are installing in the retirement home. He cannot, for the life of him, understand why someone would install a swimming pool in a residence where nobody can even walk. His mind crawls over itself. It is all he thinks about. When his daughter phones him he walks her through each possible conspiracy.

(Here, he is able to talk. We dutifully suspend our disbelief).

The conspiracies drive his daughter mad. She becomes haunted with dreams of management buyouts, retirement homes turned luxury apartment complexes, nurse bribes, retiree diasporas, her fathers’ possible schizophrenia (she had never seen the swimming pool), and so on. She becomes irritable, paranoid, and upset. She begins to frequent the gym with the passion of an antichrist. She begins to squirm from her husband who is a former top-line project manager but now teaches typing classes in Albany. His self-esteem sinks even lower. He begins to call Svetlana, his former lover in Tashkent. Svetlana, a mid-aged sales clerk with a warm face and subtle, charming wrinkles begins to dream of an exit visa. She begins to reminisce more and more of the old theater where they had met. He was in charge of the stage, the lights, it was Leningrad in the 80’s and anything, for that brief and inescapable moment, was possible. These thoughts chain her into a state of constant anxiety. Svetlana begins to neglect customers and more and more frequent the local theater. She begins to re-read her copies of Shakespeare and Pasternak. She begins to fumble with plates, hum in the shower. Three times a month she goes to the store to buy eggs and two times a month coming back she drops them. In the autumn of 2007 the streets of Tashkent become glazed with the clear and yellow jelly of broken white shells. People slip.

And so on.

But - these stories, even if I can muse on them, are not mine. I have come to realize that. My stories are much closer, they are right. here. Still, as so often it happens, I cannot reach them. It’s the things that are closest to us, after all, that are hardest to grasp, the hardest to understand. Can it be, after all this scribbling, that our own stories are the hardest of them to tell? Haven’t we been taught that it is all the other way around?

So, I stop. I look at my ashtray. I look to the side of the table where the wall is an endless white. This has been my space, my endless space between the table and the wall into which I look, into which I scribble. Sometimes. Most of the time I plainly smoke, bend my head down into my open hand, the lit cigarette like a dandelion sticking its way into my hair, I try to close my eyes, to think what I want to say, all the bla’s and none of the bleh’s but then suddenly open my eyes, remembering that they must be open, that I must simply point them into that space and that everything will be all right. But, as they say, it ain’t easy. The space has not always been there. It is not always there now. Hell, I had no idea what it was until I read about it.

Still, it is that space that I come back to and it is in that space that I sometimes begin to see. Small things. A branch, perhaps. My branch. The way it bends like a racing track over the fog. A memory of a basketball game played suddenly comes out of nowhere. Small details here also. A backboard over my head, the pointed shoes of the coach, the feeling of a marionette. Different lifetimes and everything so clear. I stop by one and peak in. I lean my eye closer to the door. And I think, always cannot help but think – what makes it mine? What makes it truly, indescribably mine?


So, here is an old thought: if I am taking a visitor to a place I have been, to a feeling I have felt, should they not see what I see? Feel what I feel? Shouldn’t my consciousness sit on their shoulders like a child leading the way, should it not be the helmet that guides them? But then, what exactly is my consciousness? What is this nasty residue clinging to the sides of my brain, this stained glass mucus of the heart? Where does it come from, and more importantly, what drives it?

I know I am a sucker for images, sounds. A single track in my earphones can dump me straight into my Kharkov apartment and the next sling me out into the narrow Seville streets. Over the years I have grown into a walking switchboard of triggers and somehow I get the feeling I am not the only one with this disease. So, has something changed? Have words, once the precious cargo of horse messengers and heralds, lost their touch? Is the continual abolition of physical distance, the evolution of printing presses from the first moving type to the one I am banging away at this very minute – has this all made words dull, secondhand? Is this changing what we read? How we read? Is the oral tradition coming back in a very big way? Have written words, once the exalted mercenaries of expression, become a form of media? Have they always been? And if so, can they not be combined with other forms, in a one, whole, cohesive dance?

What I have in mind is not quite the picture book, not quite the raw and segregated labels of Warhol and not quite the slaps of chaos of Pollock, but perhaps something inbetween. Something fluid, something that grows, in a sense - a moving type that truly does move. After all, we have a printing press here that is very much recent and very much unused. Isn’t it about time?

Of course, this is all nothing new. Nothing really is. The earth is a grandmother of inspiration. We wrap ourselves warm in its quilt and keep our eyes open. Looking. Saying everything, telling nothing. Coming to the microphone without pride, without ideas, tapping it only so slightly, and, having given our eyes a pass around the room, asking in a soft and leading voice:

Where is the story?