One More Sustainable Living Life that I Have Never Lived, No. 2

I rip romaine lettuce off the head, rinse it under an high faucet above an old fashioned sink and listen to Eric Carmen's "All by Myself."  Outdated?--I know.  Emotional saccharine?--I know.  All but forgotten--I know. Sort of like the movie, Jonathan Livingston Seagull or the Niel Diamond sound track, for that matter. But as I argued on the panel at the Beyond Post Modernism symposium at SMU, the job of the artist is to identify the real in unlikely places--the sentimental that works simply as sentimental and yet as so much more. If post-modernism is about juxtaposition, irony, deconstruction and refabrication, then beyond-post-modernism is about fusion, synthesis, bringing together high-art and pop-art without the outside sarcasm.  No more intrusive narrator needed to justify black velvet Elvis paintings in a collection of Matisse and Picasso, but neither is the pure third-person-limited voice needed, where the author is all but transparent and the story takes center stage.  Rather, text--fluid like the mind--flows between points of view, from objective to subjective, from external to internal--narrative, expository and persuasive all grafted together to bring forth a new, original fruit, like the voice in the head of a man standing at a sink, rinsing romaine lettuce, listening to Eric Carmen while simultaneously narrating his life and arguing for a more inclusive, organic art.  It can work.

By the time I cross out of the kitchen and across the small, glossy wood-floored living room to the gold, arched door leading out to the balcony, I am on stage with Eminem and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir backing me up as I expound my philosophy before thousands of screaming fans through a rhetoric that combines the raw energy of Ginsberg with the eloquence of Emerson.

Door swings inward.   I step out onto the small cement cantilever to pick cherry tomatoes from a potted plant under a small cheese-cloth umbrella I constructed from the front fork of a bicycle, two wooden dowels, and, of course, cheese cloth.  It protects the plant well from the intense noon-time sun, but is useless in the wind.  I know a summer afternoon monsoon wind could send it flying high over Mesa Street in bits and pieces in seconds, and so I usually remove the umbrella as soon as I get home from UTEP, as the sun is on the other side of the building by then.  Today I have failed, and it is pure luck that my tomato umbrella is there.

I bend down to unwind the wire that holds it fast to the pot, when I hear giggling followed by, "Hey, Professor Brown what are you doing?"

I stand up and look towards the neighboring balcony.  I jump.

"Monica, get down from there."

"Don't be silly."

"No, I mean it.  It's not safe."

Monica sits on the corner of the black wrought iron railing five floors above Mesa Street in a short, lacy, white summer dress, her bare feet swinging slightly back and fourth past the hairy legs of the boy who is standing on the patio with his arms around her delicate waist, hopefully keeping her from plunging to her death.

"Who's your dad?" he says, referring to me."

"My creative writing teacher and neighbor," she says with emphasis as she sways further back over Mesa street, long, black hair flowing in the wind.

I run to the rail, ready to grab her arm.  Dumb-ass boy doesn't even tense up, but just lets her cantilever out into the dry, west-Texas atmosphere.

In another story tension leading to tragedy might build here, but perhaps there is enough of that in the world already. She just giggles, "you were worried, weren't you?"  She puts her arms around her friend and pulls herself in.  "Jake, why don't you worry about me like Professor Brown does?"

Jake doesn't know what to say.  For some stupid reason, I instinctively reach out to rescue him too.  "Age," I say.  "You don't really comprehend death on a cellular level until you're at least twenty-five. That part of the brain just isn't there yet."

She sways back over Mesa Street.  "Sweet, sweet death come take me!"  Jake again does nothing, and I decide I can't take this and head inside.

"How was that for poetry, how was it?" She calls to my back.

I pause at the door and think, dangerous, erotic, perfect.  Instead, I quote Yeats:

That is no country for old men.  The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
--Those dying generations--at their song,
the salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas...

Inside, I finish my salad for the permaculture meeting in Mesilla and look forward to Mike Bantam's stories of dumpster diving.  The crazy old man lives totally off previously used products, even food.  I picture him pulling out his schedule of when the grocery stores discard their old milk and smile.