Notes On Another New Life #13
Start in the middle and fail to arrive.
Yesterday, Richard said one of his fingers was hurting. It was making it hard for him to hold a cup, and he was startled, as if he were no longer himself. Then he remembered his father had complained of arthritis in his hands and that his father had said his own father had had the same deal. Richard said, “I felt like my father was inside me,” and he liked the sensation, and he stopped feeling he was no longer himself.
Richard’s father had been a tailor in Syston, the midlands village in the UK where Richard had grown up. Richard said, “When my dad was getting old and couldn’t cut patterns, anymore, I didn’t think about what he was going through, and now I am.” It was a kind of retroactive sympathy. At the same time Richard had felt his father enter his body, he’d entered his father’s body, at least imaginatively. He said, “I have his DNA. I actually am him, in a sense, and he’s still alive in me.”
We were walking along Warren Street in Hudson, where we walk every day, up and down the spine of the little town. A few years ago, when we started this route, Richard thought he might get bored with the same routine, but we aren’t bored. We talk to people on the street and in shops, and we talk to each other in a way that only walking produces. A thought is a step? A thought is a breath? When Gardner, a man I was with for a long time, was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer, one day, a few months into his illness, he said, “I’ve walked enough.” We took a cab home, and I knew his life would end soon.
I was taken by Richard feeling easier in himself when he felt a jolt of understanding for his father and when he experienced their attachment physically. These are happy memories for him. It never rains in his backward glance. In Richard’s family, no one raised their voice. Before I met these people, I thought they must be repressed, but no, they just liked each other a lot, and everyone liked Richard the best, which explains why he is sometimes surprised and let down that the rest of the world isn’t his family. For example, he’s spent the majority of our 17 years together claiming I could stop raising my voice when we argue, if I really wanted to. It’s gotten so we both laugh about this. Not warm, happy laughing. It’s more like bitter laughing.
On the street, as we were talking, I thought this loving way of looking over your shoulder—if it’s who you are and how your mind works—probably perks up your cells as much as your mood. And I wondered if I could learn this way of being from my love, and I thought I already had learned it a little if I could even have this thought. Then I thought: This is one of the things that happens to people when they stay together long enough. It’s not just that you come to look like your dog and your dog comes to look like you, you start to take on the DNA of their temperament. Maybe. Anyway, nice thought.
Last week, we streamed two shows we loved and that are coloring my thoughts today, you’ll see: One Day (Netflix) and Resident Alien (Netflix and the SYFY Channel). One Day is made up of fourteen, deftly calibrated episodes that work like one-act plays, as, over the course of twenty years, we watch Emma (Ambika Mod) and Dex (Leo Woodall) change each other again and again. They meet on the last, party day of graduation from Edinburgh University, and each subsequent episode takes place on the anniversary of this meeting between July 15 1988 and 2007.
At the center of each installment is a dialogue between two people—mostly Emma and Dex—in which a world of the unsaid amplifies what’s spoken. How do we fall in love? How do we grow into the shape of another's person's love for us and ours for them? The characters are English, so skin color, their sex, and whether they are from the posh south or the working class north—whether they come from old money or no money—plays a large part in how possibility forms in their minds.
The acting by Woodall, playing a lost but open-hearted pretty boy, and by Mod, who can express irony and longing with one darting look, show characters in moments of changing their minds. In a sense, the collective piece is one long Shakespearean soliloquy—or a double soliloquy—in which Emma and Dex run out of courses to reverse. The screenplay by Nicole Taylor and Anna Jordan, among other writers—based on a novel by David Nicholls—shows people coming and going in each other’s lives until, gradually, they can identify an inner self, the self that fills them with hope and delight, only in the other person. There’s no thesis, nor moral, no resolution. They stop running.
During the last episode, sad things happen, and I cried a few times, and I noticed Richard crying too. Richard doesn’t cry. He didn’t cry when his father died. I’ve asked him why not. Maybe if you don’t yell, you don’t cry? He says he doesn’t know. Or he says he’s an alien, and I group this behavior, or the absense of behavior, with other things I find strange and you can’t talk about that much, because what’s the point. I group his not crying with his not closing the lids on jars or the caps on toothpaste tubes and not really knowing the different between left and right.
Watching One Day, we were sitting side by side on the couch, using Richard’s computer, because the sound is loud. Richard was surprised by his tears. He said, “I felt my face, to be sure, and it was wet.” This is definitely something an alien would say. Not that there’s anything wrong with being an alien. I said, “What made you cry?” He said, “I think I felt his pain.” He meant Dex. I said, “The way you felt your father’s pain in your finger?” He said, “I think so.” I can’t tell you more about the show, because I don’t want to ruin it for you, not that I believe in spoilers, really, but in this case you need to go through the moves of the dance by yourself, the way the characters have to go through them.
After the show ended, we were sad there wasn’t more to watch, not because we would have cared what happened to the characters as they moved through time, but because we missed hearing them talk to each other. They would have talked about the way life can seem a beige vagueness except for the experience of love, which doesn’t make other things more vivid—it can’t—but because love is a boat. That’s all love can be, but imagine being in a sea of tears, the tears cried by Alice, let’s say, when she ate the cookie that made her grow into a giant. When she was a giant, her arms and legs poking out the windows and doors of the White Rabbit’s house, her tears were so enormous they collected into a sea. Imagine being in a sea without the boat that love is. I think that’s what Richard was imagining when he cried.
If you ask why I cried, I’ll tell you I cry at commercials for laundry detergent if they involve a cat doing something adorable, so it’s pointless to ask me, although I think the thing about love as the boat and the rest of life as a sea of tears is as good a reason to cry as seeing a cat in a basket of towels.
The premise of the second show, Resident Alien, is that an alien with a snake face and the body of a giant, standing cricket, has come to earth to destroy the human population because humans are so stupid they have doomed life on their planet. Something goes wrong, and the alien can’t complete his mission, and in order to figure out his next moves he assumes a human form. The human body he moves around in belonged to Harry Vanderspeigle, a doctor in a small, Colorado town, and the alien takes on the doctor’s job by learning medicine on his cell phone.
The show has a Northern Exposure vibe, in that we come to know the various residents of the town, who are connected to each other by threads of feeling the alien comes to understand. That’s the basis of the show, and you ride along on the comic brilliance of Alan Tudyk’s performance as Harry, who is always an alien and always a being, now transformed by Harry’s DNA, into something hybrid and endlessly reborn to itself, moment by moment, as he discovers what it means to be human. As you watch, you realize how much of life we spend learning to be human, ourselves. Harry falls in love with the feeling of love, and after that you don’t really care that much about the snake face and creepy extra pair of arms he has. He comes to look the way love always transforms the beloved.
You cracked open a moment and there was a universe inside.💜
Again, how do you do it? I’m curious what the first glimmer idea was for this essay. Was it the arthritis, One Day, or the memory of your friend who died? All are woven together so beautifully. This is a perfect example of why “I don’t have anything to write about. My life isn’t that interesting” is full bullshit. You write here about love. What could be more universal, even if we experience it differently? Anyway, I’m becoming such a fan of yours. Thx for this