By Bart Barry-
SAN ANTONIO – In the center of this city there’s a Greyhound bus station. In the center of most U.S. cities there’s a Greyhound station. In the center of most American cities, Anchorage to Patagonia, come to think of it, there’s a bus station. Put a checkmark, then, in the box beside a line that reads: “Begin column with mundanity.”
What follows might be a treatment of current events – Danny Garcia or Kobe Bryant, the Honduran refugee crisis or “Dance of the Clairvoyants” by Pearl Jam – or a treatment of timeless events, the poetry of Billy Collins or “Emergence: From Chaos to Order” by John Holland, but it likely won’t fixate on any of these subjects longly because a dissolution of fixation is what its writer is after.
Back to the bus station. The cruel events that led wave after wave after wave of Central American refugees to crash on this Texas bus station have succumbed to still crueler events that preclude an arrival of successors – we used to help 50 families of women and children every Sunday and yesterday we helped exactly one, which is our current government’s solution currently: out of sight, out of mind.
If that’s a cliché it’s because those six words gathered thusly have proved elastic and apt enough often enough to be recycled unto the commons.
We’re still here each Sunday morning because it satisfies, barely, a philanthropic impulse catalyzed by a karmic virtue like: Work without expectation of reward. Too, because the lead volunteers on Sundays exemplify both wisdom and vocation. Sister Sharon and I had some time Sunday morning to discuss my ongoing compulsion re compulsion. We talked past one another, mostly, like good Shakespearean characters do; Sister Sharon spoke of a book about addiction whose author she met at a community gathering Saturday while I made irreverent if serious inquiries about persons of the cloth who feel compelled to control events while professing faith in an omnipotent God. Context is essential here as everywhere: After 20 months of such passing conversations neither of us is faithful nor faithless as our uniforms imply.
The concentration muscles upon which we call for creative endeavors are the very same that lead us into addictions. A capacity for fixation on one’s algebra homework, say, locking one’s mind away and forbidding distractions, other thoughts, is a universal virtue the same way fixing oneself on a singleminded pursuit of heroin, say, is a universal vice – but they’re the same muscles.
Context is essential there as everywhere, even if only to pettifog (a wonderful verb resurrected last week).
As I type these words spontaneous Kobe Bryant tributes outbreak everywhere. These are sincere. Soon to be followed by obligatory tributes, sooner to be followed by insincere tributes overlapped by profit-motivated tributes. Competitive grieving, as it were, an expression of our species’ originality amplified by social media, a manifestation of our species’ originality.
Danny Garcia fought in Brooklyn on Saturday. The fewer words about that, the better.
What the Seattle band Pearl Jam just did with its new single is inspiration remarkable. Across 29 years and 10 studio albums, three decades, in other words, and five or six hours of music, nothing anticipated the sound of its new song. To reinvent a successful artistic specialty so completely and effectively is a feat and a half.
Billy Collins, twotime American Poet Laureate, is a wonderful man fully anticipated by his wonderful poems. I met him in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas 18 years ago at a threeday literary festival headlined by the not-yet-Noble laureate Mario Vargas Llosa (whom I met in the men’s room the first night, when he was anonymous as me). I was in Tampico to get married, simply, but ever since I’ve enjoyed telling uninterested strangers I met the American Poet Laureate while honeymooning at a literary festival in an exotic locale.
A few months later I mailed Collins a letter, and he replied immediately and graciously and generously. I’ve been revisiting Collins’ poetry this week, putting “Aimless Love” in my promiscuous rotation, and while his poems were primarily humorous to me in 2002 they are quite a bit more than that to me in 2020. Of all literary forms poetry is the one I read poorliest, I freely admit, but I recommend Collins nevertheless (and I pretty much just got done recommending Pearl Jam, too, without ever getting a useable note out any musical instrument in my life).
What all this has to do with Santa Fe Institute and John Holland – a Michigan professor of electrical engineering and psychology and computer science, all three, amazingly enough – is next to nothing, which is about how much it has to do with our beloved sport, too, in its winter doldrums, but I’ve got at least four books on complexity currently colliding with Collins and others in the aforementioned rotation, so in the name of selforganization . . .
I’m reading this way, and have been reading this way for 18 months now, I realize, to dissolve compulsion, an intermediate level of anxiety one doesn’t come upon till he’s observed his way past a burning stomach and garrulousness and financed consumption and moral judgment and travel and some forms of achievement (but before he’s gotten past aesthetic judgment), and dissolving compulsion currently requires challenging every thought that endures more than 60 seconds. Which makes writing this column during the winter doldrums an admittedly skittish happening.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry