Hard Shopping
March 11, 1989
I met Lisa at the Blue Diner for breakfast, Thursday. We were both preoccupied. Lisa had been trying to get moving with her hats, but as the saying goes, "reality is what happens when you made other plans." I was feeling a pressing need to make improvements in the way I live.
Lisa talked about The Education of the Senses, "Some of those Victorian women sure knew how to have a good time. They were getting it." She is also reading Foucault. Me, I'm not reading much these days.
During the week, the French toast isn't as good as it is on Sundays, when they make it with Challa.
Yesterday, I met Sonja near the Coffee Connection. She was a half an hour late. I wasn't surprised. I knew that she had to make a few stops on the way. I waited in the Coffee Connection for a while and talked with the salesgirl about coffee filters made from unbleached paper. She said, "When the paper is bleached, residual PCBs are left in."
I asked, "Do the PCBs improve the flavor of the coffee?"
She said, "I don't think so. I think that people want unbleached filters for health reasons. You'd probably have to eat cartons of filters to get enough PCBs."
I said, "Unbleached filters, huh? As if anybody who drinks coffee is concerned about ingesting toxins."
Soon we were having the usual conversation about mankind's demographic situation. I emphasized the importance of humor when confronting these facts.
She said, "It isn't easy to look at all this disaster and laugh."
I said, "No. It's necessary." I met Sonja. We went to my house. We listened to music. We drank some wine. Frog's Leap.
I am making progress with Sonja. At a critical moment, I smacked my head against hers. It almost knocked me out. At least we're having critical moments.
This morning, Sonja challenged me to define "morals" over coffee and chocolate babka. I did a pretty good job. This led to "lifeboat ethics" and on to "carrying capacity".
"'Carrying capacity' is a term ecologists use to describe the population ceiling set by the food producing ability of a given piece of land. When a species exceeds the carrying capacity of its environment, starvation begins. There are two kinds of population control. Birth control and death control. To avoid the imposition of death control, either limit births or increase the carrying capacity of the land. The 'green revolution' was an effort to end starvation by increasing carrying capacity. Sadly, this multiplied the number of starving people. A modern tragedy is set into play when, with the advances in worldwide communication, we are aware of untold millions of starving fellow humans and we react, sympathetically, by trying to feed them. Every year the suffering horde grows in size. Relentlessly. It seems a crime to add to this for no other purpose than to relieve one's sense of guilt."
Sonja viewed this kind of charity with contempt.
"Alan and I have been developing a variation of this concept which we call 'burying capacity'. Burying capacity is the threshold past which an environment can no longer absorb waste, and toxins build up degrading the quality of life for the survivors. Historically there has always been new land available to increase that capacity. (This explains the wasteful appearing agricultural practices of our ancestors.) Today, there is no unused land. This means that when we dispose of waste, the only places to put it are already in use. So we see increasing environmental pollution everywhere. Nothing we do to feed the starving is going to help much to solve the human elimination problem. Perhaps nature will solve it through the elimination of humans."
As we talked about the defoliation of the Amazon and thermal pollution cause by the cooling of nuclear power plants, we had to go over some basic thermodynamics. Despite local displacements, entropy tends to increase over time. Sonja didn't like thinking that things have a direction. She certainly didn't like thinking that things have that direction.
"Another aspect of our demographic problem is economic. The Great Depression never ended. When World War ll. got going, much of the excess factory capacity was commandeered for weapons manufacture. Similarly, the drafting of millions of men into the armed forces masked a symptom (unemployment) of global economic collapse. When the war ended, we would have continued the depression right where we left off but we didn't for two reasons. First, the armaments industry didn't demobilize. The cold war and attendant arms race maintained the demand for this form of economic activity. Almost nobody noticed that this was unproductive of real wealth."
"Second, the global depression was also masked by the consumer revolution with its four horsemen; credit cards, broadcast media, permissiveness, and red blooded American status seeking. These two factors stimulated the need for goods and services enough to forestall our relapsing into economic depression."
The economic conditions that exist at this time are a kind of inflated carrying capacity. We scramble to pump the bubble up, making sure that the final bursting yields the most massive possible explosion."
Sonja proposed that we have a responsibility to act to ameliorate these conditions.
"I don't know if this is possible. Not breeding may spare our children, but there will be plenty of others."
"We need the arms race and rampant consumption or it will be the dark ages all over again. The problem appears intractable. The arrangement of incentives leaves us few options. The very actions that we desperately need to take to enable future generations to have a reasonable quality of life, are rendered impossible by our culture. The Latin American population explosion is a case in point. The Catholic Church isn't about to whither away. Nor is it going to tell people to limit the size of their families. This situation requires a rate of cultural evolution that is far greater than anything I have ever heard of. And this change would only retard our hurtling toward the brink."
"There is another obstacle. The problem of scale. I'm sure that one can do things that educate the mind and change the way one lives. We have less ability to change others. There are even more limits on our ability to change the behavior of groups. If you want to protect the Amazon rain forest, you can't just write a letter to Brazil, explaining what you want them to do. You need to join or form a large organization. This involves other people with their own intentions. As the group becomes larger, its resemblance to your original agenda becomes progressively more shadowy. That's politics."
Sonja can be diplomatic. She said, "Arthur, one of us has a lot to learn."
By this time, the babka was long gone. I'd brewed a second pot of coffee and it was gone. It was time to get out of bed. We went to the Blue Diner and were told that between four and five on Saturdays there is no cooking. All we could have was dessert and drinks. Since it was four thirty, we decided to have dessert first so that by the time we were done, the cook would be ready to make us dinner.
I told Sonja, "Dessert first and global depopulation, that's my platform."
Sonja went home to take a shower and I had some things to do. I picked her up at her house and we went back to mine. We bought some orange juice along the way. I fell asleep quickly.
March 12, 1989
When we woke up, we listened to Death in the Arena by the Soul Vendors. That song is strong. We took the cassette to Lisa's to play for her. The three of us walked, through the drizzle, to the Blue Diner. We were a few minutes late. We didn't want to wait half an hour so we walked to the Stage Deli once again. There has to be an alternative for Sunday breakfast. The rain was cold and the street was quiet. Lisa said, "It feels like it's going to get cold again."
We talked about a depressing movie that I hadn't seen. It sounded depressing. I noticed that the two elderly ladies at the next table (who spent at least ten minutes precisely calculating their respective obligations toward the check and tip) had actually left separate tips. Exact to the penny.
Lisa is moving forward with her hats. She has printed her business cards. "I should call Mimi and get together with her. Do you know if she is in town?"
Lisa is making herself some new clothes. "Next week I'm making myself some bellbottoms. I hate shopping. I can't ever find anything that fits."
We made some plans to go to Betsy Johnson. I hear that they carry small sizes. Sonja asked Lisa if she knew anybody who sews leather. I do. I mentioned unfucked Ann. Sonja and Lisa talked about how much money they could save by making their own clothes. I said, "It all depends on how valuable your time is."
Sonja said that when we left the deli, everybody stared at us. I guess it's the weather, but my hair looked like the Eraserhead poster. Lisa and I were dressed as refugees from a military circus.
As we walked to the Park Street subway entrance, Lisa said, "I got some hatboxes. That was the peak of my week. Now I want to faux all over them. Maybe just a little."
Sonja said, "That sounds disgusting."
The evangelist was there.
Lisa said, "I don't know how somebody could get up in front of all those people and do that. I couldn't."
The man was dancing around, singing something about Jesus. He was singing for Jesus. I said, "I'm sinning for Jesus. Without sin Jesus' sacrifice would mean nothing."
I left them in Harvard Square. They were going to watch a marathon of all the Thin Man movies. I wished I could join them.
I went to Davis Square to meet Jim and Peter. Claude let me in. He said, "I would be entertaining and all that but I've been fighting a cold."
Claude is always entertaining.
I waited.
A woman emerged from the basement. She was still asleep. She stumbled past me through the kitchen into the bathroom.
I listened to her take a shower. I listened to Claude sniffling. I didn't sound so good myself.
She stumbled from the bathroom, through the kitchen into the basement. She was still asleep. It was one-thirty so I concluded that Jim had forgotten our plans. I went home and did my laundry.
The phone rang. It was Jim. There had been a mix-up about the time and we had each been there. I arrived at one, Peter arrived at two and Jim made it home at three-thirty. We'll try again next Thursday.
March 15, 1989
It's Amy's birthday. I called with birthday greetings but Amy wasn't home. I spoke with Ann's brother, Peter. Last year I took Amy to see the Mummenschantz on her birthday.
Tonight is Jane's last night in Boston. She'll be going to New York in the morning. We planned to spend tonight together but she has to pack. We're supposed to see each other later. Jane has a lot to do.
I have some things to take care of anyway.
The phone rang. It was the other Jane. She's back from Mexico. It sounds like she had an amazing time. I'd lent her Alone of All Her Sex by Marina Warner for the trip. It's a history of the cult of the Virgin. Jane read part of it but was usually too busy or doing nothing. Carl read most of it on a long bus ride. Jane said that he benefited from it.
Jane sounded lucid. She described the light and the colors and the foliage. She said, "When I got my pictures back, I couldn't believe the colors." Jane told me what snorkeling in Belize is like. "On the keys, in every direction, it was a beautiful blue. I related it to your Caribbean experience."
Jane told me about Antigua, Guatemala. She said that there was an earthquake two hundred years ago and the rubble was never removed. It is a monument now and they don't allow any signs there. This gives the place an austere, otherworldly feeling.
She said that the busses in Guatemala are wild. They are school busses that have been painted in bright colors. The drivers elaborately ornament them with shrines and icons. "They pack them full of people. There is always room for one or two or twenty more. I spent one afternoon with a man's cowboy hat tucked under my chin. He was short. We went by one place where there were thirty-nine white crosses on the side of the road where a bus had gone over the edge."
Jane would like to live in unspoiled Belize and keep bees. "There is a strong environmental movement there and that is important to me."
Jane's memory is working very well now. She's absorbing a lot of technical information about computers. She is going to the library to read up on bees.
Jane has learned to experience different feelings at the same time without having to choose to believe one or the other. She said that she used to expect things to be pure and somehow something else would always creep in and contaminate everything. Now she sees that things are not exactly this or that. Jane is always growing.
I'm glad she's back in town. I'll try to get us tickets to All's Well that Ends Well.
March 16, 1989
The phone rang. It was Alan. "I'm home now. I can come over to take some pictures. Is Jane there?"
"I thought she would be. She's still packing. Why don't you give her a ten minute head start and come over?"
"Call her and call me back."
"OK."
I called Jane and she said she'd be right over. I asked her when she'd be leaving.
"Now. I'm driving."
I called Alan and said, "She's on her way, driving, come on over."
Alan said, "OK."
I live about halfway between Alan's house and Thayer street. I expected them to arrive at the same time. Alan was first. I brought out the wine, Acacia Chardonnay Marina Valley 1987. The doorbell rang. I let Jane in. She was frantic. She was carrying her Chanel dress, Gualtier coat and some of her other favorite clothes that she wanted me to store for her. We drank and talked while Alan took pictures of Jane.
I told them that Jane was back from Mexico and sounded good. I described her as relaxed. "You know... I just can't see having a nine to five job."
Alan and Jane laughed at my impression of Jane. I gushed about how perceptive she's being. I told them about the rubble and the colors and the busses. Alan asked if she snorkeled in Belize.
"Yes, and she loved it. She also went mountain climbing. They ended up crawling along a ridge in fifty mile an hour winds. It must have been very dramatic."
My ex-girlfriend Jane was drinking, smoking and being photographed. She is driving to New York tomorrow morning. Jane is still packing and has no idea how long it will take to finish. We'd been planning to spend the evening and the night together, but I couldn't stay up all night helping her pack because I had an appointment with my accountant in the morning. I feel like I should do more to help Jane.
Alan said that he hasn't been reading Plagues and Peoples. He's put it aside until he finishes Mankind and the Natural World. He said that book is really helping him to develop his next photography project.
Jane said, "I'm almost finished with Plagues and Peoples. It's changed my life. Every day a few things happen that I understand in a whole new way."
I said, "Jane said that she was reading it in Mexico. She likes it a lot."
Alan asked Jane about her plans for New York. She said that she had no place to live and, except for one project, no work lined up. She said that she had a little borrowed money. Not enough.
Alan said, "I see you are starting out fresh."
This move is putting a strain on Jane that is beyond her experience. She is alarmed at the number of loose ends and unpaid bills she is leaving behind. Loose ends like that backdrop.
Alan was finished with his pictures. He told Jane to drive carefully. She said that she would. Jane wouldn't have time to fill out the paperwork if she had an accident. Alan left.
Jane and I found it hard to speak. She said that she hadn't had time to deal with her grandmother's death. We had so much to say to each other . I gave her my copy of Herodotus and Plutarch's Lives.
We arranged some details.
Jane asked, "Can I call you collect?"
"As long as I have a phone." Jane told me that I am the most fun person she knows. We were both choking up and had trouble talking.
Jane said, "I'd better go."
I walked her to the door and told her to drive carefully. As she closed the door, I heard her break down and weep.
I went back downstairs into the dark and sat alone in shock.
Jane's gone.
