On not living in America

There comes a time in a man’s life when he begins to regret that he does not live in America. For me that time is approximately five o’clock weekdays. When that feeling strikes the best cure is to get me to the America-themed bar just one train stop away from home. Faux-leather red booths, brass rails, big red hanging lights, plastic menus and ketchup bottles on every table, sports games on TV screens above the bar, walls plastered with sports regalia and American kitsch.

There, amid all that American glory, I find a seat, I solemnly contemplate a pint of American pale ale, I order something from the menu, barbecue beef ribs or burgers with onion rings or buffalo wings with celery sticks and blue cheese dipping sauce. Why is it so hard to get blue cheese sauce outside the fifty states? Long have I pondered the question but the answer still evades me. All I know is that at five o’clock I can walk through the doors and ask for buffalo wings and they will be brought to me on a platter with a dipping dish of blue cheese sauce.

If I am able to look up from studying my buffalo wings I see, on the big flat screen above me, the men in white throwing the ball and hitting it and running and catching and again throwing the ball. I have never been to a baseball game, it is not something I have ever liked or understood. But I feel a certain ineffable contentment to see them playing while I sit here with my honey-coloured pale ale gleaming in the glass and the blue cheese dipping sauce dripping from my fingers. I watch them hitting and running and catching and I raise a buffalo wing to my waiting lips and say to myself: America.

If I lived in America then I suppose, at a certain hour of the afternoon, I would seek out a glass of Australian lager although it is a drink I never really liked. In time I would be brought to such a pitch of nostalgia that I would even go out of my way to get my hands on that most ubiquitous and most repulsive of all Australian foods, the corner store meat pie. And as I raised my beer glass with pie-stained greasy fingers I would gaze up at the big flat screen to see the men in white standing around doing nothing, which is to say playing cricket, a game that I have never really liked or understood, and with a proud tear in my eye I would say to myself: Australia.

But I am already in Australia. So today the pale ale is bubbling in my soul as I lean back into my red faux-leather seat and slowly, with infinite deliberation, eat America, one blue cheese-dipped buffalo wing at a time.

New Camaldoli Hermitage notebook

When I arrive one of the brothers gives me an orientation to the monastery. He shows me the chapel and which books to use for each service, he shows me my cell with its private garden looking out over the ocean, he explains the fireplace and the bells and the time for meals. He tells me what to do if a deer should come into my garden (don’t corner it), and what to do if I see a skunk (ditto), and what to do if one of the mountain lions strays on to the monastery (clap hands and sing a psalm while maintaining eye contact at all times). I wonder if there is anything in the Rule of Benedict about dealing with mountain lions.

Also he tells me: at the right time of the year you can sit in this cell and watch a hundred whales go by. I try to keep my composure, but in my heart I bless the Lord.

The cells are similar in design to the ancient monastic cells that have been excavated in the Nitrian desert. A main sitting room branching off into a small bedroom, chapel, bathroom, and kitchen, all opening on to an enclosed garden. The desert fathers each had a well in the garden too, though many of them also had slaves to draw the water. Taps with running water are one of those small but significant improvements to the monastic life. It is not true that the earliest is always the best.

Soon after arriving I hurry to the chapel for evening prayer. The first words that we sing are one of my favourite verses from the Psalms: I love the Lord, for he heard my cry.

I have not spoken today but I have not been silent either. All day long the voices in my mind chatter away like school children on their lunch break.

Coming out from morning prayer I stood outside the chapel and looked over the sea and saw a whale spouting, then another. For a second I forgot to breathe, as one always does when one sees whales. Then with all haste I got in the car and drove down the mountain to get a closer look. On the winding road down from the monastery I saw them spout again. But when I had got to the bottom and stood on the cliff above the sea, I found that the whales were out of sight. I had failed to reckon on the fact that you can see so much further from higher up. There are times when the closer you get to a thing, the more it recedes from view.

At mass each day the brothers form a circle around the altar and all the guests and visitors make a wider circle. When the presider raises his hands for the epiclesis, all the monks who are priests also raise their hands towards the altar. I like the theology behind this gesture, even if it feels a bit hocus pocus to see so many priests arranged in a circle with their hands stretched out towards the centre. I suppose you have to do this kind of thing in California. Anyway it’s reassuring to know that the mass would still be completed even if a presiding brother were to keel over and die on the spot.

After evening prayer the mountain is wrapped in darkness. I have been instructed to use the torch provided in my cell because it will reduce the risk of walking straight off the edge of a cliff and never being seen again. But I prefer to shuffle cautiously in the dark because the stars, shy nocturnal creatures that they are, come closer when there is no other light. On a high cliff I find a bench and lie down and watch the stars, great thickets of them burning out of the silent past. I remember how I always feared the dark when I was a child, ever since we lived in that place with the outdoor toilet (haunted by Australian spiders) that could only be approached by following a winding path under the menacing trees while nightmares rustled in the dead leaves on every side. Even as a teenager I was forever glancing behind me when I was alone and in darkness. And I remember how nineteen years ago, the night you came down and took possession of me, the first thing that happened was I stopped being afraid. From that night to this I have always found great consolation in darkness. I lie here on the bench beneath the moving stars and think: this is your gift to me, this darkness.

On my morning bike ride I saw a snake on the road. It was a baby, less than a foot long, black with an orange belly and a single orange ring around its neck, and it was trying to cross the road. I stopped a while to monitor its progress and, if necessary, to help it get safely across. Judging from its rather phlegmatic style of slithering, I am not sure it was fully apprised of the precariousness of the situation. But when I gave it an encouraging nudge it only rose its little head as if to strike, so I rode off and resolved to let nature take its course. Coming back later I saw the little thing broken on the road. A car had got him. I hoped his mother would never find out. Sometimes it is better not to know. Let her go on supposing that he has hitched a ride to San Francisco and that he is fulfilling all his dreams in the city. Let her go on hoping. There are people who say that knowing is always best, but if this vale of tears has taught me anything it’s that sometimes a little ignorance can go a long way.

My fifth Thanksgiving dinner in America. Twice with families, once with students, once with the homeless, and now with monks. Evaluation: families have the best cooking, students have the best music, the homeless have the best conversation, and the monks have the best wine.

Each night after evening prayer we sit on mats around the altar. One of the brothers carries consecrated bread and sets it on the altar. Three candles are burning. Then the lights go down and we sit for half an hour in silence. Some of the monks and visitors adopt the lotus position. Last night there was a visitor who filled our silence with the sounds of stifled weeping. When it is over the lights come on and everybody goes away. The icon of the Trinity is asking me a question as I touch the font and go out into the dark.

Sometimes I can hardly tell if I am myself or someone else. Sometimes everything in my life reminds me of you. My eyes look out on the sky and the sea but it all reminds me of you who looked out on this world with human eyes (my eyes) and loved it, every last infuriating bit of it. In your eyes, God looked at the world from the inside and saw that it was good. Not that it was a pretty sight. You saw Satan too. He fell like lightning under your gaze. St Thomas said there are five ways to prove the existence of God. I don’t know anything about that, but when I see my own five fingers they remind me of your hands. My feet, tired from walking, remind me of all the roads you travelled on feet like mine. You have cut your paths in me. Everything in me leads back to you. If I desire anything at all, my longing becomes a path to you: for all desire bends invisibly to you and all love whispers your name. If I were to lose you, my loss would become your way to me: for you take special pleasure in finding whatever is lost. If I were to flee from you, my flight would lead me to you: for you are the door that I would finally reach in search of refuge. If I were to hate and reject you, even my hate would lead me to you in the end, and I would find there that the rejected stone had become the cornerstone of my life. Everything in my life is pointing the way to you if only I have eyes to see. My whole being is speaking your name if only I have ears to hear it. I am the place from which you call to me. I am a constant, painful reminder to myself of the great Love that has touched with human hands, seen with human eyes, and heard with human ears. Love calls to me not only from beyond my life but also from within it. You have got under my skin. That’s my problem and my salvation. There is no escaping a human God.

The Camaldolese brothers have a special love for the Little Rule of St Romuald. It is framed on the wall of my cell. “Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish. The path you must follow is in the Psalms; never leave it.”

A saying of St Antony: “Life and death depend on our neighbour. For if we win over our brother, we win over God.”

Sunset over Long Beach

Seal
I watch the sea gulls and the pelicans and then I watch two seals swimming in the bay. They remind me of my dog when he goes swimming, black nose gliding through the water. I watch the seals for a long time and I want to cry out to the other people on the beach, “Behold! Seals!” But I know they are watching the seals too, and I know the seals come here all the time. My heart is heavy when the seals go away. But then one of them comes back and makes me glad. There is no kind of evening that does not improve in the company of seals.

Ship
The big container ships creep by in the distance as slow as snails. They are necessary, these steel contraptions. How else could we get all the cheap stuff made in China? Our houses are filled with brave seafaring trinkets. They are necessary, these ships, and they are the ugliest things on the sea. But when one of them is far enough away and when the sun is setting and all the lights come on, a container ship can look as lovely as Christmas. One yearns for it as one yearns for the lonely unreachable stars. Standing on the beach at sunset, a child would give anything in the world to make the voyage out to those far lights that glitter with such heavenly promise.

Saint
A man gets out of a car and stands beside me. He’s one of those gangsta types in baggy gangsta clothes. We stand for a while looking at the sea. Without turning he asks me, “What’s going on?” I tell him, “The sun is setting.” “True that,” the gangsta says. “Happen right here every day.” Then he goes down on to the sand and stays there a long time. Later I see him sitting on the sand, hands folded, looking up into the golden sky. The longer I watch him, the more I am persuaded that he is a poet or a saint.

Love
In the car park behind me a man and woman are arguing in their car. Their voices carry across the sand and mingle indistinctly with the voices of sea gulls and the splash of a landing pelican. I never fail to be impressed by American eloquence. It must be all that therapy. As the sun continues its slow descent over the port of Long Beach, the car park argument gets louder and then I realise they are not arguing at all, only conversing. And there is something else in their voices too: soon they will be making love.

Skirt
A woman in a pink hijab goes right down to the water and takes a selfie with the pink sky and the lights of the Long Beach oil island behind her. When she turns around again a fish jumps, big and silver, and the woman wheels back and squeals in surprise and her long skirt whirls about her in the wind. I wish I could have taken a photograph to show you because it was as pretty as any picture: the pink sky, the pink hijab, the pink and yellow lights, the silver fish, the silk skirt twirling like a dancer’s.

Colour
When I die I don’t want to do it in some windowless white room, doped into oblivion while machines labour over me and faceless doctors tinker with my insides. No black and white death for me! Let me die at sunset. Wheel me out on to the beach and let my eyes be filled with pelicans and my ears with seagulls’ cries. If you can add a seal or two and a pretty Muslim woman startled by a fish, so much the better. Just let me die with open eyes and all the colours blazing, that’s all I ask.

The psalms and the blues: a little help from James Baldwin

In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin makes a characteristically perceptive and acerbic comment about the tradition of African American songs:

White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them – sounding, in both cases, so helplessly, defencelessly fatuous that one dare not speculate on the temperature of the deep freeze from which issue their brave and sexless little voices. Only people who have been “down the line”, as the song puts it, know what this music is about. I think it was Big Bill Broonzy who used to sing, "I Feel So Good." … White Americans do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes.

A similar misunderstanding lies beneath the current academic hypersensitivity to the morality of the psalms. If we think the happy psalms are merely happy and the sad psalms are merely sad, then we'll also assume that the psalms of vengeance are merely immoral and vindictive, or that psalms of conquest are mere glorifications of military violence – without seeing the whole tragic history that gives rise to such outrageously tenacious expressions of faith. Perhaps we'd have a better ear for the psalms if we remembered that they are the precursors not so much of Victorian hymnody as of the spirituals and the blues. One catches the true spirit of the psalter in the old African American song:

Nobody knows the trouble I've seen
Nobody knows my sorrow
Nobody knows the trouble I've seen
Glory hallelujah!

Prayer for Newtown, Connecticut, December 14

“But wherefore could I not pronounce Amen?” 
—Macbeth

God of liberty, we give you thanks for the many freedoms that we enjoy by your blessing.

For the freedom to express ourselves, we give you thanks! 

For the freedom to satisfy our urges and impulses, we give you thanks!

For freedom of trade, especially the freedom to buy and sell weapons and ammunition at competitive prices, we give you thanks!

For the freedom to bear arms, we give you thanks!

Save us, O God, from those who would threaten our rights;

Save us from legislators who would take away our freedoms;

Save us from those who would constrain the free expression of our feelings;
Save us from those who would compromise our free commerce in guns, weapons, and all instruments of self-protection.

Increase our freedoms more and more:

freedom to do as we please,
freedom to buy and sell,

freedom to possess handguns, semi-automatic assault rifles, automatic machine guns, stockpiles of ammunition, holsters, slings, scopes, and other accessories,

freedom against neighbours,
freedom against strangers,
freedom against children,
freedom against the unborn, 

freedom with our bodies and the bodies of others,
freedom to pursue our own interests,

freedom to gratify ourselves at any cost.
May the firstlings of our hearts be the firstlings of our hands,

and may we bring this freedom, O God, to those who lack it.

Fulfil us, O God!
Gratify our desires!
Validate our feelings!
Let us be free, though the world perish!

We ask it in the name of Jesus, your beloved son,
whose birth and infancy we venerate,
who came among us harmless as any child –

California notebook

The future

‘As one went to Europe to see the living past, so one must visit Southern California to observe the future.’ —Alison Lurie, The Nowhere City, 8.

The slide

‘In Los Angeles, all the loose objects in the country were collected as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.’ —Saul Bellow, Seize the Day, 12.

Pasadena

The night before the Rose Parade, the Oklahoma preacher makes his way slowly down Colorado street, holding above the crowded sidewalk a big yellow sign about Jesus, the Bible, and the afterlife. Ten paces in front of him, his eleven-year-old daughter keeps the same funereal march, pointing the megaphone straight ahead like a pistol and proclaiming the King James gospel at 120 decibels. I thought: One day she will write a book about all this.

The idea of home

We stayed in that big house on the hill overlooking the sea. Everything was new, clean, polished, straight off the pages of a magazine, migrainously bright. It was not so much a home as the idea of a home, just as Starbucks is the idea of coffee and The Smurfs 3D is the idea of a children’s movie.

Disneyland

I am a cynic, a hater, a vehemently eloquent critic of the Disneyfication of childhood. Anyone who will listen, I tell them what’s wrong with Disney. I tell them: ‘You should not always follow your heart.’ I tell them: ‘The Real You is, at times, an abomination.’ I tell them: ‘Your little girl is not a princess.’ I tell the little girls: ‘Your aim in life is not to marry a prince.’ When we agreed to take our children to Disneyland I made wry remarks from the side of my mouth, I spoke of compromises and the sacrifices we make for our children, I prepared myself for the gruelling spiritual trials of a whole day at Disneyland, though secretly I wondered whether we might persuade our children to leave a little early. Then the day arrived. We walked through the gates and we were in Disneyland. The coloured shops and houses were bathed in a soft nostalgic glow, the streets curled away lazily into the distance, a horse-drawn streetcar pulled up beside us, the music of half-forgotten childhood movies started playing from somewhere beyond the sky. Everything was Sunday and Pollyanna and homemade lemonade and America. I peered carefully at a drifting cloud to check if the sky was real. We stayed for fourteen hours, until my children had to beg me to take them home.

Prison

We were eating breakfast and I was telling him about the evils of California's penitentiary system. ‘You know, the percentage of incarcerated citizens in the United States is seven times higher than in Australia. And a seventh of all those American prisoners – mostly African Americans – are here in California. It's because the prison systems here operate just like any other corporate enterprise. The prison guards union is one of the wealthiest and most powerful political forces in California. The Three Strikes legislation, for example – one of the most unjust pieces of legislation in American history – was backed by the prison guards union. For them, it's all about keeping the prisons full, expanding the number of prisons, and expanding the number of people working in prisons. A few years back here in California, over 10 percent of the whole state budget was spent on prisons. Just compare that to schools and universities. Just compare it to rehabilitation programs. I mean, once you’ve been incarcerated in California you’ve got like a 90 percent chance of returning to prison – 90 percent! My God, do you know how much money is at stake in all this? Do you know how many new prisons have been built in California in the last twenty years? The dream of these malignant sonsofbitches is to have half of California behind bars, and the other half gainfully employed as guards in correctional facilities.’ He chewed his food thoughtfully and said, ‘Man, I hear you. It ain’t easy. Wherever I go, them police move me on. I try to sleep behind the dumpster, they move me on. I stand in front of the store with a cup, they tell me they’ll send me back to jail. Man, it hard keeping out of jail in California.’

Los Angeles

He took me hiking in the mountains and in hushed tones told me the names of the birds. When we had reached the edge of a steep ravine and all we could see were the mountains, the sky, the cool stream and the canyon, he stopped and said, ‘There it is. My favourite view of Los Angeles.’

Whales

The day I went whale watching at Newport we saw the biggest pod of killer whales that has been sighted in these parts for nearly a decade. There were fifty of them, and they swam alongside us and swam in front of us and glided underneath the boat, their white patches shimmering like immense green lights beneath the water. They were so close and so good and gleaming and so startlingly alive that it took the greatest effort not to throw myself down into the sea as a happy mad grateful gesture.

Celebrities

It was a deflating experience. I had gone into Target on the way home because I needed toothpaste, and I stood at the checkout contemplating the infinite melancholy of big department stores, and then in one of the lines I saw a celebrity, and some of the Target staff left their checkouts to go over and shake his hand and tell him they loved him. I looked down at my tube of toothpaste, averting my eyes, and to tell you the truth I felt very sorry for the poor bastard.

Languages

‘I’m going to cycle around Europe,’ he told me as we started on our second pint. ‘I dunno, maybe stay and work there a while. Maybe learn a language. I've always wanted to learn a language.’ He had lived all his life in LA, so I asked him what about Spanish, did he know that LA has more Spanish-speaking people than any other place in the world, after Mexico City? He said, ‘No, I don’t like Spanish, I’ve never liked it. It’s just such a – an ugly language.’ I asked him which languages he liked. ‘You know, maybe French, Italian, maybe something like Polish – hell, I dunno, even German.’

Cracks

Jamie and I were walking down the street and as usual Jamie was carefully stepping over the cracks in the sidewalk. When an old homeless guy shuffled past in his broken shoes, Jamie told him matter-of-factly, ‘If you step on the cracks you’ll die.’ Without stopping the man nodded his profound grizzled head and said, ‘Yeah brother, they hard rules. One false step and it’s all over. That's hard rules right there, brother.’

The mysticism of the freeway

‘The freeway experience … is the only secular communion Los Angeles has. Mere driving on the freeway is in no way the same as participating in it. Anyone can “drive” on the freeway, and many people with no vocation for it do, hesitating here and resisting there, losing the rhythm of the lane change, thinking about where they came from and where they are going. Actual participants think only about where they are. Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over…. “As you acquire the special skills involved,” Reyner Banham observed in an extraordinary chapter about the freeways in his 1971 Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, “the freeways become a special way of being alive…. The extreme concentration required in Los Angeles seems to bring on a state of heightened awareness that some locals find mystical”.’ —Joan Didion, The White Album, 83.

Venice Beach

Along the brokenhearted strip of break dancers, jugglers, bad musicians and graffitied trees and sinister-looking fortune tellers, amid the slouched huddles of storefronts peddling pipes and hotdogs and t-shirts and tattoos, the medical marijuana clinics are newly painted, clean, seedy, legitimate. A guy in dark shades and a bright green lab coat takes a drag on his reefer and calls out, ‘Step inside, ladies and gentlemen, right this way, the doctor is in. Headache, back pain, insomnia, sadness – it's good for whatever ails you.’ You peer inside doubtfully, and decide you’d rather take your chances with the guy in gangsta clothes and prison tattoos down on the corner.

Australia

I told him I was from Australia. ‘Australia? For real? It must be nice, all them animals. But you got no sidewalks in Australia – it’s an amazing place.’

Mexico

When I told her I wanted to go to Mexico she said, ‘Mexico? Mexico? What you wanna go there for? Mexico – oh God, it’s so gross. You been to Sacramento? You been to Vegas?’

Dentist #1

He stumbled into the room, leaning heavily against the wall. His speech was slurred and he had to strain to keep his eyes open when I explained the details of my daughter’s accident. She had been running outside with her friends at a Mexican restaurant in Laguna Beach. There was a steel handrail. She didn’t see it and she ran right into it. One tooth out. Both front teeth broken in half. He made me repeat the part about the Mexican restaurant. I explained that we had wanted fish tacos. He slouched out of the room, bumping into the door frame and murmuring to himself as he shuffled off down the hall. It was nine in the morning, and he was either extremely drunk or (as I surmised) had been helping himself to the opiates from the medicine cabinet. Their website boasts that they have their own qualified anesthesiologist and can provide sedation upon request. When I walked out and told the receptionist that we would not be coming back because the doctor was not sober, she feigned mild surprise – ‘Really? Not sober?’ – and then whispered confidentially, ‘You could try coming back tomorrow.’ My daughter told me afterwards that she loves all dentists, but was frightened of that one.

Dentist #2

Our next dentist was a pretty Iranian woman who pursed her lips sympathetically when my daughter explained how she had broken her teeth. We read the comic books and children’s magazines in the waiting room and we got her teeth repaired. My daughter never groaned or flinched once until it was all over and the dentist gave her a mirror so she could admire her perfect new teeth. Only then did she burst into tears, because she had grown used to those ghastly sharp cracked tomboy fangs, and she resented her smooth new unblemished American teeth.

Reality

In Balboa Park in San Diego we saw a man with no arms singing country songs and playing guitar with his toes. Jamie whispered, ‘Does that man got no arms?’ I nodded. He said, ‘Is that man really playing with his feet?’ I nodded. Then he said doubtfully, ‘Is that man real?’ The boy had been to Disneyland, he had been to Malibu, he had seen the film crews at Santa Monica and Altadena. He knew that in California you can never be quite certain whether or not a thing is really real.

Dentist #3

A few days later I heard her telling one of her friends: ‘When I grow up, I’m going to be a dentist.’