Get off the bus

So I’ve been reading Adam Gopnik… a man whose writing I find so intoxicating, it goes beyond reverence. Sometimes I feel lucky that I am not a god because in the personage of that god, I’d have wanted to steal Gopnik’s talent, his inquisitive, incisive but ironically worshipful/devoted view of the world around him. He is riotously self-referential and tangential in ways that so mimick my mind my best days, that I feel like he is channeling me…he is like my better half--- independent of my body, up, walking around eating a bagel, free of the flotsam that bedevils my everyday voice.

To wit…he’s a lover of those twin cultural icons, Paris and New York. I am a native if exiled New Yorker and a Francophile to the bone. These have been his principal subjects, though shot through with the gestalt of parenthood. That latter plain is one I can’t claim as my native land but I did a good 12-15 months abroad there my senior year, so I have a good working knowledge of the material.

I contrast Gopnik’s take on the world…arguably a world that has no concrete place in my life with the worlds populated with so-called California writers like Richard Rodriguez or in decades previous Joan Didion. I appreciate the nuances of both their writings, on how they find the nerve of a colonized place. I value the criss-cross, multi-hued points of view they present in their work…but there are points of separation. Rodriguez because he writes academically and knowingly with a cultural virtuosity that is very distinct and divergent from my own; while with Didion disconnection occurs largely due to the expanse of time. (Paradoxically, this ‘teseract’ of time is bridged for me by her amazingly textured latter-day descriptions of life observed by a transplanted Californian woman surviving the death of her family in Manhattan. I unfortunately could relate to the numbing sting of that loss).

But to return to Gopnik, for some reason I feel he is key to my own higher abilities, not because he is a god (well really, we all might be in our particular, highest achieving universes), but because he functions as more of a sentient trigger, a personal talisman that points the way to my honeypot of genius. That I am enamored of his talent is rather pedestrian...if I allowed my celebration of his skill to run amok, unexamined and delirious, I have a fear of it devolving dangerously close to the path of the sycophant a la Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories. We become transcendent by association, not by achievement.

That I should use it to bootstrap my own gifts is perhaps the more difficult and companionable ambition, which is why I write this entry now. Accessing our greatness (as opposed to our idiosyncrasies, foibles, neurosis, and assorted low-hanging damaged bits) is not for the faint of heart. It invites doubt, scorn, and a bit of self-torture. It cleaves close to vanity, in the territory of pride, nestled snuggly in the county seat of narcissism. I don’t want to go there simply because I’ve made the trip before and not had much fun…neither did my traveling companions.

So to date, my answer to this call to evolve has simply been not to get on the bus. I intuit my capacity to err and then merely sit on my hands. Once again, I hope this time, I’m woman enough to risk more.