Don’t Stop the Carnival

I am not that ghost yet

When I was young I was told age would bring wisdom. I certainly hoped so; I was then a romantic and a liberal arts major, and imagined wisdom to be like enlightenment, a higher form of knowledge, something better and more refined than the instruction I had gotten in school and the simple life skills I was getting from experience, that would confer not just an easier path through the world but also deep serenity. I could then stop dealing with life’s mysteries in my frustrated, fumble-fingered piecemeal fashion, and get them all revealed to me at once.

But over years, even into middle age, while disasters and my own stupidity certainly delivered me some hard life lessons, their effect was mainly to scare me off making the same mistake twice (and sometimes not even that), which felt more like rote learning than wisdom. I was less confused in some ways, true, but that wasn’t the same thing; in fact sometimes I’d think I had something figured out and then change my mind about it, which felt like retreating from rather than approaching wisdom.

I began to worry that wisdom was a con, and that the thing people meant by it was just a general loss of interest in consequences, inspired by the nearness of death —which I could imagine as the consolation that an old man (such I was becoming) would choose to accept in place of the more majestic vision, like Ben Gazzara resignedly salting his food at the end of Happiness. And that just gave me the cold creeps.

Sometimes, though, I feel like something may be sinking in. I was in New York last weekend. As you may know from my previous essays about these visits, they make me reflective and sometimes maudlin. In fact, for years I wouldn’t go back at all, because I couldn’t bear being reminded of what I’d lost. People talk about being part of something larger than themselves — well, I never had an army or party or movement, but once I had citizenship and the privileges thereunto. The first few times I returned I was certainly happy to see old friends and share old joys, but I was still unable to shake the Twilight Zone feeling that a spectral figure waited at the edge of the frame to conduct me through the gray mist back into oblivion.  

That faded over time, and last weekend was mostly easy. I was staying at a friend’s place in Crown Heights so I got to take in the West Indian parade and, for my first time, J’Ouvert at dawn. I wasn’t shutterbugging and anyway there’s no competing with Michael Webster’s old photos. J’Ouvert was a delight — homemade, with pan trucks, more treble-heavy than the throbbing soundtrucks of the parade, and marchers cheerfully spraying talc and paint and shaking batty.

The parade proper was as I remembered it — bone-rattling bass, lavish costumes, happy young people in proud flag-colored déshabillé — though way more crowded than in my day and with barricading more rigidly enforced. Unless if you were right on the spot at the time, a casual observer might not be able to tell that at quarter to two that afternoon, before the marchers had come through, between Franklin and Classon somebody fired into the crowd and hit five people, one of whom is dead.

An awful thing, but I knew when I heard that there was no question of stopping the carnival. To some people that will seem appalling. But the parade had drawn, as usual, more than a million people, and its thrall, it was fair to assume, was (more than the hundreds of cops on the scene) what was keeping everyone level; to untether them from that would be asking for trouble. Sometimes the choice that’s actually the most humane is not necessarily the one that seems the most humane.

And I knew as I had that thought, a thought I knew many people could never entertain, that I didn’t have to miss New York so much, because I had carried some of it away with me.

I did a lot of other things. As if by rote I made a circuit of my old Manhattan addresses. I’d done that a few times before in a sullenly sentimental way — boo hoo, now probably some trustfund douche lives here, look how ugly they made the hallway. But this time I saw all my old front doors as portals through which many generations of New Yorkers, past and present, has passed; I could see the decades passing in seconds and the millions zooming through them like floods of ectoplasm.  I saw the present-day people walking past, not as usurpers of my patrimony, but as new custodians of something I had long ago handed back like the keys of my last apartment. And the changes that had come since my time, the styles, the bike lanes, the curbside compost bins, did not alienate me, but rather prepared me for my future career as a ghost, a real ghost, not the bedsheet-over-the-head pose I sometimes adopted. But I am not that ghost yet, and that is the important thing, and maybe, if I am not wrong, the beginning of wisdom.