Nicholson Baker - Traveling Sprinkler

And then we went to a small island — I think it was Mykonos — with many white houses on steep streets that led down to the water. “You need some fins,” my grandmother said. She went into a tourist shop and bought me a pair of black swim fins and a snorkel. The fins were difficult to walk in, but they propelled you through the water with remarkable speed. The beach was in a cove, with high rocks around, and I swam out to the deepest part, breathing through my gurgly new snorkel. It had little rubber flanges you could bite on to hold it in your mouth. I stared down at the green-black weeds and the lumpy rocks. I sucked in air and upended myself and dove, and I got about halfway down and then turned back. The water was deeper than the YMCA pool. It was darker, too. The light angled into it like light coming through venetian blinds. I thought I saw something moving down there, something oddly furry, like a hedgehog. Perhaps it was a sea cucumber. I took a breath and bit down on the now useless snorkel and began my descent, trying to swim like the scuba people in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea , with my arms at my sides.

The fins helped me go deep fast. The facemask pushed hard against my upper lip and around my eyes. I kept going. And then the daylight dimmed and I felt currents of cold water touching me like arms.

I reached out toward the mysterious woolly sea cucumber, if that’s what it was, but there were black seaweeds all around it and my fear was growing. I saw a spiny sea urchin next to it. I thought, I’m in an element that doesn’t want me here. Don’t go this deep. I turned and kicked my fins and swam upward. I flailed through into air and light and breathed.

So that is what Pat Pattison helped me remember. Is there a song in all that? I don’t think so. Maybe if I were John Mayer there would be, or Gillian Welch. Who is Gillian Welch? I’ll have to check her out.

I’LL TELL YOU ONE THING. Two things. First, I like wind. It blows things around and it blows the cigar smoke away. I’ve only smoked about half of an Arturo Fuente Gran Reserva and I’m already feeling subjected to an unusual force of gravity. The world has gotten larger and more massive, with more liquefied rock in it, and it’s pulling me down toward its center, into the car seat, where I’m sitting. The second thing is, when you smoke a big, bad cigar first thing in the morning, it makes you need to go to the bathroom. You’d better be at home or parked near a bathroom when you smoke that cigar. It’s almost uncontrollable.

I’m back from the Chicago gig. They gave me a gorgeous blue check for a thousand dollars. I stayed in the guest room of an English professor and his charming and funny wife who had not dyed her hair. I always like women who don’t dye their hair. The guest room was in the attic and I had my own bathroom. Before the event I lay on the bed moaning, “Why am I here?” and trying to figure out what to say about the future of poetry, and then I “boweled down,” as Roz used to say. Of course the toilet clogged. It was inevitable. I flushed a few times with no results and then the chain broke. Shit. You know the scene in Anger Management when John Turturro says, “I took a dump on his porch”? That’s what I thought of. I felt no anger, though, only fatalistic acceptance. The professor was out meeting another panelist at the airport and I didn’t want to ask the charming, funny woman for a plunger. I took the back lid off, taking care not to clank it, and tinkered in the tank for a while, and then I took a rash chance and forced it to flush manually by lifting the slimy rubber stopper. Miraculously, the toilet conceded. What a beautiful sight to see that horrorshow of embarrassment swirl away. I put on my lucky tie — it’s one of my father’s narrow paisley ties.

At the symposium the consensus was that poetry had a rosy future. Lots of interesting work was being done in out-of-the-way places like Stockton, California, and new means of distribution were bringing imaginary gardens with real toads in them to poem-starved folk in the hinterlands and innerlands who’d never heard of Marianne Moore. I said how much I liked getting a poem of the day by email from the Poetry Foundation and that I’d rediscovered Thomas Hardy that way. There was a young panelist from Harvard named Somebody Abel who made the point that we think that people were reading poetry aloud to each other every evening by the fireside a hundred years ago, reciting Tennyson for giggles, and it simply isn’t true. He read from a piece written by George Gissing in which Gissing said that in his experience among common folk nobody had the slightest interest in or reverence for poetry and nobody knew a line of it. Abel said it’s always been that way and it always will be that way and the whole push to teach the Great Books is just a way of making students miserable. I thought that was refreshing, but another panelist got huffy. Afterward we all went out for a long dinner with some MFA students at a noisy “bistro” where we had to shout and scream and sample fancy wines while all the while pretending we were talking in normal voices. I was somewhat tipsy and wiped out when we got back, and I went to sleep and had a nightmare about having to serve slices of cold brain to rich people in a black-and-white movie, and I woke up at three a.m. I wrote Roz a note on a postcard of the Sears Tower, now called the Willis Tower: “Newscrawl, five Chicago panelists agree American poetry has a future. I miss your delightful scarved self. -P.” I still couldn’t sleep, so I pulled out my new twenty-five-key keyboard and hooked it up to my computer and made a song fragment called “Marry Me,” using the computer’s tinny microphone. I think maybe it’s the best thing I’ve done so far. The end goes:

There’s lots to do

Plenty to see

And that’s why you

Should get married to me

In the morning, when the charming wife was gone, I told the professor that the attic toilet had gone hors de service , but that I thought I’d fixed it. He said, “Oh, I’m so sorry, yes, that toilet is very delicate.”

An MFA student, a poet, had been assigned the job of driving me to the airport. She played me her favorite song, which was a live performance of “In the Gloaming,” done by Jonatha Brooke in a cappella harmony with another woman. “Will you think of me and love me,” Jonatha Brooke sings, “As you did once long ago?” The MFA student and I drove up the ramp to the airport drop-off doing our best not to cry our eyes out. She closed the trunk and I thanked her and flew home.

• • •

I’VE FINISHED SEASON TWO of Downton Abbey and burned out on episodes of The Office —Dwight is simply intolerable. Instead today I watched a little of John Cusack’s movie War, Inc. , and then I watched him and Minnie Driver in Grosse Pointe Blank. Minnie Driver plays a woman with a radio show in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and John Cusack plays a disillusioned hit man, formerly employed by the CIA.

People believe that the CIA is forever — that it’s an immovable fixture of American government, like Congress or the Supreme Court — but it was begun with an executive order by a president and it could be ended just as easily. It exists by presidential whim. Obama could shut it down tomorrow, but he doesn’t want to. People believe wars are inevitable, that human nature can’t change, but think of capital punishment. In England people were once disemboweled and castrated in front of a cheering crowd, with their heads put on spikes for viewing. In India they executed criminals by dragging them through the streets and having an elephant step on their heads. Now most countries have outlawed capital punishment. Or think of dueling. Ben Jonson killed a man in a duel. Manet dueled an art critic and wounded him with a sword. Pushkin, who fought dozens of duels, died of a bullet wound to the abdomen. Abraham Lincoln almost fought a duel. Nobody duels now. It’s inconceivable. It isn’t basic to anything. Centuries of patrician tradition, absurd rituals, faces slapped, gauntlets stiffly thrown, times appointed, companions holding out pistols in velvet cases in the park at dawn, the iron laws of honor — we know now it’s all hokum. Progress is possible. Drones on autopilot are not inevitable.