The Reader Travels

Embracing the voyage across the sea, I brought my copy of Anthony Burgess’s Nothing Like the Sun, a novel about young Will Shakespeare, a glove maker’s son, bored with his party buddies in Stratford and moving on to much more exciting things. I was glad I’d read it before, because my vacation was too much of a distraction to actually focus on any of the words I was reading.

Really, it’s a beautiful work, very sexy, poetic and lyrical, but I had to keep rereading paragraphs, pondering the most minute phrases.  Like, what body part was he talking about when he referred to her “black flue”?  I think I know. I’m pretty sure he was talking about giving it to her up the old chimney if you know what I mean.

Anyhow, the first opportunity I had to read was on our flight across the ocean.  But how could I read a poetic novel when a hot young Israeli chick was flirting with me the whole time in her sexy broken English?  Burgess’s words just couldn’t compete with my trying to explain to her what the word “goo” means. 

Do I have something in my eye, she asked, leaning into me. I gently scraped her eye with the tip of my finger.  No hair, just a little goo, I told her.  I don’t know what you’re saying, she smiled and fluttered her eyelashes at me.  You know, like snot or boogers, and I made a gesture like I was picking my nose.  Sexy, right?

When our meals came, my plate held a pile of gelatinous mashed potatoes, and I didn’t think about it until later that this was the perfect way to communicate the meaning of the word “goo.” 

As I tried to sleep, I knew I could make out with her if I wanted to, start my vacation on an exciting note.  But it was enough for me to think, as I take this trip to celebrate my 40th birthday, hey, maybe I’ve still got it.

When I’m in a different country, it’s the little details I notice.  When we first arrived in England, we did three very ordinary things — we used the bathroom at the airport, got cash out of an ATM and exited the parking garage. 

One thing that I would find was pretty common about using public toilets in England was that electric hand dryers prevail.  If given a choice, I will usually dry my hands with paper, but maybe that’s because we have inferior electric hand drying mechanisms in the States.  Not so in England — man, those suckers can blow.

The ATM was not extraordinary, though the queues to get to them were pretty long, but that’s probably because we’d just gotten off an airplane at the international terminal, and everybody else had the same idea.  The parking garage wasn’t extraordinary either, but that’s where my thoughts started to wander… back to literature… and a freaky, London favorite — J.G. Ballard’s Crash.

And what is Crash about?  Why, sex and car crashes, of course.  A guy gets into a car accident and meets up with this whole underground movement of people who get off on being in car crashes, watching car crashes, reenacting famous car crashes, you get the picture.  David Cronenberg made a movie about it back in the 90s with freaky people like James Spader and Rosanna Arquette, and just so you know, it has nothing to do with the 2004 movie about racism in Los Angeles (though as movies go, I liked that one better).

So, we’re driving around the parking garage, and I remember there was a scene in a parking garage in London, it may even have been at the airport.  I’m sure there was something sexy happening because there was something sexy happening in every scene of the book. And there may have been a car accident but it may have just been a discussion about a car accident. I don’t know.  But all I could think was, that could have been right here.

I couldn’t help myself. I kept looking at the parked cars searching for heads or feet or bare bums in the windows, but to no avail.  Just an ordinary parking garage. In London.

When people ask me what I saw when I went to England, I say, “Oh, the usual – Stonehenge, Buckingham Palace, the Sistine Chapel.”  When D’s aunt told us not to make any plans for Wednesday, that she had a special surprise for us, none of us could have guessed we’d be taking a day trip to Rome.

Ever since I read Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, my thoughts of Rome have centered on one thing — Michelangelo’s Pietà — and though we saw so many things, this was the one that mattered to me. A student of philosophy, I’m more into Greece than I am Rome, but this image of a mother holding her dead son whose body has just undergone untold torture, this is something I can feel passionate about. It’s the juxtaposition of humanity and inhumanity, the universal love of a mother for her child.

For similar reasons, my favorite story from ancient Greece is that of Medea, a woman so scorned, so powerless that she takes the lives of her own children.  It’s the one thing she can do to hurt Jason, who has left her for a younger woman, and her need to hurt him surpasses her need to protect her children.  But she is cursed, for she must live with her choice and her own loss, magnified in this act of desperation.

Back in England, we caught a few scenes from Ordinary People on the television, yet another tale of a mother dealing with the death of her son.  We saw only one scene with the mother, and if you didn’t know what the story was about, you’d just think the mother was a bitch and write her off.  But knowing, as she lashes out at her remaining son, you can see her pain and know how deep her loss has cut her.

Ave Maria.