The Earthquake in My Martini

Past Lives, Lost Children, and the World Backstage

On Friday night, my girlfriend and I met for a drink at Temple Bar in SoHo. Whenever martinis are involved, I can’t help but recall a James Thurber line my uncle likes to crack as he mixes cocktails: “One is alright. Two are too many, and three are not enough.”

We got to talking about writing, and what drew us to the craft. For her, writing is a form of record, a way to crystallize an experience across time, make it audible to the future. For me, it’s something less sensible, more exorcism than echo. If I feel like I’ve made up my mind, I have little interest in taking to the page. Language has always appeared to me a game of articulation. I can’t live without writing because it is the only way I can process the intractable static of intuition—the dissonance of knowing something, feeling it in your bones to be true, and not being able to express it. Do you believe, as I do, that you can write things out of you? She had one martini. I had two.

We left to catch a showing of Celine Song’s new film Past Lives at the Angelika Film Center in SoHo. The movie follows childhood buds Nora and Hae Sung, who go their separate ways at an early age only to reconnect, decades later, as adults still grappling with the trauma of that first flash of love and sudden farewell. Nora immigrates to Canada with her family, then the U.S., and eventually breaks into New York’s theater scene; Hae Sung never leaves Korea. Life has left them unmoored—Nora geographically, Hae Sung emotionally—and both experience strong, recurring hallucinations of the life unlived. Their aspirational selves cannot exist without the other.

What gives? Neither can find the energy to sustain a real relationship in the face of the space and time that divides them. The night Nora meets her husband Arthur, she describes to him the Korean notion of in yeon, the undercurrent of destiny that brings any two humans together, across the cycle of reincarnations. The term isn’t constrained to relationships of obvious significance; a Korean proverb states that “there exists in yeon in even the mere brushing of sleeves.” The deepest in yeon involves thousands of years of potential energy, and the most important people in your life are likely souls you have encountered again and again, across hundreds of past lives.

“Do you think we have in yeon?” asks Arthur.

“Oh, that’s just something Koreans say to seduce someone,” says Nora.

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To the analytical half of my brain, this is some higher power hocus-pocus served with a side of karmic propaganda. The rest of me, however, thinks all this “destiny” razzle-dazzle is pretty hawt.

It’s hard to ignore the almost supernatural power relationships hold over us. The bonds which underscore human connection—friends, lovers, insignificant others—are not something we can perceive ex ante. Too often, we take the full measure of a connection only when it has been lost. We will unearth it again in the next adventure, buried in another layer of bodacious in yeon.

Here is something my younger self could never understand: our circles get smaller with age. Our vocation grows more specialized, our responsibilities at home strengthen, our bodies tire more easily, our social outings become less frenetic.

Most friendships will not survive the confines of a single lifetime. It is so self-evident, it is a scandalous inevitability, and yet for twenty years I remained blissfully unable to get this into my head. I loved my friends, and I was wonderfully impervious to the prospect of an existence without them. If a connection was deep enough, it would last forever, like in Matthew Vaughan’s Stardust.

If I could go back and tell that younger self one thing, it would be this: Some sentiments are so strong they cannot be sustained.

I hope he’d understand this wasn’t meant in an unhappy or even melancholy light; it is not some emotional caveat emptor. What it is, on the other hand, is a perfectly ambivalent statement, and a truth just as axiomatic for me now as timelessness was then. I still love my friends, and yet now I feel just as tethered to the ones who got away—the connections which, in the moment, seemed so profound and infinite as to emanate from a past life, only to fracture in some imperceptible way, and now exist primarily as a matter of record. They still follow me. As memento, as keys to be decrypted in time.

Language, in so many hands, can give voice to both. Whether mnemonic or speculative, writing relocates us onto less fragmented and more forgiving terrain. It is, on the good days, a way of loving from afar.

“Tell me what you see, Ground Control.”

In her novel Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli tells the story of a woman making a road-trip across America with her husband, daughter, and stepson. Both the narrator and her husband are sound archivists. In fact, they met one another through their last project, an exhaustive audio landscape of New York City. When the story begins, they have moved in together, merged families, and inexplicably drifted apart. Any visions of collaboration have been swapped for low-grade contempt. They do not want to understand each other any further; both turn back to chasing “old ghosts.”

As a “documentarian,” she hopes to report the stories of thousands of immigrant children bravely crossing the desert of the southern border—if not on foot, then on the tops of train cars—in search of asylum. Her husband, a “documentarist,” sets out to assemble an “inventory of echoes” chronicling the 1894 surrender of the Chiricahua Apaches, the last free peoples of the American continent. Despite their professed differences, both the narrator and her husband are telling stories which are, on some level, reproductions of one another.

In a memorable passage, the narrator describes her husband’s work with the acoustemologist Steven Feld, who “thought that the sounds people make, in music or in language, were always echoes of the landscape that surrounded them, and spent a lifetime sampling examples of that deep and invisible connection.” Specifically, Feld travelled to Papua New Guinea in the late 1970s to record the ceremonial traditions of the indigenous Bosavi people. In the course of his work, he realized that the funerary weeping and songs he recorded were in fact “vocalized maps of the surrounding landscapes, sung from the shifting, sweeping viewpoints of birds that flew over those spaces.” The Bosavi, Feld came to understand, recognized birds as echoes, or gone reverberations. The birds had internalized the sounds of their landscape, and in mirroring it over time, kept the voices of the dead alive.

They are, in this light, the harbingers of our past lives.

“Morini read the letter three times. With a heavy heart, he thought how wrong Norton was when she said her love and her ex-husband and everything they’d been through were behind her. Nothing is ever behind us.” (2666)

Here is my latest delusion: There’s a world we can’t see which hums along backstage. It’s made up of all the stuff of this world, but the boundary between the living and the dead has been erased. There are no page breaks. The backstage world incorporates all of history to date and history to come, but it does not exclude alternative histories, re-rememberings, and retrofutures. Some people—children, especially, but also others—are able to see and settle the backstage world more easily than they can our own.

For the rest of us, the wings of the stage mark the perimeter of our vision. Every so often, the lights are dimmed, the set pieces are changed. Perhaps we assume different roles, which we embody so totally that, in the vanity of the present moment, all the previous characters we’ve brought to life are forgotten.

Every now and then, we might find our eyes flutter, with the quickening of a seismograph needle, to catch a surprise flare of life behind the scenes. Maybe it is no more than a brush on the sleeve, a twitter of birdsong, but in that instant, the backstage world casts a shadow of its immense edifice into the theater, and we feel the edges of our perception ripple and swell like a swimming pool in an earthquake.

“Dear Cumberland, I have been very near the Gates of Death & have returned very weak & an Old Man feeble & tottering, but not in Spirit & Life not in The Real Man The Imagination which Liveth for Ever.” (William Blake’s final letters)

This past week, as I biked across the Williamsburg Bridge en route to a different film screening, I felt the familiar screech of the J train trundling along underneath me. I could just as easily have missed it—I typically look north toward the midtown skyline—but there, through the heavy beams and chain link, I saw the flicker of a young boy climbing up onto the roof of the train. Farther down the tracks, a second head rose up through a hatchway two cars down. I watched, in awe, as the first boy ran across the top of the moving train, the light of the sun glancing off the stained metal underneath his feet, so that he seemed to be moonwalking along a kind of conveyor belt, the light pulling him forward, until some ten seconds later he vanished into the hatchway his friend had opened for him.

I am not sure why (perhaps in putting it down…), but this sight unlocked another memory. Five years ago, two friends and I flew to Denmark to attend our friend’s film debut at CPH:DOX, the International Copenhagen Film Festival. The same friend, it turns out, with whom I was crossing over the bridge into Manhattan last week.

Our second afternoon in Copenhagen, two of us cycled over to Freetown Christiania, a self-governing acropolis of hippies and hashish formed from the ruins of an abandoned barracks in 1971. There are no cars, no cameras, no running water systems, and private property does not exist. We wandered around for a while, passing through organic cafés, trinket shops, and art installations, before coming up to a bridge across the Stadsgraven moat surrounding the city.

I realized I was uneasy, as if I’d been the victim of some sleight of hand. I remember checking for my wallet. Upon second glance, I noticed that, up in the trees lining the banks of the waterway, there were thousands of birds. Thousands of them, fortifying the branches of the forest around this strange community of souls, the leaves of the trees holding the afternoon light like stained glass.

With a sudden, hair-raising whoosh, the entire mass of birds took flight, circling overhead in a giant, grasping amoeba. There was no one around, or if there was, they weren’t paying attention to the aviary tornado right in front of them. My friend and I, however, might as well have been levitating. In those moments, I would not have been the least surprised if a U.F.O. had materialized in the air above us and zapped us with its tractor beam. The birds whirled and churned and then in a matter of seconds locked into formation—that imperceptible turn by which violent, indecipherable chaos attains form—and cast themselves into the sky.

Birds, bikes, borderlands, film premieres… Familiarize yourself with the portents, lads. The stage is the uncanny valley, and we have mountains to climb beyond the veil.

Living and dying? To an actuary, these are coefficients of error. This time, you and I will not panic in the face of immortality.