serenity

from the tyranny of stratigraphy

His name was Danny Riley or something like that. He was a small pug of an Irish guy. He wasn’t in the program. He was both a boxer and a writer. He would show up and take a course now and then. Some of the professors really did like him and would let him audit a course. All of the grad students hated him. He wrote really short stories and poetry. His stories were really kind of more like poems than stories. The students would all go down to Jefferson’s. That was a coffee place on State Street back then, Jefferson’s. They had poetry readings on Sunday nights, little contests. I don’t remember what the winnings were. They couldn’t have been much. But this Riley would sometimes read on Sundays, after he had boxed on Saturdays. The kids would go down to watch him read whenever they knew he’d fought the night before. As time passed he got slower and slower with his reading.

I’d heard that he came to the States originally because he was injured in a fight somehow in the United Kingdom. Something along the lines of a brain lesion. He’d been a substantial boxer but in a low weight class over there. I’m not really that familiar with boxing. But he was a small guy so he couldn’t have been a heavy weight or even a middle weight. He was a hell of handsome kid. Thin and compact. All muscles and sinew on a slight frame. I guess he’d taken a few punches too many or maybe just one. So he was banned from boxing in Britain but had kept up his training and been accepted to fight in the United States.

So he came here. I’ve also wondered about that level of dedication to something. A willingness to actually risk death. Real and sudden death for an art-form of sorts. I guess you can’t really consider it an art-form. But I have to believe that he must have seen it that way. So to enter the ring week after week and know that the next punch to his head might be the last punch he’d ever take. That must have been something. Living on the edge. An amazing abrupt slim edge. I wonder if he felt more alive than any of us. If he did, he didn’t show it except in his stories. His poems weren’t all that good. But the stories in retrospect, they were quite wonderful.

The kids liked to go and watch him at these poetry readings. It was the same sort of attraction that slows down traffic around a car accident. He’d slur words or mispronounce words when reading his own poems, as if he’d never seen them before. He’d pause in the middle of something and just stare out into the audience. The kids would express concern about it. Eyeing each other as if to express a sadness, a concern. But they’d do it in a way where it was clear that they enjoyed it. They couldn’t take their eyes off of him. He’d stammer and look bland for a minute and they’d look at him with an intensity that I’d never seen in class. Some of the braver of them would tell dark jokes about it. Vague, dark humor. You needed a certain acuity to it to even know that it was humor. None would laugh openly. Though many would smile wry knowing smiles that showed they understood and were in some way superior to those who didn’t smile.

His condition became progressively worse until he wasn’t around anymore. I don’t know where he went. I never heard that he died. I’ve always wondered about the motivation of the kids. It was exactly that way, like they were watching the aftermath of a traffic accident. A long traffic accident that took about four years from the beginning to the end. There was a real hatred there. I sensed it in the kids. He was older, in his mid thirties, I suppose. But we have a lot that age who come and go. He wasn’t a bad writer. He wasn’t a wonderful writer either. His stories were the good things but they were different and didn’t fit into any category.

He concentrated on the poetry because people pushed him in that direction. The kids couldn’t place the stories into any kind of framework that they could recognize. I remember him reading one of the stories in class and I opened the thing up for discussion after he’d read it and all of the kids were looking at each other and smiling their dark subdued smiles. The only comment came from a girl. A rather unattractive girl. “What was that?” was all she said. Danny simply looked at her as if stupefied that she couldn’t understand it. It wasn’t that she couldn’t understand it. It was that she couldn’t place it. She’d been told what it should look like. She been told to sort it into some category that she could recognize. And when she couldn’t place it, she rejected it. I said nothing. I didn’t know what to say. I suppose I couldn’t place it either.

There was this uniqueness to his style. And beyond that there was his subject matter that the kids didn’t like. It was, I think, that he had something more to write about than graduate school politics, their parents screwing around, and growing up in the suburbs. These kids had all read and reread Updike and Oats and Cheever. They’d tried as hard as they could to believe in the concept that a good story could come again and again from that same set of limited circumstances. They’d tried again and again to believe that all that a writer needed in his tool-kit of experience were the few things which they had: the suburban upbringing, the pending master’s degree, the two trips to Europe, the six classes in English literature and the two in women’s studies, and the pending stint as a waitress in New York. They hated him because he had a story, one that wasn’t just copied out of a book that someone else had written. I’ve often thought  about the frustration that those young writers must feel. They’ve got to fill endless infinite demanding empty pages with experience that they’ve never had.

He had one story that I remember very well. He called it “Serenity”. It was about fighting: boxing. It was about how a fighter had to have moments of absolute peace and that the peace was a fuel for the moments of absolute violence. He compared, a little indelicately, boxers and wild cats and writers. He actually went to the zoo over and over again and watched the cats. He watched one mountain lion more than others. He got into the way that time must have worked for that cat, and indirectly for all cats. He captured it by describing the musculature. The way the cats muscles relaxed and tightened; and what he saw in the eyes of the cat; the way the cat responded to him and other cats and food. He captured the way a cat’s sense of time must be non-linear, must be long empty periods punctuated with short moments of incredible fury. The way a cat, when it is relaxed, is almost in a state approaching death. How it must be a transcendence of the way, the normal way, the way that we, when we are awake, experience time.

Now that he’s gone, there are two things about him I will remember. There was this thing he had in his stories, this understanding of the important of quiescence. Once I asked him about it and he said he couldn’t really express it. He said it had to do with really understanding serenity. He said he thought that most people, except for those who lived by a kind of violence, couldn’t really understand serenity. Could not have ever really appreciated it. Had never really felt it. He referred me to a book by Norman Mailer, The Fight. About Ali and Foreman in Africa. I don’t normally read Mailer. And then there was something by Miles Davis. About a week later he showed up with a copy of The Fight and the Miles Davis. I had to chuckle because it was a real record. A vinyl record. When he handed both to me he said something like, “the power and the excellence are in the pauses. It isn’t the violence; it is the serenity lying between the violence. It isn’t the note; its the space between them. And then he went on about how you could go to a thousand yoga classes, but if you didn’t know what it was like to feel that real animal death which is a product of the will to survive and an essential part of violence, you could never understand serenity.

I said that I could understand about Forman and Ali, but I could not about Miles Davis. He said that for a man like Davis, or Parker or any of those, that any note, any next note could also be a death sentence. That that was the reason they could play in the way that they could play. That if they had ever become assured of their own continuity that they would have lost their power. So I’ve come to understand him. His violence was more profound than about any I can imagine. With a lesion on his brain, every punch he accepted could be the very last. If that was his fuel, if the serenity was fed by the violence and the violence fed by the serenity, his moments of that weird staccato peace, that he’d attempted to convey in a few of his little stories, must have been likewise profound.

I really feel, when I think about it, something of a debt to him. My writing has improved because of him. The other thing I’ll remember about him is this. The other boxers accepted his poetry. I could say they almost celebrated it. I’ve witnessed some banter. But the other writers. The young writers who were just beginning to write. They couldn’t accept his boxing. They condemned him for it. I would, at first consideration, have thought it would have been the other way around.