Category: Uncategorized

On Being Charlie Ravioli

By Andrea Scarpino

 

My friend Chris recently sent me a 2002 New Yorker essay by Adam Gopnik called Bumping Into Mr. Ravioli about his daughter Olivia’s imaginary friend. The funny thing about Charlie Ravioli isn’t that he’s imaginary, but that he’s such a busy imaginary friend—too busy, most days, to play with the girl who imagines him, always jumping into a cab or letting his answering machine pick up when Olivia calls. Eventually, he’s so busy he must have his imaginary assistant Laurie tell Olivia that he’s too busy to play. As Gopnik writes, “Things seemed to be deteriorating; now Ravioli was too busy to say he was too busy.” 

 

Olivia’s relationship with her overly busy imaginary friend leads Gopnik to think about busyness itself, about life in New York City, about busyness as an invention of modernity. Benjamin Franklin, Gopnik notes, “never complains about being busy, and always has time to publish a newspaper or come up with a maxim or swim the ocean or invent the lightning rod.” Henry James, on the other hand, living 100 years later, “with nothing particular to do save live, complains of being too busy all the time.” Which leads us to the present day: “Busyness is our art form, our civic ritual, our way of being us.” 

 

Busyness is our way of being us. 

 

Because being busy makes us feel alive, doesn’t it? Makes us feel important, competent, a part of something bigger than ourselves. And when everyone else speaks constantly about how busy she is, to not do the same feels like laziness. Even if we’re not actually busy, we must act as though we are. And more tragically, perhaps: we must believe in constant busyness. The importance of being busy isn’t just a lie we tell others; we must believe it for ourselves. We must believe that if we aren’t busy, we are nothing. 

 

Which brings me to a confession: I have become Charlie Ravioli, believing myself too busy to have lunch with friends, rushing in and out of an endless succession of meetings I pretend are important. “I can’t believe I have 12 hours of meetings this week!” I complain to Zac, as if sitting in a meeting is harder work than coal mining or garbage collecting or flipping burgers in grease-filled kitchens. When talking with colleagues who say they’re overwhelmed, drowning in work, I agree reflexively because I know that’s what I’m supposed to do. If I don’t have more work than I can accomplish in one lifetime, I am clearly not working hard enough. I’ve begun to schedule phone calls weeks in advance with some of my dearest friends because heaven forbid I interrupt a work day to talk about a new baby or a book’s publishing. I call my mother while doing other errands—“Are you washing dishes again?” she has started to ask; “You only call me when you’re at the airport.” Worse yet, I have started to think of calling my mother as just another errand contributing to my busyness. 

 

But I’m beginning to realize that I keep myself busy, repeat to myself how busy I am, to prove what I do is valuable—to myself, to my colleagues, to my friends. Worse yet, I believe in the lie of busyness: being busy means I’m doing something that matters, and doing something that matters means I matter. I can’t be a fraud or unimportant or just another cog in the wheel—look how busy I am! Look how much depends on me! 

 

Gopnik describes Olivia’s invention of Charlie Ravioli as an insistence “that she does have days, because she is too harried to share them, that she does have an independent social life, by virtue of being too busy to have one.” We invent busyness to prove to others (and ourselves) that we are important because we are too busy to share our days with them. What a terrible construction. 

 

And Gopnik wrote his essay eleven years ago. Imagine how much more busy Charlie Ravioli must be now. 

 

Unless, of course, he realized he was creating his own busyness much of the time and chose to step away from it, from the lies he was telling himself about being busy. Maybe he realized his importance has less to do with the art of being busy, and more to do with how he chooses to spend his days. 

 

Maybe he realized that busyness is a trap: it doesn’t demonstrate work success or intelligence or a life well lived. It just demonstrates an aptitude for busyness. 

 

I’m not sure exactly what all this means for my own life, how to work hard without the constant pulse of busyness, how to nurture everything I want to nurture while remaining fully present in the world. How do I embrace sitting on the back porch drinking coffee with no agenda other than sitting on the back porch drinking coffee—and still accomplish everything I want to accomplish? How do I make time for swimming and writing maxims and inventing the lightning rod—without falling back into the busyness trap? 

 

I’m not sure yet. But I’m sure I’m ready to break up with Charlie Ravioli. For one thing, he was no fun at all.

Not Music

 

My neighborhood is filled with crows and walking my dogs this morning I felt the pull of superstition–crows offer portents in hundreds of mythologies. Then I did my compensatory rational mind stabilizer trick–crows mean nothing. And I walked with my dog-pals and thought of crows as messengers who carry no news. My first moments outside and I faced a choice as to how I might live in the world. “Sorry crows,” I said, “you’ve been demoted.” 

 

They flew away.

 

I should say I like crows. Honesty compels me. I once wrote a poem about their songs:

 

“They Say”

 

In Korea they say 

The crow has twelve 

Notes, none of them

Music—not surely. 

& here, early,  

A pine thrush 

Sang when it felt

Hunger—invited

Nowhere its

Music came down

Heavily on desire.

In substance 

I side with the crow 

Whose sound  

Is borne heavily—

Because the notes

Are not music,

Because the crow’s

Satori

Is a mistake,

Singing that way

To pure, endless joy.

 

 

**

 

Of course nothing one says in a poem should be taken for truth–for instance “music is music” and crows do make notes and John Cage would dispute my take on crow song. But in human terms there’s an apparent artlessness to the way crows sing and I like it. I can attest to this. Its a small fact like candy and coconuts. If a crow has enlightenment it will be in spite of his song. 

 

**

 

Some years ago I was walking along a street in a medium sized Scandinavian city and I found a baby stroller outside a department store. There was a crow sitting in it. He was supremely displayed, his wings up, fierce head darting from side to side. Seeing me he flew away. And then the parents came out, strapped their baby into its seat without any idea that the dark one had been there. I am, among other things, an amateur philosopher. I thought of Theodor Adorno: “Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.”

 

What if the crow means no real deliverance will come? Truth is simply a matter of flight and appetite? And some tuneless songs. 

 

 

 

’63

 

“In plain terms, a child is a complicated creature who can drive you crazy. There’s a cruelty to childhood, there’s an anger.”

 

–Maurice Sendak

 

 

 

Last night (for reasons hard to explain) I found myself daydreaming about the day President Kennedy was killed. I was 8 years old and in the third grade on November 22, 1963. I had a blond crewcut and carried a black leather briefcase to school each day. My blindness was becoming a social problem and I was dimly aware of it–by the age of eight kids are starting to identify their scapegoats. The hunching boy with inch thick specs was fair game. I was prematurely lonesome and trying to reckon my surroundings because I felt provisional and vaguely frightened. As a disability studies professor I try to remember exactly how it felt to be 8 with a disability in public school. 

 

No one in the third grade feels secure. Forget disability–you know something vaguely sinister is going on. You’ve figured out they have bigger agendas than “eat your peas” and schoolrooms begin feeling both inviting and sad. “Inviting” because you’re learning division which is fascinating. You love that you can reduce things with careful forethought. It turns out you can make numbers smaller and smaller with acquired skill. Math is difficult: you can’t see the blackboard, you have to listen really hard. But you love its provinces. Division makes more sense than people.

 

And that’s the thing: I’d figured out by the fall of 1963 most people made no sense at all.  In fact I believe to this day “Catcher in the Rye” isn’t about adolescence at all–its about 8 year olds–Holden Caulfield is far too old for his idiopathic bloom of dark astonishment. The poisoned turd, the bolus of knowing–the admixture of cruelty and insincerity comes earlier in life.

 

At 2:00 pm, one hour before the scheduled end of the school day, Mrs. Morrisey, the superannuated secretary from the front office stuck her head in our room and announced breathlessly President Kennedy was dead. Then she told us to go home. Its possible the adults thought the world was ending. Earlier that morning we’d had an atom bomb drill which involved crouching under our desks. Maybe the world was ending? I remember our teacher telling us to stay quiet and orderly. There was no mention of home work. We were shepherded out the door. It was eery. It was a warm afternoon and no spoke a word.  

 

Walter Benjamin once wrote that “counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom” but that afternoon there was nothing like wisdom apparent. Mrs. Morrisey hadn’t said the President was dead but all would be okay, the nation had survived worse occasions, etc. Of course with hindsight I know it takes courage to provide counsel. That was the day I understood how little courage and wisdom was available. People of my generation always say, “do you remember where you were when you heard about President Kennedy’s death?” as if the main thing was your patch of ground, or a bit of architecture. 

 

For me the signature of November 22 was the parting of a curtain, a rending of an adult veil. At home I raced up the stairs to tell my mother. She was in the “master bathroom” that early 60’s status symbol–a new private bathroom for mom and dad–”movin’ on up”. I shouted through the closed door that the President had been shot. She wrenched open the door and smacked me. “Don’t you ever tell a lie like that again!” she shouted. The bathroom behind her smelled foul and she stood in the door in a house robe and I saw that she was unsteady. I began crying and kept it up on the way down the stairs to the TV room. I cried as I turned on the television. Walter Cronkite was on the screen, explaining disjointedly the news from Dallas. “The President died at approximately 1:30 pm Eastern time,” he said.

 

My mother sank to the sofa and began howling. Then she leaped to her feet, grabbed her car keys, and ran out the door, still dressed in her robe and slippers. I had to guess what she was up to–that she was driving to the pre-school where my sister was finishing up her day. 

 

If memory is really a theater than mine was illuminated by a single spotlight that afternoon. My mother was not a comforting person. She was not reliable. Adults were far more chaotic than I’d known. This was as frightening as the death of the President. That was my terrible discovery of an early afternoon. 

 

When my father came home he said nothing. He sat in front of the TV in glum silence. It wasn’t a wise or consoling silence. Just withdrawal. 

 

Authority can be strengthened by silence. But silence is also scorn. It’s fear tricked out in a dark costume. 

 

My version of that day isn’t mediated by the Zapruder film or conspiracy theories. It was the ascension, the day’s ascension, its standard raising, a flag saying how little a boy could trust adults in his near circle and also the ones down the road. In effect I became an contrarian adult on that day. I learned to abjure silence–even when to do so requires more than passing faith in the comfort of those around me. That was the day I started asking questions.   

 

Summer was short

We went to retrace our steps

At the edge of a sweet field

A black river took summer away

We dropped our walking

Prayed for the trees still budding

 

–Niilo Rauhala, translated from the Finnish by SK

 

 

Immanence and impermanence–my brothers. I think hard about you. Two crickets outside my window. Water falls on my wrist bone; I’ve a life inside a life. 

 

Sometimes I talk too much. At other times I say nothing, drink red tea from a glass, move books from one table to another.