The Giant Ambani

So today at work I read a mention of a petrochemicals billionaire whose new 27-story mansion with heliports will rise in full view of one of Bombay’s largest slums; this being a Distinction because all the slums in Bombay are enormous. Tonight it occurs to me, as I’m continuing to “process" this homeowner's tale, that maybe he has it in his mind to be an Inspiration. That he’s thought it through and now he's thinking: They’ll see it and wish to become me—they’ll see it and think that it’s possible—and they will work harder and harder until some of them even get out of that slum.

So I spend another hour at home on the internet trying to get what I can on this guy and his house, which I must report that as far as I can tell isn’t finished since 2007—but I can’t really be sure because there’s nothing accurate and new enough out there about the matter. Nor can I learn enough about Mukesh Ambani’s mind to tell whether he’s thinking to Lead by Example. He appears to be somewhat ridden by his wife but that’s the one and only insight I’ve been able to glean. (And good for her, by the way!) Otherwise, zilch, more zilch, and repetitions: I’ve almost had it with Google tonight.

But the rich—right? Lording it over the rest of us! Forever and Still! Who cares what they’re thinking? Everyone knows what they’re thinking: Hey you down there! Work harder! That is exactly what is going through their minds and I don’t need to read this on the internet to know it for a fact. Because for all their flaws and blessings, the rich are just like you and me. Or me at least, judging by how often I think the same thing myself. Hey you Mister I Sit on an Overturned Bucket in Front of a Convenience Store with a Cup For a Living! Work harder! I would have built in Manhattan, though—or better yet, across the river in New Jersey, for the view. Build a dock and a private ferry line while I was at it.

Could still happen.

Beneficial Use

Is it just that I've come to dislike my addiction to internet reading? Of the kind, I mean, that I keep at, despite myself? I really hate it: trolling the columns of comments (many too short!) page after page. Watching the race wars ignite and explode from afar: I like it.

I've got a problem.

Good internet reading is reading Les Misérables at work at every opportunity and reading it again when you're through. I know this. I strive to be better but I backslide into all the multi-vocal bilge collecting under news reports on Alvin Greene. Then I pull myself up by my bootstraps real hard and far enough to wonder: What happens to my feces?

Because I've started Book 2 of the fifth and final volume of Les Misérables at work and it's all about the Paris sewer system now. The characters are off stage and it's history, it's social criticism, it's visionary, it's an intermission: it's literary architecture now, of the awe-inspiring monumental type, and the highest of pleasures to read when I can find the time which I have not been finding lately (see above). So anyway, back to me over here, one night last week I came home, sat down at my trusty home computer, and spent a couple of very enlightening hours reading about biosolids. I have to say, as a New Yorker, knowing that about 50% of what I produce goes to a good cause is kind of a lift.

Nuristan Eye Camp Team

This morning, stuck at Prospect Park station, waiting on a sick passenger to be taken away two stations on and wondering, as whenever this happens, how it doesn't happen every day. But probably it does, such a big city system. Anyhow, the procedures are not such that the sick person is slung onto the platform so as to allow the trains to keep running. Evidently. But something like this, yet kinder--obviously--seems like it would be a good procedure. On every platform, or on every train, there could be a fold-up cot and pop-out curtains to surround it; at every other station there could be a station nurse on call. The nurse could enter, diagnose, and as necessary deputize some other passengers to assist with the sick one's removal. Bonus salary points and free rides to be awarded to the swift.

Yesterday at work I came to the end of the barricade. Also the end of Grantaire, offering himself like a chair leg flung onto the fire--with absolute lucidity; utterly humble; he dies hand in hand with Apollo (or, The Man He Loves) a hero's death. The understanding of the barricade and of the house doors that will not open to the insurrectionists who finally seek escape--the understanding that their revolution did not "catch" so those inside the houses only battened down their hatches, only waited out the hours until the army, as it must, could finally storm the barricade and kill everybody left inside--the understanding that this doesn't matter, or matters so little that even a person who was drunk at the outset and slept through the climax could wake up and still know what side to be on in the end, without hesitation--and that maybe, always, the quieter side of the firing squad makes better standing: all this understanding that Victor Hugo has so painstakingly built up and conveyed to the reader, he gives to Grantaire in an instant, like a whispered cathedral. So that to read about Grantaire, even at work, could make a person more brave.

Boo Hoo

The Mets and I are through.

Reading Les Misérables at work has finally liberated me.

Here on the one hand are all these young men standing vastly outnumbered inside the barricade, each and every one of them prepared to fight to the death because they believe in what they'll be dying for, and doing this unfed and for free. And on the other hand, another bunch of relatively young men facing the exact same number of their kind in a night game in Philadelphia for which they are being paid thousands of dollars for every single minute that they play. And yet it's the Mets who cannot fight--the Mets are the ones acting like heroes with head wounds.

Swans

Yesterday at work Gavroche died singing while his little brothers stole their breakfast from a swan. Remember that Jean Valjean, encountering him the night before on the Rue l'Homme Arme when Gavroche delivered Marius' letter, exclaimed--comprehending--He's hungry! And of course he was hungry, always; and there had been no food inside the barricade for hours: everyone inside the barricade was hungry. Gavroche was a great spirit, a hero, a Phenomenon, everyone can see this and it's true. But Jean Valjean sees more clearly, most truly, the starving child raving in its hunger, too near death.

This morning I looked all around me at the people on the Q train who by Church Avenue or so are like one or two of everyone on earth--Tibetans, cowboys, headhunters, unmarried gay people, every rarity represented--and I felt glad or momentarily glad that my tax dollars help pay other people's way out of ignorance and poverty. Then I felt glad at being able to feel glad about that because it meant I wasn't yet as bad a person as I often sound in conversation, for instance when the topic is disability fraud or teachers' unions or obesity or why some black women read such pornographic novels on the train. On this sunny bright-colored morning I felt glad to do my part towards springing a few more grossly fat malingerers and rude sex fiends from the prisons of their lonely rooms so that here they could be, here we could all be, equally free to ride into Manhattan together.

But then I thought: We're only the lucky ones. Others remain housed, and have no freedom. Others go unseen, outside the reach of care. I can pay all the disproportionately high taxes I occasionally won't mind paying and still people mostly children in Brooklyn will lack food. We who can get up, put on clothes and walk out our front doors into public--where it is really so much more interesting to be and very often safer--for all that we complain about the work load or the lines are engaged in taking pleasures. I had to stop off in downtown Brooklyn to visit the Social Security office. The guards downstairs caught the lady in front of me bringing her breakfast along--buttered rolls in foil--and let it pass. Public offices, cool, carpeted, with rows of seats and some other guards to chat with as familiar faces drift among the novelties: for those of us who can get there, the lucky ones, another Luxembourg garden.

Glacier

By comparison with how I read normally, from a book in my hands, I am reading Les Misérables at work more like a very slow reader would be reading it; maybe someone learning to read in prison, or in childhood, or in recovery from an accident or stroke. Simply unable because I am working to consume the text the way I crave to--all-consumingly, with focused greed and both ears stoppered, adder-deaf between the heaving pages--each day I take a very little at a time: I nibble. I go back to the beginnings of chapters and re-read to where I last left off: in fact, I gnaw. As if, dropped from intelligent space, it fit right into my diet of berries and bone marrow, I'm reading Les Misérables at work like a Neanderthal woman on the go.

Irresolute Me

I've really backslid on my resolve not to read on-line at work anything other than Les Misérables. Hard to fathom, really, why it didn't get easier to resist New York Magazine, at least. I had a good moment last week, though, at the home page for the New York Review of Books where every single article and "NYR Blog" post was written by a man and the only name of a woman visible was "Emily Dickinson," featured in an article by a man writing about an event he'd read at where the other person reading, also about Emily Dickinson, was also a man. The event was at the New York Botanical Garden which is too distant for me to ever get to, seemingly, as I have never been.

To reach the NYBG: I add another resolution to the suburbs of a sprawling list. Here in the inner city of this list I'm living with the resolutions I've fulfilled. They didn't vanish, no, they don't, with their fulfillment: they get fuller, more lively, all the time more color in their cheeks and vigor in their big strong limbs. Almost they hold me captive except I choose them. Upward mobility: what might have been in the back of a mind making plans to be "better" for its own sake--I declare.

I'll write more manly: I'll say, instead, my fulfilled resolutions are my Praetorian guard and the unfulfilled, Greco to my Roman, nothing but hoi poloi. I've got my core, creaking leather and broze hinges, under command, sandals slapping the cobblestones in tandem with intent to ricochet and cause affright. Unfulfilled resolutions, scratching themselves through their underclothes, sleeping in haylofts and hollow elephants, throwing dice, haunting the doorsteps of celebrity courtesans, trolling shady public colonnades for news, news, news and spitting to the left from superstition: the big To Do, easily dealt with, going nowhere but up to no good.

Or else, or also: I am inside the barricade with my fulfilled resolutions, some of whom are tied to posts and awaiting execution as police spies (a sexual allusion). All together we demand to be perfected.