Phone game

The way of the samurai

Hello,

Down and out in the Neogene this week, shivering in bed, laid up, a summer cold. I sleepily rewatched Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, which I’ve always remembered fondly and which was even better than I recalled. The film seems to me like an homage to “ancient culture” and the playacting this requires, a playacting that aestheticizes contemporary life to make it worth living. The film’s mafiosos seem just as much actors in their mafia trappings as Forest Whitaker’s Ghost Dog in his samurai sincerity. On paper, the movie is indistinguishable from parody, or at least it’s all too easy to imagine the parodic version Quentin Tarantino or the Coen brothers would have produced. While it is a funny movie, it works because it’s mostly earnest and incredibly lonely feeling. The loneliness of Forest Whitaker or Ghost Dog soaks every frame in which he appears. Maybe Ghost Dog is an American film about wishing you weren’t quite American, just as the film itself feels like an American version of non-American crime films (like French or Japanese crime films from the 50s and 60s) that are themselves already “takes” on American films. Jarmusch also seems to anticipate, in the distinctly Northeastern look and feel of Ghost Dog, television shows like The Sopranos and The Wire, as if giving birth to the modern HBO aesthetic (though Sopranos debuted just a few months before Ghost Dog). Jarmusch’s samurai-gangster mashup feels, either way, like a work of art that comes very late in the history of its genre; I say that neutrally, not as a criticism, since it’s a work that depends on an extended pre-existence for so many of its “gangster” and “crime” features. Last week I wrote about Kafka and Prague. Today, just an anecdotal note about the gym and the afterlife. Next week, I believe, it’s the return of/to Thomas Pynchon.

Thanks for reading,

Mike

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At the YWCA down the street from my house, the pool is on the ground floor, and on the second floor is the main exercise area with treadmills, ellipticals, and a variety of weight machines. The other morning, as I paused between laps in the pool, I turned to watch an elderly blob—wearing goggles, without my glasses, everyone at the pool is a blob in a bathing suit and a swim cap—lower himself carefully into the water. He stood there for a moment and turned toward me two lanes away. I’m pretty sure we exchanged polite nods, but it can be hard to see what a blob is doing. Certainly I nodded. Anyway, then he turned to his right, away from me, because a second blob, even blobbier than the first because this was one farther away, had hailed him by name.

“Hey, Mel,” the farther blob said. “Did you hear what happened yesterday?”

“No,” said the nearer blob, named Mel.

There was a pause. The farther blob made a noise, a sound of surprise or shock or sorrow.

“Someone died upstairs,” said the farther blob.

Mel at first didn’t respond, as if, like me, he was rather surprised at this news not only because he’d never been told about someone dying in a gym before but also because he’d never received such news while wearing a swim cap, which suddenly seems inadequate and wrong for the occasion. Someone died upstairs?

Mel said something like, Wow, I didn’t know. When?, and the farther blob, keeping his voice rather loud, said, “Yeah, yesterday I got here 10 or 10:30, it happened before that.”

Someone died upstairs, on the day before this in-pool conversation. And in fact, the the morning before, I had been exercising upstairs. It must have happened just after I left the gym, since I can’t imagine I would have missed the commotion if someone had died on, say, a treadmill and been thrown across the floor. I pictured, against my will, the elderly men and women I see regularly at the gym in the mornings. I imagined them cradled, lifeless, by the seat and arms of a beeping stationary bike, the screen displaying the message “Pause workout?” I imagined them clutching their chests and falling to their knees while the muted TV played a show on CNN that always seems to be on and which I don’t know at all but the host is named “Smerconish” or something that at first glance seems nonsensical, like an email handle, and a banner runs at the bottom of the screen asking his viewers to “@” him online as he talks. Horrible to die while this program is playing on the TV. Dying at the gym is like dying in a waiting room.

The blobs kept talking. It was time to do more laps. I felt more alarmed than I had any right to feel. Like the second blob, who was spreading the word, I felt the urgent desire to tell someone that people are dying upstairs at the gym. Even the phrase someone died upstairs already feels half-cosmic, as if the person in question perished on the way to heaven. Given the reasons we are told to “stay active,” perhaps dying at the gym seems sad also because it looks embarrassingly righteous and right-thinking, like a secular version of dying in the middle of a church service. Caught strenuously wishing to be saved in your final moments, the opposite of dying in your sleep, which seems so graceful, so peaceful, so unfreighted with expectation. Then again, exercise is only a habit. But think of Samuel Beckett, in his essay on Proust: “Habit is the ballast that chains a dog to his vomit.” Almost seems like a parody of Beckett, I think, but there you go. Exercise does mean hanging around your vomit, your meat reality, your truth that you are a spirit tasked with tissue. The tissue is supposed to “stay active.” That’s why they have TVs on at the gym, to distract you from this unpleasant matter of keeping your tissue active, keeping you focused by pulling on your focus.

Anyway, gossip isn’t words, it’s feelings. The second blob felt it, he passed it on to the first blob and on to me, and now I wanted to pass it on to someone else, maybe you. Someone died upstairs? Where I play my phone game while I’m on the elliptical?

Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), David Hockney