saint ursula, princess of dumnonia, eight years old in the year 383, set sail for gaul accompanied by 11,000 of her closest virginal handmaidens. she was to marry conan meriadoc, a celtic king, the founder of brittany. but when a miraculous storm whisked her ship across the sea in a single night, ursula decided she ought to postpone the wedding, maybe because she was eight, and instead undertake a pan-european pilgrimage. the troupe of virgins made it as far as cologne, where huns were laying siege to the city. the dastardly huns, who look pretty cool in the painting above, beheaded all 11,000 virgins and fatally pierced young ursula with an arrow.
of course, all that might just be a big misunderstanding. per wikipedia, the 11,000 handmaidens might not have been so numerous. this could be attributable to a misreading of the name undecimilla, who was listed as ursula’s primary virgin handmaiden accompanist, “by some blundering monk”. other possible misreadings, exaggerations, and conflations are posited by the article, as is a description of ursula’s basilica in cologne, which claims to possess the skeletal remains of the little she-bear and all her 11,000 companions, a “tsunami of ribs, shoulder blades, and femurs ... arranged in zigzags and swirls and even in the shapes of Latin words."
catholicism, baby!
in brooklyn, 1,640 years later, the name ursula refers foremost to a popular new mexican burrito restaurant—scheduled to reopen tomorrow in a new location on nostrand ave, around the corner from my apartment (pending any last-minute pan-european pilgrimaging). i’ve been to the old location in crown heights; it was a small operation, relative to its popularity, and there was always a big crowd of hungover, well-dressed, largely white, nonvirginal burrito enthusiasts loitering outside on sterling place, beseeching god for their names to be called.
i’m curious to see how this will play out on good old, reliably upsetting nostrand ave, where unmuffled cars bellow at breakneck pace and there’s far less sidewalk on which to pray. how will the transplanted ursula crowd impact or be impacted by the open-air drug market that does a steady drive-thru business from a stoop a few doors down? by the neighborhood vagabonds, forever bouncing around a fixed constellation of bodegas, always asking to bum cigarettes? by the committed neighborhood marchers who patrol up and down and blocks every day, chanting “black power for black people in black bed-stuy” into a megaphone? or by yours truly, just trying to walk in a straight line to yoga class at the god damned young men’s christian association?
a week ago i was walking in the opposite direction, towards herbert von king park, cross-stitched to a quarter tablet of adderall, two puffs of weed, and half an american spirit blue, which i mistakenly bought thinking it was their light cigarette. i’d spent the morning finishing a new draft of a short story (“the wind wakes up at night”) and stormed out of the house that afternoon to clear my head. except it’s impossible to clear your head on that heady trio, especially when i’ve been attempting to write. what happens is that i cannot stop manufacturing low-quality content ideas, they arrive on an unceasing production line, falling off the end of the conveyor belt into a pile, breaking against each other on impact.
“what about a guy who talks like this? what if everyone was assigned a QR code at birth? and had to wear their code on a t-shirt all the time? what about a school for classically trained writers? what about a sherlock holmes story where the murderer claims he passed the victim as they were coming out of whole foods on bedford as he was going in, but sherlock knows that the bedford ave whole foods exits onto north 4th st?”
on and on it goes. while, at the same time, another part of my brain is tasked with monitoring this content production, engaging with the generally stupid ideas, poking holes in their makeup, telling myself i’m stupid, but occasionally spotting something that might be worth keeping, worth developing, something i could put into a blog post or a short story or my novel, which i no longer work on but think about often. so much of being a decent writer, it seems to me, is a reflection of one’s judgment—the decisions you make around what’s worthy of inclusion vs. what gets cut. this isn’t a hot take, i guess. but what they don’t tell you is about the pain of the weeding out process, the garden that produces so many deformed tubers along with, once a season, maybe, something worth bringing to the state fair. the net effect of all this is that i often feel like i’m reading from a slush pile in my own head, of my own head. i’m proud that i’m writing more, i’m taking reading and writing more seriously in some ways than i ever have, but it’s daunting to think i will spend the rest of my life this way, besieged by my own dumbass ideas like ursula’s huns.
the day after my walk, my office went bowling at time square’s own “bowlero.” it was actually fun, the lanes are on the fifth floor, accessed via a standard midtown office elevator. we had a private lane and a full bar. positioned above the pins were televisions replaying footage of trump turning himself in from earlier that day. a coworker i’d never talked to before told me she played college softball, D1, and that her team won two national titles (“nattys”) while she was there, but that she’d hated it for the enormous pressure she felt from her family (her dad was a major leaguer, her many brothers following suit), she puked before every game.
on the way home, a little drunk, i saw that the moon was hanging with low hugeness in the sky, so i decided to go up the roof of my building and gaze upon it. but when i stepped through the creaking, never locked doorway, i observed not the moon but a dark form, low and flat, hugging the rooftop—and moving, juddering like a limb still twitching on a freshly squished roach. my first thought was that it was a person, someone sleeping up there, kicking out in their dreams. my second thought was that it was actually two people, having sex. my third thought, though i was already halfway down the stairs, was that it was a towel or tapestry, fluttering in the breeze.
yesterday afternoon i rode my bike to prospect park, took a lap. the first ride of the year is an annual ritual. the man who dances to raggaeton near the grand army plaza entrance was there, it felt good and even noble to see him again. the ride itself felt especially strenuous this year, maybe because i’m getting old, maybe because i’ve been intermittently fasting, which makes exercise all but impossible, i lost five pounds in march, my body tilted at the mode of losing, forbearance, as monklike as i get. on my ride, i couldn’t stop spitting, i was like a camel. i had a lot of nasty shit in my lungs, the winter’s accumulation, all suddenly wanting out. i was spitting ribbons onto the park track, onto my hoodie, taste of nickel, all part of this important purification ritual. you just have to be careful not to spit on anybody, that’s the only thing, and definitely not on the roving packs of orthodox families who crowd the bike lane unknowingly or knowingly. i struggled mightily to climb the hill at the end of the loop, had to pull over at its crest and sit beneath a flowering cherry blossom tree and rest, sitting and gasping in the beautiful tree’s fallen, rotting flowers, which resemble nothing so much as feces, all the season’s first flowering trees looking like they’ve soiled themselves in their pink prom dresses. biking home was easier, downhill, i caught all the lights down vanderbilt, and the ones i didn’t catch i slingshot through anyway, the wind cool in my ears but not cold, the sun warm on my unmoisturized face, spitting all the while.
in the early evening, dusktime, i had a memorable birding experience right in my own bedroom. i’d only just put down my bowl when i heard the unmistakable song of the white throated sparrow pealing sonorously from just beyond my open window. the bird had landed in my tree, what i think of as my tree, a mere fifteen feet away from me. WTS’s have the most beautiful singing voices of any bird i’m familiar with (caveat that i am a relatively inexperienced birder and might be showing my ass here), soulful and mournful both, song of the forest treetops, a sustained, high-pitched deeeeee followed by a rapid syncopation, deeee dee-dee-dee, dee-dee-dee. you can listen to it here. the WTS also happens to be very cute, cuter than your average house or song sparrow, which account for 98% of the sparrows you see in everyday life and probably never notice because they are mostly brown and do not sing lovely songs, preferring to chirp atonally in bushes. whereas streaks of white paint curve around the little head and neck of the WTS, giving it an old man’s beard, and then, closer to the eyes, he is daubed with bright yellow.
i grabbed my handy binoculars, which i keep on my bedside table for this exact reason, and trained them on his teensy face. i could hear the songs of other WTS in distant trees, for their song carries, you can sometimes hear it ringing out from many trees away (this doesn’t hurt in the old spectral beauty department). so i listened to a little flock of WTS all singing to each other, calling and responding, my binos perfectly focused on one colorful face, and honestly it felt like i’d chanced upon a pod of dolphins, such was my natural elation. i watched the bird, my bird, sitting on the branch for what was, in birding time, the equivalent of hours, his black eyes darting flicking about, his head rotating in gyroscopic ways, calling to mind clockwork, automatons, murakami.
what i wanted was for my bird to sing. i’d heard him sing earlier, when i was in the other room, but he hadn’t sung since i’d got him in my sights. i wanted to watch his little beak clap up and down and emit something beautiful in a way that seemed impossible. at the same time, i was feeling awestruck by this encounter, by the sustained proximity of such an easily startled creature while dusk settled over the borough, a magic trick of the magic hour (okay chill), so i was also thinking, “don’t leave.” i was thinking “sing, sing for me,” while at the same time i was thinking “don’t leave. don’t leave my tree.” thinking “sing for me, oh, please, just a little song.” and thinking “stay, stay a little longer, another minute won’t hurt.” the songs of the other birds started to grow faint, and then his tiny, fractional movements grew a little wider, he was using more of his torso in twisting around, and then suddenly he alighted from the branch, exiting the field of my magnified vision so quickly that it was as if he had disappeared.