On Being a Fly on the Wall

To my mind one of the most interesting things in the world is wanting to be the proverbial fly on the wall somewhere you cannot be for one reason or another. When I talk to another human being, or hear that person talk, I want to feel like I want to be looking over that person’s shoulder, wearing his shoes, seeing the event through his (or her) eyes. The greatest and most creative minds in the world have that ability.

Take Anais Nin, for example. She writes in those lush, piquant Diaries of the stifling humidity of Puerto Vallarta when she vacationed there in 1973. It is a tribute to Nin’s prose that you really feel the humidity along with her; she describes “the warm, caressing air. It dissolves you into a flower or foliage. It humidifies the sun-opened pores. The body emerges from its swaddling of clothes. Rebirth.” Short of wearing her sandals and straw hat, it is as close to being Anais Nin as us wretched masses will ever get. I wholeheartedly recommend Anais Nin to anyone who will listen; for sensory detail and vivid prose, few diarists or writers since the end of World War II come close. If Nin were looking down from Heaven at the various blogs being written, it would be all she could do not to take the stairway down and become an editor.

Along the same lines, Margot Anand is another example. I hope you forgive me that I don’t remember which book of Margot’s this is from, but she describes a sensory deprivation experiment she undertook some years ago. She was blindfolded in a hotel room for a full week, only listening to the ocean waves (if memory serves) and surviving only on grapes and water. It allowed Margot to experience altered states, and because her account is so rich, I want to at the very least try that for myself. I would have loved to have been her lover on the night Margot first discovered Tantra. Her companion, by the way, was an American and as Americans so often do, he had little or no memory of the experience.

Just at the moment, and I realize he has been referenced as much as anybody in this journal, I am listening to an old baseball broadcast featuring the dulcet voice of Vin Scully. We are slowly, but surely, running out of people you’d want to sit next to at a baseball game, because you feel as though you are sitting next to him, and Vin has been making people feel that way since 1950. It’s not even a matter of sitting in the broadcast booth with Vin. He could be on your hammock, or sitting with you on the stoop while you drink lemonade. The greater point is that when it comes to sporting events, I prefer to hear them on the radio, as compared to watching them on teevee. All great drama takes place in the mind, and when it’s done right, a great play-by-play account can make you feel like you’re right behind home plate, or the fifty-yard line, and all you need is a hot dog with a toasted bun. Vin, Harry, Jon, Marty, and a dying supply of others make one feel like a fly on the wall better than most.

Of all mystical powers I would like, it would be flight. When I was quite young, my favorite comics hero was Superman, and I guess it’s not a coincidence that the absolutely brilliant film (with that gorgeous score) came out within eight weeks of my 1978 birth. Sometimes, when I hear about an accident in a faraway city, or that someone close to me has been in an argument, I would have loved to be a fly on the wall not for the argument, but to be the peacemaker. Often’s the time during my life I have heard blazing, screaming rows among my parents and other family and wanted them to make peace.

Jeez, I had hoped not to wander off the track. But maybe, just like an insect flies, meandering hither and yon, I was meant to do so. Maybe I was meant to have these ecstatic experiences, and not have to live life so vicariously through literary and aural heroes and channels. I would like to think I have lots of life left to live, so that I would no longer be that fly on the wall, so that I actually swim in the mineral water in Saratoga, walk through the narrow streets of Ischia, or stand in the middle of Times Square, throw my hands in the air…and rejoice. Even a fly on the wall has to rejoice sooner or later.