(return home) Keep Your Lamp Trimmed & Burning is semi-autobiography about being young in New York. At the beginning of the book, Jake Moss and his friend Roman Berg talk in metaphors: Jake describes himself as being sewn up in a black velvet bag. In the scene below, after a year of dashed love affairs and professional failures, Jake finds his way out of the bag. From Keep Your Lamp Trimmed & Burning Sunlight on the Water That night, as the sun was setting and the streets glowed orange in their river ends, Jake Moss walked east across lower Manhattan. Roman met him on Henry Street, in front of his grandmother's building, in a striped shirt and ill-fitting jeans. "Alice brought home a bottle of bourbon," he said. Roman took out a green and gold pack of cigarettes and smoked, and then they went upstairs and into the kitchen. Alice leaned over Roman's shoulder to put down a bowl of olives and then she left them alone. She kissed him with a casual air of long practice, and the comfort and trust between them was so strong that it almost encompassed Jake simply because he was watching. It made him feel solemn and small. But he could not go as far as envying it, because even as their love moved him, its central mystery excluded him. "What's your metaphor?" Jake asked. Roman poured out their drinks. "This week," he said, "I woke up. I had been dreaming for a long time. I drowned in a green ocean. I staggered through a yellow desert. I was locked up in a steeple, pulling ropes and ringing bells. For a long time I felt sure that I was part of some giant's body, a tendon in his thigh, and however much I struggled to act when he was sleeping, I couldn't do more than tremble; and however much I struggled to keep still when he was walking, I couldn't help but move." "Why his leg?" asked Jake. "Why not his brain?" "No reason," Roman said. "We can say the brain. We can say that we're two of his neurons and this conversation is one of his thoughts. But we would still be blind to the larger reality. We would still be in a prison more terrible than any mere prison of stone, because our own bodies and minds form the walls." "No," Jake said, "on the contrary, you only feel blind because you're looking at the wall. If our conversation is one of his thoughts, then our experience must be part of his experience, and anywhere you look, you see the truth. You only have to look out the window." Roman swallowed his whisky. "I'm getting to that," he said. He refilled his glass and gestured around the tiny kitchen. "That's what I meant by waking up. I love my girlfriend and I'm going to school. We make love and I read books. In the morning I drink coffee, in the evening I drink wine, and when it's cold outside I put on a coat. The metaphors used to cry to me like the throbbing hamstring of a giant's leg--but now they don't." He gestured around the kitchen again. "Now I'm just looking at this." Jake had no answer. "Have you spoken to Tom?" he asked. "I have," Roman said. "I don't know whether to call him," Jake said. "My apologizing wouldn't seem to mean much now." Roman shrugged and looked away. "Can I tell him that she broke your heart?" "Will it help?" "It might," Roman said. "Whatever you think," Jake said. "Did you call Louis's friend about that copyediting job?" "I did," Jake answered, "thank you. They want me to start next week. It's funny--he didn't really interview me. He just told me that Louis liked my book. Then he asked if I had any questions, so I asked him if he liked it there. He replied with this long story about how he used to be in a rock band, and they would go on tour, and the paper was a good place to work because it was very flexible, but then he had gotten married, and he wanted to be a better husband and think in the long term, so he had taken on more responsibilities. Then he asked if that had answered my question." "What did you say?" "I said that it had." The Caesar Whose Face Is On It In the other room, Alice put on the television and Roman looked at his watch. A muted sound of voices and recorded laughter drifted into the room. Roman refilled their glasses with bourbon and ice and leaned back in his chair. "In a minute I want to go downstairs for another smoke," he said. "I thought you were cutting back." Roman smiled. "I was," he said. "Now I'm going to law school." He tapped his green packet on the table. "What's yours?" "This week," Jake said, "I cut my way out of the bag. I was in a black velvet bag, sewn up and enclosed, but after an initial panic I discovered a knife in my hand. I felt triumphant, because, as we discussed at the time, I expected to cut my way out into a bright and golden heaven. But once I started using the knife, once I began trying to cut, I found that the blade was brittle and dull and the velvet was thick and strong. The labor of cutting my way out of the bag stretched out endlessly before me, and it had no interest or rewards in itself. It was only dull, repetitive, uncomfortable labor that had to be done. So I did it. Thread by thread I cut my way out. Periodically some panic or excitement would well up--I would feel a renewed wave of claustrophobic terror, or an intemperate exhilaration at the thought of the golden country I had almost reached; but these feelings came and went. The only constant was work." Roman stood up. "Let's continue downstairs," he said. Roman ducked into the other room to tell Alice where he was going and then they jogged down the stairs and stood in front of the building. The streets were quiet and mostly deserted. A few black cars passed slowly, a young man walked by, black or Hispanic or an Orthodox Jew, and the streetlights silently switched through green and yellow and red. The night seemed streaked with rain. "After a time," Jake continued, "I mostly stopped thinking about what might lie outside the bag. It was an unanswerable question; the answer had no use. But if I did, ever so slightly, with the corner of my mind, allow myself to consider it, I expected that a successful tear in the fabric of the bag would open me to one of two things: to a ray of solid golden light, or to the heavy dark shadow of another bag." "What did happen?" "Water," Jake said. "I realized that all along the bag had been bobbing and floating in water. I had thought it was sitting on the ground. But when I succeeded in ripping the bag open, shimmery clear water began to pour in--the salty cold blood of the ocean." Roman smiled and looked down the street. "You're using my drowning," he said. "No," Jake said, "not exactly. That is what I was afraid of. I began hacking with the knife as quickly as I could, pulling at the sides of the ragged hole, trying to be born into the water so that I could swim up to the air. I thought that the bag had been keeping the water out." "Wasn't it?" "No," Jake said. "It had been keeping my body in. It was all that held me together. I noticed that the air didn't bubble out into the water--it seemed to stay where it was, as if it were attached to the bag. But as the water poured in and wet my feet, my feet washed away--they dissolved into glittering dust. I worked all the faster, and when finally, in my feral panic, I had ripped the bag almost in half, I floated suddenly upwards, and the torn black rags drifted down, and I could see from outside myself: the bag breaking up like an old rotten log, and my own body, floating upwards, drifting in thirty directions at once. For a moment it kept its shape, and then the water rippled through it, and I was gone, nothing but a series of specks on the surface of the ocean, reflecting the light of the white and yellow sun." Why I Listen to the Blues "Meaning you're gone?" Roman said. "You're dead? This is really your metaphor--glittering powder on the face of the sea?" "Yes and no," Jake said. "This is what I realized. I am the glittering powder--but so are you. So is everything. Nothing but glittering specks on the wavering surface of the sea, reflecting the sunlight when it falls at some particular angle, dark and unsuspected when it doesn't. But it's only a dissolution if you're looking from inside the bag. It's only a dissolution compared to a false ideal of solidity. Look at a Roman coin under glass in a museum. The temple to Juno where the metal was struck--it's gone. The man that swung the hammer, and the practiced beauty of his stroke--gone. The caesar whose face is on it--he's gone. And the man that carried the coin in the side of his cheek as he walked through the thick and stinking city, this living man greeting friends and thinking about his wife or his business affairs, on his way home from the public baths; and the shopkeeper that he hands the coin to; and the shopkeeper's slave that carries the larks' tongues, or whatever it is, by a different route back to the same house--all of them have come to dust, while the metal coin endures. But what gives that metal meaning? The people that mined it, that shaped it, that used it. The coin is only important to the degree that it leads our imagination towards the evanescent and difficult but incomparably more significant truth. So if I am dissolved--if I've really dissolved--then I'm glad. I can only thank God." Roman stubbed out his cigarette and grimaced. "I don't understand," he said. "The dust is still you? Is it conscious?" "Yes," Jake said, "it's me, exactly, and I'm all the more conscious--I can give more attention to what you say now if I'm not using half my mind to try to reconcile it with my idea of who you are. I'm more aware of the sunlight now if I'm not thinking of the sunlight then." Roman was unconvinced, but he let it go. They walked back into the building and up the close, dark stairs. "What do you want?" Jake asked. "What do I want?" Roman repeated, over his shoulder. "I want what everybody wants--fulfilling work and a woman who loves me, and ultimately children and nice things. Why, what do you want?" "I want the perfect metaphor," Jake said. Roman took out his keys and then stopped. "Do you want to walk down the block and get some chips?" he asked. "Sure," Jake said. They walked back down the stairs and into the chilly night. "The perfect metaphor," Jake said as they walked along the street, under tall streetlights, past shuttered stores, "will be empty. Normally the point of a metaphor, it seems to me, is to carry more meaning than any more simple statement can. That's the way I write books: I take two or three ideas that have been bothering me, and I study and bang them together until I find or create a place where they overlap. Then I transcribe it. When people can't speak the same language, they're forced to cut to the heart of things. When two different cultures collide, they form a simple and powerful creole. It's the essence of communication. That struggle to meet in the middle, that sense of alienation that heightens your feelings, that drives you to reach harder and further--" "That's the sunlight on the water," Roman said. "That's right. And the more powerful the metaphor, the deeper and darker its space of overlap, the closer it is to the center of things. But at the very center--" They walked into a bodega and nodded to the man behind the counter. Roman looked over the bags of chips in a wire racks. "Will you eat these?" he asked, pointing at a green bag. "Sure," Jake said. "At the center," Roman said, after they had bid the man behind the counter goodnight and were out on the sidewalk again, "the darkness gets so dark that it's an infinite abyss." "An empty, invisible pinhole," Jake said. "Empty in black and white. The kaleidoscope gives it location and the ten thousand colors give it form, but the very center itself is nothing at all. That's what I want." Roman nodded thoughtfully. Then he snapped his fingers and opened his hand: "Tada!" he said.