| Semester magazine Spring 2005 - Goddard College IMA program
This issue of the semester magazine again includes work by several advisors' students (the advisors, Karen Campbell, Lise Weil, and Ellie Epp, are indentified by initials after a student's name), and for the first time also includes work by advisors. Some of the work presented is by students who think of themselves as embodiment studies students, and some is not, but all is compatible with an emphasis on understanding human life as the life of a physical body. Links given below begin to provide institutional and theoretical context for the work presented in this semester magazine. We are innovating embodiment studies at Goddard, and welcome student participation in the development of this new framework.
The fear of knowing and showing what I feel has wielded an unholy power in my life to limit, diminish, prevent, and forbid the most meaningful, the most personal, and the most essential aspects of who I am and who I could be. It has robbed me of my most important relationships, including my relationship with myself. In my mad rage for order and control and perfection, I extinguished feeling, because feeling was chaos and chaos led to insanity. I had read about Sylvia Plath's shock treatments. I had heard stories of what happened to girls who made mistakes. I saw my friends punished when they rebelled. I knew, without having to think about it, that feeling and expressing my feelings would have interfered with surviving, and surviving came first. Put things in order before they exist, the Tao Te Ching advises. In this case, however, my prescription to myself is to pull everything that already exists out of order and drop down into the chaos. Then feel. *** "Come and get me." I think I always wanted to say that to you. It's not that I ended up in a bad place. I was fine, in a lot of ways that count. But I wanted to know that you loved me. That you did leave me because you loved me, as I wanted to believe was true, and not because I was too much trouble. I would have liked to daydream about you, imagining you as beautiful and romantic and tormented. I would have wanted you to be steely with the determination not to let the loss you suffered, when a cruel world parted us against your will, crush the joy out of your life. But I would have wanted you to miss me; to regret every day of your life that you let me go. Because every day of my life was a silent regret that you did. We were parted. You let me go. I couldn't form those words in my mind. You were a thought so forbidden to me, I couldn't even relish the idea of you in private. The key to success in the place where I was, was to hold you as non-existent. I knew early on, as soon as I could understand, that I was adopted. I was told it meant I was loved "as if" I were their own child. We all knew I was adopted. We accepted it in our family. But it was clear we didn't mention it in the outside world. My mother's identity depended on being a wife and mother. A mother has children. If she can't have her own, she can adopt. And there's no shame to that, and yet there is. My job was to pass as her real child, to take the place of the baby that never came and make up for the loss of the one who would have been loved as their child, not as if. We were shopping once, my mother and I, and a saleswoman was helping us. "Do you like the blue jumper," the saleswoman asked me, "or do you like the red one?" I didn't answer her. "Do you like this white blouse?" she smiled at me and held out the blouse on a plastic hanger. I looked up at my mother, who was staring at me without expression. "What do you like?" I asked her. "Tell her which one you like," she said impatiently. I couldn't express the danger I felt. I knew if I didn't like the same thing my mother liked it would spoil everything. The saleswoman would realize I was adopted, and I'd blow our cover as "real" mother and daughter. I knew that "real" mothers and daughters agreed on everything. I scanned my mother's face in hope of picking up a clue. All I could see was that she was getting mad at me. When she was mad, she didn't say anything. Silence surrounded us like fog, hung in the air for days, and left me groping blindly for answers. "Why are you mad at me? What did I do?" If only I knew what she was thinking, I could put things right and make her happy again. I focused all my attention on her, watched her expressions, followed her eyes, listened intently in case she called my name. I'd check and recheck everything in my room to make sure that I hadn't left something open that should be closed, or set something down that should have been put away. I'd color pictures and set them in places where she'd see them. I'd bring her a glass of water when she hadn't asked. I would have longed for you to come and get me then, if I'd known how to long for such a thing. Instead, I sat alone in my room, waiting for an all-clear signal and reading my Little Golden Books out loud or turning on my record player to listen to fairy tales on the red and blue records that came on top of the cottage cheese cartons. Maybe if you had come, like a fairy godmother, you would have explained to me what I had done that made my mother so mad. Maybe you would have held me on your lap and stroked my hair and said you loved me. Maybe you would have taken me home with you. From the adult conversations I overheard but didn't understand, I always thought that if I was bad, Sister Gertrude would take me away. I knew from what I'd heard that Sister Gertrude was the social worker from the adoption agency where my parents had gotten me. The truth was, the agency had two years in which to check on my parents and decide if they were doing right by me, and, if not, the agency could take me back and start me again somewhere else. Believing it was the other way around caused me endless fears of losing my home and family for some misdeed I might accidently commit. It wasn't until I was forty-four years old that I heard anything about my circumstances before I was adopted. I thought my parents didn't know. It turned out that, once again, they just hadn't said anything. I had known two important facts all along, however. They got me on December 7, 1950; Pearl Harbor Day. I'd heard the story many times, the one about how Mom lost her purse that day. However, I was born on August 23 of that year. Where was I from the time I was born until the day three months later when Sister Gertrude called and said she had a baby for them? I feared the worst and didn't think about it. I thought that I had been forgotten in a crib in a dark room, hungry and frightened and alone. Nothing I had ever heard contradicted this idea. Afraid of being sent back to that place, I tried to be funny and good and make my mother laugh and make her happy. I tried to fill the shoes she had waiting for me. "Paula walked at nine months," she'd tell people. "At nine months she told me she had to go potty and was toilet trained." Never again would I be as perfect. Never again would I rise to her expectations. And never would she lower the bar on what I needed to do to show the world that she was the perfect mother. When I was five, my parents got another baby from Sister Gertrude: my brother Keith. They never said anything about Keith's history before his adoption either, until the day when Mom and Dad and I made lefse for Christmas, 1994. By chance, it was December 7, Pearl Harbor Day. I don't know how the conversation started, but they broke their own taboo by bringing up the subject of birth mothers. "I always felt guilty about getting you," my mother told me. "Your birth mother had wanted to keep you." I kept my eyes on her, the smile I'd had a moment ago never leaving my face. "She wanted to keep me?" "Yes," she went on, "but she was the oldest in a large family of children and she still lived at home, even though she was twenty-six," the same age as my mother. "Sister Gertrude gave her three months to decide if she could keep you. You were in a foster home when we came to get you." I forbade myself tears, but the word "wanted" was making the back of my eyes hot and firey. WANTED WANTED WANTED. How could I not have known? How could they have not told me? "I never felt guilty with Keith," she added. "His mother was sixteen. She didn't want him. She didn't even want to see him." Had you wanted to see me? Would they have let you, back in the dark ages of adoption in 1950? Had you seen me? Such a question had never occurred to me before. Not only had you wanted me, you may have wanted to see me and maybe you had. Maybe you had held me. Maybe not. But maybe. There was more. "Sister Gertrude told us that your birth mother was adopting a baby at the same time we got Keith." The breath went out of me, and I couldn't pull it back in. My mother had always said that adopted children who look for their birthparents when they grow up break the hearts of the parents who raised them. She said that it's the deepest form of betrayal to go trotting off to another mother, the one who never sat up nights or changed diapers, and let her share in the glory of having a child without doing any of the work. I understood from what she said that I was never to look for you. I was never to ask questions about you. I was never to think of you. She'd know, somehow, if I did, and it would be like running a knife into her heart. On Christmas day, a few weeks later, my dad had a massive heart attack and died. It was true then. Talking about these things was perhaps deadly. But having been given this little glimmer of an idea, my mind began to track along your course. What had happened? Did you really want me? You must have gotten married, and then you adopted someone else's baby. What if, what if? Years later, I started asking these questions out loud to my partner, Sheila, who said, "Maybe there's some way you could look for your mother on the internet." "I can't," I told her. "And besides, she's never looked for me. Maybe she doesn't want to see me." I knew from my birth certificate, which lists my adoptive parents as my mother and father, that I had been born in Eitel hospital. I thought that Eitel Hospital had been torn down. On the internet, I found a web page that detailed the hospital's history. It had been in Minneapolis, across the street from Loring Park. The building was still there, it said in the history, but had been converted into Allina Health Care offices. That night I drove down to Loring Park, to the corner of 14th and Willow, and walked in front of the brown brick building on the corner. I had driven past there often, I had walked in Loring Park and felt drawn to the area, but now I gazed lovingly up at the big, dark windows facing the park. The web page said the patient rooms had been furnished with oriental rugs and mahogany furniture. It was a private hospital with an outstanding reputation. Why had you come there? How could you have afforded it? Did you live in this neighborhood? I looked up and down the street at the apartment buildings. Did you still live near by? The hospital's entrance had been bricked up and a new entry added farther down, but the original inscription over the old door was still partly visible. I walked over to the park across the street to look at the building. I was born in that building. I enjoyed the intense feeling of loneliness and longing that came over me as I stood there in the cold dark night. It was December 8, ten years after I first dared to think about you. Now, I felt you moving in my blood, solidifying in my bones. Standing in front of the former entrance, I wanted to feel what you might have felt walking into the hospital. Were you alone? If someone came with you, who? Were you frightened, ashamed? Was there something you were unresolved about that prevented you from knowing what to do about me? Then I tried to picture you walking out of the hospital that day, the day you were discharged, the day you left me behind. Did I sense you were gone? You were still undecided, perhaps, at that time. What thoughts occupied your mind during the three months you had been given to make your decision? What feelings ran through your body, your breasts full of milk? And once you did decide, did you mourn a part of you that was forever left behind? Did you and I long for each other in ways only we could understand? Did we both feel empty inside and have no way to express our loss of each other? Were you as forbidden as I was to talk about what had happened? I looked at the bricked-up door frame, closed forever as if to say, No more walking out these doors and leaving babies behind. We don't prescribe that any more. *** There is something I have always wanted to say to you. I have never known anyone I am related to, whose blood flows in my veins, whose features resemble mine. I have never felt comfortable in my body, in my family, in my life, in the world. I felt alone and outside. I felt abandoned. Still, I have carried you in my body for fifty-four years, sixty times longer than you carried me. I may never know exactly what caused you to walk out of the hospital without me, or if you successfully put me out of your mind once you did. But I do know that I have never spent one day of my life without longing for you, longing to hear your voice, to feel the touch of your hand on my cheek, to see you smile, hear you laugh. I have carried you and will carry you, your spirit, in my heart and in every cell of my body forever.
The making of an academic. Or the unmaking. This is the story of my evasions. The story of my rebellion. This is the story of coming into dialogue, into language, struggling for an academic existence committed to the social world, for a persona not detached from body, desire, life. It is the story of the explosion of certainties, the dynamiting of lies, the shedding of skins, the coming out into a theory and practice of language - fresh and vulnerable and new - that is only beginning to show its moist, green bud. So much has been done, but almost everything is yet to be said. The stages, shadows, mirages, the back and forth of an academic. Between the exploration of the territory one walks on, getting to know the territory one has wanted to stay away from, and the need to branch off, digress, wander down the barely trodden path. Between needing to learn the rules of the game and finding ways to bend them, stretch them, put heat under the ground on which they stand and make them dance. Between having words of one´s own and losing them to the voices of authority and discourse. And the question, ever present: What does it mean to work with language? What can it mean? I am a woman in academia trying to make sense of language. I am: escritora, profesora, traductora, ávida lectora . how do all of these experiences of language pave the way toward the vital theory of language I have always dreamed of? I am seeking to open an academic space for the theory I have intuited, I have worked with, I have needed, and others seem to be in need of, in order to not be silenced in the simple act of being, for the simple reason of loving language and not wanting it to be "just words". I am looking for a theory in which language and freedom may echo each other reciprocally. 1 Darkness. I am walking in where there is no door. I have felt a hole where it has been said there is stable ground. The supposedly stable ground is language. I strike a match. I am searching for meaningful language. It burns out. I strike another. Why have creativity, singularity, subjectivity been banned from knowledge? It burns out quickly in the damp air. I walk more than I am able to see. The cave gets longer and longer. I light more matches: I am both a writer and a teacher. What does the one offer the other? I am searching for a way of knowing that is not disconnected from the way in which I want to live. I am searching for the place of language in all of this, a language capable of working from and through desire. It is a slow process, how one begins to unearth a problem. A certain time is needed in order to mature a question, to find words with which to shed light on it and convince others that behind what they see as nothing there is a question beating. The place where one begins is always random. One seeks a sign or a dream or has a pain. And one begins to pull and pull, slowly, remaining attentive to connections. One thought one was holding the neck when really one was holding a shoulder, or a knee. One thought this was just a question, a problem statement, an assortment of words, but now it seems the words are just the tips of something heavier. One thought one was picking up loose limbs but now it seems that they are all connected. Out and out. So big you cannot contemplate it whole from where you are. The process requires patience, intuition, trust. I trace paths of words like white pebbles in the darkness. How to tell the story of this darkness, this unstable territory, this dismembered body, this wound we have grown so accustomed to we no longer see? *** I was a literature student fascinated by language. From reading literature I learned that words could restructure the way I looked at the world. They opened the eyes, awakened the numbed body, and produced reactions, life as the continuation of text, text after text. Reading made me write. From writing I learned that words had edges, that they responded to rhythms, they were not simple, but these edges and rhythms enabled them to poke holes in reality and restructure it. Yet, the writer and reader´s fascination with language was constantly crashing into the formatted word use of the academic and other worlds, where language was made to hide its edges, supposedly so that it could be understood, and rhythm was seen as an enemy of clarity and precision. We were surrounded by words but words were worn out. We read and spoke and wrote, but words were pebbles sinking to the bottom of the sea. Meanwhile the war raged on and there were no words to say death, to say no, to say peace. I was a young Colombian, aghast at the proliferation of war, wondering: What did it mean to use language in Colombia? What kind of (political, ethical, aesthetic) position could the reflection about language come to occupy in the national context? How could the rescue of the plurivocal vitality of language operate as resistance to the violent - intolerant, uncritical, stereotyped - frames of mind and being proliferated through education and mass media all over the world? The difference between my dream of a vital language and the flat notion of formatted language, was the importance that I gave to flesh and blood experience. Throughout my study of literary analysis at the university, I kept wondering: Why was the experience of language kept out of academic reflection about language? How was literature connected with the world? If it was true that the writing of literature fed from the world, how could the study of literature return something to the world, through its experience of freedom in language? Because, in my experience, literature threw me straight into the jaws of life. The claiming of my tongue came with the claiming of my feet; and that was late, 21, maybe. Until then I was always falling when I walked. Every step taken implied a doubt inside me, would I make it, would it come out right. Until then I had used language mostly to do homework, to follow instructions, to do what I was told and understand it. I had not discovered that language could be something other than a norm for me to follow, a path set out for me by others who did not know me well enough, that it was an accomplice through which I could give shape to my desire. Learning to walk the city I discovered that walking was not just about getting from one place to another, it was also rhythm, observation, becoming an anonymous inhabitant of a city - and a nation - that I had never felt the need to be a part of. I discovered how much I did not know about the city I lived in, how little I knew about the existence of different lives and troubles. I realized the tiny perimeter of the crystal house I had always lived in. I discovered to what extent the crystal clarity of its windex-cleaned glass walls could be a form of blindness. Walking the city came with learning the importance of defying prescribed borders, becoming political, learning to dance, to take risks, to give my body for the first time. Learning to walk had to do with becoming my own person. So did the discovery of the language of desire. And here something else must be added. When I was at this opening-up age of 21, a philosophy professor was elected as mayor of Bogotá. Mayor Mockus was into citizenship pedagogy more than into paving avenues. He employed the city´s mimes and jugglers to teach car drivers to respect the jaywalk. He implemented all-women´s night every month, where no men could be out on the streets; and also all-men´s nights. He made bicycle routes and scheduled days where private cars were not allowed to transit. He got married during his time of office and held the ceremony in a circus (he got married in the lion´s cage) charging expensive tickets to the city´s polititians that he then donated as charity. I should also say that the reason he started getting press and decided to run for office was that at a lecture at the public university - by Lyotard, on the ear of the other - he got up and mooned a group of students who were sabotaging the event. During this time there was a taking over of the city´s parks, streets, and public spaces (which had for a long time been considered dangerous and "ugly") by its young people. I grew up in a moment when arts, city, politics, and play seemed clearly connected and the only way to get people, so tired of corrupt politics and trite discourse, to come to claim and inhabit their city. I came into being in the midst of body sweat, postmodernist discussions, workers' boots, fear of being mugged, devotion to the turn-of-the-century literature of the city, complicity with homeless, stories tinted by ink of the prohibited, and lots of salsa. I learned all of this in college (extracurricularly). Literature had opened the door of my becoming. Could all of this vitality, diversity, all this stretching of boundaries and expanding of the self be brought back into language and the reflection on language? Was there any place for this in academia? 2 The city led to the land, travelling to the mountains, to the country, to the jungle. Now the legs the city had toughened with its diet of smoke would need to strengthen and be nourished on real air and green and sky. I met people to whom I was like an extra-terrestrial, people whose language I could barely understand. Here again I realized how ignorant, how tight the limits of my world were; here again my being stretched. I learned to soften my voice while speaking to a country woman, I learned to collect the broken stories that constitute this violent nation. I began to scheme the day when I would leave the city and begin life as a teacher, in a more simple place, where life was not so disconnected from nature, where I would learn so much that I had not learned. I dreamed of the moment when I would no longer seem an extra-terrestrial. I became a teacher of literature in a university institution in rural Colombia. I went from walking to epistemology. I learned from Foucault that every query is also a conscious or unconscious interest in how we are constructing knowledge. All this time, there is an underlying question that has been traced alongside that of language. An absence. At first mysterious. Then suspicious. Then unethical. Almost criminal. Definitely guilty. What is the role of the subject in knowledge? Why was the subject position so slyly kept outside the dominant ways of knowing in academia? Why did my - vital, intense, exciting - experience of language have to be kept out of the analysis of literature? For the sake of science? For the sake of objectivity. Objectivity claimed I was as dangerous to knowledge as anyone else, it claimed that there was barely any difference between myself and anyone else, and that if there were, it made no difference to science, we should act as if we were the same. Did it matter to art? What if we no longer thought about science or art, but about the people who would be the recipients of this knowledge, the neverending question: what is the role of academia in a world aching with problems, what do we go there to do, what did we study for and what will we teach? Was there an epistemological position that allowed me to reconstruct from differences onward, that took subjectivity into account as a way of knowing (like I had found in literature)? Where is it to be found? Why doesn´t it circulate? What would change if it did? *** This is the territory I arrived at: the intersection between the problem of the self and the problem of language. Weaving between literary theory, philosophy of language, linguistics, epistemology, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory, I realized that this is not a new topic. One might even say it has been one of the great topics of the XX century. Nietszsche, Woolf, Kristeva, Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, Heidegger, Derrida, . But if so, why was there still a hole in the place of the subject and even more suspicious, why had this hole been assumed to be stable ground? Why was I (like some kind of criminal) still having to look for guidelights, a method, a license, to bring the plurivocal vitality of the experience of self into (academic) work with language? Language. Epistemology. Ethics. It seems that these three are part of a triangle. If any one of them is modified, it affects the others. My dream: to re-formulate the concept of language so that the other two will necessarily have to be re-formed, re-vitalized, re-related through the acknowledgement of the subject as a question to be re-answered and re-discovered again and again. But every theoretical search is a metaphor for what occurs in the self. I begin to wonder. The Birth of Voice, Autobiography as Stance, Mother Language Wound, and Autobiography of a Social Body, these are the titles of the essays in this section. What is crying out underneath the call for voice, desire, stance, mother, a community? Language, literature have made me become attentive to my own desire. What do I desire? Then there is a voice, and she says: where is your core? Core? According to Foucault... According to Derrida... Acording to Barthes, there is no... I guess... I must have left it... somewhere far... away. Core? Could I ever respond to something so definitive? The woman asks: where is the body? I say: how should I know, I´ve never been good at keeping track of these things. The woman says, what are you looking for that you really believe in? I run circles around her but she stops me in my tracks and commands me to hold still. Only then do I see a door. The door does not lead in - to a house, to a livingroom, to a classroom; the door leads out - to the forest. *** In the middle of the forest there lies a body. White. Naked. Is it sleeping? It is beautiful. Is it the aborted baby? Is it my mother? Is it desire? Is it dead or alive? The moon shines on it setting it aglow. I push it with the tip of my shoe. It turns over heavily, like a sleeper. Wake up, I say out loud and have to smile to see the heaviness of its sleep. I kneel next to it and shake it violently by the shoulders. Who are you? Can´t you see it is dangerous to be out here, naked, sleeping, in the middle of the forest? I shake it by the shoulders: wake up, don´t sleep through your life! Is it me? She sleeps so comfortably I begin to wonder about my own state. I wonder which one of us is dreaming and which one is awake. (What place is the forest? What magic words do I say to get there? No words. Perhaps it is a matter of not saying words. Seeking deep inside the prohibited place, the sealed-up labyrinth of the self. The return to the silent place where words are born. The forest is the place where theory and life, art and science are possible in the same breath. The forest... the forest... only by believing in such a place is the lost body found.) I strip and lie next to her. She breathes into my arms placidly. She is warm. I am warm. The night is on us: she is my baby she is my mother she is my self. She is so big I cannot hold her with my eyes. She is so big I need more than my body to hold on to her. She is so small she fits into my cupped hands. It was the body I was looking for, I realize, tears in my eyes. I babble like a baby. I write with the tips of my bare fingers, whittled off with a pocket knife. I have all of language to relearn. 3 As I write this portrait I have a dream: My colleagues have decided to form a committee in order to check on me. Profesor F. tells me this, after giving me the most beautiful Christmas present, a white virgin wool duffel bag, and smiles. Yes, he says, cheekily: we want to check on you because we don´t understand what you´re doing (in academia), we want to figure out if it is serious. For example: where did you get the license to teach (horseback) riding when you should be teaching writing? And what is this that you call writing from the body? He is wearing a small turtleneck sweater that belongs to me, and when I point to it, he says it is his. The woman across the street thinks it's kind of cute because my belly button shows, he says and stretches his chest inside my sweater which is clearly too small for him. Then Profesora D. continues the interrogation, sitting at a metal teacher´s desk: What about your research project? Can you explain to me what are its objectives? I take the opportunity to tell her I never really felt comfortable with those objectives, that I tend to feel uncomfortable with all objectives, with the mere act of writing objectives, but that if she wants to hear them I know them by heart. She says, triumphant: See, I told you, she knows how to write, but she doesn´t know the difference between science and techné. (She on the other hand .) I am an academic struggling to break with academia, while still being in it. I am struggling to propose new forms, but my passion for language keeps crashing against the idols of scientific progress. I have learned that in order to be heard, I must get to know the discourse that is against me. I move gracefully through it. I take the other´s discourse and make it dance, make it whirl, make it sing, in order to convince the other that there is something missing from his use of words. Oh, dear, I had almost forgotten: I am a woman. I had never really stopped to think about it; I mean, I had never thought that it might have something to do with the sensation of being educated with a knowledge that never quite fit. I never thought it had something to do with the feeling of never being home, always being strange, foreign, stranger. Speaking in a language that was always like speaking in tongues. Crazy woman, opening up drawers inside herself and getting celebrated for those drawers. And what when I pulled them all out. What would I find there? Would I be bold enough to make sense of the air running through my hollows? With only these air holes, these empty spaces (not language), to invent, to reinvent the self. I am a woman thinking about language in academia. Anyone who wants to understand this quest will have to hear the story of the flood. How I had language and loved language, but the more I had it the more I wanted it to be true. I wanted powerful language, magical language, melodic language, and thus all the false words started to fall away, every day a new handful of them, until the distressful moment when I realized that the only word I still wanted was on the other side. I had spoken of breaking language in order to find a language for myself but I hadn´t reflected on what would happen if I pursued this mission beyond simply stating it as a kind of cheeky comment. Sailing through the walls like Alice. Learning that stillness is really movement, I became a sort of witch and when I arrived at the other side, I was all alone with my one word and no other, I was all alone and afraid, and alone, and lost and nothing made sense anymore. Anyone attempting to trace the process that is depicted in these essays will have to go there, will be led, perhaps painfully, perhaps deliciously, through this theoretical and linguistic reconstruction, spinning and spinning, every essay a new spin, less that is certain and more to be said. Every essay unsurer and barer, the self peeking out green and timid like a worm. As I rush towards it, of course it hides. I am a woman writer translator teacher vital language theorist. I am the survivor of a shipwreck. I am the shedding of all my certainties. I am whittling discourse down to the nude self portrait, stripping language to the bone. *** I wanted a simple forest path but perhaps that is not possible. The path is contorted, it is winding, I do not know it, I have never been here. I have no models, I have no companions. It seems that all I can do is be true to the prism, the problem, the ball of saliva that does not allow me to speak or to enjoy. I must perform surgery on this knot that does not let me speak. I must cut it open so I can see what yellow and green things come out of it, my abandoned children, my long lost knowledge, the land I lost beneath the bare tact of my feet. I wanted a straight and simple path but maybe it is not possible, yet. Because one has to run away to come here. Because one is like a criminal or a refugee. One has to be a bad child and disappoint one´s family. One has to say things about the people one loves that hurt. One has to say things about oneself that perhaps should have been kept silent. One has to suffer ugliness. Impatience. One´s words are fingernails scratching on glass. *** I want to imagine a time in the future when I can be a woman language theorist and not have to be measuring myself against criteria that clearly do not fit, criteria that have not even been questioned. When the bolder risks that I have taken in doing this may be of more value than the subservient repetition of theories that are only half assed. I want a full assed language theory, generous as my birth giving, salsa dancing hips. A theory to give not to take away from, that respects the reader as a living, thinking, enjoying (!) being. A theory whereby the reader can trace the path of existing language theories and end at a place of hope. A theory that puts language (back) in her mouth, his tongue back in his body, and leaves them set to continue, to discover missing limbs, to put theory to the test, but only in the practice of life, not pedantry. A theory not exclusive to artists or scientists, rationals or irrationals, a theory for more integrated beings, more embodied persons, persons committed to beauty and a better world. A theory willing to recover the valid work that has been done before it, and to be brave towards what has not been done. An academia aggressive about disrupting the dominant warring frame of mind. *** A woman is walking in a thunderstorm under a red umbrella. Her face is completely placid, as if she knew home was far away, her feet were already wet and she was enjoying the drumming of the rain on the surface of the umbrella. Everyone else on the street is either taking a taxi, or running hysterically, or locked up in their homes. Yet she walks on, like an angel of the times, an angel against the times, an art form, a performance, a cry, a complaint uninterested in what will be the reaction of others because it is so sure of itself. If this is what it means to be human, this hysterical running into taxis, and locking shut of doors, then I am with the rain. I am with beauty and I will offer no excuses for walking at my own pace. So let the thunderstorm come in. Let my language open up and swallow it whole. Let the storm come in, the contradiction. Let all the water in heaven come down, and make the grass grow, make the plants inside me grow. I want to open myself and show these words like wild flowers, this garden, and not have to argue, and not have to justify. It is all there. Look anywhere. Follow the tracks of the authors. It is written in the "corpus" of academia. There is the howl for a sense of living. For a return, a return to what palpitates. Let this old form crack open, fall to the sides of me, and leave only the impossible text. Woman in a rainshower. I have been pressing these pages under my jacket, tightly against my breast to keep them dry. It is impossible. I am all wet. When a woman writes with full knowledge of what it means for a woman to write, every single page gets soaked. The letters blur. Rivers run down the pages. The text overflows into a larger structure. The page is only one point in the constellation that is text. The rest is cosmos, forest, body, other, full fleshed life force refusing to be ignored. And so I toss forth these dripping pages, these rivers of words, leaving a puddle of ink on the floor.
1 Like a wave, smashing against a rock. Your clear vision is blinded by white foam. The shell that holds your self together cracks open against the angular rock. Is it the waves that have pushed you or have you thrown your self suicidally headfirst? How long will it take to reconstruct, how long for your three-year-old self on the Brazilian beach to recapture its spirit in the plastic water bottle that you fill and spill, fill and spill again? It is the best game in the world, nothing like the joy of warm water wetting back your hair, running down your face. It is maybe four o'clock and the low sun lays its shadows on the beach to dry. Your mother is wearing a t-shirt with legs printed on it over her tiny Brazilian bathing suit. Your father is taking the picture. She is wading in the low water enjoying the word-less poetry of the afternoon as you play with your bottle. In these gem-like moments, she forgets about you, taken as she is by the surface of glittering diamonds. The light is a golden glaze over the dark sand of her legs; her skin tingles from the touch of the setting sun. The palms of her feet are naked against the wet sand. She watches the water come and go, the sand cover and uncover her feet. It is pleasure. All that she loves is here around her: her husband, her child, this faraway land of samba, oxygen, youth, and freedom. Gulls glide through the air and she watches them pierce the brilliance of the water and disappear again through the secret windows of the air. She can see them, the windows. She feels the invisible currents pulling her self out of her skin, her body starts to dissolve into the warm honey of the afternoon. The earth entire - its complexity, its abundance, its state of perpetual unfinishedness - is crying out to her. Poetry tugs at her feet. It pulls, from here to the underworld. Suddenly a familiar sadness fills her; she recognizes the sensation welling: in the very heart of a beautiful moment. The flight of the gulls is suddenly a violent thrashing of the air. The beauty of the afternoon is a mouth with sharp teeth. The ground below her feet starts to give way. She tenses; she resists. This moment will go too, she tells herself, and spills out her sadness over the vast bed of water whose claim on her self she has rejected. When she turns she can barely distinguish her daughter from the sand and sunlight. You are all sparkling water, eyes lost in the distance. You sway gently, lulled into a trance by the great sea. Mother walks toward you, shakily, like one who has survived drowning. Possessed by the ocean's rhythm you are so deep inside yourself you don´t seem to notice her. She smiles at the sight of you, yet feels a pang. Mami, you look up, and the pang goes away. She kisses you and turns to her husband, deep in a mystery novel. It is getting dark, why don´t we head back home, she says. You on the other hand want only to return to that warm pool. To have a plastic bottle to fill and spill. To see your mother bathed in sunlight. And then to lose conscousness of her, and for her to lose track of you, as you are inhabited by the pulsing life beat of the sea. 2 Where to find the space of women, "before it is filled with dread?" (Kloepfer*) According to psychoanalysis, words are extensions of the phallus, like language is an extension of the law. Thus, the mother and daughter are mute because language was not made to represent them. And yet this is hard to understand when you have used words all your life. Both you and your mother. When you are both writers. When you have not one but two, almost three, tongues. To live without language: you cannot even imagine the bare emptiness of it. You prefer to trust that words will lead you to see through the darkness of these odd questions, that seem not to fit the rules of words or logic. What will you find when you turn your language toward the mother? How far must you go back? What is the name of our language, Mother?
You wonder if this is not the story of any self coming into being. You wonder if the problem might be that we have forgotten how to work from the void. And what would happen if we could re member the void as part of us, not absence and lack of meaning but "a space of tides and rhythms and biological hieroglyphs that transforms psychosis into primal song". (Kloepfer, 85) You wonder. *** Aphasia? Muteness? Not at all, except there are too many things that you can't say to her. Almost everything that is important to you you cannot say. What you write is what you will never share with her. For you, as well as for - her and - many women writers, "the text constitutes itself on the premise of her absence". (Knoepfler, 2) There is a tragic discommunication between the mother and daughter. You know the story: the daughter "considered herself deviant, set apart, from the type of life her mother lived; that what most concerned her, mother could not understand." (Rich, 229) Persephone and Demeter pulled apart. Meanwhile the war is raging; meanwhile the earth is withering. Before her your words spin like coins. Their meanings grow blurry. Their sounds grow muffled. Your words are phrases in the wind. Are they nothing but lies? What words will serve to awaken this deadened earth body? To caress this wounded land skin? To recover this blinded knowledge vision? ***
You are not mute, though. You have stolen a language with which to endow yourself with a separate existence, inch by inch. It is a language gained stealthily, like an adolescent closing the door of her room to put secret barbarities in notebooks that are like treasure chests. Your words against hers. The story repeats itself. What was your crime? As it unfolds it does not follow straight. It comes again and again and shows its ghostly rostrum. Then all goes white. Then all goes black. What was your crime? What is this guilt? You have done nothing. Why do your words stink of poison, then? All you wanted was a space to be. Matricide when you found the body it was dead already. Cross your heart. There are clothes and papers tossed all over the room. The whole room flowered with all your dear little slips of paper - you begin to collect them one by one - each one of them so lovingly written. There is a baby on the floor but you do not care. You walk out the window and leave it to die. You are full of explanations but you cannot stop stuttering. Dead Baby Mother. You do not want to be. Ghosts. You cling to life with your teeth. It was not life, it was death you wanted to kill. What cryptic writing you go through in order to claim your body as yours. Contradiction at the very heart of you. What paradox must be traversed so that life can grow in you You cling to writing because it is only there you are real. You cling to intuition because you are blinded by the light. If to be woman was to be your mother, you would enter the world of men through writing. How much more time and life must pass so that you can associate motherhood with life. Only words can cover the death in your self. Only words can bring back life over death, and the living mother and child. The one whose mother does not have to be dead. The one whose mother you can be. Oh, the complex ways in which our paths around the mother are written; oh, the complex ways in which our language writes us. ***
To understand the problem of (women and) language, Julia Kristeva differentiates between the symbolic and the semiotic registers in language. The first of these is the language that carries Lacan´s symbolic order and the name-of-the-father. It is the "inevitable attributed meaning, sign, and the signified object for the consciousness of the transcendental ego". (Kristeva, Desire in Language, in Kloepfer, 11) But there is also a time before the sign, before predication, and meaning. The semiotic register in language appears as the "unnameable, improbable, hybrid, anterior to naming, to the One, to the father." (ibid.) The semiotic - or chora - is the space of vocalization, rhythm, music, laughter the very workings of poetic language, that which protects meaning from petrification. But like the mother, the semiotic register is ambivalent, mysterious: a dark tug and pull unsettling all fixed meaning, that void which the self turns its back to in order to become established, solid, stable. Not all laughter and music, the semiotic
The search for the (non) language of the mother, then, leads back to the memory of before. Before language as law before identity as separation before you learned that the image in the mirror was yours is the body memory of the preoedipal phase. "In which not only ´she is mine/ I am hers´ but ´she is me/ I am her´" (Kloepfer, 33) Where pleasure was learned where desire was formed where you were part of the world and it was part of you. And then the sign is born, the self is torn from the other. The mother's body is exchanged for the word, that will enable the self to be self. Paradoxically, this is the word that cannot speak self it is?* "re-present" it. Fancy technology: we will now be able to control meaning we will now be able to use meaning to control you The body is forgotten. The mother is gagged. As she learns the language that does not come out of her body, she loses her voice. When she speaks she speaks the language that annuls the self. Kristeva proposes the recovery of desire in language as a way out of the symbolic abyss of meaning that is ancestrally locked in the family value system.
Although words do not speak her, the mother does not die. "Behind every temple to the father (the symbolic) there is a dark cave or inner hall where one might invoke the mother´s voice and rhythm." (Kloepfer, 130) Her story is behind each word She does not show, but the trace of her body (or its repression) can be read in the gaps and holes of symbolic language. The mother is the cause of language not being able to be easily retained as pre-modeled representation of reality. She is the memory that before language there is "The ´space´ they lost is not a geographical locus but a space in language, an ´in-between,´ where the semiotic register pulses beneath the ´tin-pan noises´ of male discourse." (Kloepfer, 27) It is by sensing the unacknowledged presence of the mother´s body, by recognizing the interplay within the structure of meaning (Kristeva, again), by getting a feel for the endless gamble between the semiotic and the symbolic, that language comes alive, with words that bear the mark of her ambivalence, her rocking motion, the space that is at once presence and absence, its possibilities, its tragedy. Language opens its arms, then, like a mother who has not put away her desire. Mother tongue come to lick your wounds. Mother thought running electric through the body, reconnecting you with other bodies, tapping you back into the uncontainable flow of life. Because the relationship of language and the body is not metaphor. It can be described: "as a scroll unwinds before shut eyes a kind of Freudian subconscious which was shifted was opened up as if a layer of hardened, protective sand and lava had been sifted. Behind that layer, the things that had been blighted were, by the same token, now fresh." (Kloepfer, 108) To conceive of language without suppressing the body modifies all language acts. Psychoanalysis teaches that to read language is to read the body; text is a blind under which the body is veiled, mourned or birthed. Writing can be the act by which we access our bodies and literally create our selves in language that is pulse, life beat, rhythm. "Where memory might be retrieved through meter and meter retrieved through memory." (Kloepfer, 107) Body memory, the forgotten memory of the preoedipal, before identity, definition, split, territorialization, language, war rhythm, as the memory that connects us. Ah, I see you now, mother. Nested in nature, you have not fled. Mother, you were the sky not the cage. Now I fly. *** When daughter is born it is rain over sun. That day there was the glow of the rainbow over her face. Now you have lived it too, the miraculous transformation of one in two. The stretching of the skin. The generosity of nutrition. The place inside where other dwells. Grows. Kicks. The enormous leap over the mountain of your fear. The rainbow on the face. A new voice so delicate that it would not wake a bird from sleep. The place where you never thought you would be. You are radiant sitting in the place that was occupied by your own mother. And what is this pull, this sweetness, oh dear piece of self, oh, tender piece of being that wants to grow a life of its own. Blood of my milk, tongue of my skin. There are no words for this, only eyes. Timeless eyes look at you fixedly from the cradled arms of mother. You are a link in the chain of mothers and daughters. She is the promise of vision that does not petrify, of understanding that does not slaughter, of a language that does not kill. Life beat, fluid, courage, palpitation. Between each mother and daughter lies the breadth and the diversity of the rainbow. To touch mother is to traverse the spectrum. You dive into the darkness and begin to see with rainbow eyes. *** In The Unspeakable Mother, Deborah Kloepfer clarifies how in our society language is a kind of blind contract erected upon the mother´s silence. The patriarchal economy of desire, based on "a system of exchange, with woman as its object and language as the adjunct with the signifier as the ´counter,´ is premised on the forbidden, and the forbidden, both libidinally and textually, is the mother." (174) Releasing the mother, then, is considered illicit, and unspeakable. (2) Incest. A voice whispers the word again sending an electric shock through your spine. A black woman is sucking on a mango "Her teeth would bite into a mango and her lips would fasten on either side of it, and while she sucked you saw that she was perfectly happy." (Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, in Kloepfer, 68) The longing with which your tongue squealed for the mother's breast Memory long lost The birth of desire in the infant's relationship to the mother. You cannot say that you have not loved to suck on a mango, or that your eyes do not immediately go to the woman walking rhythmically down the street, or that you do not admire the naturalness with which simple women seem to accept babies, or to envy the time a mother spends cootchie-cootching with her child. You experienced breastfeeding. It was the sweetest kiss a nipple could have. And you never quite managed to hide your breast the way a decent woman should do. And it was not painful. And it was not difficult like there was a simple, unasking, joyous way, and this was it. And sometimes you fell asleep while the baby was feeding, like you have fallen asleep with your lover still inside you during a night of love. To understand what would be necessary for the mother's absence to become a space of presence, it is necessary to reclaim the term incest - the unspeakable taboo of this shared space between mother and daughter - and reformulate its story. To do this it is necessary to ask: "if we have functioned for centuries out of the economy of the son's desire, what would be the consequences of the daughter's desire?" (174) Incest is
To recover the preoedipal memory of the mother is to undo knowledge of (the father´s) language to the point of recovering the place where the knowledge of the mother´s language begins. It is to touch the creative, connective, erotic, generous, flexible, ambivalent place (of the mother) that has been banned, abandoned, forgotten by the language of the father. To watch the words of the father - and with them abstract reasoning, grammar, syntax, the structure of the sign, the promise of fixed meaning, language as re-presentation, the economy of desire contingent upon loss - slowly disintegrate as you journey back inside the mother´s body - love skin womb - back back back to the great life body. This is the memory of before. You put your eye on the wound and look inside. ***
Waves beat against the brinks of the wound, soothing the hurt with their hypnotic hum. Waves to weave it back together. Life fluid rolling back and forth. Nutrient as well as knowledge. The very stuff that creation is made of. The relation between self and other. Subjects and earth. What is eternal and at once ever changing. Light and dark. Life and death. The possibility of seeing nature-world-life as the place where all of these dichotomies potentially flow rather than antagonize. Aren't all these pieces part of the same reality? Is there not a body that can contain them all, in their dissimilitude? You want language in its liquid state, before it is evaporated or frozen. Language allowing you to see the invisible windows in the air that lead to ways of embracing life, re membering your self as part of its great body. Because it is not enough to be born, there must be air bitten, wind swallowed, green taken in; there must be sharing, there must be courage, defiance of the exchange of time for coins, self for coins, thought for coins. There must be eyes as quick as flies to trace the constant shifting of boundaries; and a tongue that is wet enough to lick them together. There must be life giving back to life, reenacting the constant flow. There must be mothering, and daughtering and lovering that is not disconnected from the great life spool. You want language to mother you, and to mother your mother. You want language to lead you back to who you were before your body was broken, before your roots were pulled out of the earth, before you were taken away from your self, away from your body, before your roots were pulled out of the earth. It is only by reconstructing the memory of wholeness that you can inhabit life without turning your back to it, voluntarily or involuntarily. In search for a language that will tell your story, you fall and fall down this pit, making up word images to give you some ground; hoping, at the end of the fall there will be some kind of nest, mother, language, home to cradle my not knowing in its great arms. * * *
Because you must understand that your mother today is no longer the mother of your childhood; no longer the mother of your adolescence To see her better you must imagine her in the perspective of her own mother. You have known wonders about your mother and grandmother that they have never shared with each other. To your mother, her mother was the norm, the imposition, the endless list of manners and appropriate things to do, she was the constant hassle over the phone, the nightmare of your calm, humanist grandfather, the women´s doctor according to your mother. You think of your mother now, ponytail and overalls, on her knees in the dirt playing with your son at knights and warriors. Your mother sweating beneath a worker´s helmet in the petroleum fields, flying in helicopters and telling lies to her mother in order to spend full weeks in the red guerrilla zone. Your mother writing erotic novels about everything she could never share with you, or with her mother, the intimate cellars where she can see herself naked, transforming into women of different bodies and different lives, fusing with all the women of the world and all of their desires. They are not the words she uses to talk to you or anybody else; they are words she keeps in her sewing basket like a million colored threads in order to tell the stories of other women, reflections and refractions of her self. Her larger, deeper, wider, more diverse and multiple self. Your mother wearing the feathered collar she adjusts on her coat when she is invited to a literary meeting. Your mother, who made up a different name for herself in order to write love novels; who registered herself officially with that name in order to be published and now will not receive her pension because of it. Somewhere between her two names, the writer and the woman, is gestated the space for courage, the space for other, the space for body. Your mother coming to birth at the age of fifty. It is after the daughter leaves that she returns to herself; it is the painful rupture of the mother and daughter asphyxiating each other that allows her the space to come back. Oh, the beautiful pathways we must invent in order to come back to our selves. "It is not in the mother´s ´story´ that her power lies but in how she riddles the discourse that denies her." (Kloepfer, 174) Now you remember what Adrienne Rich was saying about Mrs. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf´s To the Lighthouse: "the passion of the daughter for the mother, her need above all to understand this woman, so adored and unavailable to her; to understand, in all complexity, the differences that separated the mother from herself." (228) You realize this new form of love which springs from the discovery of her complexity, her humanity, your mother´s. How to use language to embrace her in her complexity? How to love her through language? How to speak of her through this ethical consciousness of the (m)other, as a subject-in-process, this new consciousness of plurality that wants to make, more than self, connection? You want to write a text that will come together like this slow conjugation of memory, feelings, and words. You want to put together these fragments of misunderstood selves so that the sum of them will find their place in the larger picture. She, like you, is incontainable; how not to exhaust her mystery? * * * You are independent now, the life sucked out of you by the world of work. You are wounded by the sword-shaped tongues of academia. You can feel your own tongue turning sharp, it is monstrous. You are worn out by the ethic of not working to depth but also not enjoying, the plastic valuation of comfort, the epistemology of fixed meaning, arguments over definitions, classifications, isn't there anything else? You are worn out by women stopping in their paths to point to the spot of dirt on your trousers. The burden of everyone's lies. You walk out lightly in the morning and return a heavyweight, loaded with the charge of glances and words and interests that pull you into the dirt. The stories of the war accumulate on the skin of every day like scum. You are tired. You want your mother. You take an orange cloth napkin, one of the ones you inherited from your grandmother, and set it over a nest of pine needles in the forest. In the middle you place a picture of her. You and your sister are playing in the sandbox and she is standing behind you, with sunglasses and holding onto her purse. She looks elegantly and distractedly to one side. In one of the corners you place the golden buttons she sewed onto your jacket when you were away on a trip, and which you hated for being too fancy. In another you place the letter where your sister tells your mother she is in love with a woman. In the lower right corner, a picture of the mother of your man, a small, stout, brownish-skinned woman with an apron and nine children and a look that is neither happy nor sad. In the lower left corner the book of German fairy tales your mother read you when you were a child: Rapunzel, Twelve Dancing Princesses, The Princess and the Pea, Hansel and Gretel, and Red Riding Hood. In your head is the voice of Ellis Regina singing a love song in feminine Portuguese. You set down a bunch of colored wildflowers, the kind you don't buy at the florist. A ripe banana, open for the birds. A box with the school medals that made her so proud and made you embarrassed. A conch. This is the forest, mother. This is our mother. It starts to rain. And now may it thunder. Without knowing how, you begin to pray: Here´s to you and me, mother. To all of our unfinished seeds. Here´s to all that we could be. Here´s to life, that is mother´s secret. And here´s to the mother of life. When mother and daughter come together, in their thunder as well as in their frailty, the earth is replenished. You plead for delicateness and the strength that can derive from softness. You return to the small details that weave together the day's moments. The smell of tangerines. The wings of butterflies. A cloud that is a fish flying through the air. The bathing of the child, and then the patient drying, making up crazy stories as you apply skin cream, selecting every day a slightly different and novel combination of clothes, of foods, of words. You read a story to your child every night, and if you are particularly tired, you trick him and end the story early. You stroke his head as he falls asleep. Through these minuscule actions, you pass the delicate thread of your hope. Outside, the demolition goes on. You have placed your hope in the small dewdrops that remain on life's spider web in the world's morning after a night of bombing. If these fugitive pearls can survive, then hope is still possible. ***
The self needs a nest of silence, to return to for strength. Use the caressing texture of words to get to the space before words. Sunlight on the dancing leaves of trees reminds you of sunlight on the skin of your newborn self. Leaves love life. Life leaves love. Love leaves life. Home is this nest of favorite words that are cooing sounds with no meaning. The tranquil sleep of baby - so delicate, so new - atop mother, so fascinated, so tired. The touch of skin that has not coarsened. The smell of having awakened to the world. The cry of the voice that is also the necessity of breath. Language that is air. The trak trak slip slop trudge trudge of outside is aggressive to the newborn, trying to stay newborn inside. The sword-edges of words and sharp intentions. Preserve the sensual alertness. The time of self against tic toc time. The space of the self against cosmetic suffocation of the skin. Seek out the seed before self was subjected. Defend that self against the forces of the war. Preserve life against and above duty, ramble against trudge. Proliferate the love that does not take the air of self away. Create connection, do not forget rhythm. Guard with one´s words the sacred nest where life is made.
Where does this journey lead to? The closest place.
The hospital called one Friday afternoon in January to say that your mother had taken a turn for the worse and they didn't expect her to make it through the weekend. Your father called you at work and you raced home despite the slippery, greasy snow that was falling. Your highball was waiting for you on the kitchen table. Your father was already drunk. You raced through dinner and then headed out in the dark to the hospital. You saw her in the road long before you realized your father didn't. She was just standing there in four lanes of busy Friday night traffic. She stepped into your lane. It was too late when you shouted out. The car skidded into her as he slammed on the brakes. She bounced up onto the windshield with her face smashing the glass in front of you. (Odd - the first thing that happened once you were sober was the recurring nightmare of her face hitting the windshield. You woke up screaming noiselessly, drenched in sweat, night after night, to the sound of those car brakes screaming, seeing her dull, lifeless eyes peering into yours - or were they really your eyes reflected?) She flew off the hood of your car, hit the pavement and rolled down the road. Her purse opened into the windy, snowy night. Napkins - white cocktail napkins - came spilling out and started flying off into the air - twirling and lifting higher and higher, mixing with the swirling snow. Like hundreds of white flags signaling surrender. You remember only a few things about that night. One - the first thing your father said to you immediately after hitting the woman was, "Do you have any gum? I don't want them to smell alcohol on me." Two - you never made it to the hospital that night. You and your father went back home and drank bourbon highballs until there wasn't any fear, pain, hatred until there wasn't any memory. Three - the woman miraculously didn't die. And four - they were wrong. Your mother lived through that weekend and spent six more months dying a slow, painful death.
1. I remember Sundays in New York. Waking in the loft bed, always alone. Lying there, listening to the car wash, sometimes to the muffled sounds of Brian and Karen talking in bed on the other side of the wall, reading, trying to decide whether to get up, sitting on the couch, staring out the window, listening to the record player and smoking cigarettes to pass the first few hours of the day. Sometimes, a walk, or in good weather, a quick trip into Manhattan to walk around, to make love to the buildings in the Village and eat $2 falafel on MacDougal Street. Sometimes I would call you from the park, but you never answered. Later, cooking in the kitchen, drinking a beer and listening to This American Life on the clock radio. Sitting down to smoke and listen while something boiled or simmered or baked. The calm contentedness of a cat. I never missed you on Sundays, I reveled in the soft, quiet hours of solitude, pulled them around me like a favorite sweater, and also counted the minutes until I could return to the loud, impassioned bustle of Harlem. I made phone calls, I wrote, I worked on papers and essays. I waited for the Simpsons, for Peter to come strolling across the hall to sit waifish in our pink chair with the strip of metal that jutted out from behind and tore my shirts, to roll one of his cigarettes and talk about how he didn't know what he wanted to do with his life. Sometimes we talked, we usually talked on Sundays, and I think it made me happy. There was also laundry. 2. ,the buildings, neighborhoods, trendy white kid parties, the streetsound, the feeling of always living, moving, growing, creating, the churches, the dirty snow banks on the corners, boots filling with cold slush, the bodegas with dusty shelves, the walkups, the sneakers, the little tiles in the entrance-ways of all the apartments, the crooked wooden staircases, the pipes that banged and clanked and hissed in the walls as they carried soothing hot water into the room, the aboveground trains, the bridges, the gowanus yacht club, brunch with mimosas in alphabet city, mamoun's falafel, the writing group, the art galleries, the music, is that mos def over there?, the clubs with candy, lotion, and bowls of flowers floating in water in the bathrooms, with mermaids swimming behind the bar, the wooden floors, the smell of old elevators, the bricks, the stone, the cups of sweet mango and coconut icees, 3. Why were we walking out by the field? Where were we going? I remember nothing but that moment of laughter on the path, and looking up at the dark sky and my friends' faces, flushed with uncontrolled laughter - not how we got there or what we did after. But that was before. That was sweet and good, but it was not the roman candle of joy that I came to know in myself in the city, that was my gift, finally, for enduring so much hate and sickness, that came flying into my heart without warning and sent me floating from my apartment to the train, that filled me with something I didn't know about before, something that could come alive in every cell, happy and radiant, full of sweet, warm lust for everything around me and the perfect knowledge that I had everything I wanted. My legs burned in the same rhythm as the sun hitting the sidewalks. 4. ,the bronze crows at the chinatown A train stop, the graffiti, coney island, the smell of the ocean, the squealing of the subway trains, the wide yellow strips with raised bumps at the edges of the platform, the rows of people all leaning forward, looking into the tunnels for a train that we knew we would not see, the neighborhood maps, the G train, the murals, the walking, columbia on a sunny day, the crowds, prospect park, birthday party at the lake, awkward conversations with taxi drivers, everything delivered at all hours of the day, even the drugs, the stoops, the rows of brownstones in park slope and harlem, the families, the bad-ass little kids strutting around on their bikes and scooters and skateboards, the rooftops, never having to buy gasoline, hooray, the m60, 2 dollars for a trip from laguardia, the orange and white columns of steam on the roads, a Saturday afternoon of legs aching from walking up and down broadway, wasting time, bottled water and cigarettes, 5. Take the D train to Coney Island with the kids in early March while it is still cold. Go, even though it will be dark when you arrive. Claim Summer for yourself, do not wait for it. On the train, take pictures of Brooklyn, talk about the shapes of the bridges, let the girls gossip in one corner of the car, the boys look at the back pages of the Voice in the other corner. Play, listen to Ab's lectures, and wonder what we will do once we get there. Notice that the commuters want to look at us but are afraid. Eat at Nathan's, drink lemonade, even though the wind is cold against your skin. Share all your dollars, then all your nickels and quarters. Watch the kids whisper that Heather and Ab are crazy, and know that they love you even still, or maybe because. See the silent boardwalk, fly the kites that the night sky swallows, listen for the ocean that you cannot see, find the dead seagull in the sand. Take a photograph. Laugh later when Laura says that one kid makes a special trip to see her on Saturday, demanding to know why we would take a picture of a dead bird. Laugh when she tells how she explained the way the artist sees. Watch Abishai standing in the seafoam with his pants rolled up to his knees, determined to have his summer day, the girls with perfect hair and shiny lips and cute shoes, appalled at the possibility of getting wet, of acting freely, because they are so young and so worried. Feel some sadness when the kids express relief at returning to a familiar neighborhood, take last minute group photos on the train platform, watch everyone pose, become nervous, smile, try to capture the day you already know deserves to be remembered. Call him; he won't answer. Take another train back to Brooklyn with Abishai. Talk, fast and unending, not to cover up the spaces, but because you are full and unstoppable, because there is always so much to say. Arrive at Southpaw, listen to Ab confess that he is broke, pay for everything without discussion, brother and sister, know that he will do the same for you another time. See that the place is almost empty, realize that we are always early, always uncool, always so eager to begin. Sit in a dark red corner and cry out to each other over the music; feel good yelling stories. Tell them, tell many, swallow so much drink, say too many things, things too sacred even for the page, secrets. It was this girl, and I met her and she . . . but her father . . . and I don't know how . . . she said my body . . . if we could . . . I wanted to cry. Tell of fear and confusion and strangeness and regret and hate - and know that you are not afraid and are not sad. Know that you are shaping, giving things a place, examining. Acknowledge each other as family, become close, tell the stories few will hear. I love you. Watch the stage light up. Do not stop, do not sleep for a whole day. Watch Clay bring history and rhythm up from his thighs and out through his hands and mouth as he prowls the stage. Say hello to Aseer; watch his slow eyes and the long locks trailing down his back. He does not remember our names; see how he greets us with warmth anyway. Dance, even though you are the only ones dancing, even though you are early and eager. Take the next train ride home. Ride home safe in the 3am dark, know that it is almost too much, too much goodness in one day. Do not sleep; feast on the cool, blue room and the dark street sounds, open your eyes to make sure that everything is real, just as you had left it before you closed your eyes, press your face into the sheets and inhale, know this day and never forget. In the morning, the alarm. Throw it against the wall with a smile, and bury your face in the sheets again. Know that you don't want a new day to begin so soon, that you don't want the perfection of the day before to ebb away from you. A push out of bed, warm water all over your body, the sun, spring is coming, and the train again, and watch how it doesn't stop, how it never stops, for so many days. Know that it is so good and so unexpected and so delicate a joy after so much crying and loss that you are afraid to breathe, that if you breathe too sharply, if you inhale too deeply, it will crack into pieces and be gone forever. 6. ,running through the sprinklers at union square on a hot day, the courthouse where I lied about the incident at the turnstiles, the water towers, I can't believe I didn't say that first, the water towers everywhere, groaning, pumping, watching, people who know what a hero is, a cheese sandwich from jamal for 1.75 at the star deli in harlem, oui, je parle francais, the buckets of fresh flowers heaped up on the sidewalks, the bars with nothing but red furniture and soft lights, the fire escapes, the roof tops, the sidewalks, the Hasidic neighborhoods with Hebrew print on the store windows and school busses, everyone in black, those two perfect curls, the street festivals, the dollar stores, that cheap, public-school toilet paper for sixty cents, the good bands playing at the bar up the block, the gardens, the fireworks, the streets lit up, 7. Some days I remember so much that I cannot free myself from the slow sinking into a bittersweet, nostalgic ache. I feel quiet and cautious - easily disturbed by the world bustling around me. I think of many things. I think of walking down Smith Street with my beloved friend, once in the fall, the long and sweetly awkward goodbye at the top of the stairs to the train, a laughing crowd at the beer garden on the corner; I see the lights dotting the air and shimmering in the leaves above the bustling people. And then, Smith Street in the winter, waiting in the snow banks, feeling safe and loved and protected, watching him hail a cab for me like only a boy knows how to do, counting each breath, glad the goodbye is right and comfortable, not too sad, although, awfully, awfully sad even still. I think of his hands closing the door behind me, I remember leaning forward to tell the driver where to go as if he was not standing outside the window with a smile, an ache in my heart both times, and now. My dreams to live with all my friends in one place never once diminishing into the immaturity of the past as I always thought they would. My head is in the city, on the streets of Harlem, in the garden with Pablo's sunflowers, on Manhattan Avenue, in Yvette's apartment, holding Sydney's hand in the park, howling with laughter, my stomach hurting so badly, Hot 97 and bad coffee, cups of ice for 10 cents, stories on the rocks in the park, Lacey smoking her cloves with intimidating grace, the throbbing, silent crowds in the subway tunnels, my chin held high, my steps swift. I need the city, I need you, Yvette, James, Abishai. I need all of us together, our children, our lives, our families, the conversations we are meant to have, the truths and pleasures we are meant to share, I need you to keep teaching me. My heart aches at the sound of their laughter, I drown in memories of their houses, Yvette's living room full of Christmas lights, Abishai's broken stairs, Jimmi's incense always burning, the slow creak of his landlady's door opening to scrutinize our arrival, each lilting note of our laughter up the stairs, of days in the park, of walking the streets of the city, this is the most passionate love I have known. Every month of the year brings inevitable recollections of where I once was. March twelfth, March twelfth, I know you, I have been here before. I have arrived, sick and feverish on your doorstep, heartbroken and in love, I came to you in gypsy cabs, in the last car of the A train, on my own two feet, coughing and dizzy up the stairs. "H, why are you here?" "I don't know", with a laugh, but I did know, I wouldn't give up one second of that year, one breath, I had to be there, to see you, to touch all of you, because I knew it would come to an end, eventually, and even though I had to pause after every step on the stairwell, and even though I hid how sick I was, and even though I had a babbling fever and could do no work, I could not stay, sleeping, aching, alone in Brooklyn. I had to take that train ride, to bask in love, in Ab's words, in Yvette's gold, in Jimmi's brilliance. I wonder about genetics. I think of my grandfather, I piece it all together, I wish he was still alive, I would ask him, tell me, please, the story of New York, of being born in Brooklyn, of having immigrant parents, of cold water flats, of cigars and grey streets. New York is in my blood, every cell has a blueprint of its streets, my heart is made of its stuff. It is home, I felt that there, home, in a way that I never felt in Maryland, New Mexico, Texas, Vermont. A feeling of pulsing actualization, of the complete perfection of place, of the completeness of desire fulfilled and even the lack of completeness, of unfulfilled desires feeling perfect, just, completely, perfect. The drama of life is limp and distant to me anywhere else. I was born there, my genetic self is starved for its oxygen. I wish I could know, I want to know the stories of the immigrants who started this, who infused my blood with the city, with a relentless aching for it. Jimmi howls on the phone, "I need a mango", and I understand him perfectly. I hear the twins, Yvette and Jimmi's children, crying. I know I am bound to them. James would laugh to see these words. He only knows me as he has wanted to know me. He knows me, drunken and unhinged. He knows me, brave on a 3am street with his knife in my pocket. He knows me, laughing, happy as a teacher. He knows me as masculine. He knows the tough, straight, hard, clear parts of me. He has not met me, the writer, me, the poet, me, the gentle female. Yvette knows. Give me more, the everpresent sense of family, of love, of being unafraid, of being always open with the mind, of confessing and not being ashamed, of drama and physical movement in the body, of physical closeness without hesitation or awkwardness. I think of Yvette inviting me to sit in bed with her and keep my arm wrapped around her pregnant stomach, of our candid talks about sex, of Jimmi declaring joyfully his love at the end of our phone conversations, of Ab and I sharing stories and embraces, of Yvette laughing in the sun with gold lip gloss and saying that she dreamt of us watching Japanese films and drinking wine and kissing in her apartment, of always feeling like a huge, loud, rowdy family and not afraid, the things I always wanted. 8. The goodbye: a million people flowing fast around us, and we two standing still as people rarely stand still in the city, your arms around me, saying goodbye with the angle of your neck against my body instead of with words. I understand becoming woman, I understand the loss of a certain kind of pain, the loss of childhood. I stand alone crying in the afternoon light of the apartment in Brooklyn, having said a final goodbye. I cry for the loss, but also feel a timid joy at its sweetness, at the perfection of such an experience, at having known it and lived through it and known the pain of its ending. How beautiful to be crying so purely, so openly for the ending of something so violently sweet and brief. The purity of sadness, the knowledge of the goodness of mourning. The car wash went swwissssh swwissssh. The bass of the Latin music rose to the window in rhythmic vines of sound, the sun glinted from the cars and stung my eyes. The tears fell down my cheeks and I stood with my arms wrapped around my stomach, my head bowed, crying. And then, when my breath returned, I smiled at myself, I laughed a very quick, soft laugh. And I kept moving. Shine your light on the city, goodbye. Make love to a million women, Hashim, goodbye. Pour your soul onto the page, fill the rooms of people with it, press your lips against the microphone, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye cold mornings on Maujer Street, goodbye Williamsburg bridge, goodbye midnight phone calls, goodbye stolen kisses, goodbye dancing, goodbye eating baklava and sitting at David's house to pass the time, goodbye holding hands in the movie theater, goodbye outrageous passion and slamming doors and violent kissing and jealousy and screaming and crying in the train station and eating tulips and feigning cool and long talks on the subway, goodbye. I am a woman now. 9. ,the neighbors too loud, the supers too shady, the break-ins, the electric tension of the other always present, channel 13, the bookstores, labyrinth especially, the diners, the breakfast for two dollars, always open, spanish bakery, parades, halloween, the insanity of the subway performers, watch me, I'm dressed like a horse, west indian day parade in the sun, the abandoned buildings, the fire escapes, the days never ending, the nosleeping, the sneakers on the telephone wires, the cloisters, rats in the subway, are you jewish?, cold sangria at panchito's, weed delivery, karina, wolf, sean, leslie, e.j. gina, nicole, the hudson, riverside drive, $7 cigarettes, no birds but pigeons, pommes frites, crates of fish on the sidewalk in chinatown,
I did get married, and I would not say it was startling. It is blissful and peaceful this far. My husband and I have been partners for a long time, and as we met when we were both very young, we always gave one another freedom and support to travel, live apart, etc, which we both did frequently - so it has felt good to finally settle into one another after lots of separations. We stubbornly decided to have our wedding be exactly as we both truly desired. A poet friend of mine from college paid a dollar to become a Universal Life Minister so he could marry us, and he, my husband, and five of our friends spent the weekend at a lakehouse near San Antonio - a very magical place. The ceremony consisted of a walk from the lakehouse down a dirt road in the woods and through a river to a rock ledge above a huge pool with waterfalls, me with my bouquet of wildflowers gathered from the walk through the woods. Wedding picture.jpg.
It was a very small moment only a few days after we'd met. We were standing on a stage. Talking with another student about directions for a performance; how to proceed. How to set the stage. We were in the midst of directing a pathway, a way we could take an audience on a scripted adventure. We were mapping it out. We were making sure all was in order. We were preparing a strategy and then at that moment my eyes caught his. Something I did, something I said made him laugh and he looked at me. He looked at me with eyes open to every possibility, open and shining, past the line that separates him from the space beyond him. His body began to fuse with everything around him, so that I felt as though this world where I was standing opened to a place past space and time. I felt the sea around us, the trees around us, the stars around us, the planets around us. The world was spinning, spinning inside me, turning in time with the universe. Turning, turning slowly, so I could feel the pull of gravity within me. He was the gateway to truly seeing. His eyes looked as though they were not coming from him, but from You. The IYou that surrounds me and orbits our bodies. I was seeing through him through me. I felt bare. Not naked in the way you feel in dreams, as though you need to rush and find clothes, but bare in the sense that I felt completely vulnerable, open and unafraid. The look in his eyes said "you," the look I felt myself give back to him was "yes, me, you." It happened all in a split second, with no pretense and complete lack of facial control. There was no fantasy, no story being constructed around him, and with that I felt my own story begin to dissolve around me so that I could just be. He was beaming in front of me. I beamed back at him. My face feeling my body transmitted to him in a sort of Morse code. Yes. Yes, Yes. Yes. Two flashlights flashing. Two children in separate bedrooms speaking in lights in the middle of the night. All my body wanted to say was yes, yes, yes to him. * I am stunned by a bit of information I learn at school: when a baby is born, there is a moment that is perhaps crucial in defining the newborn's capacity for love: It is not only the mother who is releasing hormones during labor and delivery. During the last contractions, the fetus is also releasing a high level of hormones of the adrenaline family. One of the effects of this is that the baby is alert at birth, with eyes wide open and pupils dilated. Mothers are fascinated by the gaze of their newborn babies. It seems that this eye-to-eye contact is an important feature of the beginning of the mother-baby relationship, which probably helps the release of the love hormone, oxytocin. Both mother and baby are in a complex hormonal balance that will not last long and will never happen again. Physiologists today can interpret what ethologists have known for half a century by studying the behavior of animals: where the development of the capacity to love is concerned, there is a critical, sensitive period just after the birth. (Michel Odent, www.gentlebirth.org/archives/brtrauma.html) Hearing this, my throat swells and I begin to cry. I can remember the moment. I am overwhelmed by a feeling in my throat and my stomach. I remember. I remember the gaze. I remember the look my mother gave me. She is desperately in love with me and extremely hesitant all at the same time. I imagine this is possibly what all mothers feel. It seems only natural. Extreme love and extreme fear. In this memory I feel myself in the presence of her eyes. I am in love. I fear her hesitancy, but I am overcome with desire to live, with and without her. I feel it in my newborn toes. I love you, but want to live beyond you. It's the eye love you that wells in my throat and my heart despite my fear of her hesitancy. In the books I've read these past several months, much of what is said about daughters and mothers is that daughters are shocked to find that the mother is not the goddess the daughter thought she was as she sucked at her breast. But if my memory serves me correctly, it is quite possible that we knew all along. We knew her limitations even in the womb. We knew. But it is in the look, in the flooding of love that we say to her "I will live a life filled with love for you." My body is covered in blood and fluid. I am slimy and screaming. My new mother gazes upon me and is filled with the highest level of hormonal love that she will ever feel in relation to me. It is her first time seeing me. Her experiences of me until this point have not been visible. They have been in her dreams, in what her belly tells her. At the sight of me, she begins to feel all the other possibilities. What if it were customary for mothers to record the moment of first seeing and pass it on to us like a birthright story? What if they asked us to remember our own seeing, to remember this time when a gaze upon us spilled over with love? * On that one afternoon, his look said love one moment before his body could register fear. * This seeing him changed me. Changed everything about the way I see things. This seeing him was a rebirth. A being born again. As though my eyes had been opened, shaped by the moment I saw the world in him. As though I was aware again that the world spun, moved, changed. And now I search daily for a way of truly seeing. Of seeing the 'You' in ordinary things. Of seeing the 'You' in 'him.' I do this to take myself back to the tree. To connect my body, its limbs, all of its joys and sufferings, to the world within me, to the world within him.
the town I lived in was rural and abysmal/ the kind of place being probably gentrified right this minute/ but then of maybe eight hundred or a thousand people/ wz the remnants of a farm community/ a place where people who had already lost everything/ or more likely whose parents had done that losing for them/ lived side by side with people who had come in/ a generation or two back/ with money of some sort/ who had nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of us/ there were a lot of churches/ all of them evangelical christian/ I took myself to the lutheran one/ alone did my //confirmation// there david / the pastor/ said the only thing I can remember about the teaching I got over a three year period/ he told us about martin luther and the reformation and I wz aware cynically of how likely it wz that this story wd be told to put mr luther in some fantastic light/ the guy who got it right/ until one day david talking about the nicene creed / et unam, sanctam, catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam/ one holy catholic and apostolic church/ slipped in luther's conviction that we wd not ever figure life out/ but that we had this responsibility to live it/life /more than we had any kind of responsibility not to/i.e. to restrain ourselves you know/ to behave/ he said that luther's main drop wz/ sin boldly and believe in god/ I remember making him david stop right then and say it again / twice explaining it/ you're going to mess it up he repeated and /the call/ is to let go of that/ because true humility is to know that and still try to live/ it doesn't mean that you can just go do anything u please/ it means u have to try knowing that u will fail and /that the part where you don't get it right/ that is beside the point/ what you mess up is in some way sent as the opportunity of grace and a kind of enmity between me and god set in right then/ though the effect of this was to open a conversation/ a right of complaint/ my own moral judgment of the situation if there was a sense in which I idealized / god/ it began there/ with the ichthy and the communion wine I hauled up the back steps as the first altar girl/ only boyz before me/ the smell of the waxed to death floors/ the albs from the dry cleaner/ and learning to go on reading aloud whenever I became conscious of my voice reading the lessons during the sunday service/ which wz part of my shit to do/ carried a packet of matches always in the pocket of an old army shirt some relative or friend had given/ plain olive nam shirt/ and my parents searched it/ like they searched and sniffed everything in the boundary-less world of our tiny ranch style world/ asked if I smoked/ what contempt I developed for them then/ my mom lighting up in their bedroom and blowing the smoke out the windows like she wz twelve/ it's for the altar candles I said with the look that naturally got me both slapped and grounded/ who cared/ it wz like that all the time took umbrage at the condition to which I had been consigned/ this being created into the fall in order to make an occupation for a grace which apparently wd be purposeless without me/ that condition of servitude / maybe because it so closely paralleled my home life/ where there was a guarantee of never getting it right/ the difference being that this god/ wz saying/ what I expect is that u won't stop trying and it isn't any of your business to worry about how/ my parents idea wz that I wdn't stop trying either but there wz no forgiveness/ so this wz like my idea of a generous arrangement / and I began to have a voice in it anyway which at home/ my protests had brought my father to the point of annihilating me/ which he had assured me recently no one would have the slightest interest in investigating and I ought to watch myself/ this came about from a conversation in which I had asked him as I had so many times before exactly what it was that I had done that so pissed him off/ what was it/ I really wanted to know/ that made him hate me/ and he wd get himself lathered about the roof he put over my head and wasn't that love/ which I wz clear so clear/ that no it wasn't/ you don't even like me/ I said/ and why not/ why don't you and in exasperation/ no doubt in a considerable amount of some kind of hellfactory working/ pussy whipped wife fucking/ lard lousy pennsylvania dutch diet he towered as best he cd over me/ and I wz afraid of him but I wasn't you know/ it wz like kissing with yr eyes open yeah I'm here alright/ when my father / now that I wz getting closer to his height and had this relationship with god and cd see how it all stacked up/ he said without a trace of irony/ I cd kill you and no one would care/ do you understand me/ I cd bury you in the back yard and no one wd come looking for you. this man now with his myasthenia gravis/ agoraphobia/ married to his dead brother's wife/ I may go fishing with him this summer right/ so I wd get the dog/ and go across the narrow two lane culvert bridge over beaver creek/ right below the parsonage at the edge of the presumption of main street/and dip among the farms that swelled around the land for a mile or two west and south/ a curvy road with little traffic/ along which the mad dog/ named /unfortunate thing/ benson/ wd dash glazed eyes/ pulling the bike and me behind him like a musher/ he was about himself that dog and we never had any kind of a relationship/ liked his speed/ and I marvel now as only an adult wd stop to think about how I kept the entire contraption of rust and dog and half a sticky hand brake under control/ I can remember every single thing about that squeaking claptrap bike/ it was too big for me/ it was poorly maintained in spite of my laboring over the /small is beautiful/ whole earth catalog/ hand-drawn diagrams in my bookmobile copy / of the clear creek bike book [always that edge of counter culture/ the bike book insinuating to my dirty fingers and lack of any sort of tool/ a world of small and self reliant/ community and hippie/ I got from it that the detail of my having got a bike wz a step in the direction of marijuana / peace marching / other non violent activism] there wz nothing in the world I cd do for it but ride it/ banging fenders/ clattering chain and hard assed weather beaten seat/ screaming speed behind the neurotic the miserable dog of the lutheran pastor/ from pittsburg / who had told me about not only kierkegaard years too soon but also the pink and black fad of his college years/ crossing his legs/ and yes smoking/ effete/ I knew that grown ups were by and large lonely/he wz probably gay and his normanmailer character of a wife/ had very large brown eyes/ hook line and sinker one evening/ maybe it was may/ it was warm enough and there was still school on/ me and this mutt were traveling together when a red car something chevy I recall/ that fat and low frame/ nova maybe/ passed me came back and stopped did I know where/ but I didn't and I rode on/ yes I noticed that he passed me two and three more times/ looking I supposed for this place/ he asked about/ and I turned around my orbit when the beast was slogged /legging it back/ probably singing to myself/ gadiamus igator uvinistum deo/ when that same chevy or pontiac or /cherry curvy steel frame shoved me off the road very uncompromising a /shock that's for sure/ stumbling off the pedals feet sliding in the freestone of cd it have been called a shoulder barely righting the bike and the leash and the dog underneath me/ and with the frame between my legs looking up into the pistol in his right hand leveled at my head through the open passenger window of the car/ get off the bike the click which was the safety coming off the gun/ goddamn fool taste of metal/ blood/ in my mouth/ get off the bike he said and I did/ wild wild wild shaking of my arms and hands and legs o/trembling in my body that I cd not get control of / what wz I feeling/ all I remember really was the taste in my mouth/ and the shuddering/ and my mind arrested on details/ small completely isolated details/ come around to the other side of the car he said/ and I went behind the car cz I thought he wd run over me/ in fact he put the chevy in reverse when I went behind the car/ just not fast enough / I felt one step ahead of something/ that's what I felt/ one world without any other sound except the click of a safety and the shift of the gears of the red low car in it shaky step ahead of what/ I cd not conceive/ what is yr name he asked which struck me as my limit/ the place where I wd draw the line how shd I know I can only remember that I knew I knew that it was the edge of something to answer that question/ I wz thinking about him already/ though I cannot remember his face/ I was thinking/ that he didn't need to know my name to do whatever he wz going to do with that gun/ which he was holding in his right hand and talking/ to me out the window on the driver's side now/ shut that dog up he said/ the dog growling wz he barking some I really don't know/ but he wz menacing and now/ it seemed maybe we did have a relationship/ not that benson cared what happened to me/ but he / the dog taught me in that minute/ a little and important thing/ to know when I did not like a person/ and neither of us/ the dog and I/ we did not like this guy/ I cd feel that I didn't like him/ and also/ that I still had something but I wasn't sure what it wz for/ why do you want to know that I asked him back what he said why do you want to know my name just tell me your name why do you even care what my name is do you live around here he said to me/ no I answered in star wars/ there's that scene/ mos eisley spaceport //you don't need to see his identification/ these aren't the droids you're looking for// something wz happening this/ I wd say now/ wz the field/ but then/ I only felt that something funny wz going on/ and it made this man with a revolver both restless and dangerous/ what cd be more dangerous than a man with the safety already clicked back behind us / did he hear them or see cz his head snapped up to the rearview mirror on the road four riders I think/ on bikes/ clamorous and he put the car into gear/ peeled away from me my body began to convulse with muscle releasing/ I almost cdn't get on the bike again/ everything single muscle was contracting and releasing all out of balance/ all out of coordination/ just at whatever pulse was happening there/ in an arm or a foot/ a woman named bonny I think/ I knew her from church and her kids on bikes and I told her what happened she shushed me immediately cz of the kids and we went to her house/ called the pastor someone took me to their house/ with the bike and the dog the field/ the push/ the magnetism of can't penetrate this boundary/ wz that what the dog felt when he growled/ wz that what I entered when I wd not say my name/ my only name to this did-he-want-to-kill-me guy did-my-dad-hire-him/ I say the field/ cz there wz no reason for me to not answer him/ but I think it saved my life/ I think it slowed things down just enough/ which wz all it took to save my life that time/ and the field is like that/ this fucking with you absence of the usual/ I bet I wz glowing there along side the road/ I bet he wanted to know/ that man/ asked himself what he was doing there/ and I wonder what did happen to him that night/ I didn't walk the dog anymore after that/ david gleason took me out for coffee two years later/ at lau's general store across from the church/ he said to me/ it's my job/ it's a part of my job to ask you this/ hope you won't mind if I ask you/ kept thinking what now/ he wz sputtering / when he finally got to/ vocation/ vocation did I think I wanted to go to seminary/ it wz part of his job to recognize and encourage those with vocation/ which he felt I clearly had/ relieved to get it out of his mouth/ I wondered how he felt about his seminary schooling and we talked for awhile about college where my parents said I wasn't /going and about god and service and the time I spent / helping to found our first community library/ setting up free day care during hurricane floods/ visiting one or two of the town elderly / writing the parish newsletter/ working in the synod youth commission office and I answered/ this call you talk about/ I do feel it/ it's funny that you think you can see it/ but I can't go to seminary why not if everyone who feels this/ this /what/ that I feel/ goes off some place and gets themselves put in a gown I said/ then who is left out here/ living/ with the rest of us he was embarrassed/ he said to think it over and he left too then/ like the guy with the gun/ like he heard someone behind him
IS THERE SOMETHING about rage that is hidden from me for instance that rage is pleasurable / that there is something hugely erotic in the entire living of rage/ including it between two people what did this come from in me / I am saying that rage is somewhere part of love/ of authenticity/ of breathing/ of elements and soul kissing I say I don't trust her I say I don't trust me/ but here I am months later daily opening the network/ my self to her / when I have refused just such access to any other person/ and there have been not one or two but half a dozen or a dozen persons applying for the position/ suing for the right/ and I cast this to myself as my untrustworthiness/ isn't it rather that I do trust myself and this woman I feel as I do
feel about/ more than I trust the undead world / the world with my friends
and loved ones in it/ because of where they haven't been because of what
they refuse to know/ even/ say it/ even at the funeral/ so that my brother asked me/ these women are sizing you up can you tell or is it me are they gay/ he said it's not like I know anything about lesbians/ they're straight I said/ these friends of gia's there was something that should have been mordantly funny in it/ the sex craving that was happening in these once-borns at the gaping yaw of mortality / funeral of a beloved friend/ divvying up the widow carrion birds/ and they thought I wz finally in reach of those long sharp beaks right there in the myrrh and frankincense black robed latin incanting wicksmoking surrealism/ my eyes / my eyes/ that not sleeping never again will sleep feeling of the flesh/ of body chemistry and field and needing water and never will I eat again and my brother-in-law had come to me in the parking lot of the church before the service september eleventh the sky blue blue blue I was in a sleeveless black dress watching my son six foot two and these women circling and the feeling of the conversations around me my tongue swollen against the roof of my mouth - do you know that feeling of the eyes I'm talking about - and my brother-in-law said planes are crashing into the world trade center in new york city it's a terrorist attack and while I was thinking what a relief I'm clearly asleep for sure as strange as all of this has been that last part proves I am asleep dreaming this while that feeling in my ears in the ear canals of blood pulsing heat searing the back of my eyes getting ready for the mass and these people those two shemin and cori squaring off over me and in the lezzie crowd of our friends already plans once-overs thinkings penelope with odysseus lost not coming back my son telemachus the sound of his sandals crossing the tile of the forsaken halls/ his disgust watching me we had put her in the ground the day before/ the day before they all got there/ her parents sly about this/ there had been a private funeral unknown to all of her friends showing up the very next day for talking about it by a priest / eucharist/ and me acute
stethoscope talk always I want to talk about this scene and was warned by lorie the creative non fiction editor I worked with not to write it/ the lie of veracity she said/ and even tomjenks said if it's heavy write it light hand over hand I have let myself down the rope of these cunts/ and the feeling of stifled rage / to this the stethoscope around the md's neck which lorie told me not to mention in the writing/ write it light there I was /of the field/ riding the subway/ here is what I want to say say it say it finally fucking say it/ I knew and I didn't want to / runningstumbling fallinglikesnowinsidemyself talking aloud there is inside of me screaming there is a substrate of energy that is along the atomic structure of infinity and my screaming found ears in it and arms which held me up as I ran/ in a skirt/ with sunscreen on my body sunscreen that only hours before I had copped from a man at race point beach in provincetown riding a bike I was which I had borrowed from a woman staying in a bungalow behind the b and b in which I stayed white horse the white horse inn rooms empty off season mid week off season meredith's bike and the sun strobe orb knowingalready the sun that shone on me and that suicidal maniac my girlfriend chewing her last mouthful of something she ate that day I had not planned well and at race point noon I searched and asked and finally amid strangers I found a man who had sunscreen under a large umbrella with a baby who laughed and he let me borrow it who was quick to say something about his wife lest I be using so clever a thing a request for sunscreen as a pickup line and then off I pedaled to the beech forest on meredith's bike and still on my skin that sunscreen its scent confused with the pine needles under the sun and the cool off the floor of the forest smell of ocean air relaxing as though on a break from its work with the tourists my blue bikini under a white t shirt a square old white t shirt from the gap that smelled like the sea like salt like me like sunscreen stolen from a baby the salt still on my skin the sun still on my sunburned mouth my face and my hair my very short hair full of oil and resolve and faith in the future having painted that morning on the beach with meredith and making her get over the silliest habits she had demonstrated about the canvas and where to begin set her free before borrowing the bike a skirt a knit cotton skirt oatmeal colored to my knees my blue adidas sneakers my athletic legs my muscles my calves my knees war horse knees that I wd have crawled on in the ratriversubway tracks if I cd have changed what
in that room I sat and waited and the longer I waited of course the more certain I was because if she didn't if she hadn't been if she wasn't say it dead these words! they wd have rushed me up a donor blood type that sort of thing but it was only him coming in at last and the gorge of me rising at the sight of him
what I had held back for years can I still feel the heat on my skin oh I can I can feel the rush of the epinephrine and the flare of my nostrils like a wild horse shot in the heart rearing back when he began with the words as a doctor this is the worst thing we never want to have to say these things/ like he was begging for mercy/ like he was saying this is tough for me go easy and I did not I stood up as he spoke those very first words with nothing more than that out of his mouth I began to yell very very loudly so that she closed the door the erlicsw did and he took two steps backward and they exchanged looks I was yelling shut up shut up shut up I cd not stop the words that flowed from me shut up don't you dare say those fucking words to me you will not tell me she is dead don't tell me that and I was ranging around the room the door in the wall closed like that was the end of everything breathing hard formidable in shock isn't it like this often or do other people actually sit still and let you say these filthy things my head rolling back/ I threw myself down on that cocktail lounge sleazy pleather couch they had in there and said what what get it out yelling just tell me and put my bald little head in my brown so brown so lovely hands someone today some one who had gia bari's driver's license in her pocket someone she jumped from the seventh floor and I was moaning nononono
do you think you can do that did I want to say no and I needed to get there before her parents what can I say about the feeling in my body the thousands of nerve endings going pop and going silent the fire raging along my nerves the way that it felt the way that it felt to be I don't want to be right to be finally irretrievably not the one who was making it up or exaggerating to be the terrible bearer of what was unfortunately I've been trying to tell you real and he said to me the doctor did you have reason to think she wd do this and I looked into his eyes from my eyes floating as they were in the sludge of suntan oil from my face and my lashes with salt and the grit of the beach under my nails and in the corners of my eyes my eyes which had something to do very soon some work for which they were blinking now blinking hard in the florescent light slamming on the linoleum floor at my feet in their sneakers under my pretty legs did you have reason ah yes did I did he mean had I said to her yes I am leaving you yes it is the end of the relationship had I only too recently sat at the kitchen table with my bald little head in my hands weeping boohoo a little hysterically saying I can't do this anymore and knowing full well that the next thing shortly thereafter wd be him and me this man was that his question knowing shd have been but he was very strongly not asking that question yes he carried a clipboard with a living patient on it he read it over and over but he meant had she been depressed and I think what I answered him I was busy after all the circuits all circuits all carrier circuits are b b busy right now try your call again later I think what I said was yes o yes I knew something was wrong but I didn't think she'd do this she said she would not had she ever tried before he said and I said yes I said yes and they the doctor and that erlicsw exchanged looks and she said are you ready do you want to do this/ how does she look I said is it going to be hard I cdn't make my mouth ask what I needed to know and that caused me anguish and shame I wanted to know was her head showing brains were her eyeballs ruptured were her teeth bashed out was there anything not attached where it should be seven stories is a long flight of pigeons for a girlfriend to fall I was foamy with fear I was vi o lent ly shaking all over so we went from there to the next place the vast aquarium of curtains to the ten by twelve foot mortuary tent of her holy body where I touched it on a gurney spoke to her soul waiting for me there began the work which had come the only other thing I want to say is the cab the friend in the back seat holding my hand then as the charles river slid forever by the dark glass had I ever been in a cab where the driver didn't talk the world what it was from the choices I had made
there was a reservoir a distance from our cambridge condo/ in an area known as fresh pond/ my brother/ who came to stay with me for a week soon after gia's funeral/ he'd get confused/ call it salt pond/ which I liked/ cried there so often/ ring road / two miles around it/ dogs never on a leash there/ would run up / sensitive / dogs are / ears cocked/ very gentle noses into my hands/ that damp touch/ then racing back to play/ mostly never spoke with their owners/ unless/ sometimes/ when a dog would like me to walked there / nine months /during which/ I came slowly /almost completely apart/ words to air/ trees/ the stones/ worldbody/ breathing me/ there were small places to wander in the woods/ where I could lean against one or another tree/ very unguarded experiences/ can clearly remember the first sensation of my entire back against a tree as I looked over the pond / feeling the vibration traveling in its trunk/ movement of the wind in branches forty feet above my head/ just had never thought about that/ realized could feel the roots as well/ began a practice of that you've written somewhere/ about the need for / did you call it/ scrupulousness/ absolute/ seemed to me / emotional precision/ in writing / probably a form of dispassion/ that if you don't know why something is being written from your hand/ or even understand it/ that it's for another's use/ another whom it will find/ so your effort / your focus is the gift to those words first tantra/ things I did/ came from what had come with me into the world from my mother's womb/ blood passed by blood/ thousands of years/ and what / by that instinct/ accumulated in my own years/ details I thought nothing of until the enactment of them/ connected meanings I didn't know I had/ that became then /infrastructure the good and even interesting thing was / I began all sorts of practices without any deciding to or planning involved/ it was as though things came to my hands to do/ and I was not of an organization to question them/ as though the energy that came then/ re- organized me/ intensely vulnerable state/ could feel/ in the wind / the passage of a thousand languages/ waves/ which never creased my brow/ didn't think at all about what it meant/ mermaid and these things I did/ were for other use it seemed/ the energy around me/ the field / I accepted that I did not know what I did/ that part of it didn't concern me/ really about crossing/ you asked me once/ is it hades/ or something/ orpheus/ this is a good question the Realm is not somewhere else/ there is /no /where/ else/ we are/ in the only /place/ there is/ I think/ but there's much that we don't know we are living with/ among/ we have lost that we are part of/ this is where I came into tantra grief journals /noted walking slower / slower/ the circle around the pond/ somewhere began to realize/ in the rituals I was doing at home/ I read the tibetan book of the dead aloud to gia/ lit candles and incense/ seemed to know prayers to accompany the smudging/ because of nearness/ began to recognize that not only wasn't gia /some /where/ else/ all kinds of beings were present/ energy/ haze above summer sidewalk/ and that / I as well was nothing other than energy/ embodied/ temporarily/ the body itself/ concatenation of energy/ self generated out of it/ that there were things I / as embodied/ could do the lesser practices/ built fires often/ wrote words / made images that I burned /transmission between the realm and physicality/ not locations/ the words on the paper were energy/ there was some kind of relationship in my feelings and making words/ and this ritual was about restructuring me/ enactment/ is not 'merely' symbolic / kept smoke in the house / constantly/ airing out the rooms / filling them again/ copious incense/ ringing of bells/ certain kinds of sighing / moaning/ also/ libations/ pouring wine on the fire/ burning leaves I had gathered / flowers/ food/ orange peels/ anything fragrant/ hours passed this way some nights/ based on the moon/ by day I'd go to the pond and circle/ circle [it was around this time that robert began to take me to BSO concerts/ usually with orchestra seats/ the music astonished me/ could actually feel it on the skin of my face/ felt the vibration all though my body/ but the distinctive sensation of the string section/ on my face/ as discernable as a breeze] think my sensitivity was increasing/ and reflect as I read now/ on self assembling cognition/ the state clarity improving/ what I did not have/ were "skillful means"/ and the sensitivity was not practiced/ directed/ or contained/ so that I was prey as well to my own fears/nightmares/ misunderstandings/ guilt this spoken of at length in the tibetan book of the dead1/ as the bardo/ between births/ during which we are terrorized by whatever we have failed to recognize as our illusions in this life/ I walked in my own bardo/ without the benefit of practice/ but in the palm of the teachings an unusual thing occurred to me at some point/ had been doing the breathing practice I wrote you about/ and in the slower/ slower/ walking / began to do the same breathing as/ while sitting/ with each step / inhaling and exhaling Her breath/ soon saw something artificial / unnecessary in the duality of this/ my breath and Hers/ were Her breath/ all my steps Her steps/ only that I failed to recognize this moment by moment/ was deceived into separation it came to me that everything I did was a form of heat2/ for example/ caloric heat/ the heat of my body/ digestion/ and from there/ felt naturally/ to live is to be a smoke offering / really/ that every kind of sensation was in fact / offered in the heat of the body / breath/ exchanged/ saw that everything/ intentional gratitude/ unbearable guilt/ pain/ doubt/ pissing/ the taste of green tea/ the texture of handmade paper/ watching light come and go/ it all could be offered/ could be conscious/ is all/ there weren't words/ words in fact receded further and further from this part of my day/ no longer speaking even with the trees/ though always lingering in their high vibration/ the clearest/ vibration/ felt reverence for them/ felt passed among them/ trees everywhere seemed to know me got in the habit of cupping my hand above flower heads/ to feel the vibration amplified in my palm/ saw this as praying as body / is prayer/ which could only get corrupted by expression in words/ by formulating need as something separate from being/ came into my body/ saw that the body is of self/ me not separate or other/ neither is the field as the realm is not somewhere else didn't struggle with these things then as I do now/ because I was in it/ not trying to share it or do anything/ did not care to live/ cared less and less/ the awareness of the realm seemed to diminish the coping mechanisms of the emotional pain / the mechanisms were too bare/ too obvious/ too flimsy for the hallucinatory truths of the bardo I did these things/ rituals/ mediations/ prayer and offering/ and one night/ nine months after gia's suicide/ I lay on the floor of the living room by the fire/ and begged that something change I'm still human/ is what I remember saying/ I can't survive this/ do something/ either kill me or live me/ and what I remember is a kind of exhaustion that matched the night I wrote about in the first packet/ which had ended in eating on this night/ I tied red thread around each wrist and around my throat/ and said/ this is our promise/ I am turning my life over to you/ I will not harm myself/ I will not die until you take me/ but I will not live unless you live me for me/ that was the beginning of what I consider tantra *** 1. when I moved about our house/ I would pass though something like currents of temperature/ putting the dishes away/ for example/ I would raise my arm to a cupboard/ and feel my arm pass through energy/ making a parallel motion /slower than I or just ahead / finishing with me as my hand released the dish/ it felt as though she were remembering/ or what we call remembering/ felt conscious of bereavement of her body / that it had come as a great shock to leave her body that way/ not only the violence of the impact/ but the doing of it/ taking her own life 2. eventually/ saw these nine months/ as walking in bardo myself/ that one reason I suffered so / was the experience described below/ my own demons / the way I generated meaning/ my neuro logic/ attacking me/ in this /place /I could see the contents of my darkness/ which I understand with you as parts of the net we don't see lit/ operates out of view/ or not operating/ drop connection/ and I had some kind of moral awareness of myself/ which is a piece of electricity constantly under refinement
Step 6: Astro the Child Recently, I re-watched some of my old Knots Landing videos, which I'd taped off of cable TV in the mid-90's. I would set the VCR for a few minutes before the episode began, and I would catch the tail-end of a Loony Tunes cartoon which had aired in the time slot before Knots Landing. Usually when I watch these tapes I fast-forward past the cartoons - but this time, I didn't. This time, I watched them - Bugs Bunny in particular. And you know what? They were hilarious! They were clever, wild, uninhibited, anarchic. Bugs Bunny was witty, fearless, invincible, and could outwit anyone - especially when using some dynamite. He dressed up as different characters, did different accents, and often pursued danger for no other reason than that it was exciting. He was perpetually jolly. Nothing got him down. He had mastered the physical world to the point that he defied physical limitations. Oh my Gosh! I thought. That's me! That's who I am, in my heart of hearts. That's the person that I am becoming, more and more, each day. I'm Bugs Bunny! So maybe it wasn't unintentional that I'd recorded these cartoons. Maybe I was remembering how much I'd loved them as a kid. (Yes, I'd watched these very cartoons over and over again, in the morning before school and in the afternoon after school.) Also, it's probably not a coincidence that I played the Rabbit character in "vivianpusher" - a character whose role model is none other than Bugs Bunny! Maybe there's more truth in that than I'd realized. Maybe I'm seeking to find - create - re-create - Bugs Bunny's world. It's a very absurd world. A wonderfully absurd world. Lots of banging-over-the-head with sharp objects, lots of dynamite explosions. And no one gets hurt, of course. Mockery. Sarcasm. Violence. Anarchy. Enemies becoming friends, friends becoming enemies. Everyone wanting to hunt or destroy the rabbit, yet he hunts or destroys them. He is unhuntable, undestroyable. Yes! That's my world! This work, believe it or not, comes closest to my own work. It's the best example of me. Yes, yes, yes! "eeeeer, what's up, doc?" "eeeeer, what's up, doc?" "eeeeer, what's up, doc?" That pretty much explains my child-self: undestroyed, unblemished, uncompromised, kept alive, always, by my continuing relationship with my childhood heroes: namely Charlie's Angels (and, to a lesser degree, The Bionic Woman). I had scrapbooks, posters, dolls, trading cards, etc . The Angels were my secret pals, my guardian angels. I lived in their world, where anything could be solved through a flirtatious smile and a plea of innocence. My personal adventures and problems were "cases" to be solved for Charlie. My sexual encounters were essentially a search for Charlie: a search for the benevolent, protective, all-loving male who was always absent from my life. And my friendships have been a search for the other two Angels: my allies. I loved this. I loved living inside an invented reality. The Charles Townsend Detective Agency is my home. Living in this place, incidentally, creates an automatic affinity with childlike things all things that exist within the realm of the child are mine. They are mine to play with, mine to love, mine to imitate, mine to act out, mine to use as launching-pads for my own creations so even if I don't necessarily worship Alice in Wonderland or James and the Giant Peach, it would appear as if I do. Interestingly enough, the only men I allowed into this world were He-Man, Spider-Man, Batman, Scooby Doo, Fred Flinstone: cartoonized versions of masculinity (that is, heroic, noble, generous, Adonis-like, quite unlike real men). But there was always room for more females. Shirley MacLaine, for instance, entered the equation much later, while I was in high school. On January 17, 1987, I watched "Out on a Limb," a two-part TV-adaptation of Shirley MacLaine's best-selling book which chronicles her metaphysical explorations. It changed my life. It changed how I perceived the world. Reincarnation, transchanneling, metaphysical interpretations of human behavior and events all became regular features of my mental repertoire. I began my own "search," my own explorations. I took walks. I thought deeply. I reflected. I meditated. I wrote. I wrote. I wrote. My writings turned into an autobiographical novel (the original I'll Always Be Anthony), which I dedicated to Shirley MacLaine. She became my secret friend. I wrote for her, to her, with her. I read and reread all of her books. I displayed them prominently in my bookcases. She became a symbol of my writing-self. My writings always included a metaphysical dimension, or at least a presentation of reality that suffered from the lack of a metaphysical dimension. I pictured her nodding with approval. I pictured myself on the cover of Time Magazine, referred to as "Little Mr. MacLaine." I feel that my absurdist vision somehow allows me to express this metaphysical dimension, it allows the human spirit to be more of itself. And then there's Abby Ewing from Knots Landing. She was the beautiful vixen of the show, the troublemaker and the catalyst for many of the show's most interesting storylines - the female equivalent to Dallas' bad boy, J.R. Ewing. I have often described Abby as "the most fascinating character ever presented on network television." She's so layered - a master manipulator and seductress, a brilliant businesswoman, yet she has a great sense of humor, terrific eye make-up (which she insisted on doing herself), a roster of unforgettable smirks and facial expressions and she cares about her children. No matter what happens, Abby is at the bottom of it. And she always gets what she wants. Always. I'm in love with Abby. I've always been in love with Abby. I create Abby's - full Abby's, half-Abby's - all the time in my own writing. That's my way of honoring her, loving her, keeping her with me. I invite her into my world, and sometimes I even imagine Abby inviting me into her world. What character would I play? How would I fit into her life? Would she like me? Of course, this could also be an elaborate way of embracing the "Abby" part of myself. Yes, there's very definitely an Abby in me: a manipulator, a vixen, not quite willing to operate within the confines of other people's stale and narrow moralities. My scripts are an expression of this in many ways - the scripts themselves, more than any one character, are Abby's. They're all Abby's in one way or another, I suppose. I just realized that I didn't mention the name of the actress who played Abby (Donna Mills). That's because there is no actress for me, is there? There's only Abby. She's real. She's alive. She's a part of me, and I of her. Yet there's one more entry in this equation, a recent addition. Anais Nin, the writer (1903-77 and beyond) who became famous for her brilliant and insightful diaries. I had heard about her diaries a long time ago, but I didn't actually read them until recently. And I was blown away. Shocked. I trembled. I cried. I felt that she saw the world the way I saw the world. She understood what I understood. And as a result, I felt that she somehow understood me. Oh, I was so touched. Deeply, profoundly touched. Touched beyond words, touched beyond comparison. I held her diaries as if they were Bibles. I caressed them. Hugged them. I slept with them under my pillow. I took them everywhere with me. And I laid them out one at a time, for all the world to see. I felt that she was with me on some level. Her spirit, perhaps, her essence, her memory, or maybe just her writing (which embodies all of those things). I felt less alone, and I could feel myself transforming as a writer. Knowing that my vision is appreciated, shared, did something to me. It changed me. I can't explain how. Maybe it just gave me more confidence, and it's the confidence that changed me. Or maybe it's something else - something deeper, less defineable. I don't know. I don't need to know. Suddenly, I found myself seeking to know my characters in the way that Anais sought to know the characters in her own life. I went deeper than I usually did, and I allowed Anais into this depth - not as a critic, exactly, but as an observer, a participant. I felt us laughing together, exploring together, loving together. Anais Nin. Yes. Every one of her words feels alive to me, feels like a cure to my loneliness and pain, an access-code into a realm of loving alliances and understanding. I am in love with Anais Nin. So we have Shirley the metaphysical philosopher/adventuress Abby the beautiful vixen/seductress and Anais, the poet/genius. Three women, just like Charlie's Angels - but maybe in this scenario, I'm Charlie. *** Step 11 Astro's allies I think I've finally figured it out. Something my advisor said about The Doilymaker script triggered it: "The beautiful doilymaker," she wrote, "seems true to the stories you tell about the female goddesses in your life." Female goddesses in my life? Charlie's Angels. The Bionic Woman. Abby Ewing. My grandmother perhaps even my filmmaking partner? Do I prefer to live under the gaze of a goddess? Is there a goddess in all areas of my life? Grandmother on the homefront, Janet in the context of my creative projects, my advisor at Goddard, the owner of my favorite truck stop in Pocatello, and so on. And if this is so, then what does that do to my other relationships? Are these merely filler relationships, my duty as I interact with the lower world? Is that why I never completely give myself to them? Is my sexual attraction to men merely an effort to keep my relationship with the goddess pure and desexualized? Do I even like men? Peasants. They're all peasants. All except for the goddesses. I interact with them on behalf of the goddess. I'm a spy. Yes, that's it. My job is to live among the peasants and fools and determine who should be rewarded and who should be punished - and then I report back to the goddess through my emotional responses to my experiences. Yes, these are better and more accurate than a 500-page dissertation. The goddess knows what to do from there. Always. That's it! The secret is out. I am utterly devoted to my goddesses, but not to anyone else. I sit among people, I laugh among them, I share with them, but I am not one of them. They know it and I know it. And then the goddess walks by, or I see her out of the corner of my eye sitting across the way. I nod mentally. I affirm that my devotion is with her, always, that I am not one of these slime-brained imbeciles who feed on ideology as a condor feeds on carrion. Yes! Make no mistake. They're not my equals. I do not believe in equality. I do not believe in democracy. Or socialism. Or Communism. As Detective Humphrey Mapps says in the recently-revised version of Summon the Ant-Woman: "I am a monarchist and I serve only my Queen."
Where are you now my darling? My sweet girl. Ma cocotte. I don't stop listening for you, sniffing the air for your smell, seeing you out of the corner of my eye. Feeling your fur with my fingers. Your exquisite fur, white grey taupe black. Tes poils, which I find everywhere now, not just on couch and chairs and blanket but in my drawers and closets, white filigree lacing through my sweaters and coats. My hair sheds too only it's longer less fine. Our curly white hairs are everywhere in this apartment, I can't brush yours away. Your shit stains on the radiator, I'll save them too. You're nowhere, and everywhere. The flash of white that never appears though I'm always seeing it, wherever you used to lay yourself down. You always were everywhere, here, in this apartment, I took you in through senses I didn't even know I had. That's why I still feel you still smell you still hear you. I don't stop listening for you. All day long I keep telling myself no: that isn't you rustling papers in the corner, that can't be you at the window wanting to be let in, no that isn't the soft thud of you landing as you dismount from the chair in my study. I brace myself before walking in the door: no she is not curled up on the living room rug. No she won't be there in the hallway when the door opens, doe-eyed fur a little matted from sleep, stand expectantly for a moment and then, tail up high, start her twirl. Her own peculiar twirl of delight. She won't fling herself at the back of the armchair and hang there, her body stretched full length so her backpaws touch the floor, eyes turned in my direction. Sleep undoes all the work of the day before. I lie in bed in the morning waiting, waiting for you to come in and hop on the bed. The floor creaks, the refrigerator rattles. You don't appear. Distraction only makes it worse. Allows it to creep up on me when I'm not ready. Makes me forget so I have to remember all over again. Last night after the movie which made me leave you behind such a harsh return: to the is-not-here, the won't-be-here, of you. I don't want to leave the house because I don't want to come home to your absence: no you in the hallway circling around with your tail up high. I sit at my desk and look out at the park. Our park. You spent more hours sitting in this chair than I ever did, gazing, dozing, gazing. The trees are maimed from the ice storm, lopsided, limbs missing, pitiful to look at. What kind of spring will this be, with you gone and the trees all scrawny? Where are you now my sweetheart? In the freezer at the clinic? They're keeping you(?) there till spring, till the ground thaws and I can come and get you(?) and bring you up north. To bury you in the place that you loved. . . You, mon errante. You'd been wandering, errant, adrift, in the winter streets, hard-bitten, scrounging for food. What I wouldn't give to know where you came from, what streets you wandered through. A rich suburb was it? Or a poor one? Franco or anglo? Pointe Claire or Point Charles? I threw the slip away, I couldn't imagine I would ever care that much. What drove you into the cold November streets? Knowing somehow you'd find better, were made for better. Did you find old rags to bury yourself in at night? Eat out of trash cans? You who were born to be seated on velvet or satin. A sign from the first of how it would be between us, till the end of our days together: you wandering off and never telling. Never making me any wiser about where you'd been, what you'd been up to. Leaving me in a chronic state of wanting-to-know and not-knowing. Even when you stayed right there on the chair in my office. Your chair. Now here again you've left, wandering deep into a night of your own where I can't follow. Leaving me wanting and not-knowing. How much mystery you held in your tiny body! You, my sweet wandering girl. These terms of endearment I've never used with any woman. I never knew any shame with you, any holding back. From the first moment I knew how to touch you, and when to stop. How to give you pleasure. You never rejected me. When it was time to give you a bath I knew how, I held your forelegs firmly, without hesitation, I dunked you in, I held you there. You protested, you tried to wriggle free, but you never bit or clawed. You trusted me by then. Never did anyone trust me as you did. When we went away together, you let me place you in your box, you sat there and submitted as I lowered the lid over your head. It wasn't that way at first. In the first years you put up a struggle, I had to pin you down with one hand while I shut the lid with the other. Maybe you came to see you had no choice. Either way it was almost painful to see you sit there so passively awaiting your fate. Only afterwards, once we were in the car you beside me on the passenger seat did you start your moaning. Why am I writing to you, about you? I never could write about the women I've loved and lost. Not without feeling like a fraud. As if I couldn't be counted on to tell it the way it was. As if underneath it all were some ulterior motive which if discovered would expose me to. . .humiliation. I'm not afraid to be found out with you. Nothing feels tainted. With you I was never ashamed. My hair could look any old way. Why am I writing about you? Because I want to reach you. Because I want to put you to rest, in me, without sealing over. To heal, without moving on. *** Where are you now? Everywhere I look I see your absence. A dullness to the chairs, the rugs, the floorboards, the plants. They don't gleam and sparkle as they used to. The bloom is off. Deprived of your appreciation, of your endless consideration. Lovelorn. Without you. What am I without you. Like the trees in the park with their limbs lopped off. I prepare myself before getting into bed: no I won't hear the door creak as you nudge it open, no you won't circle the bed while I wait, knowing you're down there biding your time, I won't feel that little bounce as you mount the bed at last, hear the purr that begins the instant you land, feel you padding towards me on the quilt, purring louder as you approach. I won't reach out to where I know you are, just about even with my waist, let my hand fall on you, then stroke you as you push your head through my hand, over and over, until you've had enough and make your way back to the foot of the bed, discreetly, where as you mark out your nest then lower yourself down into it your purr subsides and we both drop gently into sleep. I keep trying to get to the new life the one you've made possible by leaving, so far nothing compensates, I try and add up the advantages but they don't amount to a hill of beans. I'd give anything to be vacuuming every week, running the lintbrush over the chairs, the couch, the blankets, riding my bike home from the pet store with my knapsack full of cans, all the shopping and cleaning and worrying and you know it was all a pleasure because it was all for you my dear, why are we here, after all, if not to make life possible for each other, to gladden each others' hearts. With you I felt the last vestiges of my mother's stinginess going out of me, those three cases of canned food I bought on my last trip to the pet store, not stinting this time, not hedging my bets, investing in your future, in our future together. "Les chats mangent la douleur" M. said to me, not long after Moses ran away. Cats eat our grief. Which explains why their leaving plunges us into such an abyss of sadness, of inconsolability. So could this be what's ailing me now? All the grief you're not around to eat? *** Not multiple, not global, not political this time. Just this one personal loss, so tiny you didn't even weigh eight pounds. Not that I was abandoned, not that I was hurt, not that I was accused. Not that I failed. Just that you're not here. No rewriting of our history, no sudden stabbing memories of hate, or love. No anger, no indignation. No guilt. The vet said there was nothing to be done. I did all I could. No regrets. I took time to stroke you to talk to you to just sit with you. We spent long hours sitting together, you and I. No plus side, no perks. No trace of relief. What did you ever get in the way of, nothing that I can think of, you were always there but never in the way never demanding your needs so simple to gratify. What I grieve is your absence, nothing more nothing less. With you I come to know the meaning of loss, pure and simple. I wonder what I will do with myself all day long, all my life. I fear a dreary succession of days filled with "no," no you, no joy, no heart at the center of things. Don't expect, say the Buddhists. Learn to live in the moment just at is. But it's my body expects you, in every moment, when I sit on the floor my hand expects your head to come find it, to push its way through, expects your whole body to come tunnelling through after, then to turn around and do it again. My waist expects to feel you sidling up against it, circling around. My eyes expect you, only now do I see how the ever-present possibility of you filled these rooms, how atmospheric was my anticipation of you. How the sight of you - your heart-shaped face your pale green eyes your dainty step your electric fur gray white diaphanous - brought. . . relief, delight, joy. And even, sometimes, shock, the shock of a lover showing up when you're not expecting her, oh remember how you suddenly appeared down by the lake on that full moon night? giving me such a start! you'd never ventured down that far, or I'd never seen you so out of context, yes it is true when you suddenly appeared "oh it's you!" and yes often even when I was expecting you, when I first walked in the door and there you were - I had the start that lovers have. My pulse would quicken as I climbed the stairs, just to know I'd be seeing you! Just to know you were there. And of course you always were there, I could count on you to be there even as I could count on that little rush at the sight of you. It seemed too good to be true. With women one of those assurances always seemed to rule out the other. My ears expect you, the language I learned that was all yours, the deep pleasure purr when I touched you, stroked you, and you'd been waiting for my touch, the quieter subtler purr as you approached, that anticipatory whirr as you headed towards me on the couch, on the floor, on the bed. The focussed, aggressive purr, while you waited for me to open a can of food. And outdoors, your particular cries I struggled to make out from among the tapestry of sounds, the rustling of the leaves and the squeaking of the chipmunks and the rushing of the wind. The series of little "mews" piping a greeting as you ran towards me from the woods, tail high, body electric with energy. The yowl at the door, repeated ever more insistently until someone came and let you in. The more primal yowl - victory? pride? conquest? pity? - as you pranced across the porch with a shrew in your mouth. The sounds that over the years I learned to pull out from among the vast universe of sounds, having strained to hear you all these years my ears go on hearing you, and I have to train them in reverse now, to release your beloved mews and yowls and purrs back to the universe, to return them to the vastness from which they came. I have to unlearn your language. What I never expected from you, what you never expected from me: attention. Interaction. Fidelity. Our "differences" were never a problem. You let me go, I let you go. It was in our nature to roam. Neither of us liked to be pinned down. All I wanted from you was: your presence, when you were there. Oh the stillness of you, how in awe of it I was. Your powers of concentration, your unending faith in yourself, your refusal to be anything other than yourself. Today I walked into my bedroom and gasped. There on my bed!! The flounce, the flash of white. As after a dream my rational mind restores the contours of the waking world. My gray shorts in a ball, pockets turned out. . . Seeing you, suddenly, on the rug in the alcove. Shock! Until I realize it is two books I left sitting on the floor in the exact spot you used to occupy. A pale sweater left draped across your chair produces another start. Just so you continue to take shape before me, beside me. What shape is that shifting over there? That flash, that swoop, that flash of light. I know this start from having hunted for you so many times. Spotting you - la voila! - the shock to the heart: you were so often scarce, so often when I called you didn't show. How well I know this stance: ears attuned, eyes trained, all senses straining to make out the desired shape, sound. That rustling in the leaves, the tiny piping sound you emitted as you ran, oh come to me please come all I ask is for you to come come home my prodigal daughter/lover/ beloved. Last night I dreamt of you, I was holding you, you were in my hands, and one hand was stroking you, all over, your head your back your sides your tail. Such unexpected fulfillment to hold you that way. To hold you, in my hands, in your entirety. As you were when you died, me holding you on my knees feeling - in my hands and my legs, as I could never do for any human - the life go out of you. Completely. Grace. Gracie. My Gracie girl, my sweetest most beautiful girl, these words I've never used with any woman, or any child. "My girl" " my sweetest girl" I called you knowing you would never be mine, knowing I could hold you, I could pick you up and shake you about, I could rough you up the way I often did, I could gather you completely in my hands, and hold you to my chest and yet - ownership was out of the question with you, always. You would never be a moi. Maybe that's why I felt so free with my possessives. You would always be mon errante, straying from me even as you stayed at my side. At the same time you were mine, you were of me, in me, part of me as my legs are mine or my fingers. My blood, my bones. My Gracie girl, mon amour, ma cocotte, I loved you without reservation, without fear. Without holding back. I was never afraid to run out of love with you. |
