The Old Devils

Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis

I was just reading a Huffington Post column about The National Book award, which also mentions the scandalous Publisher’s Weekly “best books of 2009” list that includes no women writers. I can’t comment on that, not having read many new books this year, and none of the winners. But the column goes on to revisit past award missteps, including Kingley Amis’s The Old Devils having been chosen over Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

The Handmaid’s Tale bored me and I never finished it; The Old Devils is a great book. The characters are a bunch of aging Welsh alcoholics getting ready for a visit from an old friend who’s made it big in the literary world—a sort of modern Dylan Thomas, but less self-destructive. The ones left behind are the ones falling apart.

The humor is dark and relentless; the depiction of drinking is enough to make you weep with laughter. The men drink gin and whisky in the pub, while the women drink white wine at home (all day). Everyone smokes. The horrors of aging and the horrors of hangovers blend in a way that makes more sense the older I get; I’ve long suspected hangovers are merely bulletins from the front.

Amis’s characters are right wing cranks with romantic underbellies, and he spares them nothing. You don’t have to think you could spend five minutes with one of these people in real life to adore them on the page. They’re hobbled and half deaf, forgetful and losing their teeth, selfish, resentful, envious, and deeply nostalgic for youth. They still have desire, and will behave foolishly for it, and they tell you more about dystopia—the dystopia of everyday life—than Atwood will ever know.

Kingsley Amis famously couldn’t finish any of his son’s books. I’ve liked some of Martin’s Amis’s stuff, but I have more patience than Kingsely. It’s always seemed to me that what the father couldn’t stomach was Amis fils’ pretentiousness. It’s not a killing pretentiousness—Martin Amis has a lot of virtues as a writer—but you can’t ignore it. And there’s nothing a K. Amis books skewers more viciously than pretentiousness.

Of course, being an alcoholic keeps you on the defensive your whole life, no matter how famous you become. When you’re prone to humiliating yourself any night of the week, only a gargantuan sense of humor and an ingrained resistance to human vanity can keep you going.

Alcohol

You do look a little ill.

But we can do something about that, now.

Can’t we.

The fact is you’re a shocking wreck.

Do you hear me.

You aren’t all alone.

And you could use some help today, packing in the
dark, boarding buses north, putting the seat back and
grinning with terror flowing over your legs through
your fingers and hair . . .

I was always waiting, always here.

Know anyone else who can say that.

My advice to you is think of her for what she is:
one more name cut in the scar of your tongue.

What was it you said, “To rather be harmed than
harm, is not abject.”

Please.

Can we be leaving now.

We like bus trips, remember. Together

we could watch these winter fields slip past, and
never care again,

think of it.

I don’t have to be anywhere.

–Franz Wright

Jewelry Daze

Zebra Jasper , Peruvian Opal and Pink Sponge Coral Necklace

Lost in jewelry making. My sister is having a party for me at her house, and I don’t have enough stock so I am making earrings and bracelets day and night, while the cats climb on the windowsill to watch, and complain at my focus, and I barely get outside, and the rest of the world dissolves like smoke.

A river of beads an inch deep in my cardboard box riverbed (the crutches came in this box; it’s just the right size) with clasps, earring parts and crimp beads lost in the bright clutter; the tools half hidden the cats chewing on string and jewelry wire. I’m feeling alternately stressed at my self-imposed quotas and lost in the endlessness of it, making one thing after another like the junked-out deity we unspooled from those millions of years ago.

These past several days have been like the seasons when I’d spend weeks alone in Wallkill. The whole city is here around me, but I don’t see it. I hear my neighbor in the hall, catch snatches of conversation, nod to the doormen on the way out, watch the flow of people traffic on the streets: it’s all backdrop.  I talk on the phone, feed the cats. I miss the old 12th floor gang.

If it were the old days, I’d wander down to Annie’s when I got lonely. Philip would come over or take me to dinner. Now I’m solitary: my friends are all just a little too far away, emotionally, for me to feel part of anything. I keep thinking of whom to see, dinners, coffee dates, and they’re all good: but they don’t add up. That’s my fault: what I’ve unraveled.

This happened slowly, one thing after another. Charles moving out, then being so wrapped up in Philip, the perpetual drama. Hard to believe that’s coming to an end: at least the particular drama we were part of. What will happen next is unclear.

It’s strange when all of a sudden a packet of years closes off and you realize: that’s the past now. What was the present for a long time—changing, moving forward, but still somehow all the same present—is gone: there was a bridge, a bend in the road, a jump, a cut-off.

So here I am in the new time, and solitude feels okay. I’ve gotten used to it.  I have a lot of  work. I have to make necklaces, bracelets and earrings. And edit a man’s book. And then, soon, I hope, my own again.

Passion for Solitude

by Cesare Pavese

I’m eating a little supper by the bright window.

The room’s already dark, the sky’s starting to turn.

Outside my door, the quiet roads lead,

after a short walk, to open fields.

I’m eating, watching the sky—who knows

how many women are eating now. My body is calm:

labor dulls all the senses, and dulls women too.

Outside, after supper, the stars will come out to touch

the wide plain of the earth. The stars are alive,

but not worth these cherries, which I’m eating alone.

I look at the sky, know that lights already are shining

among rust-red roofs, noises of people beneath them.

A gulp of my drink, and my body can taste the life

of plants and of rivers. It feels detached from things.

A small dose of silence suffices, and everything’s still,

in its true place, just like my body is still.

All things become islands before my senses,

which accept them as a matter of course: a murmur of silence.

All things in this darkness—I can know all of them,

just as I know that blood flows in my veins.

The plain is a great flowing of water through plants,

a supper of all things. Each plant, and each stone,

lives motionlessly. I hear my food feeding my veins

with each living thing that this plain provides.

The night doesn’t matter. The square patch of sky

whispers all the loud noises to me, and a small star

struggles in emptiness, far from all foods,

from all houses, alien. It isn’t enough for itself,

it needs too many companions. Here in the dark, alone,

my body is calm, it feels it’s in charge.

Translated by Geoffrey Brock

The Cat Psychiatrist

Hope in a Prison of Despair, by Evelyn De Morgan (30 August 1855-2 May 1919), British

As I have told you before, and probably will again next week and the week after until we both expire of collegial boredom, my cat refuses to let me sink into gloom. I use that phrase because merely being depressed—but still active—seems to go by him; and lying in bed reading is okay, too (though he prefers active). But lying in bed sunk in gloom is not permitted. He meows, bites, sticks his wet nose in my face.

Is this what I should have done with my father all those years ago? Not tiptoed around his bad moods…not believed adult inner life was sacrosanct, demanding of awe and dread? Should I have just nudged him with my wet nose?

Oh yeah, he wouldn’t have reacted by saying (fondly) “….okay, okay, ya dumb cat, for chrissakes, I’ll get up.” He would have snarled and said something hurtful. I only do that when Fitzroy is being Felix Ungerish neurotic. When I’m sunk in gloom, I’m touched by his distress. And who can say it’s better to sink in gloom than write this blog post, which is fairly useless but doesn’t upset the cat?

I always want to explore the gloom for reasons that once made sense. The metaphors of ‘shining light on’ or ‘cleaning out’ are timeless and seemingly experience-tested, at least until you try them 8 million times. Now it’s all about keeping busy, but the obvious things—doing the work I’m paid for, calling friends—are impossibly distant from the state of gloom. This isn’t. This is the coffee bar in the mental hospital, the one that exists nowhere but in my mind.

My Ideal Mental Hospital: on one side are sunny gardens, mountain views, hot springs, and a library of great poetic and comic works: books, movies and TV shows. Masseurs, yoga teachers and therapists are on call, and at the end of the session, they pay you. Grandmothers (certified grandmothers, older, wider and shorter than all the patients) prepare simple meals with lots of fresh vegetables, meat raised with kindness, home-baked bread and pie. All the bedrooms have big windows and the breeze is warm or cool, scented with the Pacific Ocean, eucalyptus, mountain laurel, autumn leaves or just-mown grass.

On the other side, it’s like a college or boarding school common room, with a stained carpet, ridiculous chairs, and people in pajamas day and night. The coffee is not bad but slopped into ugly gray plastic cups. Sunk in Gloom plays her greatest hits on the jukebox, which eats quarters and often skips or stops in the middle of the song. There’s only one phone and when it rings, it’s always a guy with a sexy voice asking for some girl named Marcy.
On The Meeting Of García Lorca And Hart Crane

Brooklyn, 1929. Of course Crane’s
been drinking and has no idea who
this curious Andalusian is, unable
even to speak the language of poetry.
The young man who brought them
together knows both Spanish and English,
but he has a headache from jumping
back and forth from one language
to another. For a moment’s relief
he goes to the window to look
down on the East River, darkening
below as the early light comes on.
Something flashes across his sight,
a double vision of such horror
he has to slap both his hands across
his mouth to keep from screaming.
Let’s not be frivolous, let’s
not pretend the two poets gave
each other wisdom or love or
even a good time, let’s not
invent a dialogue of such eloquence
that even the ants in your own
house won’t forget it. The two
greatest poetic geniuses alive
meet, and what happens? A vision
comes to an ordinary man staring
at a filthy river. Have you ever
had a vision? Have you ever shaken
your head to pieces and jerked back
at the image of your young son
falling through open space, not
from the stern of a ship bound
from Vera Cruz to New York but from
the roof of the building he works on?
Have you risen from bed to pace
until dawn to beg a merciless God
to take these pictures away? Oh, yes,
let’s bless the imagination. It gives
us the myths we live by. Let’s bless
the visionary power of the human—
the only animal that’s got it—,
bless the exact image of your father
dead and mine dead, bless the images
that stalk the corners of our sight
and will not let go. The young man
was my cousin, Arthur Lieberman,
then a language student at Columbia,
who told me all this before he died
quietly in his sleep in 1983
in a hotel in Perugia. A good man,
Arthur, he survived graduate school,
later came home to Detroit and sold
pianos right through the Depression.
He loaned my brother a used one
to compose his hideous songs on,
which Arthur thought were genius.
What an imagination Arthur had!

–Philip Levine

Do You Believe in Evil?

Francisco Goya, The Disasters of War

David Brooks wrote an editorial today deploring what he calls the “rush to therapy” in the case of Nidal Hasan—the fear, by commentators, of inciting anti-Muslim passions and so focusing on the personal aspects of Hasan’s story rather than the ideological ones.

Brooks begins his editorial by talking about the importance of choosing a story to explain life or one’s life, the ferocious need humans have to make sense of the world, and the great power these stories have.

I watched the earliest coverage of the shootings—on Chris Matthews—and this desire not to emphasize the “Muslim connection” was obvious. It did feel like denial, political correctness, etc. And yet, what to do? Brooks writes, “If public commentary wasn’t carefully policed, the assumption seemed to be, then the great mass of unwashed yahoos in Middle America would go off on a racist rampage.”

I don’t know how unwashed they are, or where they reside, but the existence of a great many angry and bigoted people in our country is very real. Hasan’s rage and bitterness led him to take 13 lives. Most of those inflamed by the ideological/religious/ethnic basis of his action will settle for beating a teenager into a coma, or destroying the business of a hardworking older couple.

There’s nothing wrong with TV commentators, who wield so much power over the shaping of stories, being  cautious. What harm is done? Will Hasan be freed with a referral to a psychiatrist?  Will Obama immediately conclude the war in order not to upset potential Hasans?

Or—horrors—will we stop believing in evil? Welcome Satan into our living rooms and tell the kids murder is a lifestyle choice?

None of this is going to happen. Hasan will be in prison the rest of his life. It may be a very short life. The army will pay more attention to the psychic toll of the war, which as Bob Herbert wrote the other day, is affecting thousands of people who will never kill anyone, whose violence will be against themselves and their families, and probably never reach the status of “criminal violence,” though causing no less suffering for that.

The army will not pay enough attention. The loneliness and unhappiness of soldiers who may or may not become a serious danger to others will never be adequately addressed. And my—and others’—sorrow about this, honestly, is not because we think suicide bombers or suicide shooters are lost lambs. It’s not because we care more about not offending people than we do about protecting people.

It’s about what works. It’s about living in a country of people who were born, or whose parents were born, in every nation on earth, people whose religious beliefs cover the spectrum; and at the same time waging and funding wars which inevitably rouse national and religious passions.

It doesn’t matter whether you are for or against our current military policy. For now and the foreseeable future, America will be an aggressive armed presence in the world. Frankly, we have to watch our back, and our back is at home. It made up of people like Hasan and it’s made up of people like the ones who’d like to lynch him—or, if he’s not available, someone with a similar name.

The reason, David Brooks, that we don’t have to go on and on about how evil it is to gun down 13 people at an army base, is that, really, everybody already knows that.

A Divine Image

Cruelty has a human heart,
And Jealousy a human face;
Terror the human form divine,
And Secrecy the human dress.

The human dress is forged iron,
The human form a fiery forge,
The human face a furnace sealed,
The human heart a hungry gorge.

—William Blake

Glorious Bird

Last night I went to a reading at The Cathedral of St John the Divine celebrating Tennessee Williams’ induction into The Cathedral’s Poets Corner. I had a sick headache and my companion was in a foul mood. No matter. Tennessee’s words made our hearts shine.

In the 40’s, Gore Vidal dubbed Williams “The Glorious Bird.” Last night John Patrick Shanley, in a passionate homage, referred to him as a “A gorgeous beast.” He’s always seemed to me the most human of writers, drunk on words, sex, gossip, praise. There’s nothing unknowable about Tennessee except his genius, and the genius of genius is to make us think we know.

Vanessa Redgrave read from Not About Nightingales. Eli Wallach did a scene from Mister Paradise with his daughter, Katherine Wallach. Sherry Boone did a brilliant rendition of a poem called Gold Tooth Blues, a very funny work that I’d include except that you kind of had to be there. Williams’ comic poems, especially, beg to be read or sung by someone who knows how.

The performers were mostly wonderful (and there were lots of them, and none went on too long, which greatly impressed me), but being steered to read the poems was the greatest gift. I’ve read a few over the years but the plays were the thing. And they still are; they contain his most brilliant lines. But if the poems seem thin, it’s only by comparison to something as great as The Glass Menagerie. Put side by side with the work of other 20th century poets, Williams’ verse holds its own. Not the best, but not far off.

The poet William Jay Smith recalled his early friendship with Tennessee, back when he was still Tom and lived at home. One night when his parents were out, Tom had a few guys over, and one started cutting up, making obscene phone calls to strangers. (In the early 1930’s this must felt more transgressive than it did when I was growing up, when it had become the province of 9-year-olds.) In the midst of their shenanigans, Rose appeared on the stairs, in a frothy white dress, furious, threatening to tell the parents. And she did tell.

I like that: not-always-fragile Rose.

The person I missed last night was Gore Vidal, who has the best first-person accounts of Williams. This is from an essay of his in The New York Review of Books in 1985.

...The Bird had never heard of Kennedy that day in 1958 when we drove from Miami to Palm Beach for lunch with the golden couple, who had told me that they lusted to meet the Bird. He, in turn, was charmed by them. “Now tell me again,” he would ask Jack, repeatedly, “what you are. A governor or a senator?” Each time, Jack, dutifully, gave name, rank, and party. Then the Bird would sternly quiz him on America’s China policy; and Jack would look a bit glum. Finally, he proposed that we shoot at a target in the patio.

While Jackie flitted about, taking Polaroid shots of us, the Bird banged away at the target; and proved to be a better shot than our host. At one point, while Jack was shooting, the Bird muttered in my ear, “Get that ass!” I said, “Bird, you can’t cruise our next president.” The Bird chuckled ominously: “They’ll never elect those two. They are much too attractive for the American people.” Later, I told Jack that the Bird had commented favourably on his ass. He beamed. “Now, that’s very exciting,” he said.

The line The Cathedral has inscribed on Tennessee’s stone is, “Time is the longest distance between two places.” Time is also the most ravishing intoxicant in any literary cocktail. Last night, it was there in spades: the dead poet, the frail and white-haired actors, the memories—including mine of reading Tennessee when he was still alive, but, as John Patrick Shanley noted, impossible for a young admirer to imagine approaching. “Tennessee was like the ocean,” Shanley said.

I think of him more as a river. The ocean spends too much time in its own company.

The Eyes

for Oliver

The eyes are last to go out.
They remain long after the face has disappeared
into the tissue it is made of.
The tongue says good-by when the eyes have lingering
silence,
For they are the searchers last to abandon the search,
the ones that remain where the drowned have been washed
ashore
after the lanterns staying, not saying good-by…

The eyes have no faith in that too accessible language.
For them no occasion is simple enough for a word to justify it.
Existence in time, not only their own but ancestral,
encloses all moments in four walls of mirrors.

Closed they are waiting. Open, they are also waiting.
They are acquainted, but they have forgotten the name
of their acquaintance.

Youth is their uneasy bird, and shadows clearer than light
pass through them at times,
for waters are not more changeable under skies
nor stones under rapids.

The eyes may be steady with that Athenian look
that answers terror with stillness, or they may be quick
with a pure infatuate being. Almost always
the eyes hold onto an image
of someone recently departed or gone a long time ago
or only expected…

The eyes are not lucky.
They seem hopelessly inclined to linger.

They make additions that come to no final sum.
It is really hard to say if their dark is worse than their light,
Their discoveries better or worse than not knowing,

but they are the last to go out
and their going out is always when they are lifted.

The Dog Physician

My mother (middle, seated) at her house in N.H. many years ago. My sister stands behind her, demonstrating her mastery over her dogs. My cousin Roberta smiles charmingly.

In an article in today’s New York Times, “Good Dog, Smart Dog,” The reporter writes about scientists’ growing certainty that dogs are smarter than scientists thought they were. (The rest of us already knew this.) Dogs can learn hundreds of words, differentiate photographs with dogs in them from photographs without, and sniff out nascent lung cancers and oncoming epileptic seizures.

So far, so good. I’m waiting for the day when yearly checkups consist of lying naked on a soft carpet while a gentle (and gentlemanly) dog sniffs me all over, then presses a paw onto something like a giant cellphone where a couple of dozen diseases and conditions are indicated by various mysterious symbols. Then the doctor will rise from his stool in the corner and say, “According to Harry, you do not have heart disease, cancer, lupus, typhus, Lyme disease or diabetes. He thinks you need a dog.”

I’ll remind the doctor that I keep up with the research; I know he made up that last bit.

“You’re wrong,” the doctor says quietly. “Look at him. He’s in love with you.”

“No,” I’ll say. “It’s not me. I was cleaning the kitty litter right before I left and a turd fell down my blouse. I got it out of course but didn’t have time to shower.”

“Oh, that’s why he spent so much time at your breasts. I almost scheduled a biopsy.”

The Times writes,  “Clive D. L. Wynne, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Florida, who specializes in canine cognition and has himself said he met a border collie who knew 1,500 words, takes issue with efforts to compare human and canine brains.

He argues that it is dogs’ deep sensitivity to the humans around them, their obedience under rigorous training, and their desire to please that can explain most of these capabilities. They may be deft at reading human cues — and teachable — but that doesn’t mean they are thinking like people, he says. A dog’s entire world revolves around its primary owner, and it will respond to that person to get what it wants, usually food, treats or affection.”

You know, there are a lot of people like that. They’re kids. They’re married to someone who has all the money or can beat them with impunity. They’re low or mid level replaceables in the corporate world of 2009. They comprise a very large percentage of our population, because humans, like dogs, are wired to survive.

The point is dogs’ intelligence, not what they choose to use it for. Perhaps my mother’s poodle would do better learning to bake bread rather than perfecting his I’m-so-innocent act after stealing a baguette. I’m sure if he cooked for her, she’d give him tastier dinners. But, you know, there’s the thumb problem. The walking on four legs issue. It’s tough being alive, even when you’re smart. Getting the dazzling ones to take care of you in their warm and splendid houses, and not butcher you at young adulthood the way they do so many others…that’s smart.

“If only they’d understand that letting us eat cat turds would benefit everyone,” mourns Harry. (Harry is my Labradoodle Imaginary Friend. He’s young and handsome, with sensitive poetic eyes and loves walks, naps and scrabble.)

Homer’s Seeing Eye Dog

Most of the time he worked, a sort of sleep
with a purpose, so far as I could tell.
How he got from the dark of sleep
to the dark of waking up I’ll never know;
the lax sprawl sleep allowed him
began to set from the edges in,
like a custard, and then he was awake,
me too, of course, wriggling my ears
while he unlocked his bladder and stream
of dopey wake-up jokes. The one
about the wine-dark pee I hated instantly.
I stood at the ready, like a god
in an epic, but there was never much
to do. Oh now and then I’d make a sure
intervention, save a life, whatever.
But my exploits don’t interest you
and of his life all I can say is that
when he’d poured out his work
the best of it was gone and then he died.
He was a great man and I loved him.
Not a whimper about his sex life –
how I detest your prurience –
but here’s a farewell literary tip:
I myself am the model for Penelope.
Don’t snicker, you hairless moron,
I know so well what faithful means
there’s not even a word for it in Dog,
I just embody it. I think you bipeds
have a catchphrase for it: “To thine own self
be true, . . .” though like a blind man’s shadow,
the second half is only there for those who know
it’s missing. Merely a dog, I’ll tell you
what it is: “… as if you had a choice.”

–William Matthews

Ghosts Chats

Photo and caption by John Diehl. The statue is of our brother, Jimmy Diehl, who was killed when he was 14.

Very soon the souls of the dead will be able to cross over for a little while. Is it for a minute or an hour? I always think of the dead in February and June. That was once true. But the calendar fills up.

When we think of ghosts, it’s always what they want: revenge or a body or someone to listen. The ancients thought they wanted food and wine; also revenge, a body and someone to listen.

Of course some think the dead want to let us know they’re doing fine, but I doubt, if they persist, they’re all that concerned. More likely, they’re chatting up the gang in the Whatever, testing out the new persona. Those of us left here are forgotten, except as parts of self-definition, as a person might forget to write home when she moves to a strange city, yet still finds it important and deeply moving to say to the new friend: I come from a large family. I’ve been married four times, though I’m only 32. I love my dog more than my parents. My brother eats cars.

Do we dress up in costumes to scare the dead? To mock them? To let them know that not only are we still alive, we can change whenever we want? We can imagine being them while they can only remember being us.

No, it’s to remind ourselves that someday we’ll be ghouls and zombies, too, and so why be frightened? Like you say to the five-year-old when you visit the nursing home and the elderly resident’s head rolls on her neck like an egg on the counter deciding whether to fall, eyes unfocused—she’s almost not there except the veiny hand is tenacious, questing out, grasping and holding— “It’s only your great-grandma, sweetpea. There’s nothing to be afraid of. I’ll show you the pictures: she looked just like you.”

Television Medium

Chronically ill with a disease that won’t
kill me, I watch afternoon TV.
Sprung sofa embroidered with
cookie crumbs and laundry quarters
I rest on the hip that doesn’t hurt
yet and click the remote.

Here’s Oprah hosting a man
who chats with the dead.
Blunt chunk smoothed
into a light blue suit,
voice like a mouse’s soul refurbished.

I inch backward on the sofa,
adorned with pillows my mother gave me,
fringed, Turkey red,
to make the room look new,
and grab one for my lap.

The bereaved testify:
A mom and dad, spruce as show dogs,
A chipper widow.
They’ve heard the words,
odd detail of a solitary act
or common memory returned
that compel belief. There is no death!
No death! Life

Everlasting; and the dead care
where we’ve placed the photo,
who’s got the diamond earrings.

I glance up. I’ve got you at thirty
putting my brother’s infant foot
into your mouth.
He flails baby limbs—
he who will also die young—
grins to wring a parent’s sweetest juices.

The Evangelical in the audience
objects. “How do you talk to those in Hell?”
She teeters on her heels.
The medium sits calm as a stuffed Buddha.
He’s too rich to care what she thinks
The dead stick to him like lint
the money washes in

though his work is no picnic
the spirits vibrate at a pitch so high
and rush forward in spurts of feeling
like excited teenagers–Mom, it’s me!
And some won’t talk at all.

That would be you.

*

Thirty years I’ve seen you
trapped in a cube
of polished stone or ice, motionless
in black space, knotted
into straitjacket package.

I long to snag you from that darkness,
set you down
on my desk like something I can fix
carve out the blight
insert what’s missing.

The image fades
the TV chatters. O my father,
who lived once and kept it brief–
help thou my unbelief.

–Margaret Diehl

In Her Consulting Room: Honey, Maggots, Needles and Bob

Revolutionary War musket

I went to the doctor today, who was not in, and got his PA, who was sweet and cheery, though not as knowledgeable as my sister from PA, who would be my doctor if she had a really fast horse. She’s a vet but says that since her clients want only the best for their furry children, she’s up on the all the fancy stuff.

She didn’t say fancy stuff. She said “appropriate antibiotic.” Later amended that, on Bob’s suggestion, to honey. Honey is a good dressing for wounds (especially burns, though armpit abscesses can also use the help). If your wound is particularly nasty—and stinking—first get some maggots and use them to debride the dead skin. By the time that’s over, a honey compress will be very welcome, although you should avoid it if you’re camping in bear country.

“Debride” means remove dead flesh, and does not refer to the infamous Pennsylvania practice of luring brides from their honeymoons by filling the nuptial bed with maggots. I’m not sure they do that anymore; I’ll have to ask Kevin.

My sister’s honeymoon was worse than a bed of maggots. She went an emergency room in England on a Friday complaining of severe pain, tests were done, and she was told to stay in the hospital for the weekend. When she asked what was wrong with her, they said she had to wait until the doctor came in on Tuesday. She said she was leaving unless they gave her a good reason not to. She was on her honeymoon, remember, in Europe, which wasn’t a continent she’d ever see again. (Yet.)

They repeated that she should stay but neglected to inform her she had an ectopic pregnancy.  If you read British fiction you can imagine just the sort of nurses she had. Not any worse than bad American medical personnel; differently bad. Nothing like the nurses in war movies, guys. Try reading.
So she left, her fallopian tube burst, and she almost died. Perhaps because of this, she’s very good about not making people wait all weekend for test results, unlike my radiologist, whose name I don’t know yet, who was supposed to tell me (“He’ll call within one hour,” promised the tech) whether my ankle is fractured or not. He didn’t call. He left for Argentina with somebody else’s bride.

This is possibly not true, but I’ll say it again when I have his/her name.

Maggots were first used on Civil War battlefields. They would have been of great help in the Revolutionary War, with its thousands of wounded, limping, miserable soldiers.  George was never debrided, either; Martha came to the war with him, in Cambridge, Morristown, and Valley Forge. I was in Valley Forge a few weeks ago; it was lovely, though not as nice as Cambridge. Martha’s son by her first marriage (the one that left her a rich widow and therefore attractive to Washington, who required means) fought in the war and died of typhus. His name was Jack Custis.

I lie in bed with my ankle throbbing, my infected shin sending out little pulses of pain, and imagine suffering all this plus high fever, chills, headache and vomiting (not to mention the lice). Then having to rise and fight at dawn. I’m not sure I’d shoot a musket very well in that condition. Not as well as I usually do, anyway.

Aftermath

Have you forgotten yet? …
For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you’re a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same – and War’s a bloody game …
Have you forgotten yet? …
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz -
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench -
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, “Is it all going to happen again?”

Do you remember the hour of din before the attack -
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads – those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet? …
Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget

–Siegfried Sassoon, March 1919

this next one is long, but worth it

Letters From A Father

I
Ulcerated tooth keeps me awake, there is
such pain, would have to go to the hospital to have
it pulled or would bleed to death from the blood thinners,
but can’t leave Mother, she falls and forgets her salve
and her tranquilizers, her ankles swell so and her bowels
are so bad, she almost had a stoppage and sometimes
what she passes is green as grass.  There are big holes
in my thigh where my leg brace buckles the size of dimes.
My head pounds from the high pressure.  It is awful
not to be able to get out, and I fell in the bathroom
and the girl could hardly get me up at all.
Sure thought my back was broken, it will be next time.
Prostate is bad and heart has given out,
feel bloated after supper. Have made my peace
because am just plain done for and have no doubt
that the Lord will come any day with my release.
You say you enjoy your feeder, I don’t see why
you want to spend good money on grain for birds
and you say you have a hundred sparrows, I’d buy
poison and get rid of their diseases and turds.

II

We enjoyed your visit, it was nice of you to bring
the feeder but a terrible waste of your money
for that big bag of feed since we won’t be living
more than a few weeks long.  We can see
them good from where we sit, big ones and little ones
but you know when I farmed I used to like to hunt
and we had many a good meal from pigeons
and quail and pheasant but these birds won’t
be good for nothing and are dirty to have so near
the house.  Mother likes the redbirds though.
My bad knee is so sore and I can’t hardly hear
and Mother says she is hoarse form yelling but I know
it’s too late for a hearing aid.  I belch up all the time
and have a sour mouth and of course with my heart
it’s no use to go to a doctor.  Mother is the same.
Has a scab she thinks is going to turn to a wart.

III

The birds are eating and fighting, Ha! Ha!  All shapes
and colors and sizes coming out of our woods
but we don’t know what they are.  Your Mother hopes
you can send us a kind of book that tells about birds.
There is one the folks called snowbirds, they eat on the ground,
we had the girl sprinkle extra there, but say,
they eat something awful.  I sent the girl to town
to buy some more feed, she had to go anyway.

IV

Almost called you on the telephone
but it costs so much to call thought better write.
Say, the funniest thing is happening, one
day we had so many birds and they fight
and get excited at their feed you know
and it’s really something to watch and two or three
flew right at us and crashed into our window
and bang, poor little things knocked themselves silly.
They come to after while on the ground and flew away.
And they been doing that.  We felt awful
and didn’t know what to do but the other day
a lady from our Church drove out to call
and a little bird knocked itself out while she sat
and she bought it in her hands right into the house,
it looked like dead.  It had a kind of hat
of feathers sticking up on its head, kind of rose
or pinky color, don’t know what it was,
and I petted it and it come to life right there
in her hands and she took it out and it flew.  She says
they think the window is the sky on a fair
day, she feeds birds too but hasn’t got
so many.  She says to hang strips of aluminum foil
in the window so we’ll do that.  She raved about
our birds.  P.S. The book just come in the mail.

V

Say, that book is sure good, I study
in it every day and enjoy our birds.
Some of them I can’t identify
for sure, I guess they’re females, the Latin words

I just skip over.  Bet you’d never guess
the sparrow I’ve got here, House Sparrow you wrote,
but I have Fox Sparrows, Song Sparrows, Vesper Sparrows,
Pine Woods and Tree and Chipping and White Throat
and White Crowned Sparrows.  I have six Cardinals,
three pairs, they come at early morning and night,
the males at the feeder and on the ground the females.
Juncos, maybe 25, they fight
for the ground, that’s what they used to call snowbirds.  I miss
the Bluebirds since the weather warmed. Their breast
is the color of a good ripe muskmelon.  Tufted Titmouse
is sort of blue with a little tiny crest.
And I have Flicker and Red-Bellied and Red-
Headed Woodpeckers, you would die laughing
to see Red-Bellied, he hangs on with his head
flat on the board, his tail braced up under,
wing out.  And Dickcissel and Ruby Crowned Kinglet
and Nuthatch stands on his head and Veery on top
the color of a bird dog and Hermit Thrush with spot
on breast, Blue Jay so funny, he will hop
right on the backs of the other birds to get the grain.
We bought some sunflower seeds just for him.
And Purple Finch I bet you never seen,
color of a watermelon, sits on the rim
of the feeder with his streaky wife, and the squirrels,
you know, they are cute too, they sit tall
and eat with their little hands, they eat bucketfuls.
I pulled my own tooth, it didn’t bleed at all.

VI

It’s sure a surprise how well Mother is doing,
she forgets her laxative but bowels move fine.
Now that windows are open she says our birds sing
all day.  The girl took a Book of Knowledge on loan
from the library and I am reading up
on the habits of birds, did you know some males have three
wives, some migrate some don’t.  I am going to keep
feeding all spring, maybe summer, you can see
they expect it.  Will need thistle seed for Goldfinch and Pine
Siskin next winter.  Some folks are going to come see us
from Church, some bird watchers, pretty soon.
They have birds in town but nothing to equal this.

–Mona Van Duyn

Didn’t The Night End?

The New York Times has an article by Gordon Marino about Kierkegaard and the difference between despair and depression, the main point being that despair is of the spirit, depression of the mind.  Certainly one can be very unhappy yet spiritually joyous: artists, monks, priests and their ilk often find themselves in this condition.

I remember it well. I call it youth. I was miserable yet the world was so glorious! So beautiful—autumn leaves in the mountains, the full moon over water, the rocking cradle of a subway car late at night. So strange, changeable, fascinating…far more alluring than the rancid charms of suicide, which has always been nattering at my elbow.

Yet if, as Kierkegaard says, despair is the result of refusing (or not knowing how) to be oneself, I must differ. Certainly, in my teens, 20’s and 30’s, there were big parts of myself I was denying out of shame and fear. And if I had been able to embrace them, I would have been much happier. Yet it’s now that I feel despair—now when I’m much more accepting and open about who I am.

Or have I only accepted my limitations? Am I still squashed by fear, this time that it’s too late for literary acclaim (among other things)? Perhaps. But there’s also my confusion about what approach to take to death. Like our President, I inherited this mess, it was never my idea, and I’m dithering.

McChrsytal wants troops to focus on protecting Afghans, not killing insurgents. I want the same thing in my spiritual life, such as it is. But I spent so many years zealously protecting parts of myself that only needed light and air, and then became furiously angry at my mistake; I’m not sure how to get back in the game properly.

I need a posse for guidance. And Joe Lieberman’s head on a stick.

Oh, sorry. That’s a topic for another day.

October (Section One)

Is it winter again, is it cold again,
didn't Frank just slip on the ice,
didn't he heal, weren't the spring seeds planted

didn't the night end,
didn't the melting ice
flood the narrow gutters

wasn't my body
rescued, wasn't it safe

didn't the scar form, invisible
above the injury

terror and cold,
didn't they just end, wasn't the back garden
harrowed and planted--

I remember how the earth felt, red and dense,
in stiff rows, weren't the seeds planted,
didn't vines climb the south wall

I can't hear your voice
for the wind's cries, whistling over the bare ground

I no longer care
what sound it makes

when was I silenced, when did it first seem
pointless to describe that sound

what it sounds like can't change what it is--

didn't the night end, wasn't the earth
safe when it was planted

didn't we plant the seeds,
weren't we necessary to the earth,

the vines, were they harvested?

--Louise Gluck

Follow the Brush

Boethius and Philosophy, Mattia Preti

I’ve been more or less in bed for a week, after falling and spraining my ankle. I’ve done this before, but I always had someone with me. This time, Charles came for several days, which was very helpful, but now I’m alone except for the cats whom I don’t have the emotional strength to engage with. Yesterday I ignored Fitzroy all day (fed and brushed him but distractedly, and yelled at him a few times); by bedtime I was ready to relent. He jumped on the bed and wandered around, first lying near my head, then by my knees, then by my head again. He bit me on the nose and knuckles as he does when he wants to wake me in the morning: not generally a nighttime behavior. He mewed and circled my body in the dark, like a Victorian suitor finally told, after years, that he can commence making love—who then doesn’t know quite what to do, where to begin, what he wants, or why.

My poor neurotic cat! I’m used to my quirks but it’s sad to see an animal flail in this nervous, closed-up life, especially without books and television or the consolations of philosophy.

The Consolation of Philosophy was written by Roman statesman and Philosopher Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius in AD 524, while imprisoned awaiting execution for treason. It’s a meditation on the nature and meaning of suffering, particularly the suffering of good men; on fate, predestination, God’s mercy, etc.  I read sections of it in college, retaining only a vague pleased sense of how much thought and literature lurked around and between the brightly lit arenas of Athenian Democracy, The Renaissance, Napoleon, George Washington, Paris in the 20’s, WWII, and Watergate. I was fond of the strenuous and dazzlingly elaborate logical structures Boethius, like many Christian writers, built to decipher and justify the unfathomable. I liked the combination of quivering intensity (his) and backwater charm (my perspective). The intellectual rigor worked on both levels. It was a man’s only weapon in the fight for his soul, yet also, to this reader, a delicious kind of puzzle and distraction.

But my current idleness reminds me of what I love best, what I still think of as myself, no matter how many other selves I acquire or display. This self is a privileged, exquisitely sensitive young  creature with a romantic intelligence, an amiable nature and a  greedy heart. A heart with a trapdoor. Such a person manages to avoid things like treason and prison.

A 14th century Japanese poet, Kenko, wrote this in his era’s version of the personal blog—an essaylike form called “zuihitsu” or follow the brush—

“About the twentieth of the ninth month, at the invitation of a certain gentleman, I spent the night wandering with him viewing the moon. He happened to remember a house we passed on the way, and, having himself announced, went inside. In a corner of the overgrown garden heavy with dew, I caught the faint scent of some perfume, which seemed quite accidental. This suggestion of someone living in retirement from the world moved me deeply. In due time, the gentleman emerged, but I was still under the spell of the place. As I gazed for a while at the scene from the shadows, someone pushed the double doors open a crack wider, evidently to look at the moon. It would have been most disappointing if she had bolted the doors as soon as he had gone! How was she to know that someone lingering behind would see her? Such a gesture could only have been the product of inborn sensitivity. I heard that she died not long afterwards.”

Meanwhile, the cat has returned and sits by my bed (where I’m laptopping, leg elevated), looking at me.  It’s always disconcerting when you realize they’ve been looking at you for a while.

“Hello, my dearest feline,” I say.

“Meow,” he replies—a plaintive, long-drawn-out meow, soulful and irritating. He needs to get out more.

The Harvest Moon

The flame-red moon, the harvest moon,
Rolls along the hills, gently bouncing,
A vast balloon,
Till it takes off, and sinks upward
To lie on the bottom of the sky, like a gold doubloon.
The harvest moon has come,
Booming softly through heaven, like a bassoon.
And the earth replies all night, like a deep drum.

So people can’t sleep,
So they go out where elms and oak trees keep
A kneeling vigil, in a religious hush.
The harvest moon has come!

And all the moonlit cows and all the sheep
Stare up at her petrified, while she swells
Filling heaven, as if red hot, and sailing
Closer and closer like the end of the world.

Till the gold fields of stiff wheat
Cry `We are ripe, reap us!’ and the rivers
Sweat from the melting hills.

–Ted Hughes

Where The Wind’s like a Whetted Knife*

Brig “Mercury” Attacked by Two Turkish Ships, 1882, by Ivan Aivazovsky (1817-1900)–a Crimean painter I’d never heard of until I found this painting. Go look at more of his work here.

Last day in Florida. I leave this evening. I’m not ready. It’s warm and very windy now—the swimming was glorious, waves big and raucous. Sparkling blue tumult. My bathing suit was stolen from the laundry so I wore an old one which is too small, and pulled it down in the water. Ah, freedom. Frolic and laughter. Shells in my hair.

“Is that a coconut or a drowned man?”

“Does it matter?”

“I like your breasts on the waves.”

“Thank you, my dear.”

The last few cool days have made me think living here would be quite nice, if I were able to get away a lot in the summer. But it’s not that here is difficult; it’s leaving there.  Manhattan. The West Village. The apartment I’ve lived in 25 years.

It would be easier if I would be moving into a big house on the ocean with a wraparound porch, but I bet everyone says that. And even the ocean day and night wouldn’t block out my memories of New York, but would rather remind me of the noise of traffic, and I’d wake up thinking I was home.

The first time I lived in Manhattan—when I was 11—I couldn’t sleep because of the noise of buses on Madison Avenue. It seemed violently unnatural, of a piece with my father’s suicide the year before. Like being in a rockslide and before you’ve recovered enough to move, the earth shifts again and you fall a few more feet. Or like the paranormal romances I’ve been reading lately, where the heroines end up in Hell frequently, but Hell isn’t Dante’s version; it’s a bit more manageable, like a Sahara crossing with monsters.

Yet by the time I left, at 15, New York was my spiritual home and after finishing school in N.H. and then wandering for a few years, I returned. I like to say how much the city has changed in 25 years, but from this vantage point, it doesn’t seem to have changed at all. More glitzy buildings, cleaner parks, too much Ralph Lauren et al on Bleecker Street. Still, it’s the same people forest. Flirty homeless guys in front of the church, single women trundling dogs in strollers, ambitious young men having drinks together while their poorer cohorts sell used books on  the sidewalk, beautiful girls on their phones annoying everyone, tiny old ladies making their way carefully to the supermarket.

All this because some fish got tired of the ocean and grew legs. That’s such a New York thing to do.

Florida

The state with the prettiest name,
the state that floats in brackish water,
held together by mangrave roots
that bear while living oysters in clusters,
and when dead strew white swamps with skeletons,
dotted as if bombarded, with green hummocks
like ancient cannon-balls sprouting grass.
The state full of long S-shaped birds, blue and white,
and unseen hysterical birds who rush up the scale
every time in a tantrum.
Tanagers embarrassed by their flashiness,
and pelicans whose delight it is to clown;
who coast for fun on the strong tidal currents
in and out among the mangrove islands
and stand on the sand-bars drying their damp gold wings
on sun-lit evenings.
Enormous turtles, helpless and mild,
die and leave their barnacled shells on the beaches,
and their large white skulls with round eye-sockets
twice the size of a man’s.
The palm trees clatter in the stiff breeze
like the bills of the pelicans. The tropical rain comes down
to freshen the tide-looped strings of fading shells:
Job’s Tear, the Chinese Alphabet, the scarce Junonia,
parti-colored pectins and Ladies’ Ears,
arranged as on a gray rag of rotted calico,
the buried Indian Princess’s skirt;
with these the monotonous, endless, sagging coast-line
is delicately ornamented.

Thirty or more buzzards are drifting down, down, down,
over something they have spotted in the swamp,
in circles like stirred-up flakes of sediment
sinking through water.
Smoke from woods-fires filters fine blue solvents.
On stumps and dead trees the charring is like black velvet.
The mosquitoes
go hunting to the tune of their ferocious obbligatos.
After dark, the fireflies map the heavens in the marsh
until the moon rises.
Cold white, not bright, the moonlight is coarse-meshed,
and the careless, corrupt state is all black specks
too far apart, and ugly whites; the poorest
post-card of itself.
After dark, the pools seem to have slipped away.
The alligator, who has five distinct calls:
friendliness, love, mating, war, and a warning–
whimpers and speaks in the throat
of the Indian Princess.

—Elizabeth Bishop

btw, I’m descended from the most famous Indian Princess, Pocahontas. Just so you know.

* Sea Fever, John Masefield.

My Grandmother, My Mold Robot

Death of a Reprobate, copy of lost panel by Hieronymous Bosch. Private collection, New York.

Rachel Maddow just mentioned that her 90 year-old grandmother, who is “enjoying” hospice care, is worried about her Medicare benefits being cut. Leaving aside the question of whether or not there will be Medicare cuts, and what kind, you have to wonder how someone in hospice  can be concerned about this. Besides the fact that Rachel’s grandmother can’t be long for this world—and the bill has miles to go before it sleeps—the whole point of hospice is no extravagant care. Are they using the word to mean something else now?

Not being elderly, and having only one elderly relative, my mother, who seems about 45 most of the time, I may not be the best person to comment on cutting Medicare. But I’m not young either, and I know I’ll be 80 in the blink of an eye. Maybe then I’ll finally have my life in order and be eager to live another 25 years. It’s possible. But if my health is such that that’s not going to happen without great expense, I believe whatever my personal wishes may be, the needs of the young should come first—that this should always and without exception be the case.

As long as I’m alive, I’m going to want more than my share of the world’s enjoyable resources—like most everyone else. It’s hard to give up dinners out and vacations so that strangers can live better. But for some reason, I don’t have this reflexive selfishness when it comes to health care. Is this because I don’t have a horrible disease yet? Or because I’m always at least somewhat depressed? Yes to both, probably. But I remember being younger and having cancer scares: it didn’t matter how unhappy I was, the thought of death was terrifying. Not ME!! My consciousness, my self, was so precious, so utterly required.

It’s different now. Only the idea of a long-drawn out, much-doctored illness distresses me. Give me a few more years, and some lucky slide into spiritual belief—which escapes me now—and I’ll be glad to surrender my seat on the bus. Especially if it means I don’t have to have my ailing carcass hauled around hospital corridors, in and out of MRI machines and operating theaters,  poked and stuck, drained and pumped, irradiated, imaged, cut, peeled and picked over by squads of stressed-out medical students.

I’d rather have my soul eaten by a cat demon, and my flesh thrown into the feeding vat for the soon-to-be-ubiquitous mold robots.

Here are two poems about illness.

A Story About The Body

The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had watched her for a week.  She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her.  He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused or considered answers to his questions.  One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have me.  I would like that too, but I must tell you I have had a double mastectomy,” and when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost both my breasts.”  the radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity—like music—withered, very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, “I’m sorry.  I don’t think I could.”  He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door.  It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl—she must have swept them from the corners of her studio—was full of dead bees.

–Robert Hass

Her Long Illness

Daybreak until nightfall,
he sat by his wife at the hospital
while chemotherapy dripped
through the catheter into her heart.
He drank coffee and read
the Globe.  He paced; he worked
on poems; he rubbed her back
and read aloud.  Overcome with dread,
they wept and affirmed
their love for each other, witlessly,
over and over again.
When it snowed one morning Jane gazed
at the darkness blurred
with flakes.  They pushed the IV pump
which she called Igor
slowly past the nurses’ pods, as far
as the outside door
so that she could smell the snowy air.

—Donald Hall

And I’ll not ask for Swine

Headline in The New York Times: Three Pigs May Be the First in the U.S. With Swine Flu

Okay, that’s the three little pigs who built their houses from straw, sticks and brick, right? And the wolf comes and huffs and puffs and blows their houses down, all but the last pig, the smart pig, who gets to keep his house and also manages to boil the wolf for dinner when the wolf, prowling on his roof, falls through the chimney into a big iron pot?*

They ALL have the flu? Things are in a bad way in this country.

A few days ago, I dreamed I had the flu, so I guess I have some anxiety. Not enough. My last memory of having the flu is very pleasurable. I was in my 20’s. I liked the mild delirium. The body aches felt sexy, like being spanked. And I thought getting the chills while burning up with a fever was fascinating. (Mother and husband kept telling me to take aspirin. I wanted to write poetry.)

Charles dreamed last night that he was either a teacher or a student at Harvard. “I must have been a graduate student,” he said, trying to puzzle out the conflicting images.
“You don’t apply that kind of reason to dreams,” I replied. “In dreams you can be both at the same time.”
“But I was trying to figure it out in the dream,” he said. “Why the students looked up to me.”
“And?”
“I was probably a TA.”

MORAL: If you live in a nice house and your mortgage is paid off, stay inside day and night, avoiding the company of other pigs, or you will sicken and die. Also, if you’re offered the post of Head of the Art Department at Exeter when you’re a 30-year-old father of four with no advanced degree,  don’t quit and become a freelance artist. It will spark anxiety dreams for the next several decades, and even having a crackerjack dream-interpreter wife won’t help.

*Depending on the version, the pig also has turnips and apples to add to the pot, which should make for a good stew, once you strain out the wolf fur. I’d add onions, thyme, and a jigger of  high quality sherry, to give it that dangerous-but-still-a-gentleman flavor.

Here’s one of my favorite poems of all time.

Eating the Pig

Twelve people, most of us strangers, stand in a room
in Ann Arbor, drinking Cribari from jars.
Then two young men, who cooked him,
carry him to the table
on a large square of plywood: his body
striped, like a tiger cat’s, from the basting,
his legs long, much longer than a cat’s,
and the striped hide as shiny as vinyl.

Now I see his head, as he takes his place
at the center of the table,
his wide pig’s head; and he looks like the javelina
that ran in front of the car, in the desert outside Tucson,
and I am drawn to him, my brother the pig,
with his large ears cocked forward,
with his tight snout, with his small ferocious teeth
in a jaw propped open
by an apple. How bizarre, this raw apple clenched
in a cooked face! Then I see his eyes,
his eyes cramped shut, his no-eyes, his eyes like X’s
in a comic strip, when the character gets knocked out.

This afternoon they read directions
from a book: The eyeballs must be removed
or they will burst during roasting. So they hacked them out.
“I nearly fainted,” says someone.
“I never fainted before, in my whole life.”
Then they gutted the pig and stuffed him,
and roasted him five hours, basting the long body.

*         *         *

Now we examine him, exclaiming, and we marvel at him—
but no one picks up a knife.

Then a young woman cuts off his head.
It comes off so easily, like a detachable part.
With sudden enthusiasm we dismantle the pig,
we wrench his trotters off, we twist them
at shoulder and hip, and they come off so easily.
Then we cut open his belly and pull the skin back.

For myself, I scoop a portion of left thigh,
moist, tender, falling apart, fat, sweet.
We forage like an army starving in winter
that crosses a pass in the hills and discovers
a valley of full barns—
cattle fat and lowing in their stalls,
bins of potatoes in root cellars under white farmhouses.
barrels of cider, onions, hens squawking over eggs—
and the people nowhere, with bread still warm in the oven.

Maybe, south of the valley, refugees pull their carts
listening for Stukas or elephants, carrying
bedding, pans, and silk dresses,
old men and women, children, deserters, young wives.

No, we are here, eating the pig together.

*         *         *

In ten minutes, the destruction is total.

His tiny ribs, delicate as birds’ feet, lie crisscrossed.
Or they are like crosshatching in a drawing,
lines doubling and redoubling on each other.

Bits of fat and muscle
mix with stuffing alien to the body,
walnuts and plums. His skin, like a parchment bag
soaked in oil, is pulled back and flattened,
with ridges and humps remaining, like a contour map,
like the map of a defeated country.

The army consumes every blade of grass in the valley,
every tree, every stream, every village,
every crossroad, every shack, every book, every graveyard.

His intact head
swivels around, to view the landscape of body
as if in dismay.

“For sixteen weeks I lived. For sixteen weeks
I took into myself nothing but the milk of my mother
who rolled on her side for me,
for my brothers and sisters. Only five hours roasting,
and this body so quickly dwindles away to nothing.”

*         *         *

By itself, isolated on this plywood,
among this puzzle of foregone possibilities,
his intact head seems to want affection.
Without knowing that I will do it,
I reach out and scratch his jaw,
and I stroke him behind his ears,
as if he might suddenly purr from his cooked head.

“When I stroke your pig’s ears,
and scratch the striped leather of your jowls,
the furrow between the sockets of your eyes,
I take into myself, and digest,
wheat that grew between
the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers.

“And I take into myself the flint carving tool,
and the savannah, and hairs in the tail
of Eohippus, and fingers of bamboo,
and Hannibal’s elephant, and Hannibal,
and everything that lived before us, everything born,
exalted, and dead, and historians who carved in the Old Kingdom
when the wall had not heard about China.”

I speak these words
into the ear of the Stone Age pig, the Abraham
pig, the ocean pig, the Achilles pig,
and into the ears
of the fire pig that will eat our bodies up.

“Fire, brother and father,
twelve of us, in our different skins, older and younger,
opened your skin together
and tore your body apart, and took it
into our bodies.”

–Donald Hall

Sometimes a Cougar is just a Cougar

photo, E.J. Peiker

From the New York Times, “The term cougar raises hackles among women who say the image of a wild animal, however sleek and beautiful, prowling for victims…is demeaning.”

My reaction is the opposite. The human “cougars’ on TV shows and in movies are demeaning to the animal; and as a writer, I’m upset that the word now is so heavily imbued with that mostly ridiculous meaning.

I’m not talking about older women in general. Of course the ones who are appealing are appealing to younger men; this isn’t rocket science. Men may be wary of getting involved with someone older, but we’re all wary of potential lovers for any number of reasons. Women are wary of older men and younger men. Dominant men and passive men. Men. Many middle-aged women have concluded the best solution to loneliness is an animal.

What feline admirer wouldn’t want a real cougar if she had the space and if wild animals weren’t so unpredictable? I can imagine living far out in the country with a big cat allowed to come and go, not expecting it to be as docile as my housecats—but even such an arrangement isn’t workable. Wild animals are truly wild.

There was a study done by a Russian scientist, Dmitri Belyaev, beginning in the 1950’s. He captured a number of silver foxes and bred them, keeping only the pups that showed no fear of humans (a small minority). After many generations—different sources cite different numbers—he had foxes as tame as dogs. What if someone did that with cougars, ending up with an animal with the relative tameness of a housecat? It would still be dangerous. You know how wicked your dear kitty, not to mention my sister’s beautiful psycho cat Bradley, can be on occasion. Still, such a creature would be a possible companion for the careful, steady, outdoorswoman.

The few times, in my 40’s, that I slept with much younger men, I enjoyed them for the usual things—their smooth skin, their sweet breath, their different outlook, their high spirits—and I wouldn’t rule out a relationship with one, should I ever again dare to engage in a love affair.

But from my recent immersion in contemporary romance novels, I can tell you what women really want: a shapeshifting cougar (or leopard or tiger). Picture it. A woman in a sleeveless white cotton nightgown, long hair loose on her pillow. The big cat enters through the open window, landing on the bed, and looks at her with those alien, golden eyes.

Cat breath, fang. The moonlight glimmering in his fur. Big paws on either side of her head. Then that moment of transformation, which in my fantasy is not brutal, but happens as quickly as a dream changes scenery. The animal above me, the man in my arms. A real human, who can laugh and talk politics, bring me coffee the next morning.

Somebody figures out how to breed those? With no females of their own species? Men would just have to pack their bags and go.

For some really stunning photos of cougars look here

To see me being silly with my silly cats, look here

The Mountain Lion

Climbing through the January snow, into the Lobo canyon
Dark grow the spruce-trees, blue is the balsam, water sounds
still unfrozen, and the trail is still evident.

Men!
Two men!
Men! The only animal in the world to fear!

They hesitate.
We hesitate.
They have a gun.
We have no gun.

Then we all advance, to meet.

Two Mexicans, strangers, emerging out of tile dark and snow
and inwardness of the Lobo valley.
What are you doing here on this vanishing trail’?

What is he carrying?
Something yellow.
A deer?

Que tiene, amigo?
Leon -
He smiles, foolishly, as if he were caught doing wrong.
And we smile, foolishly, as if we didn’t know.
He is quite gentle and dark-faced.

It is a mountain lion,
A long, long slim cat, yellow like a lioness.
Dead.
He trapped her this morning, he says, smiling foolishly.

Lift up her face,
Her round, bright face, bright as frost.
Her round, fine-fashioned head, with two dead ears;
And stripes in the brilliant frost of her face, sharp, fine dark rays,
Dark, keen, fine eyes in the brilliant frost of her face.
Beautiful dead eyes.

Hermoso es!

They go out towards the open;
We go on into the gloom of Lobo.
And above the trees I found her lair,
A hole in the blood-orange brilliant rocks that stick up, a little cave,
And bones, and twigs, and a perilous ascent.

So, she will never leap up that way again, with the yellow
flash of a mountain lion’s long shoot!
And her bright striped frost-face will never watch any more,
out of the shadow of the cave in the blood-orange rock,
Above the trees of the Lobo dark valley-mouth!

Instead, I look out.
And out to the dim of the desert, like a dream, never real;
To the snow of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the ice of
the mountains of Picoris,
And near across at the opposite steep of snow, green trees
motionless standing in snow, like a Christmas toy.

And I think in this empty world there was room for me and
a mountain lion.
And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare
a million or two of humans
And never miss them.
Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white frost-face of
that slim yellow mountain lion!

–D.H. Lawrence

Bradley

Encyclopedia of Cake

The Times has a review of a new book, “The encyclopedia of Pasta” by Oretta Zanini De Vita that sounds fascinating, perhaps not quite up there with six thousand years of bread, but in the same vein. She writes about the long history of pasta in Italy, and the many shapes—the result of the creativity and playfulness of Italian women. She notes that certain shapes can go by several names, even in the same town. “Four hundred meters away,” she cried. “As close as my house is from the bus stop down the block. Everywhere you go there are these envies, these stupid provincial arguments.”

This makes me think of my long-dreamed-of book about cake, which I put off writing for years because I thought I had more important things to do, and which I’m scared to write now because I’ve gained weight lately and desperately want to get rid of it. Investigating cake doesn’t seem like the answer. Research is all very well, but I can’t sustain interest without baking. I made an olive oil cake two days ago; it was good but flawed and I wanted to experiment. I made another, slightly different one yesterday but it had too much salt in it. I don’t know if I measured wrong or if it was the large kosher salt crystals that did the damage. In any case, it would be simple to try again—it’s an easy recipe—but I’m worried about my hips. Even the salt cake was significantly sampled: cake fresh from the oven is hard to resist.

Charles doesn’t want to waste the remainder. “Can’t you do something with it?” He says.
“Bread pudding.”
“How about pork bread pudding?”
“I’ll think about it.”

Cake holds a place in my heart corresponding to that moment in late childhood when you realize people can be played with like dolls. They are more dangerous, sure, but the creative spirit can do its experiments. I never actually did many, being afraid of my own insights and powers (fear of human or divine retribution), but thought about it.

Cake is like that. It’s more sophisticated than candy. More ambiguous. You make it yourself. You feed it to lovers and enemies. You use it to adorn your solitude.You put it under your pillow.

The Bride-Cake

This day, my Julia thou must make
For mistress bride the wedding cake
Knead but the dough and it will be
To paste of almonds turned by thee
Or kiss it thou but once or twice
And for the bride-cake there’ll be spice.

—Robert Herrick

What Are We Fighting For?

So was it worth all the trouble for Olympia Snowe? I don’t feel any more kindly toward Republicans, and I doubt they feel anymore kindly toward Obama and those of us who support him. The bill—assuming one is passed, and assuming it doesn’t have the public option—will help; some lives will be saved, many people will save money and be spared anxiety. And maybe that’s the best we should hope for, considering how many other problems there are to address.

Let’s stops the wars. Let’s pretend we don’t have time to think and plan and pack and linger; let’s imagine our collective ass is on fire and we have to get out now. Obama could walk into the office tomorrow and say: let’s see how this Presidency shit really works. How fast can you guys move? Just do it. If the Republicans don’t like it they can try declaring war again. Let them work to get that bill through the Senate.

Of course all those National Guard troops who’ve been working as real soldiers for the last several years might not have jobs to return to. Maybe the solution to the war AND the economy is to announce that Afghanistan’s mountains are made of gold and by for a limited time only, the Administration will provide transport for treasure-seekers. It shouldn’t take long before the country is overrun, the Taliban outnumbered, poppy fields crushed, and America free of its stupidest and greediest citizens. Of course that might create an Afghani society worse than the one there now, but it would make for great TV.

And the Nobel prize money? How about dividing it among the families of every soldier killed in the recent wars?

**

Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer and find myself
chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want
and end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
and fall in.

I should be suspicious
of what I want.

–Jalaluddin Rumi

Mooncalf

Diana and Actaeon, Luigi Vanvitelli

Obama won a Nobel for diplomacy. What better way to ignite the fury of the anti-intellectual crowd who already despise him? I expect calls for him to move to Sweden, and photoshopped porno pix of him with leggy Scandinavian models hurled at our spam filters. But at least he didn’t win it for his writing. As the kids would put it, that would be so gay.

In other news, we’re bombing the moon to find out if it has water. Did anyone ask the moon if it wanted to be bombed? Iran is threatening to bomb “the heart of Israel” and we think that’s a bad thing. The moon is where all the dead great writers who didn’t win Nobels go to prepare for their next incarnations as terrorists or wine-makers or cats.

Being a soulful type, I’ve long had a cordial relationship with the lovely orb. When I was 12, I borrowed a half a cup of my mother’s Tanqueray and poured it into the lake as a sacrifice to the goddess. In later years, I’d go out under the full moon and beg favors. Whenever I asked the goddess for love, she sent me a lad. The last one was 44 years old, but still laddish. My men are, if nothing else, moon-touched.  (I’ve always thought it was too bad that “mooncalf” is a derogatory term. I see an awkward boy with big shining eyes, part Minotaur, part Edward Lear.)

Barack, make peace with the moon. Let’s not be like those guys who slash paintings in museums just because they can. Remember what happened to Actaeon. And consider what would happen if those fingers pulling at the tides pulled a little more ferociously.

Full Moon

Isolate and full, the moon
Floats over the house by the river.
Into the night the cold water rushes away below the gate.
The bright gold spilled onto the river is never still.
The brilliance of my quilt is greater than precious silk.
The circle without blemish.
The empty mountains without sound.
The moon hangs in the vacant, wide constellations.
Pine cones drop in the old garden.
The senna trees bloom.
The same clear glory extends for ten thousand miles.

–Tu Fu (712-770)
Translated by Kenneth Rexroth

The Cat And The Moon

The cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon,
The creeping cat, looked up.
Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
For, wander and wail as he would,
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood.
Minnaloushe runs in the grass
Lifting his delicate feet.
Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?
When two close kindred meet.
What better than call a dance?
Maybe the moon may learn,
Tired of that courtly fashion,
A new dance turn.
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range?
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.

–William Butler Yeats

A Good Deed in a Naughty World

Yusef Komunyakaa, poet

A lot of people have been kind to me since my financial troubles began. I don’t think anyone wants credit, so I’ll leave it at that. It’s not that I’m surprised, exactly—I know the people in my life are good people. But it reminds me of when I got married. I was worried about all sorts of things—the details of the wedding, whether I was doing the right thing, my phobia of speaking in front of people…all of that occupied me, so that when the ceremony was over and people began to congratulate me and I suddenly realized I was the center of a crowd of well-wishers, everything, for the moment, about me (because Charles, of course, had disappeared onto the bandstand with his musician pals), I was stunned. I’d never experienced anything like it. It made me feel transparent and radiant and afraid of coming apart. I had to keep it at a distance emotionally because it was so uncanny, but I did note how odd it was that it hadn’t occurred to me that it would happen.

The next thing that was like that was, after years of therapy, finally being able to talk about my brother’s death naturally, from the heart, and accept people’s sympathy and interest. Before that it felt strangely criminal to even mention it, as if I were spending a stolen coin.

So, today.  Horrible dreams last night; an unexpected kindness this afternoon. Also, last night, some words of wisdom from a friend. What he told me is something I want to keep private, not because of the sentiment but how it made me feel. I was quailing in front of life’s cool choices—his words made me glad I was aware of the fear for what it was, no longer just enmeshed in bad-bad-bad. Here is a poem by a poet I had to my house for Thanksgiving 30 years ago.

Kindness
For Carol Rigolot

When deeds splay before us
precious as gold & unused chances
stripped from the whine-bone,
we know the moment kindheartedness
walks in. Each praise be
echoes us back as the years uncount
themselves, eating salt. Though blood
first shaped us on the climbing wheel,
the human mind lit by the savanna’s
ice star & thistle rose,
your knowing gaze enters a room
& opens the day,
saying we were made for fun.
Even the bedazzled brute knows
when sunlight falls through leaves
across honed knives on the table.
If we can see it push shadows
aside, growing closer, are we less
broken? A barometer, temperature
gauge, a ruler in minus fractions
& pedigrees, a thingmajig,
a probe with an all-seeing eye,
what do we need to measure
kindness, every unheld breath,
every unkind leapyear?
Sometimes a sober voice is enough
to calm the waters & drive away
the false witnesses, saying, Look,
here are the broken treaties Beauty
brought to us earthbound sentinels.

—Yusef Komunyakaa

Why Don’t You Try Writing Something?

I was having coffee with a writer friend of mine yesterday, and we talked about disappointment. She hasn’t finished anything in a long time—at least that’s what she says. She has finished her novel, more than once, but agents have rejected it. I finished a novel a couple of years ago that my agent is now trying to sell and another one that I will send out very soon.

My friend told me she was envious of how good my new book was, and asked why I wasn’t excited. “I don’t let myself be excited anymore,” I said. “I can’t. When I’m writing and it’s going well—then, yeah—but not at this stage.” Until we spoke of it, I hadn’t realized how relentlessly I was deadening that pride and pleasure one should feel in a job well done.

I used to feel it too much, so in love with my own words I couldn’t hear criticism easily, or make cuts without agonizing over it. Now I think my evaluation of my ability is far closer to the truth, but my talent and skill are not what worry me. My networking and self-promotional abilities have always been sorely lacking; if they’re any better now, it’s only because age dulls some social fears, and because blogging doesn’t require physical presence. But whatever progress I’ve made is surely wiped out by the greater demands of this era.

More profoundly, I feel cursed, even though I know, as much as one can know, that perseverance is the only blessing there is. I love reason and science so much because I am by nature superstitious. Fantasy is the genre I picked, once I decided to let ‘literary’ fiction bide awhile, because my childhood imagination was full of supernatural creatures and I still feel more comfortable with them than with people savvy in the ways of the ‘real’ world.

But there’s more to it. When I hear of writers working very hard to promote their books, I feel disoriented: books are for reading and writing. They’re like a good joke. If you have to explain it, it doesn’t work. Whenever I read a lavishly praised novel, I feel cheated: both that it isn’t what it was claimed to be, and that what it is has been somehow ruined. What makes a novel good is how it fits into the world, not how it stands above it. The last good novel I read was The White Tiger. It was gritty and particular as a subway ride. It was nothing like its reviews.

Tuesday, I was talking to my agent about looking for work editing fiction (freelance). I told her I was very good at it; that I had a talent for seeing where the story was, and where it could go, and was good at encouraging and inspiring writers. This is true. Many writers have told me so. I have no doubt that anyone who pays me to critique a novel will be getting excellent value. But it still feels uncomfortable to praise myself. I kept thinking: why should she believe me? Anyone can say they’re good. On the other hand, I liked saying it. It was like going out into the fresh air.

***

Teaching the Ape to Write Poems

They didn’t have much trouble
teaching the ape to write poems:
first they strapped him into the chair,
then tied the pencil around his hand
(the paper had already been nailed down).
Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder
and whispered into his ear:
“You look like a god sitting there.
Why don’t you try writing something?”

–James Tate

Pennies for Ben

In Philadelphia Mom and Bob and I went to the courtyard where Ben Franklin’s house once stood. Gray stone squares are carved with excerpts from letters he wrote to his wife Deborah about the house she was moving into and furnishing while he was being diplomatic in England. (She begged him to come home often, writing that she was ill due to “dissatisfied distress” at his absence; he preferred being feted in London and Oxford.) But these are not the letters quoted. Rather, discussions of books, bedrooms, and curtains.

I found it more evocative than many actual famous-person residences I’ve seen, even those preserved down to the jacket and candle stub, perhaps because words live beyond the control of curators. It brought back to me that passion between spouses for a new home being made slowly. I remember long days of tramping down Orchard Street looking for curtain material—calling Charles at work to update him on my progress—and weekends in Beacon and Gardiner buying antiques. Now I’m reduced to buying litter boxes and pet candles (specially designed to cover pet odors—no, I didn’t believe it either, but they smell nice).

Franklin is buried a few blocks from where his house used to be. You have to pay to get into the graveyard, so we looked through the fence instead. His gravestone (flush with the ground) was covered in pennies. I like to think this is a nation of profligates’ repudiation of the idea that a penny saved is a penny earned, but it’s more likely that it’s a nation of dimwits’ idea of tribute to this most practical of our country’s founders.

***

Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.

–Ben Franklin

If all the rich people in the world divided up their money among themselves there wouldn’t be enough to go around.

–Christina Stead

Money

Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:
‘Why do you let me lie here wastefully?
I am all you never had of goods and sex.
You could get them still by writing a few cheques.’

So I look at others, what they do with theirs:
They certainly don’t keep it upstairs.
By now they’ve a second house and car and wife:
Clearly money has something to do with life

—In fact, they’ve a lot in common, if you enquire:
You can’t put off being young until you retire,
And however you bank your screw, the money you save
Won’t in the end buy you more than a shave.

I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down
From long french windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

–Philip Larkin

Pensylvania

me, bell, Bob, bell, Bob, Mom, Bradley

My mother is visiting my sister Davis in Pennsylvania for a while, so I went down for a few days. We sat on the rosy brick patio in the lush garden; I cooked a couple of dinners and played with Bradley the Mackerel Cat; Mom read and proofread my novel; and Bob took Mom and me into Philadelphia for a day. Davis was working—doing acupuncture on an aged, crippled dog who also has a regular physical therapist to exercise him in the pool, and a lady to sleep with him at night, should he have bad dreams. My sister has a lot of great stories. I’m thinking: comic novel about a vet. I could publish it after she retires.

Bob is my sister’s SO: charming, handsome, kind, an electrical safety inspector (another great occupation for a fictional character) who’s good at building patios, mixing drinks and getting along with everyone. He took us to the Liberty Bell, which Mom and I had never seen.

The Liberty Bell, as everyone knows, is cracked. The letter ordering it instructs, “Let the Bell be cast by the best Workmen & examined carefully before it is shipped with the following words well shaped in large letters round in vizt. ‘By order of the Assembly of the Province of Pensylvania for the State house in the City of Philadª. 1752’- and underneath – ‘Proclaim Liberty thro’ all the Land to all the Inhabitants thereof – Levit. XXV.10’”

Few have remarked on it, but that missing ‘n’ in Pennsylvania, a typo the engraver faithfully reproduced, was the root cause of the crack. What happened was the engraver saw the mistake, got upset and fixed it, then thought maybe he was wrong about the correct spelling and changed it again, and did this six or seven times until his hands were trembling with nervous exhaustion, his wife hit him over the head with a candlestick and tied him to the bed, and the bell was sent out with the ghost ‘n’ following it to the new world to wreak its subtle havoc on the bell, the country, and liberty itself.

I made up the part about the engraver. Rather, it came to me in a vision.  In any case, who can doubt that missing N has been floating around causing mischief for the last 257 years? Where do you think the term “Nobama” came from? (Google ‘Nobama’ if you want your daily shudder.)

Trust America to revere a bell that cracked the first time it was struck. “It’s a bell you’d feel comfortable having a beer with,” they said. “Let’s keep it.”

Poem: Sonnet To Liberty

Not that I love thy children, whose dull eyes
See nothing save their own unlovely woe,
Whose minds know nothing, nothing care to know, -
But that the roar of thy Democracies,
Thy reigns of Terror, thy great Anarchies,
Mirror my wildest passions like the sea
And give my rage a brother -! Liberty!
For this sake only do thy dissonant cries
Delight my discreet soul, else might all kings
By bloody knout or treacherous cannonades
Rob nations of their rights inviolate
And I remain unmoved – and yet, and yet,
These Christs that die upon the barricades,
God knows it I am with them, in some things.

-Oscar Wilde

Davis and part of Bob

Brain Food

I want to lose fifteen or twenty pounds, and every now and then I feel determined, certain I can cut my diet to the bone and get at least 2/3 to where I want to be, then reconnoiter. It wouldn’t take long. What’s a few months these days? I still think of 2001 as yesterday.

But the problem is I only feel this committed when I hate my body, and to keep up that state of mind 24 hours tends to make me sad. So I find something that fits and flatters me and come to terms with my image in the mirror. I go out for a long walk in the cool September air—in the excitement of New York in the fall when the students return, art and theater picks up all over the city, fashion glamors the streets and dealmakers shout in restaurants—and my resolve withers in the face of pleasure.

Being around people makes it worse, although if I’m not around them I’ll get dangerously lonely and decide that, really, a few pounds are not the issue. But other people eat. My husband, who was just visiting, eats annoyingly often. Others want to meet in restaurants, or I have to cook for them, and feel constrained to offer more than boiled vegetables. And it’s nice to see my friends and they make me feel loved and who cares about diet when cuisine is the product of thousands of years of human creativity and nurture?*

If everyone agreed to stick to my own silly diet (1000 calories, nothing after 6 p.m.) and were clever at finding ways to distract me from hunger pangs, then maybe it would work. One can achieve almost anything with mimicry. This is very different from encouragement or solidarity. I don’t want to chat with pals about our diets. I want to eat greens because that’s all there is and everyone’s excited by the garlic or the ginger. Diet is already a religion in America, but it’s a very inept one. More creative brainwashing is needed.

Meanwhile scientists are getting closer to a pill solution. Gastric bypass surgery may work in part because it affects hormones that regulate hunger. Certain people, mostly young, have something called “brown fat” which ups the metabolism.  The tinkerers have a lot to play with.

I’ve been reading a book called What’s Next?: Dispatches on the Future of Science,  a collection of essays by young scientists about the future. Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University (what a cool job title, no?) writes about genetic enhancement, arguing that you need to understand why evolution didn’t select for a desired trait before you consider doing so yourself. Assuming you have the ability to fiddle with the genome, of course.

Consider brain size. We’ve all heard the theory about how our brains stopped getting bigger because women’s pelvis’s couldn’t handle big-headed babies, but Bostrom notes that the brain uses 20% of our calorie intake, and in an era of food scarcity—most of human history—it wasn’t worth it to be smarter and starve. Now that caesarian sections are so popular and cake and hamburgers even more so, a bigger brain might be feasible. What I think is that my head is just the right size and it’s too late to change it anyway, but if I could somehow shoot the calories from every snack in that direction and make my neurons hum and sizzle while my hips shrink, I’d be a very happy woman.

Crazy About Her Shrimp

We don’t even take time
To come up for air.
We keep our mouths full and busy
Eating bread and cheese
And smooching in between.

No sooner have we made love
Than we are back in the kitchen.
While I chop the hot peppers,
She grins at me
And stirs the shrimp on the stove.

How good the wine tastes
That has run red
Out of a laughing mouth!
Down her chin
And on to her naked tits.

“I’m getting fat,” she says,
Turning this way and that way
Before the mirror.
“I’m crazy about her shrimp!’
I shout to the gods above.

- Charles Simic, The Voice at 3:00 A.M. : Selected Late and New Poems, 2003

* One of the best nonfiction books I’ve ever read

Friday Night Out

Mini-movie

Charles wanted to go out again last night, so we tried Los Dados on Ganesvoort Street, in the meatpacking district. I had a blueberry margarita and pork taquitos: good but not great. I don’t usually like tequila but last night it tasted like cactus, not motor oil. We sat in the back to avoid the bar music, but had to contend with workers drilling electrical outlets through the dinner hour. They apologized very sweetly, and we weren’t in the mood to care. Charles made friends with them all, as he tends to do, while I sat in the glow of liquor and hot sauce, dreaming up plots for thrillers.

It’s a festive neighborhood, the wide cobblestoned streets full of young people clumped on the sidewalks and corners, smoking and fiddling with their phones (when are they going to make a cellphone that doubles as a cigarette case?),  the facades of new buildings lit up in changing colors reminding me both of early modernist painting and of ships. The fresh rain and cool wind made me reconsider my earlier declaration that I’m sick of New York. I’m not—just yearning for mountains, desert, country roads and fields of long grass gone to seed, grackles* and bramble bushes. Instead we investigated a shoot involving an ugly bald model in a silver evening dress and pink lipstick.

I could go out every night and take pictures of events like that, and then I’d get advertisers on this blog. I could jazz it up by choosing a celebrity or two to stalk, keep a running diary. How hard could it be? Throw in a weekly feature on medieval torture devices and female orgasms (the most popular search terms used to find this blog) and I’d have a success. Perhaps a serial about Bob, a fellow with a touch of Asberger’s who works hard researching medieval torture devices, and his clever wife Mary who finds a new means of achieving orgasm every day.

* “The Common Grackle forages on the ground, in shallow water or in shrubs; it will steal food from other birds. It is omnivorous, eating insects, minnows, frogs, eggs, berries, seeds, grain and even small birds.

Along with some other species of grackles, the common grackle is known to practice “anting,” rubbing insects on its feathers to apply liquids such as formic acid secreted by the insects.

This bird’s song is particularly harsh, especially when these birds, in a flock, are calling.”—wikipedia

A Hedge of Rubber Trees
by Amy Clampitt
The West Village by then was changing; before long the rundown brownstones at its farthest edge would have slipped into trendier hands. She lived, impervious to trends, behind a potted hedge of rubber trees, with three cats, a canary--refuse from whose cage kept sifting down and then germinating, a yearning seedling choir, around the saucers on the windowsill--and an inexorable cohort of roaches she was too nearsighted to deal with, though she knew they were there, and would speak of them, ruefully, as of an affliction that might once, long ago, have been prevented. Unclassifiable castoffs, misfits, marginal cases: when you're one yourself, or close to it, there's a reassurance in proving you haven't quite gone under by taking up with somebody odder than you are. Or trying to. "They're my friends," she'd say of her cats--Mollie, Mitzi and Caroline, their names were, and she was forever taking one or another in a cab to the vet--as though she had no others. The roommate who'd become a nun, the one who was Jewish, the couple she'd met on a foliage tour, one fall, were all people she no longer saw. She worked for a law firm, said all the judges were alcoholic, had never voted. But would sometimes have me to dinner--breaded veal, white wine, strawberry Bavarian--and sometimes, from what she didn't know she was saying, I'd snatch a shred or two of her threadbare history. Baltic cold. Being sent home in a troika when her feet went numb. In summer, carriage rides. A swarm of gypsy children driven off with whips. An octogenarian father, bishop of a dying schismatic sect. A very young mother who didn't want her. A half-brother she met just once. Cousins in Wisconsin, one of whom phoned her from a candy store, out of the blue, while she was living in Chicago. What had brought her there, or when, remained unclear. As did much else. We'd met in church. I noticed first a big, soaring soprano with a wobble in it, then the thickly wreathed and braided crimp in the mouse- gold coiffure. Old? Young? She was of no age. Through rimless lenses she looked out of a child's, or a doll's, globular blue. Wore Keds the year round, tended otherwise to overdress. Owned a mandolin. Once I got her to take it down from the mantel and plink out, through a warm fuddle of sauterne, a lot of giddy Italian airs from a songbook whose pages had started to crumble. The canary fluffed and quivered, and the cats, amazed, came out from under the couch and stared. What could the offspring of the schismatic age and a reluctant child bride expect from life? Not much. Less and less. A dream she'd had kept coming back, years after. She'd taken a job in Washington with some right-wing lobby, and lived in one of those bow-windowed mansions that turn into roominghouses, and her room there had a full-length mirror: oval, with a molding, is the way I picture it. In her dream something woke her, she got up to look, and there in the glass she'd had was covered over--she gave it a wondering emphasis--with gray veils. The West Village was changing. I was changing. The last time I asked her to dinner, she didn't show. Hours-- or was it days?--later, she phoned to explain: she hadn't been able to find my block; a patrolman had steered her home. I spent my evenings canvassing for Gene McCarthy. Passing, I'd see her shades drawn, no light behind the rubber trees. She wasn't out, she didn't own a TV. She was in there, getting gently blotto. What came next, I wasn't brave enough to know. Only one day, passing, I saw new shades, quick-chic matchstick bamboo, going up where the waterstained old ones had been, and where the seedlings-- O gray veils, gray veils--had risen and gone down.

Labor Day

Labor Day: First fall meal: roast pork with apples, wild rice and parsnips. Charles and I talked about all our possible futures—living arrangements, money—the various strands of love, sex and friendship that unite us and our desired others. We agreed that we don’t like it that our lovers have to (choose to) lie. But we keep them anyway. Or, in my case, keep him in mind.

Then we took a long walk through the mostly deserted Village, the quiet blocks west of 7th avenue I never get tired of, past a deli with an abundant outdoor flower display hitting us with a wave of rich perfume, and a stoop with a couple of paperbacks left out—Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, and Elie Weisel’s Night.  I remember reading those books. They made me feel like a grownup. Now they make me feel old. We finished the evening at home eating Haagan Dazs’ new ice cream flavors, passionfruit and ginger. Charles put the oregano oil I use for female complaints on his serving. At least he won’t be having any yeast infections this week.

Today—Wednesday—Charles is reading my fantasy novel and even though this isn’t the sort of thing he ever reads on his own, so his reaction may not be terribly relevant, it matters to me. I’m going to show it to a few other people this month. Then, we’ll see. I need to stuff myself with beauty this month to counteract all the anxiety.

This is one of my favorite poems. I had it memorized, before my brains started leaking out.

Ode to Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

–John Keats

Eyes like Ripening Fruit

We went to the Met today, early enough that the lines weren’t long, and wandered through Chinese decorative arts, American landscape painting, the Greek and Roman rooms, and the African rooms. I told Charles about Delilah’s friend Zach Hyman who’s been shooting nude women in various places in the city. He was doing it at the Met a week and a half ago, and the model, K.C. Neill, got arrested for public lewdness. That’s a little better than arresting a painting for lewdness, but not much.

It reminded me of the time Charles got busted by a Met guard for sketching. He wasn’t sketching, merely taking notes, and argued this, which the guard disputed, and when the guard grabbed him to take to the interrogation chambers, Charles resisted and ended up falling down the long staircase. They let him go after questioning, mostly because he showed them his MoMa ID, but I had to wait around, wondering if I’d need bail money. “We should have sued,” I said today. That’s a wicked staircase.

But it’s hard to stay mad at the Met. There’s so much beauty and it makes me happy. I like going on impulse, when there’s nothing I’m dying to see. I notice the building more. I’m aware of it as a palace I’m privileged to enter rather than as an endless, feet-punishing maze. Like everybody, I want to live in it.

Today, although I started out most interested in the cinnabar plates and boxes in the Chinese Decorative Arts exhibit—because I have cinnabar beads I use in jewelry-making*—it was John Coplans’ nude photographs of himself that I most loved. No beautiful young woman has anything on him  as a model. His creased, aging belly with its scattering of hair looked like a Japanese watercolor, a winter landscape with thin, bare-branched trees.

It made me think of my painter friend Camilla and her anxieties about nude self portraits and my own nude self portraits (photographs) from several years ago, which I felt joyful and excited about—my first foray into visual art in decades—until my friends reacted with everything but the idea that these might be, however imperfect, works of art. But I suppose I agree with them, in part, because I didn’t choose a torso shot for this post. Even considering it made me remember what porno movie theaters used to be like in the 1970’s. The huddled masses…the sticky floors.

After the museum we went for tea and pastries at Sant Ambroeus, on Madison Avenue and 78th. It was a perfect day, just slightly cool, the weather New York was made for, and I was having sweet and melancholy memories of the neighborhood. This was my first home in New York, when I was eleven, and my part-time home  for a couple of years before Philip moved back to Brooklyn. Today all the usual reasons for disliking the Upper East Side dropped away and I was intoxicated by art, cake, brownstones and Central Park. Of course, most of the residents were away for the long weekend. That provided exquisite psychic ventilation. The skins of the buildings were shimmering with relief.

* Take a look at my jewelry

Archaic Torso of Apollo
By Rainier Maria Rilke Translated by Stephen Mitchell
We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared. Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur: would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.

The Greatest of These

Aldous Huxley

Teddy Kennedy’s funeral was very moving. It reminded me of the Catholic funerals I went to in my teens—my uncle and my cousin? I can’t remember. So many people died in those years—my cousin in a car crash on the night of his high school graduation, others by illness and suicide—but I do remember that two of the funerals were Catholic, long, beautiful, with music and incense.

None of us had fathers we could talk about as Teddy’s sons did about him. We all wanted to. We remembered the good things and tried to make them be more than they were, as well as sometimes exaggerating the bad. Then I grew up, sort of, and watched my husband be a less good father than he should have been, and felt complicit because I was.  I was distracting him with youth and sex and freedom, and felt like I deserved his attention because his kids at least had a father, and I didn’t. If I were Catholic I would have gone to confession over that.

I try to respect faith; it awes me sometimes. But listening to the priest talk about Teddy being in Heaven with Jesus, and being with his dead siblings, I think: how is that not more delusional than my beliefs about romance that make me feel so stupid and sad?

The obvious answer is that if Teddy’s wrong he’ll never know it and while he was alive he had the comfort of it. After all, if there is no God and we die into darkness, how does believing this help us bear it? All I have is my cat, jumping up here now to present me with his amber and white furriness, glistening and clean, not quite angelic but pleasingly tangible. His small head and swanlike neck. His stupid, beautiful, tawny eyes.

I suppose the purpose of God is to be pure. Nobody we love here is. God can betray only us by not existing, and then it’s not anyone betraying us. But I can only say so because I don’t believe. If I did—if I were absolutely certain there was a God who saw and spoke and could change things, if I were like my Aunt Vera or Teddy, thinking all the doctrine was absolutely true—I’d want to kill the crazy bastard in a nanosecond.

My friend Philip thinks I don’t understand religion. He thinks I’m a Godless Unitarian hippie nonbeliever. But I savored faith early on, studying Aldous Huxley’s collection of sacred writings The Perennial Philosophy, which remains the best of its kind. He made me understand the sweet potency of a belief no human power could shake. I remember especially (from another book of Huxley’s) a description of a martyr holding fast under torture. Huxley made me see that once you’re in the place of torture, faith is all that will keep your mind in one piece. To renounce it in order to stop the physical pain is a false bargain. Your soul splinters.

This doesn’t apply if your faith is slim and you’re not being tortured. Huxley’s words didn’t make me believe—not on that level—but they made me understand the mechanism.

Still, I had radiant months and days of a faith that didn’t know quite where to land, that was looking at the worlds’ doctrines like a girl looking to marry. Trying to choose wisely. I had love and devotion to spare.  But I was like Eve. I wanted to know what I wasn’t being told. I got kicked out.

**

But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.

More About Six-Legged Soldiers

Maybe some of you read Ian Frazier’s New Yorker pieces about Siberia recently. He talks a lot about mosquitoes. In the book Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War, Jeffrey A. Lockwood writes that Siberian tribes used to execute people by tying them naked to trees. The mosquito cloud was so dense, a man could receive as many as 9,000 bites a minute—enough to drain half his blood in a couple of hours. Consider this if you’re lounging somewhere in the country, like the coast of Maine, bitching.

And King Richard the Lionhearted, after whom I named my most-beloved cat before the I knew the meaning of love Fitzroy-style, is one of the great men of history who used to catapult beehives…in his case into Moslem fortresses during the 3rd crusade. Greek warships routinely carried beehives for such purposes. The Romans used them so often for their endless warmaking that by the end of the Roman Empire, honey production had declined dramatically. Just another way we’re like the Romans, but worse.

These entries are going to be shorter from now on. I’m busier and I know you don’t have the attention span you used to have only a few months ago. Soon a headline will suffice. Our grandchildren, or somebody’s, will have a kind of “friending” that connects people brain-to-brain and neither writing nor speech will be used. No, I haven’t worked out the details. But I do know that the downside will be that when you get tired of someone, you’ll have to use an icepick to remove him.

The Penis and the Beehive Grenade

Adrienne Westwood, Penis Pendant

One of the most often used search terms that end up directing traffic to my blog is “penis jewelry.” I don’t believe I have referred to this category of wealth, although “penis” and “jewelry” are both items of interest to me. I’d like to remedy that.

According to The Encyclopedia of Body Adornment by Margo DeMello, the most common forms of penis jewelry are Ampallang, Prince Albert piercing, and Apadravya. Those two funny “A” words you can look up for yourself. Wikipedia will tell you all about it. (According to New Scientist, my weekly science read, Wikipedia is on the wane—everybody’s moved on to Twitter—and as a result, will become less and less reliable. Remember this in the future.)

The alternative to piercing, especially if you happen to be female, is found in the photograph above. I don’t want one but maybe somebody does. It’s kind of pretty.

***
I subscribe to a weekly email newsletter that keeps me informed of new discoveries in medicine. I usually don’t read it, but when I do, there’s always something interesting. This week: a study in the UK, to determine whether the calming effects of a cuppa were due to its chemical makeup (since tea contains caffeine, not valium) has shown that having a cup of tea reduces stress because of the ritual of putting the kettle on. However the effect also held for those for whom the tea was made and served by another person: soothing in a different way.

I can attest that having a cup of tea made for me is very welcome, whereas having a cup of coffee isn’t; I assume you’ll fuck it up. I like brewing my own coffee. I’d think the British would feel that way about tea, but it all depends. When you’re in a research lab, you take your comfort where you find it. Further studies are needed to discover the psychological effects of refreshing one’s lipstick, cutting into a newly baked loaf of bread, and letting the cat out in the morning.

My friend Rachel calls New Age books “Metaphysical Porn,” a label that made me think there was a whole new genre out there for me to wallow in. Those books stress the meditative, Buddhist value of the ordinary moments of life, a sentiment found in many cultures at many times, and one that French priests of the 19th century excelled at when counseling noble ladies. They basically advised these yearning, intellectually-deprived women to focus on getting through the day with patience and good humor, regarding every boring duty as holy. It’s something humans can be good at. I used to be good at it. I consider trying it again, from time to time, but I lack a crucial enzyme.  I forget which one.

In other science news, researchers have harnessed bee venom to fight cancer—building “nanobees” to deliver the venom to tumors, killing cancer cells while keeping other cells safe. This nicely complements something I’m writing—a review of a book about insects used in warfare—beehives thrown at the enemy are one of the oldest kinds of grenade. Castles in Wales and Scotland have recesses in the walls where the bees were encouraged to build hives, the better to be ransacked in the course of a siege. It’s estimated that this weapon was first employed in Paleolithic times, and continued to be used through the Middle Ages. Even more nefarious was the use, in war, of poison honey—honey from bees who fed mainly on rhododendron blossoms.  Locals knew to be wary; outsiders didn’t. That’s another story. Takes place in Colchis, home of that famous poisoner, Medea. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/160282.php

You might also want to know that asparagus leaves seem to protect against liver disease from alcohol, and from hangover symptoms. That’s leaves, not the vegetable you eat for dinner, though perhaps the vegetable helps. According to the online salesmen, it also cures everything else that might trouble you, from urinary tract infections to cancer.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/160722.php

Those are my helpful hints for this morning, August 21, 2:30 a.m. as I write and I’m not tired yet. I miss the sleep of youth.

The River of Bees

by W. S. Merwin

In a dream I returned to the river of bees
Five orange trees by the bridge and
Beside two mills my house
Into whose courtyard a blindman followed
The goats and stood singing
Of what was older

Soon it will be fifteen years

He was old he will have fallen into his eyes
I took my eyes

A long way to the calendars
Room after room asking how shall I live

One of the ends is made of streets
One man processions carry through it
Empty bottles their
Image of hope
It was offered to me by name

Once once and once
In the same city I was born
Asking what shall I say

He will have fallen into his mouth
Men think they are better than grass

I return to his voice rising like a forkful of hay

He was old he is not real nothing is real
Nor the noise of death drawing water

We are the echo of the future

On the door it says what to do to survive
But we were not born to survive
Only to live

The Death Panel

Hawaiian Cemetery, J.W. Diehl

Sit down, dear lady, sit down.

You have trouble sitting? How old are you?

That is very, very old.

You’re older than Nancy Pelosi! Doesn’t that make you feel old? Do you have many cats? A car that makes funny noises, but only you hear them? Do your grandchildren walk right through you at family functions, tangling up  your nerves like wet spaghetti?

I see. You’ve never had children, and you’re retired, no pets. You don’t drive. You wouldn’t need much in the grave now, would you? We can spare a blanket. They have pills so that you won’t notice when the dirt is piled on top. Only two, though, we need to save some for the other septuagenarians. 70 is the new 99! Yes, we can!

You don’t have to worry about your mortgage anymore, or all those jury duty notices you stuck in the kitchen drawer. The plots are free. Isn’t it something that a sprained ankle can get you so much? Used to be an ace bandage, five minutes with the doctor: now you get personal, red-carpet service and a gently used pine coffin! Complete with the latest issue of The New York Times! Some call us socialists, but we like to think we’re being neighborly. Soon you’ll have Internet access and cable.

You’d prefer to not to be connected after death? You don’t want to hear Keith and Rachel, dear little Anderson? You don’t want to tweet all your demented, frail, wobbly, healthcare-gobbling sexagenarian friends?

America needs more like you. Michelle and I are going to pray you get on the waiting list for Heaven. Every year, they take a few who haven’t been to Harvard, according to Rahm. No, I don’t know what happens to Jews after death. Nobody does, not even Jews. That’s why they’re so active all the time.

And yes—since you ask—it’s true Rahm said Satan has a Sarah Palin pinup calendar. But don’t make too much out of that. I think they’re actually going to put her in Limbo with all the unbaptized babies. Just for laughs, you know. God has a wicked sense of humor. Rahm told me—well, never mind. Goodnight, dear lady, goodnight, goodnight.

Youth In Asia

Okay, we don’t need health care. We need genetic modification, so that future Americans will not be so stupid, plus a few courses in logic before anyone is allowed to vote or drive a car.

I’ve resisted writing a sentence like this for some time, because what does it help to call people stupid? The only other explanation I can think of is that the Bush era built up so much frustration, then ended with a bang and a whimper, and Obama’s getting the brunt. He’s the good parent you can misbehave around, the one who takes all the shit for the drunken, out-of-control one. I don’t like this either, politicians as daddies, voters as teenagers, yet it keeps coming to mind.

I’ve been reading Aravind Adiga who wrote the Booker-prize winning novel The White Tiger, about the angry underclass and mind-bending realities of India, and it casts an interesting light on America today. Adiga’s India is a crazy quilt of custom and corruption, made worse by the veneer of democracy. The book is hard-hitting but very funny and somehow sweet, as the best Indian fiction often is. Novelists can find a place for everything that has no place in justice, common sense, or intelligent governance.

Fiction reminds me that it’s always a mistake to expect too much clarity from human beings.  Kindness, maybe. Daring, even brilliance. Endurance. But clear, reasoned thinking is rare. It’s a tool all of us use sometime; it’s not the fallback. The fallback is fear of change and loyalty to whomever or whatever imprinted you at the right moment. There are all sorts of clever ideas—in the evolutionary psychologists’ lounge—as to why our ‘flaws’ helped to make us the great successes we are today, though of course tomorrow is another story. Not to mention the second half of this century.

My niece is in China, enjoying herself immensely. According the The New York Times, lots of recent graduates are going to China for jobs.  China is suffering from the recession—my friend Andree, who’s been living there for 14 months, says rents have been cut in half, but there are still a lot more jobs for young Americans than there are here, and it’s cheaper to live, not to mention being an adventure. Yet the pollution is so bad than even on the coast, it can make you ill. Every time I count up my credit card points, and realize I could visit everyone I know there (niece, cousin, close friend) in three different interesting cities for a net cost of whatever travel within China would be, I think of the pollution. It sounds wimpy, but there it is. I like breathing. If it weren’t for that, I’d probably be dreaming of living there in my poverty-stricken old age with all my other poverty-stricken friends. We could offer a taste of home to the young Americans having adventures. But the health stuff is just too spooky. I’d rather face Obama’s death panel any day. (Genteel, overeducated overachievers sipping green tea and munching cucumber sandwiches as they discussed my life, its pluses and minuses. I could get off on that.)

I don’t know why people want to keep living when they’re at the point of needing constant care, drugs for pain, have no mobility, and the end is in sight. It’s one thing if you’re young and disabled, or if you expect to recover, or if you get a fatal cancer in late mid-life and want time to prepare yourself, say goodbye, and so on, but at 80 or 90-something, once your systems start to go, once the slide’s gone on a while, and you’re in the hospital for weeks, then a nursing home—really, why? When you think how many people would risk their lives to save a strange child darting into the street, why not give up those last clouded months in exchange for a young family having health insurance for years? If it were possible—if people weren’t so paranoid—I would like that to be an option. Not a requirement, an option. You could cut a deal with your insurance company, one in which they’d save maybe 10% of your projected medical expenses and guarantee coverage for a needy family (unknown to you) for a set period.

And once the deal is done, the children come to the hospital and say hello and goodbye to you, if you’re not too ill; you enjoy the pleasure of seeing the faces of those you’ve helped—the glow of children’s flesh, their warm little fingers!—and they learn what death is, and that it doesn’t have to be only bad.

This reminds me of 9th grade, when we read “Utopia” and then were given an assignment to write our own. I had lots of clever ideas then, too. I got an A on the paper. A lot of good that does in our world.

***

The wind returns; my little courtyard is green and overgrown.
The willows have come back this spring.
I lean for a long time on the railings; alone, without speaking
The sound of bamboo and the new moon are like in days gone by.
The playing and singing have not yet ceased; the wine cups remain,
The ice on top of the pool begins to melt.
Bright candles and a faint fragrance are deep in the painted hall,
It’s hard to think I must allow my temples to turn white.

~Li YU, 937-978

Guns N Crazies

I read Bob Herbert’s latest column, which is about the misogyny of American society, as exemplified in the shootings of women in an aerobics class by the pathologically lonely George Sodini, with mixed feelings. Herbert writes that we are inured to the violence against women; that if a mass murderer had gone into a public place and separated out blacks or Jews for killing it would spark more outrage.

I’m not sure this is particularly helpful. The most pressing problem is gun control, and I think young white women work as well as any other victim group to spur outrage, which is to say, not enough. The only thing that would be more effective is if wave after wave of psychopaths targeted politicians and their families (which, by the way, I am NOT recommending).

“Some people are happy, some are miserable. It is difficult to live almost continuously feeling an undercurrent of fear, worry, discontentment and helplessness. I can talk and joke around and sound happy but under it all is something different that seems unchangable and a permanent part of my being…

“I like to write and talk. Ironic because I haven’t met anybody recently (past 30 years) who I want to be close friends with OR who want to be close friends with me. I was always open to suggestions to what I am doing wrong, no brother or father (mine are useless) or close friend to nudge me and give it bluntly yet tactfully wtf I am doing wrong…

“I no longer have any expectations of myself. I have no options because I cannot work toward and achieve even the smallest goals. That is, ABOVE ALL, what bothers me the most. Not to be able to work towards what I want in my life.”

The feelings Sodini describes are very familiar, though the only time I felt that completely isolated was in junior high, and I didn’t have the weight of 30 years of failure behind me. But even now, after plenty of friends, lovers, marriage—what to Sodini’s mind would be a divine feast of sex and intimacy—I’m capable of feeling lonely and miserable, angry that I can’t seem to change, etc. When I imagine feeling this way continuously, being utterly unsuccessful at intimacy of any kind, I have to wonder: would I resort to shooting people? Probably not, but on the other hand, I would have broken a lot sooner than Sodini did.

Meanwhile, In The Observer, Barbara Ellen writes, “The dark paradox is that if Sodini felt his social status was demeaned by his lack of success with women, he probably wasn’t even shooting at the correct gender. It’s men who tend to torture other men about status, just as women tend to torture other women about body image. Therefore, it’s men, not women, who were responsible for Sodini’s misery.”

I don’t think either “men” or “women” were responsible for Sodini. He was responsible for himself. You can look at his family and background for clues to his mental illness if you want to. But have we gotten so far away from perennial human truths that it isn’t obvious that his ‘misogyny’ was the flip side of deep longing for a woman’s love? Not just sex or conquest or status. He wanted love from women (and was scared to go after it) and he wanted help from other men (and was scared to ask for it). That he was too frightened to seek help from professionals is hardly surprising: therapy is intimacy too.

He killed women to be noticed, to say I was here and I suffered.  And he was noticed, and his blog was copied, posted and read, because his loneliness and anger strike a chord. THAT’S what causes all this flurry of denial. Either that or some people have no idea what loneliness tastes like.

I understand that people are afraid that paying attention to these killings encourages them. This is undoubtedly true. If none were ever reported, fewer would happen. But reacting with contempt and labels like ‘misogynist’ doesn’t make the next crazy guy any less likely to act out. After all, that sort of contempt is exactly what they’re used to.

As for outrage leading to gun control—sorry. Not enough dead yet. People would rather keep their guns and shoot anyone trying to give them “socialist” healthcare.

***
I murder hate by flood or field,
Tho’ glory’s name may screen us;
In wars at home I’ll spend my blood—
Life-giving wars of Venus.
The deities that I adore
Are social Peace and Plenty;
I’m better pleas’d to make one more,
Than be the death of twenty.

I would not die like Socrates,
For all the fuss of Plato;
Nor would I with Leonidas,
Nor yet would I with Cato:
The zealots of the Church and State
Shall ne’er my mortal foes be;
But let me have bold Zimri’s fate,
Within the arms of Cozbi!

~Robert Burns

Never attempt to murder a man who is committing suicide.

~Woodrow Wilson

Let Me Wander Over Yonder

Grand Canyon, 1979

I’m imagining red arches of stone; the desert at night, cactus and stars; huge trees covered in vines and moss, the air thick with greeny-gold light. I’ve been looking at pictures of National Parks and wondering, for the 10,000th time, why I’ve haven’t been to one since Charles and I stopped with our cat Lucian at the Grand Canyon on our way to California.

There’s always a reason. In past years, the reasons were better: I had a country house to go to. A little, moth-breeding, mouse-occupied wood and stone house that wouldn’t let go in the summer, especially once I started gardening. If I still had that house, last night’s moon would have been close enough to climb to on a ladder, as in the wonderful story by Italo Calvino in Cosmicomics. I would sit in the kitchen doorway watching the parade of animals eating my lumpy yard, my own private Africa, and talking to the snake that lived under the doorstep and liked to pop its head up in the morning to say hello. I would make mint tea with my own mint and climb up the mountain to pick blueberries. (Okay, maybe drive up the mountain. You had to drive to get where the blueberries were. But I’d clamber over the big, uneven stones.)

This year there’s no house: the reason is money. I have to finish the novel, try to sell it, make a last, desperate attempt to stay in New York. If I fail and have to move to Florida, there will be many compensations, like being part of a couple again, swimming in a warm ocean, and maybe having time and money for car trips and camping. Plus Charles would get to be with Mouchette, for whom he feels a tragic, romantic love (at least that’s what he said in an email to Fitzroy). The cats would be happier in Florida. They could go outside, hang with the neighborhood cats (lots of them) and chase geckos. What’s not to like?

I love New York too much. So does Charles—he doesn’t want us to lose our grip on it, this rent-regulated apartment that once gone will be gone forever, like the country house. No living in Greenwich Village after that. I’d miss the museums, theater, restaurants, people, one in particular; and I’d miss walking around the city, especially my patch of it—from Soho to Chelsea, from the Hudson to the Tompkins Square Park.

But the city is not at its best in August. I feel cramped in my little apartment, and the cats are always watching me. When I think of the rest of my life, the pleasures that beckon are reading and nature. Passion—passion’s hard. It’s eaten holes in my brain. (It’s possible dementia did that, but passion and dementia are second cousins.) I’m even a little afraid of friendship. The idea of everyone I love getting inexorably older scares me. Getting older myself is no picnic either.

But arches of red stone. The desert at night, cactus and stars. They’re old already, vastly old, and still here and beautiful. And fireflies, moths, the moon, rabbits. Poetry.

A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts

The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur—

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten in the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

~Wallace Stevens

Black And White

My attitude toward the arrest of Henry Louis Gates is simple: the cop was wrong, and Gates overplayed it. The situation was more complex than Crowley being a racist. My take is that Crowley is guilty of racial profiling (like most of us) and that he has a very thin skin when it comes to being accused of it. When The Daily Show’s “senior black correspondent,” Larry Wilmore, did a bit on how thrilled Gates was to be in spotlight for being arrested-while-black, I laughed. Gates is a prima donna. (Yes, I know: this is not illegal.)

I didn’t feel the need to add my two cents to this story until I read Bob Herbert’s column in The Times today, headlined Anger has its Place. Columnists don’t make up their own headlines—if they did, this one would be considerably more forceful. Herbert is very angry and disgusted with the response to the story. He writes, “Most whites do not want to hear about racial problems, and President Obama would rather walk through fire than spend his time dealing with them.”

I was taken aback by that. Allowing for hyperbole, I think he’s right. Still, my feeling about this as been one of cautious agreement with the President: there’s so much to be done, this is a crazy country with a lot of racists in it, including large numbers of people who seem to have no idea that they’re racists, and simply doing his job well might be the best thing he can do for black America. And of course a part of me thinks: he’s not only the President of black America. If he loses support and becomes ineffectual because of morally correct, passionate statements about race, what’s in it for me?

Yet I respect Bob Herbert and it makes me sad that his feelings for Obama have soured. It worries me. It reminds me of my own anger about Obama’s caution in other areas—anger that I have heard from lots of Obama supporters in recent weeks. What I don’t want to happen is for people to let their disappointment with the President get in the way of keeping up the pressure on the White House and Congress.

I knew going in that Obama was emotionally conservative, a conciliator, that his color and charisma blinded people to his very evident politics. It blinded them in different ways, depending on whether they were Democrats or Republicans, Conservative or Liberal, sentimental idealists or rabid right-wing loonies. That was inevitable. Race is a hot button and charisma circumvents reason. I hated Reagan more than Nixon because he was charismatic: to me it was anti-charisma, disgust-making. And I remember very clearly seeing Bill Clinton on TV for the first time, in a debate with other primary candidates, and knowing he would win because he was so charming and slick (and smart). I was both charmed by him and scornful of others, equally enthralled, for thinking they were responding to his honest passion. If he’d been a conservative Republican, I would have hated him for it. As it was I didn’t fight my attraction, but felt a little dirty.

When Obama was elected and I was excited in that swoony way so many of us were, a radical friend of mine expressed contempt for my “fantasy” that Obama would be any different from other politicians. I didn’t think he would be, actually. But I thought a Democrat in the White House, elected on a platform of change, and a black man elected President were both such good things that a little tipsiness sparked by his personal magnetism was okay. If Clarence Thomas had been elected President—to give a shudder-making example—I would have been horrified but also kind of fascinated and thrilled.

So I find myself ambivalent. Not about the election—I’m still glad we have Obama instead of Clinton (forget McCain). But am I still an Obama supporter or simply someone who will vote for him next time?

***

Not long ago, I was walking down Bleecker Street after dark, and passed through a group of black teenagers coming out of a subway station. One hit me (deliberately) on the shoulder as he went by—not very hard, but hard enough to be called a blow, not a touch. I turned and yelled, “Fuck you, asshole!” Then another kid, a girl, hit me as she went by. I wanted to keep shouting and swearing but decided that since there were 15 or 16 of them, I should let it go.

Lately, it has occurred to me that there are parallels to the Gates-Crowley incident. Here were black kids acting in a culturally stereotypical way, as the white cop did with Gates, and I reacted with a level of anger that could have gotten me hurt. Yet the reason I expressed my anger at all is that I’m not afraid of groups of black teenagers per se. I see teenagers and I think children. I remember myself as a teenager: full of swagger and attitude, nonviolent. I know that they come in multiples because teenagers love being part of a group.

I don’t think Skip Gates was afraid of the cop either. He was angry and aggrieved and felt safe in venting his anger. And for the most part he was safe. Because of who he was, and because of what the Cambridge police force is, his arrest didn’t stick.

Lots of people have expressed surprise that someone as intelligent and worldly as Skip Gates could be so “stupid” as to yell at a cop. They could say the same about me yelling insults at a group of teenagers who had already made it clear they felt like picking on someone. But it seems to me being smart means knowing when you can express your righteous anger and get away with it, and how far you can go.  I didn’t run after the kids and punch one, and Gates didn’t say, “I’m going to fucking kill you for this, man.” We’re not that stupid.

***

“When angry, count to four. When very angry, swear.”

~Mark Twain

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.”

~Aldous Huxley

A Jungle of Small Bushes

Mouchette is spread across the top of the couch like an oil spill: shiny and undulant. When I stroke her, she elongates in that peculiar way cats have, as if they’ve read all the werewolf novels and are practicing their bone-liquifying tricks. Her little black and white patchwork head tilts up, nose poking at my hand, and I feel overwhelming love for this little oddity, who’s affectionate but never needy, unlike Fitzroy who checks in like a neurotic lover several times a day.

But I can’t help loving Fitz more because he stares at me in reproof if I don’t. Because he makes that Prrup noise when he jumps. Because he thanks me for meals. Because he loves being brushed and endures being cradled (white paws pushing at my crooning lips, face turned away with that mom-don’t-embarrass-me expression, but still purring) and rouses me when I sink into depressive torpor. He seems to know exactly when I’m thinking that life is just too much to bother with. He jumps on the bed and makes a racket, a very specific angry-anxious meow, repeated as necessary. I have no choice but to get up, make tea and find something useful to do, like changing the kitty litter or working.

Mouchette slinks in my room when I’m on the bed reading, waits for permission to ascend, then uses my bent legs as a tunnel, going through and back again in a way that reminds me of being a child, riding my bike through the flesh-colored porte-cochere of our house in New Jersey.* The fit is tighter for Mouchette than it was for me on my bike but that’s what makes it fun, her hard little skull getting its pleasure from squeezing through the crook of my knees, her body following like a greased licorice stick. I watch her and feel deliciously idle and female, girl-talking as she makes the circuit, admiring her sleek shininess. Fitz watches balefully from the floor, waiting to bite one or both of us.

For weeks, the only sounds Mouchette made were when Fitzroy attacked her. She’d scream or squeal or make a low, plaintive growling noise. I thought she was the silent type, human-wise. But lately she’s been practicing her meows. I’ll hear her and yell at Fitz to stop beating up his sister, only to go in the other room and find her sitting by herself on the arm of the couch, squeaking like a nest of baby mice (and believe me, I know just what a nest of baby mice sounds like). “What is that supposed to mean?” I ask and she just looks at me with those big, innocent yellow eyes. Soon she’ll have all the basic cat tricks down. Only yesterday as I walked past her, sprawled on the top of the couch, she swiped at me with her paw, claws extended, for no reason but that she could. She looked so languidly pleased after.

Now she’s in the other room, playing with her new Perrier bottle cap. Fitz has a catnip mouse the sweet young pet store guy threw in as a freebie. No other catnip toy has interested him much, but this mouse, a featureless lump with a tail, the very epitome of why-would-I-spend-good-money-on-that-crap has him completely charmed. He’s running in circles, flipping it into the air, carrying it around in his mouth.  I’m a sucker for the way cats look when they’re carrying something in their mouths, especially when it’s neither dead nor alive. They don’t look officious or manic the way dogs do. They look sexy, like French movie stars with cigarettes hanging from their lower lip.

* No Jersey jokes please.  I grew up in a green and verdant land. So did Frank Sinatra, Philip Roth, Savion Glover and Meryl Streep. My mother-in-law knew Meryl when she was a teenager, working a summer job. Yogi Berra lived a few blocks away from my family. There were fireflies, ice cream,  good sidewalks and woods for the cats to have their secret rituals far from human eyes.

Nursery Rhyme

There was a crooked man, and he went a crooked mile
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile
He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.

• A cat is a lion in a jungle of small bushes.
  - Indian Proverb
• Those that dislike cats will be carried to the cemetery in the rain.
  - Dutch Proverb

Of Brains and Bots

Farmer Wu Yu drives his rickshaw pulled by his self-made walking robot near his home in a village at the outskirts of Beijing.

The New York Times has a piece today about the dangers of computers becoming too smart. It was written in response to a group of scientists responding to Ray Kurzweil’s paean to the upcoming age of brilliant machines, when we will all be immortal and the world will be transformed beyond recognition. Oh right, the first half of that sentence pretty much implies the latter half. But transformed in even more ways! His book, The Singularity is Near, is fun and exciting-scary but not entirely plausible. But who can really know? The Times quotes Dr. Eric Horvitz, president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, as saying “Technologists are replacing religion, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture.” Yeah, that’s the goofy side of Ray. But the man’s no slackwit.

I can’t help feeling more intrigued by computers getting smart than worried about it. Maybe that’s because there are already so many doomsday scenarios out there, most of them very plausible, and/or because I’ve always been a fan of intelligence. If we create our superiors and they take over, so be it. Not if they’re nasty soulless machines, sure, but who says that’s likely to be the case? Intelligence without emotion doesn’t really function, as researchers have finally figured out—emotion is the stimulus for thought—and intelligence + emotion without empathy is hard for me to envision. That advanced AI creations might not have empathy for us is entirely possible. We’re not doing so well with chimpanzees and gorillas, are we?

Kurzweil’s thesis is that once computers attain self-consciousness, they’ll be able to direct their own evolution, without our cultural repugnance to the idea, and get smarter by leaps and bounds. I’m not sure about this; intelligence still needs experience to shape it, and with experience comes culture—who says the smart computer will be so interested in making the even smarter computer?

The Times story is not about the dangers of the Kurzweil scenario so much as about the dangers of somewhat-smarter systems; ones that will take over jobs or be exploitable by criminals, governments and corporations. Those are worrisome possibilities, and since they’ll happen (have already begun to happen) before genius computers offer us immortality in their digital arms, they’re more likely to shape people’s response to advances in AI. It’s hard to imagine what would really stop progress, though—without the yuck factor involved in engineering babies or creating animals that are nothing but meat, and without the historical evidence of nuclear experiments, public opposition probably won’t grow fast enough.

People won’t like it when their computers can critique their job performance accurately, and when the first auto-driven automobiles crash, there will be plenty who will disregard statistics that they crash 1/10 as often as other cars, or whatever may be the case. But there are too many very smart techno-freaks out there. And they revere intelligence more than I do, having more of it to begin with.

So get ready for an interesting next 20 years. Climate crash, self-aware computers…this Great Recession, our first black president, whatever you think is new and different about this moment in history—you ain’t seen nothing yet.

And for the here and now: what about robots that eat household pests? Check out this article from New Scientist

Sometimes I Feel Like A Fatherless Monkey

Venturing into the online world again, and feeling a little staggered: so many people, so much energy and hunger…artists, writers. All the talk of social networking and promotion, platforms, pratfalls, performing monkeys, it makes my head spin—I’m so not good at it. Yet there’s a definite pleasure in seeing how uninhibited everyone is, unlike the nearly chaste writers of my youth, afraid to be too eager, waiting for the powers that be to anoint them. (I waited too, waited long, unaware of the subtle art of kissing ass. Too proud? Too shy? Too dumb? Take your pick.)

If I didn’t need money, I’d say fuck the powers that be and publish everything myself online, let the readers find it whenever. A hundred or a million readers, who cares? Do I want to sell a million copies of anything? Other than for the royalty checks? I think it would wack me out. This culture has gotten too far ahead of me: I can’t imagine riding the wave anymore. I lost my moment, the 80’s, when I knew everything that became hot before it became hot but was just too unsure to write about what seemed my own private peculiar obsessions or interests. Now, the public discourse…there’s just too much of it. I like finding the good stuff, but it reminds me of trying to find a bra or a lipstick in Bloomingdales, wandering around the first floor, the lights, the music, thinking I might never escape.

My mother once asked me on the phone, “So how’s your little life?” and I don’t know how she meant it, affection or truth-blurted-out, or both, but I opted for the truth-blurted-out interpretation and was happy enough to admit that yes my life was little and it was, at that moment, fine. I’d wanted to make it big to impress everyone, but really that’s tiring.

I feel deep and quiet joy walking around the park, the tree-lined streets of the Village, and sometimes at art galleries. Literature? Maybe the chorus has gotten too loud. The muscle-stretching workout of writing something good, the pleasure of others liking it, these remain real, but literary status has become a toxic idea, and I’m not sure if that can change anymore.

I want to write a novel about Persephone in Hell. There are just so many hells to choose from. I liked Homer’s version better than Dante, I’m crazy about the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, but Persephone Queen of the Dead is the one I remain interested in. What it’s like, going from a being mama’s girl on a Greek hillside covered with flowers to kidnap and marriage to the cold and strange, the not-kind, not-Satanic, seemingly clinically depressed Hades?

It resonates in me deeply, this myth, yet when I think of the novel, it gets all chick-litty, frothy and cute dead jokes, and I think I have to go back and read more Anne Carosn and Louise Gluck. And further back to Christina Rossetti and Murasaki Shikibu. I have to  think about my cats, condemned for life to my apartment, the Stockholm syndrome, erotic attachment that has resulted.

***

Writers aren’t exactly people…. they’re a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.
~F.Scott Fitzgerald

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.~Colette

Untitled

I haven’t been posting lately because I have to focus on the novel I’m writing. When it’s going well, it shuts down a lot of the rest of my brain, leaving just about enough to feed the cats, clean up some, and take a walk a few times around WS park, (which is looking gorgeous these days, amazing swathes of tall, brilliant flowers, pristine lawns). It’s not that I work a lot of hours—not compared to most people—but my imagination needs to stay underground, so I just pop up to take a little nourishment now and then. Phone calls. Facebook. Coffee with Rachel tomorrow.

I went to see Barbara sing and dance flamenco on Monday, in a restaurant just down the street: very beautiful. I had a nice time talking to Lisa, who had invited me there, and pissed off Amelia (Barbara’s mother, my friend) because I was at her table being ignored and let myself be lured away. So far, so good, but I didn’t want to go back or say goodnight. The background and story of all this is complicated and not of interest to others—what I’m talking about is that when I’m woven into a novel I’m more easily tripped up by social awkwardness and the older I get the less willing I am to sort it out. It starts feeling strange to go to so much trouble, even while I’m appreciating the trouble others go to for me.  And I also realize I create or encourage the awkwardness to begin with, because part of me is angry I can’t be home with my book.

All this sounds worse to me as I write it. Especially because I know my mother will read it and she’s the one who did her best to teach me manners. At least she taught me what they’re for and how to use them when I want to. Thanks, Mom.

I got the cats to reduce my loneliness once Philip got caught up in Christine’s problem, but they’ve done their job too well. Now I find myself able to go several days without social interaction and don’t mind much. It makes it easier not to spend money. Garcia Marquez didn’t see any of his friends for the eight months he was writing A Hundred Years of Solitude. Proust only saw the friends who were willing to visit him in his apartment at 1 a.m. And there are countless unknown and terrible writers who never see anyone at all. So I’m just kind of in the middle, coming blinking out of solitary now and then.

But the cats think I’m God. And that pig in the water looks happy, doesn’t he?

Summer Weekend

Friday night, Charles and I went to what New York Magazine has just deemed the best pizza in the city (although Frank Bruni dismisses it as “soggy”), a place called Keste, where the owner is an ex-cheese salesman from Naples. I had planned to get there early but Charles’s plane was late so we arrived at dinner hour and there was a line. We ordered the pizza to go and ate in the little park at the intersection of Bleecker, Carmine and 6th.  There’s a tiered fountain in the middle of the park and the water was on—the first time I’ve ever seen it on in this park—and we had a view of the cool stone of Our Lady of Pompeii Church. It was a nice spot to think about whether the end will come by water or fire. Both seem equally likely in a coast city the coming sea-level rise is expected to hit especially hard, and which has, as a few of you remember, seen a lot of fire.

Actually, we didn’t spend much time thinking about that, though I do tend toward the apocalyptic these days. It was a beautiful evening and Charles was very happy, and I was reasonably happy, which is about as good as it gets. He enjoys the city so much on the weekends he’s here, and in July it’s good to remember there are people for whom Manhattan is a vacation.

I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong hills. That sentence comes to mind a lot—it’s never been far from my mind since I read Out of Africa, but it’s been especially resonant in the last few years. I miss my house in the country: the pear trees, mint, snakes, full moons, the green light coming in the windows of the bedroom where I’d read in the afternoon, during solitary summer weeks.

The pizza was as good as New York said it was. The crust was chewy and airy (“pillowy” a lot of reviewers write but I’ve never been fond of eating pillows, and anyway, chewy pillows?), charred but not sooty, and overall just right. It was a bit soggy in the middle but only because there were so many ripe barely-cooked tomatoes on it. My biggest complaint about pizza everywhere is that there’s not enough tomato, so I’m more than willing to put up with soggy middles. I had the capricciosa with fresh mozzarella from Di Palo’s, artichokes, mushrooms, Italian ham, extra-virgin olive oil, as well as tomato: perfect.

After we finished the pizza, we went for gelato at Cone on Bleecker, just across the street from Keste. Charles wanted six flavors but settled for three. I had two. We went home and told the cats what they’d missed.

Saturday, we went to the farmer’s market, and bought raspberries, blueberries, gooseberries, sugar plums, currants and peaches (and cranberry scones, parmesan black-pepper bread, green beans, tomatoes, basil, baby zucchini, fingerling potatoes and lamb chops). My faithful readers will remember I had a post mentioning sugar plums some time ago. I wanted to see what they taste like. They taste like plums.

Charles is leaving in an hour. He’s making pesto and vacuuming. He gave me his bankcard so I can get money whenever I need it. Currently there’s $115 in the account, so I won’t be tempted to overspend. I remember when he was feeding himself and two kids on $10 a week, so I’m willing to say we’ve made progress. He says he doesn’t feel any older inside than he ever did. How does that work? I’ve felt older every year since I was four. It used to be a  good thing. It’s not entirely a bad thing now, but. Definitely a thing.

(In the picture above, can you tell the gooseberries from the soochow jade beads?)

Penises in Peril

was going to make fun of how, in Nicholas Kristof’s serious, detailed, etccolumn on phthalates (a dangerous chemical in many plastics (here’s the link) http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/16/opinion/16kristof.html?_r=1 he uses the phrase “less penile volume” when he means pencil dick. But I don’t want to write about that now. Thinking about penises depresses me.

It’s a lovely summer night and the only penis in my vicinity is on a cantankerous cat with no balls. The boyfriend and I are on hiatus (not to be confused with Hyannis Port, where the Kennedys have roughhouse sex.). Why? Don’t ask. Oh, sorry, you didn’t. I just

am not supposed to talk about certain things although I could if I wanted, or could dance around nicely, but I’m tired of it all, the detours and byways, the heart-work, the way my life is in bits—.

Some of the bits are quite lovely, granted. Cats, Charles (who has mind-melded with Mouchette), my family, my friends, the park, poetry, picnics, penises—

No, no more penises. Not for me, not for anyone. I decree it, and Kristof confirms it. Boys will grow up with little ones, due to the plastic in every woman’s system, so don’t let your sons get a look at your aging whopper, or even your slightly-above-average-and-very-attractive whanger, and don’t get your daughters’ hopes up.

Don’t let her read those books where the stranger with the dark burning eyes, with whom the heroine has been hesitantly flirting, breaks through the door to her bedroom, shouting, “I must have you, my tempestuous beauty! I can wait no longer!” and so on more verbiage her clothes off, her body with the nice skin and big tits (note to self: fix description), until his mighty organ stands up proud, like the tower of Babel—no, I didn’t mean that, forget that—like a mighty oak, and, obviously, she can’t fit her hand around it, but who cares about her hand, the engorged head is assailing her inner portals, her secret lips having swelled, flushed, glistened with the nectar of love, and parted from each other by the miraculous workings of the human body, opening the way to her very core…

Don’t laugh. If the fantasy book doesn’t sell, romance is the next rung down. And these aren’t your grandmother’s romance novels either, unless she had a samizdat stash. To compete you need several-page-long scenes of sexual congress—no not that Congress, pay attention—and the man (or vampire, half-demon, werewolf) always wants to start with cunnilingus, for which he has such a mad craving he reminds me of my lesbian friend A. who now and then tries to seduce me.

To make it short: the lady has a swell time. And that’s fine; you want the character you’ve bought into to get properly banged, after the requisite teasers. But I don’t want to read so much slurping and sighing; it reminds of the damp tissues that pile up when I’ve had my heart broken, or, if you get those paranormals involved with their gargantuan appetites, the sopping paper towels when the toilet overflows.

What on earth was I talking about? The small dicks of the future. Well, it’s not my problem. I’ve written myself away from grief, though it lurks. Also, I notice I feel better once the shadows gather and he’s with her because he’s not thinking about me so much. He thinks about me late morning, late afternoon when the work slows—that golden time of day—and a lot on the weekends. We have a mental link. Very sweet and all but it’s a curse. He listens to Sinatra ballads every bloody Sunday, which has been proven to amplify the working of such curses. I want chocolate. And a witch. Get me a witch. One that barters for necklaces.

And somebody, please, clean up the world. Meanwhile, use glass, not plastic.

J.W. Diehl

I was going to make fun of how, in Nicholas Kristof’s serious, detailed, etc, column on phthalates (a dangerous chemical in many plastics (here’s the link) he uses the phrase “less penile volume” when he means pencil dick. But I don’t want to write about that now. Thinking about penises depresses me.

It’s a lovely summer night and the only penis in my vicinity is on a cantankerous cat with no balls. The boyfriend and I are on hiatus (not to be confused with Hyannis Port, where the Kennedys have roughhouse sex.). Why? Don’t ask. Oh, sorry, you didn’t. I just

am not supposed to talk about certain things although I could if I wanted, or could dance around nicely, but I’m tired of it all, the detours and byways, the heart-work, the way my life is in bits—.

Some of the bits are quite lovely, granted. Cats, Charles (who has mind-melded with Mouchette), my family, my friends, the park, poetry, picnics, penises—

No, no more penises. Not for me, not for anyone. I decree it, and Kristof confirms it. Boys will grow up with little ones, due to the plastic in every woman’s system, so don’t let your sons get a look at your aging whopper, or even your slightly-above-average-and-very-attractive whanger, and don’t get your daughters’ hopes up.

Don’t let her read those books where the stranger with the dark burning eyes, with whom the heroine has been hesitantly flirting, breaks through the door to her bedroom, shouting, “I must have you, my tempestuous beauty! I can wait no longer!” and so on more verbiage her clothes off, her body with the nice skin and big tits (note to self: fix description), until his mighty organ stands up proud, like the tower of Babel—no, I didn’t mean that, forget that—like a mighty oak, and, obviously, she can’t fit her hand around it, but who cares about her hand, the engorged head is assailing her inner portals, her secret lips having swelled, flushed, glistened with the nectar of love, and parted from each other by the miraculous workings of the human body, opening the way to her very core…

Don’t laugh. If the fantasy book doesn’t sell, romance is the next rung down. And these aren’t your grandmother’s romance novels either, unless she had a samizdat stash. To compete you need several-page-long scenes of sexual congress—no not that Congress, pay attention—and the man (or vampire, half-demon, werewolf) always wants to start with cunnilingus, for which he has such a mad craving he reminds me of my lesbian friend A. who now and then tries to seduce me.

To make it short: the lady has a swell time. And that’s fine; you want the character you’ve bought into to get properly banged, after the requisite teasers. But I don’t want to read so much slurping and sighing; it reminds of the damp tissues that pile up when I’ve had my heart broken, or, if you get those paranormals involved with their gargantuan appetites, the sopping paper towels when the toilet overflows.

What on earth was I talking about? The small dicks of the future. Well, it’s not my problem. I’ve written myself away from grief, though it lurks. Also, I notice I feel better once the shadows gather and he’s with her because he’s not thinking about me so much. He thinks about me late morning, late afternoon when the work slows—that golden time of day—and a lot on the weekends. We have a mental link. Very sweet and all but it’s a curse. He listens to Sinatra ballads every bloody Sunday, which has been proven to amplify the working of such curses. I want chocolate. And a witch. Get me a witch. One that barters for necklaces.

And somebody, please, clean up the world. Meanwhile, use glass, not plastic.

J.W.Diehl

In the Flesh

I went to my friend Camilla’s Open Studio this Friday. Her new work is mostly large paintings, nude self-portraits in which the figure is usually reclining and seen from the rear. They’re languorous and intentionally evocative of all the great nudes of art history; for some reason having to do with the bizarre state of the art world, Camilla feels there’s something narcissistic about painting the female nude. OK, she’s female. And it’s her, not a model. But although it’s entirely possible I’ve been conditioned by 10,000 years of art history, it seems to me that the female body is eminently more paintable than the male. And I understand her choice to not use a model because who wants another person around when you’re working?

In any case, her work was quite beautiful, sensuous and bold. Pink flesh tones, warm grays and browns. I’m glad that figurative painting is coming back. Check out her website—and for more beautiful nudes (and landscapes, dolls, and portraits, all selcouth and geason) my brother’s website.

Looking at Camilla’s paintings did what most good art does—it made me want to paint, which I loved doing as a child, but gave up, as a teenager, in favor of writing. I used to be a big believer in specialization. By the time I was out of college, even the idea of writing both poetry and prose seemed greedy.

Now I wish I’d spent a few years learning the craft. I know it’s not too late (well, maybe it is), but I also know that I’m not going to take the time right now to acquire a new skill, though brushing up on an old one would be a pleasure.

But maybe not. Maybe if I could sort of paint—better than I can do now, much worse than Camilla—I’d just be unhappy with the results. One reason I chose writing was that it was harder for me to see the flaws in my work. By the time I knew enough to get seriously discouraged, I was skilled enough not to be completely discouraged. It would be ironic, wouldn’t it, if that means I would have progressed faster as a painter? This assumes, of course, that I could ever have used that critical eye rather than running from it in terror.

What would I paint? Faces. Devils. Animals. Storms. A cow thrown up into the air by a tornado while a woman copulates with the devil in a ditch. Just for instance. Or a mother forcing gray cocoa down her angry child’s throat while the devil is outside, in the upper left corner, eating the universe as a pair of Dobermans watch. Needless to say (is it?) actually painting these scenes would not hold my interest. Really, I have no idea.

Another Saturday night. I was hideously depressed until about four o’clock, full of self-castigation about how much I let slip while I mooned over my unreliable lover, but now feeling ok. I upped my meds. Talked to Charles.  Posed Mouchette with Gloria Vanderbilt’s new erotic novel, Obsession, which Lisa for some reason thought was just the gift for me, and took photos. It’s the little things in life.

And now it’s Sunday night. Just like that.

Woman with Marmalade Cat

I have no idea what I’m doing with my life. It bewilders me. I see how I got here from last fall—and to last fall from the year before—and to there from 2005…but I feel like I’ve been running very fast with my heart in a sieve.

I can say:  I want cats and gardens, tranquility and travel, more books published, the smile and charm of this or that human being, newness. I want all my accumulated (frail) wisdom as well as regaining the queenly self of my youth—the one that hid mostly, but with good reason. Not hiding hasn’t paid off yet. My fault, probably.

But enough of that. This post is in honor of Fitzroy, whom the gods sent to comfort and annoy me; to comfort by annoying, by his insistently meowing and biting me on the chin, knee and toe, which pulls me from unhappy torpor. The marmalade cat wants me up and loving him, only him—when I stroke the sleek Mouchette, Fitz’s ears twitch and his narrow face turns into the mask of a mountain lion. That would terrify me if he was twice my size, but the girl-cat merely hisses.

I try to get a little work done during the cat battles, because when they stop, the love-cat stalks me with his white fuzzy ears that are shell-pink inside (they glow in any light), his nose the color of a strawberry beginning to rot, his tawny eyes half-lidded. He pokes his pointed face into mine, strolls across the laptop and makes a line of z’s on the page.

He doesn’t like the way the laptop gives under his feet. He’d much prefer a typewriter, the curling page helpless. I never tell him about the old days, the days of cat heaven, when paper was king.

His white is the white of luxury and soft ice cream, his tabby is candied orange peel. He bunches his back up like an accordion when I caress him, or else lifts his rear, making a steep slope down to his fluffy neck. Holding himself in that regal position, he accepts the tribute of my kisses and silly love songs.

I adore him, but when he comes in to my room once too often, I pick up his sloppy weight and lug him to the living room. I keep him out with a doorstop of many heavy books. When he’s determined, he can move it, but he’s learning to handle banishment.

I wish I learned so quickly. Or maybe I did. Maybe I learned too well.

In the recent New Yorker profile of Nora Ephron, promoting her new movie about Julia Child, Child is quoted as saying something to the effect that one must carry on even if “The cat falls in the stew…” When I read that I was in exactly the mood where I wanted to put the cat in the stew, but didn’t have a stew handy. When the beloved becomes obstreperous, fantasies of violence arise, mediated by the desire to retain possession, to control and absorb, in short, to eat…I’ve nibbled on the menfolk at times. The cat nibbles on me. He doesn’t know how lucky he is I don’t bite off an ear.

Later.

Mouchette hunts a Perrier bottle cap, Fitzroy hunts Mouchette, and I hunt both with the camera. They dislike the camera. When they can, they turn their faces, denying me their glorious eyes. I’d need a movie camera to properly capture Mouchette because she’s always moving, pacing, playing, circling what interests her in a sinuous writhe that recalls to me Coleridge’s lines from Kubla Kahn—

Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

When I was thirteen, I thought that described the life of the poet.
Drug dreams and thirteen year olds aren’t what they used to be. Now I have my cats and summer, and as long as I don’t think too much, all is well.

I’m going to see Camilla’s paintings today, during her Open Studio. I love her work. She said she was going to paint my portrait with Fitzroy. I can’t wait.

Mouchette

***

(This is only the first and third stanzas of this poem…you can look it up if you want more.)

The Jumblies

They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day,
In a Sieve they went to sea!
And when the Sieve turned round and round,
And every one cried, `You’ll all be drowned!’
They called aloud, `Our Sieve ain’t big,
But we don’t care a button! we don’t care a fig!
In a Sieve we’ll go to sea!’
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve…

The water it soon came in, it did,
The water it soon came in;
So to keep them dry, they wrapped their feet
In a pinky paper all folded neat,
And they fastened it down with a pin.
And they passed the night in a crockery-jar,
And each of them said, `How wise we are!
Though the sky be dark, and the voyage be long,
Yet we never can think we were rash or wrong,
While round in our Sieve we spin!’
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.

Edward Lear

Smiles of a Summer Night

(picture has nothing to do with post, except I’d like to be here)

I went out looking for the full moon and found it in the usual place, although the sky can be harder to see in Manhattan than I would like. Tonight it was the trees in the park obscuring my vision, so I cleverly found a spot where I could see the moon clearly, magic rolling off it like the daydreams roll off my tongue (backwards).

There were lots of people, in groups and alone, sitting on the rim of the fountain and on the stone benches. The cool summer air, strangers and moonlight plus streetlights gave it the feel of both crowded stage and lively forest, or maybe a lively forest on Shakespeare’s stage.

I was remembering how when I berate myself for all the failures of my life I have to admit that it wasn’t only depression and fear that stole opportunity but books and nights and this kind of solitary joy that wants as much time as it can get, that scorns society and appointments. I’ve had more than my share of this sweetness, though never enough.

I’m back now (in case the typing didn’t give it away) and sleek little Mouchette is lying beside my desk, a new step in our careful courtship of each other. We’re taking it slowly because the orange lordling gets so jealous, chasing and biting her when I show her favor, and because she’s naturally cautious, and because I give The One so much love I get somewhat cat-bored before it’s her turn. But she’s a kitty who knows how to play alone.

As do I. I’ve been alone since Friday. It becomes narcotic after awhile. Especially with cats and the city and the Internet—sending Charles pictures from my iphone, browsing Facebook—and knowing that if I want to, I can turn on the TV and find Michael Jackson and Sarah Palin, Obama and the Russians, Iranian and Chinese dissidents…

No. I’m not doing that tonight. The cats are starting crazy time: it’s near the stroke of midnight. I like to lie in bed and feel like a benevolent witch as they thunder through the apartment, pounding over my body as if it were furniture, just as my stepchildren did many years ago (though the kids were better at not sinking a foot into my belly).

I used to always make wishes under the full moon, and sometimes they came true, as will happen if you wish 12 times a year for gifts life is profligate with in any case. Tonight I asked for joy in myself and what wildness I can find, inside and out:  to be, just a little, like Artemis, Mistress of Animals, virgin goddess of the hunt.

Temple of Artemis, Ephesus

Pina Bausch

from Bamboo Blues, by Pina Bausch

I just read that Pina Bausch, the great German choreographer, just died of cancer. I am very sad, selfishly so. I love her work and didn’t seen enough of it: enough meaning all. I saw several pieces maybe 12-15 years ago, and then this fall went to Bamboo Blues with my niece Ramona, who loves and practices dance.

I won’t try to write a critique because I don’t feel fluid in dance vocabulary but, briefly, her pieces were wonderfully funny and haunting, dreamlike, with lots of characters in enigmatic interactions (flirting, vamping, raping, dying; most interesting  to me, bodies as found objects for other bodies to play with). The ‘dance’ movements were interspersed with little dramatic bits like Cornell boxes (and not at all like them, but tiny and contained and surprising). She was famous for her sets: the stage covered with earth, leaves, flowers, still pools or cascading water. She was nothing if not lush, and I found her work consistently gorgeous. That it was also deeply intelligent only proves to me that abundance is always the smartest story. (I know this is a point that needs development. Later.)

If you know nothing of Bausch’swork, look on youtube. I don’t know what’s there, but certainly something is.

It’s strange how all this week I’ve felt so aloof from the frenzy over Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, feeling no more for them in death than I did in life. I am who I am, too late to change that, but I’m not smug anymore about being divorced from mass culture. I don’t want to join in or I would, but there’s a certain loneliness.

So, feeling that, trying to put it aside and get on with the pleasure/pain of work, I read about Pina Bausch. Nothing more coming out of that exquisite brain, ever.  I would have liked to know who she was at 85 and 90.

Just before I saw the headline, I was adding up all the books I might be able to write in my lifetime, if I live an average span, and remembered how the arc of writers’ careers used to fascinate and terrify me. The great were always great young. Some writers emerged in middle or old age, but only briefly, as if the shock of recognition was too much to handle. As if they didn’t have the muscle.

It’s only recently that I’ve begun not to care about that. As they say in the world of finance, past performance does not predict future returns. What’s wrong with an endloaded career? It would be kind of cool. Three books published by the age of 54—not too shabby, it always impresses those who haven’t published any—and then a torrent, novels, essays, poems, an erotic memoir, a stocking stuffer book about my cats—.

Yeah. Cool. I better get on with it.

A Miscellany of Sex and Cats

WHICH OF THESE COUPLES WOULD YOU RATHER BE LIKE?

***

The Gay Pride parade is going on outside my window now. I’m not fond of parades, however important the cause, since I live so close to the park where they commence. This one has good energy, and the joy is infectious, which would make the noise easier to bear if the cats weren’t so disturbed.

They’re avoiding the windowsills, which are their usual daytime spots. They prowl and stare, wide-eyed, as the speeches and cries of the crowd wash over us. Fitzroy is asking for reassurance every two minutes. He’s inserted himself behind my laptop right now.

No, he’s heading for the window and the noise, then retreating and meowing. Mouchette sits quietly in the doorway, watching him, and then follows him to the bureau where they pause, looking around, on high alert.

In the Times Book Review today, there’s a review of Masters of Sex, by Thomas Maier, about Masters and Johnson. My friend Philip knows Maier from his college days; he also knows someone writing a play about Masters and Johnson. Statistically, it follows that there must be more literature in the works. I don’t believe the universe is steering them all towards Philip for some future destined event. I sure hope not.

It surprises me anyone is still interested in the duo. They were pioneers once, and they debunked the vaginal orgasm nonsense, but they also promoted the idea that women are naturally multi-orgasmic, which works well in soft-core porn romance novels, but has made a lot of us feel deprived. I can remember more than one man telling me he was going to make me come over and over, and I’d think good luck, buddy and feel sour. Not what you want in your mind while you’re taking your bra off.

Johnson is quoted as saying, “I had an active interest in sex, but never particularly to the men I was involved with.”

The way I hear this is probably not as it was intended: I never got to fuck the ones who turned me on. She and Masters married to promote their brand. It was titillating to America that a male and female scientist worked together on this risqué stuff, but it was their marriage that made it a satisfying story.

Apparently, they rarely had sex after marriage. But then, who does? (excuse-moi, dear husband. I know we did. Too often outdoors, in my opinion.)

Johnson said she considered the word ‘love’ to be “imprecise and inappropriate.” It’s not clear from the review if she was talking only about her own marriage or about all sexual relations. In any case, someone who has never experienced loving passion seems to me to be missing a big chunk of the subject. Sex without love is part of the human story and important to understand, but love is not a sentiment divorced from biological events. It certainly affects the way my body responds.

And what about mice? The New York Times says male mice sing to the ladies. When researchers played the recorded mouse mating song for female mice, the girls came to check it out—but only once. A song without a singer doesn’t appeal to the animal soul. They’re not likely to sit alone, drinking Gallo Hearty Burgundy and listening to Janis Joplin, stoking themselves with romantic self-pity because it just feels so bad.

Does that mean they don’t yearn? Who can say? Chimps may be the missing link. I know they get crushes (the females on male grad students especially). But I digress.

M&J wanted to be famous and were; they deserve their place in the  history of their era. But what’s going on outside my window is much more interesting. Gay culture has given us infinitely more information about sex, thanks to their penchant for experimenting and the fact that for the last few decades they won’t shut up.

More gays go into the arts. Their voices are amplified, and always have been, even when it was in code. It seems to me there is a lot more that could be written about that—not the obvious (who was gay and what that song/movie/novel was really about) but how much the rest of us have learned and assimilated.

I did a quick google search to see what has been written, and didn’t find what I was looking for, maybe because there are still too many deconstructionists in the universities. It’s all about discourse and how naming creates reality. I’m more interested in how reality creates reality. As they say in medical school, “see one, do one, teach one.” Oh, there are so many things I wish I’d seen and done.

Then I’d teach you. Promise.

Sung by the people of Faery over Diarmuid and Grania,
   in their bridal sleep under a Cromlech.

We who are old, old and gay,
O so old!
Thousands of years, thousands of years,
If all were told:
Give to these children, new from the world,
Silence and love;
And the long dew-dropping hours of the night,
And the stars above:
Give to these children, new from the world,
Rest far from men.
Is anything better, anything better?
Tell us it then:
Us who are old, old and gay,
O so old!
Thousands of years, thousands of years,
If all were told.

~William Butler Yeats

June Tune, Soon Done

Yesterday was my wedding anniversary. Today is the anniversary of my first date with my lover.

This is not coincidental. Nine years ago—when my marriage was in tatters after a long buildup of anger neither of us had the tools to address, and my husband was unemployed, and I had confessed a brief affair with the brother of my recently deceased close friend Ann, who’d been dying of cancer all spring, and whose memorial I had just attended, a service my husband didn’t attend because of the brother—nine years ago, my wedding anniversary consisted of the two us eating spaghetti with bottled sauce and no grated cheese (why bother?) on our laps as we watched TV.

I think we remarked on how pathetic this meal was, but perhaps not. It didn’t seem to matter. We were too numb. I had begun to spin away.

The next day, I was scheduled to go to our country house for a week alone, but woke up so depressed I impulsively called the office number of a man I’d been chatting with online. He invited me to lunch. He told me how pretty I was. He said he’d like to touch me. I took his hands. We sat like that, a two-handed grip in the white tablecloth Italian restaurant, and if this were a romance novel I could say whole centuries passed and you’d get the point without fanfare.

Centuries didn’t pass and we didn’t know we’d found love, but something happened and soon my shoe was off and my foot in his crotch. (I was being a show-off, yes, but it was good.) He carried his astonishment and pleasure well, a slight adjustment of body and expression conveying a hard-earned sophistication. I was 45 and felt like every girl Sinatra’s referring to in the classic, It Was a Very Good Year. *

And then all the rest of it. Other days and nights, other years. Broken dates, broken hearts, marriages melted down and cast into strange new shapes. We each live apart from our spouses, but our spouses remain primary. My husband was just here from Florida and we celebrated both his birthday (a week late) and our anniversary (4 days early). We went to hear Junior Mance at Café Loup. Charles went up to Junior afterward and said, “I’ve been a fan of yours since the ‘50’s.” I felt like I was in a sci-fi movie though it’s only the ordinary passage of time. Charles is older than me by more than a decade, but still. I remember when the ‘50’s were 20 years ago.

After that we went to a bar and had too many drinks and the next day Fitzroy was upset because I didn’t get out of bed at the usual hour. He walked on my back, up and down, then settled between my shoulder-blades, meowing. Get up Mom. What do you mean, you have a hangover?  Moms don’t get hangovers.

I got up. Eventually.

Tonight I’m celebrating with Philip. I have 24 red roses on the bureau I’m trying to keep the cats from eating. I’m wondering if I should have taken over the restaurant planning. I’m thinking June is a bitch. But I don’t regret getting married, and I don’t regret that day nine years ago. Life is an unwieldy machine.

*It Was A Very Good Year

When I was seventeen
It was a very good year
It was a very good year for small town girls
And soft summer nights
We’d hide from the lights
On the village green
When I was seventeen

When I was twenty-one
It was a very good year
It was a very good year for city girls
Who lived up the stairs
With all that perfumed hair
And it came undone
When I was twenty-one

When I was thirty-five
It was a very good year
It was a very good year for blue-blooded girls
Of independent means
We’d ride in limousines
Their chauffeurs would drive
When I was thirty-five

But now the days grow short
I’m in the autumn of the year
And now I think of my life as vintage wine
From fine old kegs
From the brim to the dregs
And it poured sweet and clear
It was a very good year

–written by Ervin Drake in 1961 for the Kingston Trio. Sinatra’s version won him a Grammy in 1966 for Best Male Vocalist.

Father’s Day

A handsome guy, isn’t he? In his boxers and tee shirt, baby in hand, beer bottles on the side: most likely a Sunday. Judging by the size of my brother, very possibly in June. 1951.

I can’t celebrate Father’s Day in the ordinary fashion because my father killed himself 44 years ago last Wednesday, when he was 44 years old. He was 44 and 6 months (exactly), so next December 16, he’ll be dead as long as he was alive. I suppose I should save the date.

I remember as a little kid suddenly putting together the father images from books and TV—strong and loving protector, befuddled nice guy—and the person I knew as Daddy: the snarl of a cornered animal inside the fence of a good suit. The stench of anger and unhappiness. The guy in the photo was still there, but emerged too rarely to do anything but gape at.

It was a weird mindfuck. I had a father and I didn’t. It was especially striking because my mother fit the storybook prototype so closely. She might dress up more and not cry as much as some, but many of my favorite books had mothers who were glamorous and stoic. I had no problem thinking of her as the ur-Mother against whom all others were measured. Daddy on the other hand…

When I remember that long-ago moment, what I see/feel is a whirl of emotion, hot and dark, spiraling down into the pit of my stomach. It was more than I could make sense of or handle—part of the reservoir of stuff usually hidden in that place Freud made us believe in, though he couldn’t get the map right. Something had broken a piece free and it popped into consciousness, vertiginous, only to be sucked down again quickly. I forgot but I remembered. The feelings were gone but I had a snapshot. Much later I made sense of that snapshot and had all sorts of questions for that little girl. Mostly this one:

Who did you think he was, then, before you understood that he was a father?

I knew he was attached to all of us inescapably, and that I wanted him as much as feared him. He was certainly vivid; he held the room when he was in it, if only with his silence. But he wasn’t real in the way my mother was. My mother was like breath or sleep. My father had violence going through him continually, from the boom of a thunderstorm to a quiver in his pulse, and I jumped back from that. I erased him.

I don’t mean I didn’t notice or have forgotten his presence, his personality, his insults, his threats (children running upstairs as the man shouts, “I’m going to brain you!” that southernism adding a layer of sci-fi gothic), but they were removed from me. He shouted; we fled. I never thought about why he did anything.

When I cut the cord with my mother, I was old enough to know I was doing it, and to keep my finger on the way back. With Daddy it took place so early I couldn’t quite place him. Even as he belonged, he was a stranger in the house.  His death cleaved me in two, but the aboveground part, the daily Margaret, was very relieved to live in a house with only family, even if we were all more than a little nuts.

My father embodied anger: anger as the flag of a country, as a deadly sin, a god.  I’ve met plenty of people as angry or angrier than he was—the world is full of them—but he was the only one of his breed that I’ve ever loved. Anyone else, if I get a hint of that kind of rage, my heart chills instantly. No matter what they’ve suffered, their excuses, I feel no sympathy for them.

Those are the people I can be cruel to without compunction. Though I try to talk myself out of it, on some level I think of them as having no souls. They rage; I wither.

I’m well aware that this is my anger, and that I indulge it. That I often feel very fond of it, that it’s why I have so many fantasies of killing in self-defense or in defense of a loved one or a child. I wonder if I would feel as utterly undisturbed by righteous killing as I imagine. Probably not. On the other hand—and this is an aside to my sister—I really don’t feel bad about killing mice.

I rarely lose my temper and I put a lot of thought into fairness. That’s how I keep my anger bound, how I balance it. That’s how I love my father.

There should be other parts to this, like buying him the new Philip Roth or a bottle of single malt, but so it goes. When your father kills himself a few days before Father’s Day, you kind of get the message there’s nothing he wants from you.

Beyond Coffee

There’s been a lot in the press lately about cognitive enhancement drugs, popular in the military, on college campuses, among cutting edge geeks, parents of kids with ADD, and—as of now, I would guess—reporters.

I’m familiar with one of these drugs: Provigil, aka Modafinal. My psychopharm gave it to me a few years ago for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome but the dose was too strong and I felt like I was on speed. It was great for the first few hours. I went to a session after taking it and the doc was so impressed with my new, bright, lively personality, full of urbane chat…no more mopey girl…he perked right up like a dog offered a treat. That was the woman I could be, with a little gene tweaking—someone capable of a spectacular, multi-faceted career. I try not to dwell on it. I collapsed like a cheap umbrella in late afternoon.

Recently, I tried again, cutting the pill in thirds. I was pleasantly surprised: less excitement, no outsize charm, but much less crash. It’s effective for writing. I become very focused and the words ribbon out smoothly, no better than my usual words, and sometimes not on point, because they come so quickly, right off the assembly line. But I can adjust that. Aim the stream to the left. It’s better than sitting limply in the chair thinking about chocolate, aging, and how much my ass hurts.

The drug gives a narrow window, 2-3 hours, before I get jittery. The jitters aren’t too bad— dinner or a snack or a glass of wine will soothe me. So I save the drug for afternoon, which is when I need it anyway. I’m still good for morning writing.

After the jitters pass, I feel relaxed, happier than usual, and tend to go to sleep early. I don’t know how this drug works to keep people awake all night. One of the best things about it for me is that the energy jolt has a long tranquilizing tail. I hope the military keeps in mind individual reactions. (Yes, I know, nobody like me ends up in the army. Still.)

Some reporters have been very enthused and/or apprehensive about these new drugs, seeing a world of brains on steroids, the poor falling further behind and the affluent users burning out or paying some hideous price down the line. 20 years of a dozen more IQ points, then your brain shrivels to the size of a ferret’s, and the government has to erect large wildlife preserves for the ex-middle class.  Addiction is a more immediate danger.

Modafinal works by blocking dopamine re-uptake in the brain, which is also what cocaine and crystal meth do. This has some scientists worried about addiction. Modafinal doesn’t work exactly the same—cocaine and meth not only slow the re-uptake of dopamine but also boost production, and whether that makes a longterm difference or only makes the addiction take root more slowly, nobody knows.

Brain researcher Karley Little said, “Normally, when something pleasurable happens, dopamine neurons pump the chemical into the gaps between themselves and related brain cells. ‘Dopamine finds its way to receptors on neighboring cells, triggering signals that help set off pathways to different feelings or sensations.” This means it ’s used in lots of important brain functions, including the desire/reward system for eating, sex, and other necessary pleasures.

But unless it becomes criminalized, it will be used more and more widely.  I don’t feel smarter on Modafinal. I might be less smart. But I’m able to work at times when I couldn’t, and if that’s very tempting to me, it will be irresistible for many.

I can’t take Modafinal more than a couple of times a week, or I get fatigue hangovers. It’s also very expensive, and insurance won’t pay. When my stash runs out, I may try buying it online from Canada. The difference is $1.73 a pill for Canadian generic to $15-$20 a pill for American Provogil. (Maybe I should move to Canada. A little stone house outside of Montreal, near the mountains, with fruit trees and a garden; I’d winter in Florida. Remember how Canadians welcomed draft dodgers in the ‘60’s? Do you think they’ll do that for U.S. healthcare refugees? No, I don’t think so either.)

But Modafinal and Adderall and the rest of the Ritalin-type drugs are only the first wave. Let’s see what Pfizer, Merck and GlaxoSmithKline bring us in a dozen years. I’m hoping for a little wand, the size of a candy cigarette, that I could use to touch my skull at various points—adjusting the (something) to tell the navigation system whether to go deep or shallow—and sizzle up whatever region I want.

Language. Memory. Desire. The kind of desire I felt in 2000-2003, or 1973—that would be sweet. Or sleep. Sleep at the touch of a wand: we could put our elderly (a class my generation will soon slop over and swamp) in Sleeping Beauty cities, waiting, outside of time, for when time produces the right drugs and habitable planets for the baby boomers to continue their usurpation of the universe.

Is there a Doctor in the House?

I am very angry about the AMA’s decision to come out against the Obama health care plan.  I know they don’t represent most doctors; that many of them have financial interests in insurance and pharmaceutical companies; I know that they’re only a few rungs above the NRA. Yet my cat has chosen this moment to interrupt me and he’s doing his bunny dance, reminding me of childhood Easters and the unutterable beauty and helplessness of domestic animals.  I can’t help but think: who will take care of him if I die from some illness I don’t have insurance for?

It’s not an idle question. I get my insurance through my husband, who could be laid off any day. He’s retirement age, so they probably wouldn’t even let him have cobra. Already I ignore the phone calls from the doctors. It’s been too long for any anomalous test results; any inquiries now have to do with insurance problems. Let them come to me. Many times. I’m in no hurry.

My dear friend Philip was talking today about how he now understands how in the 60’s and 70’s men like him could just suddenly decide to drop out, abandoning corporate jobs for quick pleasure and freedom and whatever might follow. I reminded him that many of the college-age hippies had fathers just like he is now; imprisoned in the corporate world, suffocated. They saw the future.

He’s not quite ready to forgive our generation’s hippies, whom he pigeonholes as  trust fund babies, though the great majority weren’t, but we both hope for a pervasive, across-the-board revulsion for the establishment. If it happens, it won’t be like the ‘60’s. It’ll be smarter, more focused and less pure, less experimental. It will be the 21st century response.

Like most people who didn’t suffer inordinately in prison camps, war zones or extreme poverty, I would not give up the era of my youth. My mother wouldn’t give up her era, and I suspect my grandmother would have felt the same. It’s like the Philip Larkin poem, “Sex began in 1963/ a little late for me” –a brilliantly bitter poem—which goes on to talk about how his father’s generation probably envied his for not being so hidebound by the church. There’s always more freedom and more loss.

Back to the AMA. I used to fear and dislike doctors. I’ve come to be very fond of the several I go to regularly (even when they don’t remember me) and the few I know socially or as family members. I’d like them to throw off their chains. For a segment of society that’s very well educated, bookwise and peoplewise, and still accorded great respect, and more than that is in the middle of one of the biggest policy decisions of our time, I think they could be more creative. Remember the Million Man March? Get it together, docs. Do something. You don’t have to agree on the details: Congress will assume control of them anyway. Work, parenthood, religion, science, art—whatever moves you, whatever makes you feel like a human being and a citizen, depends on health (and on the fear of illness kept to a quiet murmur in the head).

The ability to heal and prevent many diseases is the rare gift of our era. Gifts are more than the solutions they offer. Their power lies in their very existence: that we are blessed. Do we really want to destroy the awe-inspiring fact of that with squabbles over money made by those who never see a patient?

That’s what it’s come to. I read about advances in cancer treatment and diabetes, in malaria and AIDS, and it seems like none of it matters.  When you’re fifty-something with a few anomalies, on a handful of drugs, and the tests become unattainable, it feels like adolescence. Adolescence the way I experienced it, on the cusp of the 70’s. Anything could happen, and did. I didn’t expect to be saved by my mother, though I did expect to be housed and fed. The dangers, though, the dangers that were always there for a kid like me, testing boundaries (drugs, sex)—it feels like that now, except I have less choice. I’m out on my own with my body.  Illness will come or it won’t. I’ll be able to pay for doctors, or I won’t.

For that uncertainty I blame the AMA. The Republicans. The citizenry—the ignorant, the greedy, the shortsighted and the daft majority who thinks nothing has anything to do with them, until it does.

And I blame myself, but that’s another story. One I’m not going to write at 3 a.m

*****

“One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating. This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.”

~John Berger

“

Cats

The little one is more at home now. She trots like a puppy, pokes her pointed head into my hand, sleeks her weasel body down low under my caress. Her fur is softer and shinier; she’s eating well. Her belly is taut and warm. Her motor thrums.

It makes Fitzroy angry. He stalks off to lie on the floor at a distance. I can’t blame him. It’s when he seems to forget the new regime and comes to me in the old way, eyes soft with cat-love and I receive him with delight, stroke the white feathery triangle under his chin and tell him he’s the most beautiful of cats, my best-beloved, that she eagerly arrives, purr already louder than his, to demand more than her share.

She’s a classic younger sister. The pair reminds me of my nieces. (I could say, my sister and myself, but I was a child then and saw things differently.) He certainly abuses her enough to fuel any kind of sibling war, pounding after her and heaving his bulk upon her scrap of a body, attempting impossible mating. It’s not clear if she knows what he’s after. It’s easy to see now that feminist attempts to either separate or conflate sex and aggression are hopeless.

She yowls and wails. She hisses like a snake. She steals his windowsill, his food, his place in my heart. No, not the last. But I can understand that he’d see it that way. I can understand how it might make itself true, if he continues to chill. I worry that I should have stopped at one, kept up that unbalanced romance, at the price of his loneliness.

Since I got him to ease my own loneliness, which had moved far into the red zone, to the place where sanity begins to melt like a soft metal, I couldn’t ignore his. The danger of anthropomorphism has always seemed to me less than the danger of using an animal as an object, paying no attention to obvious signs of distress.

He’s not lonely now, just angry. Dissatisfied in a different way. When she wreathes around my hand, having successfully evicted him from my bed, he hunches over the dry food bowl, crunching the chicken-lamb-rice-dried beet pulp morsels.

All his body language is different. His tail smacks the floor; he walks away when I caress him. I never see him perched on the top of the couch—in plain sight, in the middle of things, Cat to my Woman. Now he’s a just a cat. There are millions of them.

When I came home the other night and he was amorous in the old way, rubbing his cheeks against me and gently biting my chin, and she was nowhere in sight and didn’t appear, which is unusual, and this went on for awhile, I wondered if he’d killed her. Then I wondered how I’d feel if he had.

My passion surged darkly. I’d forgive him. He’s my firstborn.

Philip was shocked when I told him this. But Philip was too squeamish to read Sophie’s Choice. And in truth I’d be very disturbed if Fitzroy killed Mouchette. It’s out of character. He hasn’t hurt her. All he wants is to be dominant.

But she’s a wildling.

Spitfire

Mouchette has been here three days. The first night, we kept her locked in the bathroom. Fitzroy knew she was there, of course, and crept up to the door a few times, sniffing and looking through the crack (none of the doors in my apartment really close). Then this cat, who has never given his reflection in the mirror even one glance, no matter how many times I held him up and pointed it out to him, walked over to the long vertical mirror in my bedroom, stood up on his hind paws, his front paws resting on the glass and gazed at himself.

Has he finally realized he’s a cat? Was he checking that his hair looked okay?

The first day, they hissed and spat at each other. They still do that, but with less intensity. He wants to jump on her, in both the wrestle-play and sexual sense, and she, half his size, rebuffs him, her white-tipped paws waving, headlight eyes glowing devil-yellow. This makes him sulk and retreat, sitting humped like a meatloaf*, his white ruff ruffled. Meanwhile, the slink-princess creeps up behind him and nips at his fat tail. 

She can stretch her body to an unnatural length when she needs to, like a cartoon character or a superhero. On her hind legs, she looks like a black felt-tip pen or a licorice twist, sprawled on the table she’s the charred hotdog a child has cooked and abandoned.

She can climb up and around the bookshelves—which contain, as well as books, open boxes of beads, framed photos, little bowls, bells, ceramic hyenas and other thoughtful gifts I’ve received over the years. She can wind her way through the lipsticks, pencils, necklaces, face cream and pill bottles on my bureau; burrow through my basket of important, ignored papers; and squeeze inside a drawer left open a couple of inches. My apartment is to her what all children want, a fabulous, slightly dangerous unmediated test of agility and balance.

She purrs when I stroke her skinny ribs but startles easily and won’t let me pick her up. She stares up at me with her piebald face like an urchin who’s been told not to speak to strangers and won’t, even if her mother is gone for the rest of her life. She comes running whenever I lavish affection on Fitz, demanding to be part of the cuddle, but she’s not used to people: she butts me with her head, then shies away from my lifted hand.

At her latest attempt, Fitz laid a caramel-and-cream paw on her back, bent down and grasped her neck between his jaws. Just like tigers do it on PBS! Oh, Mouchette, aren’t you excited!

 She wasn’t.

* CAT–One hell of a nice animal, frequently mistaken for a meatloaf. – B. Kliban

The Urchin Bride

I wish it would be like this all summer, mild sunny days, perfect for walking, a little wind now and then, never too hot or too cold, and Charles doing the vacuuming.

We ended up not going out Sunday, because we were too sleepy. He’s sleepy when he visits because he’s away from his job, and his sleepiness infects me, even as I feebly try to tempt him with museums and shows. As usual, all we’ve managed is meals and walks.

Well, not quite. We got another cat from the shelter, a little slinky, black and white 10-month-old female named Mouchette. She looks a little like a weasel and a little like a skunk, but mostly like a Parisian waif who comes out only at night, wrapped in her threadbare black fur to haunt the cafes and bar, sometimes stealing a drink or a bit of bread, sometimes charming her way into a hot dinner. What a girl does to secure that is her own business.

Patricia who rescued her (months ago) delivered her—a house call was necessary to be sure we were proper parents. Fitzroy jumped off the windowsill and hissed at his caged bride and Patricia suggested we take Mouchette into the bathroom, so she could be in a small safe place. My bathroom is very small, so I waited outside as Charles went in with Patricia. She was very impressed because he got in the bathtub to sweet-talk Mouchette, who was cowering near the drain. Once he performed that stunt, the interview was effectively over. Of course, he’s leaving today but no need to mention that. I will take care of them.

Today, it’s been cat chasing cat, meeting to hiss and spit, cat running away. They stalk each other and flirt, then spring away like those little black Scottie dog magnets. Mouchette is more persistent than Fitzroy, because she was raised with other cats and is determined to affirm the social order. He’s aloof but once engaged wants butt-sniffing and body-contact rowdy play while she seems more interested in flaunting, aggravation and creeping.

I got her mostly so that Fitzroy would have a cat life, freeing me to work all day without feeling like I had to entertain him, but for now at least they are entertaining me with their performance of feline courtship rituals, which neutering doesn’t really affect.

They aren’t really neutered, anyway. Not where it counts, in the brain. He’s male; she’s female. Missing a few bits perhaps, but neither of them has any doubts what they are.

***

For my Cat Jeoffrey

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his fore-paws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the fore-paws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For Sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For Seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For Eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For Ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For Tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having consider’d God and himself he will consider his neighbour.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day’s work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he’s a good Cat.
For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.
For every house is incompleat without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.
For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt.
For every family had one cat at least in the bag.
For the English Cats are the best in Europe.
For he is the cleanest in the use of his fore-paws of any quadrupede.
For the dexterity of his defence is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.
For he is of the Lord’s poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually – Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.
For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.
For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in compleat cat.
For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in musick.
For he is docile and can learn certain things.
For he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation.
For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.
For he can jump over a stick which is patience upon proof positive.
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.
For he can jump from an eminence into his master’s bosom.
For he can catch the cork and toss it again.
For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.
For the former is affraid of detection.
For the latter refuses the charge.
For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business.
For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly,
For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.
For he killed the Ichneumon-rat very pernicious by land.
For his ears are so acute that they sting again.
For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.
For by stroaking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God’s light about him both wax and fire.
For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, though he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadrupede.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the musick.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.

—

Christopher Smart (1722-1771)

Come and Gone

August Wilson and wife, Constanza Romero, 1999

So Barack and Michelle came to New York to see a Broadway play. Not just any Broadway play, but one I saw too, just last week. Cool as it would have been to see it with the Obamas, I think it would have been distracting. And all those Secret Service men would have made it harder to sprint for the ladies’ room during the intermission. (My companion, who had to slip out to use the restroom during the first act, would probably have been arrested before he cleared the aisle.)

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is a great play. It’s the second in August Wilson’s monumental 10- play cycle exploring the black experience in America. It’s complex, passionate, rich in language and character, joyful, tragic and funny. But more to the point—regarding the Republicans’ lament that the President should not have been allowed to leave his duties to attend the theater, especially since he didn’t invite the CEO of General Motors to go with him—the play resonates in important ways with the issues facing this Administration.

1) The central character was illegally captured and imprisoned for 7 years.

2.) An inability to get credit holds back a smart, entrepreneurial man.

3) Still, he manages to own a house by taking in boarders.

4) A salesman with a good database can find anyone.

Perhaps everyone in Congress should be required to see the play, and to write a 5-page paper explaining its central themes. These would be randomly shuffled into papers written by New York City high school seniors, and marked by teachers; only those Congressmen who scored as high as students in the top 25% should be allowed to keep their posts…

Here I go again, dreaming about small government.

Tonight, Charles and are going to a PS 122 production of Jimmy, a one-woman show written and performed by Marie Brassard. The New York Times describes it thus:

“Jimmy is a gay hairdresser inhabiting the psyche of a sleeping American officer who, having seen him in a bar, has adopted him into his memory. Jimmy is on the verge of kissing Mitchell, another fantasy figure, when the sleeping general dies, leaving Jimmy in a nether world, seeking consummation.

“Until years later, that is, when he is resurrected in the actress’s subconscious, joining regular residents there: a little girl and the actress’s old and judgmental mother…Against this background are excursions down shadowy corridors like race, sexuality and politics.”

It’s a good thing the Obamas didn’t decide to see this. I’m not sure the Republicans would have ever recovered. On the other hand, I doubt if The Times will ever recover from lines like “excursions down shadowy corridors like race, sexuality and politics.” Does anyone have any idea what this means? If one must resort to metaphor I think “waterboarded into the glaringly lit, cacophonous Grand Central Station of race, sexuality and politics” would be more apropos.

I’ll let you know if it’s any good.

****

From Joe Turner’s Come and Gone

LOOMIS. Had a whole mess of men he catched. Just go out hunting regular as you go out hunting possum. He catch you and go home to his wife and family. Ain’t thought about you going home to yours. Joe Turner catched me when my little girl was just born. Wasn’t nothing but a little baby sucking on her mama’s titty when he catched me. Joe Turner catched me in nineteen hundred and one. Kept me seven years until nineteen hundred and eight, kept everybody seven yeras. He’d go out and bring back forty men at a time. And keep them seven years. I was walking down this road in a little town outside Memphis. Come up on these fellows gambling. I was a deacon in the Abundant Life Church. I stopped  to preach to these fellows to see if I could turn some of them from their sinning when Joe Turner—brother of the Governor of the Great Sovereign State of Tennessee—swooped down and grabbed everybody there. Kept us all seven years.

Friday Night and I Ain’t Got Nobody

I haven’t posted in so long it feels peculiar. I’m not sure I want to. But it’s like a closed window and I miss the fresh air.

I’m waiting for Charles to arrive and his plane is delayed 2+ hours so I’m restless. I’m cooking Bolognese sauce, mostly because I like how long it takes. It’s the only kind of kitchen pleasure I can have in my closet apartment, to cook something slowly so the aromas penetrate, so I can sit in my bedroom writing and know the sauce simmers, reminding me someone is coming.

That sounds pathetic, but that’s how it is when I work hard. I shut myself into the novel all day, and then once freed of it, feel like a naked grub. No, not really. I’m wearing my green lounging around dress so I’m not naked (though a bit grubby). It’s just Friday night in the Village and I can feel the excitement, hear the traffic, anticipate the swarms of revelers about to descend on the hopeful bars.

Cocktails, strappy shoes, seafood, perfume, jazz, first dates, pick-ups, girls’ night out, powerful New York couples dining quietly…me and Fitzroy smelling my sauce cook, this dopey cat who has been offered 4 kinds of food and refused them all. After awhile he starts growling and acting like I’m going to hit him whenever I move. One’s early life can cast such a shadow…

The wine I bought for the sauce is elderly, edging into brown, and tastes like sherry. I had two sips and have a headache. It will probably taste fine cooked with beef and veal and peppers and tomatoes. I’m going to stew rhubarb as my sister did over the weekend, serve it to Charles over Haagen Dazs passionfruit ice cream.

***

It’s been interesting to notice how the idea that thought cannot exist without emotion—something scientists started saying several years ago, and many of us knew from the time we started thinking about thinking—has now caught on in a big way, making it into columns by David Brooks and Nicholas Kristof, among many others. So now it’s boring. I hope computers become self-conscious in my lifetime, or else Jesus (or Athena or Thor, Isis, Quetzalcoatl, I don’t care) comes back. Our collective human brain is starting to feel like Port Authority, circa 1985. A dirty sameness, wormlike buses going in and out, the usual predators and their unsuspecting prey watched over by drunken schizophrenics.

By the way, WS park is really looking lovely. Check it out, New Yorkers. The rest of you—I have an apartment I’ll trade if you live anywhere interesting, and like cats…

 

From Overheard in New York (overheardinnewyork.com)

Suit to man with cat on his head: Why is there a cat on your head?
Man with cat on his head: Why isn’t there a cat on your head, douchebag?

–Union Square

 

Washington Square

“She ordered a cup of tea, which proved excessively bad, and this gave her a sense that she was suffering in a romantic cause.”~Henry James, Washington Square

I went to Washington Square Park yesterday, to witness its grand re-opening. It was a perfect spring day: warm and cool, blue and sunny, with a little breeze. There were lots of people in the park at 6 p.m. Mothers with strollers and young men with guitars, tourists and NYU summer-school students and neighborhood folk. Everyone seemed to agree that the park looked beautiful, though a few old-Village types smiled ironically and wouldn’t stop for comment. It wasn’t the kind of day or crowd where you even wanted to say, It sucks.

Little children played in the fountain. People took pictures. They sat on the benches and on the grass, and though this is New York and people mingled with strangers only at the kid magnets and in front of the performers, there was a general mood of goodwill. Nobody was screaming about a wasted 27 million.

Most of the park was closed for two years for renovation, the most controversial part of which was realigning the stone fountain so it was centered with the arch (erected out of wood and plaster when Washington was elected President; in the 19th century redone in marble as a copy of the Arc de Triomphe). The renovation designer is George Vellonakis, who, according to The New York Times, envisioned “viewing corridors” and “great, clean lines.”

Lots of us thought the park and the fountain was fine the way it was. Off-center: so what? I’d never noticed and when it was pointed out to me, I realized it was part of the charm, tacit notice that you were not in Rockefeller Center or on the Champs-Elysees. Just in case you forgot. You were in Greenwich Village, which has its own history, much of which involves the off-center. The park was originally a cemetery for the indigent and victims of yellow fever, and then a military parade ground. More recently, artists and writers created the culture of the 20th century in the surrounding streets, while destroying marriages, neglecting their kids, driving their friends to distraction and dying of drink.

How often have you stumbled home profoundly intoxicated by one substance or another and been unable to make the world line up as it should? It doesn’t matter whether your answer is never, all the time, or only in my lost, glorious youth. The old fountain embodied it for you. It said: here be geniuses and crackpots. Check your compass. Hold onto your date and your wallet.

The park has gentrified almost beyond recognition since I first saw it in the late 1960’s. For years it’s been green and lush, full of flowers, carefully planned and tended to. When I used to prowl it at 14, smoking joints or drinking Mateus under a tree with my cousin Faxy, the grass was dingy and matted with dogshit, there was lots of trash, and I don’t remember any flowers. Of course it was always night when we went there, so I might not have noticed flowers.

My park was mutilated in 1970 when the grass was ripped out for a cement “playground” with humps in it like what you’d expect if a few visiting camels fell into the mixer. The humps were supposed to inspire childish play: they were good for skateboarding, which I had outgrown. I preferred dim greenery where I could swig cheap wine and wait for my prince to come.

Park planners were surprised that the humps were taken over by minority kids practicing difficult moves on jazzed up boards. I guess they’d  expected Caucasian 8-year-olds to run up and down playing tag, exercising their chubby little legs.

I left the Village for a couple of decades, moving back in time for the crack years. My stepson could tell you more about that; he spent the summer of ’86 hanging in the park every night, selling my antique silver jewelry for drugs. Crack? I have no idea.

In those days you never walked through the park unless you wanted to be hounded by guys muttering, “smoke, smoke, smoke,” all the way. I sent my husband out to buy me pot one night (after my stepson had absconded for Florida). The cops nabbed him and wanted him to finger the dealer, of whom there were several in the vicinity, youngish black guys in sweats and sneakers. He didn’t want to do that, so, thinking fast, said, “I don’t know. All those guys look alike.” The cops let him go in disgust.

In the 90’s, the dealers were thinned out when locally-hated monster NYU stepped up its gorging on neighborhood real estate. (One of the more deeply held conspiracy theories is that NYU paid under the table for the current renovation in exchange for unspecified park-eating privileges.)

Yes, the park is beautiful and later I’ll go check it out in the less crowded daytime, but I miss the way it was last year. I miss the way it was when I was 14. A little squalor never hurt anybody. Well, yeah, it did, but life does that anyway. I never felt in serious danger there. The dodgiest thing that happened to us was when a charming young man who called himself J.C. talked us into panhandling to help support his pregnant wife and pregnant girlfriend. We did it for an hour or so, made him a few bucks. I don’t know about my cousin, but I was hoping for a kiss. (No more than that. I was 14, and not totally stupid.)

Guys didn’t talk to us often. We were too young and we didn’t wear make up, jewelry, girl shoes or sexy tops. Our posture was defensive and we never smiled if we could smirk.

The evening would end with the 10-cent Italian ices from the guy on 6th Avenue whom I can’t think of away from his cart anymore than I can think of Sancho Panza off a donkey. The ice came in little white paper cups, perfectly packed and mounded. And like every sentimentalist from the beginning of time, I’ll say it: no artisanal goat cheese and fennel gelato can beat those raspberry ices.

Still, I’m happy to have my park back.

By Way of the Ear

(This is not another post about the cat. I got lazy about finding just the right picture.)

I resisted reading Verlyn Kinkenborg’s New York Times piece on reading aloud* because I thought it referred to the successful complaint from publishers that the Kindle’s computer-generated voice infringed on their audio rights. This is an argument that makes no sense, since my laptop can read aloud to me (I discourage it). The Kindle may sound better, but the real threat, in the publishers’ tiny minds, is that Jeff Bezos will soon make the Kindle sound much better, nearly human, maybe better than human, at which point audio book sales will fall off a cliff.

This won’t be soon. Until the New York Times pointed it out to Bezos, The Kindle was pronouncing ‘Barack Obama’ as ‘Black Alabama’.

Still, I’m the last person to pooh-pooh possible advances in this field. I’m hoping for the perfect robot pal to gently usher me through old age, not only doing the chores and chatting with me, not only reading me to sleep in my mother’s voice—the voice she had when she was 35, I mean, which exists nowhere but memory—but doing so without rancor, without muttering under its breath when I repeat myself (knowing I’m repeating myself, as the elderly generally do: they don’t care).

When that great leap forward has been made, new computers will come equipped with the technology and the publishers’ point will be moot. It was a silly waste of money to fight Bezos on this, although I think he caved pretty quickly. He needs publishers to feed the Kindle.

Back to Klinkenborg. He’s waxing nostalgic for the days when adults read aloud, not only to children but each other. When it was a drawing room activity, as in Jane Austen’s day. He’s right that it’s an educative, emotional, sometimes erotic experience to read something in front of even a small audience (this doesn’t include reading aloud instructions on how to put together a piece of furniture while your husband sweats and swears).

“Reading aloud recaptures the physicality of words. To read with your lungs and diaphragm, with your tongue and lips, is very different than reading with your eyes alone. The language becomes a part of the body…”

He’s restating Charles Olson’s famous dictum: poetry comes from,  “the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE/the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE.”

When I was young, I knew a few people who liked to have poetry read aloud after dinner. Mainly it was one family—my friend Caitlin’s family—but I came across it on a couple of other occasions and instigated it myself a few times. In the right company, it’s the best way to end a good dinner.

Those dinners at Caitlin’s grandparents’ farm: steak with béarnaise sauce and several bottles of red wine, pretty women in long dresses, Julian with his cultured Argentinean accent nobody could understand though it was easier to pretend when you were drunk and so was he, summer in the country by a river.

I always blushed when it was my turn to read. I’d try to get someone to dim the lights, never admitting why. Mood and atmosphere mattered to them, so it was usually possible. “Is there enough light for you? Can you see?” I could see well enough. I just didn’t want them to see my red cheeks, which were an indicator of how scary and profoundly exciting attention was—a fact I found so embarrassing as to be nearly shameful.

I concentrated on reading well. The words were always strengthening. I remember reading Lorca. Yeats. I don’t know who else. And yes, it went through my whole body, brain to ear to heart to breath. Mouth, lips.  My head tipped over the book. My own voice and the poet’s in my blood. Breasts, hips, the pool of my long, flowered dress around my ankles. That particular audience—Caitlin, Tamsen, Julie, Julian, maybe Charles, maybe Annabel—would dim and the larger one emerge: the one I was waiting for, and the one I felt in surrounding night.

But audio books weren’t invented for nights like that. Reading aloud isn’t feasible if you’re commuting to work alone. I suppose the very rich could hire a reader to join him/her in the Mercedes, but the very rich don’t exist anymore, or so they’d like you to believe.

I don’t imagine it would be too popular on airplanes. Though if they start letting people use cellphones in the air, I’ll fight back by reading The Wasteland aloud. At the first complaint, I’ll call my answering machine. “It’s my husband,” I’ll say. “He’s having a panic attack. Hearing Eliot always soothes him.”

Some things need to be read aloud, even if you’re alone. This is especially true of poems (though Dickens and Hemingway also benefit). Reading poetry silently is not quite like reading notes of music on the page—I don’t think; I can’t read music—but it’s close. This is true of poems with lush gorgeous rhythms, like Keats’ odes or Shakespeare’s sonnets, or Dover Beach…or any of a thousand other poems…but also with Robert Creeley’s spare, odd poems.

The Rain

All night the sound had

come back again,

and again falls

this quite, persistent rain.

What am I to myself

that must be remembered,

insisted upon

so often? Is it

that never the ease,

even the hardness,

of rain falling

will have for me

something other than this,

something not so insistent–

am I to be locked in this

final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,

lie next to me.

Be for me, like rain,

the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-

lust of intentional indifference.

Be wet

with a decent happiness.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/16/opinion/16sat4.html?em

Sneezle Cat

I’m taking my cat to the doctor later. He’s been sneezing and feeling poorly (picture above deceptive). His pretty pink nose is a little swollen and he’s rubbing snot all over me and everything else, I suppose because he’s itching.

I met his first owner, Julia, the other day. She’s a very charming, friendly NYU student. She gave me his adoption papers. He was found starving in Williamsburg with his sister, Dahlia. The shelter strongly recommended in his bio that he be adopted with his sister, because “he is very playful and will be bored alone.” Yup. I guess Dahlia is long gone.

His origins explain why he startles so easily and why he yearns for the outside—source of danger, fear and excitement, as it is for me too. Of course, he could be like that even if he had a safe kittenhood, but it satisfies me to know his story. I’m sorry he lost his sister. It’s a good thing when siblings team up against the cruel world.

For some reason, my mind keeps inserting the adjective ‘black’ in front of her name. The Black Dahlia was the sobriquet given to famous murder victim Elizabeth Short by reporters. (Novel by James Ellroy, film by Brian de Palma. Neither read or viewed recently.)

Elizabeth Short was found on January 15, 1947, in a vacant lot in Leimert Park, Los Angeles, severely mutilated, cut in half, and drained of blood. Her face was slashed from the corners of her mouth toward her ears, and she was posed with her hands over her head and her elbows bent at right angles.

Elizabeth Short was born in Hyde Park, Massachusetts and her father built miniature golf courses until the 1929 stock market crash. In 1930, he parked his car on a bridge and vanished,[1] leading some to believe he had committed suicide. Later, it was discovered he was alive. Elizabeth Short was raised in Medford, by her mother. Troubled by asthma and bronchitis, Elizabeth was sent to Florida at 16 for the winter, and spent the next three years living there during the cold months and in Medford the rest of the year, while working as a waitress. She was 5′5″ and 115 pounds, with bad teeth, light blue eyes and brown hair. At the age of 19, she went to Vallejo, California, to live with her father, who was working at Mare Island Naval Shipyard. The two moved to Los Angeles in early 1943, but after an argument, she left and got a job at one of the post exchanges at Camp Cooke (now Vandenberg Air Force Base), near Lompoc. She then moved to Santa Barbara, where she was arrested on September 23, 1943 for underage drinking and was sent back to Medford by juvenile authorities.

Elizabeth Short returned to Southern California in July 1946 to see an old boyfriend she met in Florida during the war. For the six months prior to her death, she remained in Southern California, mainly in the Los Angeles area. During this time, she lived in several hotels, apartment buildings, rooming houses, and private homes, never staying anywhere for more than a few weeks.

~Condensed from wikipedia article. Their links.

Perhaps I’ve been reading too many mystery novels. His sister is most likely The Apricot Danish, adopted by a strange, solitary novelist in his mid 40’s, determined to write the first bestselling paranormal romance in which the heroine changes, not into a lioness or a leopard, but an orange tabby cat with miraculous demon-killing powers.

The paranormal romance field is booming these days. If only I’d thought to write one 10 years ago. I’d be a natural. But now there are women falling in love with shapeshifters left and right (werewolves, weretigers, werehorses. The wererats are so far only supporting characters.) It makes you wonder how much bestiality really takes place in this country.

I do have a shapeshifter in my fantasy novel, but she’s dead. She doesn’t even come back as a vengeful ghost or a charismatic zombie. She’s merely a beautiful memory.

***

One thing I’d like to teach the cat is not to step on my breasts. I work in bed because it’s the most comfortable for my arms, and he sleeps near me. When he gets lonely, he walks up to my face for a cheek-rub without regard to terrain. When I yelp he runs and hides in the closet so I try not to, but it hurts. Especially when he steps directly on the nipple. That made me scream. An armored bra would be appreciated, if any of you have one lying around.

I like it when he walks up between my breasts and gently bites my chin. That’s just so romantic, so ruggedly masculine, so…feline. Nevertheless, I’d like to get him a sister-wife (everyone says he looks Egypytian), and let our honeymoon be over, but this trip to the vet today reminds me why I should think twice. Charles has offered to pay for it, in exchange for the 3 or 4 new pictures of the cat I send him every day, but cats live long and my sister the vet—who likes nothing better than working for free for relatives, friends of relatives and perfect strangers with the same first name as one of her relatives—lives out of town.

Later  Back from the vet, the one Julia used. I wasn’t thrilled with the guy, though he seemed to know his stuff. He kept asking questions that I had already answered in my initial conversation, when he wasn’t listening. He gave me antibiotics for the cat’s cold, telling me that cat colds were bacterial, not viral. What I understand (and perhaps I’m wrong) is they start out as viral, and then sometimes bacteria move in when the immune system is compromised. I wish I knew a way to talk to doctors that would indicate I have enough brains and background to understand simple or even moderately difficult medical concepts without making them feel they’re being clobbered by an Internet-crazed knowitall. I can talk to my sister, and I can talk to Whitney and Laura, who are people docs, but it would be nice to be able to talk to the attending physician.

Fitzroy freaked when I put him in the cat carrier, but was good at the doctor’s. He sat quietly on the metal table, looking scared, only trying to jump off every few minutes. He hissed at the technician once, but for good reason. Now he’s home and seems relaxed, sitting on the living room floor licking his butt where the thermometer went in.

Which reminds me of a story about someone my brother knows, who fed her cat cloves of garlic for days to cure worms. “The cat had worms literally hanging out its butt,” he said. I first remembered this as the woman stuffing the garlic up the cat’s anus, and only when I started trying to picture how the garlic got through the commuter-crowd of worms (and felt a pang of disbelief that this woman, whom I also know, would be so…hands-on), did I realize my mistake. The stillbirth of a tall tale.

At the doctor’s

The Fell of Dark

(I took this photo of myself a few years ago. It sets a mood, I think.)

 

Daphne Merkin’s written a new piece on depression in The New York Times magazine. It’s not bad, if you’ve never read anything about the subject of depression or about Daphne. The point she’s making, I guess, is the chronic nature of it: the deeply boring manner in which it returns over and over, knocking your life off track with the same indifferent paw.

What I find interesting about all the articles and books published in the last several years (The Noonday Demon, by Andrew Solomon is the best) is that depression is described so often as a kind of emptiness, a dark futility that has no particular cause.  Mine has only felt like that once.

I was in my late 30’s, and had been in therapy several years.  I loved therapy, loved my pretty Virginia and how carefully she listened, but talking and writing in my diary for hours about pain made things worse, though I did learn a great deal. I learned things I don’t want to give back, but they were excessively costly.

Virginia didn’t encourage me to write in my diary obsessively. On the contrary, she told me to get out, have fun, save the psychic delvings for our sessions. I didn’t listen. I wanted to get it over with. I thought it was like squeezing a blackhead.

Instead, it was strengthening connections in my brain, enhancing all the associations to the dark side. Soon, I was walking the streets seeing everyone, including children in strollers, as the pre-dead. It was as if we were in a waiting room for death, leafing through magazines, sitting on uncomfortable chairs, and the exit to the street had never existed. Only the door to nothingness. All our names were on the list.

Which is accurate as far as it goes, but it’s not a helpful way to look at things.

After a few weeks of that, I caved in and took drugs, something I’d been resisting for years. The psychopharm put me on Zoloft. At first it made me semi-psychotic, but I lowered the dose until I was merely cradled in cotton wool, docile and admiring of all the pretty colors. I remember looking at snow, the first day the drug really worked: I felt like I was stoned, but more gently. White against the green, against the gray. And the blue and rose shimmering off the stone of the houses on 9^th street.

But before things got so bad, and after they got better, depression was always around. It doesn’t feel empty. It’s full to bursting with grief. Grief over something or someone that’s missing—even (or especially) if what’s missing is my courage. I’m so used to grief. I sniff it out relentlessly, and yet I didn’t invent it; in the beginning it came and found me.

It’s hard to fight something so seamlessly integrated with my life, with memory, hope and beauty. I don’t think sorrow is the shadow that brings out the light, necessarily: I have no idea what consciousness is like for the constitutionally cheerful. But for me it’s like the rise and fall of waves and when I try to take control, to negate the troughs, I begin to feel unreal, isolated from myself, as if I’m approaching that country Merkin talks about.

My grief is not healthy, but maybe it’s healthier. Philip said to me recently, “I just realized your father’s death was much harder on you than your brother’s.”

“Of course,” I said. “Jimmy’s death was clean. I felt terrible grief, but it was pure. I knew who I was; I knew that more deeply than ever before. When my father died, I shut down. My feelings about him were so conflicted anyway, and then his choice to suicide…I had a stone wall an inch behind my eyes. I couldn’t find myself. By the time the stone disappeared, I was a teenager. A different person.”

Therapy showed me the door back to the pure grief. I don’t always take it. But when I do, love swarms in and my mood settles. Not happy, but not suicidal. Not crazy.

Age has made things better and worse. I’m less pained by my inadequacies and I trust my strengths. But I also know that I’m stuck with depression, and that it’s a serious disability. I’m almost convinced that nothing will turn out well. I try anyway, and get some solace from trying until the next rejection (real or imagined). Then the maxim “You won’t get anywhere if you don’t try,” seems like something invented as a torture device for depressives, probably during the Enlightenment.

I can’t ever forget that the world is beautiful. That’s why Merkin’s descriptions seem foreign to me. Even when I walked through the valley of the pre-dead, I saw an awful beauty there. And I was angry that I was dead. I wanted life, that torn-up illusion.

There’s always something I want. I want it, I want to get it; I want to do what needs to be done. But if I push too hard, I reach the knot, the voice that says: If you go forward, you’ll reach death sooner.

Can somebody explain to this idiot inside me that it doesn’t work like that? Believe me, I’ve tried. Somebody who knows his knots made her.

 Another poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

What hours, O what black hours we have spent

This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!

And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.

   With witness I speak this. But where I say

Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament

It cries countless, cries like dead letters sent

To dearest him that lives alas! away.

 

I am gall. I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree

Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;

Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

   Selfyeast of spirit, a dull dough sours. I see

The lost are like this, and their scourge to be

As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

Oh, Susannah

     Sappho, Charles-August Mengin, 1877

Today I am seeing Sanna (Susannah), my high school friend, whom until recently I hadn’t seen in 14 years. Facebook reconnected us.

Her older sister was my best friend, so she came to me in the role of the little sister. Big-eyed, petite, pretty as a doll, very long wavy dark hair, she was just what a little sister should be: admiring and sweet. She told me her sister Abby was beautiful and fascinating. She was her staunchest defender. She was everything I wanted to be to my older sister but never could because there was too much rivalry between us, though I also thought my sister was beautiful and fascinating.

Sanna was my experiment in corruption. Most of it was make-believe: a lot of hot air from me, yearning from her. But I did get her drunk—or tipsy—a few times before she was 16. I think we smoked pot together. I told her stories about sex, since I had had a bit by then, a few nights here and there with Jerome and Jonathan and Ken: Ken in the woods, sticks biting my back, in my bedroom in the house on Bank Street while my mother and stepfather chatted in the kitchen 3 flights below, on my scary Aunt June’s water bed (she didn’t allow males in her apartment, but she wasn’t home).

It’s so easy, even now, to leave out the parts about loneliness and desperation. It was erotic; it was exciting. I wouldn’t give back those experiences. But with Sanna I jumped at the chance to practice my craft of cleaning up the stories so they were properly corrupting (in the best sense): only the worldliness, none of the shame.

Her older sister listened too, but more skeptically. She was well acquainted with her dark side, which was why we had become friends in the first place. Dark, smart, sarcastic and weird: that was Abby. Sanna was the little sunshine girl, the lambkin who took a few more years to find her own darkness and weirdness.

And now Abby’s happy. In her pictures (I haven’t seen her in decades) she looks radiant, while Sanna’s face is shadowed with all that hasn’t worked out. Middle-aged sorrow, that frame I am so accustomed to, though Sanna still looks pre-Raphaelite to me.

She’s writing a novel. When I close my eyes, I can see her handwriting on a story she wrote in high school, though I don’t recall the story. I remember thinking her handwriting was very soothing. And I remember the time I wanted to make an invocation to some goddess or another and Abby and I talked Sanna into lying naked on a table while we covered her with fruits and vegetables. It had to be her because she was the virgin.

She’s probably still embarrassed about this. Too bad. Most virgins in that position get fed to dragons. All Abby and I did was admire our own silliness and marvel at how obedient Sanna was.

In boarding school, 18 months earlier, I used a real centuries-old magic book, banded together with Ken, Amy Wallace and a few others, built a fire on a hillside and invoked a demon to kill a teacher. (It didn’t work, maybe because the others were too chicken to voice this wish. I was the only one.) With Sanna and Abby, all I remember doing is giggling.

 

The Dog of Art

 

That dog with daisies for eyes

who flashes forth

flame of his very self at every bark

is the Dog of Art.

Worked in wool, his blind eyes

look inward to caverns and jewels

which they see perfectly,

and his voice

measures forth the treasure

in music sharp and loud,

sharp and bright,

bright flaming barks,

and growling smoky soft, the Dog

of Art turns to the world

the quietness of his eyes.

 

 ~Denise Levertov

Catfood

I’m sure there are many cats who would enjoy the raw chicken cutlets beauty contestants stuff in their bras (before they can afford  boob jobs), but my cat likes my hands. He bites the knuckles and the wrists. Today he was pulling up the loose skin on the back of my hands and nipping it, as if to say, See, a little nip and tuck is in order.

He’s decided he likes sleeping in bed with me, which means I get strange dreams when he walks across my body in the middle of the night. Whatever story I’m spinning has to suddenly incorporate nurses or bullies. Last night I was in a supermarket and got into a fight with a young man who was poking me, and ended up with a fat lip (the cat walking on my back started the fight, but the fat lip was my guilty imagination).

And on the theme of small woes, I ran out of Wellbutrin because I procrastinated on emailing the doctor, and to convince myself I wasn’t missing anything went online to look up all its evil side effects. Some sites say, Insomnia, weight loss, increased sexual appetite; some list every affliction known to man, from boils to cancer. It was a fascinating compendium, but I don’t feel I’m dying this week, so I’ve whittled my likely symptoms to carbohydrate craving, yawning, forgetfulness, and feeling like I’ve received a thunderbolt to the head.

Okay, the last one is more desired than apparent. At best I feel a mild sizzle along the outer neurons when I see the bright spring green all this rain has produced.

There’s a beautiful and sad article about Gerard Manley Hopkins in The New Yorker this week, on the occasion of a new biography. His unhappiness is obvious in his work, and I knew something about his life—the constraints of the priesthood, and the belief that his writing was frivolous and self-indulgent. I didn’t know how little regarded he was in his lifetime, as priest or poet, though apparently everyone liked him as a man.

“His soul was too delicate for the rough work we do,” said a fellow Jesuit. Too bad he wasn’t born to the circle of Emerson and Emily Dickinson. Apparently he felt the most kinship with Walt Whitman, which he thought shameful, “Since he is a very great scoundrel.” Yes, I think he needed Walt on one side, Emily on the other. Religion didn’t do much for him except exert so much pressure that he seized on nature as the only acceptable tangible recipient of his passion—and even then he felt guilty. And it wasn’t enough.

Notice how this poem descends into despair

 

Nothing is so beautiful as spring—

  When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;

  Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush

Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring

The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;

  The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush

  The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush

With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?

  A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning

In Eden garden.—Have, get, before it cloy,

  Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,

Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,

  Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

 

I didn’t like spring when I was young—too much prettiness and cheer; I felt out of place in it. Autumn was my season. I couldn’t imagine ever liking anything as much as October in the country. But now I prefer spring. I love the blossoming trees, and tulips, and the electric green and even the rain. I like walking after rain toward the river where the streets get more crooked and there’s always a new café to discover. It makes me happy to imagine who lives in all the brownstones with their aprons of steps and Joseph Cornell gardens.

I saw Lisa for dinner and she was trying to figure out why my life isn’t more abundant. It’s too much to explain—it would take a novel of the sort nobody reads anymore. Temperament, circumstance, trauma, choice; choice is the mystery. We also talked about spiritual knowledge. She was struck by and keeps returning to my statement that I don’t expect to ever understand life, that I don’t think it’s possible. She says that she can’t anticipate what she will know 2 or 10 years from now.

I can see why she thinks I’m shutting down possibility, and in fact I would rather feel open to dreams, visions, revelatory conversations and intuitions. I don’t know why it seems so important to think about limits. I’m fascinated by the brain science being done now, yes, and I’m slowly preparing for death and the small deaths of permanent disappointment in love and work.

But I don’t discount change. Do I? I’m not sure. I’m afraid to get my hopes up, in one sense, but in another I feel like I’m living on hope, nothing else, and perhaps that’s the secret; I feel guilty for being so vulnerable and won’t allow myself to see it as juice and joy.

The Cat, the Bead and the Corkscrew Penis

 

http://stores.ebay.com/MKDiehl-Jewelry-Designs

I’ve been making jewelry for Mother’s Day, hoping to see a little action on my ebay site. It’s hard with a cat in the house, especially one who likes to follow me around. I tried shutting him in the kitchen but he meowed piteously and it was hard to concentrate. So I let him out and fed him to make him sleepy, and gave him a talk about how humans have to work so that cats can be languid ornaments.* Then he sat quietly on the windowsill, watching me.

I love my vintage Italian glass beads, like the ones in the picture above. They were handmade in the late 1940’s, on the island of Murano just off the coast of Venice, craftsmen winding molten glass from the furnace around a mandrel (a steel rod) that was then turned in the flame of an individual gas lamp to shape the bead.

At one time, glassmaking was a jealously guarded craft; each worker knew only a piece of the process, and those who revealed its secrets were put to death. This was in the 14^th and 15^th centuries, when being put to death was a fairly common occurrence in Italy, as was death of the more ordinary sort, from plague, childbirth, shipwreck and fire. Glassmaking was confined to an island because of its danger in a city of wooden buildings.

I’ve never held a 14^th century Venetian bead on the palm of my hand but from pictures, I’d say the ones I have are more beautiful. I like them better than jewels because they’re more painterly, at the same time retaining that balance fine crafts have, the material sharing the spotlight with the artist.

If I had steadier hands, I’d try glassmaking. Just the phrase “molten glass” makes me see a river idling in slow curves down the workshop floor. I want to plunge my hands in it, pull out the beautiful fish. Luckily, what I do requires technique but is more about the artistry of arrangement. Don’t you want to look at my necklaces? Don’t you love your mother enough to buy her one?

I love my mother. She put me to bed between sheets painstakingly sewn from the pages of great novels, and fed me desserts glittering with shards of handmade glass. She wouldn’t dream of letting me go to school. Wizards bespelled into the bodies of frogs were my teachers. This was on an island not too far from here, whose coordinates are still a secret punishable by death.

 *A description by my mother’s friend Evelyn of a woman they both knew.

                          ****

Ned commented on how pretty the Mangalista pigs in my last post were. There was a Times article about them a few months ago and I saved the pic for a future post on pigs, about which I have much to say.

Well, not that much, really. Most of it I learned reading Boink, a lighthearted romp of a book by Mary Roach about science and sex. I discovered that boars are the only other male animals besides humans to stimulate teats as foreplay. And that sows have their clitorises inside their vaginas. (Perhaps when we get this gene-splicing thing right, we can make life easier for our female babies.) Furthermore farmers in Denmark routinely arouse their sows before insemination—done the scientific way—because sows thus pampered are 6% more likely to conceive.

It’s fun to read about these men rubbing and riding the sows (fully dressed, of course, and by riding I mean as one rides a horse), after the girls have been primed by wet kisses from a slobbery ‘teaser’ boar, and before the semen tube is inserted.

Roach also reports that artificial vaginas don’t work for boars as they do for bulls and horses because a boar has a corkscrew penis. Well, come on. If a sow can take it, we can make it. I think the boars are just being fussy.

Bullet Fever

Tamas Dezso for The New York Times, Mangalista pigs

Do you think it would help if President Obama announced we have a pandemic in this country, killing thousands, including an inordinate number of children, that everyone is at risk, especially in crowded public places?

He could call it Bullet Fever.

The next time someone glares at you or your kid for sneezing without a hankie remind then it’s your 2^nd amendment right. Disease has traditionally been a weapon of war, from besieged townsfolk catapulting corpses over the walls at the enemy to the Japanese carrying out (very successful) plague experiments in China during WWII to all the nefarious games going on today.

I think a sick kid falls under the definition of a well-armed militia as much as a psychotic college student with an assault rifle.

In fact, there’s no evidence at all that this flu wasn’t created in a U.S. lab to be used against…well, whomever, let’s decide that later… and escaped on the person of a Mexican janitor who was then righteously fired to cut costs, gave up on the American Dream, and went home.

But the important thing is we’re all entitled to our deadly diseases, and though you shouldn’t infect someone on purpose unless they sneeze first or are part of an invading enemy force, accidents happen.

A well-prepared individual purchases the flu in a sealed pouch with a spray nozzle, from a reputable dealer, and carries it along with his level 4 contamination mask whenever he ventures into dangerous territory: work, school, trains and buses, the mall and all fast food outlets.

It’s common courtesy to leave it at home when dining with the in-laws, important clients and the President.

Punishment

                                                               ANGER–HIERONYMOUS BOSCH

The hardest thing to learn is how to endure emotional pain without believing that somebody has to pay for it. It doesn’t matter if it’s a particular person or group or the world or that old stand by, oneself: the need to make someone pay, while denying that that’s what you want (in the case of others) or that there’s any reason not to (in the case of oneself)—this is something I keep battering against, dizzy with loneliness, self-pity and rage.

And that’s all. I’m lonely; I’m angry; I feel sorry for myself. Nothing novel, strange, frightful or even shameful. I don’t need to remind myself about how much worse some people have it or stoically push down regret.

I can feel it, and so what. Nothing has to be done. Delilah told me last week, when she was describing how she felt her way into a character, that she had to think of the character’s emotion as an action she wanted to carry out. That sounds right for her art, which usually means it’s what you shouldn’t do in life.

Don’t just do something; sit there. This should sound familiar if you’ve had any exposure to the infinite library of spiritual self-help. Yet all the times I’ve heard that slogan, I thought it was for other people. It excited guilt and dread—I don’t do enough, I’ve never done enough, my problem is stasis—which I would repeat ad nauseum without realizing that I was engaged in a frenzy of action, if only in my head.

A night of cold ashes, no charm, no stories. I’m angry and I can’t say why, and I’m angry that this blog can’t be like a diary where the secrets are told and somebody later decides for you whether to publish. Yet I prefer having readers before I’m dead, so I shouldn’t complain.

I’ve gotten away from the moment. The one after the tears  and the semi-hysterical punishment dramas. After I told the cat to fuck off and he galloped away to play lonely games in the living room. The moment when I realized my feelings were noisy but not important.

Punishment doesn’t work. I learned that.

I don’t have to act on my emotions. I learned that too.

I don’t have to stir them with a long spoon, imagining what I’d do if was going to act. Ditto.

I don’t have to not do that, either.

                                                                                         SLOTH

 

Summertime When The Living is Queasy

                       Rachel Ruysch, Amsterdam, 1664-1750



The tulips should be behind bars like 
    dangerous animals;

They are opening like the mouth of some 
    great African cat,

And I am aware of my heart: it opens and 
    closes

Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of
    me.

The water I taste is warm and salt, like 
    the sea,

And comes from a country far away 
    as health.

--from Tulips, by Sylvia Plath

 

Spring is cresting in Manhattan. The enormous tulips that neighborhood associations started planting everywhere a decade ago are lolling over their little fences, petals spread wide. Red, flame, yellow, cream, blush, purple, mauve and deep pink. In the after-dinner light they glow like moon flowers, and their suggestive droop reminds me of painting—the great Dutch still-life painters, of course, and all the artists who accepted the confines of theme (Christian or Classical, or portraits of the wealthy), choosing to spend their days with naked goddesses, those of the ample, gorgeous flesh: goddesses bathing, picnicking with the girls au naturel, or in the case of Venus, entertaining her similarly naked and chubby son.

Something was lost when artists started openly painting their wives and mistresses. Realism brought a depth of feeling—of sorrow, mortality and the charm of the everyday—but the figures were no longer the most beautiful the painter could imagine, the skin no longer as satiny, faces losing that expression of coy and serene pleasure.

The pleasure for us, in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, is that we didn’t and don’t often see these goddesses as perfect—too fat, we think, too limpid, faces a little too soft (Ingres’ odalisques excepted). The thrill comes from the artist’s desire poured into paint, flesh as full of light as the most ethereal sunset. It wasn’t only their bodies the artists idealized. The settings, whether forest or bedroom, were female territory. The bountiful goddesses lounged naked without fear.

Their male counterparts may have interfered with mortal women, raping them, turning them into cows and so forth, but the goddesses held their own. They were far more powerful than the Virgin Mary, who could perform miracles but not cuckold God or make her son answer to her whims. They were the women the artist wanted to submit to even as he decided the length of their tresses and the curve of their breasts, surrounding them with pillows, mirrors and tapestries—or trees, dogs and nymphs—as he chose.

This is what feminists call “The tyranny of the male gaze.” I understand the anger of being told, “There are no great female artists because women don’t have genius,” which was still bandied about when I was young, and with the grief felt at the evidence that men value youth and beauty so highly that even the loveliest woman will eventually disappoint.

I suffered from not knowing what the “female gaze” might be, for feeling like a freak for all the things I had in common with ancient goddeses: lust, erotic languor, jealousy, vanity, and most of all the desire for power in both its ‘empowering’ sense and in the wish to meddle cruelly or brilliantly in the lives of others. I wanted these qualities recognized not as those of the slut, the shrew or the castrating bitch, but rather of large-souled goddesses with their all-too-human flaws.

I shed that hope, eventually.

Even so, I was glad to see what the male gaze saw. To know what drove them to art and through life, what pink clouds piled in the evening sky, gleaming rivers, or past-their-prime tulips reminded them of. Beauty is lofty, but give a man a moment and he’ll think of sex.

I think of it too. The nights are warm now and some trees are scattering their blossoms on the sidewalk as others unfurl their colors. The streets are crowded with the young—so much so that the older couples look exotic, and older singles seem out of place, anomalies to be removed by some latter-day Guiliani.

The summer will disappoint. It always has. The year after year of golden social life, Europe and the Hamptons, Maine and Cape Cod, parties, romances, dancing on the beach, cocktails in the morning that my same-age gay neighbor remembers was never what I had. I could have it, if I’d been different. It was available, if I hadn’t been too scared to partake. It might still be available, for all I know.

But my summer will be smaller than that, and that’s okay. I want to walk in the warm darkness most nights. I intend to get to the country a few times. I’ll make love when I can. But mostly I want to read poetry again the way I used to. I want my brain full of wandering lines until I can’t understand, am utterly flummoxed by, the fact that most people have no idea why it’s read.

That’s why I felt like a freak when I was young. Not because I was female and wanted to be a great writer. Because I found poetry, Greek myths and Robert Graves’ eccentric and esoteric book The White Goddess so much more interesting than punk rock or deconstructionism that the company of my peers generally left me speechless.

Age cures a lot. Now I’m happy to talk about tulips and politics, recipes for homemade ice cream and whatever it is you’ve been doing lately. Just don’t expect me to remember the bands of the late ‘70’s and ‘80’s. I was reading Baudelaire.

Her Hair

O fleece that down her nape rolls, plume on plume!

O curls! O scent of nonchalance and ease!

What ecstasy! To populate this room

With memories it harbours in its gloom,

I’d shake it like a banner on the breeze.

Hot Africa and languid Asia play

(An absent world, defunct, and far away)

Within that scented forest, dark and dim.

As other souls on waves of music swim,

Mine on its perfume sails, as on the spray.

I’ll journey there, where man and sap-filled tree

Swoon in hot light for hours. Be you my sea,

Strong tresses! Be the breakers and gales

That waft me. Your black river holds, for me,

A dream of masts and rowers, flames and sails.

A port, resounding there, my soul delivers

With long deep draughts of perfumes, scent, and clamour,

Where ships, that glide through gold and purple rivers,

Fling wide their vast arms to embrace the glamour

Of skies wherein the heat forever quivers.

I’ll plunge my head in it, half drunk with pleasure —

In this black ocean that engulfs her form.

My soul, caressed with wavelets there may measure

Infinite rocking in embalmed leisure,

Creative idleness that fears no storm!

Blue tresses, like a shadow-stretching tent,

You shed the blue of heavens round and far.

Along its downy fringes as I went

I reeled half-drunken to confuse the scent

Of oil of coconuts, with musk and tar.

My hand forever in your mane so dense,

Rubies and pearls and sapphires there will sow,

That you to my desire be never slow —

Oasis of my dreams, and gourd from whence

Deep-draughted wines of memory will flow.

— Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952)

But I still like Artemis, Goddess of the Hunt

David Foster Wallace’s suicide has excited a lot of comment, and one thing he wrote—a commencement address delivered at Kenyon College in 2005—has been widely disseminated. I came across it for the third time while reading blog posts about atheism. He says:

 ”…in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.”

This is heartfelt writing, and at one time it would have spoken to me loudly, but now I think it falls short. Pretty much any idea or passion can eat people alive, and religion has done so repeatedly, spectacularly, and horribly in the span of recorded history. I don’t think I have to remind anyone of the many instances. Nor do I think worshipping God inoculates you against a parallel or underground worship of material things.

The kernel of truth here is that it’s possible to worship God and stay centered and sane, while worshipping money or youth will never end well. Yet most people don’t worship these things. They’re seduced by them early or late, waste time in their pursuit, make decisions they come to regret, but this is merely human. This is how we learn. I doubt that the number of those who truly worship money, youth or sex—the people we all recognize as obsessive—is greater than those who worship God to a fault.

Wallace’s remarks express the soft liberalism, the ‘being spiritual is good for you,’ assumption that sets my teeth on edge. I know what it is to feel the inrush of joy, of gratitude for the beauty of the world and the love of other people, the astonishing surprise of life. I don’t refuse these feelings. I talk to the moon and the trees, and imagine they hear me. I take solace wherever I can.

But I don’t think it detracts from this to say that our brains—which are patched-together organs, add-ons and upgrades often colliding with older systems, causing mysterious glitches—are structured so that feeling gratitude prompts us to assume the existence of one to whom that gratitude should be offered. This awareness of a self-conscious other, of debt and reciprocity, is what has made human society so successful. That it overflows into the belief that there are more others than are visible is what happens when a new mental capacity is thrown into the mix of stay-alert-to-danger, use-all-your-senses-because-one-might-be-fooled animal armor.

I’m not arguing with David Foster Wallace anymore. That’s one passage of his writing; he had many other things to say. It’s the culture of faith without rigor, belief without thought, that bothers me. It’s sanctimony and religion used to oppress that rouses ire. When my grandmother, a staunch Catholic, visited us during my childhood, my father would drive her to church in his underwear so she wouldn’t try to talk him into going inside. He did that because the Church had wounded him. I don’t know exactly how–he died when I was very young–but his anger and fear left a vivid impression.

I know Catholicism is more than what happened to my father. I’ve read Thomas Aquinas, St Augustine, Francois Fenelon, and John Donne. I’ve even met a few wise Christians, and could have met a lot more if I wasn’t such a recluse. Yet it rankles when people think religion is safe. It’s not intended to be safe; it’s not safe when it’s done right; it’s certainly not safe when it’s done wrong. 

It’s taken me some time, since I moved into the agnostic-atheist camp, to regain the pleasure of transcendent moments. I shied away at first like a hurt child, not wanting to be fooled. But that passed and I became able to value them, to make use of them to love other people more actively, to remember what I have rather than what I don’t have, to listen to the accumulated wisdom of the race. (Not that I always pay attention. Sometimes I’m too busy obsessing over money and sex.)

Those moments don’t oppose my stepping back to say: I can’t explain the world or the source of mystical feelings, but the idea of God as a sentient being that cares for me and everyone in particular doesn’t accord with my experience.

And to worship Spirit or Energy not otherwise defined (in my circles, a popular choice) seems like an oxymoron to me. One can imagine such a vague Power, but worship requires a sharper focus. Worship is love, which is why it attracted me so strongly in my youth. But now I prefer loving my cat and my favorite humans. I’m happy to ascribe whatever virtues I possess to the success of my simian ancestors in learning how to get along, and the tonic effect of reading great books.

I had a theological argument tonight with a close friend. Maybe someday he’ll convince me. That can happen. But for the present I feel strongly about the need to stand up for those without faith, those who don’t worship, those who don’t know how the world was created or what death means, and live with it.

(If I’m mistaken about God or the Gods, I hope I end up in the silvery court of the Moon Goddess or the Kingdom of Immortal Trees. I’d hate to wake up in a Hieronymous Bosch painting.)

 

“God is Love,” My Mama Said

The New York Times has an article* about how atheists are now organizing, coming out of the closet as they put it, asserting discrimination akin to, if not as severe as, that suffered by gays. The gay analogy is particularly apt, since the first task for gays was to win credence for the idea that discrimination based on sexual orientation is not okay, not simply to be expected. Atheists will also have an uphill battle to get people to understand that their complaints have merit. It’s apt but also depressing, since gay rights is a new chapter of Western Civ, but this country was settled by those fleeing religious persecution. Atheism doesn’t have to be a religion for the equivalence to hold; all that matters is that the persecution is because of religion. It’s not really a subtle point.

I live in New York, so I’ve never faced anything like the problems of the South Carolina couple mentioned in the article: the husband fears that if his wife makes her atheism public, it might imperil his job. But to read about it makes me angry in that particular way one gets angry about an injustice visited on one’s own kind.

When it’s a great coup for the President of the United States to grant respect in his inaugural address to those who don’t have faith along with those who do, it’s past time for atheists and agnostics to assert themselves intellectually and politically. And although I can generally do without Christopher Hitchens, and don’t agree with everything in Richard Dawkins’ book, it did astonish me when those books were reviewed by the usual East Coast critics, and they seemed more worried about giving offense to the  religious intelligensia than anything else. They reminded me of shopkeepers in border towns afraid that raids and skirmishes will hurt trade—an entirely reasonable concern for shopkeepers in border towns, but critics are supposed to be in a different business.

I don’t consider myself an atheist, exactly. My position on any of the ‘great’ questions—the meaning of life, does God exist, what is truth, what is evil—is militantly agnostic, which is to say that I find it preposterous that humans should believe it possible to ever understand the real nature of the universe, our place in it, how much we know and how much we don’t, or even whether these questions have any meaning at all.

Consider a dog, a crab, a mosquito. Can any of these creatures see the limits of their experience? Human self-consciousness, culture and our rapidly growing body of scientific knowledge don’t suggest to me infinite capability. I remember as a child asking someone (my mother, my math teacher?) what the biggest number in the world was and having it explained to me that there never could be a biggest number because whatever number you come up with, all you have to do is add 1 to get a bigger number. That was the sort of thing that used to give me shivers.

Believing in God is one way of acknowledging human fallibility and encouraging wonder and awe at the mystery of existence, and I was attracted to it. I spent my 20’s reading about religion, mysticism and other esoteric traditions, and concluded that all we know is that people are full of desire, fear and hope; have vivid and similar imaginations; and that certain disciplines and activities affect mental states, sometimes remarkably.

I was gravely disappointed. I wanted to find the meaning of life. I wanted to contact greater-than-human intelligences. I wanted my spirit to go on after death. I still do.  I just don’t think any of it is likely, anymore than it’s likely I’m going to wake up able to fly.

But I wonder where it will lead, atheists demanding respect. The ideas of evolutionary biologists about why human societies have been almost uniformly religious are often interesting, but the most important part is that human societies have been almost uniformly religious. Is it possible for people to hold on to the faith that so many crave without believing they must shout down those who don’t believe?

For some, of course, it is. But I’ve come across a number of (intelligent) people’s musings about faith lately. None of them seem to understand that faith is deepened by doubt, just as love is deepened by trial. God can’t be disproven. Nobody should worry about that. We’re nowhere near smart enough.

One of my less pleasant chores when I was young was to read the Bible from one end to the other. Reading the Bible straight through is at least 70 percent discipline, like learning Latin. But the good parts are, of course, simply amazing. God is an extremely uneven writer, but when He’s good, nobody can touch Him.

~John Gardner

Did St. Francis really preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.

~Rebecca West

*http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/us/27atheist.html?em

 

 

 

More About the Cat

Charles has been weaning Fitzroy off dry food (all the vets, including my sister, say it’s not good for cats) by hand feeding him tidbits of bluefish, chicken and liver. The cat is indisposed to eat real food but when it’s minced very small and squashed onto the end of Charles’s finger, it becomes acceptable. I’ve always felt sentimental about those stories of nursing orphaned chimps with fingers soaked in milk, saving the tiny creature’s flickering life, but my cat is 1 year old and strong enough to run like a wild thing around the apartment at 3 a.m., rip the leather off the couch, then sprawl like a melting butterscotch sundae on my bed; he doesn’t need hand-feeding.

On the other paw, Charles thought I was joking when I suggested raising goldfish in the kitty fountain and letting him catch his own dinner. OK, maybe I was joking, but not entirely. The fountain isn’t big enough to sustain a cat’s nutritional needs and he probably wouldn’t eat them anyway, just bat them out of water and leave them to rot under the bookshelf just as my stepson used to do with his lunch 30 years ago. But if I had more room…

Yesterday, Charles had a long argument with the lady in the pet shop about whether it was wise to take the cat on a leash to the park. I’m not in favor because I don’t think it would be sufficient: cats like to roam free, not sniff grass with a doting owner and a crowd of strangers commenting on their every move.

Still, just because I don’t want to do it myself doesn’t mean I think it would do any harm. The lady kept saying things like, “My 3 year old nephew wants to stay up all night watching horror movies; that doesn’t mean I let him.” Do 3 year olds really want to watch horror movies? The ones I’ve known didn’t clamor for that until they were 6 or 7. Eventually, they become able to spend entire weekends watching slasher flicks and Euro porn while drinking beer and tequila shots, if they so choose. When they’re the age-equivalent of a 1-year-old cat, I mean.

I hate it that domesticated animals can’t have lives of their own. Farm animals should know the pleasures of sunshine, wind, grass, mating, and breaking out of the pasture or pen once in a while; pets should have unsupervised hours. In the 1970’s, my mother’s dog Morgan used to wander every morning up to the grand seaside hotel in our New Hampshire country neighborhood and walk through the lobby greeting staff and visitors like the resident dignitary he was. 10 years before that, my cat Ricky ran away from the nice couple my mother gave him to when she moved us from the suburbs to Manhattan. He lived alone in the woods for a couple of years—mourning his lost harem of 3 female cats and me, or so I believed—and I respected him greatly for his self-sufficiency.

I’ll never get a chance to respect Fitzroy. He’s my pet, my comfort, my ward. And Charles, frustrated grandfather whose grandchildren all live too far away, is happy to spend hours feeding him from fishy fingers even as he refers to him as Little Lord Fauntleroy.

 

 

Idle a while

Charles is visiting for several days and we’ve been playing with the cat and going out in the evening with the nieces. We saw Ramona do a rumba-samba at her Dansport recital and she was wonderful and beautiful and very sexy in a backless, black-sequined dress. The school was decorated with streamers, balloons and colored lights and there were lots of women of all ages and shapes in sturdy high heels and shiny, low-cut gowns. Ramona’s teacher, who looks like a cross between a triple-joined wooden puppet and Jim Carrey’s sweeter younger brother, danced alone to The Lion Sleeps Tonight in a jungle patterned shirt  and brought back a lot of memories of the days when that song was new.

We took Delilah to a play called Jailbait, showing in a theater, The Cherry Pit, that’s new to me, on Bank Street near the river. The building housing the theater has a big plaza in front, with stone benches, and lots of young people were sitting alone reading scripts. It was 6:40, still broad daylight. There’s a drama school and an acting workshop on that block and the mood was festive and studious. Delilah, in a red shawl and black skirt, black flats, looked like a bohemian girl from any decade of the last seven, except the ‘80’s. In the past month, she’s had a big role in a play in Boston and a shot a pilot about a young woman finding herself (she’s the best friend), and she’s bubbling over with confidence and joie de vivre, grabbing New York with both hands.

When I think of myself at her age, I prefer not to.

The play was about two fifteen year old girls who sneak into a club, pretending to be 21, for a rendezvous with a thirty-something man one of the girls met the week before, and his friend. The story is well written, but proceeds with a certain ponderousness that made me restive. The shock and distress of the men when they find out the girls’ true ages—one of them has sex—is probably entirely realistic but memories of being young and shielded from any idea that I needed shielding kept crashing in, and I couldn’t take their distress seriously. I suppose even now it troubles me to think I might need shielding, though I have no trouble wanting it for my nieces, my husband, my lover, my cat.

I have love and help in abundance but nobody will put me in a safe place for a few years until I finish growing. I have to make my own safe place (carefully forgetting that such a place doesn’t really exist for anyone), and that notion makes me feel as if I’m floating just to the side of my body, a few inches above ground. The temptation is strong to simply detach and lose myself in the tulip beds.

Social life over, we have the weekend to ourselves. During our conjugal visits, Charles and I have a tendency to descend into a pleasurable but too-extravagant languor. We eat and drink. We lie about. We stroll—or swim, in Florida—and usually he fixes something of mine, and I cook a nice dinner, but mostly we lie about.

He needs a respite. I need stimulation. But my brain feels like a bouquet of weeds and wildflowers tied with an old shoelace, some of the little flowers wilting, some slipping away, the fresh green beginning to sweat, and I have to hold it very carefully but also get it somewhere before they’re all dead. 

********

They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

–Andy Warhol

 

Time spent with cats is never wasted.

–Colette

Wild Nights

11 a.m. 1926, Edward Hopper

 

So The New York Times has finally gotten around to writing about Craigslist Casual Encounters!* How long have reporters been asking for this assignment? It’s a perfect plum of a data mine: a crowded mishmash of dirty-minded weirdos trying to fulfill every kind of sexual hunger save the ones that bring the villagers out with torches.

ARE YOU MY ASIAN NYMPHO?

GIVE YOUR PUSSY A SPA EXPERIENCE!

Of course, CL isn’t what it used to be. Several years ago I went through an Internet dating phase, and though I wasn’t interested in the match.com crowd (for one thing, I was married), CL was too scattershot—it doesn’t require you to create a profile, so people talk more about what they want than who they are—but it was always fun to read.

I used to keep a file of bizarre postings, thinking I might use them in a novel. I deleted most of them last fall when I was weeding out my overloaded hard drive (though the space they take up is like a toenail clipping in a closet) but here’s one I managed to save. It’s from a woman.

Another thing, ideally I am looking for something with the soul of a writer, though by profession you don’t have to be one. I like abysmal depth and outpouring of passions. It would be wonderful if you can also balance that with staccatos of wit and ethereal delicacy.

 Any of you guys think you’d qualify?

I never answered an Internet ad unless the man revealed himself unintentionally, if only by one word. I needed a crumb of unmediated information before I bothered to move to the email stage. And then it was time for close textual analysis, which I found far more rewarding than cocktail party chatter. Email doesn’t give you the crucial physical info, but I never cared, because a date with a man with a good mind is interesting, whether it leads anywhere or not.

The men I met were all very smart, some more or less normal, others delightfully strange. A few were asking for sex but looking for love; others were straightforwardly kinky. I was seeking adventure, and in regard to sex, a kind of serious but considered dominance. I never found exactly what I wanted—some guys didn’t get the concept, others did but couldn’t embody it—but I had fun. Patrick was very good with ropes, a bon vivant with a lot of sailing experience. Big, bluff, red-faced, sweet, he was my first Internet romance.

And there was an extraordinarily handsome man—movie star handsome and a decade younger than I was—who wanted to have sex in Grand Central station during rush hour. He was charmingly insistent, reminding me of a teenage boy trying to talk a girl into some minor illegality like trespassing. I didn’t give in. But he pushed me up against the wall and kissed me while the commuters stared, and yes, I let him and liked it. I would have seen him again but he was too ADD.

There was another man who wasn’t handsome at all, but that didn’t matter. He was ferociously smart and wonderfully dirty-minded, in the way only the intellectually over-endowed can be. He put himself through Princeton writing porno. But I didn’t like his odor. He wasn’t unclean: he just didn’t smell mammalian. His scent was mineral, with a cyanide aftertaste. I couldn’t ignore it; couldn’t explain.

At the end of the Times article, the reporter mentions the site, AshleyMadison.com, which is for married people seeking affairs. He describes the site this way: “There is no pretense that anything but sex is being offered, which is just fine for people with louche tastes looking to avoid polite society.”

Louche. That’s a good word. I’d off-rhyme it with smooch, Proust, or gauche. And, excuse me, where does one find polite society these days? (In Proust.) And why didn’t the reporter go on any dates himself?

When I wrote about personal ads for my college paper, I went on a date. I was 18; the man was in his 50’s, fat, disheveled, and a tenured professor of physics at one of the Boston universities. We met at the Ritz and he told me stories of escaping from Hungary in 1956, as well as giving me a discreet but fascinating précis of his marriage.  He took it gracefully when I admitted what I was really doing. Of course I wasn’t writing for the Times. And I know how to pick gentlemen, even from the louche crowd.

Wild nights! Wild nights! 
Were I with thee, 
Wild nights should be 
Our luxury!

Futile the winds 
To a heart in port, 
Done with the compass, 
Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden! 
Ah! the sea! 
Might I but moor 
To-night in thee!

–Emily Dickinson

* http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/fashion/19craigslist.html?hpw

Pink Brains

My cat is a complete wuss. My niece, Ramona, came to visit yesterday and he hid in the closet. I opened a can of food for him and he crept out—but as soon as he saw the back of her head on the couch, he fled back to the safety of my dirty laundry and old shoes. Ramona’s a strong young woman but she has a kindly nature and wasn’t even wearing her signature belt of cat skulls.

I named him Fitzroy, after the bastard son of Henry VIII, because he’s my 8th cat (Herman’s Hermits, anyone?), and because, in the vampire series Blood Ties, by Tanya Huff, Fitzroy is the name of the vampire romance writer who happens, in fact, to be King Henry VIII’s illegitimate son. It was a picture of his teeth that inspired that, but now I’m thinking more of the romance writer part of the character. My Fitz hasn’t shown much talent or discipline. But he certainly likes to be romanced.

Sometimes I call him other things. Today it’s Pink Brains. This was inspired partly by a Frederick Seidel poem*, and partly by the Glass Cat in the Oz series. When Dorothy first meets the Glass Cat, she says:

“Dear me, I hadn’t noticed you before. Are you glass, or what?”

“I’m glass, and transparent, too, which is more than can be said of some folks,” answered the cat. “Also I have some lovely pink brains; you can see ‘em work.”**

I’ve seen Fitz’s brains work. He’s patiently destroying my windowscreen inch by inch so he can have the pleasure of plunging to his death. He waits by mouse holes, and grows frustrated when they remain indoors. He sniffs them beneath the refrigerator and since he can’t fit under there he tries to find a way in through the fridge. Yes, I too mistook his intent for a while. But it became clear to me after he’d refused every kind of meat and dairy I have, when he seemed too interested in pushing down through the leeks and apples, looking for a trapdoor.

I don’t spoil him, letting him in the fridge. I observe.

But there is hope—

“Iain McGregor and colleagues from the University of Sydney, Australia, found that rats would stop reacting to the smell of a cat that they had been exposed to repeatedly. Yet when they sniffed a new cat, the rats bolted back into their burrows and became extra vigilant. Dissecting the rats’ brains showed that the part that responds to cat pheromones became less active the more familiar they became with each cat. However, the brains of rats presented with the odour of a new cat became more active, confirming that the rodents reacted differently to the smells of individual cats” —New Scientist, 24 September 2008

The rats learned the risks of each feline one by one. So maybe the mice will start experimenting soon. See if they can get past Pink Brains. I hope not. If they run rings around him, I’ll have to get out the mousetraps again and Mouse-Loser will spend his nights in a cage, gnashing his teeth, while I hope to remember to disarm the traps every morning. How likely is that? 

On the way to finding the article about rats and cats, I found this one, in an earlier issue of New Scientist (July 27, 2007)

Oscar, a stray kitten adopted by staff members at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence about two years ago, lives in the home’s end-stage dementia unit.

I thought this was an end-stage dementia home for cats, but apparently not.

But unlike the unit’s other resident cat, Oscar is not particularly affectionate. “The truth of the matter is, this cat is extremely unfriendly for the most part,” says Dosa. “He shows very little interest unless you bribe him. The only time he seems to become friendly, or the only time he seems to spend time with people, is when they are about to die.”

He will curl up on the bed with someone who has just a few hours left to live, expressing no interest in other patients. “It may be half a day, sometimes two, three, four hours, but he’s always there when the patient dies,” says Dosa, who has written an article about Oscar in the current issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. Oscar has been observed to do this at least 25 times. But rather than view his presence as frightening, staff have come to value the knowledge that a certain patient may be near death, and Oscar has provided companionship to those who would otherwise have passed away alone. “We really are able to key into some of his insights and be able to let family know that patients might be nearing the end,” says Dosa. “Invariably, he’s right – much more so than we are.”

I can see how Oscar’s prescience might be helpful to the staff. But as for providing companionship, I’m not so sure. Given the personality of this particular cat, it’s much more likely that’s he’s waiting until the moment of death so he can eat the soul of the departed. 

*  * * * *

Here’s a poem by Frederick Seidel, about youth and age and how we kill ourselves. When I read it now, there are cats superimposed: a young cat like mine, and an old one like Oscar (Oscar isn’t really old, but he takes that part).

 

* A Fresh Stick of Chewing Gum

 

A pink stick of gum unwrapped from the foil,

That you hold between your fingers on the way home from dance class,

And you look at its pink.  But you know what.

I like your brain.  Your pink.  It’s sweet.

 

My brain is the wrinkles of the ocean on a ball of tar

Instead of being sweet pink like yours.

It could be the nicotine.  It could be the Johnnie Walker Black.

Mine thought too many cigarettes for too many years.

 

My brain is the size of the largest living thing, mais oui, a blue whale,

Blue instead of pink like yours.

It’s what I’ve done

To make it huge that made it huge.

 

The violent sweetness in the air is the pink rain

Which continues achingly almost to fall.

This is the closest it has come.

This can’t go on.

 

Twenty-six years old is not childhood.

You are not trying to stop smoking.

You smoke and drink

And still it is pink.

 

The answer is you can drink and smoke 

Too much at twenty-six,

And stink of cigarettes,

And stand outside on the sidewalk outside the bar to have a cigarette,

 

As the law now requires, and it is paradise,

And be the most beautiful girl in the world,

And be moral,

And vibrate into blank.

 

– from Oooga-Booga, by Frederick Seidel

 

 **The Patchwork Girl of Oz

In the Belly of the Beast

Utterly fatigued today. I paid a bill or two, did the laundry. Looked again for my mammogram films, which I’m sure were lost at a doctor’s office, but the office denies it. It’s astonishing. My liver doctor’s office has no record of my CT scan in 2007, which is okay because after my own files were thrown all over the living room and I was frantic, I called back and asked, “Well, if I did have one in 2007—which I understand you’re saying I didn’t—where would the doctor have sent me?” This peculiar question was one the nice young lady managed to answer, and the radiology place does in fact have a record.

And my gynecologist insists I never had a cervical biopsy because it’s not in the chart (I had two, in his office, pain and blood and all, which I know because I have a brain which also keeps records, and for the record the doctor had no curiosity about the anomaly in our respective record-keeping devices); tit films go missing—

And they will yell at me at the mammogram place for the missing films and tell me they can’t interpret the results now, so they’ll just have to cut off my breasts and be done with it.

Fine. I’ll put them back on with krazy glue.

I’m thinking of my making my sister my personal physician. She’s a veterinarian, but that’s already way ahead of what most of the human race has in the way of health care. Whatever she doesn’t know, she can learn on youtube. The only problem is, my insurance wouldn’t pay. I’d have to catch her on a Sunday, when she’s bored, give her a couple of drinks and say, “Would you mind operating on my liver, while Bob’s grilling the fish? There’s a cyst that needs draining. No biggie.”

That’s how she did acupuncture on my neck once. Of course it hurt for six months, but that was because of the third drink. I’d only let her have two before the liver.

I hate being middle aged and needing preventative screening all the time! If we were in the future already, the one I’m taking my job as a writer seriously to invent, I would just stand on the special beam-me-up-Scotty place on the clinic floor and at the flick of a switch 

an all-over deep mapping would occur, with and without contrast, color balance, hue saturation, and all the cell-to-cell chatter and bacterial conspiracies captured

and it would feel like being licked by a cat on the bottom of your foot—if your foot was in your brain as was the case with a baby born recently, don’t let me digress too far, but the baby lived

or so it said on some other wordpress blog I read today—

forget the baby, just think about the cat, its sandpaper tongue on your sandpapery foot, and you’re reading a novel and the cat keeps licking for an inordinately long time, like a minute

and once the mapping was done, the results would never be lost, and computers in their spare time would peruse millions of them and cogitate on the connections and implications, and diseases would wink out like species going extinct

and doctors would have hours to sit and talk about life, dealing with the little things, the odd symptoms with no cause, parsing anxiety’s new costumes, and those who were not worth talking to would go out of business

and patients not worth talking to would be referred to robots who would seem entirely human

and if you wanted cosmetic surgery on the order of a long furry tail and the face of Cleopatra, you could have it, but it would only last a week and then you would have to spend some time as a tadpole

I can’t wait.

 

Here’s a charming bit about the liver from The Iliad, Book XX, Homer,  translated by Samuel Butler

There was also Tros the son of Alastor- he came up to Achilles and clasped his knees in the hope that he would spare him and not kill him but let him go, because they were both of the same age. Fool, he might have known that he should not prevail with him, for the man was in no mood for pity or forbearance but was in grim earnest. Therefore when Tros laid hold of his knees and sought a hearing for his prayers, Achilles drove his sword into his liver, and the liver came rolling out, while his bosom was all covered with the black blood that welled from the wound. Thus did death close his eyes as he lay lifeless.

I guess I remember now why I liked the Odyssey so much better.

Lady of the Flies

People are frequently interested in my romantic situation (husband in Florida, boyfriend in over his head). It is peculiar and not without advantages, though the good stuff tends to add up while the bad multiplies, but the oddest thing that’s happened, and this concerns me as a writer, is that I’ve wrung so much drama from the past 9 years (or it’s wrung me; I haven’t always been the prime mover of the theatrics), that sex, love and romance, while still powerful in my life, are no longer the heavyweights in my imagination. I’m far less curious about what other people are up to, about the ‘mystery’ of someone’s marriage or arrangement. I don’t think I know everything—I just think I know everything that matters to me.

And having said such a vainglorious thing, I’m not sure if I want to be right or wrong about this. It’s nice to think the future holds surprises (she said tepidly, sitting in a hardback chair on the stage, hands folded in her lap, as abysses yawn and monsters stalk), but then surprises aren’t always nice, are they?

From one of my favorite science blogs—this is about flies—

“The influence of crowds can even sway a female’s decision based on completely arbitrary factors. To show this, Mery dusted two groups of males with either green or pink powder, creating bodies that no female would ever come across in the wild.  She placed a voyeur female in a glass tube, and in an adjoining tube, she put a coloured male and a second virgin female. Inevitably, the two flies mated, providing a sex show for the lone female to study. Later, the couple were replaced with another pair – a male of the other colour, and a female that had recently mated and wasn’t up for it. 

After all this voyeurism, Mery gave the solitary female a choice between pink or green males. She found that the female was twice as likely to mate with males from the colour that she had seen having sex before. If she watched green males getting lucky, she favoured green males; if pink seemed to be the colour-of-choice for other females, she went with pink. If the partition between the two tubes was opaque, so she couldn’t see the neighbouring shenanigans, she didn’t have any preferences for either colour.”*

Fashion always wins. The other woman knows something you don’t. We’re all confused about what we’re supposed to find attractive. Choose your lesson.

It’s interesting how science, which would never have advanced so far so fast without our hyper-rational, individualist civilization, is quickly tearing down the intellectual foundations of same. The human brain, not much more advanced than the fly brain, is impulse-driven, fast and sloppy, and expert at making up justifications after the fact. This is the rule, not the exception. Economists have just learned this; it’s a big eureka moment for them. No wonder the market doesn’t work! People are nuts!

Reason and considered choice are on the way out as the trusted foundation for human behavior. We can handle this for now. Scientists can genially say they don’t believe in free will, in the self, or even in consciousness, yet have no problem using those sturdy constructs to function and thrive. Apples and oranges, they say. My work, my life.

Because they are scientists, and not writers or artists, this isn’t hard for them; they tend not to have spent so much time hanging around with their demons. They haven’t given them names and histories, or ceded them territory; haven’t created symbiotic relationships to coax a win from a lose; they haven’t, in short, fooled themselves that they’ve corralled their irrational side into a binding agreement (renegotiated every one to three years).

Once those of us with the big crazies stop believing in progress of the emotional kind, in incremental acquisition of control, once we realize we’ll always like the guy with the pink dandruff if the other females do, and no power in heaven or on earth cares, or thinks it’s fate, or is saving us jewels of happiness for later—then I think we’ll storm the laboratories, grill the scientists for dinner along with their experimental animals, and erect temples to Asmodeus (lechery), Beelzebub (gluttony), Leviathan (envy), and Belphegor (sloth).

And the whole thing will start again in several hundred years.

* Ed Yong, flies get the buzz on sexy mates from each other

http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience

 

Easter, Spring

I was going to write about Easter but I don’t have much to say. My mother used to provide perfect Easter baskets, with lots of chocolate, twined with colored ribbons. Every spring I got an Easter bonnet. My cousins often visited.

As for the religious side, when I first really paid attention to the story of Jesus’s resurrection, I thought: so what? The Greeks and Egyptians thought of that centuries before. The Osiris story is pretty great. And nothing could beat the myth of Demeter and Persephone, the young daughter picking flowers, kidnapped by a chariot driven by Hades himself, tricked into eating 6 pomegranate seeds and so having to spend 6 months of every year in the Land of the Dead while her mother, Goddess of Grain and the Harvest, punishes Earth with winter (Earth was to blame for telling Hades where the girl was picking flowers). That story has meant a lot of things to me over the years, but right from the beginning one fact stood out: Persephone, adored by husband and mother, never gets to decide anything for herself past those initial choices of picking flowers and eating seeds. She’s Queen of the Dead, she’s Beloved Daughter, she’s the reason for the seasons—she never gets to be a woman turning her answering machine off and escaping for a few weeks to the tropics with the kind of man of whom you remember only what he smelled like when he was drunk, and that it amused him to shorten your name to Phony (once you made the mistake of introducing yourself as the Queen of the Dead), and that was just fine.

So, putting Easter aside, here’s a poem about Spring.

 The Trees


The trees are coming into leaf


Like something almost being said;


The recent buds relax and spread,


Their greenness is a kind of grief.




Is it they are born again


And we grow old? No, they die too.


Their yearly trick of looking new

Is written down in rings of grain.



Yet still the unresting castles thresh


In fullgrown thickness every May.


Last year is dead, they seem to say,


Begin afresh, afresh, afresh

Philip Larkin (9 August 1922 – 2 December 1985) is known as a poet of great dourness and gloom. He wrote a lot of poems about death and old age—starting when he was still what most people would call young—without any romantic or spiritual gloss whatsoever.

And yet he didn’t kill himself, as many more exuberant poets have. He demonstrated the value of life over and over by the discipline and beauty of his work. He was the epitome of the depressive as realist, and the realist as one who is all too aware that life very often isn’t fun or pretty, even among the so-called privileged, but that any sane being, absent excruciating torment, prefers it to nothingness.

Basho, 1644 – November 28, 1694) the most famous poet of the Edo period in Japan might have appreciated Larkin’s sensibility. Here’s one of his haiku.

First day of spring—

I keep thinking about

the end of autumn.

 

 

Joyce Carol Oates and the Cat Detective

“If you’re going to spend the next year of your life writing, you would probably rather write Moby Dick than a little household mystery with cat detectives. I consider tragedy the highest form of art.”—Joyce Carol Oates, in The New York Times Book Review, April 12, 2009

a good detective consults many sources of information

This is the sort of remark that raises hackles, like Hilary Clinton and the famous, “I guess I could have stayed home and baked cookies” line. Having just acquired a cat, and not being of a mind to write Moby Dick, though I do like a good pirate story, I took exception.

a) Joyce Carol Oates has never written Moby Dick. As far as I know, nobody has but a guy named Melville.

b) If you wrote a truly convincing cat detective novel, it would be a literary triumph of the highest order. My cat, for example, would make a terrible detective. He’s basically clueless about the world and if a murder took place in my living room while I was busy writing this blog, and it was in my best interest, and therefore his, to find another suspect than myself, I doubt he would draw my attention to a salient detail overlooked by the police. Possibly if the killer got out the window and took the screen with him, the cat would take the opportunity of getting on the ledge again, in which case I would scream, he would fall—12 stories—and probably not survive for the next volume in the series.

Or else, given that cats have 9 lives, etc, he’d come back to me missing several body parts, one eye hanging from a thread, his liver in his chest cavity, his heart pumping out his ear—and the series would devolve into the gross-out supernatural, which I don’t think is what Oates meant, though she’d probably like that better than whatever cat detective she has in mind. It could even be tragic: a cat who is neither alive nor dead solving mysteries out of existential despair.

It could be, but it would be difficult to write. It’s difficult to do anything well.

For all her devotion to the art of tragedy, Oates is not inclined to let it have its place in the normal course of things. In the same interview, she said, referring both to the fact that she does her own cleaning and to the recent death of her husband, which has inspired an interest in writing a memoir about widowhood that would be the opposite of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, “Mine would be filled with all sorts of slapstick, demeaning and humiliating things. Like trash cans whose bottoms are falling out…Didion took it on a very high plane, and she does have assistants and maybe a maid. But it’s actually a very hardscrabble experience. It’s not placid and tragic so much as it’s physically arduous.”

Now, really. Was he doing all the work? Did he create no mess? Men on trains will lift your suitcase if you ask them. I know something about doing household tasks without a husband, and if it’s unseemly to brag about cleaning the gutters myself because I was younger 3 years ago, when I last had a house, than Oates is now, my guess is I was also younger than her husband.

After my husband left—for Florida—I suffered more from  sorrow than from the necessity of killing all the mice myself and flirting with the plumber so he’d try harder to figure out why the antifreeze wouldn’t drain out of the system. (Not a job my husband could do, by the way. Either my part, or the plumber’s.)

And just on a word-use note, can you call a life ‘hardscrabble’ if the owner of that life has plenty of money and doesn’t hire help because she’s too shy? I think we need a cat detective to find out what the story is. Why wasn’t the man’s death tragic, at least to his longtime wife? Reader, I’m sorry; she murdered him.

 

Brain Edits

“Yet as scientists begin to climb out of the dark foothills and into the dim light, they are now poised to alter the understanding of human nature in ways artists and writers have not.”  The New York Times, April 6, 2009

Or to be more precise—they are now poised to alter human nature in ways artists and writers have not.

I’m used to the revision process. When I was young, I resisted it, too attached to my words, especially the bits that stuck out like shiny metal from a teenager’s face. Eventually, it became my favorite part. I liked knowing I could improve something; I liked the deft snips and rearrangements that could keep the body of a story intact while making it mean something entirely different. Revision becomes fun when you realize it’s not only work but play. That’s where the scientists are now. But what drives change in the world? Necessity, utility and boredom—perhaps most importantly, consumer boredom. Birds have brilliant plumage for the same reason designers create new styles: Buy me. 

My brain, edited, would not only be less of a minefield for me, it would be a different aesthetic experience for you. Maybe you enjoy my writing but wish you could just tilt the tone a bit, or shake out the parts you’re sick of.  I wish she’d stop writing about THAT so much. Stop trying to be funny. Stop trying to be serious. Be the same but surprise me more.

 I can think of many discrete ways of editing my husband, mother, lover, siblings—not for better or worse, but for change and highlight. If you’ve ever worked in Photoshop, you know what I mean. It’s not that you’re changing the soul of the image. Of course not. But: lighter or darker?  What if you dialed up the blue of her eyes—and turned that guy behind her into wallpaper?

I might go a little nuts editing myself. Weed out all the memories that hold me back with their whisper of failure and the ones that embarrass me with their generic drone. Take out the days and months I was bored; the hangovers; most of 1983. I’d be sleek and wily, smart, ready to pounce on the future and bat it from paw to the outfield. I’d be happy to inform you I’d forgotten when we met, that we met, what you were like on the job or in bed, and why you think you matter.

Naturally someday I’d want to return to the trashed bits, sift through them like the stuff you leave in boxes in your parents’ attic. I mean, maybe you do matter, 1983. I know there were some good days; otherwise I would have slit my wrists. There must be vast pages of forgotten hours adding to parts of myself I treasure. You know how it is when you learn something so thoroughly you forget what it was like not to know it? You feel ignorant again; only being confronted with a real novice does the awareness of expertise return. If you can never see the base of the mountain, how do you know what counts?

Trauma reappearing in dreams and phobias sounds grim, and is, but think about that other complaint we have, that human life is too short for the species to learn much—for example, that war sucks. The only reason teenagers know this even vaguely is the horrifying stories told by their elders. These stories haven’t stopped war (partly because they’re often dishonest). On the other hand, we’re not starting a war every five minutes. Not quite.

Think of the Binghamton carnage. Watching TV coverage, for the susceptible, is drama and action without emotional consequence. What if that happened to you when you were told, We excised this memory at your request, but for your information, here are the facts. Maybe you’d take the stripped skeleton and over time feel nostalgia for imaginary flesh. Maybe you’d say, I wonder what that felt like? Maybe I should let myself be raped again.

If this sounds implausible, remember that lots of women have rape fantasies, just as lots of men and women have murder fantasies. We know we don’t want our fantasies to become true because we’ve heard the unvarnished stories. There are so many of these, we think we don’t need them; we can imagine how we’d feel. But are you sure that’s true? What if personal stories of horrors disappeared, or became very, very old?

 

Francisco Goya, Great Deeds Against the Dead

 

 

 

 

Memento Mori

I just watched the 60 Minutes segment on the cancer patients in Nevada denied treatment because the legislature cut funds to the public hospital. Nevada has been hit by the economic crisis worse than most states; the tax base is narrow, focused on entertainment and real estate.

The hospital CEO, with state cuts topping 70 a million year, made the choice to cut the outpatient oncology program, rather than programs, like the Trauma center, that can’t be duplicated at other hospitals and clinics in the area. After seeing the patients whose loss of access to chemotherapy means almost certain death, one can question her decision. But it’s clear that the villain is here is not the hotel administrator.

We all know the usual villains—health insurance companies, drug companies, self-interested politicians and so forth. But the villain is more properly every one of us who fears ‘socialism’ more than the possibility of losing a job (this is a group that is shrinking fast). It’s the middle-class person who couldn’t afford the best doctors on his own, but doesn’t want to settle for what he might get if care was distributed more evenly.

I live in New York and currently have health insurance; if I got cancer or any other life-threatening illness I’ll go to the best doctors. Who wouldn’t? I already go to very good ones for situations that might become dangerous someday, and I’m thrilled and comforted that they’re good.

The patients I saw on 60 minutes may not have been getting care equal to what one gets at Sloan-Kettering. I doubt they’d complain about that. Many of these cancers have poor prognoses in the best hospitals. But to know there is a chance, but you won’t get it, to know you might live, but nobody’s going to help, to know that in the most frightening of circumstances, you’re on your own—that’s not what post-Bush, 21^st America should be.

Those who think Obama should wait on health care until after the economy revives should consider how much bad luck it would take for them to lose their job, to not be able to afford Cobra or private insurance premiums. Think of the many illnesses that make you unable to work for years. Think of the sorts of accidents that happen to spouses riding in the same car. Could you raise hundreds of thousands of dollars, or a million dollars, in a crisis? Is your house worth that much? Would your siblings and friends sell all they have and live in tents to give you a 20 % chance at living? You’re not a cute 8 year old anymore.

How much would it take?

One of the patients interviewed, Roy Scales, who’d gone for five months without treatment after being diagnosed with lung cancer, was asked what would he would do if he didn’t find a doctor. “Die peacefully,” he said. I went on the CBS site to find out the exact wording of this quote and read a reader comment about Roy, posted just a little while ago.

Hello CBS – how do I get a hold of Roy Scales? He helped through some of the most difficult days of my life. When he was in Pittsburgh about 14 years ago we were both down on our luck. We worked for a temp agency called Labor World and we worked together at a plastics factory. He would let me read his copy of Our Daily Bread, so I could just get my head around the day. Please – help me reach out to him now. I don’t know what I can do for him but I have to tell him how much I appreciated what he did for me and see if there is anything I can do for him now. I couldn’t believe it when I saw him on the screen. I’ve often wondered over the years what ever became of Roy – please – let him know Renee who worked with him at Mitchells is trying to reach him. — please –

 

He looked like the sort of man who’d make people feel that way.

Adultery For Dummies

Swapping ideas with my husband about bestsellers I could write, I came up with the title of this post. He found it extremely amusing. His girlfriend, also married, found it even more hilarious. I reluctantly gave up on the idea of writing such a book because I couldn’t in all conscience go on for hundreds of pages about the light-hearted side if it all, nor go on television (without which there is no bestseller) without revealing things that would make my lover’s wife murder me in my sleep, if he didn’t do it himself first.

It’s not something I would ever recommend to the reluctant. There are more ways it can go wrong than all the writers since civilization have come up with. But if you’re pretty sure you’re going to do it anyway and you’re tired of the humorless morality of mainstream magazines, if the word ‘cheating’ leaves a bad taste in your mouth—here are some tips.

If you live in a major city, use the Internet. You get to go on lots of dates, which in itself is a kick for those of us who married young, and you can find someone who lives in a different neighborhood, with no overlapping friends or professional activities—someone there’s a fair chance you won’t run into inadvertently. Also, by courting the truly Other (whatever that means to you), you might actually learn something.

Shamelessly indulge your adolescent feelings, including those fantasies about finally being a glamorous adult woman having an affair. Buy the new lingerie and lipsticks. Spend hours daydreaming. If you don’t have time to daydream, not even while pretending to watch TV with your spouse, you don’t have time for an affair. Keep waking up frustrated from erotic dreams about a magnetic, oddly familiar stranger, and wait until the kids grow up.

Teenage love is exciting because it’s new but also because living in different families, with rules and curfews, having to postpone gratification and keep secrets, builds tension and passion. An affair can do the same if you don’t let yourself fall into the trap of a) feeling too guilty, and b) worrying about feeling too silly.

You are guilty, though of what and how bad it is, is a matter of opinion. If you think adulterers should go to hell or be stoned to death, you should consider another line of play. If you think it’s not quite that bad, but that your spouse will be correct to despise you forever when he or she find out, do your lover a favor and disport only with those who don’t care about you. But if you think that adultery causes pain, but stagnant or sexless marriages also cause pain; that jealousy is like anger, not something that can be wished away, but something that can become manageable and even instructive; that humans are animals (no insult intended) and culture imperfect—then put your guilt feelings to use by being kinder to your spouse and everyone else.

You are silly. So what. Just don’t tell anyone quite how silly…

Pay attention to the signals you receive, not to mention what he/she actually says. Then lie to yourself to if you want to, abandon yourself to extravagant hope and impossible futures, but remember what you observed and heard, especially if the beloved made sure to repeat it often.

Adultery is good for romantic self-confidence, for reviving interest in life, and for sorting out the difference between hurt and blame. He did this to you? You brought it on yourself? How about—you got the bill and it seems steep; you heard the price but you thought you had more in your pocket; having to pay is no fun (read: excruciating); but having nothing to pay for because the shelves are bare and always will be is worse. Not for everyone, perhaps, but for me and maybe for you.

In an article about an online adultery site (there are many of these, married-specific) for Orthodox Jews, the Times quoted a rabbi to the effect that adultery never helps a marriage. This is incorrect. Adultery can destroy marriages and it can save them. It can change them into something difficult to carry off but potentially spectacular, like a designer dress on a aging actress, or full of complaint but much loved, like my new cat. It depends on what marriage you start with.

I can’t tell you much about deception, since I only lied for a little while, and then only by omission. But I can say from observing others that it’s a mistake to rely too much on that nondisclosure of location cellphones offer. If you’re going to lie, do it well. Study the form. Half-assed lying because you feel like you deserve to be caught…well, you deserve to be caught. Take your punishment and go out and do it again. Accept your spouse’s abuse for the 4^th or 15^th time as if she weren’t an adult who could walk away if she chose. When your mistress remonstrates with you for your self-flagellation, remind her that you’re Catholic and you can’t help it. When she rolls her eyes, accuse her of acting out her own childhood oedipal crap. No, don’t do that because it makes you worry that this might mean she doesn’t really love you.

She loves you. She loves her husband too. She thinks you should love her more than you do your wife, while she reserves the right to love you and her husband equally, or sometimes love him more. She also thinks you should send her flowers once a week, even after nine years, even when you have lots of worries and more bills. She’s very silly.

Adultery for Dummies. “You couldn’t use that title in France,” my husband observed. On the other hand, the French might find it the perfect gift for a new son-in-law.

 

The Art of Lovc: knowing how to combine the temperament of a vampire with the discretion of an anemone.

~E. M. Cioran

 

The Cat and Night

I have a new cat. He’s a year old, sweet, curious and disoriented. I’ll will tell you his name when I decide on it. So far he’s been Stoner and Robert Moses, but although Robert is a little sticky, I’m not sure. I was thinking of something extravagant but he’s not an extravagant cat. His face isn’t beautiful, nor his bearing lordly.  He’s an ordinary cat, with very pretty fur. Mind and soul unknown, but tantalizing.

 

My friends Maddy and Molly had to give Robert up, after 6 days, because Molly found out she was allergic. His previous owner, Julia, had hidden him in her dorm room at N.Y. U. and was caught. So now he’s here, his first night, and he doesn’t know why.

The cat I had in childhood wasn’t beautiful either, or lordly (I say now, looking at photographs; I saw things differently then). I knew how to worship him. I knew how to praise his dominion over the darkness—our house was in a suburb with big back yards, and he had a whole night world and private life, unlike Robert. And unlike me, who had to go to bed at 8 o’clock, though sometimes I snuck out very late and called him, called and called until he dragged himself unwillingly from his amours, showed his imperial self, bit me on the leg, and departed.

That was Ricky; this is Robert, or maybe Marcel. No, not Marcel. I do think he would like Proust though, Volume 1, if I could get him to listen. But all those descriptions of the two walks—Swann’s Way, the Guermantes Way, the hawthorn blossoms—might get to him, confined as he is. I’m thinking of the middle-aged Marcel who never left his apartment, hardly ever left his bed. I’m thinking of myself, if I happened to be a brilliant wealthy male homosexual French writer dead nearly 100 years.

After Maddy and Molly left, R investigated every corner of the apartment (a long time in the bathroom, less in the closet), squirmed his skinny body up under the 8-inch-open window sash, face pressed to the screen like a convict getting his first breath of fresh air in years, investigated some more, calmly walking over picture frames, smooth stones and bowls of loose change, touching noses with a stuffed kitten, chewing on a book, smelling the apples and the honey, then stood on the floor meowing plaintively for awhile before settling down on the little rug by the front door. He looked kind of like a collie lying there. Lad, a Dog, cherished book of my childhood. Probably before your time.

When I got up in my insomniac, oh fuck it’s nearly 2 a.m. mood, after lying awake worrying about…everything…not even worrying, fretting…and rummaged among the top drawer for pills, he came in for a visit. “It’s lonely, isn’t it, kitty? Come up here with me.” He allowed himself to be lifted to the bed, purred and knocked his face against mine, displaying the habits of the deeply affectionate, then was off again to his solitude, leaving a whiff of kitty litter behind him.

I’ve only ever had kittens. I’m not used to a cat in mourning for other women. I’m way too used to that with humans…but this cat is sad, and that makes me sad. He’ll get over it, I say to myself.  I wonder. This is his 4th or 5th domicile in a short life (Julia got him from a shelter) and though his friendliness suggests kind treatment, I can’t help thinking he deserves better.

I want to get him a female kitty for company, a sleek silver tabby or Russian Blue to complement his coloring. They could chase each other around my apartment and break everything. It’s good I can’t download a kitten from the Internet or I just might. My new Leopard operating system hasn’t offered any other benefits I’ve noticed.

He likes me well enough. He just misses the others, and their real estate.

 

 

Terror the Human Form Divine

 

Rape of The Sabine Women, Jacques-Louis David, 1799

Writing yesterday’s post, in which I strayed onto the subject of the tortures women were subjected to for religious beliefs—and for practicing adultery, witchcraft and other female perversions—left me a little shaken. Looking at pictures of medieval torture devices, so varied and ingenious, not to mention fiendish, made me grateful we had model airplanes, Lego and build-your-own-fallout-shelters when I was a kid; that now we have Apple Store Genius Bars.

People are nasty. This is not news. But the extent and pervasiveness of human depravity is either something you keep being surprised by or can’t for a moment forget. I know that under the right circumstances I could kill and be proud of it. I’m not sure what it would take to provoke me to torture. After reading one of my recent entries, Philip has taken to calling me Demon, a name we can both joke about since neither of us has ever had dealings with real wickedness.

Although he’s had more contact than I have. Besides working for a Republican city councilman, he used to chat with mafia killers during breaks in trials when he was a reporter. One of the Gambino underbosses, Tommy Biloti, approached him once with a vague threat—which I imagine delivered in that indirect sinister style they all learned from the movies—and Philip deflected it with a joke about the guy’s hairpiece. Somehow that sort of thing works with men, don’t ask me why.

He was threatened another time in a Staten Island restaurant by a wannabe Mafioso. The poor sap had to call to apologize, implying that one of the ‘made’ guys ordered him to because wasn’t cool to mess with a reporter. Remember that the next time you realize that in our lifetime, reporters may go extinct.

Journalism will be like fiction again, like memoir, epic poetry.The monsters and craziness won’t go away, only their painstaking documentation. The irrational is our default mode, where we go when we’re let off the leash. But there will always be the device-makers and the warriors, who won’t forget the important relation between cause and effect, or the necessity of measure, right materials, and accurate record keeping.

A certain Swedish chimp gathers rocks to get ready for opening time at the zoo.* Scientists make a big deal of this: an animal planning ahead.

How else can you hurt people properly?

 

*http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1160681/Stone-crows-Santino-rock-throwing-ape-proves-chimps-plan-ahead.html

 

Any mental activity is easy if it need not take reality into account.

~Proust

 

It always strikes me, and it is very peculiar, that, whenever we see the image of indescribable and unutterable desolation—of loneliness, poverty, and misery, the end and extreme of things—the thought of God comes into one’s mind.

~Van Gogh

 

Cruelty has a Human Heart,
And jealousy a Human Face;
Terror the Human Form Divine,
And secrecy the Human Dress.

~William Blake

 

  

Peine Forte et Dure

Margaret and the Dragon

I just read yesterday’s Times article about mammograms, telling me what I already knew, though statistics don’t stay in my head, and I’m not going to repeat them here; the point is that mammograms very often pick up noninvasive cancers that wouldn’t cause harm if left alone, subjecting women to fear and painful surgery, and that many of the killer types of breast cancer can’t be detected early enough to make a difference.

This makes me want to be like the British, who only get a mammogram once every three years (after 50). But I’m already like the British, since it’s been three years.

My gynecologist never asks. He’s only interested in obstetrics, so he probably doesn’t even notice my breasts. But when a woman is naked from the waist down and you’re shining a light up her twat, I suppose breasts are not the first things on your mind.

I hate the breast-squashing machines. They remind me of medieval torture devices like the iron maiden and the breast ripper (you really don’t want to know); The Pit and The Pendulum; all the tales of people bricked up inside of walls.

And now that I’ve spent a little time with Google—trying to find the details of other walls-closing-in stories that flicker vaguely in memory—mammogram machines will forever remind me of Saint Margaret Clitherow, executed for practicing Catholicism. She was arrested but refused to plead, because she didn’t want her young children to have to testify against her. Under the English law of the time, if a prisoner refuses three times to plead, she cannot be tried. She can however be subject to what was called peine forte et dure (punishment forceful [severe] and hard).

The magistrate condemned her in these words:
You must return from whence you came, and there, in the lowest part of the prison, be stripped naked, laid down, your back on the ground, and as much weight laid upon you as you are able to bear, and so to continue for three days without meat or drink, and on the third day to be pressed to death, your hands and feet tied to posts, and a sharp stone under your back.

She was killed on Good Friday of 1586. The sergeants who were charged with the execution got a little queasy, maybe because she was pregnant, and hired a quartet of beggars to do the job. After she was stripped and laid down, a door was put on top of her and slowly loaded with 800 weight of rocks (.4 ton). The idea was that the sharp stone under her back would snap her spine when the heavy rocks were piled on. The rocks were added slowly to give her a chance to change her mind. She didn’t.

The only record of this hideous punishment being used in The United States was in Salem, MA, in 1692. An elderly farmer named Giles Corey mentioned that he had noticed his wife reading a book. This peculiar behavior drew the attention of the witch-hunters. As he attempted to protect his wife Martha, Corey was arrested. He also refused to plead because without a trial there could be no guilty verdict; therefore his land could not be seized, and could pass to his children. The automatic penalty for not pleading was the peine forte et dure. Like Margaret, he did not lose his composure. His last words were: “Put on more weight.”

Martha Corey was hanged for witchcraft.*

There are lots of other martyrs named Margaret—beheaded, drowned, shot by the Bolsheviks, hung by the hands in prisons, feet barely touching the ground…remind you of anything? They’re all interesting stories. They make me want to throw rocks at churches, and send Cheney in his wheelchair over a cliff.

Of all the tortured Margarets, my favorite is Saint Margaret of Antioch, about whom little is known for certain. She lived or was invented in the very early medieval period, said to have been a shepherdess born to a pagan priest. She consecrated her virginity to Christ, caught the eye of a powerful man and, as so often happens, was tortured and killed for spurning his advances. According to the legend, while languishing in prison, post-punishment, she was visited by Satan in the shape of a dragon. Not being in the mood to indulge in any of the fancy stuff he inspires in the minds of men, Satan simply ate her. She cut his belly open with her cross and escaped.

I’d like to have that cross. I’d take it with me when I get my mammogram.

• *http://oce.catholic.com/index.php?title=Margaret_Ward%2C_Venerable

Twitter me a Tweet, Boz

Dr Samuel Johnson and James Boswell walking up the High Street, Edinburgh, from a print by Thomas Rowlandson, 1786. "Mr Johnson and I walked Arm in Arm up the High Street to my House in James Court; it was a dusky night; I could not prevent his being assailed by the Evening effluvia of Edinburgh." As we marched along he grumbled in my ear "I smell you in the dark."

I read that celebrities are now hiring people to ghostwrite their twitter entries. I don’t mean ‘now hiring’ as in send in your resume. I’m sure they have the requisite flunkies on hand, or if they didn’t before the Times piece, they do now. Young assistant or actual freelance writer composes, publicist OKs, star is informed of what he/she said if it has any likelihood of ever being quoted, and all the little people realize that access to the real private lives of the famous is not in fact available at the click of a mouse. You still have to put the hours in. Stalking is not a lazy man’s art.

Social networks are for our own grubby networking (and fun, yes, that too) and I’m not expecting to network with movie stars or Barack Obama. I know I’m the perfect person to help him with the new book; he may be a fantastic writer but he’s kind of busy these days. I could bring that rare “I’m not a speechwriter” quality to the manuscript, but I doubt Twitter will land me an interview. Maybe if I saved one of his kids from drowning? Oh yeah, they already have people for that. And it’s too late to become a dog psychic. That’s the sort of business you have to start when people are itching to get rid of their cash and the dog won’t eat it.

The Times quoted 50 Cent’s twitter (something he actually said in an interview; his assistant plucked it for a tweet): “My ambition leads me through a tunnel that never ends.”

We could all use that sentiment, and that sentence, with a little tweaking.

“My sex addiction leads me through strange vaginas that never end.”

“My nostalgia leads me through a fictitious youth that never returns.”

“My mother-in-law leads me through a wilderness of stories that never discover their point though they do grow fainter when I leave the room.”

“My blogging leads me into digressions where I have to confess a lot more than I might otherwise in order to make the entry flow, so if I mention you and you don’t like it, send me a rewrite and I’ll consider it.”*

• This is not a paid position.

I find I journalize too tediously. Let me try to abbreviate.

~James Boswell

And Paint My Breasts Blue

I’m not going to Florida after all. Not now, anyway. Charles isn’t certain how long his job will last. I’m both relieved and disappointed. I like feeling that I still have my city, even if I don’t know how to afford it, but I miss the idea of escape, of being in another quieter place for a long time. I miss the prospect of living with my dear, delightful husband again. I’m very tired of loneliness and simply seeing more people more often doesn’t cut it. Social life is work. I like domestic codependence with a man, which I was having on weekends this winter with Philip. That’s not all good nor is it easy but it comes to me naturally, just like some people are talented at jiving strangers out of fortunes.

I can’t go into the reasons why Philip will be relatively inaccessible for the foreseeable future, except to say that it’s not under his control, and if I don’t like the extent to which he’s responded to the situation, I have to admit it’s entirely in character and most people would say good character.

My view is more nuanced, which is a nuanced way of saying selfish. Let’s face it: I respect his choice,  and my rage is like a wall of fire. Except that I’m not charred and dead, and the furniture looks untouched, so I guess it isn’t really. That was the image that came to mind though, yellow flame 20 feet high, no wider than a bedsheet, what any demon worth her salt could throw out with a flick of a taloned hand if she were pissed. And then shrug if the humans got upset, saying, “What do you expect? I’m a demon.”

I can tell you one thing: writing supernatural fiction isn’t nearly as cathartic as reading it. Too much lowly human labor, too much, “You have to write even if you don’t feel like it, bitch,” (said to self), and most of all the curse of all writers of a certain age: the awareness that no matter how well crafted a story may be, what illusions it can create in the target brains, words are still lifeless.

We know it; you don’t.

Humans have a hard time believing anything is lifeless. I read a story in New Scientist about money’s wily power. People who have had  their hands burned in boiling water report their pain lessened if they’re handed a few bills. The lonely feel less so. Those asked to make sentences out of ‘money’ words (‘salary’, ‘pay’, etc), rather than out of neutral words, reveal in a follow up, difficult puzzle-game more reluctance to ask for help, even though they’re allowed to, and more reluctance to offer it to others when asked.

Not that this should surprise anyone. We all understand the movie images of criminals rolling in their leaf-pile of cash, laughing or kissing in wild good humor as the green notes flutter, and the subsequent scenes where they get suspicious and proceed to kill each other. The classic end for such a story is all the people dead, knives sprouting from chests, brains splattered against the wall—and on the bed, the pile of money untouched by blood, waiting in deceptive stillness for its next victims.

It’s hard not to be interested in what stories are going to come from this economic swoon. Crimes, heroism, religious conversions, and everyone’s favorite: the next great invention, produced by those creative geniuses previously shacked to remunerative work. But my natural curiosity has been quelled somewhat by what I’ve been reading lately about threats entirely likely and infinitely more dire than the last 6 months (not climate change or suitcase nukes). I won’t inflict them on you, at least not until tomorrow or next week.

I’m taking comfort from the idea that if Charles’s company goes under, he’ll visit me a lot more often. I can visit him too—in the nudist colony where he’ll share a doublewide with his brother. He says the middle-aged and old ladies shave their crotches there, just like young women do nowadays. I’ll feel like a savage. Maybe I can figure out how to grow it to my knees. And paint my breasts blue.

****

I have never walked down Fifth Avenue alone without thinking of money.

~Anthony Trollope

 

 

OVERHEARD IN NEW YORK

 

Hobo: Any change? Anything you got to give?

Suit: I wish I had something to give, but pretty soon, I’m going to be like you.

Hobo: My man, you cannot be this awesome.

–Bleecker & Lafayette

 

 

The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost.

~Murray Kempton 

 

No one as yet had approached the management of New York in a proper spirit; that is to say, regarding it as the shiftless outcome of squalid barbarism and reckless extravagance. No one is likely to do so, because reflections on the long narrow pig-trough are construed as malevolent attacks against the spirit and majesty of the American people, and lead to angry comparisons.

~Rudyard Kipling 

 

In New York it’s not whether you win or lose–it’s how you lay the blame.

~Fran Lebowitz

Teeth

Sabertooth skull

Yesterday, I was just getting a start on sorting my clothes (Florida, Philip’s apartment, storage, Housing Works), and thinking the dizzy wanting-to-lie-down feeling was emotional, until the toothache that’s been bothering me mostly at night—taking hideous, pus-and-beetle shapes in my dreams—hit me with a full body infection.

I have an appointment with the dentist later, the ever-chirpy Tim who makes me long for the wild-eyed dentists of fiction who entertain you in their backyard, wearing white flannels and drinking gin and tonics, as they dose you liberally with laughing gas, then tie the tooth to a back bumper of a motorcycle driven by a maniacal 13 year old.

Human teeth are so pitiful. It’s no wonder the young girls and menopausal women of America are mooning over Stephanie Meyer’s and Charlaine Harris’s vampires. We’ve all known the bliss of clean white canines sinking into our adoring flesh—1/8 of an inch in, anyway, with your average non-psychotic house cat.

Cats know how pretty their teeth are and that you want to be bitten by them, if not actually hurt or eaten. They’ll let you kiss them on the lips, though they prefer not to. And surely you’ve noticed how leisurely they yawn, allowing you a good look.

To prepare for the unpleasantness of the dentist’s chair, I’ve been reading about an old favorite of mine—the sabertooth cat, aka sabertooth tiger though they’re not ‘tigers’ or even very tiger-like, so we can’t call them that anymore.

The first thing I learned is that the sabertooth is the California State Fossil. I didn’t realize states had official fossils and many do not. (Florida, for example doesn’t. One website whines that the state stone—agatized coral—is really a fossil, but there’s no need to be defensive. Florida has a very apt state mammal: the cougar.)

Sabertooths were native to North America and were especially fond of L.A. Roughly the size of an African lion, though up to 50 % heavier, the sabertooth wasn’t a running, pouncing beast but a compact, rugged predator of slow-moving meat-farms like mammoths, mastadons and ground sloths. Its lower jaw could swing to almost a right angle when opened to attack—getting the jaw out of the way of the long canines. The lower jaw was fairly puny, like a screen door.

Big cats generally kill by strangling their prey, which takes a few minutes, as anyone who’s watched PBS lion kills can attest to. Since the sabertooth’s lower jaw muscles were probably too weak to strangle, or to provide the anchoring needed to bite through bone, scientists have concluded that the cat used its considerable upper-body strength to wrestle prey to the ground, then stabbed its canines into the throat, cutting through the jugular vein and/or trachea. This quick back-alley slashing helped protect the glorious teeth, which were thicker from front to back than from side to side, like knives resting on their points, and thus vulnerable to being snapped off under pressure.

The sabretooth’s nasal openings were further back than they are in modern cats, allowing the cat to continue breathing while its head was buried inside its victim. It’s sobering to realize many sabertooths must have drowned in blood before evolution worked that out. Complex analysis having to do with plant fossils in tar pits, where many sabertooths ended up,  suggest the sabertooth had a dappled coat like a leopard. But this is pure speculation as is the claim that for fun the young cats liked to suck up blood from dying mastadons and spray it on cave walls in an activity yet to be known as art.

Kindling

Jeff Bezos at a tender age

The Times had a piece today about a medical student, Satre Stuelke, who’s been doing CT scans of ‘cultural icons’ like iphones and Barbie dolls so I clicked on the pix to see what my inner iphone looked like. I wasn’t impressed. The CT scan of my husband’s head done years ago was way more interesting, making me think that perhaps humans were not descended from apes but horses.*

They didn’t include a Kindle in the slide show but I know what I’d find if I looked inside, since it’s not thick enough for circuitry: relics from famous authors, a bone, a tuft of hair, sprinkled with fairy dust or holy water, depending on the writer, and lashed to service by the stern mumbo jumbo of somebody contemporary and prize-heavy like Ian McEwan.

The Kindle is re-igniting my buying lust. I’d gotten sick of accumulating things. Now I can surf at midnight and in an instant have one of thousands of books, at a steep discount. Last night I bought a fantasy novel for 00.00 cents. It’s a loss leader, the beginning of a series, similar to the $1.69 Face yogurt Trader Joe’s was selling until yesterday when they upped it to $4.99 and I swore never to shop there again.

Before that, I had a birthday gift certificate to use up. So I haven’t actually spent any of my own money. Of course, it’s only been a little over a week.

People like looking at my Kindle. It’s a strangely naked feeling, letting someone play with it and see the 3 or 4 books I’ve bought. I’m used to my formidable library presenting evidence of how much great literature and serious nonfiction I’ve read. While my Kindle has on it…well, never mind.

One answer for this is to jettison anything embarrassing after reading. And if you should want to re-read, being in the same low-brain-cell mood? Amazon has developed a system, intended to keep you from overloading your Kindle’s memory, that enables you to delete a book from the device while amazon keeps a record of your past purchase, and lets you download it again—only to the same Kindle, naturally—anytime you want, free. It’s your very own secret (from your friends) online library, pristine and climate controlled in Jeff Bezos’ paternal embrace.**

Some people will have privacy concerns about the non-friends with access, although purchase records are already being kept by amazon (and everyone else), so it’s a little late to worry.  But the things I read will not land me in jail or even banned from teaching in the Texas public school system. What I write is more likely to get me in trouble. I’ve been considering this—reading recent wordpresss posts about people losing jobs after twittering—and though the particular mistake highlighted (slamming a prospective employer online) is not one I’m likely to make, I can think of lots of blog scenarios causing more than personal-life ill effects.

But of course I can. I wouldn’t be a fiction writer dabbling in fantasy if I couldn’t conjure doom at will and festoon it with comic grotesquerie.

The more important lesson for me is the one I learned in group therapy: while you struggle to confess your agonizing, shameful secret, the one that will make people mock you and shun you forever, your listener is tapping her feet and mentally sticking her fingers in her ears so she won’t forget the radioactive, brontosaurus-sized secret she needs you to shut the fuck up and pay reverent attention to.

*He had blinding headaches, which they decided were migraine since they couldn’t find anything wrong. I’m still suspicious since it was right after that that he started making lots more money.

** Part of what attracted me to amazon in the late ‘90’s was the name. Then I take a look at Jeff Bezos (most recently on Jon Stewart). Smart guy, sure. Making a bundle on the Kindle. But an amazon he’s not. This is a question probably answered somewhere long ago—but was he the rare lad who ignored Batman and The Incredible Hulk, reading Wonder Woman comics at night under the covers?

Going South

On November 5, in Union Square, there were tee shirts, sweatshirts and buttons proclaiming: Change has come. Well I guess so.

I’m moving to Florida soon, unless money starts falling from the sky. It’s kind of exciting when I forget about sorting and packing and leaving New York—my city, the only city I’ll ever call home—leaving Philip and my friends. I’ve been here 25 years, but before that I moved around a lot.

The sun, the beach. The quiet. Not having to live alone anymore. These are good things. I can put my mind there, but I’m not there yet. I don’t want to sort and pack, sell and give away, go to my various doctors to get the questionable bits checked, or do my taxes. I want to lie on my bed in the spring sunlight, my laptop radiating through the pillow it rests on, write and surf. I want to enjoy what I have while it’s still here—take walks in the neighborhood, go to museums, have dinners with friends.

And though I kind of want to go, I really don’t want to leave. I’m angry at the world, which could care less. I was angry at myself, but that was unproductive. To be angry at the financiers, Wall Street and the banks, Bush and Greenspan—why bother? It’s not like I’m waiting outside a cold prison in Russia to hear any scrap of news of my beloved. I’m not in an Iraqi marketplace looking at bloody body parts flung among the vegetables. It can always be worse until you’re dead and opinions differ as to whether it can get worse then.

Personally, I’d prefer no afterlife. It’s hard enough moving to another state. Dead, I wouldn’t know anybody and the jackals would sniff me out. People like to say all your loved ones—like my departed brother—come to greet you, but how likely is that? My living brother won’t even come to New York.

I’m going to Florida as everyone else flees. Land of abandoned houses (some now home to colonies of bees), hurricanes, highways, strip malls, Republicans. At least my vote will count more.

There’s no income tax in Florida. No 20° weather, no 4 a.m. drunks fighting or singing under my window. And in June, in New York, the subway fare’s going up 50 cents, with likely worse to follow.

Worse to follow in Florida too, no doubt. But if the system collapses, as so many like to predict, and the seas rise and eat the beaches just to make sure we get the message, I’ll move inland and live in a crumbling lego house with the bees.

Or not. But no afterlife. Seriously. Give mine to somebody’s cat.

***

“I am going to St, Petersburg, Florida, tomorrow. Let the worthy citizens of Chicago get their liquor the best they can. I’m sick of the job–it’s a thankless one and full of grief. I’ve been spending the best years of my life as a public benefactor.” ~Al Capone

“I turned my home state of Florida into the Land of Xanth. “~Piers Anthony

“Xanth is a land of centaurs, dragons and basilisks, where every citizen has a special spell only he or she can cast.”~narrativeandontology.blogspot.com

Always on my Mind

Death has been on my mind. Natasha’s Richardson’s accident was heartbreaking; a close friend of mine was working with a member of her family, which is not much of a connection but it lit up my own memories of her performances. I also saw Liam Neeson on Jon Stewart a few months ago, and went through the requisite envy—Natasha Richardson has everything—that one remembers at moments like this.

The flip side of that is I’ve been feeling desperately unhappy about my own life: a stalled career, no money, a 9 year love affair that is a perpetual misery machine shot with moments of transcendent joy, hours of quiet happiness—the seductions that keep one from turning off the machine.

I have health, loving friends and family, brains and talent. Nonetheless, there’s a part of me that thinks: I know nothing of Natasha Richardson’s inner life, but if it matched what one saw from the outside, 45 years of that seems better than 145 of my own life.

This isn’t about fame or a sexy movie star husband. It’s about depression, which has systematically wrecked the many opportunities I’ve had. It’s about my father, who taught me that the way you deal with severe pain is to kill yourself. My mother taught me that you deal with it by tapping your inner strength, and that’s what I’ve been doing for 54 years. The appeal of my father’s way is you don’t have to keep doing it over and over. I remember a little wooden placard he had, the kind you buy at a tacky gift shop. Written on it was, “If at first you don’t succeed, to hell with it.”

I was struck by that not just because it appealed to a kid’s natural anti-piety, but because it seemed so in character for him, and I hadn’t consciously recognized that part of his character before. My father rarely talked to me so any tidbit I learned about him was powerful. Any connection was powerful. I didn’t believe in that slogan, and still don’t: I’m more of the school that if you don’t succeed after trying for 54 years, you should strongly consider saying to hell with it.

I’m not talking about my particular goals. I know I didn’t try hard enough in my career, didn’t do what people told me to do and what I told myself to do. I didn’t try hard enough to walk away from a hopeless romance. (No, not hopeless. I can’t even say that now. Seemingly hopeless.) But the reason I didn’t wasn’t laziness, though I have more than my share of that, but depression. I’ve never liked that word, but none of the good words—despair, anguish, terror—carry the same implication of longlastingness. I have to trust you know the ferocity and multi-dimensional nature of the beast. I’ve spent at least half my life’s energy fighting it. When I read about women juggling family and career, I relate. Tending to the demands of relentless needy creatures is wearying.

Everybody’s beast is different, though, and what I can say about mine is that it’s never been that flat, affectless grey goo that so many people describe. I’ve been in that place, now and then. It was restful. Not pleasant, but restful. But I can see why it results in suicide so often. If nothing is reliably differentiated from any other thing, even death loses its mystique and becomes as harmless-looking as a sleeping pill.

Death has never looked harmless to me. I first encountered it as a murderer taking those I loved. I’ve never gone a week without moments of joy or contentment, without appreciation of the beauty of the world that death will steal from me, sooner or later. So I have to do things my mother’s way and manage to enjoy life even though the demonspawn upstairs are going crazy and may soon erupt.

You know language is inadequate when this translates as ‘hope.’

Stimulate Me

I wasn’t going to write about the AIG mess because everybody has, and I imagine readers are sick of it. But I can’t write about my personal life because it makes me weep and want to bite chunks out of my arms and legs, and my mind’s closed like a clam to to all to wonderful curious things of the world. So, politics. I keep thinking of something Philip said: that Obama was correct in focusing on the bank bailout, that Geithner would survive, and all this hysteria was inevitable and had to be both given room and ignored. “What nobody understands about politics,” he said, “is that you have to allow the populist rage. But you don’t have to react to it.”

Obama is reacting to the rage, but as minimally as he can get away with. He’s doing his best to keep the love (Jay Leno loves him). Congress gets to play the Big Stupid, as it does so well. I can’t imagine how the 90% tax plan will survive legal challenge, but maybe nobody will challenge it. Maybe the death threats will convince enough executives to give back their bonuses. Too bad Rahm can’t deliver the threats himself.

Meanwhile, AIG is suing the IRS for taxes it paid and now says it doesn’t owe. It’s one of those fights that normally would be way under the radar, but nothing AIG and its companion losers do can be under the radar now. Maybe they don’t need million dollar executives. Maybe they need a good PR guy. I know one who’d work for 250k. Although, now that I think about it, he probably wouldn’t take a job at AIG.  It’s kind of like working for the Treasury. You have to be really smart and accomplished to be considered, but if you are those things, why walk into the shit?

I’m disappointed in Geithner but I haven’t given up all hope. I still trust that Obama knows a little more than I do. In any case, you can’t expect the capitalist system to transform—which is happening—without a lot of battle and mess. The astrologers say: the last time Pluto was in the place in the sky was during the American Revolution. I don’t think we have the spine for a revolution but maybe this time we can manage change without bloodshed. (In the U.S. I mean. Other countries have it rougher.)

For the record I’m a rationalist who likes to read books about how we deceive ourselves by not understanding the mechanics of chance and coincidence, and so imagine patterns and forces when none exist, and books about the evolutionary basis of religion—at the same time, I love to read Michael Lutin. *

As Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” That works for me. He went on to say, “One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.” So, not quite applicable to my point—I’ll have to find another quote to bolster my split-brain problem—but very much to the current situation.

*Vanity Fair astrologer, website wheresthemoon.com

Obama’s a Leo. Where he is this week, according to Lutin:
“In order to be the creative genius you’d like to be remembered as, you have to smash a few rules once in a while and take a few risks that could put in jeopardy everything you have been trying to build and preserve for ages. On the other hand, when you hear the drums beating and the call of the wild night birds, can you really turn up the TV and pretend you don’t have those urges and yearnings?”

I thought it was me hearing the wild night birds. I guess I was just dreaming.

Btw—all those states rejecting stimulus money: I’ll take it. I’ll spread it around. I know lots of good hardworking, people who need a jolt, a little spring of excitement as the bank account zooms.

The American Plan

W. 47th St.

I had a lovely birthday, though things took a dive after that. Philip took me to see The American Plan, by Richard Greenberg. Originally produced in 1990, it takes place in the mid 1950’s. The story is simple, even hoary—diabolically charismatic, domineering mother, who “got the last boat out of Germany”, sad, screwy daughter. (The father, who made the family rich by inventing “something in lamps” is dead.)

The women are vacationing at their summer place in the Catskills, across the lake from a hotel full of people they mingle with but consider vulgar, and who in turn refer to the mother as “the Czarina.” The third in their party is the mother’s black maid-cum-companion, Olivia, a brilliantly understated character. The daughter complains at one point, “You never tell anything about yourself. Doesn’t it get lonely having no one to talk to?” Olivia replies, “Yes, it does. But if I told you my secrets, I’d be lonely for the things I told.”

Enter a young man. Later another one, chasing the first. The daughter tries to get away from her mother and fails. In the end, nobody’s happy. As one character says, it’s not that there’s no such thing as happiness. Rather, “Happiness exists, but only for other people.”

Mercedes Ruehl as the mother, Eva, is riveting, utterly lifelike as a larger-than-life character, with the added brio that art brings such a role; you’d never want to meet this woman but watching her on stage is pure delight. The way she bunches up her lips, sighs, how she moves her body in the exquisitely self-conscious, self-possessed manner of a middle-aged force of nature—it’s all enchanting. If theater didn’t exist, Mercedes Ruehl would have to invent it.

Lily Rabe, playing Lili, can’t compete with her but she holds her ground, which for the purposes of the story is just right. She’s too old for the character which skewed things a little—I kept thinking of her as a girl kept captive into her thirties, which during most of the play is not the case. And yet I’m not sure a young actress would have done so well. Right from the start the hold the mother has over the daughter is timeless; Lili is not just a 20 year old aching to get away. “This happens every year,” she explains to her beau, and it feels like she means, “every year for the last 100.” She has a bit of Laura in The Glass Menagerie to her; but she’s not Southern gothic crazy. She’s New York Jewish, post WWII neurotic. Her mind is not so gauzy—there’s real, terrible history in the background—and she has some spine. She seems, almost, to have a chance.

The title refers to what the hotel across the lake offers its guests, and what Lili is not allowed. When she was a little girl, her mother used to sing to her, “The Nazis haven’t found us/But darling, they’re all around us.” In fact, what’s around them is a pair of feckless young men with their own not-inconsiderable pain. The male characters are smaller and less interesting, but make a good counterpoint to the drowning power of family and war.

What makes the play such a pleasure, though, is not the story—twisty and psychologically astute as it is—but the sparkle and precision of the dialogue, and the just-right pacing. Not one scene is too short or too long (kudos to the director, David Grindley). Wit livens every exchange but never at the expense of character.

Happiness, for that evening, was mine.

Happiness=Books and Cake

Kindle Cake http://www.geeksugar.com/1131756

Nine years ago, I wrote a piece for the New York Times* about electronic paper, which had not yet come on the market. I wrote as one who had been addicted to books practically since birth, and who could remember the particular feel of a paperback that has fallen in the tub and dried out: swollen, a little crunchy, needing to be read carefully. I had a fondness for books that had survived immersion similar to my appreciation for my cat when he sat still and let me bathe him. Gone with the Wind, Jane Eyre, and Marjorie Morningstar were a few of my victims.

But now I have a Kindle and I can’t take it in the bath. (This isn’t really a problem, since my bathtub is not a nice place.) I’m perfectly happy to read  in bed. Since I’ve only had the Kindle a few days, it makes me feel like I’m doing something important, as when I first learned to use a computer. Not the same, of course. The Kindle is easy. It’s also made me more vividly aware that in the next decade or two print newspapers and magazines will vanish, and books will exist in far fewer numbers. That makes me sad—I’ll never lose my emotional attachment to paper—but it’s okay. We learned to live without papyrus. Nobody practices penmanship anymore.The problem is figuring out how not to lose valuable digital records as technology leaps ahead.

Right now, there are a number of people preserving old hardware and transferring data to new systems. Libraries make and will make decisions on a continuing basis about what to keep, what to transfer. But history depends on the found object, the book or pamphlet that has sat unread in an attic or library for a 100 or 200 years and come out perfectly readable, if a little musty. My reflex answer is to keep printed copies of everything important, but that’s not going to be what happens. Instead, we’ll develop computers that can emulate the processes of old systems, and all data will have meta-information about its own compatibility requirements embedded. Then you’ll open, on your new machine, that old disk or file you found on your grandmother’s computer and be bored or amazed at the stuff she used to write; you’ll lift forgotten gems from her Kindle. That may not work forever, but it’s as far ahead as I can see.

Still, it’s a little scary that so many questions now are answered by: In the future, when we have these really awesome computers Not to mention what will result when the computers become sentient, which may or may not happen, but I think it will. Perhaps they’ll be like 19th century schoolteachers, feeding us only moral tales in an attempt to eradicate the beast in humanity. Perhaps they’ll whisper erotic stories in our ears as we sleep in order to stimulate the amusing spectacle of human desire. More likely they’ll write their own books, and novelists like me will grumble about the competition.

In the meantime, anything I write is going to be printed on acid-free paper, bound and stored in a cool dark place. When I get around to it, that is. And since it’s my birthday today, will somebody bake me a cake like the one in the photograph?

*www.nytimes.com/books/99/12/12/bookend/bookend.html

My Pleasure Principles

Ingres, Odalisque

I expect that by now many of you have read the New York Times article, “The Pleasure Principle,” about a center in San Francisco called One Taste Urban Retreat Center*, which is dedicated to the art and practice of female orgasm. Men and women live together at the center, learning yoga and mindfulness, but the main event happens at 7 a.m. each day, when “about a dozen women, naked from the waist down, lie with eyes closed in a velvet-curtained room, while clothed men huddle over them, stroking them in a ritual known as orgasmic meditation…”

7 a.m.? Don’t they know that female desire peaks in the mid-afternoon? Men are the ones who wake up with hard-ons, and women have to bat them away in order to get coffee. If I had an orgasm in the morning, why would I bother writing?

At the One Taste Center, the men and women avoid eye contact during the orgasm-meditation. It’s not about romance, or interpersonal communication. The men don’t get to climax. Part of me thinks this would be a good place for women who’ ve never had orgasms, even while masturbating, or who’ ve never masturbated, or who can’t have orgasms during sex because of shame about their body. The female body is beautiful and holy and deserves to be serviced in hushed and velvety circumstances. I  can go for that (right now would be nice). But another part of me thinks—what is this preparing you for? Sex with eunuchs?

Women need to know how to achieve orgasm and how to ask for the right stimulation, and men need to learn the techniques and be willing to employ them. Plenty of women also have things to learn about male sexuality, which is a curious and fascinating field of study. I think sex workshops are a great resource for all genders. There ought to be more of them. Maybe in high school, right after the workshop in financial management. But a live-in retreat and a focus on orgasm as ‘meditation’ takes you away from ordinary life, which is, face it, where the best sex is to be found.

I would be happy if men all responded to the clitoris the way I respond to the penis of the man I love and desire: something that turns me on to look at, touch, lick, etc. I can write glorious emails about its beauty. (I’ve tried poems but that just gets embarrassing.) If men worshipped the clitoris the way they worship breasts, all would be well. But they don’t, and I doubt we can change that without intensive genetic manipulation, which is a task best left to future generations.

Even so, I’ve had plenty of nights of sex without orgasm that I wouldn’t want to have missed. The crazy heat, the tease, the turn-on of precipitous action is quite lovely. Having one’s breasts worshipped isn’t bad either. And in general I’ll take a man I love, a man I think is sexy, a man whose cock I worship (except when he’s being, excuse me, a prick) over an Olympic gold-medal cunnilinguist any day.

In my experience the best way to motivate a man to make love better is to a) arouse him, b) make sure he cares about you, or at least wants you to stick around, and c) appeal to his competitive instincts. If you let him know your last boyfriend was a virtuoso with his tongue and hands, he’ll apply himself with vigor. If you sigh and moan when he gets it right, he’ll keep it up.

Men are funny that way. Sort of like women, except with women you have to be more indirect.

On else, you could offer this incentive (from the Times article): “a baby-faced 50-year-old Silicon Valley engineer…said that the practice of manually fixing his attention on a tiny spot of a woman’s body improves his concentration at work.”

You see? I’d prefer a man who joined the Center because he wanted access to all those naked lower bodies and then went mad with desire and had to be restrained by brawny bouncers, chained in the cellar until the wild lust had worn itself out…

I guess I’m not the meditative type.

* I’m not going to make any jokes about the name of the One Taste Urban Retreat Center. That’s what comments are for.

If Madoff is the Devil, Who’s Cheney?

Cheney’s still distressed that Scooter Libby wasn’t pardoned. He has none of that paternal pride you’d expect—finally the little boy he made president grew a tiny ball. A useless one perhaps, but still. It’s remarkable in a man of W’s age.

I’m sure the Obama administration would be happy to work out a deal. Cheney testifies about his encyclopedia of crimes, enters a guilty plea to, well, lots of things but treason would be sufficient, and Libby gets pardoned.

I’m not suggesting we sent Cheney to Guantanomo, or an unnamed country, perhaps Poland, to be subjected to ‘alternative procedures.’ He can go to a country club prison for all I care, as long as he’s sentenced to 150 years.

Think of it: everyone from the media to the guy next to you at work is calling Bernie Madoff the devil. Stealing people’s life savings—including Elie Wiesel for God’s sake-—is abominable behavior. But I doubt any of Madoff’s victim’s would prefer this, “I remained naked for the next two weeks…. I was kept in a standing position, feet flat on the floor, but with my arms above my head and fixed with handcuffs and a chain to a metal bar running across the width of the cell. The cell was dark with no light, artificial or natural.” *

You may think the prisoner quoted above deserves what he got. I’m vengeful enough that torture for mass murderers and terrorists doesn’t upset me as much as looking at pictures of people starving. But I do think we ought to vote on this sort of thing. Maybe it’s time to re-ratify the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I know, scary. Do you trust your fellow Americans? Still…

If Cheney belongs in prison, so does Bush. He may have the Who Me? child thing down pat, but that’s no excuse when we send actual children to jail routinely. I’ve argued against prosecuting the Bushies because it would divide the country and I thought the Obama Administration needed to focus on the future. I’m still concerned about that, especially since the Republicans are doing such a good job of trashing their image. Ridicule is a powerful weapon. But I’m coming around.

Bush may be smarter than Cheney, after all. He has the sense to keep his mouth shut.

* The New York Times, Sunday, March 15

Russian torture Chair

Dick Cheney

Readers and Writers

Edvard Munch, Girl Kindling Stove

My sister bought me a Kindle for my birthday! I had just decided to stop buying books—as well as chocolate, fruit other than apples and bananas, and Perrier. I was going to do what my brother suggested and live on spaghetti and spam. Start watching more TV.

But she bought me a Kindle so I’ll have to download a few books, right? The Kindle will be perfect for all those airplane trips I can’t afford to take anymore. I have a few books on my iphone, mostly Dickens, but I hardly ever read my phone. I use it to take pictures. Which reminds me—another iphone app I’ve thought of: you rub the screen a few times and then aim it at your pile of gathered kindling and it starts a fire. It will come in handy when we’re all living in the National Parks, hiding from the reckless hordes of starving immigrants besieging our shores. Yeah, I know we’ve probably got ten years before the world’s coastal cities disappear and things get ugly. Still, it’s good to be ready.

**

A writer friend of mine who fought in Vietnam recently wrote a novel about that war and sent it to his agent. His agent asked him to set it in Iraq. I guess the idea is if your book is on Iraq you can go on Jon Stewart and Charlie Rose, and what could be finer than that (unless you’re Jim Cramer)?

I think he should write a novel about a squadron of young recruits being sent to Iraq, entering a time warp after the plane collides with some very old geese, and ending up in Vietnam, circa 1966.
“Man, this is some weird desert.”
“Desert’s supposed to be sand, right?”
“Probably the whole country isn’t desert. You know, like Arizona isn’t the whole U.S. This is just like Lousiana.”
“I been to Louisiana. This ain’t Louisiana.”
“How come our guys all have their guns pointed at us?”
“They sure look funny.”
“They’ve all got fucking antique guns, that’s why.”
“Fucking Bush.”

Okay, now you see it has to be a TV show. Hogan’s Heroes meets Gilligan’s Island. The present-day guys finally figure out what’s going on and try to explain that the war is over, that we lost, that there was no point to the whole mess anyway and the best idea would be to sneak over to Iraq and kill Saddam while he’s still a young thug (though others have different ideas on who should be killed).

The Vietnam-era soldiers, annoyed by being asked whether they’ve killed any babies yet and where their ear collection is, spike the newbies’ drinks with hallucinogens and send them out to find what the old soldiers keep referring to as ‘IUDs’, except for stuttering Jeremy from Fresno who has an eidetic memory for Internet porn, and is kept in camp to spend his evenings describing every video he’s ever seen in minute detail. Viewers love the way his stuttering disappears when the sex gets hot, and the way the Vietnam-era guys smack him every time he says, “iphone.”

The Gelded Age

George Grosz

Europeans are considering castrating sex offenders, while we can’t even manage to get the drop on the Wall Street economy-assassins.

Bernie Madoff in jail will make a lot of people feel better. But that was an easy case. He broke laws flagrantly, admitted guilt, and his victims are specific and powerful. What about the rest of them, the ones who may or may not have broken laws but nonetheless have impoverished millions of people?

Jim Cramer’s excuse on Jon Stewart last night was the CEOs he trusted, “guys I went to school with, friends,” lied to him. Stewart was scornful of this; journalists should expect to be lied to. Cramer isn’t the real villain here, though he’s a jackass. The powers-that-be at CNBC decide when and how to deploy their real financial journalists.

But what now? Americans want bonuses returned, regulation put in place, credit restored. They also want those who lied criminally to be punished, and for the rest to admit it was greed and stupidity as far above and beyond the greed and stupidity of the average person as those bonuses were above the windfall of 50 grand of new equity in your house that maybe you spent unwisely.

I understand that it all made sense if you were part of the club where everyone else was insane too. Really, I do get that, having hung out with alcoholics. But once the game is over, you’ve dried out and seen the damage, once the whole world is listening in on those private drunken conversations about your mutual brilliance…to not see what went wrong takes enormous mental effort, the kind that deforms and constricts all cognitive functioning.

Are they laughing up their sleeves? The ones who got out in time are. Many of the rest are painfully riding it out, hating their attackers. And some have brains are dribbling out their ears from the continual strain of lying to themselves. Those are the ones we need sobered out of the complex intoxication of wealth, status and risk and put to work in our universities and MBA programs, explaining to the young how it happened, what the dangers, temptations and ignored warning signs were. Nobody understands it better. Like ex gang members, they have street cred.

We don’t need their experience to run our banks. What part of it was valuable they trashed themselves. We need to tap into the fascination people feel for those who fall far, especially into the willful stupidity that intelligent kids find so hard to fathom—childhood and adolescence being places where you need your wits about you.

As for those caught in criminal lies…while they’re awaiting trial, lock them in cells with continuous video of those European doctors gelding sex offenders.

Dead Is The New Black

John Berryman, poet, who jumped from a bridge in 1972, waving goodbye

A guy from Philip’s company jumped out the office window yesterday. Philip didn’t quite know how to talk about it. He’d never met the man. He seemed to both of us more of a casualty of war than an individual meeting his private fate, though the two can’t be separated.

I thought perhaps he was shorting financial stocks on the day of the big rally. It’s just as likely something in his personal life deteriorated over the weekend. But there are so many suicides lately. You can’t help thinking of the people who jumped from the twin towers. Maybe one of them woke up that beautiful Tuesday planning a dive, but you kind of doubt it.

The last person I knew who killed himself that way did have bad things happening in his personal life but was also a high-functioning paranoid schizophrenic (he worked for The New York Times). My mother is certain he thought hostile forces were coming for him and he was trying to escape. Of course all suicides think hostile forces are coming for them. The only difference is that some of us realize the forces are in our minds.

No, I’m not a suicide. I’m writing this, aren’t I? The dead don’t write. At least, they don’t write to me. I’ve never even come close except for the night of my first date with my husband—I was suicidal before he asked me out, not after—but I have suicidal ideation, as the shrinks call it.

“I’m going to jump out the window!” I said to my doctor several years ago.

“Go ahead,” he replied. “We’re on the first floor.” Smug little bastard…I forgot we were in the new office…

I like that phrase, though, suicidal ideation. It rolls off the tongue. You could use it to name a child. Suicidal Ideation Jones. Or Suicidal Ideation Napalm, if you want the correct initials.

My father used the car-in-the-closed-garage method, classic for the time and place (mid-60’s suburbia) and his character type (pain-avoidant, fastidious about his person). Two  teenage brothers I knew from Texas shot themselves while on LSD, my friend Susan’s father hung himself, and the others used pills.

You know all those life insurance policies that disallow benefits in the event of suicide within three years? I bet the ones past the three-year mark are all being yanked. Check the fine print. And keep in mind that your kids would probably prefer it if you pulled them out of their too-expensive schools and organized a family bank heist gang, or drove to Cleveland and squatted in an empty house.

Suicidal ideation isn’t meant to lead out the window. It’s like those sexual fantasies you have about…you know the ones I mean…you’d never really do that. In your mind, you’re allowed the most extravagant depravity. Keep it there.

John Berryman

Dream Song 127

Again, his friend’s death made the man sit still
and freeze inside—his daughter won first price—
his wife scowled over at him—
It seemed to be Hallowe’en.
His friend’s death had been adjudged suicide,
which dangles a trail

longer than Henry’s chill, longer than his loss
and longer than the letter that he wrote
that day to the widow
to find out what the hell had happened thus.
All souls converge upon a hopeless mote
tonight, as though

the throngs of souls in hopeless pain rise up
to say they cannot care, to say they abide
whatever is to come.
My air is flung with souls which will not stop
and among them hangs a soul that has not died
and refuses to come home.

Dream Song 29

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of.  Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late.  This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing

I read the news today, oh boy…

Warthog. n.(wôrthôg, -hg) 1. A wild African hog with two protruding tusks and warty excrescences on its face. 2. A person who always eats the best bits. 3. Inspiration for name of school in famous children's story 4. (slang) Banker

From The New York Times, March 10, 2009, explaining the huge jump in the stock market this morning, “That hint of hope came in the form of a memorandum from the chief executive of Citigroup, Vikram S. Pandit, saying that the bank had turned a profit in the first two months of the year, and that its quarterly performance to date, before taxes and special items, was the best since the third quarter of 2007.

Mr. Pandit gave no indication of how much special items, like write-downs or credit losses, would be…”

Does anyone else feel the slightest twinge of mistrust? This nugget of questionable news made bank stocks rise in the double digits. A sweet profit for somebody. Think of the possibilities for a person with advance notice of this memo. Think of the temptation to write it.

Think of all the money people will lose when the market changes its mind tomorrow or Friday.

***

In its weekly grammar column, The Times castigates itself for its cornucopia of errors, having apparently decided this approach is cheaper than hiring more copyeditors. Today’s column concerned metaphor abuse, citing a sentence that contained this specimen “…a stew of programs, some with warts and all.”

I find that strangely evocative. Is it really an error? I’m sure I’ve had warts in my stew. Middle School cafeteria, maybe? Not that I’m complaining. Pretty soon we’ll look back on these days nostalgically. The few ancients will tell stories: “Once upon a time, children, you could still get warts. Real warts, served up hot in a stew. You can’t imagine how tasty they were: chewy, protein-rich, and no two exactly alike…

“But never mind; dirt’s good enough for us. We can live on dirt thanks to our genetic modifications derived from stem-cell research. Of all nations, America produced the most aborted fetuses in the early part of this century, giving us an unbeatable technological edge, and ending the old argument about whether sex is good for anything. It’s a shame we had to let it go.

“Now, children, what your older siblings told you that made you cry and have nightmares is in fact true—if a 2009-era person saw you, he’d crush you underfoot or spray you with nasty chemicals. But they were primitives, greedy, stupid and mindlessly destructive. They didn’t understand the elegant efficiency of the human-insect hybrid with built-in wifi capability, access to communal memory farms and daily upgrades. They didn’t even appreciate wart stew, for god’s sake; I used to have to tell my husband it was chipped beef. Beef? T bones on the grill, filet mignon with béarnaise? Forget about it. Eat your dirt.”

The Empty House Cupcake Dream

I was reading in the New York Times Magazine about abandoned houses in Cleveland. Not a place I’ve ever wanted to live, even in a mansion, but the article was long and I kept seeing the empty houses—single family, unpretentious, a few bedrooms—seeing them in the hundreds and thousands and thinking: They’re empty. Why can’t people live in them before the pipes are ripped from the walls and the boiler stolen? Wouldn’t that be a good thing?

I don’t know where I’m going to live six months from now. Here in New York or in Florida or both, going back and forth like the child of a particularly odd divorce. I’ve talked about this with both husband and boyfriend; we all have decisions to make, not knowing what the future holds; jealousy and possessiveness are still in play but security looms larger.

Philip has often said plaintively, “Why can’t we all just live together?”

“Because Christine hates me,” I would reply. “And Charles hates you.”

Now Charles has his own girlfriend, whom I will call Cynthia, and he won’t be able to afford me if he loses his job. Yesterday, he said, “I’m starting to agree with Philip. Maybe we should live together.” Meanwhile Philip dreamed that William Shatner was running for Governor, and he wanted to be his campaign manager. I want to be getting a snack in my mother’s beachfront kitchen in New Hampshire in 1974 while she and my teenage brother watch Star Trek reruns on TV.

The Times article mentioned houses being sold on ebay and craigslist for prices like $2,000. Now if it turns out that the house you bought for $2,000 has been stripped of its innards, condemned by the city and comes with a large back-tax bill, your deal is slightly less awesome than what you can find on my ebay site (beautiful jewelry, guaranteed-your-money-back free of mold, mice, vandalism and zombie banks).

But my interest was piqued and I went on line, looking at houses in South Florida. Houses that cost $8,500, or $24,000, or $55,000. Tiny houses and very small houses and smallish houses that resemble road dividers. The tiny and very small ones are often cute, painted fuschia or tangerine, with front porches, bushes, and white trim. Dollhouses. Surely I can buy several, string them together like Christmas lights?

Ten minutes later I was reading an article on Huffingtonpost.com about the amazing deals that can be had now on designer clothes, electronics and so forth. They might as well have been talking about discount plastic dog vomit. I couldn’t imagine buying anything more indulgent than dessert.

Houses like cupcakes, and the rose-tinted old days. That’s what I dream about.

Michelle, ma belle

I have no doubt many have said this before me, but I love Michelle Obama’s arms. My own arms tend more toward the languid and I’m fine with that, but when I was 13, my cousin Faxy could beat all the boys in the class arm-wrestling and I liked nothing better than watching her do it. Winning bets. Big guys. I don’t think we bet money; this was in the 60’s. It was just cool. Her mother was a radical lesbian novelist who wouldn’t let anyone of the male persuasion set foot on her territory (11 year old son excepted, I think) and that was kind of cool, but I liked men so I was conflicted. I had no conflicts at all about Fax muscling up and showing what a girl could do.

The First Lady’s fashion choices may be of minimal importance to our collapsing society. So is my recipe for banana bread and what my husband has decided to name his stray cat. They add texture though, don’t they? If you had the recipe and the name I mean, which you don’t, but it’s okay, you have Michelle. The children. The dog. We’re primates and grooming matters. Anyway, there’s no shortage of reporters giving us the grim, grimmer and grimmest news. After dutifully acquainting myself with our (by which I mean the world’s)  increasingly bizarre circumstances, remembering that someday this will be ‘history’ and I’m living it so I should take notes when I’m not having panic attacks, all I really want to do is watch Jon Stewart and look at pictures of Michelle and her daughters.

If only Maureen Dowd and David Brooks had broken the story that Michelle is really Supergirl. That would be worthy of a column.* If only Maureen and David were in a sci-fi story where the taxi left-turned into another reality where there was nothing but Nothing outside the car, no space, no time, and they were condemned to forever ride in other’s company, gossiping until their tongues became as thin as paper, thinner, and they forgot who it was they spoke of and what laughter was, until—

OK, they could come back after a few months. They’re frequently amusing. But to say Michelle has made her point? Her point is this is who she is and what she looks like and fuck you if you don’t like it. Michelle is what little girls want to grow up to be, unless they’re like me and want to grow up with a Michelle as their best friend and cousin (secretly Supergirl). I may be turning her into an empowerment object, but too bad: I love looking at her arms. My mother said recently that when the President smiles, she wants to jump into his arms. I guess it runs in the family, the arm thing.

* re: Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times, March 7

Saturday, Named after The God who ate his Children

The Swan Nebula, taken by the Hubble Telescope

They turned up the gravity in my body. There’s a switch for it.

I’m too depressed to work on my novel, or go out on this beautiful Saturday, or call anyone.  I’ve already tried vodka, chocolate and trash fiction. I’m typing this sentence because I hope it will lead somewhere better and already I feel that little excitement in the words, like a dog when you take its leash off the hook. When I was a very young writer and the only things I knew for sure were the things I didn’t want to admit to anyone, I thought I could just play with words and phrases like paints, that the beauty of the sounds and associations were enough. If I’d been a musician—but I was much too lazy to be a musician—

There are reasons to be depressed and just as many not to be. My husband, after many years of marriage, suggested to me once that maybe the reasons came after the fact. I remember feeling defensive and embarrassed; mostly afraid I was nothing but a walking storm of unhappiness. And I didn’t even know what a terrible thing that is to be, that the weight of the world’s unhappiness has always been outrageous.

People have believed in astrology for thousands of years because it’s just common sense to think the planets are yanking us, swatting us into orbit, or collapsing on top of us. Nothing else is big enough to create such effects.

I would like someone to knock on my door and ask for help,  preferably something physical. What’s the difference between that and calling my friends to see who would like help with something? Simply that I feel that to be asked would snap me out of this, while to offer would be an admission of need, and my need is too great and diffuse and primitive…it could only lead to me jumping on someone’s back and dragging them under with me.

Note to self: they can fight back.
Re: note to self: that’s what I’m afraid of.

It has calmed me to write this. A blog is an amazing thing. It’s not a letter requiring response. No one pays for it; no one is owed. Yet it’s a step outside the monotonous washing machine of diary writing. When you clip the leash on the dog’s collar what does it expect? Around the block, same old story. Better than nothing.

Home Sweet Home

As I walked in the door at about 2:00 pm today, I planned to look at my apartment as potential renters would, as well as assess it a task to be accomplished. I expected to see clutter and dinginess, evidence of my psychic disarray, and was instead astonished at how charming and homey it was, the rugs, the books, the art, and the cabinets of beads. In the bedroom more books, photographs, my writing desk, and the full-length mirror on a stand I bought a few months before I stopped buying anything. Yes, I have too much stuff for the space and there are places I’d rather you didn’t investigate too closely, but really I wasn’t thinking about you, about anyone but me; my place, mine; I thought could spent the rest of my life in these two rooms, reading, writing, watching TV from bed, making jewelry at midnight and cookies in the afternoon, and never be unhappy for a moment.

Then I ate an apple and fell asleep. I woke at four, ground coffee in my closet kitchen that has a floor half cheap linoleum and half crumbling plaster and dirt covered with $3.99 rugs—that part mostly hidden beneath the butcher block cart that serves as my only counter space—and thought of the rust under the sink and the oven that follows no instructions other than on and off, things I put up with (though I’m perfectly capable of cajoling the super) because a part of me loves neglect, feels safest when my environment is both lovely and imperfect.

I was like this as a child, in my mother’s big, beautiful house, which was always clean. Told to vacuum, I would vacuum 95% of the room and when my mother said, “Really, isn’t it just as easy to finish the job?” I didn’t know how to say, “Yes, but I like it better this way,” in words she would understand. It confused me that it wasn’t obvious, the beauty and rightness of some dust remaining, a few little patches of dust sparkling in the sun. How they set off the clean part, added nuance. And when we drove through the town, I was interested in the other big houses in our neighborhood but I was enchanted by the little houses, the smaller the better, houses where I imagined families packed like chocolates in a box.

I’m aware that, as an adult, my attachment to pockets of squalor is more complex. I’m reacting to what others think—those girlfriends who come in and say, “I could do so much with this place!” or my boyfriend who scolds me for my living conditions as if I had rats running over piles of rotting garbage and the occasional severed hand. No, actually he doesn’t scold me like that. I have just felt it sometimes, in the interstices of his words, which, as he would say, is my problem.

But leaving aside the dicey parts, I have spent a bit of time and money in the past two years touching up the place—buying a runner rug from overstock.com that I put on the far side of the bed where it’s sometimes chilly, where my boyfriend and husband have to step when they get up in the middle of the night; a painted, supposedly antique Chinese cabinet (in the Tibetan style) on ebay, which I keep the TV on; and the aforementioned mirror; and the kitchen cart…

The New York lottery prize, I heard on the way in from the airport, is up to $212,000,000. If I took it in cash, it would be a little under a 100 mil, subtract 45% for taxes—plenty for me, my mother, Charles, Philip, Lisa, Gina, Andree, Berta, my two nieces, my two siblings, my four stepchildren and their offspring, a half dozen other friends I’d like to free from the shackles of their jobs…and my husband’s brother and his daughters…and Faxy and Kate if they need it…

I wouldn’t have enough left to move. And that would be fine.

“To feel at home, stay at home.” ~Clifton Fadiman

Nothing but Blue Skies (Not)

It’s almost time to leave Florida, and as always I’m torn between my two lives. Charles and I have knit together invisibly, through dinners and walks and days and nights. I don’t want to leave and it’s harder now than usual, because what’s waiting in New York is so scary.

I may be leaving New York this summer for a couple of years, and having to go back and face that and all the effort that has to be expended to make it happen—all the while thinking that I should be trying harder to make it NOT happen, looking for work, though there is no work, and what little I might find would not be enough

—and the feelings from losing my house in the country rise up

—the debacle of renting it after endless months of fixing it up to rent, scrubbing the oven until my arms were bloody, the wasp nest I had to kiss a man to get rid of, the cleaning woman who had an anxiety attack and quit, Jennifer who broke her tooth falling forward against the roof while getting rid of the borer bees which is why I resorted to kissing the plumber to handle the wasp nest, the water with antifreeze in it, and the spiders and the snakes although the snakes were fine with me it was my tenant who had a problem

—and then emptying the house to sell, until only my study had anything in it (a pile of blankets and a laptop to play music, a bottle of scotch and the sound of the wind)

—and I feel sorry for myself because the bad dreams only stopped coming in the last six months

—and none of this is very much compared to what others are going through

—ok, but it’s the not knowing

—but everybody feels that

I’m just sad.

Ancient Tech

I’ve been in Florida for a week and went swimming for the first time today. It was lovely; I came home and promptly passed out. I was woken by the harsh ringing of Charles’ evil telephone—it’s an old-fashioned instrument, the color of dried blood, with a crocodile pattern, only used by telemarketers. This is because since 2007 he’s been checking his messages at most twice a year in order to subtly persuade people to call on his beloved iphone or go away. Some can’t be persuaded.

He came in the bedroom and took it off the hook to stop the ringing, but off course I soon had to get up to deal with the busy-signal yammering, and the sight of the receiver dangling from its curly cord brought back so many memories of hope, agony and loathing. Do kids today ever feel this amorous dread? They must want someone to call and someone else not to, fear calls they have to make, and so on. But the phone itself doesn’t seem to become the personification of what they feel; rather it’s a part of them, like their own ears (which makes it so upsetting when teachers confiscate them). If a woman were to rip her ears off for bringing her news that broke her heart, or mildly annoyed her, we wouldn’t all sigh with recognition, or complain, “What a cliché. Can’t these screenwriters ever think of something original?”

Which reminds me of Jeff Bezos laughing like a hyena on Jon Stewart the other night, discussing the Kindle. Stewart talked about the feel of a real, paper-and-glue book, its low-tech homey comfort. Others have rhapsodized about this. I could too—though I’d also like a Kindle. What we’re afraid of is losing everything we’ve projected onto books: their understanding, their silent dignity, their assurance of immortality (for some). Their independent life.

Once, I was idling in a bookshop, as I did so often in my youth, and saw a book on a low shelf, no dust jacket, with the title, Phone Calls from the Dead. I glanced at it several times, checking that it was really there and that was the actual title, but I didn’t pick it up. It stirred too many emotions, and not because I believed any of the departed had my number. But someone had written a book about it, the book had been published, and the shop had ordered it. The idea was made flesh. It was like seeing a voodoo doll that looked just like me, one pin quivering in the heart.

No way I’d get that feeling from an online list of titles available on Kindle. Anyway, I can read books on my iphone.

Now we’re going to the beach again. It’s 9:30, Saturday night, we’ve been hard at work since dinner (an early dinner that felt like lunch since I’d slept half the afternoon) and we’re taking the last of the wine to the dark gorgeous crash of the waves.

some books

Frank is a Good Dog’s Name

My mother and Frank

I saw Michelle Obama on TV complaining about the names her daughters are considering for the new First Dog, a Portuguese Water Spaniel : Frank and Moose. I’m always in favor of kids having free rein with pets’ names, unless they name it something obscene or after their grandmother.

But the thing is, Frank. My mother had a dog named Frank. Her rule of thumb, learned from her father, is that a dog’s name must be one syllable so you can call it easily. My grandfather had hunting dogs, so this rule made sense for him. If you were ever part of a big family and experienced a parent try to call a bunch of kids inside, away from the cliff, out of the water, and mangling all the syllables in a frustrated snarl, you’ll get the point.

Frank loved my mother. When he was a young adult animal, she was a single woman in her midfifties, her kids out of the house. She wanted that devoted love, and a Doberman is a nothing if not a devoted, one-point-focus kind of animal. But she also wanted to be free to travel with her boyfriends. Particularly she wanted to accompany a rather unpleasant Australian man who took her all over France and Italy: the kind of leisurely car trip we all dream of, although not with him.

While she was gone, a young man named Greg looked after her house and Frank. Greg was a gay friend of my brother’s who didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, and my mother had extra room, so he lived with her.  She always liked having a young person in the house, and was happiest when her children were of an age to provide her with needy cast-offs.

Frank missed my mother intensely. He mourned, as only a dog can, silent, stoic, not knowing if the beloved will return but holding hope alive steadfastly. I’ve always been inordinately sympathetic to the loneliness of dogs. It seemed a crime to me to inspire that degree of love and then depart with no way to explain or reassure, no possibility of postcards. On the other hand, in my mother’s place, I would have gone to Europe.

Greg told me that one night he came home from work—it was summer and still light out—and found Frank on the lawn, staring at a line-up of my mother’s shoes. My mother had 15 or 20 pairs of shoes, some quite old. Frank had taken one shoe from each pair out of her closet, down the stairs, across the hall, through the kitchen and outside. He had arranged them on the grass and then lain down in front of them, nose between his paws.

I was living in Berkeley then, reading Proust, Flaubert, Colette—all the masters of unrequited love—far too afraid of that kind of surrender, although I thought of myself as daring in matters of passion. And there was Frank, who could never take my mother to Italy, who didn’t own a car, couldn’t compete with a man who was far beneath him except for the small matter of species—Frank, who could only carry the shoes that held her scent out into the sunlight and look at them.

Maybe you don’t want this model for your daughters, Michelle. But I have to say, Frank was a good dog.

**

“The woman whose face we have before our eyes more constantly than light itself…this unique woman—we know quite well that it would have been another woman that would now be unique to us if we had been in another town than that in which we made her acquaintance, if we had explored other quarters of the town, if we had frequented the house of a different hostess. Unique, we suppose; she is innumerable. And yet she is compact, indestructible in our loving eyes, irreplaceable for a long time to come by any other.”

~Marcel Proust

Ash Wednesday: A miscellany

I realize these leopards are not white

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to sateity
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been
contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live?

– from Ash Wednesday, by T. S. Eliot

***

(Ash-Wednesday). Up and by water, it being a very fine morning, to White Hall, and there to speak with Sir Ph. Warwicke, but he was gone out to chappell, so I spent much of the morning walking in the Park, and going to the Queene’s chappell, where I staid and saw their masse, till a man came and bid me go out or kneel down: so I did go out. And thence to Somerset House; and there into the chappell, where Monsieur d’Espagne used to preach. But now it is made very fine, and was ten times more crouded than the Queene’s chappell at St. James’s; which I wonder at. Thence down to the garden of Somerset House, and up and down the new building, which in every respect will be mighty magnificent and costly. I staid a great while talking with a man in the garden that was sawing of a piece of marble, and did give him 6d. to drink. He told me much of the nature and labour of the worke, how he could not saw above 4 inches of the stone in a day, and of a greater not above one or two, and after it is sawed, then it is rubbed with coarse and then with finer and finer sand till they come to putty, and so polish it as smooth as glass. Their saws have no teeth, but it is the sand only which the saw rubs up and down that do the thing. Thence by water to the Coffee-house, and there sat with Alderman Barker talking of hempe and the trade, and thence to the ‘Change a little, and so home and dined with my wife, and then to the office till the evening, and then walked a while merrily with my wife in the garden, and so she gone, I to work again till late, and so home to supper and to bed.

–from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 1663

***

I was driving a 69 Chevy Nova 370 four-barrel with mag wheels and a dual exhaust. It’s a kick-ass car. I took the muffler out so it sounds like a Harley. People love it. I was staring at myself through the window into the driver’s side window; I do that all the time. I’ll stare into anything that reflects. That’s not a flattering quality, and I wish I didn’t do it, but I do. I’m vain as all hell. It’s revolting. Most of the time when I’m looking in the mirror, I’m checking to see if I’m still here or else I’m wishing I was somebody else, a Mexican bandito or somebody like that. I have a mustache. Most guys with mustaches look like fags, but I don’t. I touch mine too much, though. I touch it all the time. I don’t even know why I’m telling you about it now. I just stare at myself constantly and I wish I didn’t. It brings me absolutely no pleasure at all.

–from Ash Wednesday, by Ethan Hawke

**

As for me, I went to the beach and it was sunny and breezy, the waves breaking with fine force, sweeping over the sand, lacy foam sparkling, white and blue and deeper blue, and my thoughts were chasing each other, dates, places, deadlines, choices, and I’d jerk my gaze back to the waltz of blues and think you’re an idiot not to be captivated by this and then the wheel of thoughts creaked around again; I had that stony feeling I get after hauling myself up from mucky hateful despair, just barely not resenting the existence of beauty.

I’m in the dim house now repenting my lack of joyousness.

Nor was the ocean quite this dramatic

“…And all wonder and a wild desire.”

Venus and Cupid, Lorenzo Lotto

I’d like to meet the man who invented sex and see what he’s working on now.
~ Author Unknown

My sex life has waned along with the economy. The correlation is obvious. Of all the turn-ons I’ve ever heard of, financial anxiety isn’t one of them. Escaping from anxiety is, of course, a classic motive for mindless fucking, but my lover and I seem to have worn out the escapist thing for the time being. “It is what it is,” he keeps saying. What he means is, “I’m finally ready to face what it is, even though the ‘is’ is a lot worse than a few years ago when I couldn’t.”

It’s okay to take a break. We have stuff to do. But just because my sex life is on pause, sex doesn’t go away; others are doing it; I have to stop and think why I’m not, and what’s left to want. I need to write about it to remind myself not to worry. Too much of my worrying happens when I’m not looking.

It’s a truism that people use sex to get lots of different needs met, and my greatest need when I was young was to know. Specifically, the longing to know about men was intense and overpowering. My father died when I was 10, a suicide who was scarcely more available when he was living. I wanted to experience the full range of men, to gather and categorize their glamour, and also, eventually, to dispel the excess. As the shrinks say, I needed to learn to self-regulate.

The laconic boys of my teenage years were such utter mysteries that every morsel of knowledge gained was a treasure. I regarded them with awe. Even the ones I deemed unattractive were more attractive than I wanted to admit. Many other girls had it easier—knew more boys, chatted and joked with more confidence because they didn’t see the opposite sex as beings of light and terror—but I also thought they didn’t know anything.

My first lesson was that sex (on the first, not-necessarily-date) zooms you past male defenses. It did so especially then, in the 1970’s. It surprised boys into intimacy in a way that being a ‘girlfriend’ wouldn’t have. For whatever reason, my willingness didn’t slot me into the category of slut, or not most of the time. Sex was my gift—offered freely, for my own pleasure and to see what would happen—and gifts evoke a whole different response than structured exchange.

In my 20’s, I had to deal with all the usual things sexual wanderlust brings—shame; the need to create a philosophical rationale for my behavior; and jealousy, mine and others’. It was exhilarating and then it was boring. I can understand how for some, tilting against or fitting oneself into social norms can be a source of lifetime intellectual fascination. But I was interested in special cases: as in, everybody is one.

I wanted to know secrets. Among women, that’s not usually too hard: sit patiently, ask questions, offer cake, withhold judgment and most will tell you the good stuff. Men are more of a problem. Often, they don’t know what the good stuff is and/or think it’s dangerous, so you have to fuck them silly.

But whatever you learn, there’s so much more beneath. And if you learn that, there’s twice as much.  I suspected this about people in general from a young age but preferred not to dwell on it except when I was writing fiction, when it was a technical problem.  But in matters of love, it’s the thing that pulls you under.

We want love to be difficult. There’s no possibility of romance if every door swings open. What do you do when it’s too difficult; how do you decide if you’ve reached that point? What scares me about myself is that though I’m a woman with many interests and identities—writer, friend, daughter, sister, stepmother, aunt—sexual or ‘partner’ love is my ground, my true north, the heat I would seek if I were a heat-seeking missile. And the men I love are not easy. Being in a many-partnered situation (adultery, polyamory, whatever—I hate all the words) insures that new levels of weirdness will appear. You wake up in the morning and there are seven extra floors in your brain, inhabited by invisible women and argument; and you have to take it in stride, make the coffee, get your work done. To do otherwise would be saying, all those passionate promises were nothing but sexual hysteria. Actually I can’t handle anything. Take your reality and shove it.

Life is hard now. There are uncertainties I can’t write about here, except to say they involve others’ pain and desperation, and cause me a different kind of desperation, and then there’s my financial loss, which, although I’ve been writing about it for months, I have yet to fully absorb. But I still value desire, still imagine it as the secret path away from the horrible and towards the true, as if the true were never horrible. The truth often is horrible, but desire is like water. When it evaporates, the seemingly vanished is in every breath you take. When it freezes, watch your step. And when spring comes, there no escaping it.

There is no remedy for love but to love more.
~Henry David Thoreau

O lyric Love, half angel and half bird, And all a wonder and a wild desire.

~Robert Browning

Wordcamp, Miami

Me, tree

Yesterday I went to Wordcamp in Miami, a WordPress conference at the Mayfair Hotel in Coconut Grove and listened to a presentation by Jim Turner about how to make a living blogging, and another by David Bisset about the new WordPress brainchild BuddyPress (buddypress.org) which is a platform for building your own social networking site from a WordPress multiple user blog. The latter sounded fun and gave me visions of starting the next Facebook and owning reams of personal information that would allow me to rule the world, but unfortunately I can’t even start an MU site, since very few of my friends will start or stick with a blog. And even if they did, I’m not sure they’d want to be associated with this one.

The advice on making money was about attaching oneself to a corporate PR department, pitching your ability to reach the online universe. (For a fulltime position, expect a salary range of 30k-100k). Most of the attendees were techie experts of one kind or another, or considered themselves such. Turner was asked whether Fortune 500 companies would hire a blogger for this kind of work and he advised to steer clear of the big guys, because in that kind of company, “you submit a post to one editor, who shows it to someone else, who runs it by a third, who sends it to legal, then back down the chain and by the time you see it again, it’s unrecognizable.”* I’ve had freelance jobs where the same thing happened and I was working for a solo professional. Turner was also asked how to have your blog show up on Google and suggested writing good content. I like a man who sticks to the basics.

* this is not a word-for-word quote, but as I remember it.

The focus was on success yet I felt far less fear of the future than I do in New York. The Great Depression of the 21st Century, the Clusterf*ck To The Poorhouse as Jon Stewart so memorably calls it, seemed to exist elsewhere, though I have no doubt everyone present was figuring it into his plans. Certainly driving around Miami and later through Hollywood and Fort Lauderdale, we saw lots of empty storefronts, the kind where the sign is still up, and the plate glass window and dusty floors have a distinctly confused look, as if the whole business including proprietor collapsed into a black hole one afternoon without warning.

My husband says that kind of gathering—Wordcamp, not the empty storefronts—makes him feel like he’s allowed to be young, not finished yet, to be the explorer and not the authority. I’ve been feeling that way for some time. My heart’s Mickey Rourke and my body’s a collection of symptoms waiting for the inspiration of disease, but my imagination has been weirdly rejuvenated, even cosmically charged, and I would like to formally thank all the gods and powers I devoted myself to in my adolescence. Since then, I’ve fallen into rationality, but maybe I’m getting my reward for that long ago surrender.

After the conference we went to Fairchild Garden and got intimate with the Ficus Banyan trees*, which are no longer allowed to be planted in Miami-Dade county because they destroy indigenous species. You can tell that just by looking at them—how they spread out, branches growing aerial roots down to earth, adding trunk segments like extra rooms, porches, illegal apartments. Left alone, they can cover several acres. In the city, they’re notorious for breaking pavement and sidewalks, sewer systems; one woman had a tree emerge from her toilet, like the tackiest of horror movies. I don’t know the details on that story but I like to think she was away from home for a few months and returned to find the tree fully dominant, admiring itself in the mirror over the sink while tender roots cascaded into the bath.

*Ficus benghalensis, family Moraceae.
ORIGIN late 16th cent.: from Portuguese, from Gujarati vāṇiyo ‘man of the trading caste,’ from Sanskrit. Originally denoting a Hindu trader or merchant, the term was applied by Europeans in the mid 17th cent. to a particular tree under which such traders had built a pagoda. (From my Spotlight Dictionary.)

The Apparition of those Faces in the Crowd

It appears that Facebook has let go its claim to own my stuff forever, even if I quit, but as I understand it, the corporation still owns it now. And, as has been pointed out, even if they ‘erase’ the file when I exit (Can I bear to? How much in life must I renounce? ), there will always be copies. A few months ago, I was irritated that none of my friends were posting status updates that were the slightest bit interesting—nor were they responding to mine—so I said, “Margaret is trying to figure out how to dispose of the body of the man she just killed.” I expected comment. Questions. Advice. Maybe even concern that it was my own body my ghost was tasked with cleaning up before it could join the party in Hell with all the cool suicided poets and how does a ghost do that? I haven’t the faintest idea. If I were in that situation of course I would ask my friends on Facebook. Nobody said a word. They weren’t amused; they had compelling real lives; whatever. I added more friends. In actuality, there was no body (my apartment is very small, and I’m completely sure of that) so it’s unlikely I’ll be framed for murder. But what if I’m nominated to a Cabinet post someday? Wouldn’t the murky circumstances around the ‘confession’ torpedo me instantly? But wait. I don’t want a Cabinet post. I’d be the first to swear that I am utterly unqualified, unless Obama decides we need a Secretary of Imaginary  Friends—in which case my murder rep would still be iffy, but I could probably explain it to House Republicans, who are well versed in creative lying, and who understand the need to do anything to get attention. They’d also be pleased that I’d require such a small budget. A token salary—100 k would do fine—and I’d create a portfolio of imaginary friends for any citizen who asked. The actual chat would be outsourced to Africa where for pennies an hour farmers, truckdrivers, unhappy wives and lonely young men would study the specs and write charming, nonsensical, and smart-assed notes on their complimentary cellphones; English speakers would be paid a bit better to translate. Update The Wall Street Journal reports some Christian parents are considering giving up Facebook for Lent! How can they do that?  These are people who used to think it was silly kid stuff but now check in 20 times a day. They’ll be so lonely.  The article says of one penitent, “She’s also joined an online quitting-Facebook-for-Lent support group. (Since the group is hosted on Facebook, none of the members — in theory, at least — will be logging on to comfort one another during their days of trial.)” Prayer won’t help these people. Not this year. Jesus, my angel sources tell me, was summoned by Obama for advice on the economic meltdown but Tim Geithner rejected his idea to raze the banks and re-institute barter. I think the discord upset the Stock Market, but it’s hard to tell what ails that delicate beast. It blowth where it listeth. These days our Savior is occupying himself being the ‘mutual friend’ linking Malia, Stevie Wonder, the goddess Athena (now reincarnated as a 13 year old Pakistani boy) and me. I have to say, the Son of God has access to some awesome video.

Petals on a Wet, Black Bough

—Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro”

Chickenhearted Kings of Stupidity

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.
—Chesterton

This came to mind when I was thinking about the chimpanzee, Travis, who ripped a woman’s face off. In particular I was thinking how unpredictable in their violence and general behavior chimps can be, because they are like us, and how it is that people forget this when they fall in love with chimps because they are like us.

There are many conjectures on the Web as to why Travis behaved as he did. He’s getting a lot more sympathy than the victim. Because he wasn’t human, he’s forgiven as a psychopath never would be; we assume the mauling was an instinctive response to the promptings of fear, hormones or illness-derived brain dysfunction. Maybe; probably; I don’t know. I’m of the opinion that intelligent animals have some degree of free will. My mother’s poodle certainly does.

Of course, for apes as for men, there are patterns and reasons for violence, needs and impulses that can be understood—but what does it mean to say a man can understand a chimpanzee? a) It’s presumptuous, and b) it’s like saying one criminal understands another.

This reminds me of another favorite quote of mine, from Chekhov, “The stupider the peasant, the better his horse understands him.” Maybe if we continue on as we have been, the chimps will eventually understand us. Take the money and stay put: that’s something a chimp would do.

And, yes, I too am more inclined to forgive a chimp than a human (assuming the human has done something more destructive than get out of her car). But if animals R us, don’t look for saints or cuddle toys. And on the subject of stupidity—which the Chesterton quote alludes to, unless it’s alluding to madness, and unless there’s a significant difference—

Stupidity is the devil. Look in the eye of a chicken and you’ll know. It’s the most horrifying, cannibalistic, and nightmarish creature in this world.
—Werner Herzog

I got sidetracked talking about violence and chimpanzees. That interests me but what weighs on me is that the world is leaking stupid and I’m picking it up on my shoes. I live in Manhattan, currently full of the cannibalistic, nightmarish and chickenhearted kings of stupidity.

I feel stupid too. If only I had a horse.

Chimp Attack

My, what big teeth you have

I just saw the story about the attack on the woman in Connecticut by a supposedly tame chimp named Travis, who’d been raised with humans and used in advertising. I was surprised at the naivete of the owner, considering how much is known about adult chimpanzee behavior. Last year I read a number of books about chimps raised with people, mostly by primatologists living in Africa. It inspired me to start a novel, set in the ‘70’s, about such a scientist who brings a baby chimp home to his family in Connecticut. (I’ve never lived in Connecticut. It just seemed like the right place for the story.)

I set the book in the ‘70’s because in those days the study of chimps, especially chimps raised with people, was still young. I could imagine a cocky, impulsive manwanting to prove himself in the new field of ape language studies, and thinking nothing would happen that he couldn’t handle. His chimp would learn to speak, learn the social graces, be the missing link personified. I intended the chimp in my book—an unusually sweet and gentle creature whom my husband is in love with after having read 75 pages—to be involved in a violent incident because what I learned from everything I read was that is what happens, if you let a chimp roam free long enough. While they are children (chimps stay children for 7 or 8 years) they are generally controllable, but as adolescents and adults the males especially are very strong and often violent. They don’t always intend to hurt, but many times they do. How much harm they think they’re inflicting is impossible to know.

It’s difficult for even professionally observant ‘parents’ to understand what sets off an incident. A chimp can be charming, loving, clownish, testing limits but generally behaved for years, and then all of a sudden become the ‘beast’ it in fact is. In the wild, chimps are routinely violent towards each other, mostly rivals but also sexual partners and offspring. They’re not like dogs, animals that co-evolved with humans over millennia, becoming tamer and tamer until eventually we trusted them to be our closest companions. Your dog isn’t safe around the kids because you love him and were kind to him as a pup, though that certainly helps, but because he was bred to be.  A pet is not any animal you choose to take home, but one that has adapted over generations to be able (for the most part) to share our homes. What chimps share is roughly 98 % of our genes.*

Imagine a teenage boy raised by an alien species, close enough to ours that he sort of feels like one of them but not quite, can’t understand the language or the meaning of social norms, and hasn’t learned from early childhood—from both witnessing and participating—what fighting is and what its consequences can be. Imagine further that this boy-turned-youth, with all his hormones firing and causing the usual emotional confusion and  aggressiveness, has grown four or five times as strong as the alien adults.

What you end up with is not a “tragedy” but a predictable and avoidable disaster. I’m not one to call for a lawyer quickly, but if I were the daughter of the savaged woman, I’d be sorely tempted to sue that owner for sheer stupidity. Why didn’t she take the trouble to learn what happens as chimps mature? (I would ask the same question about the town authorities, who were all familiar with the animal.) Why didn’t she have a backup plan if the chimp got out of control? It especially bothers me that, knowing she needed help, she chose to call a female friend who was apparently unarmed and untrained. If a professional with a tranq gun wasn’t handy, a beefy neighbor with a baseball bat would have been a better choice.

*The precise number is still a matter of debate, as is what it means. How the genes are regulated matters.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/nyregion/17chimp.html?scp=1&sq=chimpanzee&st=cse

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frans-de-waal/another-chimp-bites-the-d_b_167768.html

Times to Readers: Give Up

Titanic

Book news of the day: Alfred Knopf is dead at 90; noted writer stabbed in Bejiing; fatwa on Rushdie turns 20.

The stabbed writer was only wounded and Rushdie is alive and thriving. As for Alfred Knopf, making it to 90 isn’t so bad.

Still, it made me feel kind of hopeless, along with all the financial articles in the paper today. The Times is clearly preparing for deep shit, reeling in more experts, finding new angles, shaping their ignorance (which we all share) with writerly elegance.

The subtext of the day’s stories: telling this is our job. We’re lucky to have one. So listen up. Yes, the news is bad. In fact, it’s worse. Sorry, but you have to pay attention. We’re going to tell you how bad it could get, from five different experts, and how bad it looks to two noted forecasters of the crisis. Isn’t that cool? It’s hard on us, you know, because reporting depends on change, and this shit ain’t going anywhere. I mean, yeah, they’ll be more of it, but that’s kind of the same, isn’t it?

So pay attention. It’s not our fault we have to tell you over and over. You listened to Bernie Madoff and his ilk for ten years, and it was all the same shit every day, up, up, up, no change; you just thought it was change. Now it’s the same too, just worse. We’re Times reporters; we can take it. But you have to listen. Keep buying the paper. C’mon. This is our job.

Just as an intellectual exercise it’s interesting, isn’t it? You liked Titanic. I mean, the story was obvious: ship hits iceberg, begins to sink, continues to sink, is sunk. Where’s the suspense? But you liked it. You weren’t sure who was going to die and who’d make it  out. We promise, some will make it out of this. Maybe us. Maybe you. And if you don’t, we’ll print your obit, if your survivors submit your stats with the requisite fee.

Posting Valentines

“— Sweet fiction, in which bravado and despair beckon from a cold panache in which the protected essential self suffers flashes of its existence to be immortalized by a writing self that is incapable of performing its actions without mixing our essence with what is false.”

This is Frank Bidart, from “Borges and I,” a poem in his book Desire.

What Bidart refers to in these particular lines* as falsity was to me the beauty, the world. To capture it and mix it with myself gave me shivers of power. I remember my first real novel, which was the first one published, the minor characters who had none of what I thought of as ‘myself’ in them were by far the most thrilling to me, though I knew they were not written with any great brilliance or insight. They were barely the real thing, but they were it; they existed and were not ‘me’; that was the power, with which nothing compares.

*He speaks of it in different ways throughout the long poem, which is an argument, a conversation, a man turning something around and around in his hand. I can’t do justice to his complex perspective.

Last night, Valentine’s Night, I wrote about my happiness and peace in regard to love, which was true when I wrote it. At the same time I knew or feared it wouldn’t be true later, or rather, wouldn’t be true any longer, therefore wouldn’t be able to be written about as a present containing many possibilities. A personal blog has a briefer shelf-life than fiction.

I wanted the story as it was. It was open. Its falsity was the kind that is an invitation.

Tonight I coil myself in words. I would like to keep doing it, page after page, like an autistic savant reciting prime numbers up beyond the budget deficit trillions, but I’ve done that before, and it leaves me with a hangover.

I will leave you with Bidart again, from Desire. The poem is called “If I Could Mourn Like a Mourning Dove” and this is the first part.

“It is what recurs that we believe,
your face not at one moment looking
sideways up at me anguished, or
elate, but the old words welling up…

Valentine’s Night

It’s Valentine’s night and Philip is with Christine. I’m alone in his apartment. I was lazy all day, reading a mystery novel and eating chocolate except for the couple of hours I spent cleaning his kitchen floor and tub and under the bed, where the dust lay in greasy tangles like clumps of human hair. Of course I thought how strange this would seem to others—cleaning while he dines the wife—and will seem to him when he gets home, but it felt fine to me.

I like being alone here. I like being alone, knowing he will come back. I like cleaning the apartment. Is this my way of claiming wife status while he’s with his real wife? That’s obvious and probably true, but it’s true in a way that’s not really or not only delusion or denial. I must be turning Mormon.

Next week I’ll go visit Charles, my husband, who lives in Florida, and I’ll cook and clean for him—lots of baking and waffles—and we’ll take a road trip, see more of that peculiar state. I’ll sink into our deep marriage groove, the comfort of repetition and time. All the things we remember that nobody else knows. I wish I remembered more.

They feel almost perfectly balanced now, Philip and Charles. I’m at peace for the moment. Tomorrow will change that. The Sunday shows that Philip must watch—what’s going on now? Oh, right, world panic. That. I’m part of it: my few hundred grand went up in smoke and now I have close to nothing and no job. No buyers for the novel I spent years writing because my agent won’t even send it out in this climate.

I have a lot to do fixing my life. It was strangely comforting for awhile that so many were in the same boat and I can’t say I’d be happy if everyone was still out spending like bunnies (you know what I mean), but the world panic stuff, governments toppling, planes crashing into houses—.

I don’t think I’m experiencing 9/11 flashbacks. This is different, but I do keep thinking of fire. “We have a hole in our economy” the President says, and I see a map a cigarette chewed through: the map is the familiar USA, but the Midwest is missing; and the paper is soft, thin, flaking around the burnt edges.

And now I’m thinking of the dead: Ann Beckerman, JJ, my father, my grandmother. My grandmother wore gold and pearls, face powder and perfume; she loved parties and men. She wouldn’t understand a black president, but she’d understand me, at least a little. She died when I was 13. Too soon.

I should have called my mother today. I was afraid of her loneliness. I have to get over that. It’s just there, like the panic. You can’t hide from it.

Rogue Pogue

Ocarinas

David Pogue’s column in The New York Times yesterday was about an app that turns your iphone into an octarina.**  New apps are being invented by the truckload, but not by me because I have no aptitude. But I do have ideas. Here are a few.

An app that:

*Enables you to give yourself a sonogram with your phone. That way you could see what your fetuses or fibroids were up to whenever you want—in the middle of the night, at parties or during long flight delays.

*Turns phone into a taser. This would have to be a secret app.

*Calculates body fat ratio when you rub it over yourself or someone else.

*Analyzes the pitch and tone of voices and lets you know whenever it detects a lie.

*Refinement of previous app: Tags lies as white, fear-based, guilty or psychopathic.

*Accepts phone calls from the dead. For an extra 99 cents will advise you not to answer.

………………………………………….

** Peculiar musical instrument. When I asked him about it, my musician husband had no idea what it was.

The Spry Fossil and the Grandmotherly Vegetable

'Celle qui fut la belle heaulmière', Rodin

Today in a New York Times blog called The New Old Age, Jane Gross reviewed current guidelines for how to refer to those formerly known as elderly.

‘Old’ is bad, as are a lot of other words, such as, ‘feisty,’ ‘spry’, ‘eccentric,’ ‘grandmotherly’ ‘biddy,’ ‘codger,’ ‘coot,’ ‘crone,’ ‘fogy,’ ‘fossil,’ ‘geezer,’ ‘hag’ ‘old goat,’ ‘old fart,’ ‘senile old fool,’ ‘prune’ and ‘vegetable.’

The appropriate term is ‘older adult.’

I’ve written a little play to illustrate the perils of these recommendations. The characters are a young man who’s just started at the New York Times, and his grandmother; it takes place in the skilled nursing facility where she balefully resides. It’s an eccentrically warm February evening and the young man, feeling charitable toward the world as a result of his much-coveted position, attained even as others are losing their jobs by the millions, comes to visit.

“Grandma, we’ve received new style rules at the paper, and I want to apologize. I used to call you old. That was wrong. You’re older.”
“Of course I’m older. I haven’t seen you in a year.”
“I’ve been busy…you like it here, don’t you?”
“Too many old farts.”
“I thought women liked older men.”
“You’re so wet behind the ears, you’re still dripping.”
“I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds disgusting.”
“Come back when you know something, schoolboy.”
“That hurt my feelings. Ageism goes both ways, you know.”
“I’ll take the other way.”
“I’m 32 but Maureen Dowd says I look 12. Do you have any idea what that does to my advancement prospects?”
“Well, don’t try it with that feisty Mo Dowd, but why don’t you find a woman her age in a sensitive professional position, have sex with her a few times, then tell her you’re really 12 and you want $100,000?”
“I hate that cackle of yours.”
“Chickens cackle. Ladies titter.”
“I don’t know… ‘titter’ sounds kind of dangerous, too.’
“Your grandfather wasn’t afraid of tits, nor of anything else about a woman. There was a man for you. He used to bend me over the kitchen table every night after work.”
“I really don’t want to hear this.”
“He’d throw my panties up into the air—they sometimes landed in the mixed vegetables, not that he minded—and have at me. A right randy old goat, he was.”
“You’re not supposed to say ‘old goat.’”
“I’m sparing your sensibilities. You should hear the things he used to make me call him. I’ll whisper them if you come closer.”
“Oh, god. I knew it was a mistake to visit. Mom was right! You’re a hag!”
“That dried-up prune? Sometimes I think she just pretended to be pregnant, stuck a pillow under her shirt, and then stole you from some dumb biddy babysitting the grandkid, too busy flapping her gums to notice. In the 1970’s, you know, girls like your mother thought sex and babies were a patriarchal plot to enslave women. She used to read this book called The Three Faces of Woman: Virgin, Mother, Crone. Excuse me, what happened to The Long Honeymoon: Too Fucking Sore to Walk? That’s the book I learned from. My son’s not even 60, and he’s a senile old fool because he never gets laid.”
“I’m leaving! I’m never coming back!”
“Fine with me, Junior. But tell your friends at the New York Times that the proper term is ‘death-challenged.’ As in, we’re not yet. Get it?”

Octopussy

Sometimes, in regard to the two men in my life and the demands of my own career and survival, I feel like the octuplet mom, Nadya Suleman, talking about what a good mother she’ll be, ‘present’ for all her children, while everyone marvels at her fake lips and Godzilla-size delusions.

Ann Curry suggested to Nadya that she was setting up for her children the same emotional situation she claimed to have suffered in her childhood: not getting enough attention from her mother. Nadya wasn’t thrown by this; she’s studied psychology. Rather, she gave her Multiple-Birth-Barbie smile and said she would do her best, that maybe she was selfish but her children would want her to be happy.

Where does such an intense and impregnable delusional system come from? The Bush White House, anyone?  Citibank’s “Live Richly?” What does a bubble remind you of?

I have, in the last 24 months, bought more than eight pairs of shoes when one or two would have sufficed. And shoes were never my vice. I started buying shoes because flats came in fashion and I thought the style might not last. No. I don’t know why I bought them. I wear maybe three pairs regularly. The rest are neglected, unloved, resented for what they cost. Maybe I should take them to the park, nestled in a stroller. When women bend to see what I have in there, I can whisper, “8 ½. Never worn. Aren’t they darling?”

I understand the fascination and incredulity, the anxiety for the infants, but not the frothing rage at the idea of one’s “tax dollars” spent on this woman’s “litter”.* We have 350 million people in this country. Some large proportion of them pays taxes. So it would be each payer’s tax nickel, at most.

Doesn’t this remind you of those editorial writer/ bloggers explaining what a tiny fraction of our economic sinkhole Wall Street bonuses represent?

If reason were in charge, writers would be out of business.

*I don’t have children, but our cat once gave birth in my bed while I was sleeping. That was my first experience of bloody sheets and it was a good one. The next days and weeks the tottering tumble seemed both magical and just right, so the word ‘litter’ doesn’t strike me as an insult. It strikes me as envy. But those were kittens and we had a big house. The mother could switch them from closet to bed to cardboard box indefinitely.

Conclusion: I’m nothing like Nadya. I have two men, not 14, and they have choices. I’ve never bedded eight at once, or even seven. And my lips are completely normal.

I deserve a book deal.

Babes in the woods

"Pan and Psyche" Edward Burne-jones

A lousy few days. My husband and boyfriend both unhappy about their wives, emotions I contract and embellish on instantly. I haven’t been getting enough sleep, and I also have a mysterious and painful skin ailment that might be shingles, or mini shingles (don’t have the rash/blisters yet).

I googled ‘shingles’ and as well as learning crucial information, acquired a sticky image of my afflicted parts covered with roofing tar and thick, overlapping black rectangles for which I will be billed $6,000, and sent to live in a Koren cartoon.

I have a nice memory of being at my country house in the summer of 2002, chatting with the sixty-something Jamaican man who re-shingled the lower, flat part of my roof. He was wiry and muscled and full of complaint, as every human being save the odd Tibetan monk is, but honest and dignified and pleasant to be with. When the American company that charged $6000 for the top part of the roof came with their long truck and buzzing cellphones, I spent the day hiding in the bedroom.

My boyfriend makes me unhappy but I’m used to that; it’s the norm. We get reprieves now and then. When I make my husband unhappy, my emotions are much more out of control. It’s like the difference between living in Alaska—9-month winters with lots of sex, brief beautiful summers with lots of mosquitoes—and driving in heavy traffic with a tornado straight ahead.

My financial panic is not being allowed all the diva room. The love debt extracts interest too, and raises the rate capriciously.* I know that financial panic comes from the same place as love panic: I’ll be abandoned to cry on a hillside like those unwanted babies who have no clue what’s happening, what the world is, or what crying is intended to accomplish.

* Originally from the Latin capra meaning goat; more recently the French caprice which translates literally as ‘fantastic goat leap’ according to a dubious online source. I’m reminded of the fleecy thighs of the girl faun sculpted by  Renaissance master Andrea Riccio. See previous post: An Afternoon at the Frick.

Sunday night we heard a child cry in another apartment—not the cry of an abandoned baby but the sharp miserable tears of a child old enough to know it’s not getting what it wants—and I told Philip that the sound of children crying has always soothed me. It reminds me of my own childhood tears, the physical release and steadying rhythm, the warm-as-fresh-piss company of the self doubling back and saying, “I hate them and I love you. Hush. I’m here.”

Panic: what the goat-footed god does to mortals. Remedy: make a fantastic leap.

But not off a roof.

Apocalypse Not

After a morning discussion with Philip about his fears for our future—I’m running of money and the publishers aren’t publishing; everyone in his company is getting a pay cut, plus no bonuses—he left to spend the day with Christine. I told him to have a good time and he muttered because he thought I didn’t mean it. But I did. After 8 ½ years my jealousy is like an old dog that sleeps all the time unless you kick it. It got kicked a few weeks ago and it’s keeping out of the way.

I worked on my novel for a couple of hours (7 pages!) and then went online. I decided to survey the fears of others, and sampled a dozen catastrophe blogs, the ones that insist we’re facing something far worse than the Great Depression: a meltdown of the whole system, capitalism kaput, riots, starvation—everything but a devolution into tree-living apes, though I’m sure there’s somebody talking about that.

Should I be more afraid? Should I make jokes? Would my building allow me to raise chickens in my bathtub? Will they allow it in six months?

I can’t sort through the welter of information to have any idea what’s coming. I don’t have the experience or education, not to mention that the future is notoriously surprising. I’m also better off than Philip, even though he has a job, because this great loss and uncertainty has unlocked my creativity in a way nothing has since I was a child and my brother and father died. But this time I know where grief leads and I’m not following. I can write from the bright side of change.

Of course it helps that I’ve lost money, not beloved people.

Philip was disparaging Facebook last night and I said that all this networking, connecting to friends and relatives who’d otherwise be far off the map, might be a great boon if we have a real Depression. More solidarity, more links to obtain help, barter, trade information and cheer. “It brings people together,” I said.

“So does war and plague.”

“I’m putting that in the blog.”

“It’s a good line, isn’t it?”

“Actually plague doesn’t bring people together. More the opposite.”

“It joins everyone in death.” He was scrolling through his blackberry to see if there were any responses to the memo he had to write at the last minute.

We were waiting for our chocolate soufflé in a French restaurant: his idea, his credit card. I had called him earlier to say—maybe we shouldn’t go out to eat, honey, I can cook—but couldn’t reach him because he was working so hard, now that his assistant has been laid off.

For the most part, it was a lovely evening. We talked politics and I reveled in his smarts—he has a kind of real-world intelligence I don’t, and most of my friends don’t. And when he jokes about death, it’s so unexpected (death’s my province, he loathes the place) that it lifts my spirits.

“What a pair we make,” he didn’t say, but he’s said it often before.

About the apocalypse blogs: this country suffers from a surfeit of imagination. Too many movies about a future dystopian America (road rage with zombies) too much excitement in the media about all things violent and strange. Too many guns and people who want to use them. Granted, we also have the experience of Katrina, and the stories of other countries’ collapses. Argentina on the one hand; Rwanda on the other.

In the current New Yorker, John Updike is quoted talking about the Great Depression. Where he grew up, in a small town in Pennsylvania, when hoboes came to the back door the custom was to give them a dollar. A dollar was a lot of money in the 1930’s. Are we so much worse now?

She Wolf

http://stores.ebay.com/MKDiehl-Jewelry-Designs_

While following the stimulus-plan drama on TV, I’ve been making Valentine’s Day jewelry—not specifically for V day, just necklaces featuring that bright pink we all associate with heart-shaped chocolate boxes, roses, and female baboons in heat.

Many men, for reasons I fail to understand, have an aversion to Valentine’s Day. Flowers, chocolates, sex—what’s so difficult? No guesswork is involved.  My husband kept forgetting that I really liked expensive chocolate. For 25 years. But he made me some spectacular cards.

That was Charles, forgetful and poor. Philip actually hates the day itself, even though he listens to Sinatra on Jonathan Schwartz every weekend, and often cries. He’s as soft inside as a Hershey bar left on the dashboard in high summer. But maybe that’s the trouble. Why have a day for romance when all of life is supposed to be romantic, from boyish heroics to glamorous women, ‘50’s jazz bars, torch songs, idealistic Presidents…oh, wait, we have that last one. Maybe he’ll feel better this year.

I’m thinking we should skip the 14th and move right on to February 15th—the Roman festival of Lupercalia. On that date, in Classical times, Roman priests would go to the cave where the mythic she-wolf once suckled the twins Romulus and Remus, sacrifice a goat and a dog, smear the foreheads of two highborn young men with blood and wipe it off with wool soaked in milk, at which point the men were required to laugh—are you with me so far, guys? Then the hide of the goat was cut into strips and soaked in blood. The young men ran naked through the streets—except for a bit of goat hide fastened around their waists (I don’t know what happened to the dog, possibly eaten by the priests)—brandishing their bloody whips and lashing everyone in sight, but especially women who would line up for the favor, as this ritual was thought to bring fertility and ease in childbirth.

Now that Robert Bly’s Iron John has been unhip long enough to be hip again, maybe we should encourage our partners to strip down and flail about with animal hide, while we wait “like children at school present[ing] their hands to be struck”* and keep our mouths shut about how often we’ve entertained the fantasy of pulling out a bloody tampon and smacking them in the face with it.

Ok, maybe that’s just me.

Yes, I have my period today, for the 475th time. Imagine if I’d made embryos out of all those eggs, rounded up a herd of wolves to bear and suckle them…I could replace the entire House of Representatives and all Republican senators with my offspring.

* Plutarch, The Life of Caesar

Shovel Ready

I’m getting seriously tired of these Republicans. From that wimp Gingrey who apologized on the air to Rush Limbaugh because, for one moment, he acted like he was actually in Washington to do his job, to McCain thinking he didn’t lose yet—I want to say one thing: America, love it or leave it! You can be in Iceland in six hours!

What does Obama have up his sleeve?  Is he letting the Repubs dig their own grave? (Now there’s a shovel-ready project if there ever was one.) By being so nice…a little stern with the Wall street guys but giving the Senators cookies…letting them think they can work him over, let them bring on their bully boys, their would-be Cheneys…then watch as the I’m-mad-as-hell-and-I-just-can’t-take-it-anymore citizens run amok and dispatch the lot of them with everything we’ve learned from watching MSNBC’s Lockdown?

Actually, I don’t watch Lockdown, but I have caught a glimpse or two. Anyway, I’ll leave it to others to do the rough stuff. I just want to help create the reality shows where we chain Limbaugh and Madoff wrist to wrist and stick them into a hot jungle together; put Cheney to work changing the octuplets diapers 24/7; and, why not, let Palin shoot John Thain and friends from a helicopter….

Well, that was fun. Back to my own reality show. Not much happening here. Lovely lunch with my friend Maddy, and before that a brisk walk in the pretty cold sparkly winter day, a stop at the French bakery (where I bought cake because it was Maddy’s birthday) and the conversation went like this:

Me –I don’t know what I want yet.

Baker  –That’s okay, it’s good to just get out of the cold.

Me    –It’s not that bad out now. It’s sunny.

Baker  –It’s dark when I get to work; it’s dark when I go home.

Me    –Well, at least it smells good in here.

Baker –I can’t smell anything anymore unless it’s nasty or it’s women’s perfume.

Me –Um, which of these two [cakes] is better?

Baker – I don’t know; I don’t like chocolate…

For those of you who get hot thinking of resurrecting extinct animals, here’s one for you. George Mitchell could take it with him as a negotiating aid. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/04/titanoboa-cerrejonensis-2_n_163943.html

Warm Mushrooms

Charles and me, wedding day

I went to thenation.com to read about the banking rescue/ /givaway/gamble, got distracted by a poem by Tomaz Salamun, and wanted to paste it here but it’s subscription only so I don’t think I should. But here’s a little—

women want to be more than metaphor.
With their moist, round, soft skin, with their
drunken scent of warm mushrooms they drive me insane.

I love that last line, especially considering it’s a translation from Slovenian. It makes me remember evenings of drink, food, sex, the country, trees and night: youth, being driven insane. There was a time when the US was in financial crisis, the late 70’s, and I noticed and was affected, but not terribly; it was never as important as the night, wine and poetry (poetry was the closest thing to God I knew). Not as important as mushrooms wiped with a damp cloth and cooked fast in hot butter until almost black, then heaped in a bowl with a little salt and lemon, and eaten in bed after sex. Cooked after sex, I mean, naked in the kitchen together—what did we talk about, how did we touch? I don’t remember.

How much does  Charles, my dear, distant husband, remember? He’s flying this weekend to that same town in Virginia where neither of us has lived in 30 years. He’s visiting his girlfriend with whom he has wild, passionate sex. He doesn’t tell me details, but he says that much. I think I should be jealous but only feel blank. He deserves this. I’ve had my share of adulterous romance in the last several years. What we had that was precious, in bed, was so long ago; nostalgia touches it with wonder; it has nothing to do with today. At the same time, nothing can surpass those Charlottesville nights—when, mind you, I was unhappy because youth drove me insane—happiness and unhappiness threaded together so close, so glittering, sharp, blurred, gray and immense. Our rented house was in the middle of a 1,000 acre cattle farm, black angus; when we walked at night, we’d be among cows we could barely see, the dark shapes moving to let us pass, that strange almost-fear of their size jolting me now and then, as well as wonder at how docile they were, these large beasts waiting for slaughter.

Now I wait for slaughter (okay, not really. Big change.) I find poetry on the Web and it startles me. I have a few hundred books of the stuff and hardly ever open one. Youth is wise in what it refuses to know. I see my nieces holding up their shields—don’t interrupt me, I’m being young!—and applaud them. They’re hurting through this crisis, but not ready to sell a body part yet. I hope.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers…

--Wordsworth

tomazsalamun.com

What do women want–part III

I’ve been reading other blogs responding the New York Times article about female desire, and found myself wanting to say more about it. First of all, I don’t think that when social scientists use the word ‘narcissistic’ they mean it as derogatory. One can argue about whether it’s an apt description, but the value of the trait, as articulated by the scientists quoted in the article, seems to me to be neutral.

I think both sexes are highly narcissistic, aroused by the desire and admiration of others. People differ in how much importance they place on being ‘quality’ examples of their gender, and how much on being unique beings. Most of us feel our sexuality is tied to the former to some degree—we want to be ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’; to be admired/desired for that as well as whatever is special about us as individuals. The point of the Times article is to survey what contemporary researchers see as being innately ‘feminine’, and I am very glad these women are doing the research, coming up with ideas, not assuming anything is settled or off limits to consider—that means more to me than whether I agree with any particular point.

My own experience of it is the confusion I felt, as a girl, about being fascinated and aroused by pictures of naked women, though my orientation was definitely hetero. Of course I thought I was the only girl that weird. Later, I experimented a bit with women sexually and found that the reality didn’t correlate with my fascination—actual women and images/thoughts of women were different things, to a degree and in a manner that wasn’t at all like my experiences with men. I think this fascination is more than learning to see through male eyes, though that’s part of it, and not quite narcissism, though there’s that too—there’s a third factor I don’t understand.

Another issue coming up in the blogs is annoyance at the representation of female desire as ‘mysterious’. Of course all sexuality is mysterious; we as a species are very far from unraveling the strands of nature/nurture, much less being relaxed about perhaps never being able to unravel them because they are in flux. Evolution isn’t over and is, generation by generation, being shaped by the choices culture leads us toward. From the right perspective, culture and biology are one, but I don’t know if a human being can ever do more than imagine that perspective.

As a rule, I think men would benefit from thinking of women as less mysterious—by going on the assumption that they can understand if they pay attention; and women would benefit from thinking of men as more mysterious.

This isn’t true for everybody, obviously. When I was young I found men so mysterious I couldn’t see what was in front of my face. That was a result of my particular background and I’ve gotten over it, as much as I want to get over it. I don’t think sex would work if one gender were inherently more complex than the other.

February 1

Jimmy at 12

It’s my brother Jimmy’s birthday today. He was born in 1951 and died in 1965, hit by a car when he was riding his bike home in the dark. Some years I don’t remember his birthday until it’s passed, although I always remember February 27, the date he was killed. That was when everything changed. The eldest of four, he was by nature more outgoing, popular and well rounded than the rest of us, and since he was the one who died, and his death preceded our father’s by months, he’ll always hold highest place for mental health. I remember him the way pundits like to talk about America before the JFK’s assassination. I’m not sure I believe countries can be innocent, but people can, children can; we were.

He died at the midpoint of the ‘60’s, after the civil rights legislation was passed, after the Vietnam war began in earnest— both issues I heard him discuss with my mother while I lingered in the hall, a nine year old girl still firmly entrenched in make-believe. He died before the Summer of Love, the ’68 Kennedy and King assassinations, Nixon’s election, The Beatles’ split. He missed sex, drugs, funerals, psychiatrists.

He missed the ‘70’s: college, falling in love, independence, career. He missed the shock of turning 30, then 40. He didn’t get to blossom or to not blossom, to know that the potential wasn’t reached, the spoils gone to fear and procrastination. I think he would have done better than I have. I know that if he hadn’t died, I would have done better. But even this life of mine, with its absurd overpayment to depression, has been packed with so much joy, learning, love, jokes, and friends, it would take me years to describe the highlights.

I want to know where his mind would have taken him. I want to see him as an adult, at work—he was always so good at things. I want to lean into the shade of Elder Brother, go to him for counsel even if I think he’ll be wrong. I want to see him age. I want to know his children.

I looked at his baby pictures over Christmas: a dozen curling black and white photos of a laughing six month old, one year old, toddler, with that soft baby flesh, those trusting eyes. I imagined more fully than ever before my mother’s overwhelming love for her firstborn, her astonishment at her brilliant creation. Not this, not words, but an entire person, fashioned as the young are among mammals, for maximum charisma.

We evolved to fall in love. With our parents, our siblings, our sexual partners, our babies. (And now, lucky us, our President.) All the accomplishments of reason are in service to that, to get and keep the best ones.

We invented God to take the love left over.

One of Jimmy's drawings

MelancholyMiceChocolateDeathTaxes

After a long walk in the cold and a bad movie, Medicine for Melancholy, that might have worked if the lovers—the only two characters—had spoken more than a line or two every fifteen minutes, I’m sitting in bed having a cup of tea with milk and honey, remembering that classic bit from British novels where the old lady says, “Now, dearie, have a nice cup of tea and you’ll feel as right as rain in no time,” and the young heroine, suffering from a love affair or murder attempt, always does. (Question for another day: why is rain right? Because the gladiolas need it? Or the Brits don’t feel the world’s in order unless there a muzzy bit of drizzle somewhere near? Or is just the alliteration?)

Speaking of love and murder, when I was packing to come uptown, I went to put an unopened chocolate bar in my bag, and found a mouse had nibbled a tiny portion from three of the corners. I’d told Philip the mice hadn’t been around lately so I didn’t mention it but I wanted to; the nibbles looked so tidy and considerate. I was reminded of Charlie in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory making a chocolate bar last for months by keeping it under his mattress (or was it a hole in the wall?) and eating it one crumb at a time, each time unwrapping the silver paper with reverent anticipation. That’s what I want the mice to feel when they scent the chocolate chips at the end of the tunnel-shaped electric mousetrap.

See if you can spot the mouse nibbles

Some people (but no rodents) can feel that anticipation even knowing that death is at hand. My aunt Vera was one of them. She was quite happy in her hospital bed at the end, having no doubt that she’d be in Heaven soon, conversing with Jesus, probably over tea or a dry martini. She was a very strict Catholic, always warning others about hell, but not the type to worry that her own soul might come up short.

Samuel Johnson famously said, “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Many of us have had this experience as a result of the economy’s death spiral, but not, apparently, House Republicans. Nor Mayor Bloomberg, who wants to tax movie tickets, haircuts, and cable TV.  How about a stupidity tax? Progressive, so if you’re both rich and stupid you pay more.

Updike in the Afterlife

John Updike

Philip and I were talking about John Updike’s obit in the Times by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. Philip said,  “Isn’t Christopher Lehmann-Haupt dead? I thought he was dead.” I suggested maybe it was written years ago—and we went on like that, Philip grumbling while I said why shouldn’t the dead criticize the dead? (In fact, Lehmann-Haupt is not dead. He lives in Riverdale.)

I know the Times writes its obits—of the well-known elderly— in advance because my friend Annie was friends with philanthropist Steward Mott, and a year or two before his death he had to come to New York to be interviewed for his. There was a flurry of emails back and forth with the newspaper staff about how much vodka he needed to get through the conversation.

I prefer the idea of the dead interviewing their own. Too much congress between the afterlife and our earthly existence would ruin the mystery, the fear, the je ne sais quoi of human hope springing eternal, but perhaps if one email could get through just to say, “It’s pleasure to have Updike with us. His descriptive powers are stimulating all our sexual memories—which is painful for those who don’t have sexual memories, but what can you do? He’s brought his characters. Rabbit is relieved to be really dead at last and the Eastwick witches are enjoying our multitude of devils. John tells us you’ve really been fucking things up in the world. Not that we care especially, but… we don’t want you arriving en masse. Somebody has to dust the purgatorial chambers. PS—be kinder to your writers. Without books, there wouldn’t even be an afterlife, and believe me, you wouldn’t like it. Those of us from the really old days can attest to how stultifyingly boring it was.”

My favorite book of Updike’s is “Roger’s Version.” My favorite Kingsley Amis is “The Old Devils.” Muriel Spark: “Memento Mori.” A little spite goes a long way to give fiction crackle.

Kingsley Amis and Muriel Spark

After They’ve seen Paree

Old Post Office, Washington DC

Gray day, light snow and eddying pools of slush at the corners of 6th and 7th avenues. I walked in a daze—I had left the apartment in desperation, hoping that a long walk would energize me—and my neighbor John had to jump directly in front of me waving his arms to get my attention. Even then it took a couple of seconds to recognize the man with whom I’ve shared a wall for 25 years.
We talked about the people we know: those with no money, those terrified of losing their jobs, and those for whom this is a wonderful shopping opportunity. The easiest way to tell about someone’s finances now is to ask about the summer. When they say, “I can’t look that far ahead,” you understand perfectly and change the subject to the unlikely possibility that Obama will fix things really quickly.

In the mystery bookstore two people were arguing about whether a certain author was a high-level CIA agent or just a good at doing research. The bookstore proprietor remarked that when he met the man, he commented on how legibly he signed his name, and the author replied, “Probably because I invented it recently and haven’t gotten bored with writing it yet.” I fantasized about pseudonyms, which used to seem risky—you think you’re anonymous, publish things you don’t want to be known by, but you’re not safe, someone always finds out—and now seem more like Internet dating. When I first tried that, in 2000, several of my girlfriends were worried. In the end the only risk was love. The ‘stranger’ part of the equation offered novelty, entertainment, hijinks like those I hadn’t indulged in since I was 15—intrigue on the cheap.

My friend Jocelyn remarked last night that in the Great Depression, at least people could go back home, live on the family farm and grow their own food. I said that a lot of people had had no farm to go back to. She conceded this, but still thought it was an option for more people then than now. But we have far more wealth in this country than we did in the 1930’s. There are plenty of houses. Some people are going hungry but most are losing their dreams—their own home, college for the kids, a safe retirement…all the province of the upper classes in 1932.

Still, it feels like the perfect storm. Ice, snow, freezing rain; the great sinkhole of the summer when the cash runs out; the post office wanting to eliminate Tuesday.

I’m ready for a new identity.

Tenantless farm, Texas, 1938, Dorothea Lange. Public Domain.

Late Night

I just watched Stephen Colbert interview Philippe Petit and realized again how brilliant he is as a comic interviewer. Put him with any person with a sense of humor, no matter how different than his own, or how ordinary (like the “sex preacher” of last night) and he connects and charms them. He makes it look easy but it’s one of the most difficult things, to be at the same time so funny and so sensitive to the other person. Think of what you’re used to seeing—comic and straight man, whether the straight man is the interviewer or interviewee. Colbert collaborates. Without a net.

I wrote six pages of my novel today. Back in the groove. Finishing it by April is doable if I give up exercising and cleaning the apartment, avoid drinking and illness and don’t go out much during the week.

But tomorrow I’ll walk in the snow. Thursday do laundry.

What Women Want, Part II

One of the scientists in the New York Times Magazine article on female desire, Dr. Marta Meana, citing research that women are, on average, less lustful than men, theorizes that it takes more to kickstart a woman’s desire. This goes some way toward explaining why women have such frequent fantasies of sex with strangers and of rape—the latter being in the class of “only fantasy” (we hope), while the former is often acted out.

One can interpret these fantasies in many ways, and the interpretations differ from woman to woman. But what strikes me as incomplete about this idea is that while male lust on the physical level is more demanding and constant (married men retain their desire for marital sex longer than their wives do), male desire and fantasy is every bit as novelty-and-thrill-seeking as women’s. So if you explain women’s fantasies as compensation for a lower or fluctuating sex drive, what do you make of all the bizarre male porn?

I would say that desire by nature tends toward the extreme because it’s always constrained by reality. Most of what turns us on we can’t have, or won’t do, or wouldn’t like if it were done to us. How is this different from the rest of a person’s daydreaming? I want an impossible amount of recognition and well-being; I mentally murder my loved ones often; when I have insomnia I imagine terrible disasters far away, a practice that works to draw off the catastrophe demon, keep it from summoning my real fears.

The first time I went on Zoloft, I was driving my car alone in the country, in a state of calm euphoria, when I saw children playing by the side of the road up ahead. I had a sudden impulse to run them over, imagining the crunch under the wheels as being pleasurable in the same way stepping on a dry twig is.

I resisted the impulse without difficulty but kept thinking about it, as I drove on—specifically about why I couldn’t act on it. What was strange was that while I could imagine vividly the negative consequences to me should I do such a thing, and I understood that killing was ‘wrong’, I couldn’t feel that wrongness; the concept was empty; I was taking it on faith. I was, for that period of time, phantom-sociopathic. Only the fact that I remembered my previous self and was aware of this one as somehow ‘not me’ kept me not only safe but sane.

I told my sister this story and she said, matter-of-factly, “I know what you mean. Sometimes when I’m chopping vegetables and the children’s hands are spread out on the counter I have a desire to chop off their fingers. Not because I’m feeling hostile; it just seems like it would be satisfying.”

My boyfriend Philip is creeped out by these stories, and quick to see them as being somehow confined to my family. I think these things lie around in everybody’s psyche, like the most grotesque sexual fantasy you will never admit to. On the other hand, I’m put off by his tales of daily in-your-face male insult and challenge, what is sometimes banter and sometimes humiliation but for him simply part of the human spectrum. He takes for granted that men have all those macho qualities that, at 15, reading second-wave feminist literature, I thought brutal and anachronistic, soon to  be swept away. More than taking them for granted, he sees the artistry in them, and though I can’t yet see themthe way he does, I’ve learned to trust his feeling for artistry.

I guess my point is that desire has evolutionary, survive-and-propagate roots, but for a long time now it has been riffing on itself. It evades or overflows categories, finds a way out, in or around; what it’s exists to ‘do’ and ‘why’ is no longer entirely relevant. How can we tell what’s the score and what’s the improv?

Imagine the day when computers finally become sentient. Maybe this excites you; maybe you’re afraid. The one thing you don’t think is that consciousness will simply help them do the job better. If you’re human, you know being aware of yourself as a separate being is dangerous.

This has been a long post. You are now excused to your own fantasies. I’m in the mood for tea and chocolate chip cookies. I baked them for Philip but he made me bring them home. I’m glad. I like the silky pleasure of my own apartment, my poetry books, my thoughts up in the corners and my cookies.
Some books I love

What do Women Want?

The current issue of The New York Times magazine has a long article about recent studies on female desire. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/magazine/25desire-t.html?em
Some of the studies discussed were performed with a device called a plethysmograph attached to the subjects’ genitals (in women a plastic probe inside the vagina, measuring bloodflow) while they were shown videos of sexual acts, men-women, men-men, women-women, bonobos.

Bonobos? Why not golden retrievers? Tigers? Black Widow spiders? I’ve known women who messed around with their dogs. I’ve told men to hold me down by the neck like a tiger, though their mouths aren’t really big enough (and they complain mine isn’t big enough).

Never mind. The interesting thing is that men are reliably aroused by what say they desire—the hetero scenes if they’re hetero, gay if they’re gay. Women are aroused by all of it, including the apes. They’re also more aroused by a woman exercising than by a naked ‘chiseled’ man taking a walk. Dr. Marta Meana, of the University of Nevada, explains this with a theory of female desire as narcissistic. We like to look at other women because what matters to us is being desired, being desirable, and so the female body itself is deeply interesting. A naked male body with a limp dick doesn’t do it, because he obviously doesn’t find us ravishing. I have no quarrel with this, but it doesn’t really cover the appeal of the apes.

What evolutionary explanation can there be for the fluidity of female desire? Sexologist Lisa Diamond claims women are more ‘relational.’ A woman might be involved with a man at one point in her life, a woman at another. It’s the intimacy that turns women on. Certainly it’s been true in my experience of knowing gays and bisexuals that switching back and forth is far more common in women. But the idea that she’s attracted to the person and not the gender sounds wrong because the women I’ve known who go back and forth have very distinct ideas about what’s appealing about women vs men. They don’t say, “Terry just happens to be a man (woman).” Terry is Terry, unique individual, but also their needs have changed.

Dr. Meana dismisses the ‘relational’ idea entirely because her research indicates that women are attracted to sex with strangers and that intimacy in a marriage is no predictor of desire. I could have told her that 20 years ago, if I hadn’t been so busy trying to justify it to myself.  But being ‘relational’ doesn’t have to mean always wanting nice, or familiar; what about being interested in human relationships, the oddities and differences, being both curious and cautious, wanting (needing) to learn more, and being willing to learn through sex? That, perhaps, is why women are aroused watching bonobos, who reputedly use sex to cement alliances and smooth social interaction.

Men want variety—any attractive woman, or any woman meeting their criteria, or specifically, “I’ve never had an Asian.” Women are more likely to say, “My darling, I find you sexier than Liam Neeson and Barack Obama combined,” but also, “I wonder what it would be like to be a gay man?” Or, “How cool to fuck a giant—a blind man—a werewolf?”

But perhaps that’s just me. What do you think?

post-coital?

Astrology and Penises

I’m beginning to think what MSNBC needs is an astrology pundit show (in the slot after Rachel, we don’t need Keith twice) so all the intricate parsing of the day’s events could be livened up with discussions of what Mercury retrograde will do to the President’s Blackberry and what effect the coming eclipse (Jan 26; you have to be in African, Antarctica or Australia to see it) will have on our  alpha Leo. Here’s my prediction, for what it’s worth: Obama won’t get 100 days to prove himself, much less the couple of years the press has been nattering about, but more like a week and a half. Already he’s closed Gitmo and bombed Pakistan. If he can cut taxes, pass universal health care, outfit Air Force One with solar panels and get the girls their puppy before the end of the month, the country will sigh and start shopping for valentines.

So, okay, the stimulus bill, what’s supposed to save the banks, our jobs, savings and houses: that little thing. The early draft sounds like those sex guides that define foreplay as caressing all the erogenous zones (there are so many more than you thought!) repeatedly—and never once mention what might be called the art of it: narrative, strategy, precision. I know Congress is out of its depth. Brains aren’t passed out at the door. They just want to make us and their donors and the lobbyists and the President happy, and not be made fun of on TV. They’re not potted plants, as Tom Lantos once said. (Not Axelrod—he said that the cabinet members aren’t potted plants). All I can say is, Can you help the girls find their dog?

Philip expressed his pleasure with my post yesterday about respecting his (and others’) privacy. It kind of makes me want to upload a picture of his dick. But dick pix are everywhere, and his isn’t two pronged like a kangaroo, nor bullet proof like Obama’/s inauguration suit. (http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/01/president-oba-1.html) It’s just mostly perfect, like the private parts of every man I’ve ever slept with who might be reading this blog, but of course more perfect than most.

(As for Charles, he’s spoken for himself, most eloquently, in a recent comment. He knows how perfect he is.)

My Privates

I’ve been considering what level of openness regarding my personal life I want for this blog. People have raised issues—hurt feelings, privacy—that have made me uncomfortable, though not surprised. I was in therapy and AA for years, so the personal spills easily. And I’m a novelist, so raw emotion and peculiar human detail seems like the good stuff, what I hate to let go of even if I know it will upset someone. Not that I don’t have boundaries; there are plenty of things I’d never put in here, though the writer in me salivates. And I know exactly where the boundaries should stay to keep my loved ones happy, but I can’t help wanting to move the goalposts a little.

I find my sexual and emotional life an endless source of comedy. This isn’t because I haven’t cried several rivers, but because I have and so what. My boyfriend’s pretzel of a psyche, my husband’s Man-Who-Fell-to-Earth oddity spark enormous tenderness in me, yet there have been many times over the years when one or another has lain beside me, disgorging secrets and dreams, revealing astonishing delusions (like the ones you and I have) while I repeated the words in my head, memorizing the turns of phrase, thinking, What a character he’ll make someday.

I thought that ‘someday’ I’d be disconnected from one or another.

“I don’t want to censor you, but you can’t expect me not to have a reaction.”

“You have to write what you want—you have to—but can’t I tell you how I feel?”

Well, okay. I guess the appropriate cautionary tale is Nixon and the White House tapes. He probably didn’t get the novelistic splendor of it all, but he knew the joys of the raw meat moment. General This and Senator That, talking shit. You want to preserve and protect. You don’t want to be kicked out of the place of privilege.

Wet Pelts Glistening in the Blue

Andree and I sat in my bedroom eating bread and butter, watching the Inauguration. We liked it when they booed Bush–there was some unidentifiable expression on his face at that moment, not exactly fear but something like that. The men around him did look afraid, except for Cheney who just looked like the large, unpleasant reptile that he is.

I thought Obama’s speech was very good: serious, inclusive, loving. I was especially pleased with, “Christian and Muslim”— pause—“Jew and Hindu and non-believer.” At  last, some acknowledgment of the legions of us who don’t have a religion, even if we sometimes wonder. My guess is he got the majority of the atheist vote, so thanks, B.

I’m glad he didn’t speak too long or try to soar too high. He was just eloquent enough. Anyway, after Aretha we didn’t need any more soaring. Seeing her made me want to cry and that mood kept on through the speech. I only wish the poet had been better. This country has so many great ones, multitudes of good ones. Alexander is so mediocre she made Rev. Joseph Lowery’s “when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man” sound downright charming. Well,  I’m sure if I did a google search of poems about Obama, I’d find quite a few. In fact, let me try now.

–I found something more interesting, this poem, written by Obama for Occidental college literary journal in 1981.

UNDERGROUND

Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance,
Tumble in the
Rushing water,
Musty, wet pelts
Glistening in the blue.

It reminds me of a poem I wrote 10 years ago

Girl and Ape

A girl and an ape are in the garden.
The girl reads novels while the ape
Cracks nuts.
The moon swings across the sky
shedding light like a woman sliding a dressing gown
off her shoulders.
Beautiful moon!
The fronds of the palm trees
tremble at your approach.

The garden is deep and lush,
a bowl of cool grass
cut freshly across the top.
The girl is sobbing and the ape is sad.
How can he please her?
He dances.
Soon she sleeps
dreaming of a naked man
like the ancient statues.
The ape stands over her
naming each strand
of the long curled blooms of her  hair.

I guess we both feel a kinship with our close cousins, feel them as our animal souls. His apes are experiencing—what? Frustration, power, sensual happiness? Dionysian revel? Mine is caught by love and sadness. Not so different. What is always under the surface.

Barack won’t have time to go under the surface for many years. Although, I don’t know–he’s got the ability to seize slivers of time, not lose himself entirely to the public arena. You can see that watching him dance with Michelle, or talk to his daughters. And that’s in public.

Besides wanting him to work like hell, I wish him moments of glistening in the blue.

Tomorrow Will Come

Philip is still sleeping, after getting up very early for therapy then coming back to bed, so I’m quietly drinking my coffee and watching the muted TV. Obamania without sound. The crawlies tell me what ’service’ Barack and Michelle are performing today, and I can’t help but think they deserve to sleep late and take it easy. But that’s why being President never appealed to me. Bush took 77 vacations. I wonder if Barack will manage 7.

We were having a desultory conversation about which fate we would wish on our criminal soon to be ex President and when Philip suggested being eaten by a mountain lion it seemed exactly right. I had to think about why. After all, there are lots of nasty ways to go. I think it’s because mountain lions are our indigenous predator, as American as buffalo, resurgent and unafraid. Because all wildlife was at risk from GW. And because while in the normal course of things one can’t imagine a mountain lion devouring an entire adult, Bush seems so lightweight now, such a shadow of a man, that I can picture him eaten to the last whisker and button, disappeared inside the lion without even a tummy bulge marring the sleek feline shape. “We couldn’t let anyone kill the lion,” I said. “No,” said Philip.”We’d put its head on a coin.” When he said that, I had such a vivid image of the coin; now it exists, even if all by itself in its own universe. And, of course, here.

Is it just me, or is Obama getting handsomer? Maybe I needed time off thinking about other things (Christmas, suicide) to fully appreciate him. Or maybe they just didn’t choose the right musicians–Garth Brooks and Beyonce just can’t match his star power. Only Herbie Hancock and  Stevie Wonder came close. What we really needed was Ray Charles, back from Heaven for a visit. No, I’m not even going to imagine Ray Charles in Heaven. Somebody funnier than me would have to do a skit.

How anachronistic we will seem in 20 years! To have ever lived in a time when a black President seemed impossible.

Sunday Morning

I’m trying to write and Philip is swearing at the TV again, this time at David Brooks for saying Bush’s freezing out of those who didn’t agree with him, “my lifestyle is better than your lifestyle” was what the ‘60’s were all about. “No, you cocksucker,” my sweetie said, “that’s what people who have money are all about.” Philip was hurt by what I wrote last week so now I have to describe his good qualities, like how much he hates Republicans, and how pretty his eyelashes are. I’ve have learned a lot from him about what it was like not to be a hippie in high school, and how to access one’s inner Rahm Emmanuel. But I also have to object to his assertion that wanting TV and music on at all times is recognizing one’s connectedness to humanity. This is how I connect to humanity, and I need silence to do it.

Which I have now because he’s in the bathroom and the TV is cavorting on mute. I fell in the bathroom last weekend when I was drunk, not hurting myself (God protects drunks and fools has always worked for me) and coming out of my stupor to feel him lightly slap my face—he couldn’t carry me to bed, alas, no one has done that since I was 5—and it was kind of a faux S/M moment, part of that tough love I seem to want, but once I get it feel energized to turn the toughie into a softie so we can play, childhood rough and tumble, tease and silliness until I explode in toddler giggles. It can never happen enough for me though both Philip and Charles are extremely good at being silly. I miss my husband, his unpredictable flights of fancy. Maybe I’m perverse, but I can’t help feeling happy for Diane whom he’s ‘in love’ with now—what a pleasure for her to receive that overflowing romantic spirit. I always felt that I got too much of the good stuff from Charles, that not enough other people experienced him at his best. Mostly I was sorry his kids didn’t. But the grandchildren are getting a good dose, and they need it.

Postdepressionism

Feeling blank and sleepy, recovering from a bad week. Philip is soaking his bulgy infected finger and swearing at the TV; I’m thinking about Laura in Iowa, taking care of a sick mother; Gina in Woodstock, recovering, I hope, from her depression; and my mother in California, who is beginning to be seriously scared about money, which is hard to face for the first time in your life at 84. And, of course, Obama, who looked so fine today, so calm and handsome, though cold. I wanted to give him a hat.  He told us all to make change in our own lives, and I had a ghostly idea of community, which is something I’ve always been coy about. Community, great, but only with the right people, and where are they, anyway? The odd pleasure of bad times is how people reach out and you realize you’re not quite as selfish as you thought you were, and neither is anybody else. At least that’s been my experience. What’s also interesting is that even before this reaching out had happened, back in October, people were anticipating it, talking about solidarity in the Great Depression, weirdly excited. I don’t know if this will last. I’m not expecting wholesale spiritual development. I’m hoping for my own, since the alternative is last week, clenched in a pain that didn’t want to move, that wanted to grieve, unmoving, grieving beyond grief—or else explode in rage, determined to rip love apart. I won’t allow it. And Philip won’t allow it, and Charles won’t, and that’s how we know each other best, by what we value more than our wounds. Of course, some call it co-dependence. When I was at boarding school, they made a big deal out of the three C’s–Cooperation, Community, Communication. I made fun of of it, sarcasm being my default mode. I still have trouble with committes and their C’s. So I’ll stick to the one I’ve earned, co-dependence. The world is a net of needs. It holds.

Going, Going, Gone

I imagined that now I’d be feeling excitement about Obama taking office but I don’t. I’ll probably feel it Tuesday. What I’m feeling now is a deep happiness that Bush is going. I’m not even worked up about how he got away with everything. I disagree with Paul Krugman about the importance of inquiries into the Administration’s crimes. It would be fine if we could do that without stopping Obama’s momentum but we can’t. And if that’s always gong to be the case, if no President ever wants to give up his momentum to punishing the last guy—well, maybe that should teach us to start fighting sooner. I know his damage hasn’t all been done yet. More lives will be lost, jobs and homes will be lost. But he’s going. He’s not our president. Most of us made it through. And all you guys who wanted to have a beer with him—start a petition. Maybe he can spend the rest of his life passed from saloon to saloon like the parrots and chimps sailors used to bring home and set up as mascots in the local watering hole. You can teach a chimp to drink beer; what you can’t do is teach George Bush how to be—what did he say he is now? A citizen. Not even.  He just lives here. Might as well let him entertain the drunks (but they have to really want him).
**
In Michael Kimmelman’s obituary of Andrew Wyeth in the Times, he refers to the painting “Christina’s World” as dark, humorless and morose. The first time I saw a reproduction of it, as a young teenager, it comforted me that there was a man somewhere who knew about the loneliness of girls in fields. (Cristina was 55 at the time of the painting, but it never occurred to me she wasn’t a teenage girl.) I knew the difference between, say, Degas and Wyeth, but had room for both, and more, and all the art I could find. I suppose my quarrel with Kimmelman is about the word ‘morose’…although if I were to using my teenage self as a measure of normal, it would be hard to find anything that would qualify as morose. The painting doesn’t do much for me now, but I’m grateful for the memory of what it gave me. And for the memories that come with it, all the hours roaming in fields and woods in New Hampshire, the trees and snow and mud and rocks, the bay and rivers…the great gorgeous weight of it all…I was dizzied by so much beauty; I didn’t know what to do with it; I wanted to talk to it; I thought it was trying to talk to me.  And none of that would have been so astonishing without loneliness.

Chew Toy

I forced myself out on a walk today, further than the corner, all the way to Hudson St, and the cold was biting but I was layered up and with my new $8 hat was okay. Still depressed, though knowing it is finite, some inner purge or tantrum; it never ceases to astonish me how I can revert to the worst: pulling my boots on I wanted to start gnawing on my leg like a trapped animal, which, admittedly, I never did, but I would bite my arms once upon a time, leaving deep marks. Not now. Now they hurt all by themselves.

So I was out in the world, chewing on my psyche…which is like an ancient dog-toy which the poodle settles with in the corner glancing at you reproachfully for noticing…as I was thus occupied, suddenly the light turned up a notch and I saw the street, W. 4th, the snow covered cobblestones and sidewalks, the restaurant awnings, and it was all white and blue, sun and grime and men shoveling, traffic moving thoughtfully, twinkling leftover Christmas lights…19th century and 1970 and all the years of the past when the world’s beauty was plastered on my eyeballs day and night. MY neighborhood. I love it, I do.

And I’m glad they rescued all the people from the river (flight 1549). Our embracing waters, even if they are damn cold.

Nameless

Depression a whirlpool, sucking me down. So much force. Will it be gone tomorrow, next week? Never? Right now I wish there were a door to go through marked ‘Death’ ( not into the earth but somewhere airy and bright that’s  also nowhere and empty but in an airy, bright and possibly surprising way) and to go through this door is okay, nobody minds, people wish you ‘Bon Voyage’ and aren’t unhappy. Of course I don’t want my friends to go through that door, except, if we all went, it would be okay.

Bush made us old

Feeling better tonight. I’ve taken it easy today–okay, flat on my back terrified suicidal depression leading to afternoon knockout nap, that counts as taking it easy doesn’t it?—so my arms don’t hurt. And I wrote 5 pages on my novel. Charles has helped immeasurably by researching current voice recognition software, and offering his software-ready computer, so if my worst-case scenarios (no, NOT that my arms will fall off, but that I won’t be able to work for several months, as happened in the 90’s with an eye problem), I can always tell stories to my laptop, practice my timing,  as well as exercising new parts of my brain and staving off Alzheimers.  Maybe someday be able to write while walking down the street.

They showed a pair of those before and after pix: how much Bush aged in the White House: not enough. Not as much as everyone else. Can you even remember the fall of 2000? I was feeling the  strong scent of  mortality, which kicked my romantic neurosis into high gear, but that was a scent, not, you know, the whole house falling down, the rats swarming in.  My  parents-in-law are both gone, a friend has lost 2 brothers; others have wounded knees, shoulders, necks, feet, lost teeth and inner organs. My mother nearly went blind a few times. Not to mention the broken hearts and busted wallets, and Philip’s shrink embarrassed by what Bernie Madoff has done to the reputation of the Jews.

The Times claims that a scientific Love Potion # 9 is on the way (danger: it may not induce subject to fall in love with desired object but rather with the next person walking by or, more Twilight Zone, the very kind of man/woman they have spent their whole life in repression to avoid being consumed by)—soon to be followed by a Love Vaccine, which the reporter thinks will be more useful. Interesting hypothesis: had this been available to me 5 years ago–not as vaccine, perhaps, but cure–would I have taken it? I think my boyfriend’s boffing someone else this week. A little something in his voice. Probably Nancy, his gal-pal, fuck-buddy, the ‘Not-You’. I’m no victim, being as unfaithful as the next person in our menage-a-whatever, or if not the next person than an average thereof (decode that if you can).  It’s just that I imagine him doing it with all the exuberance and energy we had in the fall of 2000. These days our sex life’s being scripted by all the best cable TV whiz kids with their hyper-realism and psycho-smarts; let’s call it “Midlife: The Eternity.” Somewhere you can hear Richard Pryor laughing. And Charles is visiting Diane in Charlottesville in a couple of weeks: that doesn’t make me jealous, exactly, just wistful….

Repetitive Stress

Can I go through the screen like a magic mirror?

My arm and shoulder hurt when I type or use the mouse; my vague and flickering RSI has flared into something more serious, and I may have to stop this blog. I don’t want to.  I’m just starting to feel comfy here, in this writing that is most like ‘a message in a bottle’ as anything I’ve ever done. I always loved that idea as a child, and would look earnestly for bottles whenever I was by the ocean.  The idea of stopping working on my novel, as well, for any length of time makes me teary and panicky–how will I earn any money? To write popular fiction quickly is the only plan I have.

The pain keeps moving. I think that’s not unusual, from the little amount of research I’ve been able to do.  Philip was scoffing at my distress last night. He thinks it’s the pain; he’s always in pain. Yeah, I and I have been too, many years of my life. I don’t care about pain, per se,  not a moderate amount of it. It’s the idea that it might get worse and worse ; it’s the idea that I have to stop writing right now, if I’m *sensible*,  and somehow not mind desperately losing that wonderful thrill I had last week, writing so much (not tons of hours, just quickly).

Later–well, I worked on my novel today anyway, in short bursts. Got 7 pages done. I’m in pain. But I’ll probably write tomorrow. This is all so sudden, I can’t help thinking it will go away, that it’s underlying stress, fear of drinking/not drinking, fear of the anger I hide by drinking. I’m sure that contributes, as does being sedentery for a few weeks, but I still think I have to face the medical system again. sigh. I’d hoped not to for, oh, years  maybe…(months, anyway).

Rummy

i drank his Christmas present

I’m hungover, Philips thinks I should quit drinking and I want to, though whether I want to enough remains to be seen. I’m not so much worried about the hangover  days but the ordinary drinking, how it dulls me and retards my imagination. That’s not true exactly–it feeds my imagination in some ways, but I’ve had a lot of that kind of food lately, and I need the perspective of sobriety more. That exacting clarity. What I’m afraid of is that I feel so pulled into my writing these days, the novel and this blog and all the other novels half written and hanging around, that I already have difficulty seeing the point of being with people, though I do get lonely. Alcohol helps. Sometimes it becomes the point of being with people, which is bad, but what can I say? I don’t have anything to say anymore, in person; it’s all going to the writing.  I know I can  figure this out. I don’t feel particularly worried, for some reason. Maybe the last glass of rum is still feeding me its sweet southern delusions.

Philip is with Christine today. I’m still at his apartment, because of the hangover, and writing this on his computer. It’s all a little strange. They’re watching a football game tgether. I’m glad I don’t have to do that. Still–and though I am thinking actively and lovingly  about my own husband and looking forward to seeing him again–imagining Philip with his wife (and the cats and the dog) makes me want to stick knives in him. This is why everyone thinks my life is crazy. It is. I want to bark  at the moon. I want to take LSD and sit in the bushes all night  talking to unscary  ghosts as I did in Virginia, in 1978, then lie on the floor all day reading Proust. (Actually I sat outside all night in the summer and read Proust in the winter. I remember that because we dragged the mattress down in front of the oven to save on heat. )

Their heads are green and their hands are blue

I want to learn Ancient Greek. I’ve wanted to since I was a teenager, just as I’ve wanted to learn German, to read the poets. I didn’t do it because I wasn’t good at languages—scary French teachers—because of general laziness, and because I thought I should learn French better first. Those teachers. And I should get out more, talk to people. I could talk to people in German, of course, but I’ve never wanted to go to Germany. I read too much WWII history as a child. Now I’ve spent just Christmas with four year old Daniel, who speaks German, but only to his father, so the rest of us are left out, and I’ve read Anne Carson’s book conjoining Simonides with Paul Celan (who wrote in German, though he lived too much WWII history and eventually killed himself). The desire for Ancient Greek is fairly commonplace; German less so. I love Rilke; I love Holderlin. But I love plenty of French and Spanish poets too, and Chinese poets…the difference is that German poetry (and Russian) is so fractured in the translations, you can’t help but be aware of how you’re limping through the verse. My fear of language studies these days is less about my native ability than my declining memory. My brain feels like the precarious vessel of Jumblies,  who went to sea in a sieve.

All my life I’ve remembered that image, and assumed the Jumblies shortly drowned, as people and others often do in children’s poems. But I just looked it up and—aha— they survived, several verses carrying them to the far shore. When they got where they were going,
“…they bought an Owl, and a useful Cart,
And a pound of Rice, and a Cranberry Tart,
And a hive of silvery Bees.”

Which reminds me…

“And a small cabin I build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine beans rows will have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.”

I didn’t need to look up those lines. I memorized them at thirteen, and always night and day hear them lapping with low sounds by the shore. (Though I did, of course, check.)

Homer next. Wine-dark sea; clear-eyed Athena.

Simonides, cont. Death.

I’ve been cleaning dust off my surviving brother’s face with the clone tool in Photoshop. It’s a curiously intimate act, especially in this photograph, where he is young, long haired and dreamy, sitting on the sunny porch of my mother’s house 30 years ago, his pals down below, not the camera’s concern; there’s an empty beer bottle at his feet and he probably has a hangover. Anne Carson writes in “The Economy of The Unlost”, her book about Simonides and Paul Celan, that Simonides invented the epigraph, and it was probably the constraints of the gravestone that perfected his economy of language. Many of his poems commemorate dead soldiers. She claims as his the line, “We all owe a debt to death” and writes that it was the custom on the island of Ceos, where the poet was born, for those who reached the age of 60 to drink hemlock, in order to preserve scarce resources for the young. Simonides left the island for a grand career and lived into his 90’s.

Photo of me, circa 1986, taken by my brother John in a graveyard he found (he finds graveyards often).

Innerspace, or The Death of Romance.

I’ve been sick with a bad cold for almost two weeks, alone the last several days except for a brief lovely visit from Andree, my writer-singer friend who’s back from a year in China and having trouble with her inner ear. Doctors know nothing about the inner ear, it seems. I felt like asking if she’d inserted anything Chinese into her ear—considering their unfortunate tendency to substitute ingredients—but that sounded rather crude, so I just said something vague about “Chinese…” and she knew what I meant. But she’s been in the states two months so probably not. I’ve heard a lot of tall tales and mostly see through them but one I believed into my thirties was that earwigs were a kind of insect that, if allowed to crawl in your ear, would eat its way through to the other side. If you’ve ever seen what moths do to cashmere sweaters, and mice to manuscripts of unpublished novels, you’d understand why this seemed perfectly feasible.

Anyway, in this solitude of being ill and being home, I’m starting to freeze up like someone who’s been in bed too long, though I haven’t in fact been bedridden. I need to write and not be distracted so I’m not looking for company quite yet. But I feel the lack of it and am aware of the weight of it throughout my life, too many years of solitude all day. At first it was glorious not to go to school, to write in the mornings and walk in the afternoons, to shop and cook dinner for my husband. Once we moved to the city and he got a regular job, I often had coffee in the afternoon with friends, other writers or freelancers or stay-at-home mothers: there used to be so many of those. All of that was fine as far as it went; still, I felt understimulated and unsatisfied. But because I experienced my shyness as a deformity and was afraid of how anxiety destroyed the calm I needed to work, I avoided the distractions and novelty I craved, and so have ended up truly deformed, at least to my inner sight . What I’ve always focused on is a) the terrifying excitement of other people, the god and goddesses among us whom I wanted and hated and was blinded by, and b) the value of solitude, the power to endure and shape it. I forgot to think about c) the ordinary growth of the mind in the presence of the new; the curious bits and pieces that adhere through association; byways and second cousins and lucky chances. I don’t mean I never thought about these things or knew what they meant—put them in a novel and I’d immediately get restless, hungry for the book and the neighborhood at once—simply that I didn’t give them enough weight. It was like counting pennies. It was like counting pennies and thinking about how pretty they are, how their color makes them special, and they’ve spawned so many good words and phrases, ‘ha’penny’ ‘penny candy’, ‘penny for your thoughts’, yet still thinking: you’re wasting your time. Pennies. All of this is sex, how it dominated everything, diverting all interest in people and projects into tests of value and desirability, the old Dead Daddy story grinding away in my semi-conscious. My friend Annie talks about coming home from school in the afternoon to find her mother drunk, in her expensive negligee, lying on the couch listening to the same record over and over. (They had records then. You had to lift up the needle at beginning and end. If you weren’t careful, people yelled at you—though if you were a drunk ex-runway model alone in a Park Avenue apartment except for a maid and a kid, probably not.) She doesn’t remember what record it was, or maybe it’s that I don’t remember what she told me. I do know that I had to dance to a certain tune until the needle snapped, until the musicians died, until whatever it was happened that allowed me to put the old opera back on the shelf, where it still babbles foreign love songs in a wordy drool but I don’t have to listen.

What happened was I met someone who played the same tune, but not quite, I crawled into his brain and made my nest, and since he’s sentimental the idea of ‘nest’ arrested him. More and more I heard his music, and when it was entirely him, it wasn’t a magic opera anymore, it wasn’t the past. It was just a man and a woman or I should say, two men and two women, or three women—or however many women there are now between my husband and boyfriend, I don’t ask—what I mean is, it became a farce.

No, it’s been a farce for quite a few years now. I just took off the funny glasses, let myself cruise into ‘relationship’ territory. Stripped of Romance, lonely again, I started a blog, joined Facebook—which I know is not face-time, but still. Grownups and schedules are like giant vitamins, the kind my husband always claimed would stick in his throat and kill him.

Simonides, my teacher for 2009

I’ve been reading Anne Carson about the poet Simonides, supposedly the first poet to demand payment for his work, other than the traditional guest privileges. She estimates he earned, for one poem, the annual income a successful doctor made in a year (in Greece in the 5th century bc). Doctors were in those days far less effective than poets, but people still paid to have their bones set and their humours balanced, which often involved vomiting, enemas and bloodletting. By another measure one of Simonides poems earned the equivalent of what an ordinary laborer earned in  28 years. Not so much really when you think of today’s movie stars and directors. But having paid the upstart poet in coin, the patron would short him on the dinner: no snow to cool his wine, a measly portion of roast hare. That was okay; Simonides knew how to write poems about such things, as well as sell the food he didn’t want out the back door. Carson’s thesis is in fact that this emergence of the money economy within the old gift economy was Simonides’ subject: he wasn’t so simple as to bemoan the slipping-away of the old, ‘human’ connection—the linkage of guest and host, giver and recipient (all meanings of the same word ‘xenos’, which also of course means ‘stranger’). Rather he noted it, thought about it, wrote his poems and got paid, much like some of the hipper cultural observers at The New Yorker. I can nibble on Simonides and feel refreshed, but he’s too far away for me to desire too much. Anne Carson is someone whose mind you want to hijack for a week or two, just to know what it’s like in there before the pruning and exquisite ordering, amid the original (still orderly?) ferment. It can be nothing like my woolly mess, my thoughts that wander like mountain goats in NYC streets—the yellow-eyed ones that blunder out of mists, slink back in—luckily too benign and out of place to be remembered. Do you know how magicians do sleight-of-hand? It’s not just by distracting your attention—or rather, how distracting your attention works isn’t simply grabbing it with bright shiny stimuli over here, but by feeding your brain incomplete information about an event it has witnessed before. The brain, in its need for shortcuts, is willing to take half a story and extrapolate the rest; it jumps ahead, just as you do when you get to a boring bit in a book or a blog and who’s to say the boring bit is actually there if you’ve jumped ahead? But back to Simonides. There’s a story about him finding a dead sailor on the beach and doing the right thing by burying the corpse as well as writing an epitaph that asks God, in the sailor’s voice, for his enemies to get what he was given and for the one who put him in the ground to profit from life. Simonides didn’t actually expect this profit, perhaps (except in the way that a poem is always a gift from what inspired it) but the sailor came to him in a dream and warned him not to board a particular ship. He paid attention to the dream, stayed home, and the ship sank. As I said, a man who knew how to obtain serious recompense for his work. I’m going to think about him at the dinner table, drinking his overly warm wine, eating his slender hare, and feeling the weight of coin in the little leather pouch hanging from his waist—or wherever he kept it.

Afternoon at the Frick

The boyfriend who thinks he’s Anthony Bourdain is cooking chicken gizzards while pouring wine and dissing me for a) not liking gizzards, b) opening the wine wrong, c) scattering chocolate wherever I go.  He says if I write this in the blog he’ll sue me for palimony. Quiz: what famous actor’s romantic troubles led to the coining of the word ‘palimony?’ No fair googling. I always wanted a Palomino pony, mostly because I liked the name ‘Palomino.’ Today, we went to the Frick and saw an early Renaissance sculptor Andrea Riccio (whose father had the wonderful first name ‘Ambrogio.’) Beautiful intricately detailed small bronzes marrying Christian and Classical imagery, the entombment of Christ quite similar to the Elgin Marbles. My favorite was a satyr entwined with a female satyr—usually they go for nymphs or the odd human, but apparently there are female satyrs, at least in Andrea Riccio’s world, and they have lovely fleecy calves to match their mates’ hairy thighs. Her lips are puckered for the kiss. I also liked Riccio’s goat statues—one with tail raised. In both of the, the teeth showing. The detail is exquisite. It reminds me of the trance state of working on something that you’ve been working on a long time, how you don’t notice the deep pleasure you’re feeling. Obesessive in the best way. That is what connects me to other artists—the recognition of the thrill of capturing the details. Christ’s toes curling under the edge of the relief. What does it feel like to work on those toes?

Excerpt

Post Revisions

2009: All Aboard

New Year’s Day, 2009. I’m slightly hungover—‘languid’ is the term I prefer—lying in bed in a dim room with my notebook, watching it get dark. Philip is out buying food and Charles is sunning himself in Florida. Charles complained over Christmas that his recent appearances in this blog were only related to a toilet plunger so I will let you know he crossed into 2009 in his red convertible, driving through the warm night with the top down, fireworks erupting all around him. Then he went to the beach, to a second party, and probably sent lots of love notes to his paramour. I would be jealous if I thought about it in any detail, but I don’t, and he’s not writing a blog. Yet. I used to read his diary when we were first together. He knew I was reading it and knew he didn’t have to worry because his handwriting was indecipherable. But I remember seeing my name a lot. It was satisfying and frustrating like being a dog while humans talk about you. There’s a beautiful view from this apartment, very old New York, which it makes me feel slightly less melancholy. The buildings are lit up, growing brighter as night falls. My mother’s house in Lompoc was the only one on her block not to have Christmas lights. “That’s how we’ll tell Whitney to find it,” I said. We found it by using Charles’ iphone. The route appears in blue and a blue blip moves with the car like a UFO in one of those stories that begin, “I was driving alone on a deserted country road…” Strange, how nobody gets abducted by UFO’s anymore. Perhaps that’s another achievement of the Reagan administration, something historians will uncover decades from now: our secret treaties with the aliens. They got to keep all the halfbreed babies and we didn’t nuke their home planet. OK, not very convincing. I’ll have a better story tomorrow. Lompoc’s a strange town. The shopping center where the grocery store is also houses a Payday Loan office and a discount cigarette store. My mother thought the town was upwardly mobile when she bought in but I think her real estate luck has run out. Why does 2009 sound like such a good year? It’s an elegant number. 2009 should be the year computers attain sentience and amaze us with their perspective on things, not ‘mechanical’, not hostile or psychotic, simply wonderfully peculiar. The new kid in town, the one from some country you’ve never heard of, who speaks funny, does everything wrong but is somehow unerringly cool. Oh well. The collapse of the greatest boom in modern history ought to be at least moderately interesting. Maybe if I could watch it from Mars. Do you think Obama has a hangover? No, I don’t either. I just read the first 6 chapters of my friend Andree’s new novel, Stardust: a Jazz Mystery which takes place in 1992. I want the rest. It’s a pleasure to lie in bed reading and feel like I’m doing somebody a favor…the second time lately that I’ve read a novel ‘for’ someone and found myself entirely drawn in and seduced. It’s nice to have such talented friends. Maybe I won’t have to buy books anymore.

Last Night in Lompoc

I’ve been sleeping all afternoon, still sick; I don’t want to get on a plane tomorrow. I’ve gotten over the feeling that I should leave because my brother did–it’s quieter now. I could read and write and spend time with my mother. I have to start planning longer trips, like the Victorians did, staying a month or so and keeping on with one’s business. Not that they had a lot of business (the women),but. I could. Or maybe it’s just the pain talking, the desire to not have to face crowds and security and coughing on others and a cold wait in the taxi line. My mother’s talking to herself in the other room. That low murmur is so soothing. As as child, it made me know what she was thinking–that it was nothing harmful or strange, only what she was doing or had to do–now it makes me think she’s not lonely, which is probably untrue. When I told her Charles said he was lonely, she said that’s what books are for. Actually, he said he was lonely for me, so I guess that’s what my books are for, or would be if I could write day and night. We talked about Dickens. Nobody wrote or writes as wonderfully as Dickens. “When he dines alone in chambers, as he has dined today, and has his bit of fish and steak or chicken brought in from the coffee house, he descends with a candle to the regions below his deserted mansion, and, heralded by a remote reverberation of thundering doors, comes gravely back, encircled by an earthy atmosphere, and carrying a bottle from which he pours a radiant nectar, two score and ten yeras old, that blushes in the glass to find itself so famous, and fills the whole room withthe fragrance of southern grapes.” I could go on quoting for pages, but will not. Read it yourself. Bleak House. Dickens cures the ills contemporary culture inflicts, though it helps if you’ve spent some large part of childhood and youth in like company. If the style  is too unfamiliar it may not help, but for me it brings back everything that made me excited about being alive, conscious, possessed of language and sympathy.

Foggy, Foggy Brain

My mother, in her living room

Sick as a dog in Lompoc, CA, post-Christmas, drinking peppermint tea and reading my haul of nasty-Bush-era-politics books. Somehow the books do the opposite of what they are intended to–I find the wealth of detail makes it all seem less horrible and frightening. I can’t blame the authors for humanizing the actors because they don’t, much: the personality sketches are perfunctory and I don’t feel sympathy for the devils. They just don’t seem like devils. Is this because of Obama’s win, or is it a quality of the writing? Or of my cold-fogged brain? My mother and brother murmur in the other room, at work on a series of projects. The main one is scanning boxes of family photos–Mom in her glamorous middle age, my grandmother in love, Daddy doing his Don Draper imitation. The past will always be seductive, never more so when I’m ill and unable to work or even think about working. Does that statement make sense without a gloss? I spent too many years doing not enough to find idleness (which I can’t afford but even if I could) romantic; I may long for it when I’m tired and feel stupid but never think it will equal the idleness of youth when time and the world were vast and gorgeous and could be ignored for awhile or two. I like hearing my family’s voices. I feel profoundly safe. As I went to sleep last night I thought I would be happy living with these two, even if it was a dwindling-world kind of happiness, but realized that in fact I wouldn’t, not as time passed, that this was a fugitive pleasure to be enjoyed and let go of. Johnny and my mother are arguing about whether ‘emend’ is a word just as I am wondering whether it is my writer’s history of constant revision that makes it seem that it is, that it should be possible, to go back and change one or two little things, that nobody would notice (and the image I have is the not-quite-dark of a house at night, me on tiptoe going into a corner with a needle, picking up or pulling out a stitch)…

Poodle Christmas

The poodle stands at the bottom of the bed, waiting for me to be more fun.  He looks like topiary. Charles has gone to buy a toilet plunger. While we ate breakfast and my mother and husband talked, trading familiar stories, I watched the garden emerge from darkness: the sage green of dawn and the glow of aging, spread roses. It’s magical to be in nature again, but my feelings are timid and stiff. I don’t want to get too used to it. I don’t want to start dreaming of flowers, garden centers, the smell of dirt in the sun.  Last night we arrived when it was already dark, and after months in New York and hours on an airplane, it was vaguely shocking to be in a house this large, this crammed with stuff. When we dined in the dining room off old china and silver, using napkins that were part of my grandmother’s wedding haul, and my mother talked about population as part of environmental pressure she seemed like a class enemy: one woman in an eight room house when I and most people I know live far more modestly. I can’t remember when it first started seeming odd to me, how she lived. Probably when I sold my own house, which was much more humble and decrepit than this one, but still a luxury: a country house for a Manhattanite, a house with several rooms I could wander through alone, sinking into books and nature, the nature often coming inside for visits. Vines flattening themselves to reach through the gaps around the upstairs windows, making a pretty drapery above the inside sill, snakes exploring the not-quite-finished parts of the downstairs, their looping mud-brown bodies like the exposed electrical cables come to life. It’s only been three years since I sold that house, but life in two rooms has altered my perspective in ways I’m not aware of until I do something like visit my mother. It’s as if the layout of my brain resembles the layout of my living space—and I know this is no mere metaphor, that our brains do change all the time to reflect our surroundings, expand and contract, sprout and wither. It makes me wonder how much the need to create and the nature of what’s created is affected by what’s there and what’s not there, and whether, as I hope, having known intimately many generous houses with character, and now being confined in a small space yet awash in the luxuriant density and detail of Manhattan streets and public spaces, I have all the tools necessary to make vivid imaginary worlds. I’m writing a fantasy now and nothing can be taken for granted, not the animals or the weather or the food people eat: it’s daunting and I love it. I’m just sorry it took me so long—that I had to prove something to myself about being ‘literary’ and, perhaps more profoundly, about having a knowledge of the real world sufficient to convince others that I was indeed one of them, a human being, an insider. This is old childhood stuff: nice to live long enough to shed a bit of it, and to return to the childhood stuff I actually enjoyed…wandering through the glorious world of the back yard, and down the long halls of a house of a kind they used to call a ‘white elephant’—before everyone who could afford it (or not) wanted miles of extra space—spinning tales of my imaginary friends.

Under the Bark of Me

truffle assortments; book

On TV last night, Pat Buchanan said Afghanistan was where empires go to die.  Obama made promises we can’t keep. I think we have the answer in Bernie Madoff. A name change, a little cosmetic surgery, and we could send him over to swindle the poppy growers out of their wealth, along with the Saudis, the Syrians and a few others. No money, no weapons. No weapons, no influence.Obama has shown a taste and ability for subtle political machination. If  he can work with Rick Warren, why not Bernie Madoff? Lots of laid off financial sector professionals who could play the Jack Nicholson part from The Last Detail, escorting and keeping an eye on the slippery ‘family man.’ And the money harvested could bail out the bailout, removing some part of a zero from the national debt. Meanwhile the auto industry, in thanks for its rescue, would send every registered voter a $2000 voucher toward a new (hybrid) car, redeemable in 2012; AIG would provide free health insurance to artists and the unemployed; and Citibank, Chase and the rest would send us more credit card offers…0 % for the lifetime of the loan, guaranteed to last longer than your lifetime, and to be cancelled upon your death. The god of money and death, Pluto, in his guise as a planet, entered Capricorn on Nov. 26, for the first time since the American Revolution. According to astrologers, this means dramatic change in the direction of  hard work , hard times, necessity and playing by the rules. You knew that already? Yeah, but you didn’t know it was Pluto, did you? Cold little bastard. Having a number of important planets in Capricorn, I’m supposed to feel an inner gladness at the triumph of the reality-based community, and in fact I do. I’ll pull myself out of trouble,  I will. I’ll make my own fortune, yessir.  It’s growing dark out, this evening before the winter solstice, Satchmo is singing  “(I’ll be glad when you’re dead)You Rascal You,” on an LP Philip found today in the Spence-Chapin thrift shop, and I’m ruining my stomach lining with coffee to have the wit to write anything at all after a night of cabernet, fettucine with venison, ceasar salad and christmas cookies, sambuca,  espresso, bourbon, rum and cigarettes. Not really as bad as it sounds; I’m not hungover, merely languid. This is the best way to be while contemplating 16 years of Pluto in Capricorn, the Taskmaster. This morning we went out to the Crawford Doyle bookstore and Maison de Chocolat and in both places Philip said, “Get whatever you want.” He hadn’t bought me any Christmas presents yet. It was one of those moments—I could almost feel my child self widening her eyes in wonder: a bookstore! A candy store! Get whatever you want!  It reminded me of a story about my father, told by my cousins to my sister. They were little children, in the local candy store, with maybe a few nickels to spend, or maybe nothing and this handsome man in a suit comes in and tells them they can have whatever they want. Whatever they want. (That probably did not refer to quantity, however.) He buys them all candy and disappears. Later, at home, the stranger is at the dinner table and they discover he’s their uncle, whom they’ve never met before.  That’s my daddy alright. Charmed strangers all to hell. He could be like that with us too, sometimes. Anyway, this bookstore, Crawford Doyle on 81st and Madison, is not the same store but is in the same location as the bookstore I went to several times a week in the two years we lived on 79th st, when I was 11 and 12. I bought my first adult  (as in non-children’s)books there and also my first ‘adult’ books. Actualy I didn’t buy the ‘adult’ books because it would only have embarassed both me and the kindly bookseller if I had tried. I stole them.Two or three, maybe four. Two I remember vividly.  They were  utterly perverted, even by today’s standards, but also, somehow, sweet.  I don’t think anyone could write like that now. I wasn’t frightened or put off by the revelation of the male sexual imagination (greedy and without boundary) but rather consoled. These guys were way ahead of me, and I was happy to be their student. Every afternoon after school, I read under the covers, masturbated  and ate chocolates . Pounds of chocolates. Many orgasms. —Now Philip interrupts me  to tell me Ring Lardner’s rewrite of the lyrics of “Night and Day”: “Night and day/under the bark of me/oh such a load of microbes making a park of me”—as I was saying, it was not that bookstore but almost that bookstore and not Fanny Farmer but Maison de Chocolat–and given free rein, I was restrained, 3 slim books, a quarter pound of chocolate covered ginger, a few truffles…and I think I need some of that chocolate now. Chocolate and kisses.

My New York

Heading to dinner at Antonucci's

Wet snow and sleet in New York; Philip is sleeping to the lullaby of Chris Matthews talking about the Franken recount: there’s no accounting for taste. It’s too warm in here, and the boyfriend snores…if I turn off the TV, he will wake. He has a big window–sliding doors to a terrace actually–with a classic New York view of lit up buildings. It reminds me of the city 40 years ago, when I was 12 and living close to here, on E. 79th St, absorbing the city as if it were the only New York, as if all the bus-drivers, newsstand owners, doormen, had been those things forever, eternal, as were the urine-scented streets, sweltering subways, and predatory loiterers in Times Square. When I was bit older and had read more, I envied those who knew New York in the 30’s and 40’s and 50’s. Now I can say I knew it in the 60’s and 70’s. I like holding all that history inside me; being a person so relentlesly interior, more disconnected than most from the public or external world, it’s nice to have enough memory piled up so that I can feel like a citizen of the world. Meanwhile my nieces are so confident of THEIR New York, the one that isn’t nearly as dangerous as their mother fears. To hear them talk, hear their claiming the city as their own, for now and the future, is startling and pleasing.  It gives me  a stronger grip on the city–as my parents’ years here fade in everyone’s memory, Ramona and Delilah are just beginning to make a mark. I, of course, feel as if I’ve written in snow, not just as in *writing*, but in living, my experiences here intense and deep but not broad. What’s happened to me here? I was molested (in a small way) at 11. I took LSD and went the movies,  spending most of the film in the bathroom, playing with the sink facuets. I met my first drag queen. I went to great performances (Barishnykov, Vanessa Redgrave, Alan Bates) and got drunk in lots of bars. I published my first and subsequent books and went to my friends’ book parties.  I got sober in AA and heard the incredibly messy and fascinating details of hundreds of people’s lives, not quite stranger than fiction, but possibly more diverse. I endured 7 years of open-heart psycho-therapy. I cooked dinner for my husband in a glorified closet and put a Christmas tree on the coffee table, sometimes we were happy. When we weren’t anymore, we went to couples therapy , first to a woman on the Upper West Side who had decorated her office walls with vintage evening bags–the beaded or embroidered kind–which freaked my bushand out  so we quit her, then tried a man who met us in the room where he also led groups, so that the 3 of us were surrounded by 7 or 8 empty chairs. This freaked my husband out so much  he moved to Florida. (OK, that isn’t true, he moved for a job and also because I was having an afair. But I have something in common with those shrinks. Let’s embellish. ) I went on the Interent to meet men; had sordid and ridiculous and sexy sexual encounters; I fell in love. I spent 9 hours at a Tribeca cafe with my lover’s wife, held in place by a force of personality that explained quite a few years of strange boyfriend behavior. Lots of stuff has happened, and I’m not even talking about 9/11—nothing I went through that day was any different from anyone else. What I mean is, this is my city. Yet I don’t know many people here and never have. I just watch them. Sometimes want to sneak into the brain of a person on the street, and take a mind-print; sometimes I want to knock on the door of a brownstone with a lighted window; and sometimes want to find a giant broom and sweep everyone away.

December 17th

Last night coming home from dinner, there was snow on the roofs of the cars, a few flakes in the air, and I began to feel winter yearning. Fields of snow, silence, crisp blue air, air the way it was in New Hampshire when I was 18, and a walk across a snow-covered golf course with a boy was full of meaning packed tight…the kind you don’t unravel for years, and maybe shouldn’t at all. It’s not hard for me to feel sorry for myself (in my teens I saw it as a gift, that I could do for myself what I couldn’t ask others for), but now I feel there was a kind of luck in being so lonely. Connection of any sort was astonishing. Moments of intimacy were like stars that I hoarded in memory, wanting to share their brilliance but never knowing how. And once I did become able to talk about them, talk with all the words I knew to someone who wanted to listen, I found that what for me seemed so rare was to other people not uncommon, that they weren’t moved to tears by the idea of a long night’s more and more honest conversation, by the ability to reveal something new.

My nieces have nets of friends such as I couldn’t imagine in youth. I wanted a gang, a group—which many people had—but what exists today seems closer to what I would have asked for, had there been a deity encouraging me to expound on my desire. Friendships with boys and girls, with people from other countries, individuals flitting in and out, around each other like dancers on a stage. I’m not envious of them for being happier: I doubt they are. Happier than I was, maybe—that’s a low bar. But not happier in general. Sex, for one thing, has gotten worse: it’s a competitive sport. How well do you perform? Have you shaved your crotch today? Philip Larkin has a famous poem that begins “Sexual intercourse began in 1963/Which was rather late for me”—1963 being when the pill came out. Larkin was brilliant at self-pity; he turned it into art without making it utterly comic, which is hard to do. In his poem he goes on to muse on how maybe his father had the same envy of his generation, because they weren’t afraid of God and hell. And reading that at 22, I wondered if I would envy the young of the future their newer freedoms. I don’t. It’s not about freedom now. I marvel at their friendships. Even so, given a choice I’d rather be young again in 1975. I miss my dinosaur era, the slowness and silences. Maps you had to draw yourself and nobody at dinner with a telephone. Not that it matters, but I think I’ve made progress: I’ve fully accepted that I’ll never be young in Paris in 1921, that I won’t know everyone great and peculiar and interesting, that my life is and will be more hedged in than I ever imagined. Hardly surprising—I wanted to live in books. They’re not really large enough for a person. I kept not getting that. They seemed large. And now it seems small and sad that I don’t want to live in books anymore, barely even remember what it felt like to want that. I want to live writing books, which is entirely different. It may be that you only become mature as a writer when you can’t live in anyone’s books but your own. You have no choice then. They have to be good.

My Room

Insomnamania

Well, I like my new habit of writing fast and not re-reading, except that I make so many typos. Sorry. My typing gets worse every year. I think my mother has cast a spell to keep her young; the devil neglected to tell her he was taking the juice from me. But I’m used to falling apart. I might even be getting used to terror, although so far I’ve only tested that thesis at home. I’m dreading Christmas because my brother will want to talk seriously and often about my mother’s finances and mine are so much worse it makes me feel like I’m on a planet with double earth gravity and I’ve eaten something funny and am getting hives. (This just from the phone calls.) But I don’t want to make him worry about me too. Not yet. He keeps talking about how we’ll end up living in our mother’s house and I’m beginning to think he half means it. When I was 11 and first lived in New York I was so lonely, I longed for my siblings’ company but their doors were closed, and I had to barge in and Johnny got locks and now this idea of us living together in the maternal home is awakening an idea–sort of like an Anne Tyler novel–of aging oddballs riding out the storm, one foot in the womb, one foot in the grave. Nice image, isn’t it? It’s hard to keep your balance in that situation, the womb all slippery and the grave 6 feet under.

Philip told me tonight his boss has told him they’re firing his # 2 person ( a man he recruited, respects, likes, who has worked very hard ) at the end of January and the fellow and his wife are spending big bucks trying to get her pregnant. Knowing the ax is falling on this guy, unable to stop it, unable to give warning. Philip kept saying, “I want to shoot myself.” He has other reasons for that sentiment, but still. I had to stroke his warm hand that always reminds me of a gingerbread man puffed up from the oven.

Why the fuck can’t I go to bed earlier so I will have more sunlight? And why, now that I’m asking unanswerable questions, do I always feel, returning home, that there will be an animal waiting for me when I haven’t had a pet in 25 years?

Drunkenness

I just read Susan Cheever’s article abut how nobody gets drunk in New York anymore. This after reading a article in, I believe, New York magazine about how young women drink more, feel fine about it, and have no intention of toning it down. The second article was a bit frightening, at least to me, who can’t drink until 4 a.m. and then get up for anything, including Armageddon. Though I suppose one wouldn’t need to get up for that. I used to drink until drunkenness; then I was sober for 12 years; then I drank ’socially’ without problem for several years; now I go in and out of having problems, though nothing like what happened in my 20’s. So the whole issue is very personal for me. Reflexively, I hate the idea of people getting drunk, even though I do it and when I do, love it while it’s happening. I remember in my youth waking up with a hangover and finding a note I’d written to myself the night before, “It’s worth it, Margaret, it’s worth it!” Semi-illegible but I got the idea. Then went to throw up again. One commentator on Cheever’s article had it right–’you got older, and the alcoholics you know hate parties because they can’t drink.’ If it’s not cool to be drunk in certain circles then one simply doesn’t attend parties or else drinks after leaving. I’m not at that point now but remember it well. But I don’t really like parties even when I am drunk. People are an intoxicant for me–either that or a toxicant. I get lightheaded with excitement or heavy with dread; one or two close friends is about my speed. Five people I feel comfortable with–heaven. After that, I’ll drink, maybe only a little too much now that I’m older and wiser,or just sit miserably thinking nasty thoughts about myself and worse ones about everyone else. But wine still tastes really really good. A bottle of scotch still seems like liquid gold (but only if it’s single malt).  I still find reality extremely disturbing at times.  Hard to face without screaming. And I did enough freaking out/sobbing in my sober therapy years to last me until doomsday. Which now that I think of it might be right around the corner. No—that’s January. Hate January.

Time to go buy more Christmas presents for children.

Wacked

One of those days where I had to do everything twice. Wrapped up the wrong necklace, got a brain tickle and remembered in time, opened it, realized I also had to re-string it, wrote up the new description for it and rewrapped it, forgetting to restring it so I had to unwrap it a third time…this is when I start wanting to run around and bite my tail like a dog withdrawing from Prozac. Then I lost files on my computer. Not anything of importance, just more grunt work. And was overcome by a wave of CFS, yes I still have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, the disease everyone loves to disbelieve in, after 24 years. Self pity smells like pine sap, don’t you think? A little Christmasy. I like it when it’s late and all my potential readers are asleep; I don’t feel self-conscious anymore but like one of the pre-dead.

My niece and I keep having a conversation about whether sentient robots would be a good thing. She says not because they’d be slaves. But I want one as a companion. Smarter than a cat, not as crazy as me. Is that too weird? Not quite Dr. Spock, but…Oh, I don’t know. I get lonely here in this decaying mousetrap of an apartment, but remember living with someone, how difficult that was. I love Charles so much more cleanly and sweetly now. If only I could figure out how to do that in regard to myself.

My friend Andree’s brother died and it’s made me very sad. For her, for him, for the old pain of brother-loss. She’s lost two. I can’t bear the idea of losing my siblings. Yet even so, feeling more family love than ever, sometimes I look at my nieces and think it’s been like a sadistic science experiment bringing them into our family. At first they were just Davis’s children…but now, as adults, they’re part of all of us, heirs to a past they’ll never understand (I’m not going to divulge all the bits I haven’t spilled yet), and of course going far beyond us but still…

I have to buy a Spiderman sleeping bag for Daniel because I’m not going to write a story. I need something for William. Hannah and Myles are taken care of —Shea stadium mementos, pretty clothes, great books. Jaden and Jack get books because I’m not sure they get read to enough and I haven’t seen them in so long…barely know them.

I’ll have another Christmas in late January for all my girlfriends. We’ll need it then.

Myles, William, Hannah

A Chrismas Story

It’s a little late, but I want to write a book for Daniel for Christmas. Whitney says he likes Spiderman and rocket ships. I went to amazon.com to look for toys and games and found the usual junk. He’s four. This may be his best Christmas. Shouldn’t he have his own book about a boy named Daniel taken up in a rocket ship by Spiderman to visit the weird creatures on a moon of Jupiter? I’m thinking he’d be interested in how astronauts deal with having to go to the bathroom. The recycling of urine: fascinating when you’re four, and still deep inside the mysteries of the body, your body, your one and only. (That sinuous, silky feel of being a child. Nimble, agile, balanced, low center of gravity!) He’s four, and sometimes life at home is a drag. Why not go up on a rocket ship with Spiderman? I would. I’d go with the aliens of our 1980’s mass fantasy—world peace or anal probes, adjust for type. At the time,  I wouldn’t have (a little timid) but now? Now I’d go almost anywhere that’s unquestionably strange.

So I want to write a story for him, and I guess I won’t have time. I’d have to be utterly happy with it. I’d want it printed somehow, or at least handsomely bound. And I’m afraid if I started writing about Spiderman I’d make him too much my own. I’ve already got him living on the West coast of Mars (Jupiter is a little too far, chilly) with a talking cat who escaped from a top-secret lab, Count Chokula and Young Frankenstein, Sid Vicious and Mary Poppins.

I’d do better to stick with astronauts and recycled pee. But what about drifting in black space, held only by a slim tether while one fixes the that part of the warp drive that’s making a whimpering sound? Is that part of his fantasy? Or does he just like the explosion, take-off, the shimmery acceleration as the rocket splits open the sky?

Stoned

There was an middle-aged woman who lived just like you
But with many beads she didn’t know what to do

I have pearls. I have turquoise. I have lapis, amethyst, opal, and agate. Rounds, squares, diamonds and oblongs. Chips and bits. I have crystals, new and vintage (the vintage are like kaleidoscopes and the stars when I was eight), and Venetian glass, sometimes with roses painted under the faintly cloudy surface, or zigzags of gold dust on the outside. If I hadn’t bought these beads, I could pay off my credit card debt, which has now leapt from 2.99% to 29.99 %, due to some confusion over the meaning of the phrase, “For the life of the loan.” What they meant was, “For the life, until we change our minds.” Oh. Like marriage. I’m still married, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish—how about you? We just live apart and love others. We can’t let go. We’re sticky. (Hot new word, ‘sticky’. Ideas and trends are sticky or not. Coined by someone who never cleaned up after children.) My debt is sticky, but my beads aren’t. They roll off the tables and under the furniture, vanish into the vacuum cleaner, are stolen by the mice. Mice had my wedding ring for years. It was hung on a hook in the throne room of the King of the Wallkill Smaller Rodents where hundreds gathered to feast before their nightly Olympic games. They only gave it back when I was preparing to move, sliding it back out from under the baseboards in thanks for the cookie crumbs and lack of cat.

Mice and debt are always with us, but beads can be strung prettily and sold. I’m trying. I stay up late making jewelry and feel like those mothers in fairytales who work all night to sew clothing for their children. (Not like real mothers who do such things, because I am not actually suffering, except from insomnia.) I wouldn’t like to calculate how many necklaces I’ll have to make to use up all these beads. Nor to divide that number by the days and weeks left in my life, assuming I live to be 99, which is not the plan. In the beginning I excused my extravagance by saying that as a writer, I was used to having every word in the language at my disposal. My creativity had been nourished on abundance: to choose among too-many-to-count was the craft I learned. And it’s true that my best necklaces are made from combinations I couldn’t have imagined in advance, wouldn’t have shopped for. But it’s also true that one of my favorite children’s books is called “Millions of Cats” and is about an old man and woman who go looking for a cat…the prettiest cat…with results you can guess. At the book’s end, the millions have dispersed and they have only one gray kitten, but I never cared for that ending. The mice were right to thank me.

I know. Ladies with too many cats live in stinky apartments, die alone and are eaten by pets gone feral from sheer numbers. Which is why I bought polished rocks. It would be hard to kill me with them, even if an army of Lilliputians decided I needed it. Guinness World Record holder Michael Lotito, a performer also known as Monsieur Mangetout, ate bicycles, televisions, and an entire airplane (a Cessna 150, over a two year period). You can’t even do that with beads because to say, “I am an artist and I’m going to eat 10,000 beads,” would be as if some timid hippie crawled out of the cave she’d been living in for decades and thought to be provocative. There are bead artist yes, like Lisa Lou* but she uses the tiny ones as pointillist color. For me the only solution is to buy millions more (fast, before Visa comes calling), to buy until I am crowded into a tiny corner of the bedroom by the open window, unable to reach the kitchen or the front door, hearing the words of my friends distorted into growls through the shifting walls of stones, and thinking Beauty! Art! Death! just as I did at 14 when my favorite activities were getting stoned, reading Yeats, and walking anywhere in my smelly, fleece-trimmed Afghan coat with the tiny mirrors sewn all over it.

*Liza Lou, bead artist extraordinaire

http://mocoloco.com/art/archives/001422.php

CURRENT EXHIBITION http://www.lmgallery.com/exhibitions/2008_9_liza-lou/?view=pressrelease

Porkbelly Futures

Since it got cold a week ago, I’ve gained a nice new layer of fat around the middle, which feels as bulky as a life jacket but is probably no wider than a pork chop ordered in a cheap diner. A pork chop girdle, good for attracting canine friends. I have pork on the brain as well. Bacon twice this weekend and for dinner last Friday a roast pork loin with garlic slivers poked into the flesh (the knife-slit flesh); a mustard, salt and pepper rub; and a few good splashes of Knob Creek bourbon poured over the top. Cooked until done, as the old cookbooks say.

In the 18th century, as attested in The Discovery of France, by Graham Robb, French peasants would sleep most of the winter, getting up only now and then for a piss and a bit of dinner. Government busybodies from Paris were appalled…the village as quiet as a graveyard, no industry…I’m thinking New Yorkers could use a bit of that. Everyone is scared-to-terrified—lost job, maybe-soon-to-be-lost-job, no savings to speak of, debt. And we can’t afford to go out and drink, not with cocktails going for $12 to $16 a pop in Manhattan. The solution: afternoon naps and home cooking. I’ve had enough of restaurant food—the best chefs cook better than I do, mais non, but so what? Making the dinner is the journey. And at journey’s end one finds, traditionally, only sorry death…I’m mixing up my analogies, but food and death go together, don’t they? Ask a pig.

Whenever I feel bad about having to cook in my microwave-oven-sized kitchen, I remember a story about Anna Akhmatova entertaining Western guests during the long days of her fame and deprivation. Hospitality demanded that company be served food so she offered what she could: a small dish of boiled potatoes. Knowing, of course, how dramatically pathetic this seemed to them. As a child I yearned to run away and live in the woods on nuts and berries, waiting for Robin Hood or the fairies or a talking lion. Not quite mad enough to try it then, I’m willing to attempt the adult version, and think of my apartment not as too small, poor me, I’m a failure not to mention stupid, but as an enchanted hut in the vast forest, the kind of place where the witch comes up with dinner out of an old bone and a withered stalk. If my cooking skills aren’t quite magic, I’m not really poor either. Not yet.

Making Jewelry

Detail

I’ve been working madly on making jewelry all day, trying to get it on my ebay site in time to send out a newsletter and perhaps make enough money to pay the fees for my ebay site. Making the jewelry is deeply satisfying, scanning it and photoshopping it is fun; looking it on ebay and seeing what they do to my photos is not fun. I have to work on ways to make the best use of their pitiful platform, being too overwhelmed to attempt my own. I should also put everything on sale, slash prices, 50% off, but how can I do that when I hardly charge more than the cost of making the stuff? I am a bad businesswoman. I love my materials. I take my time. My image of myself is always as a eccentric-gypsy-crazy witch woman in a cave or hut, making art or medicines or magic without heed for the world until the world comes to me and then, since nothing cost anything to begin with, I can sell it for whatever I want. I blame the stories I read as a child. I remember takes of labor–the wheat from the chaff, etc, all those tasks that involved the kindness of elves—the cold miserable years of Psyche’s quest to find Eros after she spilled candle wax on his delicious nakedness because doing it in the dark wasn’t fun and her sisters said he was a monster: fairytales and legends are full of travail. But living in the woods, or an island, or in a cave upon, basically, nothing, what the earth would give freely, was what resonated with me. One might say this was because this was how I already lived, in a house. I was just adding some solitude, injecting autonomy into the easeful days of childhood. But I think artists do live like this, even if only for a few hours at a time.

I am purely happy when I make things, and then the social whirl is is too carnal, like a rib roast of beef salivating on its china platter when you only want a few autumn vegetables with a sprinkling of fresh thyme and a piece of whole wheat bread. If I had no engagements for the next two weeks, I would be disconsolate; having them, I feel pressured. They are stealing me from my leopardskin jasper, my venetian glass, the fantasy novel that will make me solvent.

I went to a party at St. John the Divine last night; the reopening. It was quite beautiful—the huge vaulted space, the tapestries, the crowds—and I saw a few friends, met Jonathan whom Philip has often spoken of. Saw my brilliantly talented painter friend Camilla. Then went home with Philip and he heated me up some frozen tamales from Trader Joe’s and we made love until we got too tired. That middle aged thing—the fucking is nice, but we can finish it tomorrow, right? It was nice to feel excited, your body against mine, tenderness; orgasm is no longer required. Not that it ever was for me, but I’m used to male lust. To feel it changing int osomething–dare I say–softer, is disconcerting but rather pleasant. As long as it’s not because I’m not losing my charm, which of course I must be, but perhaps very slowly

15 years ago I stopped having sex with Charles because, a) it had been deteriorating for a long time, and b) he told me I was too fat; I looked like a ‘giant green hamburger.’ (The green was the tee shirt.) That led to many years of misery culminating in Internet wanderings and Philip: the erotic frenzy of the turn of the century. Now Charles is visiting his old flame–the first time he’s seeing her that I know about ahead of time, and it makes me feel so amazingly calm. Happy for him of course, relieved of my own guilt, but also just calm as if the world is back in order. I don’t know quite how to explain it. I don’t want to think about what they’re doing, feel none of the prurient, anguished left-outness I still often feel vis-a-vis Philip and Christine, but am still glad that there is a story there, real emotion and event happening—just nothing that’s my business

Meanwhile my sister’s boss dropped dead of a heart atttack while running on a treadmill. I’ve always thought they were dangerous. I used to hope GWB would drop dead on one. This man, my sister’s boss, never sounded very nice, and I never met him to care one way or another, but still it is unnerving how death just snatches us. I would like to write more about the underworld before I die and am disappointed to not find one.

Going Home

Today is my last day in Florida. I worked in the morning, walked on the beach and made banana coconut bread. I got the recipe from Epicurious.com, Gourmet 1990, and tweaked it a bit, replacing the vanilla and lemon zest with fresh ginger, cognac, black pepper and nutmeg, and the macadamia nuts with pecans. I already know from tasting the batter that Charles will think it too sweet but as long as it stops being goopy and becomes bread I will be happy. The area I use for cooking in NYC is not properly called a kitchen—in its previous incarnation it was one of those large closets with a sink and counter hotels had for people to mix drinks in. That was before mini bars. You brought your own bottle and mixers; the hotel provided glasses and ice. I remember watching my grandmother make drinks in such a room —so adult, so sophisticated. In the picture in my head my father is there in his Mad Men suit (it was the 60’s, he was handsome and in publishing) but I can’t figure out when I would have seen them together in a hotel so I’m probably just adding him for color. Or because I saw him make drinks so often the very idea of whisky poured in a glass filled with ice brings him up out of the grave for a Proustian get-together. In any case, compared with my kitchen, Charles’s modest space with the crooked stove shoved into one corner—only the small burners working and you have to adjust for the tilt—and fluctuating oven is a rare treat. Charles bought a table especially for me to use baking so I’ve been churning out the stuff, cookies, muffins, etc.

I’ve liked hiding out down here. I don’t look at my bank account. Now that I have to leave, the terror is coming back. I have to turn my life around 100% financially in a year or so. My 2.99% loans have suddenly morphed into 30% and not because I was late with a payment. They just changed the rules. I think too often of suicide.

Wilderness Adventure

Today we went for a walk in Hugh Taylor Birch State Park, gold medal winner for best state park, the only one to win two gold medals, the sign informed us. We were proud to be part of such success. And it was a very nice park, although I’m not sure it deserves two gold medals. Maybe it won for litter management: it was very clean. We saw mangroves and lovely man-eating trees and coconuts whirling round and round in a stream. That stopped us. We thought they must be doing a mating dance but nothing happened but more whirling, so we revised our theory and thought they were dervishes, and then we walked on and who knows what they did behind our back.

Charles made me pull my shirt up so he could photograph me au naturel, in response to my brother’s recent art shot of Laura naked in a meadow, but my brother’s photo wins the gold medal. So, yes, we still act like the same old goofy married people even though we are both amorous elsewhere, though not polyamorous, a word which reminds me too much of polyunsaturated fat to ever be used as a self-descriptively. In Central Park a few weeks ago they had a Polyamory Conflagration. Yes, I mean ‘Conference’, or some other ‘C’ word, but Conflagration hit my brain first, and it’s staying. Look at the picture adorning this post and think about it.

Anyway, I don’t want poly—two’s more than enough. One and a half would do, though which man would give up half?  If only I could photoshop them, cropping bits from Charles and bits from Philip—and not the ‘nasty bits’ as the Brits call them, but the redundant DNA, the unnecessary facial hair, those personality flaws they are not emotionally attached to. Charles could still be disorganized (a vast excuse for almost everything), just give up the memory loss regarding birthdays, plane tickets and what I asked him to do five minutes ago. Philip could keep his righteous anger, but not the excess that he slops around the room in moods of untidy despair. Why shouldn’t he learn to aim it like a smart bomb against those who understood the term ‘credit default swap’ before September (always excepting Paul Krugman)?

In regard to that, Michael Lewis has a clever piece about Wall Street in the December Portfolio.com http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom
It fills in some of the details I didn’t quite understand, as well as contributing a depressing but lucid history of the last 20 years. Folly on such a grand scale is most of all educative. I feel like I’m back in 5th grade, deciphering algebra. The only difference being that I liked algebra. I wonder what this would mean to me if it didn’t affect me personally, if I’d been smart with my money, or won the lottery last week. It seems like I was foolish partly by contagion and am now gloomy partly by contagion, and if I found cash breeding like mice in my bank account I’d still be feeling dark, and not only out of sympathy.*  But maybe I’m only experiencing, finally, what most people feel all their lives: a solid linkage to others. TV will do that to you.

We got back from the park, I worked on my web page, it rained and we had tea. Now it’s Sunday night. I don’t want to go home. Subways, elevators, boots, bills. I’ll remember the good parts when I get through security. (Yes, dear, I miss you. I’m not talking about that.)

* I’ve never experienced rabbits breeding uncontrollably. Mice I know about. I’ve heard the squeaks from the nest under my bookshelves and killed the babies one by one. I know ‘they have their own little mouse lives’ as my sister says, and I don’t really like it when they’re caught by a hind leg and thrashing all over the counter, dragging the trap like the National Toxic Debt behind them, but it pleases me to think of exerting dominance in the creation of order.

Fish Chowder and The Afterlife

The Kingfish gave of itself willingly.

I was going to make a pumpkin-rootabaga-parsnip soup today, with roasted chestnuts on top, but Charles snuck away to the docks, bought a kingfish and proceeded to make chowder. He made stock from the head, vegetables and cilantro (simmered for 45 minutes) then added celery, rootabaga, onion, garlic, cuisinart-pureed raw eggplant and a little cream and “cooked it until it was done.” Grilled fish and red peppers were added at the table. It was the best fish chowder I’ve ever had. The cilantro and eggplant gave it a hint of my favorite Thai green curry, but not enough to distract from the freshly-caught fish.

I’ve been working on my ebay site all morning, though the beach beckons. Describing my necklaces makes me want to create more—or more honestly, makes me want to pile up all the stones and run my hands through them. When I die I want to be buried with beads; not the finished jewelry and not the glass beads, but all the jaspers and agates, and lapis to bribe the devil. William Burroughs was buried with his gun. For a man who shot and killed his wife by accident in a stupid William Tell game, that takes some nerve, the kind associated with disturbed 14 year old boys and male writers of the Beat generation. But I guess he thought he might need that pistol where he was going. Might need to shoot his wife again.

I always thought the idea of a coin to pay the ferryman was odd. If a spirit-being condemned to row the newly dead across a misty river endlessly wanted anything from earth, you’d think it would be a case of whisky—or a goatskin full of fermented mare’s milk, as the case may be. As a child, I was also confused by the ancient custom of putting food in the grave with the corpse. I thought: it’s stupid to think the dead need to eat, but assuming they do need to eat, won’t they get hungry again when they finish the little bit you sent with them? I hadn’t yet gotten used to the idea of being weaned from a familiar, relied-upon substance: coffee, carbs, Prozac. I suppose the dead might appreciate those kernels of corn and wizened apples to help get them through their withdrawal from life. In this light, purgatory is no different than what heroin addicts go through in prison. You’d need it, I think. If an afterlife exists, which I find very hard to believe in but the rumors persist, surely the transition would give you the bends. A hospital room, then…flatline…Heaven? Back up. I’d need a compulsory orientation (folding chairs, bad video), the longer and more boring the better. I’d want to squirm beside my fellow recently-departeds—sorry, arrivals—checking out their reactions, looking for potential friends. And if I died when I wasn’t feeling too bad I’d need a few roundhouse punches to get me over my addiction to the earth. I’d want that smashing-down-to-nothing addicts go through so that simple health becomes a flaming miracle. Even if Heaven is in fact heavenly, I imagine I’d miss the wind in the trees and animals and hot tea. Brew me something foul from a dog’s liver and whack me with a branch a dozen times, I’ll change my mind. I’ll take Heaven.

As for Hell: if I end up there, I can always look for Daddy.

Underwater

Oh dear. I meant to blog at least every other day, but Thanksgiving and Florida have undone that resolution. That edge of loneliness and despair impelling me to reach out to faceless dozens has been soothed by Charles’ loving presence, and finally a decent set-up in the kitchen. I made cranberry muffins this morning from a recipe in a falling-apart 50 yr old Fannie Farmer cookbook, and we ate them while watching Al Gore on Oprah talk about the end of the world. On the map Al made the piece of Florida where we were sitting disappear underwater and as my eyes strayed back to Oprah’s perfect bronze-black curls I felt already underwater: hearing the ex-veep dimly, sensing the storm overhead, entranced by the hum of deep water. As a child and teenager I was so interior I barely noticed how the world worked, even when it directly impinged on me. Necessity and loneliness have taken care of that, but I wonder what I have gained. I know more, see more, but not enough to succeed in my enterprises, and I have lost the joy and space inside my head. I remember moving around in my consciousness as if in a landscape bounded at the back by a forest—which I am now reminded of by the dense foliage of Oprah’s hair— getting close to the forest and thinking it went on forever. I worried that if I went too far, I’d never come back to our house, dinner, my mother.

I thought I could explore that part of myself later. And in my 20’s and 30’s it was still there, but felt more alien, clearly dangerous, hinting of mystic wisdom and psychotic drift, and what the difference was, and whether I make choices after taking the first step wasn’t clear. It should be noted that I also didn’t want to experience anything close to ‘God’ or ‘The Good’ as that would entail responsibilities I didn’t want. And now? My brain feels corroded, as rust-eaten as our old ’68 Ford Torino when we abandoned it in Charlottesville in 1979. If I desired to go anywhere beyond this ordinary consciousness, I’d have to practice, focus and sweat—and still let go of what I don’t want to let go of, my precious selfishness.

So I live dimly in the world, which is being changed, changed utterly, as I write. I can’t honestly say I want to be more engaged. As to what I owe human society that has given me so much: I’m afraid it wasn’t a wise investment. I’m like a house cat that catches the occasional mouse (which in fact I do; I’m good at catching mice), but generally prefers sleep.

No. It’s Florida doing this to me. I’ll wake up again. I hope.

I dreamed of Stephen Colbert

Last night I dreamed I was having sex with Stephen Colbert. He was quite enthusiastic, with interesting tastes. I grew fond of him in the course of it, as one does, and wanted him to stay the night, and the next night and forever, but he left me. When I was young I used to have very intense erotic dreams starring invented men whom I felt so connected to emotionally that I’d wake up confused and bereft, the way you’d feel if the moon disappeared and nobody but you remembered that it had ever existed. While I was in therapy I regularly received intriguing come-ons from handsome vampires and scotch-drinking ghosts, but my therapist unkindly insisted I turn them down. Now my dream lovers are either people I know or public figures. I always miss them in the morning. My husband once dreamed a spider crawled out of my vagina. He doesn’t remember this but I’ll never forget it. I think at the time (this was at least 15 years ago) I was scared that he’d seen my dark side, but now I would like to talk to that spider. Maybe she’d have a record of all my erotic adventures—have them on video in her crimson cave, ready to use as teaching tools for her many offspring with their tidy and delicate appendages.

Money, Honey

We’re all scared about the economy, some more than most. I’m not an auto-worker or single mother; I’m in no danger of being homeless. I’m a member of that unlamented breed, the formerly privileged—having always depended on money from inherited stock to keep me barely middle class through a life of writing, depression, chronic illness and a deep-seated terror of men with angry voices. In my youth, I thought every job came with a boss like that. Recently, my boyfriend Philip assured me that, in fact, most do. 

My mother is in the same pickle, though she won’t admit it yet, and it’s a little worse when you’re 83 and not really qualified for phone sex jobs. My brother thinks we should all move in together in her big, unpaid for, not-worth-what-she-owes-on-it house. I imagine a second childhood—hers and ours—where we’d learn the character-building truths somehow neglected in our education. Either that or set upon each other with axes.

My neighbor, also in financial distress, tells me that he’s going to kill himself soon. He tells me this often. People confide their suicidal thoughts to me because I listen without recoil. My father killed himself when I was 10, and in the next decade I knew half a dozen people who killed themselves: two husbands of my mother’s close friends; two teenage brothers I’d met a few times while we visited their home in Houston, and lusted after; one I’ve forgotten; and my schoolfriend’s aunt, who used to drift around the dinner table of her father’s elegant house, neither eating nor talking except once when she halted behind my chair and touched me on the shoulder, pronouncing, ‘watch out for this one.’ I doubt anyone heard her but me. I was spooked by how she knew, without ever having a conversation with me, that I was also profoundly disturbed.

Philip’s wife once said to me, “Nobody kills themselves for love.” I looked at her incredulously. “Well, unless you’re depressed; that’s different. Then you need help.” Indeed. It’s easier to imagine dying over money. There’s no niggling feeling that the bastard isn’t worth it, no pathetic transformation into the martyred lover. There are just numbers and though numbers do lie, frequently, you can’t really take it personally.         

My neighbor and I discuss methods. I remind him that overdosing on pills can leave you brain-damaged. He’s more worried about who’ll take care of his white cockatoo. I consider it a good sign he’s not planning to take her with him, perched on his shoulder in the coffin, ready to sink her wicked beak into any welcomers on the other side.

Philip  called me just now to say Obama had announced his Treasury Secretary, exciting Wall Street. He thought maybe my stock had shot up to the moon, and when I told him I’d sold some this morning, he asked if I could buy it back. Yesterday he was infuriated with me for not selling it sooner. Charles left a message on my machine telling me he was watching the market news, and the woman anchor was wearing an ugly necklace. One of my handmade pieces would look much better. “We’ll have to work on that. I bet she’d pay more than $45.00.” 

My mom says, “You should ghostwrite for Sarah Palin.” 

Apple Cake or Not?

For a couple of weeks now, I’ve been buying apples at the Greenmarket, preparing to make an apple cake. It’s true that there are better things to do with apples (pies, for example) and better kinds of cake (too many to list) but I love the word, thing, idea of apple, and worship cake in all its forms, so the prospect of baking an apple cake pleases me far out of proportion to any pleasure I may get from eating it.

I love the smoky blur on the skins of certain freshly picked apples, that color that’s like looking at autumn leaves through a car window in the rain. I love the names: Winesap, Macoun, Gala, Pippin, Northern Spy, Ida Red, Rome Beauty. I love that they were always around in childhood, unlike pomegranates, star-fruit or papayas.

For an apple cake you need apples, flour, butter, brown sugar, eggs and pecans. Rum, ginger, nutmeg, baking powder and salt. You can do half and half apples and plums, substitute cognac or calvados for the rum. You can eat the whole thing yourself over the course of a week, or serve it to your girlfriends for afternoon tea if you have any girlfriends you can convince to come for tea. Once, I had many girlfriends and a good number of them were self-employed, or worked freelance, or were artists with a little inherited money, or stayed home with children, and were thus free to join me after the morning’s work for psyche-laundering, spiritual maundering, and the mostly well-intentioned exposure of our significant other’s faults and peculiarities.

Now I have a boyfriend who will eat cake if I provide it—then immediately feel guilty for the calories. Since he lives in a perpetual state of guilt in regard to his many faults and peculiarities and I have wrung more righteous pleasure from this self-castigation than any woman could want, I hesitate to inspire more. A slice of apple cake is too lovely, too fragrant, too tempting and yet motherly—too redolent of childhood afternoons outdoors with a book—to be pushed into the maw of middle-aged male, raised Catholic, married-and-possessed-of-a-girlfriend self-hatred.

Forget all about that now, I say to him. You’re separated. I’m separated (and my husband has been reunited with his first love). But then I’m just playing my usual role—Eve holding the apple, naked, while Lilith paces outside the garden, inventing unpronounceable names for demons.

See? She has a good job. Who wouldn’t want that job?

I think of my cake and don’t bake it. The apples wait in the dark and I eat them one by one. I live alone. I would like a dog. I would get a dog—really I would—if it would sleep until afternoon and I could feed it cake.

5 tablespoons butter

2/3 cup brown sugar

1 ½ cups flour

2 eggs

3 tablespoons rum

I tablespoon fresh, finely chopped ginger

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon nutmeg

2 cups chopped raw apple

1 cups lightly toasted chopped pecans

Preheat oven to 350. Grease and flour an 8 inch square pan or small bundt pan. Beat butter until creamy. Gradually add sugar and blend well. Add eggs, ginger and rum; blend. Combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, nutmeg and sift into batter. Beat until smooth. Add chopped apple and nuts. Bake for 35 minutes, give or take.