mrkrgnao (pace joyce)
Friday 14 May 2004 | I like a cookie
From sleeping all forest-mottled and beautiful and rustily purring on her green comforter at the foot of the bed, Nina arose, stretched, came and blinked at me for a few minutes, tried to walk on the keyboard, startled at the sight of the Possum, sniffed with horror at my salt and vinegar potato chips (potato chips!), submitted to petting and fussing, and then leapt nimbly down and minced away.
Funny that cat names are the only true ones we really use in the blog. And that one of the Google ads [from the bl•gsp•t days of yore] has been “Related searches: tabby cats, Maine coon cats.”
I was just now randomly musing on the Monk Girl who likes me, and how I don’t feel, regretfully, that special feeling in regard to her—while there are three men in my brain, and I’m thinking of at least one of them at any given moment, whether Film Critic, Librarian, or the Young Monk. Maybe I don’t like girls, I wonder briefly. Then I think about Miss Thing in Noho, and her pre-Raphaelite chestnut hair and her wide hips, and what it felt like to talk with her even for fifteen minutes, even mostly about her asthma and about her gay ex-fiancee (who recently told her that he used to have graphic fantasies of harming and murdering her—but only before he asked her to marry him, though!). Then, I think of Mandarin.
Oh, I like girls alright. Especially straight ones.
[Distracted by painful piece of potato chip which has inserted itself between gum and tooth.]
[Potato chip successfully extracted.]
My mom is on a conference call, my dad is picking dewberries up by the fenceline, and I am hiding inside and PMSing on this gray rainy Texas day. I saw a proto-tornado yesterday in Wichita Falls, which (wich?) can also be transliterated Ouichita, a Native American name. They were indigenous to that part of Texas and I think now they are gone.
And now my wrists hurt and I am going to be lazy and append portions of a missive (or a massive, as he calls them) to the Married Librarian. I’m in withdrawal. Other people drink, smoke, use, gamble, binge, starve, cut, wash, count and arrange objects, and I have done some of these things myself. Whereas I now feel compelled only to write fearsomely long epistles to appreciative literate men. Herself would confiscate all my pens if she knew. Jesus, I should confiscate all my pens. Why is it not sufficient to write Mandarin, or write essays? I don’t know, but embarrassingly, I think it still has something to do with some shred of hope that I’ll get masterfully kissed at the end of it all.
So I’m finally in Texas and you [Librarian] are en route to Maine and I entertained myself during the 14-hour drive today by listening to all my CDs, way too loudly (my ears are still ringing), starting Fontanel in my head (the other title kicking around is The Dark-Haired Daughter—Fontanel may be a shorter thing within that) and beginning and discarding many missives/massives to you, who a) won’t read it/them/this for at least a week, and b) surely have your mind on More Important Things. Nonetheless, writing you in my head kept me going and will probably continue to do so as I reenter the nested, Infernoesque hell realms of Texas/hospitals/Maman’s suffering—exacerbated or augmented or in some way modified by the price of petrol (at $500 a gallon, it would still be too cheap) and the garishly colored US News, paused over and read when I get out to pee at rest stops on I-40, only just what’s above the fold and barely visible through the metal bars: these ones tortured, this one beheaded, and what Ani calls “the defacto choice between macro or microcosmic melancholy” becomes less distinct by the minute—anyway, in the midst of all this, that there’s a Librarian in the world who may actually read these words with interest and attention becomes, well, essential for good mental hygiene. And I feel the press of the need to write them to him [see small demanding monkey, above].
Fontanel is coming together mentally in ways that make me salivate and wish I had a month or even a week to crawl off by myself. I was wrestling for several hundred miles with this whole horrible new truth that I apparently am or anyway have been addicted to, or let’s just say have chosen to adhere to, romantic pain as a subject matter, and this is worrisome and limiting, yet also at present still very much where my heart/mind tends to wander, probably because I’m still of childbearing years and haven’t yet developed that ugly chin wart with hair growing out of it. And in Zen when you learn the first precept, non-harming, it’s not restricted just to not killing or not eating animals—it’s interpreted as broadly as, can you refrain from killing your own thoughts or feelings. So, these feelings are in there, inside this human female who still has a monthly estrogen surge, and is there a way to accept this without necessarily enacting it or writing about it nonstop. Then I started thinking from the perspective of that “macro or microcosm of melancholy,” and somehow this blended with the signs I kept seeing all over northwest Texas. Many traditionally immigrant-owned businesses, like motels or convenience stores now sport large patriotic flag/banners that read “AMERICAN OWNED AND OPERATED!”. What means: “We are white and do not wear teatowels on our heads nor speak with funny accents.” When I realized I was seeing a trend I got chills. It’s a little piece of World War II right here in Amarillo and Childress and Estelline. I give us another year of this, at this level of intensity, before people named Khalil and Shaheen are asked to relocate for the duration.
Where was I. Oh yes, the macro/microcosm. And there’s an injunction CD Wright gave out once, about how you can put all the disparate things in your poem, and what holds it together, what the different topics/objects/styles/&c. have in common, is your mind. So I thought, can the dissolution of the elements (earth to water, water to fire, fire to air, air to space) which for Tibetans illustrates the process of death, also parallel the process of desire? That unbinding of the body, its dissolving into boundlessness—and can the narrative of a death not lie next to a hankering for life, however unfulfilled? In terms of Buddhist philosophy, fear of death no more or less than desire are both part of samsara, the endless merry-go-round we’re supposed to want off of—though that gets hard for me, because I happen to like the details and fiddliness of embodiment in the relative, and am not always convinced I should prefer the absolute. There’s more to be pondered as I start to write, crucial matters like lineation and shape and form, because it doesn’t do at all to set content or to get stubborn ideas in your head about What You Are Trying To Say until you know how you want to say it. The how is always more important than the what, or even the with whom, in this as in so much else. I’m thinking of producing some really messy line lengths, because I’m always so James Laughlin about measuring them precisely, some weird layout/OCD impulse gone awry. (Marianne Moore on how poetry is “nothing more than the instinct toward tidiness.”) What if they varied wildly, some lines one word, some longlonglong ones, a great agile Poundian simmering…possibly even lyrically defensible in terms of the confusion and back-and-forthness of samsara.
Of course there’s also the school of thought that it’s somehow immoral to conflate great tragic events (i.e., Maman’s impending death) with unimportant ones (i.e., no one will shag me properly, boohoo)—and not only to conflate them but wrest some mileage or, shudder, moral from their proximity. One must interrogate this deeply and handle it with precision. Yet there is an innate similarity, from the Zen point of view: the reason we avert from some things and grasp toward others is that we have some sadly misguided notion of ourselves as separate, and thus are forever wanting our situation to be Other than it is. Oh Lord this sounds desperately portentious and pontificating and portly and ponderous and other words beginning with por- and pon-, so I really now must quit with the précis and fire up the cauldron.
I keep thinking about our last evening in SF, when M. suggested we drop by to say goodbye. I didn’t yet know there were five cluster bomb replies from you (though was startled that you knew about my recent enchilada mania—and thought briefly, oh my God, this guy has been reading the Librarian’s email!). And for your part, you were probably repelled to witness me laughing myself ill over David Sedaris. I even seem to remember that I had to get out my handkerchief to deal with the resultant effluvia. Well, you know, it’s my whole English As She Is Spoke fascination—Miko Fancy stationery and all the rest of it—someday I will have enough money to go to Japan and encounter Angrish for myself. Any rate my wheezing and snorting like a heffalump over the flying bell of Easter (”he bring of the chocolate in the night while you sleep in the bed”) probably dispelled any vestigial attraction you may have still harbored in my general direction. I’ve thought of a great title for a slick Parkeresque volume of lyrics: Married Men and Straight Girls. Unfortunately I haven’t written anything to go with such a title in decades (requiring long anapestic lines, feminine end-rhymes and wry, dry, world-weary Cole-Porterish diction, names of drinks and places—cosmopolitans, Biarritz—like the Trivial Pursuit category encompassing “Leisure”). Maybe I could sell it (title) on eBay.
Another great title: Canon Porn. If I successfully penned the Emily-Virginia-Gertrude bodice-ripper, could I sell it for enough money to put your son through Sarah Lawrence? Really, if you think about it for more than ten seconds, it starts writing itself; cf. Anaïs Nin writing smut, Delta of Venus &c., to pay inordinately mundane bills, like for Henry Miller’s dental work.
So here’s the really important question: Was Virginia Stephens really beautiful because of her suffering, or just because she had those cheekbones and deep-socketed eyes? I’m inclined to think it some combination. Herself is always emphasizing to us the difference between pain and suffering; and there’s no doubt Woolf wasn’t just in pain; she suffered. [As an aside, I abominate what Nicole Kidman and Michael Cunningham and a whole entourage of well-meaning movie industry people did to her, and to Leonard. Attempted to represent her as boring, dowdy, surly, ungrateful, and in preposterous relationships with Leonard and Nessa. But maybe I’ve already tiraded about my hatred of The Hours, which was of the slump-down-in-seat-pouting-and-kicking-the-back-of-the-seat-in-front-of-you variety.]
Speaking of the moving pictures, I too took in and rather liked Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, at the request of the Film Critic of the mutton-mouthed name (I’m so grateful for your biting assessment of same), after which he unhooked me, still raw and gaping from the fishing lure, swiftly and bloodlessly in the parking lot of DeVargas at midnight (”but technically I’m not dumping you, because we never had a relationship”). And now you know a bit more than M.—which perhaps is not so difficult to do, at least where some things are concerned (he probably knows more than you about econophysics, for instance; but not necessarily). Though he does do things like read House., and try, and say he wants me to write, even though historically he couldn’t leave me alone to do so.
But I buggered it up as usual, went and sniffed the bushes, wrought more weird karma to have to deal with, and now cannot bear cinema, and any references to film criticism make me curdle. I knew I was easy but I didn’t realize I was so naive. I went looking for sexual healing and instead got my fingers caught in the slammed car door, those little dim dark red and black stars you see when—[realizes she’s veering dangerously toward an unpopular trope]. So now I fantasize about finding a small cramped cage, a heart-shaped box, and locking myself in it and giving someone who doesn’t much care for me the key, so s/he will be deaf to my entreaties in the event that I should at some point plead for egress.
I could also just move to London in October with my husband.
Alors. The Married Librarian and I have pencilled in June 12-13 for our little writerly mano a mano, and both cherish high hopes that it could be insanely productive. I think we should work in the day at one of the libraries or colleges or institutes, and not in either of our houses, but especially not my casita, which needs to have fewer males rampaging through it, virtually or emotionally, I’ve been living with ghosts. Also we need to be proximate to places where we can obtain tea and pizza and sugar, and there aren’t such in Tet-su-geh Owin-geh.
Of course all this was written and all these things have been thought in NM, or en route, or now chez mes parents, where I still have relative peace and freedom and decent ergonomics. But I’ll head to San Antonio tomorrow or Sunday and all that will go to shrieking hell and there will be no more missives or massives either one. I’m scared. I dread Maman’s emotional stuff more than the physical things, even, right now, suddenly. But I have a letter waiting for me from the Young Monk and this is a shred of solace. I am going to miss Mandarin even more than I already do, like a wild thing, like a caged wolf that just wants to shut its eyelids and not open them again. I am not her spouse and never could be in a million years and couldn’t assuage anything and wouldn’t presume to try. I just wish she knew that I want to be with you no matter what state she’s in, and maybe help her eat little bits of things and sleep little bits of sleep and watch little bits of films and, well, Du bist meine fleidermaus. And I am still holding out to myself some faint shred of hope that I’ll see her in Noho in June.
[I’ve just had a horrible boring irritating conversation with M.; oh dammit, I’m going to be divorced. The Editor opined that still-available mid-thirties men may be further scared of women who have been/are married because this implies that such women are capable of making an honest, considered commitment (I can’t believe I’m using that word already)—and that such capacity alone can cause the men to become ausgefreaken, even if the women insist (as for example I did, vehemently) that they aren’t interested in the least in remarrying.]
Nina is crunching her healthy kibbles loudly in the bathroom. I must get a cat.
post your glowing encomium (or bitter philippic) »
Follow this heated, lively discussion through its very own feed; also, you can pingback or trackback from your own doubtlessly much more interesting site.
