boys who like girls who like girls who like boys
Wednesday 24 August 2005 | I like a cookie
In Albertsons tonight (where is that son of Albert, the brave, the shining-helmeted one, the bright spear-carrier?) I walked into the door and stopped before an enormous heap of brown burlap bags, and inhaled deeply the smoky-sweet smell of freshly roasted Hatch green chili. This they don’t have in other supermarkets in other states. I know. I’ve lived in them. States that is not supermarkets.
California
Colorado
Convoluted
Exhausted
Maryland
Massachusetts
Nascence
New Mexico
South Bliss
Texas
Well, that was something. (In the David Letterman sense of, Is This Anything?)
I decided today to learn how to use my digital camera. So here is a proper picture of me, as gradually I grow more adept at not cutting off my own chin or making my eyes be demonic red.
I’m tout en noir because I’ve just come from my friend Persephone’s ordination at Chez Zen, that beloved monastery down the street from me, and one of the original reasons I moved onto Cerro Gordo Road. It was a very strange experience, all in all. I’ve spent thousands of hours in that temple, buffing its wooden floor, straightening its zafu and zabuton, bowing and lighting incense, and so everything is at once alien and totally familiar. But I haven’t set foot in the place since Rohatsu last year.
[Rohatsu being a Buddhist “holiday” which takes place around the first week of December and in which one celebrates the historical Buddha’s awakening—but not by singing or dancing or wassailing or carousing or anything tacky and vibrant and joyful like that; no, instead we all face the wall for eight days, start meditating while it’s still the dark and stop after it’s dark again, and on the last night everyone has to sit until the head monk leaves, and some people stay awake all night to follow the example of the Buddha. That last night can be hilarious. There’ve been lots of nights when I’ve been the only person in the temple, and have fallen asleep, and woken up with a start, robes dishevelled and my mouth so dry I’m scared I must’ve been snoring, and sat panicky upright as the three priests doing jundo enter the temple to chant and light morning incense.]
This time last year I was a postulant myself, supposedly, and in the middle of practice period, or ango. This is the first summer ango I’ve missed in five years; I started with the very first one in 2001, and everyone from then is gone—except the Zen Priestess, ordained since Rohatsu 2002. She and Persephone are very very dear to me. It’s really not fair that bald women can be so beautiful.
I couldn’t ordain for so many, so many reasons. Today I didn’t feel jealous or regretful, felt nothing but grogginess (because I dragged myself out of the woman’s hut, as it were, to go, uncomfortably menstrual but knowing I didn’t want to flake on this), as well as serenity and what Walker Percy’s character Alison called “smiling ease, and a sweetness in the deep regions”—a feeling of liberation and lightness and limpid joy for Persephone, looking spotless and alert and Japanese in her starched white kimono, so that I completely believed the preceptor when she asperged the women ordaining with her little pine branch and said softly now you are fresh and pure.
And there I was, basically sitting in a pool of my own blood, dark black and clotted, my smile just a twinge sharp and a shade Kali. These precepts have been transmitted from the Buddha through eighty-two ancestors; now I give them to you—what’s the meaning of “blood lineage” when the ancestors are all male? To me, it means that every one of their pious, celibate heads was agonizingly pushed and pulled through some woman’s dilated cervix; to me, the blood lineage is that approximately one in three of those women died while doing so. I thought of this at midwinter three or four years ago, when I traced my own red thread through the ketchimyaku, the lineage chart, when I received the precepts myself as a layperson.
Layperson. I am disgustedly averse to that word. It sounds idle, as though laypeople are just lazing around on the lawn drinking lemonade or swinging in hammocks. Well, I suppose I do a fair amount of that, or its equivalent.
I can hear the scrub jays harrassing Weetzie; she’s in the back yard alone for the first time…I hang out the window to see that she’s in a faceoff with a big bedraggled blue one, which is rasping at her (they’re unbelievably loud) as she’s half-bleating, half-mewing at him, creeping forward on her forepaws, never taking her eyes off him, with obvious murderous intent. He jumps up and down on the fence shrieking furiously, she creeps forward. Finally she lashes her tail and makes a tiny leap forward—only about six inches, but it’s enough for him and he flies away defiantly squawking and threatening to return.
There are two other important characters in the life of an Unnarrator: a Boy and a Girl. They will have names which are not their real names, though why I’m not sure—to protect them? me? from whom? the guilty from the innocent? though who among us is innocent by now? after the twentieth century, how can poetry be written? who can cast a single stone?
Anyway, if you already know them, you know their real names; and if you don’t, you don’t. It’s not like I’m going to send my blog URL to my parents. I can be out of the closet, but not quite that far. Kind of like Eloise in the back garden.
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