about “doe” (illustrated with accidental photos from within handbags, etc.)
Thursday 9 November 2006 | I like a cookie
What in the world am I writing?
When it was finished, House. turned out to be about domestic space and believing myself to be strangled in it and fleeing it, those stifling, airless rooms of the marital non-home. Now I look at these gizmos I started writing at Maman’s in the fall of 2004, the Librarian called them “frontier vignettes” and I suppose they had that flavor, fucked-up Little House on the Prairie.
I’ve been thinking about frontier as representing a far-flung space of domesticity that has room for or contains or is threatened by or stands back-to-back with or glares at, wilderness: the territory. Like Huck’s nervous confession, which Anzan has above the door of his zendo: “But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” Is frontier a place where domestication isn’t necessary. Or even possible.
The west was called wild because all the old forms—the literal baggage—would get left behind. Where streets have no name, your family or your social class or your education, none will do you a bit of good. The days-long journey strips the remnants of your conditioning, the train spits you out into the prairie to fend—the Brujo says, we have no idea how to do what we’re doing. We have sissy Easterner hands, white and uncalloused. We have scarred lungs, hacking coughs, messed-up heads, nervous prostration, bent backs, tired eyes from clerking over crabbéd print with green tinted visors, hunching over basting and tiny embroidery, fingers pricked. A near-impossible challenge and an unlooked-for redemption offered in equal measure, sudden death jostling against restored health. Wildness need not seek; sought for, will be missed. It’s unavoidable, unmanageable; how can anyone control such a big sky, so much horizon, such a sea of waving grasses, in a cracked mud-chinked cabin barely keeping out mosquitoes or stars?
Now I am thinking of baby Carrie getting lost one afternoon, and Laura’s desperation, how can they find a tiny girl in thick grass that’s waist-high on a woman. Foolishness, children’s stories—but why not. Why not take one of the first narratives of domesticity our American girlhoods are fed on, and mess it up? Laura’s smart, could go to college; has to become a schoolteacher to send Mary to a school for blind girls. Laura says, I will never marry a farmer; ends up marrying Almanzo. Laura stamps her foot in hot fury and the Plains Indians laugh and like her and try to barter with Ma, an armload of furs for this sparking-eyed fiery one. And Laura, barely out of infancy herself, watches a tiny cradle-boarded baby, a papoose she calls it, ride away on the back of a horse, a paint we call them (overo or tobiano, the two colors of pinto) and she sobs, because she wants it. Ma is scandalized: You can’t have that baby, it belongs to its mother, and what would you do with a baby anyway. What she really wants to go with them, because they seem so free, laughing and joking and wearing hardly any clothes. She hates having to wear a corset and takes it off all the time and Ma and Mary say, but it will spoil your figure and she tosses her head and doesn’t care, likes haying with Pa so she can not wear stays, those that keep you in place.
And that is my errant disquisition on the seven Little House on the Prairie books force-fed to most bookish girls before the age of twelve and probably the first we know of an absent frontier; so it makes sense the imagery would initiate/generate itself from there. And also from the degraded, used-up, pimped-out West the Brujo and I witnessed in Taos. Parodied by all of us, whether wearing tin concha belts with plastic turquoise or looking for the used bookstore, leathery dieted white women in gold-spangled tights, the plaza crowned by a pine gift steeped in pueblo sarcasm, an eyebrow cocked toward severed timber, a sliced-off foot, an undercurrent to which the Kit Carson revering city fathers are to this day probably oblivious.
But there is a different west, is there still. A frontier alive in imaginal memory, uncontrolled. Still breathtaking. To wander into it, sunburned lips and long hot skirts and a mind accustomed to turning on itself, a caged thing that plucks out its own feathers. It would change her, Doe, in ways she could not imagine.
Penetrating the source and traveling the way,
You cover the territory and embrace the road.
What I see when I look at my lover can feel like gazing into wilderness, an unknowable body, all blue-irised long-legged vital maleness, stubble and intelligence and sanity and excess and experience in black jeans and an immigrant sunburn, and my heart flies out of my eyes most every time I see him, or something gapes open and flaps to and fro in the wind, a screen door before a storm. His tending of late has been to shimmer in my sight, a numinosity I associate only with that which either starts out as or swiftly becomes ruinous. History is a nightmare, etc. But isn’t everyone numinous all the time anyway, we only know it when we’re paying close attention to the other, and we so seldom take time (O’Keeffe) unless forging limbic links, have cried in each other’s arms and cried out in each other’s mouths, been curled against another’s chest and not let go. In Taos, flung sapped and weary on the green grass, recovering, he said looking at the treetops, “aleatoric,” at the moment I was thinking, “oneiric,” but aren’t the leaves always stochastically raining silver, we just don’t always look up. Relationship or passion may be the narrow vessel, but we are such narrow vessels all by ourselves I don’t know how we would learn to see God any other way, besides in each other.
But of course I would think this, being a romantic poet and all.
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