throat-clearing
Saturday 9 May 2009 | 9 cookies in the jar
And if you don’t want to hang around for the sound check, no one would blame you a bit. It’s just that, classes being officially over (though I haven’t read or graded my students’ final papers yet), I have a bit of free time to, you know, brood copiously and spangle your feedreader with pretty pictures.
But first of all…who are you, mysterious Vancouver reader, who is patiently trudging through all the dreary ancient entries of my blog? I’m worried about you. If you’re reading this I want you to stretch, stand up, and walk over to the window and look outside for a moment, breathing deeply. Go on. I’m watching. It’s just that I myself have so many brain-in-a-jar issues with attempted cyborgian meshing, with all the attendant forgetting to eat and forgetting to pee and forgetting I even have limbs—and I want you to live to read another day. You are so kind to be reading all this at all.
It’s six a.m. and the house is quiet and the world is calm. Well, okay, the air conditioner is roaring and the fan on the Mac is roaring and birds are tweeting outside with some perverse kind of aggro aestival cheer. Pyewacket is sacked out flat on the carpet, completely relaxed, her fur blowing in the icy draft of air from above, her ecorexic owners having finally given up and turned on the a/c, accepting (however resentfully) that summer isn’t really so much a-cumin in as it is actually now in fact here, particularly when I insisted on baking batches of cupcakes last night for three hours at 350º. Because we had a party.
We had a party! It was the usual silly annual affair, observed faithfully, marked by my deciding to do everything at the last minute, everything in this case including making red velvet cupcakes and buttercream frosting from scratch (for some reason they turned out kinda dry, though—maybe because I cooked them forty minutes instead of twenty? do you think?), and enormous platters of “sushi” AKA nori rolled around sticky rice etc., which rolls an amiable colleague suggested be called not futomaki but pseudomaki: avocado, cucumber, red and yellow pepper, daikon sprouts, smoked salmon and cooked shrimp, and half-a-pound of slivered fresh wild ahi. The other traditional hallmarks of an end-of-the-schoolyear/belated-birthday unparty include emergency trips to the grocery store and my begging the Brujo for various last-minute housemate favors. He’d had the day off, wandering around comfortably shirtless and playing online Scrabble with youtube soundtrack (Primus, David Byrne, Beck, Butthole Surfers, and our latest obsession, M2OH) (and if Ms. O’Hara’s new to you, we suggest starting here and then go here); so he obligingly vacuumed up black snowdrifts of dog hair and fiddled with extension cords, me having some kind of frantic but apparently necessary personal compulsion toward and subsequent revelation about the Xmas lights (always meticulously tessellated away in their tiny boxes, as if by a particularly tidy packer of Xmas lights, i.e. me, and none of which ever work, because they were all culled from various dumpsters and street corners whence their former owners wisely discarded them, because they don’t work, and I’d like to think I’ve now accepted this, only I seem to go through the exact same process of acceptance every six months without any evident increase in practical wisdom, and without ever getting new fairy lights).
Now the kitchen is dark and cool, countertops stacked with dirty plates and half-full glasses and sesame-seed-speckled pseudomaki platters and encrusted cupcake tins and mixing bowls with dried red drips of gory batter. Before I went to bed, I cleared a path to the coffeemaker so as not to awaken to the Brujo’s cursing. When, instead, Pyewacket woke me at 5:00, crying plaintively for companionship, I tiptoed in and pilfered a cupcake from the fridge.
What am I saying. What am I doing. I don’t know. Bear with me.
A poet has died, far too young, not an acquaintance but a good friend of good friends and as I sit reading the last news of him, someone else’s tears plop into my lap and I puzzle over them as over deaths; that’s what they’re for, I guess. They’re can’t be, they’re certainly not, any good for anything else.
The big black dictionary another poet gave me falls over, as I’m struggling to sort through and relocate the toppling stacks of accumulated books making my desk unusable, and it crushes the robin’s-egg shell I found a month ago in the grass. I ruefully inform myself that this is not a metaphor. But then what is? I don’t think they’re allowable. Or should be. Either metaphors or deaths.
When his first book came out, we got a review copy in the magazine’s basement office and I took it home with me that night to read, admiring it in my hands. It was such a beautiful slim thing, that book; he was so young, only a year older than I; it was so minimalist and white and delicate, itself like a paper shell. I swore to win the Yale prize myself, could barely read the poems through the fog of envy. A decade ago.
A day comes when G••gl• searches on our names yield more information about our deaths than all we wrote. Then that too passes.
Several books, their particular topheavy stack (Mailer, Kesey, Ellison, Pynchon) shorter than the rest, must be dealt with by Wednesday, when their paper is due. Some of my colleagues, who wrote this paper in the past, claim that their final version numbered more than sixty-plus pages in length. If I can keep from dragging Sontag and Wallace into it, I can maybe escape with twenty or thirty. Of course I haven’t begun it yet—not properly, though there are scores of pages of handwritten notes. There’s some kind of slip betwixt the cup and lip at work here—all my life, but the last few months in particular—an ellipsis or haitus between private and the presentational, that fit for public consumption. Private equals pleasure, social equals shame. Doesn’t everyone know that? But actually as that slip keeps happening, as days slip into the gap and leave no track—
Throat-clearing. No more metaphors.
What is private, what social. The tasteless, the classless. The impolite. The rude.
There are bits of writing still to be written for Walt Whitman also, which I should have finished in the fall (Frost, Stevens, Auden, Jarrell); and writing I have been promising to the Duende all semester (short fiction in longhand which I do not set in type, for reasons which only seem complex and mysterious but which are in actuality fairly dispiritingly straightforward).
In recent weeks I’ve somehow managed to convince myself that the slithery slope between brain and pen is a mere problem of techne, of upaya, and would be solved in a fell swoop if I once again had a typewriter—a cast-iron indestructable Smith Corona like the one on which, at seventeen, I wrote my tinselly villanelles and stolid book reports on John Steinbeck. Even then I did most of my (real? best? most precious?) writing in my head, having been accustomed to this practice since I was maybe eight years old. Other technical solutions proposed by my tirelessly procrastinating brain have included literally tying a notebook and pen to my arm, somehow; fastening a mini tape recorder around my neck, like those handy librarian-glasses-on-a-chain; or giving up writing on paper entirely, and accepting that I am a mental novelist only. Ambiguity intentional.
SEVEN REASONS NOT TO TRANSCRIBE THOUGHTS INTO TYPE
1. The Duende won’t like it/them. [This is true.]
2. I can’t ever publish fiction (at least not under my own name) because my parents would read it and stroke out. [Also true.]
3. God will punish me. [Possibly somewhat less true.]
4. I’d have to curtail my other pseudo-writing activities severely, particularly social ones. [Certainly seems true.]
5. Other people are better writers. [Indisputable.]
6. Who cares? [Rhetorical.]
7. I would have to accept the words’ own inadequacy, rather than placing the blame for their inadequacy/nonexistence on my poor work habits. [...]
Of course the understood clause following each sentence, implied but not explicitly stated, is “…and then I’ll fall on the floor and then I’ll die.” [Highly unlikely.]
Finally, there’s a line of “reasoning” which goes something like this: Typing up writing makes it so it can be distributed and others can read it. When others read it, they often don’t understand or like it. When they don’t like it and they tell me so, I have, in the past, stopped writing. Solution: Never write in the first place! Then I won’t stop writing. [Puts head in hands and moans gently but comprehensively.]
The bitch of it is that, as we all know, if you don’t honor and treasure their gifts, the faeries will quit bringing them to you—you are by now tired of hearing me observe this. Lately the faeries appear to have upgraded their hostage demands. Mere longhand scrawl no longer propitiates them. They want bylines. They want a daily word count. They want twelve-point Palatino or Times New Roman.
Or is that something else, and not faeries?
“My heart is what isn’t my ego,” Don Share says Artaud said.
Whatever it is, or they are, they’re also very unhappy that I’m not writing about—how did David Mitchell put it to the Guardian?
It’s a rule of thumb that precocious young novelists start off with something loosely autobiographical…but three books into his career, David Mitchell has revealed very little of himself. This, of course, has never been his point, and until recently he had almost no interest in delving into his own life story. By the time he started writing seriously, he says, he wanted “to write the world, underlined three times, three exclamation marks.”
I stood on the back step yesterday, right by the grassy spot where I found the robin’s-egg shell, and looked down at my feet contemplatively. I was wearing thin white sport socks awkwardly tucked into the rubber crotch of my flip-flops like tabi. Where the socks normally say in gray letters “liz claiborne” I could only see “borne.” But actually the socks don’t say anything, that’s a figure of speech. Socks are very quiet. This made my toes hurt. Not the quiet socks, but the fake-tabi effect.
Later I tried to go to a mall, to buy underwear. Well, I didn’t try—I did go to a mall. But what I discovered about the mall is that it’s like those big-chain grocery stores, like Albertsons or Bashas’ or Fry’s or any of those other puzzling permutations of plurals and possessives (which is too alliterative, but what can you do). Anyway, what I long ago learned about the grocery store is that it’s this big building full of stuff, but there’s no food there. They don’t have any actual food, that you can eat. They have plastic bottles of stuff, and boxes with stuff in them, and bags and tubs and other containers and arrangements of substances; but not food. And thus after three-quarters of an hour popping in and out of shops I haven’t entered in decades, if ever (Macy’s? Dillard’s?), I concluded that the mall has lots of stuff, but no clothes. It just has clothes-shaped objects hanging deceptively on clothing hangers, items made of some papery or plasticky stuff in clothing-like colors—though generally the colors are just a little too bright or combined in a way that’s just a little too noisy to be plausible. (It’s like Douglas Adams said about Bach: If they wanted you to believe that just one guy wrote all that music, then they gave us rather too much of it for credulity.)
So it came to me, surveying rack after dubious rack, purported to display wearable garments—at some point, they just stopped making clothes. Sometime in, what, maybe the early seventies, late sixties? They phased out women’s clothing altogether. In particular, underwear that actually fits your bum (without vanishing uncomfortably into it) and isn’t either hideous or made of melted-down tires and baby sea tortoises. And they just assumed we wouldn’t notice—that we’d accept the slightly too-bright color schemes, the fuschia and turquoise and navy and red with a lavender bow and yellow-green “lace”—that we wouldn’t suspect anything was wrong. It’s like those nightmares where your parents turn out to be complete strangers. I came to my senses pawing frustratedly through a Victoria’s Secret bin, looking for an elusive archaic relic of happier, less figmentary times—bikini, size medium, dark blue or brown or white or black or gray, 100% cotton or silk or something from a plant, no legible branding, no scratchy seams or constrictive, sinister-looking elastic, no “decoration” or “fashion detail” which will only remind me, every time I look at it, of the pricked fingers and burning eyes of some modern Victorian seamstress, hunched over a sweatshop table in Manila or Chiang-mai or Honduras, and do I even know the name of a single city in Honduras—? No. Oh, and also it would be nice if one pair of knickers cost somewhat less than, say, thirty bucks. But this thing, I realized with a flood of relief, no longer exists, here or perhaps anywhere. This entire “shopping mall” has no clothing in it.
Thus I fled Victoria’s Secret. I don’t even wear knickers when it’s over 100 degrees anyway. As I exited, a young woman in full purdah was trying, literally, to pull her (Western-dressed) male companion into the rosy-lit archway. “No, no; later, later,” he said uncomfortably, unable even to look up at the headless plastic-clad plastic mannequins. I could not catch her soft reply but as I walked away she was still pulling at his arm insistently.
Chelonian. Cartilaginous. They even have these weird slippery prosthetic-looking rubbery “molded” brassieres now, which have all the tactile appeal of swim goggles. I left the mall and drove home, knowing to my chilled bones what a hopeless dinosaur I have survived to be.
Case in point:
A laptop! is what, at one point, I decided I needed. To solve the whole brain-to-text technological conundrum. If I had a laptop, I could take it in the backyard, or the kitchen, or to a café, I reasoned brightly, forgetting that coffee makes me speed my brains out. And why would it be an advantage not to be in my study? No Internet access; writing would revert to private from being social or interactive. I would have wrested back enough privacy and anonymity to write the things for which I still apparently believe God wants to punish me (and the more I read about the Quiverfull movement, the more I remember why it is I think that. What fundamental, fundamentalist sense of my own unnatural wrongness is entrained and ingrained in me and can only be exorcised out through prose. If at all. Because the very thing I want to write about, is the very thing which tells me it is wrong to write. That if I write it, I will spontaneously combust here in suburban Tartarus, leaving only an oily ashen smudge on my little blue yoga ball). Thus demonically encouraged, I optimized various combinations of size and speed until an anvil of sanity fell on my head and I suddenly realized that I was contemplating spending more than a thousand dollars to achieve something I could, if I wished, achieve right this second by merely reaching around to the back of my current computer and yanking out a small blue cord from its plug. Besides, then I remembered that smart people have gone and invented this fucking wireless thing, so God is everywhere.
To be honest, I actually came up with a plan whereby, in order for me to be able to write properly, the Brujo and I needed a whole new house. So the laptop seemed less extravagant by comparison.
Thousands and thousands of dollars having been thusly saved, I revert back to the whole typewriter idea, and contemplate this skiey beauty. Added benefit: less neck/back/tendon strain, paradoxically thanks to the total-body engagement involved in vigorous portable pounding; whereas a laptop is how I injured myself in the first place, in 1998, and practically guaranteed to put me back in wrist braces again (plus I just had my last p/t session yesterday! and I do not want to go back to that awful, awful place—this “gym” they speak of). The thing is, though, I hold very little hope that it will help in the production of text. Because frankly, I suspect that eventually I will, still scrambling for purchase, fly out over the ledge and enter the empyrean with a very bad word on my lips. Because I didn’t have a pencil. Or a laptop.
Or, apparently, the loving discipline and passionate attention which allowed Craig Arnold to produce, for example, this.
[and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death
you FUCKWAD]
It’s not my intention to co-opt, by definition sleazily so, the tragedy of a better writer and person for any purpose other than to illustrate the gravity of the situation in which you and I find ourselves; viz. to wit., none of us are getting out of here alive. And maybe even leaving traces makes no difference. But it’s too late for me, it’s good money after bad—too long ago I staked everything on, it does matter, it has to matter, something has to matter and I can’t think of anything else beautiful enough to justify our agape for it.
I dreamt another poet and I lay side by side in a tent, gazing into each other’s eyes. He was older, grey and wise with age, and our love for each other was exactly matched, whole and complete without action. He said to me slowly, “I would love to have an affair with you; it would be so incredible. But I won’t. I love my wife. I love my children.” I delighted in his fidelity; I would have been cruelly disappointed by any other response on his part. Our faces and bodies glowed in the filtered light as it came through the tent canvas. “Tell me,” I said taking his hands, “all about them. Tell me about your children.” He told me about them, a boy and a girl. We had all weekend to talk, which seemed infinite.
“Aren’t non-productive writers who piss and moan about how social relationships suck away all their time, or how this and that are obstacles for them, just being unconscionable pussies? Don’t they have only themselves to hold responsible for the fact that they aren’t writing, or don’t like what they’re writing?”
Yes.
“Didn’t Anaïs Nin’s analyst tell her to stop writing in her journal so she’d write more fiction—a piece of advice with which Nin wholeheartedly agreed and which she faithfully recorded…in her journal? And yet don’t we now recognize her journals as comprising, in fact, the salient valuable bulk of her oeuvre?”
Yes.
“Aren’t bloggers who only write about how they wish they could stop or start blogging boring? And don’t people who write about how they can’t write make you want to strangle them, because of their self-absorbed privilege?”
Um, yes.
“And aren’t you actually writing right now about—”
Yes.
Wisława wrote, “I apologize to time for the muchness of the world overlooked per second.”
She wrote, “I know that as long as I live nothing can justify me, because I myself am an obstacle to myself.”
Stuff you delete after you type out and print and review and mark up and revise the essay. Stuff you say at the beginning of your share, or your shy workshop comment, all the hedging and hawing of “It’s nothing, really, I just think…” or “Maybe this is just me…” or, “Oh, I was only going to say that….” An apologia for existing/breathing/having thoughts which I see all the time in female students, even those in their thirties. Perhaps just a rare American form of politeness, one of our few—it seems sometimes almost Japanese to me, like the formally humble things you’d say in an elevator or bath house. “Forgive me for disturbing you.” “Not at all! Forgive me for being here in the first place.” And then, upon departing: “I’m sorry I am leaving you here alone.” “It was kind of you to stay as long as you did.” Throat-clearing. 3,500 words of it, to be precise.
If you have time to clear your throat. If they give you that much time.
Poets should go where ordinary people can’t or won’t go to tell what experience is like. —Craig Arnold, 1967-2009
9 cookies in the jar
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Thank you for this.
Shut up! I adore you.
You spelled gray with an E.
OMG IT’S THE DUENDE.
I really enjoyed this as I have been struggling with art making and what direction to go and what to say and what to do and when to do it and end up inevitably sitting on the couch drinking a beer and alternately walking out and standing in front of a canvas and begin shouting obscenities at it because it is you, the canvas, that is at fault… sigh.
my party sushi recipe it taking a glass 9 x 13 cooking platter and lining it with saran wrap then building the sushi backwards starting by lining the bottom with thinly sliced lemons, then smoked salmon, daps of wasabi then rice, more saran wrap, apply weight evenly over the surface to compress, invert the whole mess onto a countertop remove the saran wrap and slice it into rectangular sushi shaped bits…
cooking helps me to feel creative when painting does not, though it lacks the sort of mimetic effects of personality or thought or soul or some such thing, it is techne pure and simple, where art making is poesis, or something other or some such drivel anyhoo look I boggarted your blog… sorry mon ami! I guess I should go back to grading papers
Um, please come be creative at my house any time! (I’ll supply the smoked salmon.) And always boggart too.
At Chez Zen we used to make “sushi salad” which was all the vegetarian ingredients layered roughly in a big wooden bowl—the shortgrain sticky rice sprinkled with vinegar/sugar, strips of tomago and nori and red pepper and cucumber and avocado, black sesame seeds on top, tamari on the side. All these are still white-person “sushi” but nonetheless mighty tasty if you’re not near the real thing.
I think there was a brief time when sewing had that pure-mindless-techne quality to it; and it mostly still does; but also sometimes it can become kind of hair-clenching. Usually when I am thinking about it (i.e., overthinking it) instead of actually doing it. When I actually do it, there’s like this major wave of relaxation that hits me and I’m all: ohhhhhh, yeah. This is actually something I like to do.
And frankly the same is true of writing.
a) Y’all are making me hungry.
b) Un– your experience of sewing sounds like mine with knitting.
Ouch. I feel yr pain. But having just concluded a 415 mile bike trip I’m somehow uncharacteristically optimistic. Off the grid, life goes on. Maybe it’s the fact that the downturn has finally come to Manahatta, where so many of those responsible for the Great Ugliness make a more than comfortable living. According to data lately collected by my five senses, the biosphere, for now anyway, goes on doing what it’s done for eons, despite their most ambitious depredations. The ordinary folk seem likewise to be muddling through, against all odds. We seers and seekers and saints mustn’t lose ourselves in navel gazing. We’ve got work to do. Figuring out what it is, is the great task. Please advise if you intend to drop by. We do hope to see you and your longtime companion hereabouts.
I would be all flattered that someone noticed me (months ago) because I did wade through all your archives for several days, but I do not live in Vancouver so I guess it’s not me you noticed. (my IP shows me in Hamilton, so far as I know.)
Mary Margaret O’Hara has also been a favourite of mine for a very long time–I found out about her through Martin Tielli, who was influenced by her. They both appear in this clip from the CBC’s Black Widow: http://forcessweetheart.tumblr.com/post/112255705/mary-margaret-ohara-mattys-lullaby-via
Martin vocally “samples” her famous song “To Cry About” at the end of his “Midwinter Night’s Dream” to chilling effect, and there’s a great Tragically Hip/Rheostatics cover of the same song. I have other odds and ends of that nature lying around if you would like.