multiform
Thursday 15 October 2009 | 2 cookies in the jar
A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore a risky and unfeeling act to send it out into the world. (Marcus Rothkowitz)
Now where was I, before I so rudely interrupted myself?
This is going to be harder than I thought.
Maybe the way is to sidle up to it. Not try to tell you any coherent story of the last few months (as if such a thing were possible anyway) but just tell you about last night. Which is fairly straightforward. Maybe.
(I type this while also tentatively picking at a piece of blueberry cheesecake, which I could only manage to take a bite of last night, and drinking a cup of rooibos caramel tea, cos it’s finally cool enough for tea, and can you believe I’m wearing sweatpants? and my beloved blue-gray hoodie, gracias a October.)
So last night, I would normally have been teaching the free community poetry workshop from 4:30-6:30 (which only has three students, but they are all three so loyal and committed and, well, desperate for poetry that I couldn’t bring myself to cancel the class, which we’re supposed to do if there are fewer than five students who sign up, but anyway)—but there was a reading by a really lovely poet instead. Having been bone-tired for days due to and so I decided not to go to the reading either (but you can hear her read a haibun, a hybrid form I am excited to screw around with in calmer times, when those return). That meant I could 1) go see Bright Star on its last night, 2) stay home and watch a Michael Winterbottom film lent me by a thoughtful friend, about which film (Code 46) I know next to nothing, or 3) stay home and read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which I bought over the summer at the thrift store for 50¢, Mandarin having recommended it highly to me in 2005, and to which I am suddenly and most completely addicted, because of its brilliant period spellings (chuse, surprize, scissars!) and because it is like Jane Austen, only except if Mr Bennett and Mr Darcy were, you know, practicing magicians.
But instead of doing any of these things, at 7 pm I abruptly decided to go to an Al-Anon meeting—which is how I spend a great many of my free evenings, starting July 3, when I literally dragged myself kicking and screaming to my very first one, probably partly as a result of reading Infinite Jest, but perhaps more as a result of realizing that I was in imminent danger of strangling the Brujo. (But still I refused to raise my hand when the chair asked if there were any newcomers, a refusal which I justified by telling myself that I’d been to CODA meetings in Santa Fe and they were practically the same.) I don’t normally go to the Wednesday night meeting, for the reason given in the previous paragraph, but also because I don’t much like that meeting—they give out tickets for sharing, which I don’t think they wouldn’t have to do if the business announcements didn’t take up twenty minutes of the meeting, but anyway—
I went. And as I drove down to some church or another (it’s disconcerting that the meetings are always in Sunday school classrooms, decorated with moralizing posters of how to sneeze and cough and display other virtues, and then these sinister-looking crayonings of freakish “people” hanged from the ceiling by clothesline, e.g., or in another room a wall-chart with the bizarre header, HAVE YOU EVER FOUND ANY MONEY, and then “Yes” and “No” columns, placed at about kid-height, and many scrawly names under the “Yes” but none under the “No,”—)
—and so as I drove, since I now go everywhere now with iPod firmly grafted into brainpan (THANK YOU GORGON), the better to keep me from Thinking, I found myself, through the beauty of the shuffle, listening to a song I haven’t particularly liked since college, so roughly, what, 15 years ago, and here it was now, and now I was listening to it, and I heard it. And wanted you to hear it too.
the blue it speaks so full
it’s like a beauty you can barely stand
or too much things dropped in your hand
and there’s a green like the peace in your heart
sometimes
printed underneath the sheets of ashy snow
and there’s a blue like where the urban angels go
very bright
•
So obviously the Brujo and I are, are, isn’t not, we’re just, um, yeah. Obviously.
I mean, obviously that’s why I quit blogging. Nothing else would have really stopped me. Well, maybe it’s not obvious to you. It’s only obvious to me. And would you look at this, I can’t even write about it yet. I just discovered. My stomach started churning typing this much, and my palms are suddenly shvitzing something ghastly. So I have to type about other things. This should be entertaining. And fragmented. Because I am, right now. Completely in, little disparate, small pieces.
•
your behavior is so male it’s like
you can’t explain yourself to me
I think I’ll ask renoir to tea
for his flowers are as real as they are
all the time
and the sunlight sets the furniture aglow
it’s a pleasant time as far as people go
(how far do they go)
his roses are perfect and his words have no wings
I know what he can give me
and I like to know these
things
•
So Dar’s “Mark Rothko Song” (which I think she ruins innocently, her own song, as many of us do, just because of being in her glib twenties, and I think I cover it much better, at forty and coarsely speaking it over a very plain piano line)—but it made me think of many things, but the one of which it most made me think at that moment, standing in the graveled unlit parking lot, in the shadow of some hideous yellow-brick Protestant 1970s era structure or another, waiting to go into the room with the taped paper sign AL-ANON SPOKEN HERE, of David Wallace. It made me remember how petulant and shut out of non-traditional fiction I used to feel, for decades, how impotent, how shaking my delicate fist at its tightly shut door. Exactly (as the songwriter puts it) like a woman, or like me, when I recite the DBT question listed under Interpersonal Effectiveness as “Turning the Tables” (quoting it word-for-word, because I’m too terrified to think of my own words, so I fall back gratefully on the overlearned scripts): I’m not able to accept this behavior (heart pounding again) and yet you really seem to want me to; what do you think we should do?
And the gentleman in question looks away, or says I don’t know, or says we should talk about it later, and later turns into weeks which turns into a month or months, or he changes the subject and I permit this, or he points out something suddenly very interesting happening elsewhere in the landscape, such as at the city park where people are winding themselves up on the big black tractor-tire swings and then releasing the chains in a wild circle, laughing like hyenas, and he says They are going to be so sick! and I wonder despite myself, Do I exist?—(and the churning stomach again, will he read this, will you read this, will anyone be mad at me, will you think you know what I am saying, will you foreclose on what I am still trying to say, just what do I think I’m doing, will your suffering be increased by what I say, how can telling the truth be so harmful, we made such amends except where to do so would cause further harm to them or others, should I move this blog, should I axe this blog, should I mercy-quash it the way the Brujo this summer had to step forcefully on a half-crushed baby salamander to put it out of its wriggly suffering, only its nervous system was still twitching, the thing was dead already, should I go back to paper journals as I have done all summer, what do people do, how do they start anything, how do they stop anything, how do we move, how is it that we are able to go on, to go about in the world, to make anything at all)—
I conflate incidents, I rearrange mutually agreed-upon observations to suit an invisible aesthetic of my own, it pleases some and displeases others, it makes my heart race and my stomach pump out extra hydrochloric acid.
On the outside we are clean and on the inside everyone is full of vomit.
And in general nothing happens. Watch the movie with the sound off, a person with a lot of sobriety advised me; and when I do that, it is all very clear. To me if not to you. There is no you.
You didn’t cause it, you can’t control it, you can’t change it. In Al-Anon this heuristic is called “The Three Cs” and I have half-a-mind to declare that the Three Cs are useful when it comes to reading non-accommodating recent literature (Annie Dillard’s “contemporary modernism”) too. You can either be in the relationship with that book exactly the way it is, or you just can’t.
The funny thing is how, with exposure, the incomprehensible becomes totally translucent. The first dozen pages of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, which I literally couldn’t see in 2003—I remember black squiggles on white paper, and meaninglessness, and frustration, and crestfallenness, like when your lover is forced to stop you and tell you gently, I’m sorry honey, all that work you’re doing, all that trouble you’re going to down there? is really doing nothing for me,—but then at some point something changes silently in your brain, or your birth-chart, or just you’ve been in this body a certain length of time, or whatever, and then the impenetrable text parts before you like two halves of a buttery ripe peach and you dazedly enter and everything is Easy.
It was that way with me and Infinite Jest. It was as straightforward to me as a Dickens novel, and I’m not sure why people, i.e. me, got so bent out of shape about it.
Yes, I do like to know these things, these definite roses, this furniture. But I also like when I don’t know what it can give me, too. That is being a person, surely. To both like what I already know I want, or anyway think I know I want; and also to like what I don’t yet know that I like. Think about the first time you ate an olive.
•
I met her at the funeral she said
I don’t know what he meant to me
I just know he affected me
an effect not unlike his art I believe
the service starts and we are in the know
he had so much to say but more to show
so we weep for a person who lived at great cost
but we barely knew his powers till we sensed what we had
lost
•
There’s always shame. Plenty of, buckets and ponds and bathtubs overflowing. That of being a tourist at one man’s death, a tourist in his oeuvre. Then there are the ways in which I’ve been a tourist in my heart. Not showing up for my own consciousness, because I haven’t exactly even wanted to wake up to what I’m seeing and feeling. Easier to tell myself I have no right to observe it or let it affect me. I’m ashamed of the complicated furious rationalization which masquerades as thinking.
At one point I had a whole line of fancy mentation going about how, if I went to Al-Anon meetings because the Brujo needed to go to AA meetings, then wasn’t I just going for him, as his proxy, instead of him, taking that burden off him and therefore becoming the one to carry the responsibility of Going to Meetings, and just making it easier for him to not? And I told the Brujo all this, because I didn’t yet know to whom else I could tell it, and he listening, throwing the red tennis ball for Fiona, and finally said, quite sensibly: Well, if you’re not going to meetings because you think that would stop me from going to meetings? Then that’s probably a sign that, um, you really need to start going to meetings.
I laughed crossly and agreed. Then I did. On the first Friday in July I went, seething with resentment. But only because the alternative would have been (in my mind), lying in the spare bed in my office staring at the wall and listening to him typing on his computer and cultivating a fine case of the mean reds.
Right away I started seeing some of what I had been very hard at work trying not to see.
I will say without reservations that from my point of view there can be no abstractions. Any shape or area that has not the pulsating concreteness of real flesh and bones, its vulnerability to pleasure or pain is nothing at all. Any picture that does not provide the environment in which the breath of life can be drawn does not interest me. (Rothko)
•
a friend and I in a museum room
she says look at mark rothko’s side
did you know about his suicide
some folks were born with a foot in the grave
but not me of course
and she smiles as if to say we’re in the know
then she names a coffee place that we can go
up town
now the paintings are desperate but the crowds wash away
in a world of tired pedestrians who’ve seen enough today
The painting is desperate. The writing is desperate, by nature. It begs to be seen, it demands to be taken in. I insert the sentence into a poem: You have to read this. (Having stolen it from a fine painter and a truly killer temporary long-distance sponsor, who just happens to turn up in my life 20 years after we first meet, exactly when I need to hear exactly what he has to say.) I say this sentence now triumphantly, even cruelly: I am making you read this, I am making you see these words and know what they mean whether you wish it.
There is only one way to not read it, and that is not to buy or even open the book. If you type the letters “theunreliablenarrator.net” into a vacant field, the machine will obediently bring you here. Don’t come here. That is the only prophylaxis I can offer. Don’t go there. Or, read this page with your eyes closed. Or blindfolded. This will also protect you. I am telling you this now.
Another reason why I stopped writing here is just that I started writing elsewhere, of course. Like right now, it’s 11 am, I started this around 9 am, and I didn’t write the poem I was supposed to write today for forms class (a villanelle, but at least I did get an idea for one yesterday—a nasty corruption of Sexton’s ballad refrain: “At night, alone, I bury the head.”)—I kind of would like to graduate from this program this time, unlike with Boston (because I still owe them $2400, in that case; but still). So I don’t know. I should maybe only post every few days or every week or something. Because I am writing a thesis.
I don’t know what I’m doing, I told the Brujo with the blown-open candor which seems to mark many of my utterances in the last week or so. I’ve never done this before, or anything like this. It is terra incognita, he agreed nervously. Part of what is unknown about it for me, is that I have in some sense apparently stopped trusting him, or have paused in my trusting. I don’t know if trust is a feeling or a belief—presumably the latter, in which case, it can presumably be reconstructed. Rudolf Steiner wrote:
Create for yourself a new, indomitable perception of faithfulness. What is usually called faithfulness passes so quickly. Let this be your faithfulness:
You will experience moments—fleeting moments—with the other person.
The human being will appear to you then as if filled, irradiated, with the archetype of his Spirit.
And then there may be—indeed will be—other moments. Long periods of time, when human beings are darkened. But you will learn to say to yourself at such times: “The Spirit makes me strong. I remember the archetype. I saw it once. No illusion, no deception shall rob me of it.”
Always struggle for the image that you saw. This struggle is faithfulness.
Striving thus for faithfulness, we shall be close to one another, as if endowed with the protective powers of angels.
Just prior to last night’s meeting, the aforementioned temporary/long-distance sponsor-shaped person had suggested to my hysterical ass that I read all the entries under “Detachment” in the reader, Courage to Change. I read a couple and sighed inwardly and gave up and drove to the meeting. As I walked in the door, the chairperson was in a dither because she couldn’t find a copy of the book from which she was supposed to read and share (it was what’s called, amusingly enough, a literature meeting). Another group member randomly suggested she read from Courage to Change. “Why don’t you read the readings on ‘Detachment’?” I sat down resignedly in my ugly taupe metal folding chair.
I can’t even describe to you the facts of what’s been happening, because half of the story isn’t mine to tell. I can only tell my internal perspective, with half-sketched or hinted-at externals, or no externals. Like a stage set for a play by Brecht, or Dogville. My part is that I am devastated and sick, and am not sure how it is possible to live as a couple again, and am not sure how to get help or to move forward, or where to move in any direction at all, and I go about my M-F schedule in an automated manner, and I suddenly read a bunch of books with hideous avocado-green 70s covers and typography, and crushingly chastening titles like, The Dilemma of the Alcoholic Marriage.
None of it would be possible, the humility to say nothing of the humiliation of entering this jargon-riddled program filled with toenail-polished, frosted-haired Christian ladies with capacious handbags, were it not for Wallace. That’s just true. I am Roy Tony, and Don Gately. I do whatever they tell me to do.
They say to pray on my knees every morning so I do it. I hope it’s okay that I imagine God as looking a lot like Hannah Arendt, world-weary but sage, smoking her cigarette. I think of her as like my analyst or something. And I always end the prayers, lamely, “…and I hope You have a good day too. Call me if you need anything, okay? Love you—bye.”
They say, live and let live. And one thing I already discovered is, you have to live, before you can let live.
So being unreliable here will look like this, now, because it is living.
I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing, and stretching one’s arms again. (Rothko)
That, girlfriend, was brought.
And all I can stumblingly try to say is that the longer we’re friends the more I seem to be in your debt, because you keep inspiring me, first with the pretty words in a perfect order and the balance of candor and funny and having my heart torn open wider and wider, then with the courage to plunge head-first into “contemporary modernism” and slowly discover that the only thing really that hard to read any more is anything that’s satisfied being mediocre, now with the courage and honesty, personal and programmatic, that seems like a signal that a day at a time actually can work, and then again with the living coming before the letting live, which, ugh, the inversion years ago seems to have left me with too little room inside.
Thank you.
My pleasure, to have done brung!
Ah, Live and Let Live. There’s also good old Let Go and Let God, and I remind myself, via my somewhat one-sided conversations with Professor Arendt, that She can’t get to work until I pry my cold clutched little monkey-fingers off the situation, i.e., Detach with Love.
“Early one morning I stopped to watch a colony of bees. A little intimidated by the frenzied motion and intense buzzing, I reminded myself that if I didn’t poke my nose into their hive, I wouldn’t get stung. If I chose to maintain a safe distance from a dangerous situation, I would be fine….The choice is mine. When I sense that a situation is dangerous to my physical, mental, or spiritual well-being, I can put extra distance between myself and the situation. Sometimes this means that I don’t get too emotionally involved in a problem; sometimes I may physically leave the room or end a conversation. And sometimes I try to put spiritual space between myself and another person’s behavior. That doesn’t mean I stop loving the person, only that I acknowledge the risks to my own well-being and make choices to take care of myself.” (Courage to Change, January 12)
One thing that’s I’ve started to see is how intensely I circumscribe what I am allowed to consider “dangerous.” Being unable, usually, to decide whether the behavior is merely inconvenient/doesn’t fit in with my neurotic tidy control-freaky plan (e.g. the Brujo forgets to wring out the kitchen sponge), versus when it is harmful for me to be around it. I find that I tend to minimize my own suffering and/or damage—to be predictably unreliable about assessing its gravity.
I may have mentioned my own personal set of self-created helpful slogans, which include such catchy sentiments as But at Least He’s Not Drinking, or You Don’t Know How Good You Have It. Just as an illustration. I don’t think I’m very good at making up slogans, though, and for the time being I’ve decided to stick to Conference-Approved Literature™. And to treat its group-authored clunkiness as a kind of tonic, astringent anti-poetic! This is the kind of useful thing graduate school trains one to be able to do, you see.