Another Love Discourse, page 10
So what pleasure to wake one morning in the parsonage and find myself so happy to hear the music of the new love, who again performed with an ensemble last night in Los Angeles. To feel, for this second, I had arrived somewhere. Even in my messy room.
Remembrance
The pain of going through belongings after someone dies is that we all touch billions of objects in our one life. An old dramatist text on types of plot would organize such moments this way:
It will be seen that the appearance of these figures of the second plan, these Choruses, Confidants, Crowds, Clowns, even Figurants re-enforced by those
of the original groundwork, precursors whose importance ranges from Tiresias to the Messenger of ‘Oedipus the King’, from prophet to porter, modifies most powerfully the effect of the ensemble, especially if we reflect that each of these, considered separately, has his own especial motives for action, motives soon apparent in regard to the characters who surround him in some dramatic situation subordinate to the dominant one, but none the less real; the turns and changes of the general action will affect him in some particular way, and the consequences, to him, of each vicissitude, of each effort, of each act and denouement, contribute to the spectator’s final impression. If the Third Actor, for instance, be a Disputed Object, it becomes necessary to take into account his first and his last possessor, the diverse relations which he has successively had with them, and his own preferences.
And so I stayed silent on the call with the beneficiaries.
If he appear as Inspirer or Instigator, we must consider (aside from his degree of consciousness or unconsciousness, of frankness or dissimulation, and of Will proper) the perseverance which he brings to his undertaking; if he be unconscious, the discovery which he may make of his own unconsciousness.
What does it mean when you cannot understand the social awkwardness or fuzzy thinking of someone related to you?
If he be a deceiver, the discoveries which others may make of his dissimulation (‘others’ here meaning perhaps a single character, perhaps the spectator) —
It is not my job to reveal
deception. The middle path
is to take
a walk near old grounds. Near the interregnum apartment where I possessed nothing, in which daughters and I danced at night in a living room bare but for its high ceilings, wooden floor, a futon from the street, a hammock that best friend sent. To walk by that place where I fancied myself a mother dedicated to her math geniuses. Every night, after homework, I rolled out a bed on the living-room floor by the heater for daughter #1, while #2 and #3 shared the second bedroom. We invited someone over for dinner; bowls of spaghetti were passed over my head while I sat on the stepstool and we laughed. We had no real table in the kitchen. To walk by that place was to walk by the world where
I had nothing, no membrane, no appurtenances,
a pupa flung out into
the world raw and sensate, as if
we could all be given chance
to begin again. A colored
bit of translucency
afloat. Seen through,
untied.
To touch what it meant to have a self that first year after the great sundering. Not as someone sheltered. But now we were shoring up foundation: even more terror.
What story could help us
find a way?
Fulfillment
Up the hill from the writing shed
where I have started work on this
Roland book tilts the grandly altered
schoolbus, camouflaged brown,
of the ecotenant who
moved in as if to make
(what seems now)
the hubris of home purchase possible.
The tenant would make the dream
of safety tenable. We would
exchange labor (his)
for his chance to bring
his tiny home, species giant schoolbus converted inside,
onto the land (ostensibly,
temporarily, only in legal terms, ours).
Such is the contract struck
by the communalism
of my childhood west coast:
I hoped for help and/or company.
Get what you wish for
but not in the form you choose:
perhaps I spent most daylight
hours of our ripcord
winter outside, shivering, talking
with the ecotenant about his
plans. My private hunch
is that he must rank among our
contemporary world’s most notable
planners. A scientist-in-training,
a beanpole at that crisis
inflection point of twenty-five, a young man of
species grad student americanus,
of Midwestern vintage, so kind
in actual bearing, one might overlook how great
a proportion of his head
more than tickles clouds.
A Luftmensch: what a delicious word—an ‘air -person’
or Atisha’s cook in hiding.
The ecotenant’s parents came
from Kansas and helped him
drill, tilting his home from seventeen
to twelve degrees. Good for my core, he says,
about living in a skewed bus
in woods abutting our
would-be simple home.
Any agreement we make, Luft always jots
carefully into one of two black
books he always carries
and then proceeds promptly
to forget. We have spent
so much time talking and
planning. Now and then, I see
him moving things
north to south: three stones, a rusted rake,
a branch, an extensible
shovel for snowy eaves. He moves
things and in this lies
his work; is writing any different?
I admit something
in the certainty of Luft’s
movement pleases me
(a morocco slimline planner
toward future order).
My present leans toward the future.
You could imagine him with more
of a grip on reality, a more organized
sock drawer, when really he lives
in a bus packed with dishes
in untethered milk crates, its level twelve
degrees off plumb.
Yet how easy it has
become for me to
appreciate order in
everyone else.
Errantry
When you become a parent, much of your energy becomes a libido toward structure: how do you create parameters?
Here’s the amazing aspect: Luft, not a parent, lives without order. His apologies are fine as midwestern cider, frequent, profuse, also with a touch of passive intergalactic force prone to electroresistive mishap: alarms are not set, time management falters.
Luft presented me with a boxed set of hand-pirated DVDs for a player I don’t own for a movie about the cosmos: a gift to honor the solstice. He celebrates holidays with pagan precision. Always magneticisms zoom in beyond his control. To his breed of plaint, I am deeply sympathetic, as if we are all creatures fallen onto the planet by odd gravitational hunger, held under the moon in our spinning galaxy.
Perhaps this trait—over-sympathy, the heart that bleeds itself out until left for squirrels to nudge in their search among tall oaks for disappointed acorns—has led to our current state.
I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient, says Roland.
What after all were Luft and I discussing all summer and winter? While I was supposed to be writing on Roland?
Where to situate oneself. How best to live. In other words: the best position for Luft’s bus and my shed in which to write the opus for which I had hocked the family fortune (future for past) piddling as it is.
While discussing positioning, I was led off course and now must pay. The bills have been piling up in a giant hand-woven basket, as if a peasant’s harvest. So repetitive, these creditors; they cannot help but repeat themselves. For both writers and bill collectors, lean syntax can become a pipe dream.
The basket harvesting all the creditors’ bills teeters in a small former parson’s room, a neat space with a fold-out desk, where the man once doled out his form of indulgence for those who had sinned.
At the bank, my main creditor, the mortgage official, is a swift numbers whiz with an algorithm of starched hair, smile, pearls, and perfume, all a deadly feint away from next month’s risk: my foreclosure.
The bank itself—you too could be deceived—happens to be a cooperative seemingly run by a young pregnant woman soon on leave who sends me lovingly misspelled messages, her personal semiology: sorry, your overdrown again :) <:.
The last contract I had—one which put miso in the pot and bread in the frying pan, kids’ favorite working-mother meal these days—was to write for an embassy an investigation into certain hushed-up killing fields.
Such contract work seems to have dribbled the last of a particular sum into my bank’s account. Now the piper has come to be paid, the book on Roland overdue, and Luft our ecotenant moves branches east and south and then returns to his huge tilt of a bus where he occasionally sleeps under blankets though mostly in his lab on campus.
Reader, I got distracted. And now my survival brain has taken over: in writing this book, is someone riveting me? Actively shelling my shed. I stood there, worried about being riveted, the children soon to return back for their time at their father’s house, and I soon fleeing with new love for this hospitable artist retreat of an island off Maine’s bold coast.
A trend in dramatic irony which Barthes may have appreciated: the exact steps a character takes toward her greatest wish brings her farther from it. Where is the safe home for my children? (Me, gone. O, prayer: may I not be my absentee mother.)
Faults
Parenthood can mean the following: learn what you have repressed. Learn all you wished never to possess. See the shadowed mirror. We seek to recuperate whatever we were not given. Of course, you hope you could be better, you do the best you can, you walk faultlines and hope not to get stranded on the wrong side when the earth quakes, and yet you are human, and orient inexorably toward your humanity; each morning you fall into it.
And so it is with every conversation the child has about a dog. She wants a dog and is strong as a classic rhetorician, so well does every argument orient toward an ultimate end: having a dog. The sky is blue and this quality links with a dog’s love of a peaceful day. She sees Uncle Rick’s dog padding around, seemingly neglected in the house of dead grandmother, and so a trip prior to ripcord involves caring for Rick’s dog, she lights up in happiness, a blaze that could swallow grief. How capably she marshals arguments about ideal ages, anxiety, college, futures. We could save it! We could just take care of it back east for a while. Out in the cold, taking a dog for walks becomes a more difficult proposition.
Say it is your last day out west after your mother has died and you walk dogless yet with newish love and daughter in the hills over the San Andreas Fault above the grand vista and bowl of the bay at what appears to be a predetermined hour for the lone lanky older intellectual men of all nations, those who have long lived by the bay, to walk their neat non-shedding canines.
(For this second, let) the dogs represent the men’s bodies.
A Frenchman, a Dane, a Japanese grandfather. They have merged their intellectual lives with the beauty of the place and they walk alone, for a moment having traded the mess of human encumbrance for the uncomplaining dog, the problem with their collective triumph being that each sighting makes your child, your beautiful product of the mess of human encumbrance, the one who has just lost the last grandparent, find greater ballast for her argument, the ongoing one, the mission to have a dog who can understand her wordlessly and soothe her worst fears. The center is barely holding, let alone the handholding of you and your beau which hurts, she says. You understand, you cease; her hoodie she yanks over her head.
Can you tell me when you can talk again, you say (frequent mother plea).
Twenty minutes.
You have long since stopped holding his hand. Instead a leash strings taut between you. As if a joke for her at which she will never laugh. Unwilling recall: the moment walking a mountain road with soon-to-be-X when he had held your hand and because he had been unkind the day before, when you had been caring for everyone yet were bleeding after a small medical event, you found yourself nauseated by the rare touch.
Final condemnation, already exiting the body of the marriage, your body stayed honest if faulty. Your daughters had cheered at the sight of you two handholding but you cleaved, unable to fake marriage’s leash, fallen into that fault of authenticity which Rick used to accuse you of over-cherishing. Authenticity is such a value for you, he said, me, I like politeness. For the marriage, you traded authenticity, wanting to take yourself for a walk, to find the peace of resting near someone safe.
Magic
There is no innocent
speech (says Roland):
all is puppeted by system.
You know your innards
are always revealed by what
most disturbs?
For instance, there lives a breed of man born after counterculture but before/in/after millennials who finds himself cranky mainly because of gender coding—manboys confused by their generation. Feminine at heart (to be essentialist) who wish not to play aggressor, soft inside but cloaked by stern justice-seeking principle. Or vice versa: aggressive within an armament of softly righteous words. Say you cross them, you are lost: they cannot survive if they do not see themselves on the side of method and the right. This sort is dangerous. Cross them and you land squarely on the list of the bad, a target for passive revenge.
To these wounded manboys, fathered imperfectly by baseball-cap-backward bros of the last generation, small questions sound like criticism. Advice therefore: never question much. These boys like to be hailed discreetly as both papa and provider because it was thrust into them how impossible it would be for them to attain either status wholly, raised as they were by absentee or secretly old-timey masculinist dads.
Similarly, there lives a kind of woman who uses holistic precept to best justify a narcissism so omnivorous, there dragons be.
It may seem I am on a criticizer’s roll. Both kinds of dragons have crossed my recent journey; do you have yours?
My Vegas husband to me was exotic; no breed recognizable in my child-hood out west! Not bad at heart, just scarred by ancient history.
Imagine you are no stranger to this question of how to occupy where you actually are. So much more fun to focus on other people’s problems and wishes: you get to save others or spectate. You get to vacate.
For years I have been that little girl, as if locked in a tall plexiglass column: see out, never ask for anything, serve others’ needs, don’t speak up, be a fast study, don’t be a burden.
No surprise: I have had a hard time letting others approach—and here the surprise: all the dangers of my marriage kept me in such shelter of reproach, my own and X’s, I got to stay safe (enough) from love’s sublime.
Once, while a young art student, in a first iteration, I found myself having to leave the room: the young woman model was too sumptuous, hair bundled atop, eyes a knowing drowning violet. To see her was to see Marxism die, as Brodkey says, but while drawing her, I underwent the grip of synesthesia, all symphonies gathered, angles resisting the round, her gaze an index card with a message meant only for me. Between poses, a perfume, she gathered a tropical robe around her shoulders, belted her waist: it was all too much. In spectating, I could no longer locate the good, my gaze a spray that left me empty, lacking signature, tag, identity. Imagine yourself a lawless child bereft of anything but appreciation. You can savor a moment overwell and then wonder what message lives in your own discarded bottle.
Such optimism led me to this isle. An early-morning person, before we fled here, I had been trying to stay up to find who had been shooting our refuge.
Tenancy, dwelling. How do any of us finesse the art of safety? I still am not sure what to say to myself, to Luft the ecotenant, nor to Biff, the subterranean grad student from the Alamo who only recently left our east-coast new home’s basement room, semi-finished. Rather precipitously, I had bought the house (hocking our future), and then daughters and I found ourselves needing to travel before an opportunity expired (beholden to the past’s dream of the future).
Together with an old friend, we created a restorative-justice creative workshop on a foreign isle, in a war-torn coastal town, useful, meaningful, empty, pleasurable, backfiring. Long story, not to be put down here.
We returned to find that Biff had not only moved into his room but had taken over the new home and entire basement, lining up Alamo posters, covering the back door with a flag of his hometown heroes.
Picture Biff: a grand young seigneur with lips sugar-scrubbed and the gelled curls of a contemporary Fauntleroy, welcoming us back to our newish home.
