Another Love Discourse, page 11
At least the girls did not fear; each of the tenants drafted to support our new safe life lacked the cis-male heterosexist energies of the frat boys alight on the street below, hugging it up to spread viral patriotic drinking-song parodies. Somehow these elements had amassed on or near this parsonage land to help support, last year, our illusion of the safe life.
Bulletholes started to appear, however,
like the holes in reasoning
which led us here.
Call the local sheriff about the incursion? We cannot. All have grown ever more wary of the sheriff’s office, given what we have recently learned.
The local newspaper in our proto-agrarian village, which supports its own ecosystem of a thirty-thousand-person state university like a seasonal spawning ground for salmon, has in its log helpful remarks such as:
Nude man seen running the agricultural fields northwest of the university in nothing but new hiking shoes. Sheriff located one shoe but was unable to track escapee.
Or:
Neighbor reports thump on porch and unknown driver. University police came to investigate what is a form of mail-order package delivery.
Not known for having mind and heart in the right place, our sheriff—instead we have formed a neighborhood citizen corps of vigilantes.
We all wish to be adult. One trick: secret one part of yourself away in a red velvet box and enter the fray, show up in the world of signs, and return later to tend the one hidden.
Informer
One can also hide in admiration. The leader in our zone is Vida, an elder sibling in a family of eight who runs the bio lab on campus, a stalwart mother, skater, scientist, competent fun-seeker from the south where clean-air peaks made her stronger than most, her hometown the place where people come to tug ropes and learn how to be rugged autonomous American citizens.
Vida enlisted her family to help move my writing self into a shed, her boys carrying boxes of journals on Roland which I cannot ever hope to revisit, the markings of years made trivial.
And so she too is alarmed, she too has a stake: who could be targeting your workspace?
Our local officers are not obviously swigging racists (too aware of being watched by lone lanky scholars) but boys from farmtowns who chose the academy, willing to wink away balcony fratboy hijinks with their own collegial half-envy, the fratboy students themselves come here as if solely to inhabit the sign and mythology of college boy, all getting their voices, hooting bro! at one in the morning, from central casting.
Frisbee, beer, party—ways to negotiate late adolescent vulnerability. My middle daughter, wearing shorts on her bike, they terrify; the sheriff looks off into the right middle distance.
About the bullets? Don’t call the sheriff, our Vida keeps saying, a woman of such speedy acumen it can be harder to understand those who falter, our messy home, my newish love who defies gender norm, myself, my daughters.
Call this the theme: having extricated myself from hell, I find myself anew in the one most like heaven. Here amid the competents, scrabbling to make amends. Who among us has a truly organized sock drawer? Those with whom I have found myself, our new neighbors. In the realm of a perfectionist, mine, to falter feels (in my inner ongoing trial) like indictment.
What does it take to let
go of perfection?
Could this habit of self-
exile (not) travel
to knock elsewhere?
Must it always be
my forever guest?
Drama
I tried mentioning more about the bulletholes to Vida, who, in one of the nearby labs seeks the secret of existence—she oversees the ecotenant’s working group—but for all her authority has time, in organized sectors of afternoon, after son’s tutoring, to practice with him, twenty-five-minute timed spurts of soccer, golf, badminton.
Don’t call the sheriff, she repeats, as if a backwoods woman, nothing but trouble. We’ll find them, as if her son’s nets alone could catch any intruder. And so it has been that though there appears to be a threat on the land, our crisis has started to assume a gravity no greater or worse than any other.
Water seeps into the grotto in which Biff of sugar-scrubbed lips was recently seen capable of great multitasking: texting, eating ramen, killing it at videogames, talking to Alamo parents, watching football playoffs on his mammoth nailed-into-wall high-definition screen, managing to avoid paying rent for three months.
In addressing everyone’s needs, I have lost the central thread. While talking about how to make all these tenants’ lives work well enough—not good enough, I failed to work on Roland, the Institute for Roland Studies now is folding, and someone is taking shots at us.
No one is anything more than a temporary dweller on this land, here where children and I were to make a new break.
New Year’s of the float, new love and I were heading out toward the risk of an Indian restaurant. The last message of the year came from Vegas mate: I should take you to court, at least one kid hates living with that guy in your home. But I talked to lawyers and just now decided I would not. Happy New Year!
In the last years of the marriage, it became clear: fighting became our sex.
Perhaps the New Year’s message was his version of my mother’s Valentine poem: perhaps he missed some part of me.
Not to mention that we fought differently: Californian speech is fake! he would yell. I understood, having seen from Uncle Rick and others how much psychologically astute speech bears its own buried violence.
As a bulwark against hurt, you can internalize your aggressor, swallow him whole so you forever hear his voice: that can be your hope of taming whatever assaults. Once you accomplish this feat, it longer matters if he is there: the aggressor abides, you are tarred and so fail to recognize yourself. Reactive abuse. I ended up in the last years of the marriage imagining myself so fully unlovable, like Klee’s etching, Hero with a Broken Wing, unable to fly or help anyone, unable to recognize myself.
Scientists now ask this riddle and I ask you here: how much of the time do you need attunement with another to have a healthy relationship? What do you think?
Only thirty percent.
Thirty percent of all hours, waking or not, attuned with your beloved. That is all. If one-third of the time, you are dreaming, spooning, or present, aware of the other, your child, lover, friend, or reader, your gaze, heartbeat, and sympathy aligned, your loving attachment will do just fine. How are you doing? Not an innocuous question. Love requires tremendous heroism. Are you attuned? To go back to Klee: does at least one of your wings work?
What I remember
Not historic dates but lines of dialogue between new love and me, the colors of shirts he wore but not capitals, not his full lineage with its names, but I will never forget how the angle of light slanted from behind his head on the streetcorner that day before we began when we shared poems by heart, whether he sat on the left or right as we faced the ocean, not the content of misunderstanding ever, that so quickly forgotten, my survival technique, perhaps you too share it, but that I wore his dark blue sweater, feeling myself a college girl as he bent his knees at that first goodbye hug in the train station.
Errantry
Every gathering at our university
has as its suggested preamble:
I’d like to begin
this event by acknowledging
we stand
on Nonotuck land. I’d also like
to acknowledge our neighboring
Indigenous nations:
the Nipmuc and the Wampanoag to the East,
the Mohegan and Pequot to the South,
the Mohican to the West,
and the Abenaki to the North.
We are temporary in all ways,
some less justifiably.
And now it seems—to turn the focus personal—this little family is about to become a little too pro tem. What happens next? The bank seizes control of land I’ve already desecrated? X gets to gloat? Children and I move to the homeless shelter, now conveniently located two doors down?
There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present-day society: to retreat ahead of it (says Roland). Life is endlessly ingenious in multiplying opportunities for loss. Consider the tree that had been sacrificed in order for the Luftbus to enter. In the end, a great oak with roots gnarled wide, favorite shade-tree and refuge of youngest daughter, had to be sacrificed for what we termed Luft’s highway, which he called an alley, so that in case of the apocalypse, Luft our ecotenant could drive out, solar panels intact. Would you call this an example of sacrificing ends for the means?
What does Roland say about ritual sacrifice, a vertical means of understanding one’s life, seeing one’s sins go up in communal smoke?
From a course of lectures Roland gave at the Collège de France in the late seventies, on The Neutral:
Where there is
meaning, there is paradigm, and where
there is paradigm (opposition), there is
meaning . . . elliptically put: meaning rests
on conflict (the choice of one
term against another), and all conflict
is generative of meaning: to choose
one and refuse the other is always
a sacrifice made to meaning,
to produce meaning,
to offer it to
be consumed.
And what did we
lose as a culture when we
gave up ritual sacrifice?
I gave up, reader, and most days find myself looking at a heap of logs, stumps, behind which a huge tiny home looms.
Gradiva
Months into the float, college students convene. Fifteen of them press together furiously in a party room and spread glitter everywhere: numbers toll. In reaction, as Orwell might have painted it, outside the dormant giant of the ice-skating rink, squadrons of students line up, obedient, masked, gloomy. They present numbers, hold vials, follow arrows on the ground to where a nurse behind glass watches them twirl a swab in their noise, replace it in a vial, offer up numbers. They pace outside, tested twice weekly. No Gaia, no earth mother, could have imagined such a scenario. No goddess can tell us how we brought this to pass. No one feels mothered by our moment.
The gift you imagine giving the neighbor who acts as your friendly mother instructor, Vida, the one who seems to have her act together, is pumpkin pie, a simple human interaction with nature. A great umber dragon of dried leaves chases its tail at your doorstep. Thanks to travel and research into Roland, you had been able to take your daughters to see the world. In the new containment, you are glad that, even as the world shrinks to your driveway and these rampant colors of fall, you gave them the chance to see beyond your nation and town of scuttling fall leaves.
Vida shows up during this time in a multitude of ways. She organizes people for skating expeditions. Often she brings food in unbreakable dishes and offers to teach your children how to make spanakopita and other tricks in which you feel your lack of motherroot becomes obvious as an oak stump. Your car breaks down and she drives you to the auto shop, having skillfully popped out some multilayered pastry for her kids who are obediently helping set the table. On the drive, you marvel at her efficiency.
Next day, you go to the local vast market since you cannot keep up with your three children’s appetites: you are on a treadmill, offering this meal and that, vanishing quickly into their maws or the compost. You used to cook better, one says. Now we have snacks and fewer meals. But when you put great thought and care into the meals, one or another doesn’t like them, and the task becomes a highway of diminished reward (behind you, as you try working on this Roland book, one scrapes her plate). Perhaps the morning meal had been almost acceptable. Yet the glass measuring cup used to serve the puppy shattered; the puppy food must be thrown out in case glass shards cut up the dog’s intestines. Instead, you serve the dog some of the pseudogourmet meal you had tried cooking for the kids, after the toilet flooded and the excavator came too early at the ecotenant’s behest to lay the groundwork for another of his deferred dreams. Storm predicted for the weekend.
Your morning therefore had been crowded. Autumn falling, and so at the vast market you buy your neighbor both premade pumpkin pie and flowers you believe to be marigolds, with their connotation of domestic bliss and ease. In the afternoon you will give her both.
And yet you find a slice neatly cut by a child out of the gift. Not even meant to be a homemade gift; just a fresh offering. And instead all three of your daughters begin explaining, at once: one had peeked in, curious at the perfection. Crust shivered tectonically, pie imploded as a sinkhole, cardboard did not fit back into itself. Another, feral, tried to fix it by licking the center of the pie. The third then celebrated or assuaged the guilt of the other two by cutting an actual slice.
The gift to Vida who seems to have her act together: gone, licked, sliced. Such is the muscle you have been trying to build in your mind ever since the implosion of the marriage, you choose not to care. What a fabulous opportunity the world offers you: your boundaries are becoming swirled ink. Once, you were a world-traveler, no need to make borders; just move on. Here, firmly stationed, you must learn the trick: see through all walls, let it all dissolve.
Say you never learned during your time with X that a person gets to state boundaries. Instead, a nervous system might have become so dysregulated that you no longer heard the dancing skitter of leaves across a field in the fall.
Instead of the pie being
brought, it still sits in the fridge,
part of it licked by game-playing child,
a sign:
aspiration for belonging
plus the eternal incomplete.
Absence
My mother: she
was an incomplete novel.
She too invited in the surprise guest—the small element that starts to loom—a trait her granddaughters also have taken on, yet my mother, a dramatic scientist, did so in orderly fashion. Outtake, for example: the week prior to my father’s death, I’d been pleading (such had become my role in the family) for her to consider hospice for him, in the nursing home where she had him stationed. Of course such choices are understandable and yet also predictive, somehow: she had tired of his having caregivers in her house waking her at night. She confided, furthermore, that she worried, in truth, about the mess—logistical? emotional?—of a body dying at home. Solution: his dying outsourced.
Though I spoke with his doctor who also thought hospice timely—titrating the meds that soften our end—this same doctor made the mistake of leaving a message on my mother’s cell.
I then received a very upset email and voicemail, both, from her saying the following: I have no time to deal with this question of hospice in the nursing home because I’m too busy preparing for my one-woman performance at the Moosh in San Francisco on the experience of living with a dying man.
Imagine the Kafka story in which the artist keeps the dying subject alive to get content.
All that said: postmortem, I flew to see my father and his waxen head gazing up, a stone-faced Lincoln lacking comment on what he had just seen. In death, he stayed front row at a performance: outside the door, a stranger chanted ancient time-banishing ritual for him, the words life’s substitute lexicon. The muttered prayers made clear the cliché that became so obvious I had to go live it: life is no dress rehearsal.
Once and never again, says Rilke in the Ninth Elegy, once and never more. You die having delivered yourself of all gifts (eggs, other) that were yours to offer this brief life. So why care about the particulars? We perpetuate details, acting as if ledgers matter, and we must learn again in detail the joys of a thin-veined leaf, the wonder of its spiral down, even if smashed by a bus, even if your shelter lets in winds you don’t choose, this too has to be celebrated as part of the journey. So why is it so hard?
Her head
It also became incomplete, contested territory. Toward the end of her life, as mentioned, she had two thick horns atop it. Dying can turn the most flamboyant into their most feared monster.
That story of those last days:
Wilhelmina who works with her in the daytime puts oil (olive, coconut) on the horns, which Frieda, who works nighttimes, complains about.
I just want to clear my record, Wilhelmina tells me. I’m not the one putting her hair in braids, don’t listen to everyone.
Two dreadlock horns: thick
thwarted heart shapes with the
narrow point starting a half-inch
from the head, a whorl of
origin matted in a tangle of
desire unmet. This the pain
of dying, the asymmetry of desire met
by the outside world. The hair dreams of
length, the imagination of flowing
chestnut locks, the hair testifies to
all. Instead the ends find
one another, swirl, the tangle
replicating what happens inside
