Another Love Discourse, page 12
to the ganglia of a mind
fed by cannabis and the untwisted noose
of poppy petals.
Morphine is the best: it doesn’t knock her out anymore, she can still converse.
What a long dying does often—not always—is bring out the singularity of the person. In this case: mother’s sweetness, a hopeful young girl forever ready for the party, lower teeth jutting forward as if thereby she could catch life, chew off some last twist. This the stilled underbite she used after someone complimented her, or at any bliss, the lower part of her face bunching with the joy of a squirrel, the smiling clenched kisser, eyes lustrous, loving shared pleasure. A face used when recognizing some silliness of both self and world but also when noting the world was there to savor. Teeth not especially straight or white. The relic of the childhood she did not have, the life which (thwarted) mother hoped might be hers, a mother whose thimblework helped with the quick patch-up job. Mother’s tender older sister, honey running in her veins, stayed in the nation’s heart and lived the dream of (thwarted) mother. Her swimming pool was paid for by clipping coupons, as caustic-tongued grandmother explained. Mother’s sister lived the dream: offering an unthwartable gift of local clans, battalions of great-great-grandchildren. A vast world swarming with weekly metabolism: games, sports, meals. The glisten of pool outside, and inside, a pool table flanked by twinkling well-thumbed glass jars of jellybeans. Sister knitted and crocheted, received (unthwarted if conditional) love, created perfumed champions with straightened noses
and white teeth with only the grandchildren divorcing. Families usually have only one black sheep. What my mother has in her dying: new wisdom.
She gazes distantly. I tell her, without going into the kind of detail she loves, the pith and tang she repeats back, some of the stories she has told me of her childhood. Only school offered her true love and horizon, a place to be recognized.
O yeah, she says, winsome and hopeful as if brushing up against a distant wraith of self, a figure flitting on the moors.
Toward death, you recognize the lineaments of rewards that have come your way.
And can elide the failings. What you have inferred and then come to know: poor mother had been caught touching herself and (in the grips of thwarting) her mother asked diligent father to hold the girl down so as to paint fire—mercurochrome—pouring it on groin and down her legs so that young mother’s walk to and from school became a walk of shame. See mother as a young girl then: head held high, tall and straight in handsewn skirt with unwashable crimson streaked down the back of her knees above scrimped-for American bobbysocks and the penance: having to answer questions all day. Flee, don’t desire: that could be the legacy.
This story my mother only told me upstate, long after I was the age she was when she had me. Angelic, she showed up after the birth of third daughter, sitting there rocking as I nursed. For once, needing to find out how the cord of maternity had been cut, the grisly, evil sentence, I queried.
And to mother’s credit, umbilicus clipped, she still wished to spare kids her own suffering and rarely criticized, offering instead, as for many guests, the philanthropy of a house with her absent. The motherroot cut and so I had to pull out the story: who had done what to whom. What made early childhood hard. Bitterness of mercurochrome. At some point in her mirrored room, the room in which she will die, I arrange a bouquet before her, flowers passionate, crimson, redemptive.
O yeah, my mother says, as if bashful at their beauty, with the exact softness of a young girl.
Performance, war
Nights lubed and epoxied toward
dawn, a performance and war
take place in the same zone:
for no one but me, choreographed
by the oddities of human
quirk and history, in a privately
darkened room, a wild struggle.
This skirmish with victories and
war announcements takes place
between the bony calves
of mother and the angel
named Frieda with her gloved nighttime hands:
both are hard-working presences. On the side of the legs, testament
to mother’s decades of work
as an Oakland civil servant,
insurance grants mother this last
gift, the chance to hire caregivers.
Frieda came through her own hard childhood and kept finding
herself going up the chain in corporations, in offices,
but instead prefers to be her own nighttime boss-angel
and work with the dying, she says,
I like to be useful and your mother’s still
useful, she should still live.
Her hands slide up and
down with unguent drawn
from the teats of sheep.
The lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
In that psalm of David, the sheep
find themselves splayed face-down in
the field, delighting in and
accepting their limitations.
Sunset Boulevard
Like a caul of grace, some great astounded humility has come over my mother. Perhaps she has accepted the basic sheepishness of humanity. We graze and savor, we move on, we pause in wonder.
And so she submits, grateful, to the warm ministrations of Frieda, who does good while narrating all that she does (no different than any writer, an echo). Is a deed good if it is not narrated? Maimonides says the second highest charity, among all strata, is generosity given anonymously; the highest rank occurs when you help someone to be self-sufficient and no longer in need of charity. Perhaps Frieda’s narration has more to do with a quirk of her church and less with herself. Your mother is finally so happy, she is dancing with her dead husband, Frieda will sing at the wake, doing a cha-cha to demonstrate mother freed of earthly care.
But before all that, something drops into the world predawn, such a strange quantity, a pair in mortal combat. I wake at 3 am and for my passerby hearing, Frieda strenuously rehearses what she is doing, vicious spasms of movement as she raises the leg, sets it down, her commentary thus: Sugar, let’s show your daughter here what we do here! The skeleton legs obey, rotors of joints, my mother prone, staring up as if a wreath of crumpled flowers hang over her and she cannot have her attention veer off, a woman motionless but forever striving toward a goal. Sugar, let’s show what Frieda does with you EVERY MORNING! The legs bend and straighten. The truth (as was often the case for me with my mother) is that I lack stamina for viewing (every) performance of love.
Around the dying, I have learned, you often find a certain kind of person gathered close, the moth-eaten hunger of someone hoping to be recognized. This being as true of me as any visitor. Because death is so asymmetrical, one needs to feel affirmed by at least one set of eyes, which are, depending on one’s belief system: worldly, divine, neighborly, self-congratulatory.
I am visiting
the dying, I am helping
the dying, the dying
saw me.
Those of us born into motherlack may know it as a hole in the solar plexus, anaclitic depression, or achievement hunger, and so my mother huddled with me in belonging to the tribe of poorly mothered daughters. In a poverty-stricken immigrant ghetto, her own clever mother would have preferred to be a journalist, someone hard at work at a typewriter, using that caustic wit to incite revolt, but instead lost herself in sharp-tongued gossip at the canasta table.
This grandmother lost the universality of kindness along the way. She had four children, pitting kind eldest daughter against the other three: my mother the one who got farthest away, using mind as passport; another sweet sister, burnt by critique, lost a son, loved other children, tended frogs in her enamored palm and ate herself to death; a brother so favored he ended up in jail for cleverness, the one for whom the state of Mississippi changed its blackjack laws, and that friend of his, the wingman who became my unblood uncle Rick. Who among them counts as black sheep?
As my mother gets made up for the visit of the hospice man—the Baptist chaplain whom Frieda calls mother’s boyfriend, with his earring in one ear, divorce and four kids part of his precociously world-weary baggage, who says that she, too, has become his friend—my mother’s smile becomes that of the winsome haloed debutante her mother wished her to be, the one raised high in the photo by fraternity boys who voted her their black-ringleted jewess queen. Deep into a last myth that will keep her alive much longer, the monster of desire offering its final gift, my mother narrates the arrival of the hospice chaplain as her date coming to pick her up:
He likes to come see me, to talk of theater and friendship. He has other people and things to do but he likes to see me, it is practically as if every time he wants to have a party with me. And more: we are having a party all the time together! He is always with me!
I tell her, as in Sunset Boulevard, she is ready for her close-up. She misremembers the film, quotes another, her bird-boned hand creeping up her neck, and six months later it turns out she was mostly right.
His voice on the phone echoes as if through a tunnel: I loved your mother. There are always certain patients whose being is much bigger than whatever life they have left. Doesn’t matter the time you had with them he chokes you love them forever.
Festivity
Why did birthdays so matter in our family? A chance to be called out from the collective. A chance to be seen for your birth alone. Some hearkening back to old-timey nostalgia. A chance to do it differently.
My mother’s favorite game:
a string strung over everyone, mouths gaping at marshmallows strung at different heights. The mother jiggles the master string, mouths gape. This of her mothering habits you retained for your own kids’ birthdays. Marshmallows and pretzels, the food going to the mouth of the most eager aspirant.
This game resembled her wake, the shiva: one almost didn’t know she wasn’t there. We gaped, we consorted, we felt her nearby: you can find comfort in such a game.
Gradiva
The hero of Gradiva is an excessive lover; he hallucinates what others would merely evoke (says Roland), and the object of this love, she, she enters into it a little.
She consents to play the part of Gradiva, to sustain the illusion somewhat and not to waken the dreamer too abruptly, gradually to unite myth and reality, by means of which the amorous experience assumes something of the same function as an analytic cure.
We try to play the role without precedent of script, the constructed family of new material; every other week three children and dog, chaos and laughter descend. (There are scripts for such schedules, the horrific new learning of divorce algebra premised on emotion, all of which we rejected: such as 4,4,7,2, as in four days on with kids, four days off, seven days on, two days off, every number marking the length of 24-hour periods with which those who came from my body can be with me. Week on, week off—did it not seem simpler? And ours was called a collaborative divorce, using only one lawyer, those sessions tense in a small lit room as we aimed for composure while I sought to recognize the generosity in which I had wished to believe all those years.)
Then Jonathan said to David, really, whatever
your soul desires, I will
especially do it
for you. So that David said
to Jonathan, look, how about tomorrow
the new moon when I cannot fail
to sit with the king
as he grinds away at his meat: but instead I will
go, I know how to hide
myself in the field
(and you might meet me)
(can I be met?)
Consider that in their new roles everyone must balance delicate teacups on thin trays on their heads; given the collective wish that new beau’s be a featherweight presence during what also happens to be the time of our float. New beau holes up in front room with organ, accordion, and kitchenette where Luft first lived, love hiding so that no one feels too chafed. He is good at making himself a light presence, and affection for him flows, yet the strafing starts, my body become a battlebridge over which energies tramp. We have in our future a land of ease, yet sometimes it seems too much to hope for armistice or even détente; I cannot help my vigilance about how the daughters feel. The divorce came about in large part because in our old home, there was no refuge for me simply to get to be a mother with them.
We are all getting along, says new beau (skewing toward the positive and picturesque as late father did). You are stressed by how everyone is getting along (says eldest daughter, by contrast), last year you were a jungle cat, you were better. In her last year of high school, in our strangest moment, she is prone to metarecognition. You and I, we do talk, we talk all the time.
What do we talk about (I ask, as if predicting amnesia. The most recent science says that if neuroticism pairs with high conscientiousness, you can possibly bystep late-life decline even though no one gets out of here wholly unscathed).
In the kitchen you and I talk of my father (to my chagrin, the addiction rears its head), in the dining room we talk of food.
That’s it?
You need to get back to caring for yourself (she says). This year you are fire and air, you need more water. You need to start an orphanage in Portugal! You need to worry less about who is getting along with whom. The friend says: All your problems are with the earth element—how you create good structure for the family.
It will be said to the lover (says Roland) or to Freud: it was easy for the false Gradiva to enter somewhat into her lover’s delirium, she loved him too. Had I imagined too forcefully we could all live together peaceably?
Vouloir-saisir
In the middle
of a different tournament—
the argument—based
on early childhood
trauma, I learned it
worked to
go possum.
Play dead;
have Stockholm
syndrome, identify with
the captor.
As Roland says, considering
Dante’s concept
of the Vita Nova,
a poetic and narrative form
to express love and mourning:
Two contradictory paths are possible:
Liberty, Hardness, Truth
(to reverse what I had been)
or
2) Laxness, Charity
(To stress what I had been)
To freeze, to go dead, to give
up, partially to reverse!
To not let the soft animal of
your body love what it
loves, as everyone
quotes the contemporary poet,
but instead to let the soft pink
fog of dissociation
roll down my front:
this had most often been
the unchosen pick
of long marriage,
the opposite of ultimatum.
To disown.
To sever body from head.
The unstated middle way
of the Vita Antiqua:
my old life.
Not liberty/hardness/truth
nor laxness/charity.
Just dissolve!
Free to anyone!
You could go foggy at front and let your back become a carapace, stiff as Kafka’s own beetle or roach, however one translates Ungeziefer—monstrous vermin, an animal unfit for sacrifice, from the proto-Germanic tibra.
Offering, sacrifice, victim. You might let your body become these things. And afterward, call yourself survivor, not victim. Or, taking cues from the pink fog, call yourself nothing, since dissociation offers such ultimate pleasure: you feel nothing but the numbing of your nonchoice.
Was marriage Hobson’s unchosen pick or Occam’s razor? Did we think we were making the simplest choice for which our epigenetics equipped us? Was it Zeno’s paradox, the arrow never quite reaching its mark? As if one day those arguments would achieve actual release. A happy ending, as a red-light masseuse might say?
I thought we would be like two cats in a bag punching it out, Vegas mate said somewhat disconsolately, also handing me a touching note of apology for talking badly about me all those years to everyone, in the corridor of divorce court where I had teared up after the female judge asked her most terrible final question (wait for it, a query required by law). Memory torques, that faulty corkscrew releasing venomous vapor.
Of course you can make any relationship work. But at what cost? Parts of my body had started to be cut off with scientific method. It seemed high time to leave parts in the trap—Roland’s abandoned rib!—and for the sake of all (daughters, me, even Vegas mate-in-his-better-future) to move on. I didn’t feel I had survived childhood to end up unfit to live for my kids.
You divorced so you could be happier, youngest daughter said, angry at the start, accusing me of the crime of being for my self. Running on a landscape from the cloud of selfishness. Hillel says: if I am not for myself, who will be for me? but also if I am only for myself, who am I?
After trauma, they say, travel forward. Establish gratitude practices. Say thank you to each morning and meanest flower, the universal wind, the tallest tree, stray leafshorn twig. Thank you, light, shadow, gnostic binaries, thank you conflict that lets me appreciate what I have now, syntagm, thank you for all that led me here, healthy, with children in this house, unusual boy tenants, these sheds.
