Another Love Discourse, page 15
boundaries, their voices
strong, who know how to
move through the physical world?
My eyes filled with images. Though I
was a painter through most of college,
the faulty dexterity of my
hands protested. All that stapling
of canvases! The caring for the
physical. The order demanded.
. Next to me in class, the future
art-world star crawled with muscle-beach’s vaseline
slathered over his careful gym-toned model’s
back, readying himself for finicky
curators and the aperture of future
success. You ask yourself
at such moments: how is such exertion
art, how does it solve anyone’s
problems, why do the chattering
classes chatter? What the public wants is
the image of passion, not passion itself, says Roland, and
also that the New is not a fashion, it is a value.
Can we say half of art comes
from anxiety, the other half from play?
Something is missing
in the universe, you feel a hole,
you attempt to patch up your old mud-
house in a new way.
Or you see its beauty and you do
what you can to enter the party.
It is not mere romantic belief
to feel we create art to order
chaos and so head
toward the sublime. The bowerbird
arranges its nonessential art
and mystifies scientists. The infant
makes pattycakes with her
potatoes. Genet loves the smell
of his bespattered bedsheets.
We wish to speak to others,
to touch as we have been
touched, create some kind of
mark: we matter, we mattered.
if you are raised
with the code of loyalty over
autonomy, you will have a different
dance in the workplace,
our contemporary site of passion, (no longer
family, community, religion).
When at work or in life you bump up against people
who do not wish to offer, receive, or ask for help, you will
find your expectations bruised, and it all goes back to that first
family code: loyalty (Old World, interdependence,
easy exchange of favors and help) versus the maverick
code of autonomy (New World, manifest destiny,
self-protection). Roland says:
This is what we are told
by a folk poem which accompanies
these Japanese dolls: Such is life
Falling over seven times
And getting up eight.
All these efforts I have done to create
mother around me:
forever stuck
in labor.
Fall rather than ask for help. Be fuzzy rather than clear.
What does it mean to have a drawer
marked miscellaneous in your psyche? Mama
doesn’t struggle with anxiety
like I do, says eldest daughter to my new beau
and to this (regulated as he is) he smiles with the knowing
of my first grotto crush.
Do people well-mothered not
wake with this little bowstring
of nerves? Does the world feel
well-barred, preventing break-ins? Are things less slithery?
Objects flying away.
There is a Giacometti image I love: a man
in a room, every point on the contour of
his being touching a corner of the room.
Which is why it became such a pleasure,
one particular morning before the ripcord,
to rise and have as background
this song of his, one my new beau performed across
the continent the night before—I heard the deadstream,
sonic particles waking me—
his fine grace welcoming everyone, his mention of
snacks at the end, finding myself stirred not just by
the music but by the fact of his ease in
the world, his warm
understanding of what a moment needs.
He too like me learned at some point what it
means to perform to be loved, or what it
means to feel unsafe. And yet
was he born
with a greater birthright of internal ease?
An avatar of love. Yet we have
this emotional congruity, which I first
discovered when we were on a beach,
for a day, he visiting
a scholarly conference with his mother
in California the day before
a brief trip which changed my life—
which made me see the world as having two choices: the technicolor overburdened struggle of those who would make the desert bloom?
Or the void, blessed
by the ancient caryatid with translucent wings, an amethyst head.
Reader, I chose the void.
And then had pleasure emerge.
As if I stumbled into the exact hall of
pleasures that was the inverse of the
marriage. Each time I was sad,
I must have dropped a tinsel
coin into the future that now became mine.
And then what do you reach for?
Intimacy
In lonely years, married, when everyone else seemed to be in love or loving or just feeling good, when pop songs and celebrities seemed like Greek gods frolicking in an empyrean I would never reach, I must have subscribed somewhere to something which ended up meaning that I got the sex email newsletter of someone I will call Rafina. While I blocked her, I somehow still get her exhortations. She traffics in grandly nurturant carnality: Darling! Sugar! I just had the most explosive Orgasm with Jimbo. The lovable aspect of the benign narcissist.
Rafina is filled with herself, confiding in her ideal audience as her waist does this little figure-eight dance while she tells us how to lead the embodied life, supporting herself with an odd striptease of intimacy from the tropical island of explosion on which she seems to live. She could be from Germany or Suriname, but what is constant is her self-regard, well performed, clearly a lucrative business: her missives enter my email box with a regular orgasm of self-revelation which our time might encourage (and which I fear this text, jouissant or not, becoming.) What does her young son think? We live in the time of such exhortation toward intimacy, and I am not immune to what Roland would call such Values.
They have become my shield
even as I hope to bring the loved one
(of art) near, our greater story about art
(love) nearest of all.
And Jonathan said to David, go peacefully, given how much we have both sworn within
the name of mysterious creation, saying our bond will forever stretch between the two of us,
between our two lines forever. And he rose and left for the realm of all busy labor.
Clouds
A story you need
to tell means you
are not apologizing
for existing.
In the weekly heir calls in which you find yourselves reenacting the family dynamic, you find yourself resorting to the greatest trick: the great invisibility act of your childhood. If you were invisible, you couldn’t be bullied. And so you don’t speak and when you do it is a rush of words, tight and maybe wiry and over-caffeinated, because you don’t want to take up more than your due and the longer you’re in the open air, the more likely your neck will be throttled or at least false stories will be projected upon you. He is an older uncle, says someone, as if that explains Uncle Rick. But you have friends who are older uncles who do not take up space with the same entitlement.
What is your survival brain trying to protect by obsessing or judging?
Fear or need. The fear of being squashed. The need to stay safe. Judging, you create bad magic, as in a fairytale tower’s fence of vines sprung up around the self.
If you were on your deathbed, what would you want to have been your legacy? Connection, love, service, generosity, great works of art that moved people to think or see or feel or be able to articulate differently.
But why differently? The rock tumbles into the river and so the course of the river is altered. Does alteration matter?
And yet how tired you are, as if
pregnant for the first time with a new self.
Why
Roland lists modes of waking: sad, wracked (with tenderness), affectless, innocent, panic-stricken. For a time, I wake each morning with my mind rehearsing argument with X, who found one part of life spark in being a contrarian.
Oppositional defiance disorder finds life-force in argument, and can be carried by genes. Much easier to offer diagnosis than empathy, both a means of returning toward respect. You can feel for the situation that caused X to suffer, traumatic brain injury as a child or when a casino bouncer, or perhaps all that his genes carry. How much you would like to stay open-hearted.
All meditations tell one to rest easy in the great embrace, but when dissociation has been your bedmate, you wake to the great O of absence you cannot fill: what is missing, as Germans would say, was ist los?
How many ways have I failed to provide a safe home? Is it impossible? No writing shed ever really finished in which to finish this book on Roland that will never be written. No safety. A polite temporary tenant who turned out to be a drug dealer. Our ecotenant, the trees with thick branches that wish to fall on our roof, such anthropocene problems.
Where was my first mistake?
Show me whom to desire
Now I am with the person who forever questions conventional assignations: self, other, world, gender, parenthood, redemption.
Every time I assign a role, he riddles it.
Why was whoever I have been always working? That person was escaping (toward another future in which work was not required) or burning out (hocked by the past for the future.) Both scenarios create a huge helium balloon of the self. You imagine the self as being someone who will survive better if you just work a little harder.
The same is true with these binary definitions: man/woman—in a relationship/out of it.
And yet when you leave a relationship, to yourself, to your former mate, to your former ideas of overwork, the demon you must face is your own dependency on the former constructions.
Why is working hard such a sanctioned part of our current consciousness? Because on one particular continent, a few believed in manifest destiny: never rest, tame the outside world, let inner grace be revealed by the extent to which you splay yourself over the outer!
Work hard and avoid your inner caverns. Imagine everyone is so endlessly dependent on you, your life feels as if it might become (only) that of giving to others. Give up your own gameboard and wonder why you are playing at all.
After the break-in and knife-to-the-throat incidents, of all people Rick, so frequently wise, there’s the rub, said: Take greater precautions as he had taught me so well you need to recall the body deserves care because without your body your soul has no vessel.
Your spirit needs your body intact. Do most of us need reminders to recall the body deserves care enough to hold spirit? When one daughter is upset, she sings the praises of dissociation, but finds it odd that her mind then attacks her body. The center can only sometimes hold.
Ravishment
Roland spoke of spirit moving through body with such rapture: in a new relationship, neither knows the other yet. Hence they must tell each other: ‘This is what I am.’ This is narrative bliss, the kind which both fulfills and delays knowledge, in a word, restarts it. In the amorous encounter, I keep rebounding—I am light.
In America in the 1920s, the movement called meliorism had people chanting this mantram every day:
every day in every way I get better and better.
Reroute the brain and all is better. But if you find it hard to surrender the concept of yourself as an asylum seeker in the land of love, a love refugee, do you have this choice? (And in the background plays music about glacial music, not unlike newish beau’s, making the question itself a joke.)
This music that beau cares about suggests that our main truth rests in slowness, a view of prehistory and later apocalypse. That we may attend to the small gritty data of our living. We may care for the samsara in which our monkeyminds like to frolic. We do well to attend each vine and vein in every leaf while at the same time knowing how mountains see beyond us.
And so in the speed of my messy room with the cabinet that does not work, which beau said I just had to bang shut, I try to see the glacial movements of this moment, to arrive, to choose this state.
The happiest older women I know, even concentration camp survivors, call their state of mind a choice. Each has said to me, in so many ways: you must make the choice of happiness, you must savor the strawberry. They swivel their hard-working hips when music comes on, they feel ravished by the joy of the unexpected visitor.
Many non-huckster preachers will say our problem is we always strive: that it is good just to note arriving, arrival, arrived. To bask in this moment now. My dear friend who struggles in her long marriage says she has learned such savoring to be the key to sexuality. She strives to do all she can to cherish the good, focus on it, expand it, dilate it, let it be everything. Simulatedt: the typo a visual poem. Bring everything inside, you might find the good.
Yet some of us experience the greatest stress in sameness, and novelty becomes the precipice over which we hurl ourselves with abandon, some genetic latticework making us heed most acutely the risk of new pleasure.
The problem with the routine of cleaning one’s room is that while order may be a mother, it is not the evolutionary focus of vitality unless one anoints the act with the concept of love which is always self-renewing, as if one could be Roland’s lover importuning him for the first time.
I hate cleaning my room, middle daughter says, it is an act which leaves me terrified and my existence emptied. Once I cleaned youngest daughter’s room so thoroughly and she came back to say: I don’t know myself, I am lost. And proceeded to mess it up again in exactly the way that made her know herself best within a friendly animal den.
The Californian mystics
would say: imbue
the act of cleaning with
attention.
When Vegas mate and I were trying to have our children nest—to stay in the same old house while the separating/divorcing parents moved in and out—I came distressed into the mess of the old home, as if finding another robbers’ break-in of the house, as if finding all they had smashed and left lying about, and spent two full days cleaning our communal nest. How not to resent their father? How to do it with love?
A friend said: call it a new contract. With this act, I am freeing myself of the old contract, I am thanking the world, I am beginning afresh, I am loving my children, I am creating a space for the new peace we will all know. Could this be the new ritual sacrifice? Abandon the inner skeptic. Chant and intone intention. Let the old acts configure themselves on a new gameboard: trust the banality of the act, take a new journey, spell yourself anew.
Encounter
The oddest part of finding another person’s
sexuality after years of having been with a different person
is that it is like a garden with a wholly different door and key,
as if one were indeed Alice having fallen.
You see that, ah, they like to linger under this mushroom
and then they like to suddenly take flight after this toadstool
and then you are sitting at a long table
and prating about this and that which really has nothing to do
with anything allowed at any former table,
and in fact the table is not even a table as such,
it is floating over Towsley Canyon near Los Angeles, hovering,
and then you see two deer stop and eye you
as if they understand who you are in the great mating dance,
you feel a part of nature with this person in
the way that X, though a nature-lover, was more
a part of cities.
But then there is this to remember:
your newer love, you rode behind him on
a bicycle in Berlin at night, a city he knew,
watching his back, and you knew you had arrived
somewhere you had not even dreamed possible.
It is not that long misery creates joy.
Of course there had been joy in the marriage, and by
declaring annulment, it was as if
you acceded to some master narrative
which said yes, there was no joy, now this is the new script—
