Another Love Discourse, page 16
yet as psychologists say, you script your life anew.
But this thing that happened back before our ripcord quarantine,
doing yoga in an overheated bedroom at the parsonage,
when suddenly a part of my body
looked as unfamiliar to me, newly loved,
as new as the concept of a crested butte—
what is a crested butte anyway?—this is what has
started to happen now too. You are re-
membering parts of yourself, bringing them back into
the newly constellated twinkle
-fingered family of being and finding
a fresh clan moves in fresh ways.
And then time will not stop its march,
it keeps on.
Annulment
Introductions frame our hearing,
such simple profundity lives in how we meet anyone.
This light is what we look for in
marriage and love and even divorce:
to recall the cosmic stardust hope
inside all introduction.
When living in New York,
determined not to couple
with the man who became Vegas mate,
as mentioned, I organized radical picnic parties
on the Upper West Side
getting to live with only some friction the
fiction of being a Roland writer
during which huge platters of lemon
-bedecked roast vegetables
were on offer (foods of ritual sacrifice)
and there I introduced the one
whom I believed would not become (my Vegas) mate
to young lissome friends of my acquaintance
until an older strawberry-savoring friend, yet another dead this year, said
(one of several to whom I introduced X,
before leaving that friendship
so that he could feel freer to curse about me)
What about him? Why not him?
And it was true: I laughed,
X’s values were wonderful,
I knew he would be interested,
passionate, funny, and loyal
forever, whatever that meant,
plus he walked straight out
of the book of Paley.
I bring ease to noxious kitchens
and fuming bedrooms,
Paley says, carnal as ever,
one of her characters
speaking that dialect
no one understands out west.
People who have tried to live
by cross-ventilation alone have thanked me.
The problems began
when he and I could no longer
hear the other’s yearning.
Askesis
Divortere: to turn toward
other paths.
Askesis: severe self-discipline, usually for religious reasons. These two might seem to war, but here shall we try to combine them? In one of the oldest codified laws on divorce, some 1760 years before the common era back in Babylon, the king Hammurabi himself, allegedly, carved the first law on divorce into a massive black finger-shaped stone stele with some 281 other laws.
Say you were a man wishing to unravel: a simple verbal utterance sundered the union: You are not my wife. The man was then to pay a fine and return the dowry. The wife, however, had to file a complaint to obtain rupture.
Let what I write here not be reproach—that tribunal already filed in diaries—but rather, in a movement toward self-discipline, a path toward light, perhaps of use for others.
To say it straight as I can: an infective agent shot in, vigorous and bristling with possibilities of transmission. Aiming to create a daughter haven, I failed to understand the news. My newish love jumped onto a plane in March and showed up, hooded and ready to engage in the float of an imagined two-week quarantine, as if of the family. Careful, of stately cadence, but alert. So began our cohabitation.
Everything was proving untenable; great horrors mauled the world; as in certain island-nations oppressed by political regimes, the ravaging brought out, with unpredictable rhythm, the angel or devil in the populace; and meanwhile the Institute for Roland Studies slowly sank with a few bubbles of distress, my ruddy editor and his publishing house also hocking themselves to bits.
Uncoupling distracted me, a hook sunk deep in the emotive-connective tissue. How is it we keep worrying the scar tissue? How do we get so addicted to the smallness of the personal sting? I kept revisiting scenes of former yokage. And tried neither to recreate nor natter on about them. Waking flung from dreams, still rehearsing arguments with X, the jejune ego forever seeking to be right.
And every now and then X, isolated, threw one of his tantrums, making everyone unhappy—o, sad recall of his own father’s thin-lipped smile whenever he had thrown a line with enough sadism to sting son most, getting a rise out of him. X could not flee the habit, occasionally doing whatever he could to hurl flames into the new home. My task stayed to focus on the good, to avoid engagement as in a reverse courtship.
Yet still, as if a child, I would freeze, flooded, wishing to fawn: as if a child with bullies or Rick. Disbelieving: how could someone be like that? Didn’t he want our kids to have a more peaceable life? Had he not heard a thing in the parenthood classes about avoiding making them weapons? Wasn’t the world better? Didn’t he mean better? How could he accept this meanness when it arose in himself? Overhearing him speaking to a daughter: you can tell your goddamn mother I saw her note. But his moods and impulses had semi-predictable cycle, and here lived the rub: no gnostic binaries of good/evil separated him from the rest of humanity; he had his good days.
Seeing in him any quality meant I was forced to see the same in myself: Vegas mate and his toddler swagger in a dark mirror. And here I have written myself into a corner.
Having bitten off more than you can chew, so goes the saying, but chewing more than you can bite stays our more common habit. People outside the culture industry don’t always understand how very flimsy are the joists that hold up the house for writers and opiners. Hope to keep the warmth going for newly built family through a cold New England winter with fires stoked, no manuscripts burnt yet, yet the furnace grows impatient, rocking its metal feet.
Consider the premise of the womb: some rush out, others fight to stay in a bit longer like my three daughters, who rejected their first zone of uncertainty: thresholds have never been their friends.
Emerging into the unknown, this period of catastrophe requires this negative capability from all of us: accepting unhinging and continuing to believe in the illusion of the firm. (Is it any mistake that the firmament, a heaven, is made of sky and unreachable?)
Some Buddhists say the chance of being born into a human incarnation is equivalent to the probability of a sea a sea turtle rising from ancient watery depths into a small golden yoke randomly placed on the surface of the water: so lucky to be born human!
And so too you could recognize: we are so lucky to have all landed here, to be on this journey together. Your new love does not believe in reincarnation but when pressed will say he might have been a raccoon, big patient eyes, active hands. Or a hard-working mother of the Levant with ten children, who, when labors are done, goes to a nearby hillock to wonder at the night sky.
When it comes to thresholds: who are you? How do you play it out? How to make this moment’s crossing toward a new path illumined as a beautiful scimitar curved under the moon?
Leaving the small Chinese-goods grocery, let us say you find two masked girls emerging from the next-door establishment. You might be struck by the way they investigate the backs of their hands, as if to see a moon reflected, as one does in the ancient astrolabe ritual closing the sabbath, when one aims to see the braided candle’s flame reflected in one’s nails, the grand in the small particular. Any of us might hope to see our future in the now.
But no. Their moment’s deep intent study has to do with this simple truth: they just got their nails done, luminescent pearly white, French tips, a particular act of self-grooming which brings some joy: two caught, deeply caring, in a parallel so tight it almost spells perfection. Firmament: the apparent surface of the imaginary sphere on which celestial bodies appear to be projected. No amount of self-discipline can get you there. Is it possible to train your mind to dwell only on the beauty of what is before you? Your three daughters and beau eating cauliflower curry soup together on a night in which the house is warm enough: could such a moment of domestic bliss be enough?
Reverberation
Some twenty-two centuries after Hammurabi, X and I had our working out of an agreement toward divorce, led up to in intermittent sessions with one acute mediator, our lawyer with her forehead broad and mouth quirked at the exact angle to contain all human foible.
Though I come from salt-miners, no ancestor could have poured more salt into the wound. Still I commend to anyone who needs it such collaborative sundering: the one-lawyer divorce.
That lawyer with her quick mind and searchlight clarity! Despite the mire of picayune detail, she led us, wading through and beyond.
And so we were not exactly free from the fireweed and thornbush of human interaction but got to glimpse a tiny clearing ahead.
In the caste system of modern life, exactly what regal temperament or dint of birth qualifies someone to be a divorce mediator? Can you imagine yourself waking with buoyant step each day and bearing fresh soap, stepping into a shower, only to emerge clean and ready to sit in closed rooms with your share of couples disentangling, each with their own inner mustering, their own scales for war and peace?
In 1519, young Martin Luther began writing on marriage, only a year or so after he had pinned his Ninety-five Theses on the Wittenberg church door, his version of Hammurabi’s carved 282. When he began his revolutionary writings on coupling, Luther argued that marriage should be for love and companionship as well as for procreation and that it is, for most people, a better choice than celibacy.
What I first understood from scholars and believed notable: it took Luther three years of being married to begin writing about divorce; you could say sola scriptura flowed from sole fide.
Yet my ruddy editor, well-partnered, happened to believe the exact opposite: that it took Luther three years after starting to write of divorce to sacrifice celibacy, wed, and by most accounts go on to live the life of a happy husband.
Who errs? I turned toward an early divorce in the American colonies: 1650, Herodias Long, a wonderfully wayward woman notorious for fierce self-advocacy—perhaps you have met her heirs—bearing an entitlement both geographic and emotional. But when is geography not emotional? (When you have dissociated long enough from the earth.)
Some say the peculiarity of American marriage and divorce springs from the way Luther’s heirs turned marriage from sacrament to contract, regulated by magistrate rather than priest. If historians no longer consider the Reformation the hinge on which history turned, nonetheless something protestant tinged the New England springtime day we banished sentiment, a cool legal asperity marking release from our life together.
We were losing
something. To declare
an end will always be
artificial. Of course
memory and grief will always
know a particular
eternity.
To have realized all those years ago, in our first five minutes of meeting, that history had conspired against us, that each was never meant to be—forget my mother’s use of Ivory soap to prevent my existence as her second child, it was also true that both our fathers were born in a small Australian outback town, some years apart, which meant those ready to hoist our families by apocryphal horns had failed. Both families contained, removed, and murdered in this century, the last century and even before, yet somehow no circumstance could slay whatever led to our standing in line at a convenience store in a campus town, our first meeting, his two hot dogs for a dollar, my huge ice coffee for the same, and then our later walk within that dripping summer which led to an outdoor New England lurid-green concert because we seemed to have a friend in common. So it began.
Cosmic destiny, Vegas mate would later say. We were not supposed to have met and borne these children, our ancestors defying all history of aggression, yet our three grew under our yoke of struggle, in rancor-laced cheer, as if we all remained in prior centuries, as if all had not been blasted into our ostensibly new world.
You fulfilled your old-world karma with him, says my friend the buddhist, you burnt off the peasant, prisoner, pogrom karma.
Whatever magic the broad-faced divorce lawyer managed to apply led to the cold puritan day outside an actual court building. Compliant as our slain forebears, we lined up with others ready for an odd moment of community. Sentiment flourished. Hoping to hold on to a vision of our future lives in which our family lived out its happier twinkly-fingered new constellation, I gave Vegas mate my own little eulogy, a page from a legal pad, speckled with praise, apology, remorse. As if we would never speak again. And in return, later, he gave me a scrap, a hasty epitaph with scabbed letters saying something of touching simplicity, to this effect:
R.D., sorry I spoke about you so badly
always to our daughters and everywhere to everyone else.
This apology contained a legion of misfired speech, our arguments, the way I publicly became the butt of his jokes, in the vein of that midcentury comedian’s line: take my wife, please. I appreciated the note all the more when, soon after our unraveling, I gave a few lectures on Roland around the States and one by one people came up to me after each and said—after the first time, it became less shocking: thank god you’re not with him, X always talked so badly about you to everyone, complained of you, sucked air out of every room, never understood why you were with a narcissist who made everything about himself—he blamed you for his life. In protest, my psyche shot up holographic scenes of his tenderness, the burred mournful palpation of his being, and that his brain probably could not control the way his 1950s-imprinted era and father’s temper had left such watermarks on him. Just because someone is kind to you some of the time, that’s not enough—you want a mate who is always kind, said a friend, seeing my younger self unfettered and joyous in those early mud-caked honeymoonish photos.
Of those photos, Roland would say I participated in the code of appearing to be the beloved. When are we ever free of such codes? You reading this also wish to belong to a code: the reader is beloved, the lover, the one who seeks love. How do we escape them? Why do we always fall blind to the codes of others and believe we are creating our own way of being, a strange legacy of our individualistic time?
Back in the hallway of divorce court, awaiting our turn inside, X and I sat on hard wooden benches as if out on a date, joking (a moment in which we were kind). A short bald man left a room, still arguing with his tall orange-haired ex-wife. We would not be those people, no, not the Lockhorns, that forever-fighting couple with the scary horrible square chins from my childhood’s Sunday comics. Whoever they were, we would not be them. We would observe decorum. So much of marriage orients toward twin polestars, good faith and right effort, and toward these, in our last moment, we aimed.
Until entering a courtroom made of women. Until hearing the utter narrowing-in toward the one question, asked by the female judge whose reputation had called her an ethical dealer.
Are you sure she asked us—the last time we would be us beyond any reasonable doubt we both shifted are you sure that you have worked and tried every last thing
Imagine! every last thing?
to keep this marriage alive?
When in life have you known that you have done every last thing to keep something alive?
In that room of women, I teared up. Could that be an answer? The unmothered, hardest-working part of me had chosen an unmothering, hard-working marriage.
Overwork at the marriage and in the world as a twisted means of mothering the outside and the self: such had been my prayer of nonserenity.
Reader, in that courtroom, whatever I had been: I did dissolve.
The incommensurability of inner reality welled up against the limits of speech: what can one never say? Would love always be work? Would love work out for any of us, all of us?
That this courtroom happened to be in New England, in the biggest cobblestoned town closest to the country green of our first outing, o drippy outdoor first-date summer concert, the upstate country to which New Yorkers must escape, how mimsy were those borrowed groves, the life of easeful love a grove ending up not ours. The geographic proximity almost coincidental. We ended up where we began; the serpent swallowed its tail but the cycle would not end, not yet.
We returned to this town towing third daughter. Anything but Vegas stayed an adopted rural realm where Vegas mate never felt at home, as he said, too far from his own birth paradise, too far from any real city.
Roland would appreciate the way Vegas codes had helped Vegas mate: he had grown up in the big-spending tuxedo’d-waiter city of the fifties and after, the remaking of the town in which people spoke in a way that made his own way of speaking make sense. His mother a nurturing lipsticked waitress, his father a blackjack dealer turned pawnbroker, he could not help it, he said, his life filled with brusqueness and the limiting views which justify it; it has been documented that even pigeons squawk more quickly in Vegas.
