Another Love Discourse, page 19
Flattered and honored to hold such a place in his realm. Until the oddest moment, the ripcord encouraging brute honesty:
Well, R.D., what do you feel toward me?
I’ve always had love for you.
No. Say it. Say: I love you!
He reminded me of an unfortunate story: that he had asked me to marry him on a street soon after I had graduated college but I didn’t fully reme-mber until the moment came back I thought you were joking to which he said I asked you lightly to protect myself, but we’d been together and it is customary—people marry—you were a person graduating from college—I asked—
And he continued (my past self so skilled at presenting reasons for present self to ridicule it) you said, Lots of people have asked me.
I did? (Horrified.) That’s so heartless. I think I had the model of a male artist—that I had to go out and be in the world.
He has given up being a film director, having owned a small diner at the edge of a ski resort. At sixty-three, he is applying to grad school in anthropology. Once he had been more connected to others, in a fraternity, with friends; an entire existence can pass. I’m different, he says.
I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one, Roland says. If he is on some spectrum, so am I, the term spectrum disorder not so common when long-ago beau and I commenced. Perhaps together we created my lifelong romantic spectrum. Sharing experience and thinking deeply inside, I believed, was that not enough?
Roland confesses: I thought I was suffering from not being loved, and yet it is because I thought I was loved that I was suffering; I lived in the complication of supposing myself simultaneously loved and abandoned.
Catastrophe
A mother dies and everyone is aflame with advice. The way the heirs should take care of the physical assets should become a child’s game. Take turns! One person, then another, colored dots with chemical glue you can—just like that!—affix to sentiment: each person claims something. The greater value rests in the memory. The things do not carry memory. Just let go. The people who say this do not lack for material goods. And yet do you really want your life to be about this project management? Especially when it’s not a tight relation.
Do you think your non-uncle Rick will end up homeless? It is not impossible. He had ended up suing others or being sued, the story kept twisting its codes, biting its own tail, so that he ended up back in your mother’s house, awaiting the last suitors to pay him off but somehow he ended up near-destitute, claiming his stay was for her own good. An unfunny uncle, present at all the wrong times. As with anyone, he had his benign sides, that damp cloth he lay on your fevered forehead, the old-fashioned red hot-water bottle for your belly, the insistence on wiping a mirror down, but after the death of your mother, as with your divorce and X, many come up to you to say that Rick is mentally ill. So smart he seems, you cannot quite believe it.
How great is Rick’s metacognition about everyone else, prone to citing platitudes: you almost cannot believe that a man so clever in mustache and trenchcoat, hiding in habits of an Italian opera aficionado, his chess-playing café now virtual, could be off-kilter; now he spends most of his time a bit stunted, beating teens in Kiev or Taiwan.
What is mental illness? (Ah, someone says, the 64,000-dollar question.)
Who decided on 64? (Ask R.D. Laing.)
Who, at heart, is R.D. Laing? (The one who said there is no mental illness and freed so many back in the sixties.)
In so many details, Rick cannot manage life. What does this mean, you ask. Rick drives a car stuffed with a hoarder’s paradise of stuff (you have had this attribute). He spends a great deal, coming to parties laden with a potlatch of generosity. (You have done this at times.) His virtual chess, his trenchcoat, his golf vacations, all that puts him into debt, the beach-side timeshare condos on stilts over climate change. (You share with him the search for love.) He has two grown and alienated ex-stepsons but still subscribes to parenthood magazines. (You have also tried to learn to be a parent.) Fun times with a toddler! Articles on making memories with kids!
Times when Uncle Rick most wanted to manipulate your mother, he used an odd infantile voice: he would make it go up a half-octave and slow down, as if he forever patronized his little friend and he were a knowing child circa age twelve.
Advice surrounds you.
Can your head see out
of this thicket?
Burn it all down.
Even before her dying days when the frequency increased, your mother would confess to you and her caregivers that she felt manipulated by Rick and the voice he used. That he kept vanishing, never around when she needed him. Yet she could never say no to him, he always had to be right, he used his words too well. Finally, she wrote him in as executor. The second she passed, he began the myth of how his days were filled with his caring for her.
You visited him once before he moved in with your dying mother, his tiny pre-flood apartment filled with flyers from weekend retreats regarding how to find romantic partners and superior ketogenic diets. His freezer had been filled with neatly compartmentalized freeze-dried foods as if these alone could help him manage life.
Why bother being in touch with him, certain friends kept asking. These friends happen to have been born with that silver spoon of self-sovereignty, the ability to play that bartender with the stentorian straightforward voice after last call, a role far beyond your capacity. Despite your ripe age, how hard to make boundaries. The most severely cut prisms cast the most glorious rainbow hues. What does it mean to cut someone off? If today were your last day of life, in which color do you most wish to believe? The forgiving bending hue that admits no past angle or the sharp light in which those of your past become dark forms, cut-out silhouettes, the litotes of this text, with all its holes expanding to swallow even where this life sentence should end.
Palimpsest
First given me by a friend, the mattress in the bedroom.
In this time, everyone and their relationships spiral like smoke. The women especially seem to be rumbling the ground, restless. One bit of research reports that the only documented difference in the assigned-female brain is the thicker corpus callosum, a neural link between hemispheres: according to this study, a female stroke victim might regain language more quickly, as if more prone to multitasking, berry-picking rather than the hunt, shopping for multiple items: my gender-nonconforming beau questions the test’s very parameters. And yet may it be said that during our collective stroke, this float, those identifying as women (birth, behavior, identity) seem to hunger for new berries. One local woman who happens to share my name, a kerchiefed trans dancer who once sat next to me in a group, ends up unable to survive the isolation: R.D., may her memory survive as a blessing.
As crocuses start nudging umber leaves, my dead mother hurts more. Husks fall away, mourning revives. The possibility starts to feel real, that I could return to her marital bedroom where, in solitary waning, she slept with dim lights, forever ready for horsemen who might come a-knocking. Athwart the wall, the driftwood antler holding dusted love, travel necklaces from my wayward father above so many other signs and gifts, ancient squeezable perfume bottles, a pearl I once inhaled dangerously into a nostril so as to breathe in her absence. Thick swirled mugs, bright patterned scarves. Why did I not understand? Death clarifies the tardy insight: love of the lavish let her navigate the body-mind divide. Through objects, she sought to share the bounty of joy with others, her hugs, dance, and scarves of the same cloth. Not just prudent materialism borne of the Depression, but an embrace of human-made hues. Redwoods and ocean’s tangy air thrilled her, but especially lovable: humans who alchemized bliss from the bad, the ecstasy of human creation. The mad ones, the talkative ones. Art! The very fact of it startled her awake.
On visits, I tiptoed into her room. Her baseline waking state: a startled girlishness. O hello! She wanted to be awake, ready, eternally a student. A woman who wished to be alive, who would stir no matter what. And then who asked for massage. Her spine with the S of scoliosis especially loved the one western skill my hands held—not homesteading, gold-panning, nor macramé: massage.
Once, an eastern friend whom I met in a filmmaking class in Manhattan looked at my family photo of a bellydance party and found her particular punctum, saying: I can’t imagine this: a tumble of people in full puppy pile off an embroidered couch, the western body-friendliness as foreign as was her family’s Manhattan to me, that blindingly white apartment overlooking the high East River in which a low untouched bookcase hosted a heavy array of ornamental black iron knives: impeccable a priori hygiene, singular cultural imprint, ostensibly neutral, inviting certain proclivities. The hand’s end: knives being a history-swallowing technology amid the heavy symbolism of money.
Out west, you learn to use your hands toward amnesia: massage to take away the difficulties of the past, the opposite of an epitaph. At a party in northern California as a child, you find massage a form of saying hello. People don’t drink, they put their hands on another’s shoulders, feet, hands, their thumbs grinding away all history held by connective tissue. Only in esoteric circles on the East Coast, say, in the dance world of contact improvisation world which I briefly visited at the end of my marriage, did I see the same culture: this need to announce (by touch not speech) this bare fact of being mammals together.
Just as our puppy keeps asking for anyone’s body nearby.
And so one daughter shines this bright face at me this morning, having woken, having temporarily replaced my beau in the morning bed, she soon to go off, to college or not, her smile still as if she were an infant, that same brightness, and yet she says she has been sub-depressive this year, this lack of movement that has beset us all, meditating on home, she asks me to massage her skull, a way of saying hello and goodbye, swallowing the bad.
Inexorably
spring is making me
long to massage my mother.
And in this season, as we all were attempting new forms of health, I tried for one week a little white pill meant to keep that long-dormant autoimmune issue, unrelated to our collective float, from worsening. For years, I had known no greater impediment than cold hands and occasional insomnia; lab numbers reported worse. Still, the little pill, even in its lowest dose, designed for those coming off heroin addiction, blocked opioid receptors. And so, as in the darkest days of the marriage, I lost at the same time two hands: my wish to write and the capacity for joy. One week into the white pill, I had to stop. Was the double helix at my core an anxious opioid-starved wish to reach out and connect through words? What’s the point of it all, I wondered. Not serious ideation, just the untouchable shades of the past: the flitting that had awaited me down dark streets
should the leaves be raked
should the word be writ
should I stop to savor
can I savor
should I stop
Compassion
I had three beings depending on me and suddenly had ten. I stand and nod listening to another man talk about the physical universe to me. You must grade the land if you want to put in your writer’s shed. You must have someone come and take out all the dead trees. At noon, your friend wants you to do a daily meditation with her: breathe in the black pain of others and breathe out light. Right now your throat is scratchy, your land ungraded, your Institute restitution manual unread, your own book unwrit, and to breathe in suffering goes against the tiredness of six a.m.
To understand
The dream was of going to the megahealth grocery and a moment comes in which blackout curtainflaps are pulled down:
The store employees have
become police. The one checking
the sanitation has everyone line
up, arms outstretched. You don’t
want to touch someone but now
we are asked to do so. Disobediently,
I see as if in a line dance I can
circle the line toward the entrance.
Why don’t we just leave?
Why don’t we just go to the parking lot?
The anxiety is so great, the dream is
its reward. Apologies to Milton, it is better to line
up and obey than flee.
Behavior
That somebody starts to judge more. That another starts to feel vulne-rable to judgment, as the openness of branches to wind becomes more solitary, lacking human gaze. On the secret paths threaded along the college town’s rivers, the mix of those who inhabit nature changes. The nature now belongs to everyone and each brings habits of the city to the brink. For eons, humans knew the wisdom of the riverbanks which had no need for the wisdom of humans about any eon. And now trucks haul the provender of rivers to the mouths of those who forgot how to say thanks.
The text from the friend’s husband is curt: we want to talk to you about social distancing. The friends don’t want my beau to be around their son, my daughter’s friend. These are not bourgeois mores. This is old love rejecting the new.
Connivance
The dreams of that time
drag you through your past with
a willy-nilly intensity.
Your dead mother speaks with her
sister who ate herself to death.
Because you are messy, a man
thinks he can follow you into
corners abandoned by the populace.
A hotel with no one staying in it.
Such has been the state of
your joy. You start a journal
which you began two years
earlier, and though you live
tenuously, the hammock of your
life conspires to swing in one
direction: gratitude.
Body
In the cold outside the body inside
is hungry for that which it cannot
have. And yet in the middle of
the night the body next to you is so
beautiful you make love to the idea
of beauty itself without waking
anyone or touching anything but
the way the air rests upon the side
of your cheek, gazing upon him.
Contingencies
If you tell the former mate that the current mate is now in the home, does the anger mess up everyone’s immune system? Do you wish to have your children live with untruth? Don’t tell him, they say, he will be angry. Marriage exploded, you left and no longer must tiptoe around the anger. He is a good person. Yet he has a shard of himself that only you have seen, you and his dead dad, and it is a scary rage. The kids have seen most of it; you have seen it all.
But what is the right thing to do? Others have said: you are not cohabiting, this is unprecedented quarantine. But in the unprecedented, don’t we still get to have truth? The kids are not adults. You want to tell the former mate. Is it better to tell him when the kids are heading for their week in his house, your old home, or will they then bear the brunt of his anger? So much of your family system was constructed around fear of anger, not just his.
Your youngest child says, astutely, you want us to be the adult pacifier? You get advice: tell Vegas mate about the new quarantined cohabiting beau when the kids are away from him so they do not have to bear the punch. Who will write the history of tears? Roland asks, and also at another point, of his mother’s birthday all I can offer her is a rosebud from the garden. At least it’s the only one, and the first one since we’re here. We do whatever we can to offer anyone love, good timing sometimes its simplest coin. Is that enough?
Smitten
Some people create boundaries and
feel wonderful, declaring the self. Others
feel contemptible.
One of the reasons you asked for the divorce was you no longer wanted to be mad. People get angry at injustice: a system, a history. The grief hardens into grievance. You no longer wanted to be the mad mother or mate, and you wanted to leave the conversational games: who was at fault? Who was the biggest martyr or victim? Who was being a freier, as X’s croupier pawnbroker father always told him not to be: a sucker, and in this schema, who played sucker, who suckee? Who did not get what? You did what you could.
But to find yourself mad and then your new beau in the middle of the night soothing you: you have imperfection. Yes. But then you can also be loved.
Roland here is of little help: What do we call the subject who persists in an ‘error’ against and counter to everyone, as if he had before himself all eternity in which to be ‘mistaken’? Whether it be from one lover to the next or within one and the same love, I keep ‘falling back’ into an interior doctrine which no one shares with me.
