Another Love Discourse, page 2
I’m red-diapered blue trash, he said, wittily, deprived of the ancestors’ huge legacy and so all the more scrupulous in clinging to ideals, a person having made an art of befriending new students and older more permanent scholars on campus while hoping to complete the never-finished dissertation, an oral history of truck drivers on two major northeastern corridors, 90 and 87, instead ending up one himself, a substitute truck driver, liking the urgency, camaraderie, fun stops, and long solo hauls of a dashed-line highway. Destinations often justify all means: the great unjoke of all classes, high, low, middling, the anxious, the uneasily wed.
I’ve watched you, he said, early in that diner, even when you walk and talk with other people, you’re always alone. And in this comment, I felt so seen already that what we call—as Roland’s beloved Sarrasine narrator says my heart for want of better term—my heart for want of better term bounded out of my belly where it usually descended and skipped somewhere down the road as if alongside another.
In the loving calm of your arms
Besides intercourse (when the Image-repertoire goes to the devil), Roland writes, there is that other embrace, which is a motionless cradling; we are enchanted, bewitched . . . In this companionable incest, everything is suspended: time, law, prohibition: nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted: all desires are abolished, for they seem definitively fulfilled.
Roland solo in the country with his mother had the following habits:
7 am: wake.
Make tea, feed birds in garden with crumbs, dust desk,
empty ashtrays.
7:30: listen to radio news.
8: breakfast with mother: two boiled eggs, toast, black coffee, no sugar.
Buy local paper, then work ‘til
10:30: black coffee and first cigar,
work ‘til 1 pm lunch.
Hour nap, putter in garden, burn papers in garden or prepare a box of index cards.
Work again from 4 to 7,
including a short tea-break.
Then water garden, play piano, have dinner.
After dinner, TV or writing notes on index cards and music.
10 pm: turn in and read until sleep.
Of routines such as these, he says they indicate class, and fails to mention the connection to mother he maintained for a half-century.
Many of us indicate our maturity by the extent to which we stray from legacy; some indicate it by how well we stay in the embrace of mother values, father tongue, communal mischief.
Note the possibility of 10:30: the burning of papers in the garden.
Alone
A volunteer French teacher in Morocco might play-act being aristocrat of the body yet Roland, guilt-prone, took pains so mother would never find out, the gap between scholarly mien and erotic proclivity only one direct reference ever: sunglasses hiding his black eye, souvenir of Biarritz where he was beaten and robbed on the beach.
Elsewhere, not published before Maman’s death: The art of living in Marrakesh: a conversation between a moving horse-drawn carriage and a bicycle; the cigarette is handed over and a rendezvous arranged, the bicycle veers sharply and speeds off.
I too have known this rough trade and shrugged it off because it speaks more of flinging myself on the arms of the world, trying to find in any home outside what I could not inside. I replicated this trait with the daughters: forever taking them outdoors. Outside we went to find the mother found in playgrounds, forest, marine waters. The oceanic. The goddess held in the concord of friends playing games. Knowing what one does inside with a self yet knowing less what one does inside with others. Having mothered self from the outside in, I sought to give them the same.
But Roland? Well-mothered, he stayed indoors (with notable exception) enjoying his eggs.
How can a man follow need yet half-keep it from mother a whole half-century? He forsook most forms of activism, given his wish to reject the time’s hysteria, as he called it, happy nonetheless to be called Marxist, but also did not pretend to be what he was not. Midlife, for instance, he told one friend he preferred camel drivers to camels.
Therefore he became a being with one foot at the closet door who loved saying every text speaks to us in five codes, and how we might listen to any text as an iridescent exchange carried on by multiple voices on different wavelengths. What he did for himself: he changed the very architecture, making of the closet, that impervious jail, something like a Gaudí fever-dream: melting, layered, graspable.
All along omitting the most intimate closet: Maman had to be spared knowledge regarding how he found love in any world outside her door.
Does sexuality undergird what he wrote? Some would say his lifelong illness mattered just as much if not more, a self forever in sanatoria, a being forced to report to authorities from the gurgling interior about the aspirational joys of normalcy, the injustice of forever standing apart. That slithery sense of never belonging. To talk to the healthy is to abandon part of oneself: the secret throbs.
Who among us can say we threw away a part of a surgically removed rib? Roland: tragic, flippant, happy after surgery, flung his actual rib-bone away. Ungendering Eve’s binary, undone. Minorities, madness, prison, the marginal: his peers (like Foucault) write of and through prisms not unrelated to the queer (a double-negative circumlocution the more grandly closeted Henry James also favored). Sole direct appearance of Roland’s queerness? Within his book on himself you find this:
The goddess H:
The pleasure potential of a perversion
(in this case that of the two H’s: homosexuality and hashish)
is always underestimated . . .
It produces a more: I am more sensitive, more perceptive,
more loquacious, more amused, etc . . .
Henceforth it is a goddess, a figure that can be invoked, a means of intercession.
Every class of secret lives within every class, yet all bear a family resemblance: secluded, mystic, occult. And so what if Victorians used collective hush as a way to stir up the tribalism of families, binding them together, and our more psychologically fluent moment, so aware of the redounding of trauma, instead makes the revealed truth tear families apart? No matter. A secret pulses light through goddess figures as well as demiurges, shines within any flimsy structure we are here together trying to build, illuminating soft parts, silhouetting bones.
Identification
A memory from childhood: a bully squashing me, a body that felt giantesque. An unblood uncle, an unrelated friend of mother’s. He had his own ways, but such is memory that at times even mother’s hug melded with his, a fear she might crush me with goddess-size loneliness, need as if an enormity of avoirdupois, though she herself was only five feet two, the height of one of my daughters now.
Imagine that mother: she loved the painting by Reubens, the woman with a rose in her hair. Imagine this beautiful body, its face painted, washed, repainted so many times—so you will think I’m pretty, I heard her once say, plaintive to my father before they headed out—I need to put my face on. The face is what will be loved, bringing plaudits and bouquets to the transom. The face can be shown outside the domestic closet in which no mask is needed. The face is what the public understands, joining in some kind of communal orgasm of meaning: to sanctify if not meet that deepest need which we all have. To be loved for who one truly is stays closeted. How does anyone find a way to belong more to the grand tragic comedy of humanity?
Once I sat with father and mother on a boat not irrelevantly named the Queen Mary, docked in Long Beach. My mother appeared to be flirting with the accented waiter in front of my father and I made the fury vow easily made by adolescents: never be that. A rare solo travel with her: alone, she and I went to Muscle Beach in Venice, California, near its aspirational garlanded canals to watch vaselined bare-chested men inside their own chosen cage heave weights. Amazing, she said, the titration and proportion of contemporary investment in—and faded out, her protoscientific speech unable to mask libido. The men who like her (like me, like so many of us) had the habit of present pain toward the future gain of revealed grace. Roland would call it the signifying gym-body, or in the States we might term it the Calvinist capital of time invested.
Once she started to run out of time, at the end, the kindest caretakers understood her need to be appreciated. And so with love they daubed her with zany lipstick. (The clown magnifies what the audience fails to admit: the need to be loved. And I too have long felt myself in drag. The clown must please herself first, otherwise she stumbles. Do you have to wear eyeliner, my daughters always ask, as if I paint lines away from them and toward the outside world where I too could be taken offshore, lines moving off from our morning mussed loving hug, using a style ripped from the harsh econolines of the slapstick decade in which I came of age, clockhands seized in paroxysm around eyes meant all the more to take in the outside world.)
Mother’s hair spiraled into dreadlocks and her caregivers lovingly fashioned it into, atop her head, two giant unquivering horns (past signification of jewess). Since all dying distills essence, my mother became love itself. Not just a person who appreciated solely the hope of love in some Zeno’s paradox of an endlessly deferred future but actual love.
Imagine yourself mother’s daughter in her last era, and you might find yourself with devoted caregiver bearing gentle steak knives, sawing to free hair from a head containing an active mind gone to watery islands. Her grown child, you wish to do your best as ever. Hold such a steak knife and of such moments the laughter of the gallows is born.
We might as well hang ourselves, laughing, giddy on asphyxiation.
Though your back quickly can become carapace, a great defense: your front is that slow pink fog of dissociation rolling in.
She went frail at the end, becoming her glowing eyes: she has not been buried long.
A few early truths: systems crush.
The need of others, whether tyrant or mothers, can squash.
And safety is to be found away, in the unblue light of outside, exile.
More first lessons: inside the tiny bulb of my baby uterus, the eggs of future daughters already lived inside mother’s body as I was born, all sharing the same birth-month and now death-year, pioneering forward without that origin, their grandmother-body home.
Adulthood: become your own home of love, your being filled with fireflies of possibility.
Demons
Here on a northern island with St. Francislike new love,
who gently cups his hands around
moths, perfecting techniques for setting
them free (less and less recall
of Vegas mate clapping before my face,
to kill in a great coup one or three,
my startle justified by his
need, a rage at intruders who despoiled his Vegas
childhood, his father that canny blackjack dealer, all the fire I can
understand, yet still the PTSD sings)
arrived here, May as the ripcord
loosened, on a canting boat.
We left for this period our
H O M E—
ruptured marriage,
dead grandmother,
ecotenant and other animals,
and the need to keep
abode straight
for three daughters
and arrive
on a new island of reckoning,
honeymoon/survival
energy shading into sparking
joy and the dream of
stability.
The past year lifts,
in which we all roomed together
in a rambly parsonage
run poorly by me
as a boardinghouse
with unusual tenants,
the only place (too big
to afford) which I could find near
schools no daughter ended up
attending, with new love
and lost mother,
all rupture, death, and life housed
together this year
of the great float. A small bug worked
its way over all of us:
call it unrest.
No paradise anywhere:
the isle’s
mossfairy forest sighs,
needing none of us.
And yet a crown of thorns tightens;
I cannot stop feeling
every word fights death,
my brain has no time.
Flayed
Apparently deer and possum swim to this island, as can chipmunks. All might ramble here when tides are low. Imagine an ocean filled with swimming deer trying to get to this island and its covert vantage. There is a trail I misheard as the booby trail, as in: you are a booby if you get lost, because get lost you will. This path I love taking is marked just enough that I keep my faith. It is the buoy trail: faded mercurochrome pellets tied to trees amid scrubgrass and ocean breeze. I keep trying to ring the island but give up halfway: my motivation puts on its usual show. No completion. Some thornring of fire seems to be circling my head.
Look how you hurt the kids, my Vegas mate kept saying, self-willing blindness to his part in the passion play and our transfiguration, you broke up their home.
Soon and then later, eventually, all three daughters said they were glad for the divorce, as they felt health return. Let life expand to fill your dreams, said the divorce doula, a friend who made herself available in ways that still tentpost my heart with their generosity.
This last spring, at middle daughter’s coming-of-age ceremony, held in a basement with sputtering light and rain hitting gutters hard, an old friend said to Vegas mate: Your relationship is not failed! That’s one idea, that a relationship fails just because it ends. But there are failed marriages which are relationships that stay unloving and intact for years: it is more a failure that they don’t stop—
But Vegas mate interrupted, legs wide, a wrestler’s stance: Not where I’m from! His birthplace Vegas is famous for quick relationships and yet his lineage is Australian prisoners who rebelled, caring for fairness.
A relationship ends, it is a failure!
May I say I prized this loyalty in him and value it still? Our daughters knew that, irascible as he could become, he would never leave. The foxtail sticks. Roland says the wrestler who suffers in a hold which is reputedly cruel (an arm lock, a twisted leg) offers an excessive portrayal of Suffering; like a primitive Pietà, he exhibits for all to see his face, exaggeratedly contorted by an intolerable affliction.
Before we wed, all those years ago outside a plasticine set of Vegas columns, X asked me can an eagle get married to a rock?
In the land around this question, girded by flamethrowers, loyalty trumps autonomy. Never could I identify with the shark or eagle, animals to which he compared me as if lovingly. Hadn’t I always loved more the dolphin, panther, butterfly? Safety: the greatest shapeshifter. Yet the hope for refuge (impregnability from all you have not invited) might make a person speak. While the wind will not be ignored, shaking overladen branches threatening to fall on a ramshackle roof.
The you that is I that is we: the hope of all writing, that we might learn to do this dance together.
In dreams begin responsibilities
Realizing that to identify with your father at age eight made sense. You wanted to process things the way he did, to be him, to not be that icon: the shouting, enraged woman. (His fingers, stiffening, cool blue, on the driving wheel. Father who had just left mother holding towel to chest, black ringlets pouring down, as if in a last Italian aria from Sarrasine, while he tripped lightly down the stairs, as if he played clerk in the end of that keen and now less-cited but crucial Delmore Schwartz story. Your mother shouting from the veranda at him. He, already gone.)
(The lack of emotional commensurability. The one-sided communication. His lack of attending an inner wound made outer, all that she needed to say.) In other ways, you wished to resemble him. How he gave succor. His broad head and pacific blue eyes of equanimity. To be sure you had a roll of quarters in your pocket when you went out in the evening, ready to hand to the errant or lost. Unafraid when finding a homeless man sleeping in the back of your car. Never kicking anyone out. Instead offering tenancy, at least a ride.
Imagine being that father. To sit on a bench in East Africa (hoping to create renewable energy for others) and to open your arms wide and smile disarmingly as three bare-chested men approach, each bearing on their shoulders long spears. They return the smile; you get to survive. Socialist, working any job, be that father connected east and west to the world, who met beggars, waiters, bankers, parking attendants, businessmen as
equals. Drive through Beverly Hills in the rain, laughing, garbage bags strapped to the roof of your station wagon. Become that unusual beast back then: an energy pioneer, awarded and saluted by the capital of capitol. Age does not always tarnish idealism. Be that provider, open your home to the wayward and lost. Averse to confrontation, merry and jocund, have a wayward eye yet be a person frequently swindled.
Imagine yourself that father’s daughter. Undo the work of Vegas mate who sought to make of your father an evil effigy in young ones’ minds. Your words a plea. Please know your grandfather was admirable, you tell them, generous, kind. You wish his memory to be a blessing. If I have done any good for you, much has to do with my ma, whom you remember, yes, but also with my gentle father, the one you mainly recall dying. Is it best to die long before a mate, which was your father’s wish? Yet during his dying he cried out to you: I am nothing but a burden to your mother. Uncle Rick once told me the same: dependency enrages your mother. How can you be different?
