Another Love Discourse, page 21
Flayed
11:11, 12:12, 1:01, deep into the new morning, the girls giggling.
You go in and three sisters are getting along.
Not always a common occurrence, but everyone in the house, beau, tenant, you, all have been awakened by their hijinks. It would be one thing if they heard what you said and then immediately went to sleep. But instead high spirits continue, puppy in the mix, who does not sleep crate-trained (the dream of order) but on the ground next to daughter #2 in her preferred mode, mattress on the floor, window open. Liking the savage, a child of nature. To eat from a pan with two hands, filled with gusto. Part of the whirl of their being is a warm joyful wit, but their loudness and hexagonal gaze can feel like impudence.
The gentle heart of Roland with his mother in the morning, tapping teaspoons in steady rhythm against soft-boiled eggs in heirloom cups, hoisted as the last of riches pried from stern ungiving grandmother’s house, son and mother making gentle wry jokes before silence—
such stillness is not your home.
Some forms of anger come from a rightful sense of injustice, a friend keeps saying. But how amazing, now permanently awakened, 1:30 am, in the kitchen with your beau showing up to hug you. I feel what you feel, he says. He wants to help the kids and also wishes to hold your back: have you ever known this before?
A friend writes the next morning that she told her children to find a puppy born the day she dies and she will come back as that puppy to be loved and stand by them (as you wish to stand by yours).
Some say anger roots itself in earliest misunderstood beliefs: entitlement, insult, a form of neurotic attachment. Adults make agreements but children have one-sided expectations: anger dents the bridge toward maturity.
There are some people with whom you must be transactional and others with whom you are relational, counsels a friend. You had long thought the key to survival had always been to keep your heart open, limitless.
There live those who understand fences, marking the ego’s limitations and needs, or those who say the secret code is to keep oneself open to love, soft and trusting, to proceed with compassion always, even with aggressors, even with Vegas mate, to never take a stand. Your recipe: you had turned aggressors into your own private Stockholm Syndrome party: you could see why they were aggressive even as you flew out of your body. What right did you have to mark the terrain of your body, to take a stand?
To write
Roland believes reading is a form of writing and that writing brings you into being. At a low point in the relation, you had forgotten who you were, so you made a child’s list of items you liked, as you had forgotten. You had become so dedicated to telos, the far-off goal, you had turned into a robot of survival. You went to work, you met people’s concerns, you scraped the lowest part of yourself out and served it to the masses. As if to say: see this gruel! It had been some years since you felt.
Imagine feeling yourself an alien living among others. Might you one day be inducted into the tribe of those who know what they want? On arrival at the eastern college, I was shocked to find these hardened girls of the isle of Manhattoes or other cultural archipelagoes who opined with their hard noses and jut jaws of needs, wishes, and interpretations in a way that requested no lateral reading: was this the way to be? To know with definitives, to profess knowledge of all ends?
While to avoid stating anything with certainty allowed for a certain western perfectability, my father’s aqueous soul, the possibility of movement as in metaphor which lifts meaning from one realm and transposes it elsewhere. Can we enjoy the journey? Is that such a hard goal?
And yet can you state a need, from the self, and stay in a relationship? Can you be loving, unattached to outcome, and still speak some truth in a shared journey? Some people have finessed this skill. Might you at a late age get to enter that most special alien tribe?
The cuttlefish and its ink
It is so hard to give up this urge to be seen. How does one finally see oneself enough?
We always will meet difficult people, the genius friend says. The antidote vision: picture yourself with roots going through damp earth and underground rivers and bedrock to the fiery core, then shooting up into a giant tree overhead, the bigger picture. You get to have a boundary around yourself.
But what happens when you identify with captors too young and so lack a self, and read too much ego-burning buddhism at too formative an age?
What hope for you if early on you wished to banish ego, becoming transparent as a form of survival? Imagine that later you must do all mind-tricks to establish an ego: a purplish aura egg of protection. These roots the friend suggests. That you too can enter humanity, you too get to speak the truth from your heart. How wonderful that might be.
Do others stay rooted in the face of difficult people? As if a child, I want the difficult people to be happy.
We crave certain forms of elaboration to help us find ourselves in the specific. Nabokov used to give a final exam at Cornell with only one question: what is the color of the wallpaper in Anna Karenina’s bedroom? It is the details and how we savor, relinquish, or manage them that makes us great as the sky.
I was living a bit
blindered, in a picket
-fence hell of my own
making, and I had
forgotten myself.
So I tried, as in Harold and the Purple Crayon, the great children’s story in which Harold summons up all that is lacking in his environs—a ladder into the stars—to write, yet I had this idea of discipline, of daily word quotas as a way to cheat the superego and find a backdoor key into the garden of wonders. The problem was that the cheating of the superego became, in its own way, the superego.
And so I had to recall a list of things I liked, because I had become such a creature of servitude—children and art and work—that I forgot the core:
cardamom
making fairy castles out of twigs and moss by the river with the youngest
It is oddly these small pleasures that can remind us of who we are. Do you know what it means to put a pinch of clove in your coffee and be reminded of a narrow cobblestoned alley in Andalucía and the fatalism of that sad man in the tetería who felt his life had only ceiling, and you first rubbed against your Californian birthright horizon-banishing apart from your family’s travails, an endless can-do optimism, that gift of the first part of your life?
Most art rises from fascination and its attenuation—you must be divorced from a thing to know that it could be of interest. Hemingway often said the following: that to write about a place you must be far from it. What if you are far from the self? And to which self do you write?
Embrace
Sometimes only music helps. The student says he came to the Roland Institute solely on the strength of whatever casual warmth happened to be the particular music of your mood that day.
Recall this: a small sink in the tiny room that was one of mother’s studies in that rambling house that became an expression of her wish to study, each room an office, bought for nothing back when that part of Berkeley was considered troubled.
Her scientist mind appreciated the house did not sit on such a steep hill that one would have water issues. Atop the small office sink, a pile: one dried rose bouquet upon another, given her after past performances. She lacked the heart to throw even one out. Maybe thirty bouquets dried but drunk from the happiness of past evenings, a hoarder’s monument rebuking what hung above: the colorized fearsome hanging photo of her mother the critic and a father too fearful and hard-working to protect.
What does it mean to
perform before another?
You may wish for their attention for a period: they see you, everyone feels seen, love flows. The imperfect time-swallowing tense of bouquets: chosen before seeing your work, open or lustrous buds proffered, attesting your performance was fresh and perfumed but that art blooms eternally. In the farmer’s markets of Los Angeles you find fresh fruit and flowers, yes, but also a local rarity: preserved roses that never age. People still hungering for love, well-hatted beneath the punishing sun, poke at these bouquets: immortal yet lifelike!
Say you store that bouquet. If you were born near the Depression, you always know the risk of scarcity. Hold on and store because there will never be enough bouquets, and at your death, you will wish to plunge into the most delicate velvet-tinged rose petals. Could there ever be enough love?
Regretted
I feel she stays here
with me yet keeps right on
changing. We know death
to be asymmetrical but right now this
writing might call her here.
Mourning: a cruel
country where I am no longer
afraid (Roland says
after the burial of Henrietta).
Yet also: henceforth
and forever,
I am my own mother.
His dear mother’s slights
informed his,
her unlived life his piston.
Habiliment
Your daughter happens to be wearing a shirt. Black, neck angular, collar jeweled. A mother’s eyes finds it astonishingly beautiful.
Where did that come from? Did I get that for you, as you usually ask. (The two questions also apply to nature and nurture: the basic surprise being that someone is linked to you without being exactly like you. Compañeros del camino, soulmates, fellow sojourners.)
Remember? The used-clothes store?
(So many sites pass before you: dustlight scalding angles on leftover hopes.)
Can you remember which side of the border, she asks, eyes bearing a riddle. Greek or Turkish?
The one we went to with S?
Your sooty memory: S yet another hyper-competent mother in the league of those you have collected. Neighborly, altruistic, opinionated, one of many who have triangulated affections with your daughters. This daughter she told to buy a sackdress, that daughter’s own mother didn’t know how lovely shone the young knees that should be shown.
Stunned mute and accepting, Stockholm syndrome, you listened to louder bleats. So often you felt the entitlement of being someone’s mother was barely yours: only gleanings should be yours, the dusty used clothes of others.
An echo in your imagination, during those early days of being a mother: the biblical Ruth. Wherever you go, Ruth says to her mother-in-law Naomi I will go; wherever you rest, I will rest. Your people shall be my people, your god my god. Where you die, I will die—there I will be buried. This much and more, let this happen should anything but death separate me from you.
Say you felt in your first acts as a mother as if like Ruth, ready to live in the foreign land of new forms of love, knowing mainly this brute deep inchoate loyalty toward these kids.
Early on, toward these little sheep, you felt you could learn mothering only by proxy. Shouldered next to other real parents in the sandlot or playgrounds, you could study. One day, like the velveteen rabbit, you might become real. Pick and choose: the consumer marketplace of contemporary parenthood. Who do you want to be? Believe yourself, like Ruth, forever a foreigner, immigrant to the land of mothering. Belong to the realm of mothers mainly by analogy. Be that eager student, an apprentice! Not a mother-in-law but a daughter aspirant and mother-in-name. (Only Winnicott helps, whispering it is enough to be good enough.) Not that you had to invent the wheel. The wheel exists. It is just a juggernaut which—with your ideals, your belief in perfectability—could run you into the ground.
There are certain parents whose ideals are so high, they can only sustain the performance of parenthood for a brief interval in the day and then are exhausted by the paces through which they put themselves. The smileyface organic perfect parent who then desperately dials the babysitter for a 40-hour stint the following week, or who must thrust the child down for more than a few gin-and-tonics or any other form of mind-numbing release.
This may all sound super-complicated. Is it complicated to believe you must invent your own motherroot?
Yet with or without all this intellectual mediation, the link grew between me and the little sheep, the brute deep animal fact of connection, its contours surprising and self-created.
Let us say you felt most at home mothering your daughters in places where foreignness made more sense. The fun of mothering daughters outside home! Unite as perpetual travelers, jostle, explore with a delight no dictionary can contain.
Let us also say that apart from motherhood, you might belong to that chorus born with a sense you don’t belong. And thus, even apart from ecological virtue, it makes sense to wear the clothes of others: you are finding yourself in something that doesn’t belong to you.
The estimable Gordon Lish, writing teacher, father of one, replicating the suffering of his youth in which he was mercilessly teased for psoriasis, famously made his students read stories aloud, stopping them and even kicking them out of his lauded workshop when he believed they came to a false word. He sent someone out—crying?—when she used the word parenting. This is how you feel, writing about parenthood. You could be ejected. Your clothes are borrowed. You don’t even know the right language.
Come back, if you will, to that conversation with the daughter about the dusty used-clothes store. Our conversation continued:
No, daughter said, this used-clothes store had a completely different atmosphere. And there was that boy, the crazy one with matted hair, linked with the refugees.
That guy who helped us go undercover to help at the refugee camp? But he was so together!
Not that one!—teenage scorn has a polite correlate, an emphasis on nuance, which shouts at deaf parent: Can’t you see? Those two exist on different sides of a spectrum!
And then the memory returns, jeweled as her shirt: the boy with his beauty smudged by street hardship who had started in, as so many have done, confidingly:
and you know that a person can start to speak and touch on his loved ones and his former loved self. And you watched him assume the contours of another face, because time folds, memory yearns backward, the spiral of life pretty much assures that one period of time will have very specific correlates with more than one prior period.
And yet because memory will always play trickster, whether or not this is what the boy said, what I recall is this story: early in a poor family, his looks made nearby aunties say he would easily have a Bollywood career. At birthdays, he would be prodded to dance, to act, he could do it all! On the strength of everyone’s conviction, he palmed a one-way ticket to Bollywood where he found in Mumbai nothing but tricksters and hucksters and ended up living in slums outside the grand hotels. All the while, he was troubled by the way legacy seemed to have backfired. An employment agency sent him to Greece where he was mistreated by a wealthy family, and his papers stolen. He ended up, as people can, in Cyprus. Not an official European Union refugee, he had just landed on an isle where people stared at him.
His hope like anyone’s, like yours or mine, was that any place would see his inner worth and recognize him. Can you help me with a job?
Let’s go talk to the refugee people. Thinking of the hepcat pierced
workers with gentle faces in their tiny bare air-conditioned office. Along crumbled ochre stone corridors that stand as testament to every kind of failed institution, we kept talking, and he stayed quite voluble: the aunties, obstacles to making it as a screen star, why his best chance lay around the corner.
We entered the AC freeze of an international outpost, a room dedicated to offering newcomers homes and jobs; he perked up, but when we said goodbye, he fell mute as if disconsolate, staring at the forms thrust his way by the hepcats, and looked—in his studied regard of papers asking which skills were his, what he might be qualified to do—as if that room made him so much smaller, more aware of belonging and its lack.
Weeks later, in a brisk supermarket, all matted hair and chalky jaw, he was seen again, weighing a bag of potatoes and a bag of apples, items of the new and old worlds, and when almost no one was looking, he thrust both the cookable and raw into his satchel. The hepcats, it turned out, had never quite helped, and it may have been that the cold sterility of bureaucracy, the fretwork required at the threshold of future belonging, rebuked the very strategy used to arrive at the brink.
The star could not arrive, the means rejected the ends rejected the means, the telos demanded a better present. Your shared dream had seen him before a vast audience, singing with such talent, crooning his heart toward the skies which had recognized him, plucked him from obscurity, granted him his wishes: at least that he could find some streetside audience.
Art (mode, manner, skill, weapon) almost could redeem all. That boy and the beauty that sent him out on a quest. Remember that boy? your daughter in her jeweled shirt asks. How could you not? Amnesia is a privilege which this survival screed forces you to abandon, despite your best intentions. Roland might have counseled the boy that he was right to fear structure, that stepping over another’s preconceived threshold itself can be a theft, and that belonging is always invented, because what trust can you always have about being enfolded in another’s body?
