Another Love Discourse, page 22
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There is something about gluttony that bothers you, daughter #1 says, after the birthday of daughter #3. Perhaps, instead, empty rite disturbs. As a child, ignored but for the moment celebrating your birth. In adolescence, you were offered dinner out! Imagine a lowlit restaurant and your mother’s love of the ceremonial: inner dissociation found its locus. If the cosmos was a tent pulled tight, you floated somewhere, inside or out, it didn’t matter. No gravity to your being. Eat all the tempura you want, nothing changes. You cannot consume love. Yet knowing the script called for a particular performance: happiness?
You want to be appreciated, says daughter #1.
Not because of daughters’ table manners, you would rather offer them mangos sloppy with juice and eat in the shade by a trickling brook than get them stiff-backed in a restaurant too fancy.
I used to like luxury, says middle daughter. Now I’m aware who or what this might displace. What all this might feed or do for someone.
Once you had a friend, of the isle of Manhattoes, a warm connective person, who meant so well, equipped with wonderful ideals even as her status climbed, and she could not help it: her manner altered so radically, a rip in the universe, whenever she took you along for a fancy lunch or dinner. As she approached the front staff of any restaurant—reservation clerk, the take-out person, the maître d’—you shivered. To hear someone speak with such imperial assumption stripped all pleasure from consumption.
So often you wished to do it all, aiming to be unstinting, free-hearted: to offer them beautiful birthdays, their father somewhere near the punchbowl, creating fun for them until you collapsed. How often did the marriage feel as if you had burnt yourself to forest floor so he could waltz in like a happy bear, dancing over charred remains and enjoying low-hanging fruit? After the divorce, he chooses your secret special spots with the children as sites for himself to celebrate their birthdays, teaching them poker by a river. Avoid focusing on despoilage. You would do anything to love and outrun his message. The problem being that these two impulses war. You cannot love if your heart is scared. You cannot become the thing you wish to be—loving mother—if your fists are clenched and you can no longer recognize yourself. Reactive abuse, one friend diagnoses your case, you have to get out ahead of reaction. Respond, yes. React, no.
The image crumbles in
memory and moment both. The red wax
of the slice of birthday cake
melted on its plate without me.
Unknowable
Late night under a half-moon, no child in sight, you release the praying mantises you had ordered (natural way for ticks to be consumed) that had been hatching in a pair of plastic drinking glasses. Perhaps releasing them from their plastic home too soon, before they mate. Your newish beau had implored you let them out: if they lack enough to eat, they will eat one another, become cannibals. Alone, you let them out under the prune-plum tree you tried planting with your newish beau and ecotenant, the tree a European genus called hardy for this region, meant for human neighbors and your children to consume, but which already has been speckled with original neighbors, leaf maggots leaving a lacework behind. It is not clear who will survive all the transplantation of this time.
Next morning, no praying mantis in sight, one daughter comes like a snaggle-toothed renegade from her father’s house to plant tomatoes doomed for the dumpheap she had found in her garden nursery job. Her handiwork: around the hill on which the parsonage sits, staked like wayward souls, planted well and poorly now are legions of poor starters, dark-horse tomato plants to whom she has performed outreach, stuck into the clay earth around the parsonage. Who dares grow from such difficult soil?
From your office of the summer morning kitchen, pondering the various unknowables of right now—why was x excluded from y gathering, what will happen in the world of health or politics or street or even this house—the legacy of your mother appears. Her belongings slammed up in the driveway, arrived in a dented pod. Let it be said that the homeland’s cheery, sleepy movers, members of a moving collective who received the
government’s float funds, did their best but did not tie down your mother’s legacy, now strewn and broken all around inside the pod, as true a metaphor for what the dead leave the living as any.
A wealthy person tells you a story about belongings coming to own the heirs: someone he knows ended up slave to the obligations required by an historic family house. And the siblings also ended up practically married to the house so that no one married successfully, he says, whatever success means, yet in this case: no mating, no later families, no future tenders for a dwelling that ended up outside the family.
In your house, recycling plastic from the vanished mantises’ home, you don’t want to become slave to your belongings.
But now in the living room you are a slave to the belongings of your family’s past: a pillar stands from your mother’s old life. (Don’t look back if you don’t wish to become a pillar of salt.) Open up bubble wrap to find the kitschy painting of villagers you had misread within her context. Back in that workaholic paradise, you had seen them as happy; now, opening the picture, you see them as bone-tired. The distinct glamor of her perfume fills the house.
The eldest daughter, tomato-strewer, cries at the arrival of the dented pod. It had escaped her visceral ken: grandparents’ home? Her tears induce some last-ditch insanity: what if you had bought out Uncle Rick and your brother so as to give kids the illusion of a pillar that never bends? The myth of permanence. You cannot do it. Ridiculous, impossible, and yet the flare crosses, when all the wise minds of your contemporary moment and greater moment, whether poor or not, say to let grasping go.
Your mother loved pillars, stairs, hierarchies: bearing her cane, leaning on banisters, learning to walk so soon after the first stroke. Eternal, sweet-faced student, determined to improve. Careful, up each stair at the nursing home. Holding on to aspiration itself. Is it not remarkable and also ultimately unknowable the way each of us finds a way to stare down our own personal Armageddon?
The praying mantises, hung suspended as potential in their little egg, are nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they will have their meander and in some ten years their spawn will return to improve our neighborhood, and where will we all be then? We have created our plans and what will remain is the twist of our past with any word used to conjure it.
Outcomes
This is a time in which our
pretense at discreteness is
revealed: forget je suis un autre
there is no other,
we cannot help but stay
among ourselves.
Jealousy
He has not seen anyone for five months who is not related to me, and she comes by, the former childhood star, and he has told me two things: that friends of his are coming by, and they will aim to take the puppy for a walk. When she comes, contrary to his usual genial welcoming of me into his sphere, he doesn’t tell me to come to the door. He is cute with hair tied, the smile from his maternal line beaming at them.
One daughter in the parsonage spies on his backwoods visitor and sees her squat to use the facilities of forest floor.
Next day, I take puppy with daughter #1 to the puppy obedience class. Daughter has been in a relationship with someone who chides her for her way of treating the puppy; who talks to her about being the alpha, who holds the dog’s head to the ground, commenting on her treatment of new puppy. At the class, we are given clickers. In class, we are to decide on a task for the human who is led out of the door: touch the purse, bow before the hoop, whatever it is. The humans are confused; the point of this is to show that, using learning theory, one must reward good behavior. To give the treat to the dog before she barks, that we are alert to the door opening. The trick is that one must be sensitive to what can perturb our animal: what does she perceive as a threat?
Does the dog trainer love animals or how she controls them? And yet she is gentle with daughter. Perhaps to do this job well, one must suffer fools gladly. So seems to be the case for what is being asked of all of us in this moment. We misperceive signals, weak or strong, we must give one another grace notes of acceptance. And that we reward wrong behaviors with negative attention: what can one do with that? You are everything to me, says new beau, you are my mate for life. While you imagine the movie star’s forest floor, her latest screen. Let your mind frolic where it will but also give up its crueler habits, here in a time when the outside has shrunk to the scale of the doors of your heart.
I-love-you
He sits by me in the outdoor
watercolor class I teach for
the neighbors and is a beautiful
presence. Who needs pigment
diluted by water?
The next morning, the heat
is intense and yet I reach for
him. Intensify, intensify.
Languor
You lie in the field of
exquisite, a river valley
to which you have driven,
a fleecy Saturday
of our float and you
know heat: some instant flash
peeling away memories, offering
so many states,
all those
years of that and this
pealing in the cathedral of
trees. If you pay attention to the
minute teaching of heat, there is
pleasure to be had: a rocket ship
through your past, down the center of
the earth, up above the trees, you
are left, luminous, unbounded, unaware when
the next bolt will pin you down.
Magic
The onscreen you was talking with an onscreen someone his age whom you wanted to bring into another partially screened conversation, this literacy project you started with the idea that it is good to share the powers of storytelling. (Let all gather around the campfire to gaze at stars and know awe.) Downstairs in the life called real, you wash up the fetid squalor of the welcome squash you cooked on his return, your beau having been gone a week, the chance for girlchildren to be solo with mother. Some guilt to the request for absence, some reparations within the yellowing squash, some metaphor to the yellow-wallpaper squalor: do you have the right to call a temporary cave around just you and cubs?
The guilt probably provokes the shadow-thought about someone else. (In class the day before, discussing a writer, you mentioned this concept: The most dangerous person is the one who does not own his own shadow.)
What, just because she’s my age? You’re my mate, he says, a breaking of the fourth wall, addressing the unspoken, and then goes into full recitative:
It’s you I like,
It’s not the things you wear,
It’s not the way you do your hair
But it’s you I like
The way you are right now,
The way down deep inside you
Not the things that hide you,
Not your toys
They’re just beside you.
But it’s you I like
Every part of you.
Your skin, your eyes, your feelings
Whether old or new.
I hope that you’ll remember
Even when you’re feeling blue
That it’s you I like,
It’s you yourself
It’s you.
It’s you I like.
Why do we find the childish so oddly fulfilling? (Because it speaks to the little wormwood of immaturity that tinges our personal absinthe.) Younger, you squinted uncertain at the sketchy screen: the performer Mister Rogers sang the song, faking it your way. An actor like all adults, he only pretended to see you while your seeing of him was the only possibility. He doesn’t know me, you thought, as if angry at the artificial intelligence of it all. You believed no one could see into you, doomed to lurk outside, as if Frankenstein’s own monster peeking into the routines of others.
Today the computer tech at the collapsing institute confides he hoped to find a girlfriend, yet, having been here some years, erasing one year because of the glittervirus, he feels less hope. A psychic told him to go to cities where emotional life lives more suppressed: say, Amsterdam or Montreal. That he wasn’t in the right place. You know me a little, he says, I am not always easy.
But what is easy? The magic of the person who can recognize the vastness of nature and yet hold a hand with such warmth? The magic in your mate’s hand after the Mister Rogers song; that you can guess the tiniest part of another which needs the greatest soothing. By some carnival trick, he offers it. That both of you feel seen by the greater eye of love at the same time. Is that not magic?
Yet in order not to be torn
By bulletholes, money, art, love, family, job, householding, say you leave briefly then with new love, to go to this artist island off the coast of Maine. Threaded into the story is the substrate of thermal energies beneath our feet which erupt. So much life lived in the premise of fiction: what if? If only?
You can spend life rehearsing dread, never full
in engaging, forever dancing with if-only-I-finish-
the-next-thing, imagining freedom
at the unreachable end, as in so many religions that magnetize
followers toward the cliff
-hanger of the end.
You could run amok off the cliff toward an illusion of freedom.
Say that just before you leave for the island, the pills given you by your drag-mother-friend-pharmacist suppress your body’s defenses and cause your mood to be tenuous as an egg balanced on a tiny silver heirloom plate as you improvise modern dance backwards across a tightrope made of your past.
Say that on the island, you overfunction around dysfunction, the John Henry gift learned over years, the overweening mistake of hubris. You find a thornring tightening your head which no caffeine loosens.
Say that you feel you are trying to write this Roland book against imminent death: it must be writ, even if you tell it slant. Imagine that the bite sends you spiraling back through time to when humans were on the level of a bug and unable to make too many decisions beyond the binary: survival or death.
Say you gave a ride to a bad tick and, half-full on blood, it offered the lesson you were finally meant to get. Bacteria ate the neural pathways.
Ah it is not the tick, it is the bacteria, says the doctor, yet the medium also happened to be the message, Roland would have whispered into the ears of young McLaren. And the bacteria carried by Midas will burn out all the major and minor causeways of your brain.
So you, your face, your brain will freeze. Imagine the poor unknowing tick, Midas, just carrying its bacteria, wishing to eat like any of us, finding you hospitable, its bite injecting poison.
Imagine: after the first of long days in the emergency room, brain scanned inside a long chute colored as if from a 1970s scifi movie, you will feel grateful to all these long-hunched scientists who have created vessels for knowledge. And your new love shows mettle, canceling a trip out west. And the diagnosis arrives.
I am tanked,
ending as it were with half
a face lifted in a smile, unable
to move, an eye unable to close. The tragicomic
face of drama, a clown
immobilized.
As in a fable. No longer able to participate in the demands of others; I will have to shut down.
All this forward movement of life—the sundering, all—the overweening imagining of a new life and then no more forward, felled by a bug no bigger than this letter T.
In short, reader, a habit trained by generations of pogroms, the gesticulating monkey wishing to serve, the evolutionary habit of tend and befriend, now gone: I could not serve.
Know catastrophe and you must abandon all ideas of the self: not all-powerful, not abandoned, not independent, not defined by what it can push away.
I may have just buried my mother after her long intermittent sojourn through so many hospitals, her graciousness of a young girl and the affect she assumed: her dignity imperious, the calm suppliant arm presented to yet another nurse wishing to prod, poke, extract, wrap.
How her skin became a tender battleground, riddled and soft, still containing her after so many assaults. Knowing catastrophe, I catapulted into a period where, arm out, I understood mother’s grace as an older person in the land of hospital.
Offer your body as if ready to be filled with buckshot. To become a veteran in a tunnel of ricocheting bullets in one of the acronym-laden tests we sling about: MRI or CT, spinal tap. To depend on the blandishments of strangers: meter readings, triage, the poisoned air of emergency rooms. Friends and family release you.
Back home in the parsonage, hole in arm, dangerous tube open and straight to my heart for a month, no bathing or swimming or exercise allowed, who arrived? Newish love came to enter and heal that vein:
Make yourself comfortable, he said each noontime
putting on music and offering pillows
wiping down plasticine mat for the saline/antibiotic/saline/heparin injections,
the (s)ash experience
pulling out four syringes
ripping open wipes
placing the tiny green plasticine hood
