Another Love Discourse, page 3
One daughter you teach to drive in a nighttime parking lot, alone until a deer comes to watch, heraldic copper but ghostly amber at the periphery, evanescing. Does it matter that grandfather’s name translates as deer? The night animal nods approvingly before bounding off under sodium lights. You are a good driving teacher, daughter says, so chill. You mention that grandfather taught you patiently how to drive, hoping honor might cling to the ghostly brow of the salt-miner‘s grandson, saying you channel grandfather’s calm. The magnet braid of legacy: what ends up clinging?
Late in life, you sense the weight of all your mother had to handle. His depressive moments, his wandering. When I am with you, your father used to say, you know it is the best moment in my life? (Such burden on one psyche alone could train a person to run.) How old were you? Eight? What is my purpose in living? I have fulfilled my biological function, just as a salmon does, and now can swim upstream—
No, Daddy, no! you might say, cartoonish and peddling furious toward cheer there are so many reasons to live! Invent cheer, invent invent, eight years old: there are so many reasons to live. Don’t die! A lifetime of wonder (or its opposite, a sense of doom) already opening in the young coach.
Fade-out
Don’t forget: this may always be the favorite command of early spring when you easily mistake the burls of dying trees for squirrels, who do their clownish best, standing stockstill. Everything this second tends toward becoming gentle tendrils of green or some dark furtive knotted nest.
Everything collapses.
It is here, the formal beginning of the big, long bereavement, Roland says in his diary: notecards he began to keep mourning the loss of his mother.
Do the dead care what words we pitch in with the stones? Under duress, I tried penning a eulogy in my mother’s house. Only three moons later, the home would be quickly dismembered, as if the funeral cakes were not to furnish a too-quick wedding, as in Hamlet, but rather Uncle Rick’s future infinity pool. Tears with quick salt would soon be invested in the natural seawater swim my Uncle Rick would build using the home’s cremains.
California forever dreams Shangri-La: natural luxury yet magically using no resources. Or, as Stevens asks is there no change of death in Paradise? Of grandmother’s home, soon to be dismembered, youngest daughter, sentimental, would have reason to say: my one permanent place, does it have to go?
Under duress, at my late father’s desk, the house still sturdy, I tried penning a eulogy. Who knew we would all soon be penning eulogies? Ripcord and float would come. Our collective lives would come to resemble what my mother’s heirs began to do: over videocalls, heirlooms sorted, belongings become trashed black bags thrown in cacophony down the stairs, distressing the earth and a last surviving tenant in
mother’s basement. Some homes, like some writing, stay bare to create the future, while others hoard tokens of the past.
At my father’s desk, under duress, in his study filled with foreign coins, obsolete how-to scientific tech manuals, its windows beat by plums for which my friend and I had risked death—climbing out on Spanish tiles, defying Aesop to reach branches, eros over thanatos, our song of youth—under duress, I tried penning a eulogy to my mother, having just seen her unspirited body, lipsticked, dark-ringleted, no longer Reubenesque but dead, stripped of her sparkle—in that study, under duress, I tried penning the eulogy (which due to a miscommunication Roland might have enjoyed, entered neither funeral speech, an act in which he half-believed, nor the funeral brochure, a mythological relic we late pharaohs create as if an ample enough hoarding to hold all memory).
I tried writing a survivalist’s oxymoron, the nonfatalist eulogy, my hand trembling at words implying hope.
Yet nothing made it in: not those words, not these, nothing, no, every proscenium gapes. However I might celebrate her remains a giant gaping maw: the words that might have been. Uncle Rick and my brother and everyone forgave me, but O dear reader! A born mute, unwanted, unmothered until late, I ended up as ever a stammerer at mother’s grave.
Absence
The last sense to go is hearing, apparently, but was mother present, any way we understand it, there at a funeral under California skies oddly unblue? My father had been buried a decade before at the same site and the sky went cerulean as his eyes, vast and forgiving. Yet when mother was buried, skies misted over mercury earth, vapor dense and violet as if touched by her gaze until the cloudburst at final eulogy: it seems too easy—a cliché (cast-plate click from the print factory of images)—until anyone recalls her magic.
Some people’s dazzle comes from singular piquancy and others’ from the combo platter. My mother: eternal student, biologist, inveterate teacher, party-thrower, community-gatherer, protoprofessional artist, drama and film impresario, dance teacher, frailer and yet more beautiful each year, skin silken, eyes essential. Having risen as a child under the poky umbrella of an era in which an immigrant family’s vexed aspiration justified cruelty. Her mother: critical, daunted by dint of generation, cleverness throttled toward gossip and manipulation. Father: descended from Odessa shipbuilders with the broad ribs of boats, one of 350-odd people born on Ellis Island, having left school in the third grade to work, a master of benign diligence, almost illiterate. Each year, a birthday card arrived my way: xoxo and his name, Fred and that’s all he knows how to write, the cruel echo sung by thwarted grandmother, her sharp blue eyes and pink asp of a tongue on constant campaign to denounce husbands or kinfolk, even daughters, never son or nation.
Both parents of mine: the ones who got away, jumping from vast herds. Every zebra is bred for loping off from threat but some young edge their tribe, ready to escape. Hello? (And already I think of leaving. You too might wonder if you could love.)
Tell us about your first break-up,
someone asked here on the island last night,
on the tiny platform on which I write, all guests crowded onto it to see
one of these famous island sunsets.
I’ve never been left, I said with conviction, it’s pathological:
that fear of abandonment.
It is true.
In the marrow, seek out those who defy physics,
those with a gravity that seems to transcend mortality.
Perhaps you too have it: the myth of the person who will never
leave. When our molecules forever jump
from my hand to your eyes to your hand;
meaning transforms, slippage always, and yet:
too many childhood moments
with some new
beloved arbitrary
temporary caregiver
spirited away
(and I watching from the window,
my punctum the broken frame).
This spring, non-uncle Rick has been chewing over the phrasing of his friend’s tardy memorial stone, making me his bystander as ever, infantilizing my lost mother. An ashfield tickles the throat, that funeral soon before the ripcord when I forswore touching the hand of new beau. Untouching at the funeral so love-meaning might stay ours alone, private. Untouching so that nothing, as in a fable, could scissor the grandmother-root for my gaggle of girls. Sun glimmered for a second before cloudburst. My mother’s mercury earth rose up; words fled. Did she care? For lack of eloquence, I would have been fired, for bad expression alone. Hang god, hangdog, whatever—words? I had none.
Reader, can you understand?
Always I craved her body.
And then sometimes,
it was too much upon me
heavy suffocating me on a bed in needy hug.
I was born, I drank milk, I spat, I suffered.
My first story—I was lying but she typed it, a rare moment of attention. Inside your belly, almost born, ready, I hung, in a brown paper lunch bag, and whenever you drank your coffee the stuff that made you go round the sun faster, mother, so you could work harder and better earn the love of outside people, men and superiors in the world outside, your own metaphor for your own soon-dead, never-approving mother I spat it up. Upended, I spat up the tube all that instant coffee my mother drank, and inside her I lingered, banged about, a being upended, as if inside the brown-paper sack lunch our father made whenever he happened to be home, showing his love by how he scored a circumference around the globe of the entire orange’s peel.
She went to work first among forensic anthropologists and lab biologists and then later tech billionaires:
for a while, the only one in her family to have gone to college
stomping to work among neurodivergent biolab technicians wrinkling their noses at her lemon musk, high heels, huge sprayed dark hair, sheath of heavy necklaces, a splendiferous multicolor drag of sorts, a woman who in their boys’ club clattered right in. Thirsty for love yet solipsistic, the narcissistic wound left in her by her mother a gift lending her the glam armor of confidence. A woman impressive not just to me. In this way, reader, mother’s workaholism became my dearest teddy, a lemon musk you could scent for hours if you knew how to linger just the right way in the after-corridor.
Performance
More about absence, which is really death, which is really theater: I once worked for a performer boss (wait for her life sentence) who first said we must make the act of theater special because you are asking people to sit in a small oxygen-less place for a fixed set of moments: a definition of life or anti-life. So theater must be superabundant, vital, overflowing.
How moving that my mother’s unlined unaged lemon-water-sipping theater son (present hocked for future and past), who works as a seller of mildewing books and does sit-ups behind the cash register, who finds life in being called for roles, who quotes himself saying, early in their deep friendship, to my mother sorry you like father figures more, can I at least be your child figure?—by her last bedside, a final gift of art, her art-son performed the play she had written for the dramatic writers’ group she taught, the oxygen tube’s gurgling pump the swish of mortal seas.
Roland would have understood this group and her loving gaze. Art, at the origin of the word, comes from Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, a mash-up of manner, mode, skill, preparation, weapon, business. Surveying her group, a soldier fending off death, my mother knew all art's rich meanings and how they suffused her blood.
Studies have shown novelty and danger—as in walking a tightrope—heighten both our sense of beauty and our attraction to the next face we see: such fact alone might argue toward breaking (conventional) form. Consciousness loves contrast, as Uncle Rick intoned. Toward mother’s end, Rick invited her out for art’s full risk. On mother’s lap, she carried a portable box of hissing oxygen, front row at the theater as she loved, face dramatically pleasured, and only for a second entered rigor mortis, legs sticking straight out, before returning to life: contrast loved consciousness a little too much.
Would you die to watch something artful, knowing pleasure and freedom?
The last play I saw near her had to do with three generations of women sussing out the American diaspora. Having dropped her off with oxygen apparatus and Rick, I stayed held back by ushers in the lobby, watching a tiny screen about misbehavior, the corridor’s lemon musk letting me know our last shared moment of art. Mother, are you with me now?
Theater gave her
oxygen. Her funeral—the feeling
she watched us all from above with joy
at our best true performance: love.
Fulfillment
Ripcord brings about the great
float and a blizzard falls
on the land. People
rediscover touch and
slowness, there is dread
and gold, raised flowerbeds
are ordered. At night in the
messy parsonage, they sit
on a burst couch furred
with the blessing of animals,
making up songs as if
to send out on the airwaves.
As if to sing is to be seen
by possibility itself.
Pigeonholed
Weekend before the great tugging of our collective ripcord, a person I admired but only partly knew lay down in her allotted five minutes in the women’s gathering and bravely removed a hospital-color bra to show hospital-created breasts, said there was nonetheless one brave little neuron that had made its way, asked us to touch her breasts here, saying symmetry is very important to me, touch me on one side then switch, the ten women gathered for the weekend, her longtime friend asking, if I press here, can you feel it. I had never felt younger or more immature than burrowing in next to my large friend, feeling the animalcave warmth of her, unable to touch. Feeling not prohibition yet reserve. People who had asked to see me naked or had touched me in ways I had not wanted. Whose bodies had a certain flop and overextension not dissimilar to that of Uncle Rick who had invaded my own. You can stay in place and still flee. How does one rework that neural pathway?
Just touch my periphery, I had said, when it was my turn, sing, anything, songs of praise.
You are held by a river, you are safe, one started singing a song that means a lot to me, or at least it sounded like it, b’shem hashem, in the name of the name, this angel is near you, Rafael, Michael, Uriel, Shekhina. And the neat woman who had been in the next bunkbed had played a video of an earnest bearded man singing I am blessed by the help of a thousand angels, softening my way to you and this she sang now. She overachieves and pushes; I understand, we practically copulate in our love of work. Workaholism is a wonderfully never-ending highway. When it was my turn to dance, I didn’t know how to soften my head: a feeling it would all collapse.
Adorable
No one ever wishes that anything (believed) good ends, including health, including love. Roland unfastens storytelling to say every sequence is made up of small nuclei which always involve moments of risk and that precisely, at every one of these points, an alternative—and hence a freedom of meaning—is possible. Each moment: attend it!
Early in the relation with new love C, then living far away, out west, I kept looking at the marks on my hands and body and thinking: how can I be loved? Wouldn’t it be silly, he said, if you were all that you are, and I let a few lines keep me from that? When you have been my dream since I was so young?
The thing we fear with age difference is that we exist on different timelines, that one of us will skid into a different metaphysical vista than the other, that the core wound—of being fundamentally unlovable, of being bad—will be revealed.
In marriage, you pray to the gods of connubial bliss with both good works and faith. Calvinism would say the lack of grace becomes evident. Judaism would say that everything depends less on faith than works, that you can perform sans faith: some rabbis lack all belief.
Hence the scene of my prior marriage, the Fiddler on the Roof scene: do I love you? the wife sings at her philosophical mate before citing a litany of unseen domestic labor on his behalf, the bond of hard yokage. What happens when you forget how to replenish? Our old-world marriage had started to have this flavor, the crisis of faith right before the wife turns to us, her audience, and asks: do I love him?
Try to be a good person, best you can, act by sublunary impulses with a strong code of ethics, but forever your act binds you laterally to the community. Forgive the ghastly echo: work will not exactly free you but does bring you to the threshold.
As in a promiscuous bathhouse, jews cruise chances to overwork: the joy of working yourself to the hilt! Come to the edge of your stamina, hava nagila, go beyond!
Nine ways to escape psychic distress, said the mystical school in which I partook during my early twenties: panic, gossip, overwork, cruelty in a relationship, toxomania, gluttony, sensuality, crime, another I forget. Even zen monks drink a drop of sake, said my effervescent long-ago mystic-school mate, the one I didn’t wed, a man twenty-seven years older than I, a living-health testament to the fruits of working hard on oneself, almost eighty but feeling himself aging in reverse, in a note last week joking that he’ll be near seventeen by the time we see each other!
A repeated activity of long duration, not without risk: find yourself yet again sitting in the ostensible driver’s seat outside your daughters’ house, your former home shingled, stump-hued, wind-bleached. This house an overdetermined sign. You are awaiting transition: daughters leaving father’s home, returning to yours for the week. Phone clock’s digits tick toward numbers where they least belong; most waits of this nature can feel like hell’s own infinity loop, a journey without terminus.
Finally, one daughter appears, bearing no bag of her own needs but rather a photo. Find your photographed self, younger than new love, beaming into your current self. Imagine: your face and torso caked not just with the unpassage of time but with actual Andalucían mud, you and two women striking mysterious poses—their names linger, one tall, one short, a moment carpet-bombed into your post-divorce waiting car from the time when you and X in uncertain honeymoon traveled to a Spanish art colony. Every couple seems to have at least one mode of near-excellence: the mode X and I employed best had to do with freedom. Untethered in travel, we did better: our lives when stationed resembled a three-legged race, tied by burlap together, trying to hop along, falling in order to inch toward any task.
