Another Love Discourse, page 5
forever improvising.
Even though baking—
our current neighbor,
who happens to be
a joyfully competent biologist
(our avatar of order),
tells my youngest—depends on
(what I lack) chemical exactitude. The youngest is a macaron baker,
she nods, her taste far more exquisite
than my lunches can ever be: our running joke.
She sends a text from school:
dinner you made was delicious last night
and I liked where you were going with lunch today
but it smelled rotten, did you wash
the thermos? Never mind. The secretary
gave me
some of the teachers’ lunch. Really don’t bother
making lunch tomorrow,
please don’t bother
and at home shows me
(the punctum) photos of two
lunches, the one I made an overladen
Soutine disemboweled,
and the neat penne roast vegetable dish
she received
from strangers, as if a gift
from grandfather’s long-ago legacy
of charity. Daughter is not homeless
(I protest inside). The contrast of the two photos:
funny because at incongruity
we laugh, and in this case, I
am so far from any ideal,
yet like a clown, I never stop bothering.
Of improvisation I make
an art, yet motherhood
I meant not to invent—
rather, to learn at the feet of the great
mothers. Who were they?
My neighbors? And/or
Sarah? Gaia?
Amina? Bhumi?
Indra? Tara? Teresa?
Waheguru, self-revealing and
necessary, genderless?
Nighttime car drive,
eldest daughter continues
her aria: we are heading
yet again to the patronym,
the house of her father.
She has skidded into eighteen,
that age of self-naming,
having often said I
raised her to be a free-range
mammal, and now resists
the week-on, week-off paradigm
we, divorced, weakly raise
to span rupture:
homes
unpaired.
Collaboration:
Vegas mate and I tried, always
with our burlap
race, our faulty flag
we tried raising at the end
of each goal achieved.
Don’t worry, said one angular
curly-haired New Age counselor to all five of us, prior
to the farce of divorce, twinkling ten fingers
near youngest exquisite-taste daughter’s face, the one
most prone to taste
hypocrisy or at least falsehood:
you’ll have a new constellation of family!
Same grouping, just shaped different
(not saying)
fractured as a mirror, like a spray of lies,
iodine-stung cat-scratches on a girl’s leg or face,
seismic faultlines—earthquake!
(Look what you’ve done to our family,
it is all your fault!
Look how they suffer:
this the intermittent chorus
from the livid and ex.)
A broken home. The cleavage furrow
known by rock and stone.
Geologist’s daughter, I seemingly summoned this tectonic plate shift off the Richter scale into being, and for this, I was blamed. Will I one day be forgiven?
Over this fractured earth and into the sky, oldest daughter roams, coordinates unknown. The pact between her friends and me: we text do you know where she is?
Where is she?
This daughter in nighttime
car speaks with passion of what
I have done right, saying: I love you,
(don’t take in the love)
(don’t pause)
(never digest). Epigenetic
to the core, instead I rehearse
dread, equip her for war.
I ask if she has
done what she needs to be
ready for the next day
(when torch-bearers might come).
The lesson in my genes:
stack your hay, play
a small violin you can stick
in a satchel when you
must run, be alert to
shift of mood
and tone, be ready to
hide or flee,
find a new home.
Prepare for the worst:
that one has kept
me buried forever: do I now emerge?
What Roland says, emerging from the trauma of his own body forever betraying him, dreaming of roses and attentive lovers, yet frazzled by bouts of tuberculosis: signs are everywhere.
Language is a sign for the signified, he says, after Saussure, and our language exists on a spectrum. Especially loving to point out the fake binary, always arguing all stern opposition must stay a function of mythology which is really a mask for oppression and tyranny. However, who among us always relishes the joys of the middle way? Is such relishing the destination of adulthood if not enlightenment altogether?
To circumscribe
Early in the time of the great panic, people retreated to their bunkers, though many from the past came forward, and we found a path at a road with a name as if from an early blues song, something like Coffinnail Cove, as if with a line I’m going out there to find my love. At the trail-mouth, an older man approached, genial. Hearing of writing, he spoke of his own. No longer did he care for home construction, his business card’s first metier, he cared for spreading his name out on the waters. Skeptical about the invisible glittervirus, he tried palming the card directly into beau’s hand, as the little rectangle also mentioned his first or last book. His wife stood by, similarly skeptical about his need to have this recent construction, the writing self, recognized.
With care, we placed his card between two rocks for later retrieval, so it would not moulder too quickly, and returned to this east coast forest, so splendid in its understanding of all collaboration with death and memento mori. Branches fell earthward only to climb upward from new roots. And inside one hollowed trunk, on a moss-covered pelt, a bark-prince sat, coolly regarding all hubris, our ideas about forward motion.
Brief lecture on semiology
Offered last night to an island-mate who asked, a cheery Dutchwoman photographer with big wonderful hands:
that, according to Roland, even your gestures, even your shirt, is a sign which represents. Each sign has two meanings: denotative or connotative. We organize denotations and connotations into myth which make ideology natural. Our assumption of such ideology as universal—our tendency to accept myth sans nuance or differentiation—blinds us.
Take the denotation of egg. Call it whatever you want, organic matter, proteins with a palisade layer of crystalline calcium carbonate columns, a container holding the embryo of a future bird. The connotation of an egg, as Roland and others would have it, would be our thoughts or feelings associated with cyclicity, purity, hope, spring ritual, renewal, a dream of flight, something to be tended and warmed.
He goes on about denotations signifying connotations. Sometimes the connotative field alters, losing historic meaning, just because an event, culture, history, or terminology shifts. Say someone ripped away the idea of free-range or Petaluma’s bolshevist poultry farmers, say there were no halal egg or golden egg for Prajapati, no cupola in a stupa, no Easter hunting or Passover plating: what then happens to an egg’s meaning?
From the above, he limns a greater truth: all of us live on a wavelength, depending on how motivated our speech and actions are by social codes. His goal is that we stay attuned to how every act—including every speech-act—lives as a little mushroom nub peeking up from a giant greater subterranean fungus of cultural, ideological, and hence mythical meaning.
And so you can find that Roland ends up a grapher of chaos, seeing a nullity at the heart, a sort of blissful emptiness. And might also note that he believes in an artwork which calls overt attention to the form and fact of its fabrication. For him, only certain acts have any true residue of the natural: obvious moments of your animal life, such as when you are born, eat, sleep, have sex, die. Other moments stay wed to connotation and hence myth and ideology.
A dead father’s hat may live as your hands torture it. Your senses may know the hat (punch it, stroke it, crush it), yet the hat also participates in greater cultural ideas you have about fatherhood or death, and this is what Roland calls the abstract connection of a sign to its meaning.
While Roland says some signs or symbols may be even more tightly motivated. Say your father casually finds and brings home an American cop’s cap from two decades ago. The thing that sits as a quiet object on a doorstand cannot be understood apart from its operations: U.S. history, lineage, racism, sexism, patriarchy, oppression. The most tyrannical systems will blur the individual into the collective, the essence into the individual, and such myth exists everywhere.
In this light, Roland calls some signs so motivated they are what he calls driven: the sign almost disappears and merges wholly with the signified. If we were to invent now this symbol—%—as a means of telling the story of the cap from two decades ago, we would encounter what he calls the driven. When the thinnest system conveys the grandest, tightest scheme, you will find the least movement or variability, the least individual movement or autonomy.
Each sign also tries to make itself understood in different ways. Symbolic (the color red can represent passion); paradigmatic (red is not green, it is understood by what it negates); the syntagmatic (red can function as an analogy—it operates within the rainbow, within the history of color, up and down and across your memory and the question of collective perception).
The Dutch photographer with the wonderful hands clapped, nodding inside our mossfairy forest. For the moment quiet but not lacking in interest. Once I began talking of Roland, I sometimes could not stop myself. Yet in our forest I felt the great void at the end of any string of words, as if at the close of analysis: together we shared an interest, but why did I think any of this mattered?
What is the myth that matters to you? the photographer asked.
Being a good-enough mother. That’s my real one.
She had chosen not to have kids and understood.
That’s why I convinced my last man we were not fit to have kids.
But what about art? Isn’t art also a myth? She may not have known
I had no exact clue, but her great laugh let the question drop.
The good mother. Such myth—I could have told the photographer—that one can garrote your throat the way a wedding ring can grow too tight.
You who are parents, do not let it choke you. Abstract concept, motivated and driven, symbolic or syntagmatic, yes, but the concept of the good mother can almost kill those who are epigenetic self-improvers. All myth plays all the time at being natural.
In this case, this particular myth stuffs my ears, occluding the possibility of my hearing any news daughter ever shared with me about being good for her, except that I write her nighttime car homage and aria here, o code of literature, an epitaph of words tall and mythologizing against other winds.
We are our own demons
Prevailing winds in college: every one of my professors had been overinfluenced by Roland (egg-eater, card-keeper, shadow-lover, mother loyalist, pirouette artist). I took all of three Shakespeare classes, each time dreaming of peering deeply into mystery, each time disappointed by Roland-laden guides, disillusion and tricksters themselves great Shakespearean themes. For thirteen weeks, one professor’s major point: the letter O remained the focus of the story of Othello—
—and going deeper, the O was the stage, proscenium arch, and shape of an Elizabethan theater in its entirety, yet also was the O of absence and implication: what you fill in with novelty, anxiety, pleasure, meaning. O! Consider the story: Othello’s jealous Iago invents an empty O of a story implicating Othello’s appointee Cassio, saying Cassio made the beast with two backs with Othello’s own wife Desdemona. The whole plot an O, O becoming the space in which nothing exists and into which everything can flow.
Thus this O oriented the offering I had hoped would be such an opening of that semester. Nothing filled our guide’s oratory other than O, and yet in it started one of the greatest overtures of my life: a lifelong friendship with a queer man who offered such open love and recognition, I could name my own habit of nonconformity. The refuge of wearing father’s over-large shirts. Why dressing female stayed a drag borrowed from a
mother whose own femininity had been a kind of anachronism, a switched-era drag.
Sweetheart, so obvious, you are the first young woman I have met so much like me—just another gay man in a woman’s body. This said by my first true boss after my semester of Os: in Los Angeles, a palm-laden high-glassed restaurant, her live pet rat on her shoulder. Who was she? A woman with a great shiny bald head. Wistful, gracious, insightful, no-holds-barred, ministerial, charismatic, lower-chakra-bawling, Paris-accented animal activist and grande dame of performance art, the long-ago daughter of a pearl king, the former wife of the first McDonald’s clown, then an ecological pioneer who had also been third-wheel friend to the great gay couples of Manhattoes, Cunningham and Cage, Rauschenberg and Johns.
Gay man inside a woman’s body. My destiny she named, offering a gift I then lost in all later years’ moves, as well as a felt hat from an old-style hatbox. Can you not see? She wished me to be clear. She cared for clarity. Around this tall bald prophet flocked a bevy of ex-Mormons, wraiths and bears, artists queering performance, my main colleague a young boy who had played assistant to pop divas, punctilious about wiping down computer keys.
Please, she said, your first task is to see yourself. Every young person should have guides, yet how easy to be obstinate in listening. And yet still wisdom pokes through. Easy to understand why putting on eyeliner as if to soften twitchy Los Angeles traffic cops (stagey legacy of mother) had always felt as if it were the greatest drag. Or why I may have loved songs with antiheroines named Lola, Jane, Candy. Or followed films about vagabonds, people ruined by sympathy, held hostage, angels fallen to earth. Roland says: the professionalism of the striptease artist keeps her cloaked. The angles of the movie star’s face hide her.
Consider you too may have been born natural and quickly grew into imposter syndrome (myth). Childhood has so many steppingstones, so much learning and bliss, but so many stones are the same: shame and its opposite, awe. The word of one’s innermost self gets misunderstood and society, prematurely or not, offers us gender and sexuality. Should there not be one long word for that slow process of misunderstanding? Is it partly to be found in the invisible ink between these lines?
The calendar transformed
O, consider this game. What if we each kept a true calendar which marked every anniversary of the firsts, each serpent swallowing its own tail, the O of loss or gain?
Each date can be a proscenium, a hollow stage now yet also, bear with me, a palimpsest. An O-shaped stone: memory laid over by the deepest carving or most recent rubbing.
One evening, July third, I plunged into new intimacy with the man who later became Vegas mate. That afternoon, a defense against hunger, I had been trying to set him up with another woman.
Future Vegas mate had arrived in California to visit someone down the coast. That morning, I picked him up—as a friend—at the San Francisco airport.
A brief affair with X years earlier, followed by my hosting that preferred game on the isle of Manhattoes: a whimsical party specked by what do you do? a favorite amid a herd of workaholics in their twenties. (How can a workaholic be present for anyone else?) Prescient or not, I made a short silent film starring future Vegas mate, its plot made of a later game: his failure to notice the woman before him who kept becoming someone else.
During that period, I worked three service jobs, running around the city, yet because I had been with so many older than I, it seemed best to avoid anyone not my age. Much farther into the future, once I linked with Vegas mate, seventeen years older, a wise friend joked: you’re cradle-robbing!
All around me, the isle’s tournament startled: people seemed to keep dropping to marriage. Ambitious women not quite my direct friends read secret rule-cards unaddressed to me about what it means to approach thirty.
Instead, for fun, I kept organizing big picnics along the Hudson River, near the tiny shiproom I rented on the Upper West Side, offering up platters of delicacies and also future Vegas mate, introducing him to some potential person or another. One wild-haired Lizzy demanded: what’s the bad about him?
Funny, alive, passionate, good values, I said, along with some other notes. And so kept him in that status—the ex/friend. He would leave long voice messages in which he perhaps seemed a bit stuck in the past, ruing mistakes made with ex-girlfriends.
