Another Love Discourse, page 7
After the photo, Roland goes on to live with mother on and off for some fifty years, seeing her struggles as noble. Friends and foes will call him an avid, rapacious guest at their dinner parties, a man eternally legislating the discord between body and mind, on diet plans meant to contain the wish: to suckle more than he needs. His body continues the great betrayal begun in adolescence: at the sanatorium instead of college, breathing afresh an institution’s order, its community and meals. Hypervigilant and frail within traitorous body, he micro-analyzes what happens on the surface of his villi and skin, attends costume galas in broad swashbuckling drag.
Chère Maman cheers from the sidelines, and back home, he makes up for lost time, lives with her. For a half-century! (She dies.) A handful of months beyond her death, in a fug, he is hit by a laundry truck and soon follows that originating body, mother, tunnels down toward her, and will no longer be betrayed by the waxwork of physical self, the question worn by coming out of her. He melts back toward the woman who offered him ressentiment, whose worth he believed had never been fully understood, high-born but treated wrongly by her own motherroot. Having explicated the worth of the individual and her choices, the slippery code of the self as it struggled to communicate such worth to anyone who would understand. A boy born second year of the first world war in the same era that one poet declaimed the center could not hold and another called out to a chorus of angels and asked could anyone hear? The world falling apart birthed the question: what private voice can be heard and understood? Forget mother—might understanding itself become a lover, with unmothering only the background, a world-echo?
Attentive
Then Jonathan
said to David tomorrow
is the new moon, and you
will be missed, because
your seat will be empty.
A brief history of love,
genus solipsistic: as a child, my first
memory of mother (is it
possible?), eight months of age:
Toronto where she had been
hired to be a biologist
in an era when women never
were such things! Baby recall:
narrow womblike corridor
toward a gold-bling chain:
a security latch. A blast of cold.
Later, ocher Los Angeles
pale light fluttering curtains,
a short broad window
seen through eternal time spent
in wood-slatted cage,
older brother in nearby crib.
At the stove,
a hired ambivalent Scotswoman,
manic-depressive, raised
in an orphanage, unwitty
in combing hair harshly as
had been done to her.
Looking across a kitchen, under
five, at someone else: who?
Mother. Watching that alluring
dark-haired lipsticked
stranger called
mommy:
she was making a sandwich.
Might I go toward her?
No. I barely knew what to call the stranger.
She worked; wanted
a doctorate not a daughter,
neither award nor diploma
to be found
in the boiling of diapers.
Other uncertain caretakers surfaced:
the rule being I should charm and
attach to each before, months
later, they left, unreachable.
Bullies and others flowed
in to fill the vacuum, their refined
habit. No refuge in
the house not a home.
Heart’s message: be loved
for doing, not being;
charm or be left! Protect or flee!
Alteration
At readings, people would ask: why so much focus on Roland? I’d say: do you prefer an answer from feminist film theory or autobiography?
The canon taught me to develop a particular gaze in which the desired one is female while power accrues to the male. And then suggested I see women as my father did: attractive shills, deep reflecting ponds, lyric muses skilled at bringing out father’s aqueous poet soul.
Animus, anima, like many, I began to read, think, and write as a man. (To do so meant to leave the home of sadness and get to travel.) In a way I could not recognize (instead)(for all these reasons)(before my bald boss and her decree) I identified privately: a gay man in a woman’s body.
Consider that first obvious coming-of-age moment, bat mitzvah age thirteen on the ides of March, the aleatory wisdom in being assigned singsong chants off an ancient burnt scroll hidden from spilled blood: the rich story of David and Jonathan, those boys entwined in fields, plotting the world before knowing its cost.
With both that king’s son and his lovely interloper, at thirteen I identified, though how does the signified walk into the world? Such deep longing lived in my gullet: that my brother might receive for once an approving hug from my father. Same-sex friendship a totem to be guarded. Let David and Jonathan not be sundered, let Ruth glean for Naomi.
And the nearby San Francisco pageant did not clarify much: Castro cops, cowboys, sailors, the signified swallowing sign, like the Mapplethorpe billboards of that time, white and black men staring out as if to dare, the hearty Oakland lesbians in low-slung jeans and their heroines in overalls on album covers.
In library-dusted hands, great women writers of my time and earlier passed through, but never did I dream you get to choose as career what you love. Instead I thought to become (like mother) a scientist: observe the world in humility and report findings, not yet realizing this was the same code you might crack by reading or writing. The paradox of solipsism turned outward: Roland’s core theme.
If ever I dared write, I believed, best to publish under a male pseudonym. Because under a name no one knows, you find sanctuary from bullies. (And once I did publish, some rascals from my past came forth, offering that most asymmetrical text, the dream of a common language, an apology.) A new name might let a person doff all girlhood’s cost, risk, and vulnerability, in the spirit of Edward Said, who calls the final stage of a nation coming into awareness the invention of its own undone name.
Contingencies
That era: men
falling in the streets of
San Francisco. That era
in college: meaningful nighttimes
of gay antidefamation dances
(mother, where are you?).
That alluring dark-haired
lesbian dancing nearby.
That era: the lifetime friend I met,
light shining from behind his head
at the Providence station.
What grace.
Over the ricketing clatter
of the train, that new friend
with whom I spoke
for seven hours, asking
training-wheel questions
about homosexuality.
Before, during, after: I met
people, was with them, lived
with them. I slept, sidled,
was touched. And yet inside
forever kept safe the
sanctum sanctorum
and mantram of (my) love:
never trust. Cauterized feeling. Soul
and epigenetic song of that time:
leave.
Lost to the dust of
history. Who in the rising
seas will care what
is acted, said, written? What forest
can be planted
to redeem these leaves?
The poisoned bugs amass
because of the morass we have made.
Festivity
That era: my mother!
She came to see my
value when I returned home with a fancy
college degree and became a person
of interest.
On a monthly basis, she
hired me to help her pursue
creativity.
On a hunch, worried myself
(rehearsing dread,
wishing not to repeat mistakes,
to have an unwanted child), I asked her:
was I a mistake? It turned out,
yes, I was: horror
at the news of me, Ivory soap
the old-time contraceptive.
There in her big new job,
designing experiments in Toronto!
To be saddled with another kid—
who wanted me?
No one, not then.
As the genius friend says:
Now I understand!
You were never met
by that good-enough motherly
effusive adoration.
Rather, young,
I knew myself first as
a burden: wishing to earn
my keep, feeling
myself the maid
rising at five to bake and offer each sleeper
blueberry muffins as I did, understanding
early that unlove of love: performance.
To hide
Roland, do you understand? I didn’t know maman until I was twenty-one. I take myself to task for not having shared more. We should go out some time, she kept saying to my adult self, to lunch! As if a novel concept. Beyond the blueberry muffin: we might share a meal.
And by the end we came to know each other: respect, love, closure—is that not enough to heal all?
She too lived with ambivalent attachment. One Valentine’s Day in Oakland toward the end of my father’s life, to him she read a reproachful poem against love. At a freighted table in the low-rent penthouse apartment where I lived with the man twenty-seven years older as if a second mother, my first read her anti-love poem, ending in a cataclysm: Once I needed you, husband, I thought you were a god, now I do not (a song of emancipation).
Who was my father? He perfected the art of sitting as a stone statue, face unmoving during and after dramatic pieces my mother performed about people for whom she may have longed. An era both looser and yet less expressive. Father sat through performances that splayed public revenge against his own hunger for the soulful lyric muse to be found in others. What did you think? (I once asked his military posture and Lincoln face).
I thought
I thought
I thought
she gave a very good performance tonight, he said, recovering himself, forever skewing toward the picturesque, the positive.
But there is proof of attachment, some love documents, true writing as Roland would say—not what he would call écriture, the official writing of, say, that of a state tyrant who might mention a lakeside forest in order to control his citizens’ identity. Notes mother wrote in her own style, offering a metaphoric lake that asked nothing of me: loving notes she sent whenever I was frequently shipped off outside the home, to camp or anywhere. Did she not (in her way, with her art) tend me?
Consider the home she provided, rituals of caring and structure. Can rituals of a home not be enough?
Induction
Can’t you just become an insurance agent?
she said (to me at twenty-three)
when on the isle of Manhattoes
I dreamed of burning
a gemlike fire
like that notorious
neighbor, the satyr male
writer, whose nighttime
light and discipline never
went out, the one whose sexist
eros she admired
until his death
preceded hers.
And yet: the warm
grandmother she became to
my daughters. Her baby
talk when applying thick white
stripes of diaper paste.
Her love of buying
matching pajamas.
From where had such mother
instinct appeared?
Her last time with me, I testify,
she came to see me
as if for the first time.
What does it mean to feel
seen by your mother?
Delicious beyond all earth.
There is no change of death
in Paradise.
Reader, do you care? Were you seen by a parent? Does it matter when people are dying in deserts and oceans, roofless, bearing tarp and leaky canteens?
But to know mother’s love—mother is Mother, as a well-loved taxi driver once informed me—at least once, if you got that much, that at least once you were seen, that fact never dies.
Our moment: you are so good and kind (she said, fingering my unbroken rose quartz on a chain) and generous and caring, yet you like simple things like this necklace. I like how you are so simple. My children are simple. The thought comforted her enough to return to troubled medicated sleep.
So bright and loving from the hospital bed rigged in her mirrored home studio, in the house she kept going for all of us, a shiplike creature run by bo’suns and others, a seemingly permanent landing-place for grandchildren. With my own breath bated—out of the fog of meds my mother emerged.
Rose quartz (say the California mystics) the great heart protector.
Out east, just a few weeks later, the stone broke on the floor, hours before I heard of her death. I wear it still: better to wear the rough than never have had it at all. Her love at the end and the stone, its surface corrugated like her words and the latterday sight we had of each other: can you understand how the rough can mean the world?
As the divorce began to break and spread over the waters like an oily mess, the gift of childhood abandonment fear which made me seek only the ultra-loyalists, she was already on her way out.
Annulment
Most often these giant roots look like ganglia under consideration.
Take this as a first premise: we begin with fear. Your amygdala might most easily recall all the times in your life you have been hauled out of whatever is safe and comfortable, and then were able to find a perch you believed safe: at least that seems the message of our forest.
Some of the thicket: three daughters depend on me and a book I meant to write for which I hocked the family fortune, piddling as it may be, nest egg socked away during years of the long marriage which last year (I/he/they/we) ended.
Imagine this simple hope: borrow from one future to write a book of the past.
A book which might cover nothing less than time, memory, coupling, the whole universe of love, even though I am only learning about it now.
A book for which an underpaid publicist had to send a catalog description long before the thing was writ:
A riveting and engrossing read on Roland Barthes destined to change the very nature of reading itself, to shed light on gender relations, tribal misprision, national legacy, coupling, mothers, divorce, illness, death, love, light, ecological crisis, immigrant rights, regeneration, and all the rest of our puzzle.
That one figure stood at the head of this parade, twiddling his baton, ready to be put to use, the man on whom I had rested my entire career, such as it is, ever since I was a waitress who kept getting fired for my face that telegraphed much too quickly.
My sign: symbol, paradigm, a little too syntagmatic.
Back in Los Angeles after college: either as a waitress I chatted too much with the funny, other-directed clientele or (apparently) once/finally showed horror: the famous scary-film producer! A short man treating his smart mate as if he had invented the word bimbo, as if he owned her and more. Sorry, you’re being put on furlough, said the manager right after to me, deferentially at the coffee station, a dark corridor with its musk of spilled beer, where creamers stacked more neatly than the future that seemed might be mine, white witnesses watching me understand this first of my (long line of) waitress firings!
I listened to both sign and signified of that (melancholic blond-handlebarred former Kinsey sex researcher) manager:
The owner thinks you don’t like certain customers, here’s your last check, what’s your hurry, we always seemed to like each other.
What is it to show liking? You can (fail to) show affinity in so many ways; or you can believe in someone who gets that the understanding of likeness has everything to do with the greater codes and forces running through all of us.
As a waitress soon to be fired
three times, I could not put myself
on furlough. Turning off the
sign of my face: this
among many challenges
Roland could have helped.
Some photographs he called
a message without a code,
yet I felt much the same in life: codeless.
If my goal was to write
on Roland, I
lived equipped only
with the uncertainty of his principles.
In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one
I think I am, the one I want others
to think I am, the one the photographer
thinks I am, and the one
he makes use of to exhibit his art.
