Another Love Discourse, page 9
Natural that Roland would end up extolled yet not at the center, creating a haut-bourgeois existence with streets, delicacies, furtive pleasures.
My first encounter with the figure of the European intellectual: a high-school history teacher, Helmut in Berkeley’s balmy Mediterranean airs. A cherubic balding older German man, stray ear hairs seeking higher frequency, who favored a certain café for a pastry stratified as an imperial court, some Prussian cloud-fluff and cream. Helmut wrote his own book detailing the entirety of European history as he saw it, personal historiography trawled all the way through the glorious German empire, spittingly articulated: the defenestration of Prague toward the abominable ahistorical consciousness of the Americas in which Helmut found himself.
Each day, a student was to repeat back the prior day’s lecture (the past hawklike over us, circling). Can we have a summary? he would say, cued (as we all are) by habit. Is it useful to add that Helmut had been a fervent pink-cheeked flag-waving Hitler Youth? What could he make of his latterday incarnation as teacher to a flock of Californian students so motley?
His order suggested that history could be assembled in a compendium,
a pharmacopeia in which remembered poison becomes antidote.
So when I call upon Roland, my mind sometimes conjures Helmut, at yet another café after another pleasant debrief with a comrade, surprisingly careless in brushing crumbs from rounded lips onto spattered lapels, crushing an ant on the table, and in California style, he rises, casting smiles all around the café as if otherwise the court of public approval could find something in his past amiss and eject him from paradise.
If you destroy one
life, you can find
yourself seeking its chains:
hypervigilance, walking
on eggshells, worry, fear,
flight, fawn. Without
your shackles,
unmoored.
Is new love heavy enough?
Can you attach without oppression?
Embarrassment
To sign your name to anything! How do you dare? The most humiliating requirement of early childhood, launched into a new second-grade class, the kids older: the signing of a clipboard hung outside the bathroom door. Much better to avoid such disgrace. Who wanted to author their body?
After some early incursions by Uncle Rick: never! Never author, never sign. Stay hidden.
Hello, said the future friend, sorry, there’s a puddle under your seat. Imagine you stand outside as janitor is summoned, that you might then haul (avoiding shame from mother) a sodden garment back and forth in backpack until carefully shoving it into the back of a drawer (hiding from thwarting) your mother had carefully labeled miscellaneous.
The body and its miscellany. The enigma code becomes: tell no one anything related to your body. Instead, hide in culture. What part of the natural must you repress in order to live inside human culture? What section of the alphabet must be excluded? What words does your superego let emerge?
Body
You don’t have to be a lizard
with that secret capacity for a new tail
to have some aspect of your life hushed.
That paradise of high school
was not immune: a different teacher
who, like Roland, still lived with mother.
An overgrown boy in long shorts biking,
leading scouts. Whispers accrued.
Or the black-bearded funny leader
of snapping eyes who brought a team
to the nationals until something led him amiss
in a hotel corridor, witnesses stacked
like Salem creamers, hysterically innocuous
in the lobby near the hospitality station.
.
There also sparked some kind
of touch in the zone
between the rumpled defiant chin of one sports coach
and the pert endless ballerina
impetuous competence
of another. The erotics of knowledge,
the flinty-eyed hope:
who wishes not to be understood?
Roland, known for positioning desire so clearly, did not come clean with friends. An era of closet and cusp meant he hid lust and hurt in text. Called a phenomenologist, he pressed all mushroom tendrils of hiding and observation into ink.
An orientalist about his own body, his extremities distended and foreign, he took such pleasure exiting it, since how much easier to believe you see the system once out of it. The book he most loved writing concerned the subject he knew least: Japan. As if the most pleasurable travel arose when wrapped in an unknown vocabulary, living inside the preverbal with one’s own skewed consciousness.
A few books I read as an adolescent seem to have had disproportionate influence: Grace Paley’s The Little Disturbances of Man, one I’d prefer to leave a mystery, and then the work of Roland.
About that Paley book: only last week did I realize that for years I had chosen as Vegas mate someone foreign to me but identical to Paley’s wise-cracking men.
In this way, but not just in this way, marriage can be revealed as a recherché fiction. You keep believing the premise so you might continue the promise of rejuvenation. X and I told the story of our courtship out of the corners of our mouths; this, according to marriage scientist Gottman, is a dead giveaway. Soldiers of the apocalypse stalked our conversation: stonewalling and critique equipped our armory. Poor daughters, exposed to endogenous cortisol, their nervous systems left on high alert. One reason for the union’s end this wish: to model for them a better fit: my heart’s cry, not just post-factum mythology. I didn’t want them to choose an angry mate just because certain modes—worried, tearful, or raging, far from any valorous, moderate Dorian—stayed our most common music.
From this fiction made too real, the father of three daughters, I diverted my path, and only now realize how much he spoke like some first book loves:
You don’t look half bad, you know (says one of the men of Paley). Don’t laugh, you ignorant girl. I bought real butter for the holiday and it’s rancid.
Before I met Vegas mate, working as a butterfingered waitress, not yet knowing what undergirded my romantic life, I found three lines of Roland spoke to my soul, such as it was:
I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
AND
Language is a skin: I rub myself against the other.
AND
You see the first thing we love is a scene.
A scene then: imagine you find yourself walking, after your undegree, the long hazardtape stripe of beach in Los Angeles near where you once traveled with mother to Muscle Beach, but you are thinking of Roland and his love of looking at cultural products as a series of myths extolling power structures of capital or desire, and random men shake themselves free from archetypal self-improvement routines to rake you with comments:
I’m an idea person, how about you?
Or: how’s your workout shaping up?
Among other jobs of that time, I had a small radio show. Occasionally, I interviewed commentators, interrogators. A means of flipping the vector. To rub myself against the other of Los Angeles. Everyone there had invented everyone else. Everyone was an idea person. Each day asked you to contact the loving gaze of your own self-appointed church, a babe lost in the American wilderness of self-improvement, and the populace let you know your coordinates on their map.
Whom again did I interview? The short inventor of liposuction with his handlebar mustache plus his fast-talking genius girlfriend, allegedly his favorite work-in-progress with her well-contoured cheeks and lips of rubber (neé Celtic, most resembling an anime doll). She professed herself a lover of form. Also: the speed-addled self-anointed body-fluid sprayer boy inventor of performance art. The genial billboard model who invented contemporary dog-walking. The blockhead heir to the Day-Glo legacy. See in the dark. No one knew how before me. Asking them to be on the show undid society’s catcall. They stepped through the black-cloaked hall into the studio with touching displays of vanity, preening before the two-way mirror and so becoming even more archetypes in the most transient time in my life. (The signified become the sign.) You could not help be moved by the varieties of human vanity, my own included.
By making myself transparent, I was also vain. Everyone is raw at heart. They entered, I established audio levels, and their comments rose out of the vast bubbling fear we all keep well-guarded inside. To see in the dark? Infinite hope tickled the edge of tomorrow’s cosmos.
Imagine you interviewed all these inventors, sidekicks and appurtenances, and then submitted this document of discourse on cassette tape to a producer and somehow this served as one of your most legit post-college jobs.
Between interviews, I played music I loved. No one made any profit. That these recordings served any part of the common good was as apparent to me as to the makers of American cheese. The work of the studio time ended up beamed out somewhere over Iowa cornfields by something called the American Radio Network. Maybe a lone cornhand heard some of my ridiculous questions, driving his truck after a hard day’s labor, following the dashed yellow line that led nowhere. Maybe migrants working over a soiled amber factory floor heard the static between the self-regard of my interlocutors and my wish to get them to speak their bare truth, degree zero. It is hard to penetrate between a person and their own idea of themselves, the hazardous task of both hair stylists and writers.
But all the while, foolishly, I took a bet on Roland, headed north to a big public school with summer gingko trees spreading the foolish scent of bliss next to seminar rooms, late nights in the library with the broken, crumb-brushing intelligentsia, to study everything about him. Humans are odd in how we strain to make ourselves believe we matter. And all this took place on the west coast, California with its slippery coastal sandstone logic where no human ever counts too much.
Now amid the melted snows of the east, human-scaled dwellings, I find myself in this increasingly wobbly enterprise of a strongbox, aiming to create sanctuary for three girls which depends on avoiding carpet vipers while aiming for the completion of a book about a man who loved the incomplete: the sketchy scrap, soot pendent at day’s end, a silhouette waiting in penumbra.
Literature is the question minus the answer, he says, before dying along with the world’s optimism.
Born amid world war, a critic of colonialism yet his own grandfather an explorer of West Africa, seeking to map it, Roland born between the Fall of Nish and the Battle of Ctesiphon in the era of the French cavalry’s greatest bloodshed and worst offenses, a writer who went on to change how and what we read.
Come across an original
and any critique you might
form twists, since all critique
springs from the way
your original taught you to think.
During my undegree, I took those three classes on Shakespeare but found anything I would want to say about such shimmer to have been said already. Roland may have half-ruled some professors, yet no matter their insight, before anyone even shows up to read, already the Shakespeare play anticipates you. Any potential interpretation already embeds in the text, tiny little mirrors as if sewn onto a Moroccan purse. In such a mirror, you cannot see yourself, of course: the tailor has already anticipated your love of shine. This is partly why great narcissism must die in most text. You write something to surrender outcome: people often understand you as you least wish.
And yet if this investigation I am bound to write is not submitted, my new and groundbreaking inquiry into Roland, such as it has been touted to be—Riveting! Promising to change the very nature of our understanding of inquiry! Engrossing! Bold! Bald! Brave! Revolutionary!—our parsonage with its band of help meant to let us all thrive, like a peat disk made of manure which you impatiently loosen into water so that a store-bought dahlia bulb might find best sustenance—this entire flimflam structure will sink deeper than buried Roland.
How do you turn to a child and tell her you have failed? And in this most basic respect: keeping a house over everyone’s head. Keeping it safe. If we were being shelled by mortar, I would be doing no better than I am with all this elaborate planning.
Perhaps it’s useful here to recall that even hell has its angels. Also its hills and declivities; the very nature of hell is that it is not undifferentiated, there are shades, chimeras, near-misses, tantalizing strategies, escape, hope.
Quick interlude
Anyone might be forgiven for imagining some eschatology of future release. So easy to miss the greatest memo: contentment in the present. Until you get bit by the unexpected and learn what you must.
Which meant for me that in planning a major event (hocking present for the future)
I
ignored
the little bug
which bit my cranium in
its most ancient part.
One tick
bearing all the worst news
of evolution (that inexorable
juggernaut, pushing forward).
It was a time of augury: the end of spring when the outside enters your inside. Imagine that you turn to nature for succor, so it might mother better mood, because new habits revive when you overturn old earth.
At the start of summer, the tick you will name Midas bites you. Because you are tending others, getting a child or two toward a coming-of-age event, a job, a camp, helping others toward freedom or autonomy, you will not monitor signs that might spell your own dependence.
The innocuous act of pulling weeds up—how in life do we ever know what to call a weed?—does not help. You wished to put frustration elsewhere and the weeds returned the gift. A vast poison ivy rash considered first wrists and ankles ample terrain but then wished to plunder your whole being, making your face its own garden, a rise and spread until your eyes almost swelled shut. You could barely see out. Let us imagine your doctor will not recognize the rash, instead offering a scrip for a steroid you have never taken.
Should you stay alert to odd signs? The thing is never what it seems. At the pharmacy, the one who dispenses pills for the family, she lives in something like your own costume.
Platinum hair, penciled-in features, warm sienna makeup, late twenties. Hard to tell what she looked like at six but she probably would have been your friend in any embarrassing long-ago classroom, and you can see her a warm woman at eighty-two. You are also in a drag: receiving the medicine. For some reason you both quickly escalate into dialect, one probably known to teen girls on the Jersey shore, slathering each other with tender precepts about all the ways to manage life within a body.
You’ll be so fine, you’ll see.
Totally (you say).
Just don’t take it with milk!
Motheringly. And just as Winnicott’s good-enough mother does for her child, the platinum pharmacist sings the future in which you belong to
a genus of people who are well, where your health makes sense in a realm to which you belong, and how wonderful that there is some kind of consummation in meeting another person in dialect and drag, using that exact mode—the kindness of strangers—that has so beautifully mothered you so many years.
What happens when one is touched by a small poison part of a larger poison? Each of us swallowed by patterns larger than our control, all of us parts of the larger bacterium, and how can we learn what we need to learn from, say, the multiple intelligences in slime mold?
John Henryism, one daughter reads to me, this
is you! A strategy for coping
with prolonged exposure to stress such as
social discrimination by expending
high levels of effort—you can always work harder—
which results in accumulating
physiological costs.
The illusion that you can work harder as a means of controlling your circumstances can make a person implode, especially deleterious when you have a difficult roof of any sort—real, socioeconomic, emotive, imagined—over your head.
Have you planned for the great lessons of your life? From your current vantage, you never imagine your biggest lesson. Break bonds of the past, you might be forgiven for thinking you stand on a new plane and then also get to leave your mind back in baggage claim. Hold too many roles and you might stay clumsy playing the present: ex-mate, life manager, parent, other.
Do I stutter here?
Dependency
There had been mornings after her death in which waking alone into the morning made the vortical nature of my mind wish to drag me down, I could not find joy, and everywhere I looked lived the story of Atisha’s cook.
The sage Atisha had a cranky cook and all the rest of his retinue asked: please, tell us, Atisha, why do you keep him? And of course Atisha said: because that cook is my best teacher.
After years of a relation the opposite of nurturing, in which I felt I needed to jump, walk on fire and then eggshells around the moods and organizational style of an angered mate, perhaps my brain got addicted to the neural pathway of negativity.
