lycanthropia

According to Lacan, the sexual relationship—or, more precisely, its failure—represents the primary stumbling block in human relations, a stumbling block that results from our insertion into language. As Lacan puts it, “No relationship gets constituted between the sexes in the case of speaking beings.” “There is no sexual relationship” because the categories of male and female indicate a structural impasse: each position is structured so that it looks for what the other does not have, not for what it has. The desires of the sexes are thus not complementary. This dooms relationships between the sexes to be antagonistic, and it dooms both sexes to a continual battle to overcome this antagonism. The only way out of this antagonism is to turn to fantasy, although fantasy can only overcome this conflict in an imaginary way. Fantasy allows the subject to discover, through producing a narrative around it, a way of creating the illusion that the successful sexual relationship is possible.

[Todd McGowan, The Impossible David Lynch]

I have reached that point in the semester. The make-it-or-break-it point, the moment of truth, the small but powerful eddying whirlpool of black-hole hell down which one is inexorably sucked. In short, grades are due Monday and worst, my research paper is due Friday. And I have fallen headfirst into the classic grad-student trap of, “I’ll just read one more book/article and then I’ll start writing.” Now it’s Tuesday and the paper is due Friday and all I have are pages and pages and pages of notes—

Dead cold panic.  The usual. Cursing my lack of work ethic and all those nights I stayed up late eating tangerines and watching Firefly. (NOTE TO SELF NEVER EVER ORDER FIREFLY UNTIL AFTER ALL THE PAPERS ARE HANDED IN OH MY GOOD LORD.) Wishing I had an extra weekend, that same panic that assaults the hearts of my own students, its icy fist gripping inside their chests, and then in a rictus of fear they google desperately and start downloading and/or cutting-and-pasting. Out of a class of 25 students, 6 plagiarists. I asked four to rewrite their papers, after being stern and scaring the bejeezus out of them; and the others will have official university sanctions, which means I have to write letters and print out websites and document copied passages with a highlighter and colored pens and OH GOD I DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR ANY OF THIS.

So of course, I woke up this morning and immediately started making salsa verde/green chile chicken enchiladas from scratch. You know. Because.

There is really no known terror, for me, quite like the unwritten-writing-assignment terror. Which is kind of hilarious, since I’m, you know, a writer and all. Sometimes I’m not sure how I bore it, working at the alt weekly for as long as I somehow did (thanks mostly to everyone’s studiously and kindly looking the other way as I floundered and gasped and thrashed)—I don’t know why I wasn’t vomiting on like a weekly basis every Sunday night. I guess I was cutting and hitting myself instead, and accusing my boyfriends of being to blame somehow—hang on, I have to peel the blistered skin off the poblano and serrano and jalapeño.

Where was I. Ah yes, reminiscing delightfully about my dashed career as a movie reviewer. And my thwarted career as an academic, off to yet another lurching start. All because writing prose scares the pants off me.

(Taste salsa verde: way too mild. I knew I should’ve bought more serranos. Can I text the neighbor and ask him to pick up some more habaneros or something? Add to list of things I’ve learned to do since my ex left me: Revel in insanely hot Mexican/Thai food.)

Suddenly I have to post this and not write it anymore. It’s a day where I hate everything I write, myself, am convinced my friends all secretly find me a big drag, and why the hell didn’t I start this paper two weeks ago. Just the usual. But when I was looking up whether habanero should have a tilde, I found this Wiki entry on hyperforeignisms, and you should read it, because Americans are silly and we apparently like to gussy up our foreign loan words even more than the foreigners originally did. We mispronounce everything! Petruchio! Empanada! Schizophrenia! Beijing! Maraschino! Now I can be even more snobby.

(PS here is my winterface. This is the face that tries to figure out how Kristeva’s chora relates to Eraserhead, or Lacanian ego development to the construction of the lesbian in Mulholland Drive. This is the face that panics and goes into denial and paces the house, skin prickling with anxiety, and tastes the salsa verde, really pretty amazing with all the cilantro and lime.)

She has always been prone to worrying about things she has said in classes or at parties, subtle social slights she might have made unintentionally, tossing restlessly in bed at night wondering how she can make up such offenses without adding more or worse to them. And now she has plenty of time alone at night to think about the years she spent having sex with her lover. She remembers many times when it would start with a massage, she would give him backrubs, digging her elbows into the really knotted spots the way he liked, then at some point him flipping over and then she would, for lack of a better phrase, service him, but it didn’t feel that way, it felt like a beautiful offering, like she was doing something sacred and exciting. And then too he would crawl up on the bed between her legs, peeling down her panties and nibbling at her inner thighs and flicking his tongue in that way that made her literally feel as though she might go insane, she might be losing her mind, she might not be able to stand it but then somehow there she was crying out hoarsely, hollering coarse and loud without shame, clutching at his head as he stayed there, his mouth firm on her, not going anywhere, I am not leaving you, her hips held securely in his strong hands. And now that she has the leisure to think about all this in her solitude, she wonders and worries about it in a way that did not seem possible at the time. She worries that the giving and receiving, the giving and taking of turns, was not as mutual as it should have been, not as mutual as she thought it was, perhaps did not feel mutual to him. But she never asked him, when they were together, it was an unspoken understanding between them that their lovemaking was deeply mutual (though they never called it that, they just called it simply having sex, it seemed less romantically fraught somehow, though now as with so many things she feels differently about that, she wishes that they had called it making love). So now, she worries, was their unspoken understanding really just her misunderstanding? Had he felt resentful, neglected, put upon? If someone (neither of them, but some unimaginable neutral observer) had been keeping count, who would have been ahead? Who would have been indebted to the other? Because the pleasures seemed so inextricable—hers was his, his became hers. She decides (again and again, in her solitude, putting the question to rest only to have it come up the next time she is tired and alone) that if he felt there were some inequity in the division of labor, in the reward system, he might have told her—he might have said something, he might have asked for more attention, rather than just leaving her to wonder about it alone. It never seems to occur to her in her worrying that in fact perhaps it was she who paid an excessive amount of attention to him.

The students never know what is really going on inside my brain, which, thank God. It has saved me, my carefully constructed teaching persona. I wisecrack my way along, feign aplomb, antic my way through the syllabus, clown against my inner waver, challenge them with active learning not least so they won’t notice my hands shaking. Me to one student: “Please tell me you’re not on Facebook. Please tell me that is not what I see.” Her: “I’m posting all the funny things you say as my status updates!” I make commanding close-the-laptop gestures and frown dramatically. They know both that I am not angry and that I am exacting. I ask a question and the entire class responds except for one young man, so I immediately turn to him for the answer. “There’s nowhere to hide,” I tell him sweetly, and when he protests: “And there’s no crying in baseball.” We get through the hour and a half together, somehow. They’re going to be horrified when their seemingly super-fun English teacher hands back a bunch of Cs and B-minuses next week. I count on that reality check to bring them up short and induce panic. I teach by means of confusion, misdirection, frustration. My teaching style thrives on irritating students to a point just short of rage.

And I tell myself, twice a week, driving to school: There’s no motherfucking crying in motherfucking baseball.

I feel completely fragile and confused today, like an egg being candled from the inside out. I keep forgetting my medication, maybe this is to blame. Maybe the anaesthetic from a very minor dental procedure this morning. Maybe the psychic wear and tear of chronic teaching anxiety, usually most terrifying at 2 a.m. the night before. Maybe the wind, the stars, an influenza from the heavens. Maybe none of these.

Someone is right now, honestly, practicing the accordion. I can hear them from my backyard. My neighborhood is anachronistic at times.

I came home from the dentist and passed out, the ephedrine in local anaesthetic always hits me right in the middle and I feel that whole heart-pounding, chest-turning-inside-out thing. It’s as if I’ve eaten way too much MSG. So I came home and faceplanted, but tossed and turned and drooled, and then just woke up suddenly thinking very vividly of this passage which was written by my ex-boyfriend to his sponsor, the day he broke up with me:

[redacted because writing not mine]

I woke up from my involuntary nap feeling panicky, with my age completely visible in front of me. Not some other time, but now. I keep having this vision, I see myself at fifty, at sixty, at seventy, still lying in the same bed, my body mine as it is now, the same shapes of me but less defined, with softer wrinkled skin and long gray hair, partnerless and intact, as a friend said nothing going into the body, nothing coming out of the body. A long deep sterility or barrenness I am destined to inhabit. I think menopause is barely around the corner, yet even carrying this much age I cannot write the poem of the salt marrow, the useful poems my friends are writing. I’m glad someone is writing them, but I wish she were me. No matter if there’s a book, there will never be a baby; no matter if there’s a baby, there is no turning back. It sounds or is so facile but I keep having to realize on a daily basis that I will never be 25 or 35 again. As much as I wish he, my boyfriend, had drawn different conclusions from his spiritual awakening, I know very well what he is talking about. It’s one breath.

I became a Zen student circa 2001 because I was so aware of the nearness of death. It seems that’s something all serious Zen students give a lot of thought to, death. We are in fact kind of obsessed with it. My then-husband and I watched the movie Alive, which, kind of ironic that title, and afterward I shuddered late into the night thinking not just, I am going to die, but more, I am actually dying right now. And I was drawn into Zen practice because it was the only spiritual discipline I could find which admitted that.

Poets of course are the other group of people in our culture obsessed with death. A trusted friend for two decades, Richard Ray sent me this sweet yet skeweringly accurate discussion between a poet and a novelist who are married, Naeem Murr and Averill Curdy: “My Poet / My Novelist” (originally recorded in 2008). So many, i.e. all, of the things of which Murr gleefully accuses Curdy, are true of me as well, and I was often teased about them by my novelist, when I lived with one. And I suppose they are true of most of us who write this kind of deep lyric writing, we are far more obsessed with the dictionary and death than we are with narrative elements.

(I have two dictionaries similar to the one Murr describes, which thoughtful exes procured for me in happier days; I think one cost fifty cents in a garage sale and the other, truly gigantic, cost $5, and has its own table, where it sits with a globe on top of it. An acquaintance, seeing it in my apartment, jestingly asked if it was my book of magic spells. Clearly he was both ignorant and percipient, and I never asked him over again.)

Then too, so many female friends going through deep changes right now. Everyone swimming in her process, barely keeping her nose above water, and I can’t help or even give hope from where I am. I am about to turn 42 and I live in a 400 square foot rented casita for $635 a month and I don’t have a lover and I don’t know anything. I teach 24 students twice a week and I can’t help them either.

Despite its very real seemingness, I get a bottle of kombucha out of the refrigerator and take my meds dutifully, in case all this is just wonky blood chemistry. Ashtanga class is tonight. Now I am truly a white single middle-aged woman, having used the words “kombucha” and “ashtanga” IN THE SAME PARAGRAPH. Someone show the lady what she’s won.

This terrible fragility.

So confused. How can I be this old and this confused. I feel terror, and simultaneously as if inside my chest as if there’s a nest of little brown-speckled blue eggs. But how can this be. There can be nothing left to be born in me, I feel while only halfway through so nearly finished with this life. I dream dreams and wake up having already forgotten them, no one is there to tell them to, to ask about, it’s okay, but honestly there is no one to take a walk with, holding hands like schoolgirls, watching the neighborhood cats come out at dusk and stretch and begin to hunt, no one listening deeply to each other’s deepest allegedly most alien things. Because where are you, my lost black valentine.