lycanthropia

There are flame-colored tulips on my desk.

I drink blood orange Italian soda. The cat comes in from the backyard saying all her words at once. I finally wash the dishes, sweat dripping down off my nose into the sink, listening to my old tape player, an album I haven’t listened to in years, Rosanne Cash’s little 1990 breakout/breakup album Interiors. The whole album is barely a half-hour long. They are such short sweet-tempered country-pop songs about remembering abuse and reclaiming the self from relationship, and a flimsy, sad small kind of anti-domestic feminism. I remember that they sounded like fierce roars to me twenty years ago. That I felt daring and unbridled, singing along.

don’t give me your life
I have one of my own
it was a brilliant idea
inventing the home

letting it go
though it won’t be the same
is to dance with the tiger
and laugh at the rain

Should I extend this unexpected spurt of domesticity to vacuuming up the cat hair and scrubbing down the bathroom fixtures? to washing my own hair and depilating and clipping my nails? I decide not.

I decide, stay slovenly and write.

Ever since I have been awake today I have been reading Dodie Bellamy’s the buddhist, which I read on her blog last fall avidly, ravenously, the way one reads a good new blog, clicking through the whole thing furiously backward, gulping prose passages entire like too-big bites of hot food even though they burn your throat and tongue. I am awash with admiration for her, and for Kate Z. and Repat and Bhanu and everyone—they all seem to be doing the real work, to me, the hard work, the work of really laboring to make their writing mean itself and also double back on itself to mean even more, big and real and sweaty and deliberate and full of trust in itself—nervily so, because it knows the risks of trusting. The risks of loving.

Last night I dreampt I was applying for a teaching job and the interviewers asked me a question about poetics, one of those perfect questions you are always waiting to be asked. (Which reminds me of the time my friend J. walked up to my desk at the newspaper and asked me a question about The Deer Hunter which I had literally been waiting YEARS for someone to ask me. And I answered in complete and joyous paragraphs. And J. listened, after which she said, “Yeah, I thought so too,” and went back to her desk, and I sat there glowing happily for the rest of the day.)

So in the dream I gave my answer very enthusiastically, with vigorous hand-gestures, and pacing back and forth excitedly. I told them that I’d heard Jorie Graham read at Harvard in 1998, two poems from The Errancy, poems which she’d just written and which were still untitled (and which remain untitled in the book), and that I closed my eyes and lowered my head and listened to those poems and heard what she was doing in them, and it blew my tiny world apart. (Which is all true.) I said to my interviewers:

“In those poems, the conscious mind is examining the process of consciousness. The self encounters the self. [Hand gestures.] Openly, for perhaps the first time in literature!”

Sleeping as well as waking I realize this is grandiose, and I qualify it by saying something about Keats. But I am completely enthused in the dream.

And I wake up, and read Dodie Bellamy. It’s good.

I am stuck and stuck, stagnant on 150 Roses. I know I can’t write it as fiction-fiction and I also can’t write memoir-memoir. Beth is reading Reality Hunger by David Shields and says she wants to dogear every page, it is speaking so clearly to her. She wants to teach it this fall in her advanced fiction class, and as always I wish I were one of her students.

Sarah Manguso (whom I really admire) writes of it:

[Shields]…seeks to understand how the conventional literary novel has become as lifeless a form as the mass market bodice-ripper. Shields provides an ars poetica for writers and other artists who, exhausted by the artificiality of our culture, “obsessed by real events because we experience hardly any,” are taking larger and larger pieces of the real world and using them in their work. Reality Hunger is made of 600-odd numbered fragments, many of them quotations from other sources, some from Shields’s own books, but none properly sourced—the project being not a treasure hunt or a con but a good-faith presentation of what literature might look like if it caught up to contemporary strategies and devices used in the other arts, and allowed for samples (that is, quotation from art and from the world) to revivify existing forms. Shields challenges the perceived superiority of the imagination and exposes conventional literary pieties as imitation writing, the textual equivalent of artificial flavoring, sleepwalking, and small talk. I can’t name a more necessary or a more thrilling book.

It makes me think, as most things do lately, of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets—and of Cioran, of Novalis, of course Nietzsche, the aphoristic always turns up as a form during these transitional periods, when genre is reaching toward the limin of stopping being something and starting being something else.

Then, speaking of disillusionment, cultural revolutions and genre-transgressions, Jonathan Franzen gave a commencement speech reprinted by the NYT—”Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts,” which had us all aflutter for the requisite fifteen minutes. Really I find him a better essayist than novelist, which is perhaps part of Shields’s point, that one can’t always go on writing Middlemarch set in Ohio and expect people to keep finding it fascinating (though I’m a fan of The Corrections, and to be fair haven’t read Freedom, partly out of spite). (Also: is Kenyon College somehow trying to best the Wallace commencement speech?)

(Interrupting my interruption to say I have been bleeding for days now, and have just started eating a piece of turkey jerky, and my body is all like WOW THAT IS SO I LIKE THAT which explains why I am not a very good vegetarian, I don’t like consuming sentient creatures but every once in a while there emerges a lithe woman from within me with a sharpened spear who won’t stop until I have eaten ALL the ahi tataki, but so anyway—)

Franzen in this essay adopts the persona of his crabby old-man self, which I appreciate, as within me is also the crank, the git-offa-mah-yard geezer who rather wishes her typewriter were no longer melded with and indistinguishable from the Internet. (I keep trying to use my mustard-colored manual typewriter. But it is so LOUD. Even the cat complains.) It isn’t hard to problematize his argument, however, mostly because first of all it seems like he got it from his friend Alice Sebold, and secondly it is true that so many of my loves and deepest not-likes have been gleaned from the ether, because I live like a hermit and because (maybe) of the crazy. If I’d had to make friends from readings and parties and talks and panels I figure I would be much lonelier. Maybe I’m wrong. (A sentence you might not hear Franzen say.) I flash back onto the first time I met Farren, the first time I met Dana, meeting Elizabeth and Jessica in person for the first time at AWP. Meeting people around whom I am all tongue-tied, like Kate Z. and Ariana R. and Allison Carter and Teresa Carmody. Never yet getting to meet Mara, or Alicia, or Repat. All of us women, all of us writing, all of us working hard in different degrees of poverty and obscurity compared to media juggernauts like Franzen, even the most successful of us, even Dodie Bellamy and Bhanu Kapil and Chris Kraus, and what do we have, what master’s tool can we use to dismantle the etc., and lo and behold, here is an Internet; and we understand it intuitively, we don’t have to warp ourselves to fit any Procrustean form, and I have really just one very forceful word to say to Mr. Franzen and that is: BLOG.

(Which he might just take in, nodding, as his argument isn’t against writing, only its humanity being indicated by a limp thumbs-up.)

Yesterday I updated my status, hoping if I said it, it would be truer:

I’m finally kinda starting to get into how much I weigh. It feels, you know, solid. Real. Like I’m actually HERE. I’ve spent so much of my life being an evanescent wisp that to be curvy and full-bodied is sort of interesting! Like I’m not going to take any shit off anybody. Like I EXIST.

I mean, really. Weighing 135 rather than 100 and feeling acceptance is a breakthrough for me but I microblog it? The ironies compound themselves, it all deserves its own essay, in particular a very sprawly womanly essay. But it’s easier to compress it, get a lot of Liking™, and eat leftovers.

Poet (and comedienne) Genine Lentine (does she know how hysterically funny she is?) posted similarly a while ago, noting the resemblance of the little Facebook people-icons to rubber baby-bottle nipples:

Facebook is the perfect source of secondary narcissistic supply….When someone posts their childhood photo and friends click the like button, the little globe with the red numbers becomes a source of the flush of Unconditional positive regard of seeing one’s self mirrored in others.

Franzen wrote:

A related phenomenon is the transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb “to like” from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving. The striking thing about all consumer products—and none more so than electronic devices and applications—is that they’re designed to be immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature.)

But if you consider this in human terms, and you imagine a person defined by a desperation to be liked, what do you see? You see a person without integrity, without a center. In more pathological cases, you see a narcissist — a person who can’t tolerate the tarnishing of his or her self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing lengths to be likable.

(Smart people said more things about his piece here.)

Is it any coincidence that my ex has over a thousand Facebook “friends”? That I felt our partnership slowly yet inexorably supplanted or eroded by the online forms or simulacra of human connection, porn and poker? When he reacted with immediate anger to even so much as an ignorant question about these and other pastimes, I might have known he was in his addict, not in his integrity. Because as a smart friend of a smart friend said, “Dopamine levels are for people who don’t know how to dirty-love.” Because as the smart friend said herself,

I know how to love. I have BEEN knowing how to love for a long time now and the best parts of my life–my writing, my friends, my pets—those things are borne of and sustained by dirty-love, mucky love, every day even if it’s boring or inconvenient or it hurts love….Perhaps one of the very few things I am emerging from this time of profound loss with is the conviction that real love, verb love, dirty-love, EXISTS. That I am capable of it and that it’s around me all the time and the giving and receiving of it is what keeps me alive and that I should accept nothing less.

It’s a dark gray day—I have to search for the word—a cloudy day, rare for here. It’s too early for monsoons, and the whole month has been unseasonably cool. The cat doesn’t know what to make of it and neither do I. Letters sit in my mailbox because the postal carrier only comes back to my casitaita if he has something to deliver. I should frame that nice note Jorie wrote me when she was guest-editing Ploughshares.

I am stuck in my writing and don’t know how to move in any direction. And I don’t know if changing or discontinuing medication would be a distraction or a solution. I can hardly criticize my ex for seeking mediated forms of human connection when I seek them myself. And if I can’t argue against him then I feel I have nothing to say, is how thoroughly he has colonized my mind, my art, like mold or mildew spores. I am either missing him or angry with him, it is so hard to have a space that doesn’t have him in it.

It will be easier when I move. But that is two months away and in between then and now I want to WRITE IT OUT, regurgitate him in a final way so I can symbolically as well as literally Move Onward.

I feel crazy today, in an unpredictable way I mean, like I might do something even I don’t expect. I want to combine my three blogs all into one blog. I want to pool all the narratives as saliva pools in a mouth. I want to print out the vast swaths of ungroomed prose I have generated over the last several years, call it 150 Roses and be done with it. I just do not have the techne. I don’t know how. I know what I want to do but I don’t know how to do it.

But I’ve been doing this long enough to know that you figure out how, teach yourself how, AS you do it, not beforehand. Actually my ex brought this to my attention a few years ago, as I was trying to plan a quilt in my head and feeling frustrated. He said, I think you need to just start sewing, and he was right. I finished it in an afternoon.

This is like quilting. I have already written the story a hundred times. I don’t need to write it again. I need to revise it, and that is worse than washing every dish in the house. Quilting happens where you cut up fabric that is already whole, and repiece it into a new whole fabric. The apparent randomness of the exercise can make you feel crazy unless you have a firm grip, like a girdle, on an aesthetic.

Where do you start?

It’s so messy. You have to pull everything out and spread it all over the floor and look at it. Annie Dillard says it’s like weeding a garden, you go up and down the rows of chapters pulling things out and putting things in. She says you need acres of space to write a book. I could only find a structure for a nonfiction book I ghostwrote/edited by going up the hills to the Great Books College one afternoon in Santa Fe and using a reading room in the library, with an enormous long table, and placing all the chapters and bits that didn’t fit anywhere one after the other all the way around the periphery in a gigantic circle and walking around it, slowly, like the Stations of the Cross. After about my tenth or eleventh or twelfth circuit, the subheadings and the whole table of contents smote me like a wave and I stood there with tears in my eyes thanking something or someone for giving it to me all in a rush like that, the segments of it fitting together like teeth of gears, the whole little engine of the book revealing its structure to me so generously.

It’s a bright mauve sunset over Piestewa Peak. What will it be like to live by the sea, with no mountains visible from my front door?

There has to be a way to make a book. To make this book.

Do I have to paint it, dance it, sing it, piece it, quilt it? Do I have to retype the whole thing from memory, like one of Hemingway’s lost briefcase manuscripts? It may not even be interesting to anyone but I am obsessed, this is the only book I have in me right now.

That’s called, 150 Roses.