lycanthropia

I wake up this morning with “Jackson” playing in my head, quiet but bell-clear, one of Lucinda Williams’ more resigned songs. Even with my eyes closed I know I will choke up if I try to sing it, to get it out of my ears.

once I get to lafayette
I’m not gonna mind one bit

once I get to baton rouge
I won’t cry a tear for you

It’s that inane time of the month where no matter what I do there’s an ex-shaped space in my chest. I work as many hours a day as I can, but in the interstices feel completely bereft all over again, to my vast frustration. Like it hasn’t been positively aeons of time for me to have amply understood/ accepted/dealt with/moved on from the obvious fact of his departure. A departure which he chose quite clearly yet with great solemnity and an attitude of reluctance, exactly as if he weren’t actually the one chosing it.

And he was so polite. He was so terribly regretful, but firm, and polite—

and for all your talk
you don’t say much that’s real
I think I know more than you
about the way that you feel

You know there is a difference between affect and mood, my best friend recently reminded me of this in an email and that difference is very apparent right now. My mood is stable, my baseline is calm and sanguine and actually unflappable. I bathe and I eat and I get to school on time and I do things and I sleep (except for the ridiculous nightmares, and the cat wanting affection at four a.m.). Yet my affect is completely rubber-band and volatile—almost anything brings me to the brink of tears, for days now. I hit pause, sternly, on all emotions when I go into a class or to teach, and can manage to sit still during a three-hour seminar; but must flee the classroom during the fifteen-minute break to pace outside, laugh, talk to myself, fight the lump in my throat and the pricking in my eyes. Being around other people is another way to hit pause; limbic resonance with other mammals still the ultimate distraction from it, from the it, from that cringing voice speaking out of the cavernous black region somewhere near the cardiac muscle.

(He was my best friend, where did he go? I know he never would have left me.—she whimpers fretfully, monotonously; and cannot be reasoned with.)

There’s all this misery, says my workshop leader disbelievingly, leafing through the poem-object like she doesn’t quite want to touch its pages (or that may be me, I’m increasingly paranoid these days, as my writing gets worse and worse)—why don’t you turn it around, rail against fate, camp it up? There is missed potential here for real tragicomedy, where the narrator could maintain more distance and play himself for laughs—

And here I am all this time thinking I was being funny, or wanting to be. No one ever got my lyric jokes but him. He always laughed during my readings while everyone else sat stony-faced because Poetry Is Serious.

This blog also seems serious, so serious, and I don’t know how to make it as outrageously ribald as I generally feel everything is. I laugh and laugh these days. What else am I going to do, when everythingisterrible.com? See, even if I say this, it will sound melodramatic and ghastly and like you should intervene and call my psychiatrist or something, but I think it’s funny: all my simmering wild young potential has gotten its fancy education and traveled overseas and divorced its first husband and decided it didn’t have time for children and, look, arrived at midlife and turned out not to be any big whoop after all, though I sacrificed everything I could lay my hands on for it—and it’s funny! it’s so goddamned funny! I’m not Nietzsche after all! or Dickinson or Hopkins or Anne Carson or Wallace or David Markson or any of my classmates like Zadie, Nicole, Jhumpa—, maybe because I wasn’t crazy enough, or because I was too crazy, or because I wrote too many journal entries, or not enough, or because I forgot to drop out of school, or because I am just plain old not talented enough to be even a minor poet—whatever happened, whatever made it all not pan out, I think it hysterically funny, I drive around Montrose laughing until my cheekbones hurt. Whatever needed to be there for an immensely gifted ambitious girl to become a productive achieved artist/thinker wasn’t there, didn’t happen, and now it’s just the usual bits of sweeping up, it seems to me, quite factually, without any drama whatever I say this—the aging ailing parents and the years of caretaking, the protracted physical struggle against gravity, the pouring of the self into service—generously, without bitterness, into teaching and students and the essential work of midwifing the next generation of writers, the devoted selflessness, the committee meetings, the inevitable lumps under the skin in six months or forty more years, the university memorial service. I find all this hilarious and wry. Novels could be written out of it, amazing hair-raising tear-starting novels, and have been, and will be, by people who aren’t me. I love them for doing it.

But me, I can’t make anyone see how funny this is. Not the way Beckett could; or Kafka, or Borges. You’ll just have to read them. They got the joke.

I am (believe it or not) trying to say I still say yes to all of it, a dogged humorous yes, or maybe more of an okay. Okay, why the hell not. Maybe not an outrageous campy yes, or a yes where anyone else feels inspired to join in, or feels I’ve said it for them, said it where they could not: but yes. Okay. The pointlessness and the stupid death following hard on the heels of a beautiful, energy-consuming life which nonetheless accomplished nothing (and what is there to be accomplished anyway)? Okay to the loss of all that. All the shimmering thoughts, all the complicated ideas, all the playful linkings of words and skillful touches of lovers, all the meticulously unravelled nightmares and dreams and the books read carefully multiple times and the laboriously achieved spiritual insights, all, all dissolving into materiality and leaking out of a deliquescing brainpan? Okay. And the universe reaching some inevitable grey-goo state of equilbrium eventually, with no more clinamen, no more atomic motion, no more contrast, nothing generative ever again, no more collapsing and expanding and reemergence of complex life forms, just a temperate equilibrated bland vague static existence of matter without differentiation? Sure, to that too, okay. I say okay.

(You have the chemical physicist next door to thank for this cheerful vision of cosmological entropy, by the way. It’s much less optimistic than my former Stuart Kaufman-inflected complexity theory worldview about life endlessly reevolving again and again—)

So yesterday I drove away from school, away from an tortuous three-hour seminar on Foucault (I still can’t figure out what it is—just painful boredom? brain zaps? fluorescent lighting? air-conditioning? those stupid little-kid desks with tops so slanted that your pens always roll off onto the floor? I don’t know why, but after about an hour of such a class my very bones start to hurt, the mental akathisia grows unbearable, I get flashes of jumping up, shrieking OTOTOTOI POPOI DA, enacting some strange and obscene prelanguage mystery ritual to break the stultified droning educational form, no matter how “enthusiastic” or “participatory” the conversation is it seems anguishingly dull and pro forma and predictable to me—teaching isn’t this way, but being in class makes me feel like I am going batshit insane—)

—driving, as I say, away from the campus, laughing at myself and half-weeping and playing Ani DiFranco (“cause I know the biggest crime / is just to / throw up your hands”), accepting that estrogen depletion has transparently made me into a sloshing bucket of emotionality, and I get to be that way in the car, no one will see, no one cares anyway. I pulled up in my driveway and the neighbor immediately apologetically asked if we could cancel our dinner plans—we were going to hit up some allegedly fabulous non-white-people fried-chicken place near campus, I had been furtively entertaining okra fantasies all day—because he had a more tempting engagement with a hot young number with whom he hooks up whenever she’s available, which apparently is seldom because “she’s really complicated,” and I couldn’t not laugh at the look on his face (dismayed yet helplessly allured) as he admitted all this. The sole source of my exasperation was that just a few hours before I had stood in the college library with all four disks of Brideshead Revisited in my hand, debating whether I should check them out, and put them back on the shelf telling myself no, I would have company tonight and then tomorrow I needed to work; and, I could have picked up my own damn okra on the way home and then fallen into the sofa-quilt-cat elysium and not left the house again for 24 hours; whereas now I would have to go back into the cruel world.

Which is what I did. I wound up blank-minded at Blockbuster, staring at those insensate walls of a zillion copies of the same movies, leaving with a strange random collection of DVDs (3:10 to Yuma, Mother, Interview with a Vampire) and stumbling equally thoughtlessly into the Boston Market next door, acquiring mashed sweet potatoes and cornbread. The last time I went there was Thanksgiving 2008—my ex and I had a tradition if you could call it that of nontraditional Thanksgivings, the best one was in Mexico and involved fish tacos is my memory, but buying a whole sweet potato pie five minutes before Boston Market closed one night might also be a candidate.

(Aside: why do I keep dividing my email into “Sent” and “Saved” on the one hand, and a file called “Houston” on the other hand? When will my new Houston friends stop being Houston friends and start being just friends? It will take many more months, but when that happens I will know I live here.)

Doesn’t this just happen every autumn semester, as it has since my first one in Santa Fe, confused about boys, flunking Greek quizzes, and wandering all day down by the river in the yellow aspens?

I can’t write today. I can’t. All blogs will melt and I’m not a funny poet, and today is the last possible day to write this book review. Also the cat doesn’t like it when I sing. She folds her ears back disapprovingly and narrows her eyes. Probably I would’ve been a great chanteuse if not for her. Probably I would have been a celebrated heartwrenching beauty like Emmylou Harris.

There never was that unfettered pipeline, the flute from the throat of the loon, for words to get from the inside of me to the outside. It’s okay. There was matcha and my favorite pair of panties with red rosebuds and the kindest friends anyone could have. And if I ever let another driver out ahead of me in traffic, or made the way slightly easier for someone, or gave a student an extension or a Kleenex, or said nothing when one of my parents was insulting, or held a door, or stayed up late talking someone off the ceiling, or shared my dinner with a friend, wasn’t that enough? In the parking lot I rolled down the window and let out a mosquito, so it wouldn’t have to spend all day stuck hungry in a hot car. The light slanted across the ugly supermarket construction, which apparently has replaced the last open space in Montrose, there was some argument about whether those remaining few wild acres should be a community park but of course instead it will be a giant chain store literally right across the street from the very sweet and wonderful neighborhood grocery that has been there for forever, I have already resolved I will never set foot in the new store. I drove past, a wet yellow light fell on the metal I-beams and the blacktop rollers and the men in hard hats and the sign telling how they dug up all the trees and carefully replanted them elsewhere, and I thought: how sweet it has all been, how sufficient, how very very fine. The gods are still here suffering alongside us, grieving along with us our laughable futility.

oh for the nightingale’s pure song and a fate like hers
but mine is the sheer edge of the tearing iron

(Ἀγαμέμνων 1148-49)

The girl woman singer died in her flat, alone in her bed.  Too many people said, “It was to be expected,” because we knew this girl who was a woman but really she was a girl. We knew she had problems and she did not have the luxury the rest of us do to handle our problems privately, with dignity. She was a mess. So what? We are all stinking messes, every last one of us, or we once were messes and found our way out or we are trying to find our way out of a mess, scratching, reaching. We knew she had demons that were bigger than her, demons she tried to fight or she didn’t, we can’t possibly know. Her struggles were documented and parodied, celebrated and ridiculed. Celebrity. Call. Gossip. Response. We have seen the pictures of this girl woman in the street, barefoot, in the street, her midriff bare and swollen, in the street, her makeup smeared, her unforgettable hair, stringy, pasted to her pale face, her body being carried from her home in a red body bag. There was no privacy for her, not even in death. That is a tragedy too.

I love her music and listen to it regularly. I always hoped she might survive herself, hoped she would give her adoring fans more of her voice, hoping she would give herself the blessing of a long life. I heard she died from my best friend who sent me a text message and we commiserated about what a shame it was for a girl woman to die at the age of twenty-seven. It is a different kind of devastating to think about the life she will never know, about those gifts that come with more years of living than the girl singer was afforded. I do not wonder about the cause of her death. The how of her demise isn’t my business. And yet. When I first heard of her death, I wondered if she died alone. I wondered if she was scared. There is fear and there is fear. Now, I wonder if she knew real happiness in her short life. I wonder if she felt loved or knew peace. [Roxane Gay for The Rumpus]

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.