lycanthropia

Goblin foxes are peculiarly dreaded…for three evil habits attributed to them. The first is that of deceiving people by enchantment, either for revenge or pure mischief. The second is that of quartering themselves as retainers upon some family, and thereby making that family a terror to its neighbours. The third and worst is that of entering into people and taking diabolical possession of them and tormenting them into madness. This affliction is called ‘kitsune-tsuki.’

The favourite shape assumed by the goblin fox for the purpose of deluding mankind is that of a beautiful woman; much less frequently the form of a young man is taken in order to deceive some one of the other sex. Innumerable are the stories told or written about the wiles of fox-women. And a dangerous woman of that class whose art is to enslave men, and strip them of all they possess, is popularly named by a word of deadly insult—kitsune.

Many declare that the fox never really assumes human shape; but that he only deceives people into the belief that he does so by a sort of magnetic power, or by spreading about them a certain magical effluvium.

The fox does not always appear in the guise of a woman for evil purposes. There are several stories, and one really pretty play, about a fox who took the shape of a beautiful woman, and married a man, and bore him children—all out of gratitude for some favour received—the happiness of the family being only disturbed by some odd carnivorous propensities on the part of the offspring. Merely to achieve a diabolical purpose, the form of a woman is not always the best disguise. There are men quite insusceptible to feminine witchcraft. But the fox is never at a loss for a disguise; he can assume more forms than Proteus. Furthermore, he can make you see or hear or imagine whatever he wishes you to see, hear, or imagine. He can make you see out of Time and Space; he can recall the past and reveal the future. His power has not been destroyed by the introduction of Western ideas; for did he not, only a few years ago, cause phantom trains to run upon the Tokkaido railway, thereby greatly confounding, and terrifying the engineers of the company? But, like all goblins, he prefers to haunt solitary places. At night he is fond of making queer ghostly lights, in semblance of lantern-fires, flit about dangerous places; and to protect yourself from this trick of his, it is necessary to learn that by joining your hands in a particular way, so as to leave a diamond-shaped aperture between the crossed fingers, you can extinguish the witch-fire at any distance simply by blowing through the aperture in the direction of the light and uttering a certain Buddhist formula….

Strange is the madness of those into whom demon foxes enter. Sometimes they run naked shouting through the streets. Sometimes they lie down and froth at the mouth, and yelp as a fox yelps. And on some part of the body of the possessed a moving lump appears under the skin, which seems to have a life of its own. Prick it with a needle, and it glides instantly to another place. By no grasp can it be so tightly compressed by a strong hand that it will not slip from under the fingers. Possessed folk are also said to speak and write languages of which they were totally ignorant prior to possession. They eat only what foxes are believed to like—tofu, aburage, azukimeshi, etc.—and they eat a great deal, alleging that not they, but the possessing foxes, are hungry….

As soon as the possessed has been freed from the possessor, he falls down senseless, and remains for a long time prostrate. And it is said, also, that he who has once been possessed by a fox will never again be able to eat tofu, aburage, azukimeshi, or any of those things which foxes like.

While returning from my visit to the Jigyoba Inani, my Japanese servant, who had guided me there, told me this story:

The son of his next-door neighbour, a boy of seven, went out to play one morning, and disappeared for two days. The parents were not at first uneasy, supposing that the child had gone to the house of a relative, where he was accustomed to pass a day or two from time to time. But on the evening of the second day it was learned that the child had not been at the house in question. Search was at once made; but neither search nor inquiry availed. Late at night, however, a knock was heard at the door of the boy’s dwelling, and the mother, hurrying out, found her truant fast asleep on the ground. She could not discover who had knocked. The boy, upon being awakened, laughed, and said that on the morning of his disappearance he had met a lad of about his own age, with very pretty eyes, who had coaxed him away to the woods, where they had played together all day and night and the next day at very curious funny games. But at last he got sleepy, and his comrade took him home. He was not hungry. The comrade promised ‘to come to-morrow.’

But the mysterious comrade never came; and no boy of the description given lived in the neighbourhood. The inference was that the comrade was a fox who wanted to have a little fun. The subject of the fun mourned long in vain for his merry companion.

—from Lafcadio Hearn’s Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan (1894)

Ono, an inhabitant of Mino (says an ancient Japanese legend of A.D. 545), spent the seasons longing for his ideal of female beauty. He met her one evening on a vast moor and married her. Simultaneously with the birth of their son, Ono’s dog was delivered of a pup which as it grew up became more and more hostile to the lady of the moors. She begged her husband to kill it, but he refused.

At last one day the dog attacked her so furiously that she lost courage, resumed vulpine shape, leaped over a fence and fled.”You may be a fox,” Ono called after her, “but you are the mother of my son and I love you. Come back when you please; you will always be welcome.”

So every evening she stole back and slept in his arms.

[from Human Animals by Frank Hamel, 1915]

I am of course embarrassed now by what I wrote a few days ago. That whole self-pitying shtick about letting someone out ahead of me in traffic? Oh please, I am the pushiest driver ever and besides have never put friendships first in my entire life, always, always throwing them under the wheels of my privately ruthless ambition. Nice try, but I am too damn old now to get out of the game, not knowing any other; and not too old to give up on myself quite yet. Almost, but not quite. Fifty. Maybe fifty. I can’t jack it in at forty-two, I have to give myself at least until I’m fifty before I hubristically decide I’ve failed as a minor poet.

(The soft abrupt collapse of my body that started last year, though, the thickening ankles and neck and waist, the melting chin and the receding hairline, all that is still true, and dismays me, to my amusement. So I’m starting #c25k over again tonight, after 3 months lolling about deconditioning. I’m not going to want to do it, but as my former therapist used to say brightly, that’s fine—I don’t have to want to, in order to be able to do it anyway. Apparently vanity is the only thing that will motivate me off the sofa and onto the pavement. It sort of surprises me to discover how vain I actually am, when all these years I thought I was one of those people who didn’t care about my appearance, slobbing around in thermal underwear shirts and men’s jeans. Come to find out, I was secretly apparently very proud of my ankles, otherwise why would it distress me so much that they’ve vanished?)

Also I had a revelatory moment in Intro to Doctoral Studies on Tuesday night. I’ve given up hope of anything interesting ever happening in class and, along with the other painfully bored students, now bring in my laptop and furtively surf or do other work during the three hours—so my moment came while studying the CVs of my peer-professors. Thanks to the raging political paranoia of the state in which I teach, the eyes of Texas are upon you / all the livelong day, all CVs and syllabi from public universities are uploaded and available, presumably so that worried parents/legislators can make sure we’re not teaching Marx, which, apparently, many instructors have perversely decided to do for the first time just as a response to being thusly gawped at—et alors, I have of course twisted this resource to my own purpose, and download the PDFs 1) to help me decide what professors to work with, and 2) to study the career trajectories of those people with whom I went to undergrad, and to try to figure out what they did vs. what I did and where we diverged. How can we all be exactly 42 (me and the three new hires), and they are associate professors with spouses and children and 3+ books apiece, and I’m, well, me? What was the process via which we became ourselves?

It’s very interesting and I believe I have learned something. Not too sure how revelatory the somethings, but here they are:

• I dropped out of college when I was 19. That put a small crimp in things. And I didn’t finish till I was 26. Yay lycanthropia!

• During those years I was waiting tables and working in bookstores and travelling around on Greyhound and writing songs. I keep forgetting it, but I spent all of my early twenties wanting to be a singer-songwriter and battling a great lot of anxiety to do this. And as it happens, just about the time that I really got started with that, the year I discovered alcohol and won second place in the college talent show and played in my first coffee shop and somehow scrounged money together for guitar lessons with Jaimé Morton (David Wilcox’s former student) and hung out one idyllic weekend afternoon with the Western Mass songwriting group (at the time Jaimé, Dar Williams, Richard Shindell), and got more money together to go to Song School at Telluride, and take master classes with Janis Ian and Jonatha Brooke and David Wilcox, and get bitten on the ass somehow by a brown recluse while camping in the Colorado woods—just at the same time all this started happening, and I wrote what I thought at the time were a handful of real songs—I also met the Parisienne, and Joseph, and took his class, and wound up in the psych unit for the first time, and won a summer fellowship to write a terrible novel which I never finished, and, ultimately, wound up reading English at Cambs, and bit by bit, traded lyrics for lyric.

(It’s always funny how we all thought Jaimé would make it and Dar wouldn’t, because Dar was so shy and mumbled her lyrics and Jaimé had such a big warm gorgeous stage presence and was such an astonishing guitar player. This is how life takes us and decides for us. This is how life lives us.)

Somehow all this was oddly encouraging, to understand more clearly why my careering trajectory (bouncing around unevenly) is so different from that of my peers, who got a quiet first book out promptly after their MFAs and then patiently doggedly slogged their way upward through prizes and contests and publication, without deviation from a path, while I went on instead to distract myself very thoroughly with, apparently, serially imploding relationships and editing and adjuncting and freelancing, and took haven in the small eddy/backwater that Santa Fe can be, the impenetrable hedge it can offer those who want to hide out. I observe all this without judgment, it’s just what happened. If I’d gone straight from BU to Columbia as I was invited to do, things would have turned out very differently. (Not least: my then-husband, who worked as a quant for Cantor Fitzgerald in London, would have been killed in 1WTC on 9.11.)

These are the ways we blunder through. I feel philosophical about it this week, as opposed to stinging and cauterized.

This CV-review moment also reminded me as to why I may butt heads with these professor-peers aesthetically, why I’m instinctively confessional and obsessed with phanopoeia—because when you spend five or six or seven years teaching yourself, album by album, the entire Joni/Tori/Ani playbook, with a sidecar of Polly Harvey and Dar Williams, that’s probably going to happen. I have all these inky notebooks, hundreds of pages of chord charts and tablature and lyrics written out by hand, as I painstakingly taught myself one song after another, because we didn’t have the Internet yet and the only way to figure it out was to study it, the way you’d study Marvell or Fulke Greville, and this is how I misspent my youth. Sitting at a guitar/piano and rewinding the tape over and over so I could unravel some knotty chord or garbled lyric or tricky bit of phrasing.

Understanding all this about myself was oddly cheering. This is how I got this way. If I want to reinvent my aesthetic it’ll take at least as much work, immersing myself in the same ways and with the same intensity; but as Tito used to say, “If it’s work, it’s only work…and it is yours to do.”

Finally, part of this week’s mental/emotional turnaround wasn’t just hormonal (I’m such a materialist—part of being lycanthropic) but: Hopkins. I brought “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire” into workshop, managed to read it without my voice cracking, just all my hairs standing on end, but then made the mistake of trying to repeat his final words, and—

“I am so happy, I am so happy. I loved my life.”

That he could say that. Of all men. Immortal diamond, / Is immortal diamond.

I’m memorizing this poem. I want to be able to bust it out in case I’m ever imprisoned, paralyzed or bed-bound. Hopkins died when he was 44. Shouldn’t I give it at least two more years before I conceitedly write myself off?

Somehow this combined in my head with Mona Simpson’s reporting her brother’s last words to be: “Oh wow oh wow oh wow.”

And hearing that Georgia is better. We have a little time. Small window, reprieve. Before flesh fade, and mortal trash / Fall to the residuary worm.

In the meantime, I write part two of my weird poem/prose thing which nobody in workshop, not even me, likes, and I watch Deadwood and David Lynch and Wanda Sykes, and pet the cat, and go for grilled cheese with the neighbor, and sing angrily in the car when I am alone, and wake up at four a.m. chilled by ghosts, my hair standing on end, and “all the untidy activity continues, awful but cheerful.”

As Mr. R. says, we bash on regardless. Let’s get to it, people. Shit is on.

1. This happens every month.

2. This too shall pass. You won’t always be existentially exhausted yet insomniac at four a.m. and deep-throating an entire packet of Pim’s chocolate biscuits, deeply lonely yet freakishly shy and only emerging from the carriage house late at night to get cherry Slurpees.

3. While you don’t yet know where anything is on campus, inside of two weeks you’ll be 95% acclimated and know where parking and the classrooms and your office and the gym and the coffee shop and the library all are. You’ll have a favorite route to get to school and an ID card with a weird-looking picture and approximately 15-25 embarrassed teenaged students and an ungainly composition textbook to lug around and a bunch of new friends on Facebook.

4. While right now you have no furniture other than an inflatable bed and plastic lawn chair from Walmart, your stuff gets here next week and before you know it you’ll be sprawled on the sofa with the cat watching season 3 of Deadwood.

5. The Cy Twombly museum is three freaking blocks away.

6. If he wants you to meet him in Cabo San Lucas for Christmas, he is perfectly capable of asking you.

7. If your higher power wants you to be back together, s/he is perfectly capable of making that happen. If from now on you get to be friends, your higher power is perfectly capable of transmuting this pointless romantic love into something more useful.

8. Whatever is happening with Georgia is exactly what’s supposed to happen.

9. You’re not doing anything wrong by existing and breathing air.

10. For chrissake, go to a meeting.

Made using tumblr, by crafty fellow blogger/12-stepper Ms. Kelly—!

And then just like that, not a moment too soon, I remember that I’m the one who can make me feel better.

After a grim four-day siege by the menstrual faeries, with attendant weeping and pain (and much consuming of ibuprofen and paracetamol and chocolate biscuits and cheezy poofs, the latter of which have shredded the roof of my mouth), this is important information. That I have it in my own power not to just feel huge and stupid and useless forever.

(Looking for your keys with your keys already in your hand.)

Accordingly I get up off the sofa, open all the doors and windows to fresh night air, do a tidying raid on the worst of the house’s flat surfaces, sweep laundry into baskets and dishes into the sink and rubbish into trash cans, and then snap a pound of asparagus and start sautéeing it in a suitably indecent quantity of pasture butter. Pour the Riesling over ice cubes and toast Maman. Put on Rickie Lee Jones and sing along, however much it irritates the cat, who hates sopranos more than dogs and slinks outside to sulk on the front porch, also mad that I’m not giving her any butter.

love seems sure around the new year
now it’s April love is just a ghost
spring arrived on time
only what became of you dear
spring can really hang you up the most

Thus I haul myself out of the small trough of last week, grateful inch by inch. I am wearing sparkly indigo fake acrylic fingernails which make typing almost impossible—in fact, they make many things almost impossible, which is why I’m wearing them, because in the lycanthropic phase this month I literally shredded my skin, and this is a last-ditch effort to leave it alone long enough for it to heal. There are several parts that need to heal.

Other ghastly features of the moon-phase this month were a renewed preposterous obsession with the growing size of my body, and an ongoing terror that I will never write a real poem again. At therapy today I asked Lauren if I could use the scale in the clinic’s hallway, which I guess is there for eating-disordered clients? She said sure, so I did, and, fair reader, the number there was not one I had ever seen before associated with me. It was very interesting! It is so unique! I just keep getting larger, where will it end!

So too is the fact that this is the only kind of poem I can write, right now.

Wildflowers.

She don’t know how to anything, whacks with her hoe
at the dirt along the concrete block wall, there should be wild-
flowers and she stubborn will put them there, in spite of her
long sparkling indigo fingernails, thick acrylic just glued on.
A creosote drizzle wets her hair flat. She ignores, hacks,
the cat watches impassive. Stub the blade edge on rocks,
on roots. At least three inches deep for seed to catch
and take. Now is the part where you come in, you with your
tricks, with those women walked straight up to you and
murmur you want to party baby, was it something on
your forehead said you’re a john, she wonders and method-
ical chop-chops like her grandma at a cotton row. At a
payphone (that long ago) as a girl, unable to speak for tears,
and the same old woman saying with finality, after an unhappy
pause, Well they’ll sure run around on you. The folded paper
packet has red poppies, blue flax, something gold. And she
stopped crying then. Yes ma’am, they surely will. Has black-grit
glitter between her fingers. Has something real to hold.

I don’t know what it will take for me to be able to write again, I mean really write real poems, but I suspect it’s going to involve monkeying with meds and my pdoc doesn’t believe me so I may have to go commando on this one. Or am I done writing? Am I just empty of all lyric, anything aslant and interesting, I envy every poem I read and feel completely incapable of figuring out how people manage to do it, how to put them together, I just finished an MFA and am starting a PhD and the terrible truth is I DON’T KNOW HOW TO WRITE POEMS, what will happen to me! Again it is so interesting! I curl up on the sofa (back on the sofa again!) eating buttery spears of asparagus with my fingers and wondering what I’ll do next!

As it happens, my phone rings, I look down, it says Beth’s name, I pick up: “Hi, Beth.”

“For one thing, that was a starmaking turn from Gene Hackman.” It is Scott, Beth’s consort, starting in mid-paragraph concerning The French Connection, which I dissed in a text earlier in the evening. “For another, it’s a rare example of William Friedkin at work. And were you not on the edge of your seat when they tore apart the car? Come on!”

I’m already laughing. “Yes, okay, great set pieces. I think it’s because I watched four seasons of The Wire over winter break. I’m burned out on police procedural and narcotics units. But I liked the editing. The way Friedkin shamelessly cuts from one scene to the next, total change of lighting, then immediately, no dialogue, cuts straight to a third, compressing the time scale—”

“Do you want frozen yogurt?”

“Um, YES?”

“Do you need time to get ready?”

“I’m already standing here with my purse waiting for y’all.”

Yogurtology is closed so we go to Half Price Books, where Beth and I discover to our delight a section called MEN’S ADVENTURE, also INTERRACIAL ROMANCE and PARANORMAL ROMANCE. It’s Scott’s birthday so Beth buys him a record album called, and I am not making this up even a little, The Dangerous Christmas of Red Riding Hood (1963), which has songs by both Liza Minelli and The Animals. Then we get 99¢ Frosties™ at Wendy’s.

Now I am home and so relieved that my dreary little blue period is officially over. Tomorrow I grade papers with Mark and then, oh then, attend the thesis defense for my friend, poet Allyson Boggess, who has the most beautiful defense invitation ever—and she took the photograph herself. Mira! Behold its atmospherically inviting bedlinens.

There are two other wonders of the Internet I must share with you before I retire this evening, full of asparagus and Frosty™:

1. The magical website of poet Patricia Lockwood, which is pretty much the funniest damn thing I have read in lo these many weeks. Just her deconstructions of The Boxcar Children book covers ALONE. But also she is an amazing, muscular, loopy, rococo, did I already say amazing, poet. I’m pulling for her to get into the Best American anthology, either for her Hayden’s Ferry Review poem or the one from Poetry. I feel tongue-tied around these poems, like the awkward girl at the Q&A who you just know is going to raise her hand and say adenoidally, “Where do you get your ideas from?”

2. An excellent speech by playwright and television writer Theresa Rebeck, an honest and funny and clearsighted look at how being a woman has made it harder for her to do her job, and is making it harder for lots of other female playwrights and television/film writers to do their jobs too.

This is the situation: Plays written by women are not being produced. In 2007, the one year I opened a play on Broadway, I was the only woman playwright who did so. That year, nationwide, 12 percent of the new plays produced all over the country were by women. That means 88 percent of the new plays produced were written by men. (Back in 1918 before women had the right to vote, the percentage of new plays in New York, written by women, was higher. It was higher before we had the vote.) [...]

This is a disastrous statistic, and it is related to another disastrous statistic, which is the number of women writers and directors in Hollywood. This year 6 percent of films were directed by women, and 8 percent of produced screenplays were written by women, or women had a shared credit on them. That means 88 percent of all plays were written by men, 94 percent of all movies were directed by men, and 92 percent of all movies were written by men.

Women playwrights like myself have a lot of anecdotal evidence to support some pretty coherent theories about why this is the case. People in the power structure seem more mystified and often they don’t seem sure that there is a problem. (One of them actually said to me, not to long ago, “But Theresa, where ARE the women playwrights?” Seriously, he looked me in the face and said that.) Several artistic directors have expressed concern at the idea of “quotas,” they really don’t like the word “quota.” I don’t like that word either. Another word I don’t like is “discrimination” and, “censorship,” and I wish I could get them to dislike those words as much as they dislike “quotas.” [...]

The Dramatist Guild tracks the percentages of women and men who enter graduate school as playwriting students, and it also tracks the numbers of people who apply for membership, and those numbers either stick to the 50/50 ratio OR there is a higher number of women. So in the ideal world, those women and men who are over the years developing their craft as playwrights should rise though the system at an even rate. This is not what is happening. Women are being shut out, at different levels of development and production, and you end up with this crazy 17 percent number which seems to be the highest percentage we can get to, year in and year out. Seventeen percent of fifty percent is thirty four percent of a hundred percent. (Bear with me I’m not making this up I’m actually pretty good at math.) That means that sixty-six percent of the best plays by women—the plays that SHOULD be rising to the top, the plays that in a fair world would move into the culture as the stories we are telling ourselves—sixty six percent of women’s stories are being lost. Every year.

And I have to reiterate the premise of those numbers is that playwriting is NOT in fact a gene on a Y chromosome, and that we are NOT losing women playwrights because they decided to run off and have babies. The reason we lost all those women playwrights is, We buried their work, and we sent them away.

Night before I bleed, restless, wordless. Trying to write the same poem all day and too agitated/dysphoric, not enough attention span. Not exactly unhappy, just unable to settle down to anything. Jittery, fidgety and teeth-grittingly aphasic. Can’t concentrate to read. Can only strings of nouns, verbs, odd words in odder places. Should have tried yoga. Should probably have taken Klonopin sooner. Tired and wired in equal measure.

Last night, though, finally the girl-dance birthday party of my dreams—thanks to Mark and Kelly’s generous willingness to let us hijack their front room, and Beth’s having portable speakers, as well as having plenty of Erasure, Madonna, Prince, James, Pet Shop Boys on her laptop. On my own iTunes I scrounged up Paula Abdul, the Cranberries, Pulp, Björk, The Cure, Depeche Mode, I don’t know what all else. We sang all the words and hopped around wildly and were literally drenched with sweat, it was glorious. Mark made mojitos, he and Kelly fed us tacos and guacamole and rice, Laura made her amazing fruit salad with strawberries and mangoes, and I brought an enormous fruit-decorated vanilla cake from Whole Paycheck (on sale for $12) and a bottle of Liebfraumilch. At some point there were white tequila shots with orange slices. We partied like it was 1999. My friends performed various sobriety field tests on me and I was judged fit to navigate. I drove home at 1 a.m. crying softly, in love with all my friends who are going to be insanely hard to leave, for a city where I no know one but my beloved hometown librarian, having not seen him in circa twenty years? But I am. I typed an official letter of acceptance and it’s clothespinned to the mailbox right now, for the postal carrier to pick up in the morning.

After the dance party, ibuprofen and faceplanting. I woke late and drank a liter of water. Then all today, post-dance fatigue and a deeper inertia but without relaxation, an agitation, I should be doing something, something, but what, but I am exhausted and allergic and half-menstrual. I managed to put away a load of laundry, wash and hang out another, repot a dying basil plant, plant catnip seeds for Pyewacket, run errands with Beth—I bought a white fitted sheet, which will save me washing sheets another week, and three wineglasses, the fourth in the box being broken, I haggled till I got 20 percent off. They are good wineglasses, a thin bell-like chime when you flick them gently with your fingernail. And I am tired of drinking out of water tumblers. Then I bought a packet of wildflower seed for $1, how could I not, though I have a hoarding problem with collecting seed packets, I am always going to plant them and never do, so I have enough desert-hardy flower seed now to fill a five-acre plot.

All day no appetite, bloated and disfigured, but I force myself to make a rehydrating cherry smoothie for breakfast, and later a small supper, linguini alfredo, plenty of black and pink peppercorn ground on top, sea salt, the last of the Liebfraumilch with ice cubes. The cat licks the empty bowl, chases moths sportively then looks at me over her shoulder to see if I notice. I am half-menstruating, enough to spot the sheets this morning when I blearily sat on the edge of the bed and wasn’t fast enough. Stained the ivory silk gown I once fancied sexy, thrift store $2, why think of it as his when it has always been mine. In the mirror eyelids swollen mauve, face blotched, pocked and scabbed, a unhealthy pallor now used to my skin. That old conundrum: do I look objectively plainer this time of the month, or is my lowered self-esteem distorting my appearance.

I hate this and it is boring and I am keeping writing it.

I fell in love with a woman today in Target, she had an ungainly box in her red shopping trolley, one of those big reinforced cardboard boxes that doesn’t quite fit, the kind with the big copper staples, some lawn equipment or furniture that some man in her life would be putting together. But I looked and she had no wedding ring, just slender strong tanned hands which she ran over the rows of candles. I paused at a nearby end-cap display and sniffed an unscented violet pillar candle, looking artlessly the other way. She wore Teva sandals, brown canvas shorts and a red cardigan. Her hair looked like mine, shoulder-length brown highlighted blonde, but it looked healthier. She looked healthier, little muscles in her calves and forearms, creamy tanned skin. I thought, Have I just seen the woman I am meant to spend the rest of my life with? I thought, Does she look like me? Nose somewhat Roman, cheekbones strong, intelligence in her eyes and hands as she tried on sample moisturizers in the cosmetics aisle. About this time I realized I was behaving like a weirdo so I gave up on watching her and went to stand in line and buy my sheet and broken wineglasses. There’s this new thing with stemless stemware—where they try to sell you just the goblet part of the wineglass. I get this for reds, but not white, surely, where you want it to stay chilled, not warmed by the heat of your hands?

Somehow I stood right behind her in the checkout line, coincidentally. She bought the big mysterious cardboard box, a little ruffled purple bathing costume, um, swimsuit I guess we call it (Jesus I am Edwardian when I feel this lycanthropic), as for about a three-year-old girl, also a little plastic sandpail and shovel. Then she wandered out and I will never see her again.

But all day long I have been trying to write a poem about her, my alter ego, my unknown angelic beloved, like Allen Ginsberg’s Whitmanian longlong line ode/cri de coeur to the darling boys he sees in the frozen meat aisle, “A Supermarket in California“—

           I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
           I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
           I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.

O beautiful woman, oh you, it is you whom my soul loveth, I have fallen in love in Target but my love does not see me, O see me, here I am, we are meant to be together and write songs and poems and make movies and quinoa salad and lie on the grass and tell stories to each other, we are meant to be each other’s other halves, feed each other strawberries and try on each other’s lipstick, oh love turn your head and see me, I am standing by the candles that make me sneeze, reading their ridiculous names (Birthday Cupcake, Angel Whispers) and wondering what your voice sounds like,—the dream of the twin, growing up with my cousin just a year and a half older than me, how we developed our code language, its secret inflections and vocabulary, I think all my female relationships since then have been compared to that with her and found wanting—do I love you because you are beautiful in yourself or because I think you look like me? Am I even more solipsistic than I have dreampt?

I half-seriously entertained walking up to her and saying, “I never do this. But I think we might have things in common, or perhaps could be friends. Here is my card if you ever want to call or go get coffee or frozen yogurt.” But then I saw the lawn furniture, and the little sandbucket with its plastic shovel. And after all her toenails were painted red and she seemed in such good shape, the way a white woman in her early forties is either already starting to give up (id est, me) or is in the best shape of her entire life.

Oh my love, there you were among the scented candles and now all is lost.

I can’t even tell you what it is I am trying so hard not to say, but it is in there. It is right up in there with being afraid that my parents are actually going to see the inside of my apartment, which means seeing all of my witchy accountrements, like Buddhist statuettes and images of various deities and Feri paraphernalia and book titles, oh dear the book titles, I have few openly sapphically incriminating ones but the pagan/witchcraft books alone would give any good Christian parent an aneurism. The best I can do is be the best daughter I can be, and hope my religion doesn’t come into it.

I’m scared to go back to Texas, from whence I fled in 1991. I admit it.

don’t take me back to the range
back to the range
I’m just coming out of the cell in my brain

The first guy I ever went out with, a nice boy from Katy, Texas, turned out to be gay. But I only found that out about a year ago. In 1986-1987 I had a massive crush on him, I think we went on like two dates and then he pretty much ditched me like he couldn’t wait to get rid of me, I was devastated and confused, and spent twenty-plus years not knowing that he’d broken up with me so preemptively because actually he didn’t like girls.

If I had known that, it would’ve helped. But maybe he didn’t know it yet.

Instead I spent all of my twenties and a good deal of my thirties determinedly reenacting that primary sexual rejection. Trying to get it to come out right each time.

The reasons change—being gay, being unable to commit to honesty—but the take-home is the same: I don’t want to touch you or be near you or call you my girlfriend. How people style it varies, but the outcome is identical.

Probably the Target woman would just invent some new elaborate system of sexual rejection. Was she pretty because she looked like my mother, like me, like my best friends? What is the mechanism of attraction? What is the will of the universe, of the power Greater than myself?

So I came home and tied my new so-called karma bracelet around my wrist. It fits there as if it had always been there. If there ever is a thirteenth lover, s/he can cut the bracelet off. Otherwise it stays there and I stay single. If nothing else, solitude sure is good for the lycanthropy. When I’m feeling jangled and unstable and a few bricks short of a load, I can stay up till half-one blogging and eating toaster waffles. I can stand in the doorway of the refrigerator and squeeze a long stripe of yellow mustard onto a slice of maple turkey and roll it up and nibble one end, giving a microscopic morsel to the cat. I don’t have to tiptoe. No one cares.

Why do I keep yelling at this blog about how I’m going to be single? I’m starting not to believe me, there’s so much repetition and vehemence.

Once again this is not a literary post.

I will therefore conclude by sharing two uselessly pretty things. Isn’t it nice that I can make myself less respectable, diluting my own ethos, by performing my gender and fetishizing illlustrations of fripperies.

First, I do think this Lancôme “L’absolu nu” lipstick looks gorgeous (pronounced GARjuss, if you are Björk; which, actually, if you really are Björk, I have a project I’d like us to do together, but anyway)—it’s so pinkly sheer and nude looking. I may have to splash out on this one next paycheck—Red Chiffon, or Rose Veil? But then there is Japan, and they need my money so much more than Lancôme does.

Then, the second pretty thing is this lovely enamelled necklace my new friend Cambria thoughtfully gave me (mine is the sunset/robin’s egg one on the left). I was blown away, and so touched by what she wrote in the card too. Isn’t it weird to be just now meeting people in time to leave? I think part of the belatedness of these friendships was my being so heterosexistly encoupled. If my ex were stilll in my life, no way would I have had a girl dance party with tequila shots and orange slices and vanilla cake decorated with blackberries. This is something it would behoove me to remember.

There is so much messiness in me and I don’t know if what I write is legitimate, or can be legitimated. Yet that word—legitimate, illegitimate? If I bear a child, of course it is mine. Surely it’s only men who would need to ask, wonder, try to determine: is this from me, is this of me?

Everything here is generated out of me. Shapeless as it might be—

I distract myself from the mess, everything is so messy right now, in my mind and chest and crotch, the three cauldrons my Feri teacher Valerie calls them, the cauldron of pelvis, of heart, of skull. I despise myself for not being able to write a more literary blog. I should be writing essays on Melville and Brontë and Chaucer. I should write essays on important topics, like: ________________________. (I can’t even think of a topic. Hairballs? Cooking? Cats? Back pain? Lipstick? Proust’s use of the semi-colon?)

My friend M. gave me Donald Barthelme for a birthday present, the book with sixty stories in it. I thanked him and said, does it have the one about Miss Mandible? Because I loved that, when I was a little kid and didn’t know enough to find it strange. He said yes. Then he said, a better one is “The Balloon,” start with “The Balloon” and then read backward, and then forward.

I don’t know anything. I’ve been blogging for roughly ten years and still don’t know how to say anything that’s interesting. I could never write my essays in Cambridge either. Juliet, my director of studies, tried to help me by making me write with a timer. That I could sort of do. As long as I didn’t have to adhere to an outline—I could just freewrite for an hour, and then type that up and it would be more or less an essay. And then I would be soaked in relief, and go to the midnight movie showing at the Cambridge Arts Cinema, a place I miss terribly sometimes. They’ve closed it down, of course. You could go see everything there, every film you can imagine, for £3, and you could bring in your own food. I would hand in a blotchy Shakespeare essay and then go watch a John Sayles double-feature, riding my bike home at 3 a.m. in the fog.

Today I went to two thesis defenses and a poetry reading, so I have been sitting quietly in uncomfortable chairs for a great part of the day, which has a feeling, as my Barthelme-giving friend noted dryly, of being in church, because no matter how restless you are, you can’t leave. I feel despondent for no good reason. Everything is fine. It was good to be in the MFA community again. I forget how isolated I am until I am around so many normal people and then I feel so raw and awkward, I start laughing inappropriately and wondering if everything I say just sounds like the barking of a dog. Many people congratulated me kindly about Houston, even friends who probably applied and were rejected. But I’ve been rejected by Houston before—and good news, they are allowing me travel funds to visit and look for housing in June—there is so much good news, I am fortunate—

Messy. Ugly. Nonliterary. Too personal. Uninteresting. One of the thesis candidates talked about this today, prompted by a faculty member who writes public poems, occasional poems, poems for the people. So the candidate stated in response that they too felt the need to lift the poem out of its own small circumference of focus and give it more longevity by appealing to more universal or global values. But, the candidate hastily amended, there were poems that they love just because they’re great art, not because they deal with epic themes. I was sitting there dully, thinking Hopkins, Yeats, but confusedly, because they too treat of great, spiritual themes, as well as broken-heartedness.

It used to be simple: there was le matière de Rome, le matière de Bretaigne, le matière de France. Then the troubadors came along and there was suddenly this pesky matter of elevated romantic love.

Anyway I am no doubt butchering what the thesis candidate said, but it made me uncomfortable. It was like listening to the back end of a Socratic dialogue, the side of the weaving with all the knotted threads hanging out, the rough draft that Plato never got happy with and threw away without finishing. These categorizings of poetry, even into public and private, always make me vertiginous and queasy. But I can’t explain why. I’m not a literary blogger, as much as I say I want to be, and I’m PMSing and I’m on a full milligram of Klonopin tonight because I was crying, and lately I find crying to be just unbearable. It’s not so bad, I know that, it’s human to weep, I know it’s not as bad as throwing up, or having a cut that needs stitches, or having bronchitis or strep throat. But I hate it. I fight it. I pace the casita and literally wring my hands, admonishing myself, trying to laugh myself out of it. And I take Klonopin when I PMS.

leave all your love and your longing behind
you can’t carry it with you if you want to survive

If I write it, and I am female, doesn’t that make it écriture féminine? But that doesn’t necessarily make it good? Why is my writing not better? Is it that I write at midnight after having swallowed a mood stabilizer and a benzo, with a half bottle of strawberry-flavoured mineral water and several pistachio-covered dark chocolate toffees?

My internet dating stint ended horribly and abruptly last night when a bunch of totally inappropriate guys messaged me, in their midst one person who actually seemed semi-funny and personable, even though he’s also an IT/tech type guy and not what I have lately inexplicably taken to calling, in my head, an interlectual. Jewish. Forty-something. Funny. Likes 30 Rock and Douglas Adams and Dorothy Parker (as opposed to all these guys who list, like, Animal Farm and To Kill a Mockingbird as their favorite books, because they clearly haven’t read any books since middle school), and so I was in the middle of looking at his pictures and feeling that new but already familiar revulsion, and there was something welling so I let it rise up in me and I let it, I named it, I named it was very clear: He’s not my boyfriend. I have a boyfriend, and this isn’t him. Then the next thought was equally crystalline: Why am I on this site—to meet someone and fall in love? I already met someone! I’m already in love. I’m deeply in love with someone, and none of these men on this site are him.

Then I paced the house convulsively sobbing, hiccoughing, again with the hand-wringing, fighting the urge to cry out to him, to call him to me. Like if he’s in another room of the house, I would just call his name and he would come into my office or the bedroom to see me. Where is he? Where is he? It flooded me in a matter of seconds, even the marrow of my bones melting with the urgency of the longing, it was like the last nine months didn’t exist at all, everything was so simple: I wanted him, I looked for him, I was looking around the house to find him, searching, searching, why wasn’t he there—

So tonight I went back onto the Internet dating site and disabled my profile. It’s too soon. I’m not ready. The man doesn’t exist who will cradle me against his bare chest while he reads Absalom, Absalom aloud into my hair, and I don’t want anyone else.

Then I read this poem, “Heat Shield,” by my friend Jill, it’s about her wife Josie, and it undid what was left in me. You should read it. She’s a really good poet, in that deceptively simple way that takes about a zillion hours of revisions to get right. She nailed it and that nail pierced me and then—and then nothing happened, only I sobbed and I took a Klonopin for the first time in a month and I went to bed and read Chaucer’s The House of Fame and Feminaissance until I passed out.

The last time I slept with my ex was 25 May 2010. We cried and wrestled and bit and caressed and kissed and fell asleep tangled together, he said I won’t leave you, I’m not going anywhere, and I slept like I hadn’t slept in weeks.

I dreamed Maman’s Steinway grand piano was on fire. I was trying to play something in A minor when I noticed smoke seeping out from between the keys, and when I opened the coffin-lid of the harp, the box of the piano, the flames billowed out, fire licking up along each wire. My lover and his older late-stage alcoholic brother stood there looking on. Fire! I cried out, Fire! Get blankets and water, help me put out the fire! They did nothing. I looked around, frantic; found thick woolen blankets and towels, put out the fire. Then, sooty and scorched, I turned to my lover: You had the piano insured, right? Because it’s worth tens of thousands of dollars. He turned to his brother: Yes, I gave him the money for the insurance. And then I despaired, because I knew the money had been spent on alcohol, and the piano was ruined.

I woke up alone. He’d left me a handwritten note: “Thank you, I love you, thank you, I love you, thank you, thank you.” I wrote down the dream in my journal and then got up to take a bath. I was sitting the bath with my soap in my hand when I thought, I have to leave. That afternoon I left to stay at a friend’s house for a few days. When I came back home, he and all his stuff were gone. The note is in a box somewhere where I don’t have to see it, along with his other few letters to me. He has beautiful handwriting, curved and jagged and elegant without being pretentious. I loved it. I love him.

What is writing? What is the woman trying to say? When will she turn into a tree?

What is écriture féminine? What is the meaning of experimental, what is boring, I am boring, what is trying to be less boring and has something new in it, you have to be willing to do something bad to do something new.

I still don’t understand why I can’t write essays as I know and love them, and that bothers me. Why I can only write endless accounts of what it feels like to be bereft and those aren’t interesting to any of us. Why do I not read wonderful books and tell you all about them. Tomorrow I will try to write about something that is not my failure to be on Internet dating without having unexpected hysterics.

He was the first and best reader for all of my poems. I am missing an arm, limb, or branch. The sap oozes out and covers the sawn-off oval, I keep typing “swan” for sawn, I don’t understand why I am so deeply faithful to him who was unable to be faithful to me, why I am so persistently, deeply loyal to something that doesn’t even exist.

I have allergies and keep scratching the roof of my mouth with my tongue, which doesn’t help.

This makes no sense and isn’t about what I wanted it to be about.

Here is a beautiful short film by the same friend who gave me Barthelme. If nothing else I am rich in friends, though I am not sure why. I love the billowing blue dress, and the dog. And the Satie. I love my friend for making this tiny film-poem.

The girl in the blue dress is also a poet, and a friend; she boiled creosote branches in olive oil and melted in beeswax and made a green salve that smells like the desert after a rainstorm. I put it on my cuts and blemishes every night, cupping the little container in my hands and huffing the smell to get it as deeply inside me as I can. I will miss the desert, but this will remind me of it. She is a beautiful witch.

My mother was a witch, and her grandmother; but maybe these things skip a generation.

Not only am I wondering what is experimental writing, but why can’t I write it? Why can’t I write even plain old normal writing? What is missing? Why am I lacking, why so obviously inadequate, illegitimate, why can’t I read, why do I pace around the house begging and pleading, please put out the fire in the piano, please, please? sobbing in fear. It is like I am trying to do the wrong thing. It is like I am trying to do something I’m not good at, like waiting tables or making sales calls or trying out for the drill team.

I think there was a time in my early twenties when I wrote things and I didn’t know what to do with them, there wasn’t anywhere to put them, they didn’t belong anywhere, so I shoved them back down away inside. Whereas the little princess shoes were admired, so I polished them and placed them in neat rows and that became a BA thesis, or an MA thesis. The ugly children I called names, like “unfinished novel” or “failed prose poems” or “bad short stories.” And now I’m not really sure that’s what they were. And in a sense I did it again for the MFA, setting out my brightest shiny apples in rows for the teachers.

I sent out Cherry-emily to Saturnalia today, but with a profound sense of foreboding, resignation and proleptic failure. But I did it. It seems so messy.

Now I look at people’s poems and their paragraphs and it seems everybody is doing what I cannot. Literally cannot. It is like being in a roomful of eloquent bendy willowy ballet dancers and not knowing the dance. It is like an anxiety dream, only I wake up every day and I live it.

I feel stupider and less certain of myself with every word I type. This seems worse than merely the monthly dropping estrogen, it seems like an aesthetic crisis of some kind.

Something has to fucking change around here.

Suddenly the crazy is in full force, exactly as if it were November and me not yet stable on meds. Within three days I’m too depressed to drag a brush through my hair.  Just walking from one room to another feels like moving through wet concrete. Everything tastes like cardboard and it’s hard to hold my head up. I can’t sit upright even when driving, I kind of have to look through the steering wheel. One of the yoga teachers asked me tonight what was wrong and I just looked up at her blankly, without words even to begin to explain. It’s bewildering and frustrating to take such a big step backward and not even know why, what caused it, what I should do about it. Was it the pinot grigio? The toaster waffles? The two days I accidentally forgot to take my antidepressant? Was it last week’s upswing and poem-writing, was that hypomanic, is this the inevitable crash?

It’s kind of hard to care, to be honest. Mostly I just am focused on doing what I have to do.

So I make an emergency therapy appointment to talk about what to do next and am in my therapist’s office, randomly showing off my new blog (we’d been trying to work on some of my procrastination issues, so I’d brought my laptop along). I scroll down, narrating various photographs/entries, until we get to the picture of my ex I posted a few days ago. She starts laughing.

“What?”

“Oh well, just—I mean, talk about apparently insigificant actions that leave the door open for targeted problem behaviors in the future!” she responds, in fluent DBT.

I stare at her for a beat. Then I start laughing too. And then I take his picture down (though I was proud of the colors and composition of the photo).

Sometimes I love behavioral therapy.

Though we still don’t know why I’m so depressed. I left a message with my pdoc’s receptionist, to see whether I should maybe double up on meds for awhile. And otherwise I just keep dragging myself along.

Stubbornness is maybe my best trait when it comes to battling depression. I get very dogged and just automatically, mechanically carry on without varying my approach. It may be a trait I learned as a Zen student, for that matter: Just follow the simple schedule. You don’t question, you don’t have bright ideas about how to do it differently or better, you just eat what they put in your bowl and sit when you’re told to sit and clean the temple when it’s time and then go to bed when the candles are extinguished (or “disenlightened” as a Swiss friend used to say, much to my great delight).

So I woodenly ate my frozen lasagne and took my evening meds and now I’m putting myself dutifully to bed to read Wilkie Collins and then go to sleep. Sleep is the great relief, a period of time during which there are no pointy thoughts, just vague bad dreams I can’t remember, but not that brain full of shrapnel which makes almost every thought conclude, “…and thus you are a terrible person who doesn’t deserve to live.” It’s funny to think that all that mentation and ratiocination, masquerading so cleverly as real rationality, is actually more or less mere manifestations of brain chemistry. Or anyway thinking this makes the brain-shrapnel less deadly. At least it gives me something to say back to it, like Scrooge trying to scare away the Ghost of Christmas Past by telling it it’s but a bit of undigested beef.

And I hate everything I’ve just now written, but in my obdurate way I post it nonetheless. I did manage before the crazy hit full-force to send out six batches of poems, and I’m still waiting to hear from three magazines and one book publisher anyway. If I can’t have love, I’ll have literature, the consolation prize. I am as mulishly determined about this as about putting clean sheets on the bed even when I don’t want to, because the other sheets are indescribable from all the cat hair. Love you all.

Sitting here putting away the pinot grigio morosely, I just realized: tonight is the six-year anniversary of me trying to kill myself on Atalaya Mountain with sleeping pills and cheap brandy and hypothermia but then blacking out and down-climbing and getting search-and-rescued and admitted to the psych unit at St. Vincent at like 5 a.m. and not dying after all, unlike Hunter S. Thompson who successfully dispatched himself that same night.

So there’s that.

This, from Jeanne Petrolle‘s new blog, This Is Madness:

The movie gives expression to the male yearning to be seen in all his brutishness and loved/accepted by the Beauty anyway. The Woman, who does indeed see the Man for who he is and loves him anyway, expresses what must be an archetypal female fantasy: to save the Man she loves. “You cannot save him,” an old gypsy wise woman tells her. Of course, she is destined to try despite the warning. “You must not condemn him,” says the gypsy Woman. And she doesn’t. “You can kill a Beast,” muses the Woman-Love, “but not a Man. But where does the Beast end and the Man begin?” Given that Man and Beast are one, she cannot kill the Beast without killing the Man. With great courage, the Woman-in-Love confronts the Beast in the Man-she-loves and, though she acts to protect herself against his rage and violence, she beholds him in his all his bloody rage, seeks to have him recognize her, and accepts him, as he is. This practice in love of accepting the Man as he is releases him from the cycle of violence. The two lovers do not get to live out their dream of Love—his rage has destroyed too much—but the family drama closes.

When he feels his rage rise, the Beast-Man tries to avoid the Woman-he-loves because he fears he will hurt her. In the Wolf-Man, the woman must choose love over personal safety, but she also must defend herself against the Beast’s bloodlust. The Woman is prepared to sacrifice her safety to an extent, but she must refuse to consent to her own death. She can put herself in danger for love, but she must not cross the line where sacrifice becomes martyrdom. In its central female character, the Wolfman gives audiences a vision of selfless love, courage, loyalty, and sacrifice, but also of feminine self-defense.

I hate to say how much this explains about my own intimate relationships.