lycanthropia

Curled up on the sofa half-working on my syllabus, eating organic cheesy poofs, listening to Sigur Rós and The Orb and Brothomstates, because that’s the kind of speed we’re at here, after a month of deep householding peace. The house is quiet and the world is calm. Just now Pyewacket was playing with a ribbon from A’s Christmas present (an enormous box of fancy black and green tea pyramid teabags) and got it looped around her neck, and I had to liberate her, as she staggered bewildered on top of all my shoes lined up by the door. A single ribbon throws off her whole proprioception, she’s all bigeyed OMGZ WHAT IS DIS, and she can’t function.

Really trying not to be the same way about school starting tomorrow. Trying to just be very chill. Aiding in this effort are a) the horrendous menstrual period I just had, which made it nearly impossible to care about anything other than When Do I Get More Drugs Again, and b) the neighbor, who has been screening back-to-back episodes of The IT Crowd and Doctor Who and feeding me salmon fried rice with egg and maitakes. We are about to stirfry more of this same salmon with some baby bok choy, and I’m not sure how much more I have to say than that.

Chill. Relaxed. I’ve done this a zillion times. Tomorrow begins my sixteenth semester of teaching. I’ll wake up relatively late if I want (8 am? 8:30?), put on jeans, go to school. No makeup, no fancy, no. Using the textbook which has been conveniently stashed in my office all break (so that I could, you know, access it easily), I’ll put some finishing touches on my syllabus (like, um, adding the actual paper descriptions and semester schedule)—then print out 51 copies, and meet my two classes from 11-12 and 12-1. Some kind of lunch, then Dickinson seminar from 2:30 to 5:30, and that’s my first day of school. Easy. Simple. Ain’t no thang.

The cat scampers in from outside, cold, purry. I pick her up and kiss her; she smells like ozone, each black hair somehow tipped with molecules of fresh ionized air. She loves it when I stay inside and do nothing; doesn’t take it as a sign of mental interestingness but merely that I am pleasantly available whenever she wants her feet warmed. We snuggle together under the duvet; I call her mei mei, and scratch the little white tuft on her chest until her claws curl and her eyes close in bliss.

And yes I have been watching back-to-back Firefly episodes all day and drinking tea and coffee and eating tangerines and almonds and drinking more tea with biscuits and doing absolutely nothing, why do you ask?

And I will go running tomorrow. Yes. Tomorrow. Yes.

At least I finished grading yesterday, or what I could of it—there were 6 plagiarised final papers out of 25, all at different levels (ranging from naive cut-and-pastes from Wikipedia WHY DO THEY NEVER CHANGE THE FONT to careful “paraphrases” where every other word is meticulously changed using Word’s thesaurus, to one wholesale swiping of an online essay)—all of which will receive different levels of sanction/corrective instruction. In every case these episodes speak to me of panic and cluelessness and a sense that the course’s demands cannot be met in any other way. It depresses me beyond anything else, even my ex’s posting all those pictures of Baja without me in them, so I arrived at the neighbor’s for dinner last night disconsolate and droopy. Mostly I suffer from the usual paranoid Al-Anonish conclusion that somehow it must be my fault, because they couldn’t possibly think it was okay to do this unless I somehow gave them the idea that it was, right? For shizzle I am doing many things differently next semester, including using turnitin.com (about which I feel very grumpy), and never again teaching this particular assignment, the “informative report with surprising reversal,” because in too many cases the surprising reversal seems to be “I didn’t actually write this! Surprise!”

Alors, I meet with a helpful administrator tomorrow to resolve all this. Final grades to be handed in Wednesday, Lynch paper due Friday.

The neighbor kindly cheered me up by playing episodes of Twin Peaks and feeding me his spinach, egg, and three-kinds-of-cheese casserole, also a large glass of Shiraz. Also cuddling me assertively on his IKEA sofa, which is the identical twin of my IKEA sofa except that it is brown leatherette instead of Mexican hot-pink canvas and therefore slipperier and harder to cuddle upon. So we went to bed, and ended up many hours later criticizing videos of Richard Dawkins, until I realized to my horror that it was FOUR IN THE GORRAM MORNING and I collected my belongings and fled home to cat and bed; though I was considerately extended an overnight invitation, it was for whatever reason too much to contemplate. Also my duvet is warmer.

If there is a point to all this, which I for one am beginning to doubt, it’s becoming bogglingly quotidian even for me—but if there is a point, it is twofold: one, it is really freaking nice to do nothing after weeks of doing something, or feeling as though you should be doing something at all times; and two, I’m not sure why I didn’t figure out before now that the whole River Tam storyline in Firefly is actually about mental illness. But it is.

Simon: Whoa—mei mei, how you doing?
River: I threw up.
Simon: I’m sorry, it’s a side effect. We just have to find the right treament for you. How do you feel now?
River: Going. Going back, like—apple bits, coming back up. Chaos.
Simon: But you felt okay this morning?
River: Played with Kaylee. The sun came out, and I walked on my feet and heard with my ears. I hate the bits, the bits that stay down and I work, I function like I’m a girl. I hate it because I know it’ll go away! The sun grows dark and chaos is come again. It’s—fluids—what am I?
Simon: You are my beautiful sister.
River: I threw up on your bed.
Simon: Yep. Definitely my sister.

[Warning: yet another breakup post, even though I wanted to write about something else. But apparently I have bits still lodged in me that I need to cough up out of my system, shrapnel or phlegm still working loose—]

So I resist the temptation for days but finally break down, awash in premenstrual hormones and—voluptuous, glowing with concupiscence, welling over with affection and desire—text him the single word, “Love.” I sigh at myself but conclude this is harmless enough. It could be worse, anyway—if I were in my twenties I’d be showing up unannounced at his house in skimpy outfits, or calling him nineteen times daily, or god knows what else. When I obsess, I don’t do it by halves. When I love someone, I love them in that kind of frightening totality that often understandably alarms them.

The next day he sends me a brittle email in which he rather condescendingly decides that (paraphrase) “perhaps we can now be in communication without causing any harm.”

But he has misunderstood me. I don’t want to talk to him. I just wanted to send him love, which I did. And then I fell into a tempest of menstruating and weeping and impotent rage.

And frankly lists are the only way I can explain it anymore, tell anything how it is, because it’s this AND this AND this AND that AND that AND this, all those ands jostling against one another and colors blurring where objects touch each other and the swirl of it deplaning and debriding and degloving and decomposing in mid-sentence and moving on to the next, the next, the next, the next. I think for no good reason of my pink lava lamp, lumpy inside with coruscating molten emotion. I despise him AND I miss him hourly; I am disgusted with myself for still loving him AND I can’t touch myself without bursting into tears; I am enraged by his uncaring formal brittle prissy email, which reads as if composed by his robot butler, AND I wake up at three in the morning reaching for him. It’s been nearly a year. I haven’t even seen him since last August. Just how many more seasons of 30 Rock am I going to have to watch before I get over this guy? Who’s just a guy, just a forty-something guy with dumb sneakers and bad posture? Just when am I going to be done with this stupid fucking breakup already? I’m sick of it, sick of him, sick of myself. I am sickened and fuming and shaking and defeated that I am still so painfully in love with someone who clearly cares so little for me.

He thinks it would be “grounding” to talk. That it would be “helpful somehow.” My translation: “You will accept that we are better as friends and you will quit being sad and in love, and then I won’t have to feel guilty for first betraying you and then completely abandoning you.” No. I don’t want to be his friend. I don’t need another friend, I have friends, and the friends I have are amazing. Be friends! the very idea is insulting. The way he addresses me, using my full name, is insulting. All along he’s kept saying this stuff, like we should spend time together because it will normalize the situation and help us accept it and and and and and. And there is nothing normal about this situation and anyway I don’t want to accept it, so fuck that noise.

I go to bed menstrual and tearful, wake at 5 a.m. in pain and the usual dramatic quantities of blood, and, half-asleep, email Exurbia Community College to say I will not appear on the 9 a.m. panel about feminism, which has a title like Why I’m Not Afraid of the F-Word. I drink cold tap water out of the bathroom sink, swallow three ibuprofen and go back to bed, wake at nearly noon and read his email, eat a handful of almonds and one of blueberries, seething but not even knowing it. Drive to teach, crack jokes with my students and push them as hard as I can for an hour and a half, drive home, eat leftovers, still don’t know I’m angry until finally I talk to my best friend and suddenly am yelling into the phone, to my surprise.

Me: Why am I the one left holding the bag? Why does he get a free pass out of this?
S: You can’t know that—you don’t know what’s going on with him.
Me: But why am I the one who can’t stand the idea of being friends? Why am I the one writing all the poems? Why am I the one reaching for him in my sleep at 3 a.m.?
S: Because he’s probably playing poker at 3 a.m. He’s an addict. He’s doing what he does.
Me: Then why do I still love him?
S: Because you do.
Me [yelling now]: I AM SO FUCKING TIRED OF IT.
S: Yes, you are.
Me [yelling and crying]: BUT I STILL LOVE HIM.
S: Yes, you do.

Then I went to therapy where I repeated this messy stichomythia, Lauren making me FEEL MY FEELINGS and all kinds of crazy outrageous UNSEEMLY shit like that. I demonstrated the waking-at-three-a.m.-wrapping-my-arms-around-air maneuver, laughing, and she told me that made her feel really sad. Then I started to cry. We’re like that.

The thing I am grateful for, through all this, is that it can be both/and instead of either/or. I miss him and think of him constantly, AND I am able to go to Giuseppe’s with Beth and have amazing gluten-free fettuccini al salmone with asparagus tips and that gorgeous soft house Chardonnay of theirs, which is like a pale golden Vermeer-colored light reaching down into my soul and illuminating the dark corners. I reach for him in my sleep and wake myself up grabbing air, AND I turn over and pet the cat, keeping her eternal vigilant post at the window, guarding us from hobgoblins all night long, the breeze from the window ruffling her hair, and she mrrrtles a little at my touch but doesn’t turn her eyes away from her watch.

The catalogue, in short, it is saving me. Fiery longing can coexist, and quite companionably it turns out, next to curiosity, interest in frozen cherry and almond milk smoothies, and the ability to mail poems to literary magazines, to read submissions for our literary magazine, to comment on papers, to read Chaucer and Whitman, to play Scrabble, to sit in the grass with the cat, or curl up with her under the yellow quilt, to watch Tarkovsky and Bela Tarr and to worry about my hair (the break-up induced blonde highlights are growing out, and I can’t decide if I should color them back to brunette).

As long as I accept my fundamental shallowness and my insistence on having chocolate with breakfast, I should be fine.

Finally, for your entertainment or maybe mine, an email to my beloved BFF, who’s a Zen priest and therefore knows the story to which I’m referring:

I finally figured out, 24 hours later, why I’m so irritated by his wooden email. It reminds me of that story from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones where an old lady has been supporting a monk for all these years and she wants to test his Zen, so she sends him the young lady “rich in desire”? And he says something pompous and frigid and condescending and turns down the young lady? And the old lady BURNS HIS STUPID MONK-HUT DOWN HAHAHAHA because he was such a self-righteous ice cube.

That’s why this email chaps me so. Because after ALL THESE YEARS does he not know me but at all, that he’s all using the passive voice and being formal and standoffish and prudish and I TEXTED HIM THE WORD LOVE and his is not an appropriate response to love. And yes, as the Zen people say, the practice of a lifetime is the appropriate response.

But, okay, I will level with you, and then I swear this will be the end of this ridiculous post—it’s spring break, this next week is spring break, and last year we went to Tucson and Madera Canyon and we fought the first day (a bad fight, I had to ask him to let me out of the car and walked for a few minutes alone, looking up at the moon and asking her for strength as tears rolled down my face and he followed me in the car), but after that we actually had a wonderful time, intimate and close, and it’s all too easy for me to romanticize it, the hummingbirds at our window every morning, the dinners we made in the cabin’s tiny kitchen, the hikes walking hand in hand.

And, that was a year ago and this year he’s going to Texas and New Mexico alone, and that’s just how it is. So I’ve got to plan as many nice things for myself this week as possible, as many ANDs as I can fit in. Yoga four days this week, that’s without doubt. Maybe a Scrabble evening with friends, definitely working on new poems with my silly but fun new marker/ posterboard system, hanging out with Alison who’s here with her family from New Mexico, watching season five of The Wire, keeping myself busy and happy and distracted even as the ringing AND of loss and longing still sounds down in the marrow of my bones.

[Best Marlo Stanfield quotation from season four: "You want it to be one way...but it's the other way." Yeah. You're not kidding.]

in which the abandoned row houses are also characters

And not a moment too soon says I, huddled safely on the sofa beneath the yellow wedding-ring quilt, with mineral water within arm’s reach.

Not that it’s particularly wintry here, or even cold; last night was down to freezing but then today I sat in the sun in the backyard and ate strawberries. So I can’t really complain. It’s just that I have a particular history with February, with its being a terrible month in which terrible things happen to me and/or I do them to myself. Climbing up mountains and falling down them and so forth. So I am grateful to watch another February sliding into the past and leaving me well and sound and mostly totally unscathed.

Pyewacket is blissed out passed out on my lap making typing nearly impossible, or I would say more. And maybe I will say more tomorrow once it is safely March, which is always a good month because my birthday is in it. And the equinox. And the start of spring.

I’ve been watching inane Youtube clips for hours, I won’t even link them because they have made me feel really dumb. But I can’t read for anything, can’t concentrate, I don’t know why. It is maddening. Out of I suppose boredom (which I have always thought was a mild form of anger or irritation) I finally unblocked my ex on Facebook and it was completely uneventful. I don’t feel anything, only a slight but sincere pity, which is condescending of me but that was what I felt tonight. Maybe another time I will feel another kind of something.

And I am waiting, waiting, waiting for the five PhD programs and the one fellowship to contact me. March is also the month of notifications so that is always kind of interesting, after a long winter of waiting, to see where you will be in a few months’ time, what address you will be writing on the boxes and the forms, or if you will be going anywhere at all. I am not even sure I want to go anywhere, but I know I probably should. Otherwise I will stay in this town and always have this physical pull of knowing roughly where he is and what he is doing. When I was in DC for AWP it was wonderful, I felt free and young and like a person again, this was maybe partly because we were walking everywhere and taking the Metro and it feels wonderful to get around on my own physical power, not eternally slumped behind a steering wheel like a drone, and also partly because I had a crush, and yet I think mostly because I was in a city without him in it. I felt so good. I want to feel that free again, in my city. Whichever city it will turn out to be.

My friend Laura sent me a very nice horoscope which promises I will have all kinds of revelations and insights; it says in part,

Your craving to be free is real. The restlessness you’re feeling is not something you want to medicate away, talk yourself out of, or pretend does not exist. It’s not merely spring fever, though that’s a good way to describe your whole life. Rather, what you’re feeling is your soul calling you to wake up to your beauty and the beauty of life….

On the other hand, in slightly dampening news my friend who is exactly one day younger than I am and who is a midwife tells me we will probably start being menopausal at around 45. I thought I had until 50, but clearly I really will be childless now, unless I adopt, which I might do some day if I have any money which I never will. I have hated having periods all my life but now I feel each one is actually, and I know this is so obnoxious you will want to slap me, but I feel each one is singular and precious. I don’t mind them anymore. Sure they hurt but then at least there’s something going on down there (which reminds me of late Texas governor Ann Richards joking about getting frisked by airport security because she was wearing one of those leotards with metal snaps at the crotch).

I drive around with the air conditioner on low, because I am always wearing a sweater and it’s hot in the car, and I listen over and over to Patty Griffin’s album Impossible Dream. I’ve had it for years but it’s like I’ve never heard it before. Songs like “Florida” and “Mother of God” and “Rowing Song” and “Icicles,” songs for which I didn’t much care six years ago, are now so desolate and redolent for me that I get gooseflesh when I hear them, driving along and singing, singing. They are natural songs for me to sing, falling easily in my range, with my sharp rural soprano that matches hers, the voice of those “hill women” with whom CD Wright identifies:

I have no trouble spotting myself: bony but strong as a weed, an abiding refusal to smile or sing; a relentless if not brutal honesty; streaks of the mean, the grotesque in humor. Thomas Hardy’s descriptions of the peasant yeomanry of England…are likewise faithful to my relations: “blond, grey-eyed, slim, with straight mouths, determined chins, independent and hidebound, adaptable to circumstances, free of outside influences, not complacent and don’t fight well unless cornered. Then to the death.”

(That little autobiographical essay of hers was gospel to me at twenty-five.)

Nothing I have to say tonight is as galvanizing as those songs.

I am craving fettuccini alla carbonara pancetta from Giuseppi’s, an unexpectedly amazing ristorante cleverly concealed in yet another mud-colored Arizona strip mall. I would have ordered the pasta with a side dish of deep green grilled rapini and a glass of buttery oaky Chardonnay which is not a wine I usually care for but I liked the taste Beth let me have out of her glass when we went there. I may go tomorrow night, if anyone wants to go with me. To celebrate surviving until another March.

(The cat has moved to my feet and it’s possible to type now.)

(But now I can’t think of anything to say.)

(Which pretty much sums up February.)

isn’t it hard sometimes
isn’t it lonely
how I still hang around here
with nothing to hold me

I taught today in head-to-toe Hamlet black, as is my wont on this ridiculous holiday. Our first year together, five years ago, I made my then-new, now-ex, boyfriend a black Valentine, in silver ink on black paper, upon which I wrote on and on morosely about my dead cat. I have a long tradition of being in public mourning for the three days between Sylvia’s death-day and the celebration of VD, and no intention of letting up now. I almost recited Yeats to my students, just out of perverse despondency. But spared them. But will not spare you. This is from memory so if I get something wrong, too bad.

One that is ever kind said yesterday,
“Your well-belovéd’s hair has threads of grey
And little shadows come about her eyes;
Time can but make it easier to be wise
Though now it seems impossible, and so
All that you need is patience.” —Heart cries, “No,
I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain.
Time can but make her beauty over again:
Because of that great nobleness of hers,
The fire that stirs about her when she stirs
Burns but more clearly. O she had not these ways
When all the wild summer was in her gaze.”

O heart! O heart!—if she’d but turn her head
You’d know the folly of being comforted.

(There should be a paragraph break and some indents after “Heart cries, No” but I can’t make WordPress do that, so just imagine it there.) I must’ve memorized this as a child, I don’t remember ever not knowing it, even down to its punctuation. I love the pounded-out spondaic insistence of “turn her head.” Those last two lines are so bitterly insistent.

My then-new, now-ex boyfriend wooed me by reciting “When you are old and grey and full of sleep,” as we lay enwrapped in bed; he read aloud to me the entirety of Four Quartets last spring, just a few weeks before he ditched my ass. The one before that wooed me by quoting Elaine Equi (among others); and the one before that recited Paul Verlaine’s ‹‹Chanson d’automne›› to me in French, which practically made me come over the phone. Men have read Faulkner to me and Joyce and Stein and Dickinson and Whitman and made every kind of avowal; and yet, mes amis, I woke up this morning completely alone.

Well, that’s it; I’m done with poetry-quoting men. In fact, I’m done with love. I’ve had my last fruitless crush and I’ve whispered my last tentative endearments, and now my heart is officially constructed out of those horrible Neccoesque chalk-flavored candies with rude sayings printed on them in dull pink. GOT HURT? QUOTE POEMS? LOVE ME? FUCK OFF.

And now back to business.

So the Claudia v. Tony show rages on unabated, though a few folks have made some effort to raise the quality of the dialogue. Honestly, I still don’t get it—why can’t he just apologize for crossing way over the line, and for being insulated while doing so by his white privilege—as even Louis CK can admit?

It’s just one poem, how hard is it to say yes I wrote an insulting and shitty persona poem and I’m sorry, I mean it’s not like the guy is John Keats or anything for chrissake and OMG WHY ARE WE STILL EVEN TALKING ABOUT THIS. For my part I am done. You will hear no more peeps out of me in re: the matter of Tony’s misfortunate verse. (Per Faulkner’s doleful Ur-cracker Anse Bundren, “Was there ere such a misfortunate man?”)

Then there’s The Other Thing. Eileen Myles has written (of course) the best essay so far about what is now being called simply, The Count. (Though this just makes me think of a purple-caped Transylvanian muppet gleefully reciting cardinal numbers.) It’s called “Being Female” and I kind of am torridly in love with it. With her essay.

Because a woman is someone who grew up observing that a whole lot more was being imagined by everyone for her brother and the boys around her in school. If she’s a talented artist she’s told that she could probably teach art to children when she grows up and then she hears the boy who’s good in art get told by the same teacher that one day he could grow up to be a commercial artist. The adult doing the talking in these kinds of exchanges is most often female. And the woman who is still a child begins to wonder if her childhood is already gone because she has been already replaced in the future by a woman who will be teaching children like herself. And will she tell them that they too will not so much fail but vanish before their lives can even begin. These pie charts don’t surprise me. They just demonstrate that a lot of us can easily become just a few of us or even just one of us.

It gets better. With truth I feel ringing down in my bones.

Plus women always need to support, I mean actively support male work in order to dispense with the revolting suggestion that they are feminists. I supported Hillary Clinton with my vote but did you notice she wasn’t really a feminist until she was losing. Well what does feminism mean? Well I think it means that you don’t do much in your work except complain about injustice and describe the personal sphere and talk in a wide variety of ways about labias. You think I’m kidding. Cause I actually do that in my most recent novel—I thought well women in the art world are always celebrating their labias so maybe I should do that in writing. What a great, funny, even masculine idea. To use the pussy as material. So I wrote five pages of pussy wallpaper and gave it to the editors at VICE who did publish it but confided in me that the money people really had to be convinced that it was not entirely disgusting. With all the dirty and violent and racist things that VICE has done, this was um a little troubling. Do we really want to send that kind of message to our readers. What kind of message is that. I guess a wet hairy soft female one. I mean a big giant female hole you might fall into never to be heard from again. I mean and there’s just always a danger if you’re a feminist that you’re also a lesbian (I am) and the only way to really make it clear that you are not that (or that “it” means nothing) is to firmly vote with the guys, kid with them, and be willing to laugh at other women (to demonstrate that you have “a sense of humor”) and not push too hard to include women in anything. Speaking frankly as a lesbian I have to say that the salient fact about the danger zone I call home is the persistent experience of witnessing the quick revulsion of people who believe that because I love women I am a bottom feeder. I am desperately running towards what anyone in their right mind would be running away from. Which is femaleness, which is failure.

But that’s enough from me—please go read the whole thing.

Which is much more interesting than, say, the poor editors of Graywolf Press as they rush to defend themselves from not one but two charges: not only do they publish Tony Hoagland, but they apparently publish a great many of him, so now they feel compelled to blither on about how they are making a greater effort, they are going to do better, they are trying, trying, trying.

How about everyone just stop fucking trying and start actually reading the manuscripts we are already sending you?

(And a vibrant soprano BRAVA to Jim Behrle, for having his politics in a rigorously deviant line and for continuing to be a hilarious fucking thorn in the side of, well, just about everyone. His posts on The Count and on Tony’s appalling poem are just SO right on. Though I desperately miss his old feature/column “Dude, What the Hell Is up with Your Author Photo?” which made me cry-laugh on more than one happy occasion.)

Finally, in a bit of cultural news which mercifully has nothing to do with literary publishing, there’s a trailer now for the forthcoming film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s “novel” Atlas Shrugged. Watch if you dare:

Unfortunately, I think the filmmakers already have it all wrong. The real reason that teenagers, and in particular girls, love Ms. Rosenbaum’s book has nothing to do with steel, trains, or capitalism. We loved it because of its preposterously comic-book BDSM, and scenes in which Hank Rearden and/or John Galt held down a writhing naked Dagny Taggart and topped her manfully, whilst simultaneously festooning her with priceless ruby necklaces. Atlas Shrugged should be all about Wagnerian hetero sex, not stupid bullet trains or special metallic alloys, so I predict a flop. Besides, who are those actors anyway? Are we outsourcing from Eastern Europe or Canada or something now?

(As a witty friend of a witty friend noted on Facebook, “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”)

Alors, now I move on to my special Valentine’s Day dinner and festivities. These describe many arcane and secret time-honored rituals, concerning which I cannot possibly reveal very much, only to say that the evening will probably conclude with a maple-glazed doughnut and three back-to-back episodes of The Wire, season four. Though one can never be certain. My little black cat seems to have a few plans of her own, perhaps involving a long piece of string she has been tossing around in front of me suggestively while I’ve tried to finish this post.