lycanthropia

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.

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.

I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless, nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple, desperate, human way. You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed, and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is really just a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this—but oh my dear, I can’t be clever and standoffish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how standoffish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defenses. And I don’t really resent it.

[from Lapham's Quarterly, via Don Share]

femmy and unavailable: just the way we like 'em