I want to hug my faith, to cultivate it. Of course, that involves nothing.
Still pain, still swollen, still quite ill at ease.
Author Archives
Note the differences: Anne and Sylvia, Remedios and Leonora.
I love the worn out ladies brave in Mexico.
Lots of things.
I could get caught up.
Let’s try to relax. For lunch I ate 3 tiny cubes of cheese. Some off-peak grape tomatoes and some fairly dried baby carrots.
A couple of nacho chips with cheese sauce. And some bottled water. Later, Halloween candy from the bowl in front of me.
Over the ridge, a view.
A view, a view, a view of the electorate.
Excellent dew we’ll go out fishing and fishing has come up. All smiles in a night dream, hiking up the humid woodsy path, all moist and mud, on my right the human fish ladder sparkling turquoise with its uphill current all bubbling and clean, the naked humans serious as porpoise, bend and flail feet flippers, swimming up to spawn I guess.
I learn to mourn
I yearn to mourn
I learn to yearn
I mourn to learn
I mourn to learn how
So what. The leaves are fallen. Falling. The leaves are alphabets.
The array of beautiful concepts, the fine array of lovely concepts, like false teeth, all pearly and defined.
Working on the book, fixed a footnote flaw, but undecided on the title.
Who notices the me, back of the moon.
Ann said don’t stay away. There’s much more to asana practice, we will adapt. I am absurdly grateful to be so invited.
The mirror. The mirror doesn’t know you.
I have an understanding of disease.
I entertain the calm moon in my head.
At home, peace snacks and bed.
I am not hungry. I lost my appetite. No dinner last night, just some mozzarella sticks, frozen and reheated at Richie’s. A glass of cold white wine. Sauce: ketchup mixed with hot sauce, tasted good. Richie and Suely slathered hot sauce on knuckles of reheated chicken meat. I watched and held my own.
Suely told me about her sister’s breasts. So ugly, so ugly, one larger than the other, and after childbirth, even more misshapen. She sent her first money earned here home for her sister’s breast operation. Results: keloid scars and things are worse than ever. She cry, she cry.
Yes this was me. I am suspicious of me, what is it. Today spent time in completely anonymous pursuits that will never offer any recognition. I’m suspicious of my name. It doesn’t feel appropriate for fame. I wrestle expectations down and down and down again. Meanwhile, why not call it home? No this is not me. Me so what. I like the universal flux instead, brightened and tightened in a node that is my skin, my wrist. My stinging teeth, my statically electric hair. My shapeless brows.
november 5
The quiet relief that the weekend is over. Platinum light gone down and gone down early. My dream mists back into my mind. Medieval garb, a princess in pink veils, brocade gown, pointed hat. I was dark-haired, petite, happy, pretty. I was in a play, but I had an agenda. Much more active and engaged than I ever am in waking life.
I was privileged to meet him, Russell Edson. I had to go to New Hampshire to do it. And he lives right down the street.
I heard something on the radio yesterday about supermarkets and the vast surplus of food/calories we produce here in the US. The radio voices said—No wonder we are confused—due to the pressure of food marketing. I am immune to food marketing.
I close my eyes to it. I used to get overwhelmed in the supermarket, until I blinded myself. Every year, I buy fewer and fewer packaged goods. No meat. Less and less fish. Ordering herbs and tea in bulk, online. This is a project full of pleasure.
A possible sadness antidote.
I would like to wash my face. I would like to wash my hands.
I haven’t washed my left hand in almost a week.
I am attracted to behaviors by which we might move off the grid. Out of the mainstream. These are the behaviors I have to hide at work. Sam tried to rig up a stand for my swollen arm that I could wear, out of a piece of copper tubing. It didn’t work.
I like the sensation of a loose form. Three pages at a sitting. Or thirteen fragments. Or 50 words. I feel safer. Enclosed. I am in a quieter, less hysterical space.
I am also reading the latest BANR (Best American Nonrequired Reading). I read the introductory material. I like it. I am there, on the fringes. Essentially light and non-required. I didn’t grasp that it was high school students. I like their giddy sensibilities.
I sense there are too many people in the world with too many attachments. There isn’t room. There is no more room. I am squatting here.
Everyone is on a trajectory of some kind though. Achievement-life: I can smell it coming a mile away.
I like to look at things. I really enjoy drives or train rides, even plane rides, because we can look at things, an unrolling scroll of new things passing before our eyes. Also—walking.
I like to put myself in a place where a metaphor might make itself known to me.
I thought about my lack of focus. An attachment disorder. To exhibit no passion, not to be drawn to anything with that lovely intensity.
I have been collecting thoughts on writing. Unfortunately, I haven’t been writing them down. Here they are from the vagueness of memory:
- The new genre of fantasy. I forget what he called it. I am a fan.
- That personal writing has its roots in Puritanism. The drive to perfect yourself through documentation (R.D. interviewee?)
- Alembic: using Nanowrimo like binge eating
- Writing without a plan
- Geof Huth’s thoughts on blogging. His desire to focus, desire to focus on theory.
Still sad. Last night I had an apple and a few chunks of parmesan cheese for dinner, and watched an Italian movie “I’m Not Scared.” Intense. I was distracted from sadness by my awareness of what was going on inside Michele, the 10-year-old boy. Empathy, I guess. I also felt the heat of the sun and the joy of running in the wheatfields. I played and ran in fields. Corn fields. Forests. Meadows. I played in brambles and thickets, streams, streets.
november 4
I threw out the white gravelly cauliflower soup. I really needed to make tea this morning. I made it—chai teabag and some soymilk. I also had some orange juice with water and four ibuprofen tablets. My hands are ice-cold. I was resting my swollen arm on top of a fleece jacket on top of a flour canister, with a bag of frozen wild blueberries draped over it. I need the elevation and the cold to combat the swelling. It’s painful.
I also threw out three small dead or mostly dead houseplants. No green thumbs here unless they are green from bruising.
I had to miss the poetry class on Halloween. This was disturbing. I should have tried to go. I could have made it. No use trying to reinvent the past. I had to miss out. I hate to miss out. I am easily disappointed.
Sad girls are responsible. They take on the tedious tasks no one else wants to do.
If I’m very busy writing, I won’t have time for tedious tasks.
But something’s wrong with my invention. My imagination is broken. I don’t get out much.
I invented a common noun—no, it’s a collective noun—for poets: a “discovery” of poets. I’m waiting for an opportunity to use it.
The beginnings are slow and primordial.
Food is very important to me. I miss being able to cook, having a broken wrist makes it an ordeal. I like really tasty food. I like fruit smoothies. I love wine. I like vegetarian food—all the variety, none of the danger. I don’t think I could be vegan though. I like eggs and dairy too much.
My mother had very few stories. She repeated some familiar ones often. How great Christmases were. How she broke her leg riding a tricycle. Her problem students when she was a second grade teacher. How she developed a dread of throwing up from an incident in her own second grade classroom. How she ate the same thing every day for years. Now I can’t remember what that was—an egg sandwich? fried egg? maybe it was with tomato and mayonnaise, maybe not. The world of stories was very thin.
I wanted the juicier ones. The ones about menstruation. Her relationship with mother and sisters. Her thoughts about her father. I wanted the whole scoop. I was fed crackers. My next door neighbor said our house smelled like crackers. She found that comforting. Many people found my family comforting.
One of the things that I love about Natalie is her ability to make judgments about people and say them out loud. It’s thrilling to hear her sum up a person, their behavior, their motivations, their unconscious fire, all rolled into one or two quick incisive statements. Initially, I just bought into everything she said. I had never experienced such a wise window opening onto other people. I was hungry for the guidance. Somehow, I had been misled, led to believe that everyone was a Child of God. Christian psychology is very flat and its behavioral modification systems are very dumb. I had no ability to read people, to differentiate between them. I was like a person, a woman, in an arranged marriage with everyone. As far as Natalie’s stories go, later I learned there might also be other points of view.
Writing is a hopeful country.
I am waiting for breakfast to be ready. I’m not the one doing the grocery shopping and now I’m not the one doing the cooking. It’s quite a change.
Some envy. I enjoyed a short story that included a line about envy.
I enjoyed John Ashbery’s line “I write in the afternoon.” It hit
me with a great impact. Why? Because I don’t like afternoons. They are a negligible, hateful time, a chunk of time to get through. I am optimistic in the morning (usually) and pessimistic in the afternoon. There’s a wish that I could heal this. What would a good afternoon look like? Sunshine? Satisfaction? Rest?
I don’t like any hour of the day.
Resistance to going to make political phone calls. Even if they work, I don’t want to do it.
november 2
Appropriately, raining. Wet leaves scattered everywhere. Sad place in my solar plexus, deep hole of mourning. Or rather, not so deep, shallow and sheltered. Impressionable as a child.
I’m writing because it allows me to coop myself up in a safe place. Do I feel threatened All-the-Time? Do I think if I weaken myself, I’ll go undetected, and not draw the attention of predators? I don’t know.
I will sit for a half hour this afternoon.
In silence.
Something clicked against the window. Again. Don’t know what it was.
I can’t make tea. Broken wrist, can’t manipulate the tea kettle. No clean saucepan available. I won’t toss out the white gravelly cauliflower soup.
I am wondering about this work. I was driven to this writing by my absolute incapacity to live comfortably in my home, in my relationship, in my own damaged skin. If I am writing, I am not falling down.
This morning I became aware of the bathroom. It is not that bad. The grout is clean. So is the caulking. I wiped the little table surface recently.
I am sleepy. I am starting to dream more often, but I believe this is due to sleeping in a too-warm room.
This room does not feel like home, although many of my things are in here. I have my Tarot deck, and some candles. My place for meditation. Some favorite posters on the wall. Art supplies. A little rehabilitated lamp. It’s quiet in here. No speakers. Very little in the way of electronics. An iron and ironing board in the closet. The room is relatively neat. I have control over the neatness in here, which is not true of other rooms.
I am seeking the grand, healing metaphor.
Do eccentrics have this sadness? Do hermits? Do religious believers? I would like to know. But there are things I can’t change about myself, things I have to accept.
One of those is tears springing to my eyes. I am a frequent cryer at any little adversity.
It’s familiar to shame I felt as a child. It’s a familiar syndrome.
I heard about Immaculée praying the rosary to survive while shut up in a bathroom for weeks, hiding from murderers.
Something I want to know? Don’t know.
I said the rosary everyday for a year. Maybe it was a school year. My sophomore year. The cheesy pearlized paint flaked off my little white first communion beads. Once I lost the rosary—it fell from my pocket. That immediate pang of irrational loss— desperation. I retraced my steps and found it, on top of a desk in a classroom. I was ashamed that someone had found it on the floor, maybe even identified it as possibly mine, and decided to place it on the desk for the owner to more easily find. It meant another person was thinking about my things.
Is there a character in this story? No. Yes. No.
Returning to the sadness, the persistent sadness. The sadness of short sentences. The sadness of employees. The sadness of elderly eyebrows. The sadness of muted achievements. Of not knowing your place. The bewilderment of multiple remotes.
The fear of not ever having a home. Not at home here.
I have the anger about the network router. Something is working—why change it? I live with a curious technology monkey.
Writing in ruts.
I would like to decipher this sadness.
Does it relate to the personality? The philosophical outlook? the biochemistry? the inability to get on the network?
november 1 4pm
The quiet room, the late afternoon.
Dogs barking in the neighborhood. The house phone rings; not a good idea to answer it, it’s either a political call or a fund-raising call. Or both. Or a wrong number.
I have nothing else to do but put some effort into this. I am one-handed in the house. I can’t sleep. I have trouble with the network. My mind races regarding home repairs. I start to target my relationship and I want to tear things to pieces.
There’s fantasy. I wish I could access fantasy. I mean real fantasy, not just the odd fantastic incidents of my past—drug addiction, murder, alienation of the corporate world, near-fatal blood disorders.
I want to stay relaxed.
I’m nervous about Sam coming upstairs. If he saw me writing, I would say “I’m writing.” I don’t want him to know what I’m doing.
There’s a stack of paper next to me and a stack of poems in front of me. “Backwoods Broadsides.” I enjoy seeing them there, in a little box decorated with pears. There’s a pile of pink ribbons with white dots on this desk. I picked them up from a rainy Nantucket sidewalk outside the Unitarian church. After a wedding. I guess they’d been used to tie wedding favors together.
TV noise at night bothers me. I feel very lonely. I remember Eli watching movies drunk in the middle of the night. What am I to do. Sam is asleep on the couch. The soundtrack of “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control” is pleasant. I can try to listen to it.
I could try to embrace this space. I could give it a try.
I’m wishing for my own soundtrack. I don’t think I have ever really lived my life. Just stepped through it. Looking backwards, while walking forwards. That’s how I broke my wrist. It was windy at the time.
The train goes by. It’s lovely to ride the train at this time of day. Very quiet passengers, almost empty trains. We took a train from Amsterdam’s train station back to the airport at this time. Working people with staid composure. Kids in dark baggy clothing.
Lisa wrote me. I am hanging onto emails from Lisa and Olivia like lifesavers. I’m wondering if I should transfer my efforts to my own writing. Signs point me in this direction, but I don’t want to go. Maybe I should give it a try. Might make me happier in the household.
I walked down the hill, the easement nobody owns. I thought there might be some kids there, drinking, fucking, smoking. There are some white plastic chairs back there, a trio of them, but they were empty. I thought about Al ruining his life, and how Blair rejected his friendship. I liked the stucco look of that garage. It reminds me of Italy, a place where kids hang out and ruin their lives as well, I guess.
I went for a walk in the neighborhood. I’ve spent a lot time walking in this neighborhood. The streets were quiet, just glazed with honey rain. Faint smell of donuts. I was glad to see the Dunkin’ Donuts was open. I didn’t encounter anyone, just heard someone in a car picking through people’s recycling for returnable bottles. I didn’t want to greet that person.
The only time I was afraid was when a brief yellow leaf fell onto my arm.
november 1 4am
It’s November 1st. Just barely. It’s 4:10 am. Light precipitation. I can’t sleep. I’m trying to adjust the power balance in my household. It’s been damaged because I broke my wrist. One little bone crack, everything changes.
I didn’t mean to write this. I’m not trying to write a story or anything. I’m trying to write a novel in fragments. Fragments of bone.