01 "The roaring inside her"
02 Stale puddles, muddy stuff, golden bubbles
03 An old worm at the keyboard
04 "Be forever lucid, alive to yourself"
05 Illuminations
06 Cookie Baking Sunday
07 Titles are always hard
08 Walking in the neighborhood
09 Trabajos del poeta / The poet's works
10 "If I have weaknesses, don't let them blind me now"
11 Poetry and occasional woofs
12 Going native, going troll
13 Free delivery
14 Sheer food genius!
15 Just a few things I want...
16 Sooby, the blue Mennym
17 A thousand and one ... no, 3 nights
18 Implosion, flame, pink light
19 Goodwill towards girls
20 Wandering on a Sunday
21 Lawyers, bakers, boys
22 Something brought out of the abyss
23 Ghosts in the museum
24 A time for wondering
25 Romantic images
| December 7 Titles are always hard |
| Here's my horoscope for tomorrow (by Sydney Omarr): "Take charge, rebuild, know once again that hard writing makes easy reading. There is room for you at top. Scorpio helps you arrive. In games of chance, stick with number 4."
I can't let that "hard writing" remark go by. I feel faint when I think of writers who work and rework and rework yet again. Virginia Woolf wrote that way. I believe it did not do anything for her mental health. I don't have the time or patience for it, although I do a little light rewriting online (but none in the paper journal). I'm more of the Natalie Goldberg school of writing as process. Which is easy writing. Even this here now is not truly easy writing, since I pay attention to grammar, punctuation, sentence structure. I have yet to do true uncontrolled free writing in this journal. I'm not sure I could. It can be very exciting. It can be hard reading (nonsense). But certainly not as hard as a lot of poetry. I feel sick when I think of how hard some poetry is to read. Do people think your normal everyday mother has time to struggle through something like that? I'd rather read Mother Goose. Russell Edson bemoans "easy publishing." He thinks it's necessary to be isolated, to experience a terrible privacy, "so hard to bear, but necessary to get past the idea one has of oneself in relation to the world." So what does this mean in terms of an online journal? It's nothing if not easy publishing. Just the small inconvenience of having to have a computer and some basic technical knowledge. There's no editor. No rejections. No competition. There does not even have to be any readers. I'm not sure the "hard publishing" system is all that good for writing, for my writing anyway. The competitive spirit is deadly for me. I can barely stand to look at magazines like Poets and Writers for the horror of all those awards and competitions and prizes. I experience this journal as writing to get TO the idea I have of myself in relation to the world. Once I get there (Oz), then maybe I'll have to get PAST that idea (back to Kansas). Wow. If I ever get to that point, then I'll cut out resorting to easy publishing, Russell, I promise. So here's my personal credo: easy writing, easy publishing, easy reading.
On the subject of silliness, here's Younger One taking the stage: Once when he was maybe six, I was trying to put him to bed. He was talking and talking to me nonstop, showing no signs of running down. I listened patiently, trying to have a mother and son bedtime moment, until he asked me "Mom, do you want to know how to build a bicycle?" Then I lost it. Do you want to know how to build a bicycle? . . . |
| December 8 Walking in the neighborhood |
| I avoid walking past Mario's house. He's lonely and he will talk to you for an hour, unless you bring yourself to be rude to him. He lives on the corner. He's the neighborhood junk collector, but his junk collection has taken on a quality of folk art, for me. Right out front along the street, he has tied a bunch of old clothes to a pole, wrapping them tightly with a rope. The clothing layer closest to the ground is a tyke's footed pajama suit, light blue and worn out. The feet dangle a little in the breeze. Mario has created a wraith. The wraith guards his yard. Maybe it's there to frighten little dogs who want to mess on his front lawn.
Last night, my neighbor two doors down was hanging a gigantically huge wreath, maybe four feet in diameter and covered with hand-size plastic lights and bows. At first I thought it was Bob on the ladder. Then I realized it was Mary. Mary is about 10 months pregnant. I was going to yell at her about doing that in her condition, but I bit my tongue. This inner drive to hang huge wreaths -- maybe she's trying to bring on the baby. This morning, the sky was low and threatening gray at 6:45 am. It was chilly, but not cold, pleasant for walking. Three blocks down, a woman wearing a bathrobe was being followed up the front walk, up the front stairs, and into the house by a man wearing dark work clothes. The woman's robe was exaggeratedly puffy and white and feminine, enveloping her with comfort and light. The man was following her, several yards behind. They were silent. I was completely smitten with curiousity -- what had they been doing outside together? Why were they silent? Why were they walking so far apart? Who was she? Who was he? Why was she in such a beautiful robe? It was only by a tremendous effort of will that I did not stop on the sidewalk and stare at this tableau. I would bet that it's impolite to stare at your neighbors while they are making a silent procession up their front walk at 7 am, whatever they are wearing. A paraphrase of my thoughts as I continued my walk:
Up the hill, I passed a house with a knee-high Alberta spruce decorated with lights left on all night. They glowed in the gray-muffled air, a combination of white sparkling lights and deeper mysterious blue-green bulbs. I did stop and allow myself to stare at this sight for awhile. I used to be able to go into a trance of joy at a sight like this in the morning. But today all I thought about was the cost of electricity, whether they meant to leave the lights burning all night, if somebody forgot to turn them off, and who was responsible. And why could I no longer go into a trance of joy at a sight like this on a cloudy morning? And is this condition temporary or permanent? |
| December 9 Trabajos del poeta / The poet's works |
| I am this close |<->| to slicing into myself with razors of ugly, shameful, wicked name-calling. Lucky for me, I have achieved some modicum of emotional stability over the last few years. Otherwise, I would be drizzling away in the corner.
It started out to be a good day. I took Octavio Paz's Eagle or Sun? to work, just for moral support. I found a paragraph I will type in at the end of this entry, by which time I will need some strengthening. I went to a lunchtime 12-step meeting. This is usually good for me. There were a lot of people there. I was aware of many undercurrents, this one having a problem with that one, the other one having a dislike of the first one. This is the corrosive power of gossip. There were a lot of men in there. No, several men. No, a few men. Anyway, I raised my hand to share which is usually good for me, and then I felt people looking at me, and I got shaky and lost my words, and felt like an ... well, here come the names, so let's move along. This stagefright was bad enough but then someone whom I supposedly like came up to me and commented on it afterwards, magnifying it into some kind of fatal defect in my eyes. One of the men shared about how he is achieving creativity in his work. I never hear people talk about this, maybe I'm in the wrong groups. I made him into my hero immediately, and thirsted after his every word. He gave very little detail, and I wanted to throw myself at his feet afterwards, begging for his secrets, asking him for a job ... I just don't want to recognize that no one can do this for me. Then someone talked about prayer. Very very problemmatic. I haven't written anything about the gods and goddesses for weeks, and I haven't talked to any one of them. The only worthwhile attention I have given the whole divine arena is the persistent thought that polytheism really lets the gods and goddesses off the hook because they can always blame somebody else. "Oh, I wasn't in charge of the hearth that week, I was on vacation, so-and-so was supposed to be handling those calls." Monotheism is much more a "The Buck Stops Here" type of approach. And I consider myself even less than a polytheist as far as belief systems. I consider myself sort of an atheistic metaphorical dabbler in religion, which is just a bit removed, eh? How can I possibly pray to a trope? (Is that the right word? well, it sounds good.) I got a grip on myself after that really healthy experience, and then I went back to work and actually did some real work. Then I went in to talk about some bugs with the Indian programmer. He was having some issues that we decided needed to be discussed with Boss 1. So we went in a room about 2:30. I could tell it was gonna be one of those endless loops spiralling out into the universe, rehashing every decision, proing and conning like bad tennis, leading to a crushing sense that everything is defective and non-ideal and we should really start over after two years and do it right this time ... Soon it was 4:00 and I suddenly realized I had missed my appointment with Younger One's teacher for the conference about his report card. Waaaah, a different set of names kicks in, the "what kind of a mother" litany. And then the attempts to calculate the price I would have to pay later confessing this to him ... So I got another grip on myself after that and went and picked up Younger One and confessed, and paid a serious price, on the verge of tears (him not me, gee I am just so stable). But he held on (kept talking, no silent treatment), I held on (no groveling, problem-solve), we got home, I ordered a pizza, and everything was sort of okay. Now for my reward of Paz for being so marvelously stable:
Wind of knives, don't torment me, I want to ride along with you! |
| December 10 "If I have weaknesses, don't let them blind me now..." |
| Hmmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.
Yesterday's entry was just a tintch florid, I think. Today I will be very terse. I am making progress with the new site. I finally resorted to reading the "README" file on their server. It told me right there, in black and white, where to put my files. I had been struggling with a trial and error approach. And I have completely switched over to editing in Visual Page from Notepad. Although, yes, I still work in "source" at times. Just like everybody said. Today I whetted my appetite for learning still more by looking at glassdog, a web design site, with a section of cranky and snide, but informative, articles about html, css, javascript, and etc. The look of this site really appeals to me. I am so attracted by certain designs. But he removed the eye designs that I loved so much. I loved them so much I wrote him a fan e-mail. Oh, just looked, here's a leftover eye: . I finished the last big piece of graphic design homework. Two more classes. No clear view of what to do next, except I don't want to do anything as demanding as this was. Should I take a week long writing workshop with Deena Metzger next summer? It only costs a mere $1100. I am attracted by the idea. But -- WHY? I talked to my friend B for a long while tonight on the phone. She really listened to me. Sometimes this feels so novel, I start to get nervous and sad. She seemed genuinely interested, and even asked me a few gentle questions to illuminate my quandaries. ~~~~~~~~~~~ This is an example of the kind of tricks my Muse pulls on me: She knows I just experienced severe stagefright trauma yesterday. So today she sends me a burning idea for leading a performance poetry experience tomorrow night at Poem Alley. It's the kind of idea that seems so right, it just cannot be ignored. The only "poem" I seem to be interested in right now is a random freewrite from the paper journal. The theme is sort of writing, inspiration, loneliness, observation, sensual language. I don't want to read it though. I tried reading it at the last Writer's Night in September. I noticed it doesn't really flow, it's all in parts, sentences. At that time, I thought it really should be in two voices. Then this morning I get the idea to write it out in pieces on index cards and pass them out to random people (or selected people) in the audience. Then I will "direct" the people by cue-ing them to read a random card from their stack. I feel very excited about this idea, and it is really the true nature of that poem, but I am absolutely petrified about actually doing something like this with the half-dead scary-solemn zombie types that typically attend Poem Alley. I was very pissed off at the Muse (I just corrected a typo where I called her the "Must"). So her follow-up after leaving me pissed off and petrified? In the car, maybe a half hour later, driving up to my office's parking garage, I heard one of my favorite Paul Simon songs from "Rhythm of the Saints":
and I pulled over to the curb so I could really listen to the line that got me through a lot of anxious terror in the past:
Realistically, I think the readings portion of the evening will go much longer than expected and there won't be time for our own work, even though Ann said she will "insist" that we read something. So I have to maintain a small amount of rational perspective about it. It's still a good idea for that poem, whether I do it tomorrow or some other time. |
| December 11 Poetry and occasional woofs |
| Egret. Prajña. The blind man. Corpses. His mother's teeth. Sweet spirit, worm spirit. Missing carnivale by one day. Barefoot. The woman in the ocean. The woman floating in the river on a raft. "My minds are too nervous." The woman on the riverbank teaching her son to dive. Weekend in Guyana. The plane was twelve hours late. Beans and rice. Peeing by the stairs. The poet helps a dying woman. She says "You're a poet. Don't you do miracles?" The egret. Mahakali. Prajña. Grandmother. Egg body. Tomatoes. I see. The opthamologist. The yakshis. The yoginis. Bananas. His pipe. The poet gets a blow job when they turn on the heater -- he is standing on the vent. Suzanne's crystalline voice. Stillness. Ann's adventures. How to board a bus in Trinidad. Two dogs in the audience, punctuating the reading with their occasional woofs. They belong to a Scottish boy. Tomatoes, dogs, and miracles. Ralph talks a bit about typography, okay for this I am taking graphic design class. Suzanne is tall, thin, and beautiful with graying blond hair, and a mouthful of teeth. Mario's eyes and teeth are bad. When asked to show his scars of war, he smiles. Ann reads a poem about the Story Room and doesn't insist on anything.
Later I find Ralph has written a post-word in Versus Exsul with a paragraph about the first reading by Mario at the church. It was September 20, 1996. "Tall willowy women with glowing intentions receive us" and "The woman with hearts as wide as ocean liners tell us they sent out 3000 announcements" and there's a "huge billboard in the heart of downtown." But "The space is empty." But that's okay, "There's no better audience than the emptiness of a godless crypt; there's no better hearing but within silence." I was there. I licked those announcements. I painted that billboard with B. Now I watch my ego's shamelessness and remember that night. We were ashamed and disappointed, the poet deserved better. We couldn't believe hundreds of people did not show up. We were going to make a lot of money and bail out the church. We were godless and dogless. Tonight, not dogless, goddess-blessed. Prajña, grandmother. I make love noises to the dog with the sweet collie face. I bought books from Ralph: Versus Exsul, Mario Susko I already own and cherish Devi, by Suzanne Ironbiter. If I ever say anything bad again about Poem Alley, don't believe me. |
| December 12 Going native, going troll |
| After yesterday evening, today seemed unreal in its ordinariness.
I woke up exhausted. I went to graphic design class and rendered photographs. (This always sounds like rendering fat out of a chicken to me.) I liked the work. I made a flying briefcase and a troll briefcase. They were a lot of fun. If I had a scanner, I would scan them and put them in here. I am so pleased to have discovered tracing paper, since I have never been able to draw. If I had been more alert in graphic design class, I would have been struggling with trying to make up work fictions based on the troll briefcase. I have always wondered at the resistance of work life to being made into mythology or stories. I think I'm just not up to the level of imagination that would be needed. Then I came home and tried to sleep. No go. Older One needed a ride to work. He asked me to pick up kitten food, so I stopped at the store. When I got home, Hot Diggity Dog needed walked and fed. Then I got stuck on e-mail and website maintenance. I think I got the site set up completely at westwick. Here goes. Younger One and I went to the MALL, of all places. I try never to go to the mall. We kept it very manageable. He bought himself an Ironman watch with his own money, couldn't wait until Christmas I guess. I've been reading about Daisy Bates (her "biography" by Julia Blackburn). I find this book soothing. It's about a woman finding a life she loved working with poor degraded aborigines, and living a simple life in the desert. She always dressed meticulously though. (One of Ann's poems was about the phenomenon of "going native," Daisy's dress was a defense against this.) I think about Sister Margaret a lot. I knew her back in Omak, where I worked on the Colville Reservation for a year (once upon a time in 1977-78). She was a little bit of a joke amongst us volunteers, maybe for going native? Her little yellow pickup truck with a camper shell. Her pointed toe cowboy boots and tan corduroy clothing. Her darkened glasses, severe blond braid, uneven teeth. Her little rooms in the back of a forgotten building. I wish I would have followed those inner promptings to get to know her better. Ralph said the poetry he looks for makes a "movement between worlds." |
| December 13 Free delivery |
| Something is structurally wrong with my life. I don't know why I put up with it.
At least this worked out: we got our Christmas tree from the fire station this year. Free Delivery! by a man and two teenage boys, and they even set it up in the stand and made sure it was straight. As usual, I got a tree with a top sprig about six inches taller than the ceiling. This was easily fixed with the clippers. This however did not work out: trying to get the lights from last year to work. I can't bear to throw away all these cheap light sets yet it seems an impossible task to get them to work again. This is a classic source of frustration, so I was trying to be abnormally patient. But when Younger One got on my nerves I had to go out in the backyard to be by myself for a long time. When I came back in, I read more of Daisy Bates, and I felt better. She writes a lot about death. She writes of Dowie, one of her "blind men" that she took to a camp at a place called Wirilya to die.
I don't know why, but Daisy's story of Dowie the cannibal and her kindness to him before he died comforted me immensely. Daisy wanted to keep the skull of her friend Fanny Balbuk. In the middle of reading this otherworldly stuff, I remembered the younger teenage boy helping deliver the tree. Maybe he was just 12. He wasn't helping, he was looking around my living room. He noticed the elk skull on top of the piano. Everyone always asks first "Is it real?" Then they ask "What is it?" It's more than a foot long, and very dramatic, with very big teeth. I was a little nervous about it when Younger One first brought it home from his summer travels, because it didn't look quite clean. But I have gotten used to it and it hasn't exhibited any bugs, so it's kind of a friend. If I had been a tad more quick-witted, and a lot bolder, I would have said to the young boy, "Yes, my little Christmas delivery elf, that is our Reindeer Skull. We are happy to live with these reminders of death." |
| December 14 Sheer food genius! |
| I cooked tonight. I stirfried little cubes of stew beef. Then added gravy base and boiling water and boiled them for about half an hour to tenderize. Then washed and microwaved a whole bunch of broccoli rabe. Then microwaved some instant brown rice. I piled it all together. The rice was watery. But actually the dish tasted delicious. I love the bitterness of the rabe.
The most delicious taste I have ever encountered was yogurt cheese with rose hips mash. My tongue is flopping around in my mouth just thinking about it. I don't think I'll ever be able to recreate it. I got the recipe in a cooking-with-herbs class, and the instructor sent us home with some of the rose hips. They were soaked? boiled? for a long time, until they got just a little mushy. We were to rub and rub them over a very fine strainer with a spoon, and then scrape the exudation of rose hip from the outside of the strainer mesh. It was a dark burgundy muddy rich color, sort of reminiscient of prunes, but more red than brown. Yogurt cheese is a wonderful thing. I lined a colander with coffee filters, or paper towels, or something along those lines. I was probably supposed to use cheesecloth. Then piled in plain yogurt, and set in a deep bowl or plate in the refrigerator to drain for at least overnight. The yogurt cheese turned out very bland and creamy, but much firmer and more fun for the tongue than yogurt. The rose hips exudation was so dark and tart, and the flavor with its memory of roses was almost unidentifiable. The combination -- hoo, baby, I could live off it! I cook once a week if I'm lucky. All the rest of our food is of the frozen heat-em-up or microwave leftovers or takeout genre. And it's unfortunate, because I really love flavors and textures and colors of food. Younger One stared at the beef dish in the making and started to ask "what is that?" with just a hint of that grating whine in his voice. I said "Don't talk to me about it." He said, "Why Not?" I said, "Because I'll bite your head off." He shut up and ate what he was served and washed down a few tiny sprigs of rabe with large gulps of milk. I have a reputation in my family as sort of a gourmet (or is that a "food fussy"?). Once I made pecan pancakes for brunch for them. They acted like that was inexplicable food genius. Another time I brought an artichoke back from California. Hmmm, strange fruit. My younger sister wouldn't eat it. She thought the fuzzy stuff would really choke her. Well, I guess I had something to do with convincing her of that, actually.
After dinner, I took my evening off while Older One sat, and I ran all the shopping errands that I didn't do yesterday -- picked up the right clothes for Younger One's holiday concert, got a $10 gift for a work party Wednesday, and did the grocery shopping. I didn't see Phara, Mesidor, or Andreecarme at the checkout line. But I did see a lonely little brussel sprout, separated from its mates, and shoved to the side against the wall of the next checkout. It raised its little leaves at each side, like wings, or extra small outstretched arms. I resisted the urge to pick it up and take it home and lay it in a manger. |
| December 15 Just a few things I want... |
| I had a whole entry written in my head while I was walking the dog this evening. Then I did too many chores and now it's gone.
Oh yeah, it was about correcting a misconception from the December 11 entry. We didn't send out 3000 flyers and put up a huge billboard to advertise a Bosnian war poet. We were promoting our whole inaugural fall series of speakers. I was idealistic about the speaker series catching on, but even I am not that idealistic about the popularity of a Bosnian war poet. I have this drive to market what nobody wants. I want to figure out how to bring people in to a problemmatic downtown church full of atheists and pagans. I want to get lots and lots of people to attend intellectual events at that same church on Friday nights, right across the street from the MALL and two movie theaters. I also want everyone to be a feminist. I want to convert all fundamentalists to -- what's the opposite of fundamentalism? wishy-washy-ism? I want goddess worship to be mainstream. I want corporations to encourage the Dionysian (Poets&Writers, Jan/Feb 99, p.10). I want all mothers & motherers to be on welfare. I want everyone to discover the treasure chest of racial and cultural diversity. I want everyone to be interested in the inner life. Not only that, I must want a percentage of everyone to be interested in MY inner life, since I went ahead with getting this journal set up in Open Pages. And this leads me to the Naxi. I want to live in a society modeled after the Naxi. The Naxi live in the Yunnan Province in southern China. This is the bit I underlined in the New York Times, May 11, 1997:
Just letting that sink in ...
Is this true? Why haven't I learned of the Naxi in school? I think they are worthy of study. Can you imagine such a social organization? Actually there are probably pockets of Naxi-ism here in cultures of "color." I can't understand why we have not all simply got together and agreed that it sounds a lot better, let's adopt it. AND I WILL NOT REST until I have done my part in making it happen!! (joke) Meanwhile, tonight Younger One learned to tie a man's tie for his concert tomorrow. He practiced about a hundred times. He tied the tie around the dog's neck, around my neck, around a milk bottle, around a doorknob. He held his tongue to the side and his breathing was noisy with concentration. Learning to be a man, tying a tie and playing the trumpet. |
| December 16 Sooby, the blue Mennym |
| I suppose I ought to comment on world events. All I can say is : I have nothing to say.
Here's the story of Sooby Mennym. The Mennyms were a family of live rag dolls. They were life-size, so well-made, so realistic, that at a distance they could pass for humans. And through magic, they were brought to life. Because they didn't know what else to do with themselves, they copied the actions of human families. The father went to work as a security guard, well bundled in clothes, even in summer. The mother took care of the house, and made clothing for the children. Three times a day she pretended to cook and serve food. Although the family couldn't eat it, they all politely pretended to be sipping their tea and exclaimed over the deliciousness of the cake. There was a baby, Googles, and a nursemaid, and a teenage daughter, Appleby, who had the misfortune of being forever 16. Sooby was the older son. For some reason, he was made of blue cloth, so he was particularly incapable of passing amongst the human folk outdoors. Besides being blue, he was moody, and wise, and spent a lot of time reading. One day, Sooby was in a particularly bad mood. Sitting at the table, watching everyone go through the motions, talking about their days' activities, enacting the sipping of tea, cutting of meat, buttering of bread, he found he could no longer tolerate this silliness, and he leapt violently up from the table, and muttered "I'm no good at these pretends!" and ran off to his private window seat. Sooby is with me a lot. Like him, I'm no good at these pretends. I felt sick all over after today's three-hour festive holiday team lunch. I'm also no good at these polemics, like yesterday's entry. I'm no good at these politics. I could never be a pundit. I often have a vision of humans as ants. I am a person observing ant hills from far above. I watch the different species of ants swarm, forage, care for their young, attack their enemies, be attacked, and be destroyed. With ants, that's the way it is. Author of the Mennyms series of children's books: Sylvia Waugh |
| December 17 A thousand and one ... no, 3 nights |
| About a dozen men walked in to the room in the middle of a gentle meeting I was having with two other quiet women. They brought chaos with them, boisterous movements, heavy stained work clothes, muddy boots, loud voices, a foreign language. They sat down at the table. The most boyish one started reading from a paper, something in a foreign language. It sounded intimate, like a letter or a journal entry. The others listened respectfully. I got up from the couch and sat at the head of the table. I listened to the boy until he finished. Then I calmly assumed some leadership authority, welcomed them, and introduced some principles. They were still very rowdy, and a small group of them later burst into spontaneous song, in harmony. The two women with me were comforting each other dealing with another issue. One had tears in her eyes. I looked at them tenderly. I had absolutely no anxiety, only feelings of detachment and compassion.
~~~~~~~~~~~~ I'm in a small group. We are an audience in a darkened room. A naked pregnant woman with blond hair stands up. Her belly is huge and her breasts are very round and full. There is drum music starting. She holds a piece of sheer red stretch material of the kind that might be used in a skating dress or an evening gown. She uses it to cover herself, covering her head completely, and then her body. She is completely covered in red, like a flame. She is also wearing a sarong patterned in orange, brown, and yellow squares that is tied under her belly. The drum music gets very intense, and she dances wildly, pounding with her feet and beating the sides of her belly with her fists. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ I am walking down the road trying to get to graphic design class. I am anxious because I have forgotten some important materials. A stranger comes up behind me. He is a short man, an old man. He's dressed like an elf or a wintry Merry Man, wearing a green pointy cap, a bulky brown coat belted over short pants. He has red stockings and rough pointed shoes. He doesn't speak, but starts a mocking dance next to me. I sense he is taunting me. I have a moment of hesitation, thinking maybe he's insane. Then I decide suddenly to join in his dance. I copy his motions. We do a kind of softshoe down the road. We come to an intersection. I have no idea which way to go, but I choose to turn right. A little ways on, and I recognize my surroundings. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ Dream life lately. |
| December 18 Implosion, flame, pink light |
| I'm having a fit of anger. The tendons in my arms feel like they are vibrating with anger. I have a big white burning hole where my stomach and other abdominal organs used to be. Old sprains in my back and my left foot revive in full whine. The muscles in my face are not tense, they are just immobile, like wood.
It always comes up suddenly. Usually at something at home. Older One's housekeeping. My housekeeping. My lack of housekeeping. Tonight I tried to think. What has been going on?
I refuse to believe I have a psychological problem. I got some books in the mail today. I ordered some cheap books from QPBC. (They made a mistake in the order, adding a little white hot coal.) I hid myself in my bedroom, under my implosion shield, my paisley comforter, and browsed Gayl Jones, Corregidora. She has a complicated personal story which I am not able to reproduce here, but which re-echoes for me in her writing. I found this:
A matching anger helps me. My white hot center changes shape, from round to flamelike. It joins in flame to Gayl's. I read her words in an interview included in the book. I'm not like her, but I know what she's talking about. She says that book was a song, a poem. My limbs feel carved with her words. My electrons are harnessed, electric current, not bomb blast. I know where to go. I can go to the pink light. |
| December 19 Goodwill towards girls |
| Oh, frabjous day, Calloo, Callay.
It feels so good when the anger goes away, and with little or no yelling this time! I will enumerate good things:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ And now a whole story of the good: I went to Goodwill to try to shop for unique gifts. I could only find gifts for myself. I browsed listlessly and sort of soaked in the earthy used atmosphere of Goodwill, which I love. Then I told myself I had better put these above-and-beyond clothes back and get on with my frantic gift shopping. So I meandered listlessly to another shopping center, and went into a store or two, but it just wasn't coming together. I got back in my car and went towards home. Younger One was coming back from dad's soon and Older One needed a ride to work eventually. Then I thought "This will not make good journal copy, it's too boring." So I went around the block and went back to Goodwill and spent $20 on "dress-ups" (childhood word for costumes). So now I can write this: I bought
AND:
Is it called a tutu when it's ankle-length? Don't know, but it sounds good. I think every inner girl deserves a peach tutu.
|
| December 20 Wandering on a Sunday |
| Passed through an upstairs hallway, a door ajar leading out into the air. The red sands of the desert stretched out in all directions before me. The camp of Daisy Bates, her white tent, weighted down with kerosene cans to keep it from blowing away in the wind like a big white bird. Some vegetation, hills, dunes of red sand, rocks. Her people are there, I can't see them, but they move through the desert. They come to see her, come out of the desert, and stand at her campsite, a family group of 26 men, women, and children, naked and shining. They stay with her awhile, they build her fire in the morning, she awakens to their soft voices. They know when they need to move on. "Heart's growing hot," they say, and disappear into the desert, or go down to the Line and are lost. I can't bear to look anymore.
Passed into a classroom. We are being asked to state our opinions on Impeachment and Whether we should bomb Iraq. I try and try to formulate my thoughts. A phrase from the New York Times sticks in my head, "the scythe of Neo-Puritanism." I think I have an angle. Dionysus (Clinton) versus Jehovah (the Republicans). They are two sides of the same coin, I look it up in the Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. I fight to stay interested in this topic, but alas, I am not. In the corner of the classroom, miniaturized, I see baby Dionysus in his liknon, his cradle, a cereal god before he was a wine god, son of Ceres/Demeter. I lose my whole argument in mists of mythology. Passed through a sanctuary. The minister is in the pulpit. He is speaking of Ramadan. I am mildly refreshed by his references to Islam rather than Christianity. Later I see friends. They say things to me that I don't understand. I try to guess at their meanings, but really, I just want to pass through. One wants to see what I am writing. I can't possibly show her my online journal and I feel like a heel. She thinks I am looking for feedback, but I'm not. Maybe I am looking for revenge or maybe just -- nothing -- an open-ended opportunity to look. Stayed for awhile in the heart of my upstairs room, with vanilla candle and balsam candle. I thought of my writing, wondered whether it is Dionysian, with the appearance of deliciousness, dancing, colors, soft velvets and pink lights. I'm starting to have a tantrum because I can't stay interested in Dionysus. He's a prototype of Christ. He used to drive the Eleusinian mysteries. He used to be a Gerber baby, but he morphed and dissipated, and he's not right for me or my work. Then I find the story of Amaterasu in the Illustrated Dictionary of Mythology:
This is it, this is it! In this or any dark time, I want my writing to be bonfires, crowing, music, dancing, a mirror. My effort is to entice the goddess out of her cave, spiralling into an effort to make me happy, spiralling into an effort to make more women happy, to relieve anger, to lift depression better than St. John's Wort. I remember now, this is my effort, this is my celebration. So there's no Dionysian here. My journal is Uzumian. But I hear no one say "Uzumian" or "Baubonian." There's no traditional effort to make women happy, to entice them out of their caves at the dark time of year, in honor of Amaterasu, in honor of Demeter. Instead we give gifts in honor of the baby Jesus's birthday. I think he's far too spoiled at this point. Amaterasu and mother gods everywhere are pouting in their caves, wondering whether anyone cares. I want to change myths, but maybe it's too late, maybe they are already too angry and will not be reached. I will have to work very hard at these enticements. |
| December 21 Lawyers, bakers, boys |
| This morning, at a weak moment after an hour of insomnia, I accused myself of writing about "Chicken Soup for the Soul" or "The Woman's Comfort Book" yesterday. It's already been done. I don't know what I'm talking about.... There was one very bad thing today, which was a deposition on a car accident I was involved in four years ago. I was at fault, although there were a lot of extenuating circumstances (according to me, not the law unfortunately). I hated the deposition, I hate the whole situation, I feel like my house and my kids' savings and my retirement are all going to be taken away. I think I must have seemed very peculiar to the plaintiff's lawyer. An INFP in a deposition, not a pretty sight. Or maybe I was just like any Joe in that situation, I don't know. I couldn't process any facts, I had no memory of seeing any documents, I was baffled by the names of the documents, I couldn't remember any names at the insurance company, I had no clue about my insurance policy. And yet I used words like "subjective" and when he said I had made "an error in judgment," I corrected him to say "an error in perception." Like, who cares about that distinction but me. And I was hyper-aware of the necessity not to lie under oath because of the recent unpleasantness, but I was constantly grasping for flaky metaphors, making stab-in-the-dark guesses at distances, waving my hands, and generally moving from the concrete to the abstract. The truth constantly eludes me. At what turned out to be his last question, I just put my forehead in my hand, and sort of moaned, "I have no idea how to answer that question, I just want this whole thing to be over." He said "No further questions." Later I laughed with B, how he must have thought I was going over the edge. |
| December 22 Something brought out of the abyss |
| It's just constant, isn't it?
Richard Wright, in exile in Paris, having lost many friends, sick with amoebic dysentery, harassed by cold war politics, mourning the death of his mother, the death of Albert Camus ... he wrote haiku:
So. Self-control in writing. I am looking for control. There's more control here than in the paper journal. I like this for that reason. But I am not prepared to be as controlled as haiku requires. Maybe I have not been pushed to such extremity. I really want to spew rhythmic prose (free-write). I'm not doing it. My heart is growing hot. I don't want to just write journal. I want to make a poem.
Is it the haiku's fat and slovenly brother? It's mostly journal, but not completely journal. It's one step back. It's not a poem, or if it is, it's a very very messy poem, kind of like the floor behind the stove which I asked the gas man to demonstrate moving so I could consider cleaning out the two sticks of melted butter which accidentally dripped down behind it last night during cookie-baking. Now I'm going to quote Russell Edson again, "Portrait of the Writer as a Fat Man, Some Subjective Ideas or Notions on the Care and Feeding of Prose Poems" (this essay won't let go of me):
I really really wonder if his claims about humor are true. I know I recognize the sensation of a bubble in the chest, and not knowing if it's laughter or a sob. I know I adore the phrase "the humor of the deep, uncomfortable metaphor." But does there have to be humor to be a prose poem? Does there have to be a metaphor? More than just a mess? How is it done? How is it done? I was going to finish with a haiku, but now I find that jarringly inappropriate, so I finish with more Edson: "This kind of creating should have as much ambition as a dream ..." |
December 23 Ghosts in the museum |
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| I did go to the museum today. I couldn't resist the challenge. The city was very intense. It was cold. The train was so crowded I had to stand in the aisle all the way in. Lots of kids in the city. Lots of shoppers. Cars. Tourists. Many languages. The Museum of Modern Art had free admission. I had to stand in a line, which frightened me because I didn't know how long the wait would be. But once the line started moving, it moved very quickly.
Worry and guilt about taking time for myself plagued me. I felt time pressure because I wanted to pick my son up by 3:30. Nevertheless, I wandered in the painting gallery first and visited my favorite Klee paintings. I did something I have never done before: sketched the lines of these paintings in my journal. I wish I could have traced them, they would have turned out much better! I just love the way Klee used lines. I think I love his lines because they are close to the line of handwriting. The paintings:
At one time, in the past, I stood for long moments before Mask of Fear. It gave me an uncontrollable urge to raise my eyebrows. It isn't particularly fear-provoking, and did not remind me of my fears. It reminded me of business. Which maybe is a mask of fear, now that I think of it. Letter Ghost was particularly interesting today, thinking about my correspondence, which I've been neglecting. I got the chin all wrong in my sketch though. I think the chin is the most touching part of the painting, or maybe it's the little doubtful mouth. Then I visited the photography gallery. Then architecture and design (where I got the idea for the header of today's entry). A quick stop in the video gallery, a video presentation called "Eating." Then a whirlwind tour of the Jackson Pollock exhibit. I'm not a Pollock fan, but I thought I ought to look at him to educate my eyes. Finally, I got to the Japanese textiles exhibit that I came to see. It was worth it. There were "do not touch" signs everywhere, but they had set up "Touch Panels" with good-size swatches. I crave touching fabrics. Some time ago I realized my desire to shop is sometimes just a need to touch fabrics, not a desire to take clothing home. I can go home empty handed as long as I handle enough microfiber. The web will never provide for this need. I'd like to start sewing again someday when I calm down (?). The piece which evoked a strong reaction in me today: "Small Pattern" by Michiko Uehara. The exhibit room was very dimly light, and these hanging transparent scarves were lit from below and hung in a draft, so they made moving shadows on the ceiling. Small Pattern's shadow looked like a little ghost, sometimes clutching its head in despair with its frondy arms, as it wavered and twisted up there. "This ten-to-twenty-one denier silk yarn is dyed with the stalk of an herb called mercury." Another one: "Yaeyama Choma-fu" by Akiko Ishigaki. "One of the most beautiful aspects of her finishing process is when she washes the cloth in the sea." I'm exhausted, and distracted. Older One is going to watch a real gory horror movie with his friends, so I'm going to bed. |
December 24 A time for wondering |
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| Well, I hugged a dying man tonight.
I was insanely jittery and fretful about the Christmas Eve service. I delayed too long getting ready and then I had to rush and rush. I was nervous about Younger One who was asked to be an "usher" and he was unhappy about it and did not want to cooperate. My sister and her family were coming to the service. I had about 10 plates of cookies to conglomerate and wrap in saran. I didn't have the right clothes. I was late leaving the house. Then I get into the church kitchen and B greets me, did you hear about S? He has a large tumor on his pancreas, it's making him yellow, it's inoperable, he has six to nine months. Oka-a-a-y. He was there, singing in the choir, and so was his wife. He looked very yellow and shaky. His head even looked a different shape than usual. The choir sounded dreadful, absolutely the worst I've ever heard them. I did Reading #2. My slip was showing. I reversed the last two lines of the poem I had to read. I'm sure no one noticed; maybe the minister noticed. I did read clearly, with expression, and plenty of eye contact with the audience. No stage fright. I was just having sort of an earth-shakes-under-me moment. I can be so uncharitable. I've never liked S. He's a pessimist (a realist?) and overly conservative and stubborn. He got a lot of power for being old and eminent and speaking up. Not to mention doing a large majority of the actual work around the church. I tried to think of what to say to him. I didn't sweat too hard over it though, as I would have in the past. These things happen. Finally I just went up to him and shook his hand and said "glad to see you here tonight" and gave him a long hug. Other people in the church were taking much better care of him than I could ever do. Just to continue to be absolutely self-centered (my defense), I've been having hypochondria. (This morning, when I was trying to remember that word, the only word I could think of was hypocrisy. I've probably been having hypocrisy too.) When I come back from vacation, I'm going to the doctor. I feel completely diffuse. Here's the last four lines of the reading. It's a poem by Sophia Lyon Fahs, a Unitarian Universalist, and dedicated religious educator:
Only I read, "A time for worshipping -- A time for wondering." A time for wondering, to be sure.
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December 25 Romantic images |
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| Nerves. Lots of them. This always happens. (Voice of experience here.) I'm leaving tomorrow for a major cross-country trip with my son. I'm completely unprepared right now. I'll just go to sleep, and get up in the morning and pack all morning. By noon, it will be fine. It's a romantic image of myself as the spur-of-the-moment traveler. I'm not sure that's such a positive trait. I'm so pleased with Older One. He got me gifts that were just perfect for me! A Griffin and Sabine writing box. And two books on collage. It's nice to know your teenage son pays enough attention to you to know what you like and to care to act on it. Whew. Because he works at a bookstore, he got books for everyone with his discount. His choices showed a lot of thought and sensitivity. I'm very pleased. Another gift today: I snuck away from the family homestead and drove a few miles down the road to take photographs of that blue barn I so admire. It's very dilapidated and every time I drive up there I'm worried that it will be gone before I can take pictures. The color of the barn is absolutely incredible. Sort of a faded, sunworn, rainwashed, smeared bluegreen. I took pictures from three angles. I climbed up the snowy hill and over a stone wall and through a barberry hedge to get the right angle on the back. I don't know what I will do with the photos. I just want to have them for my collection of old house photos. Someday I will make a color journal, and those colors will be part of it. And then there's always hope that I'll invest in a scanner ... Tomorrow I enter a different world. No computer. No dog. No phone. No chores. Just a warm cozy enclosed space to travel in. My favorite, favorite space to be in. I'm going to miss the online journal. It has really changed my life. For the better. I'm more focused. I pay more attention to my real priorities. I take myself more seriously! I have more fun! Honest, I do! But there is always more to be revealed. I want to see what will be revealed by wandering away from it for awhile, and retreating to my private paper notebook. I'll be back here January 6, or maybe 7, depending on how together I am when I get back. |
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