Today my job with the Census, which was supposed to last until the end of the month, ended. I am dropped back into a familiar void: of not checking my bank statements out of fear, hoping I can coast on the fumes of cash past; wondering how I will continue to pay Sara’s daycare and my rent costs alone, wondering how I got to be almost 35 and in this position. Reader, that question will not be answered here but probably relates to my inability to check bank statements, stop buying lip gloss / red wine, or function while emotionally flattened—which, since graduating college, was most of the time.
On the plus side, I can lie in bed eating sea-salt encrusted dark chocolate and reading O Magazine. I bought a new notebook at Borders last night because I intend to start writing again: yes, the aforementioned writing that will never be published and, if it is, only a few will see. I feel like there is more welling up and I need to connect…and this past 5 weeks spent in meetings, wearing a nametag, driving over the steep Mississippi river bridge to New Orleans East, sitting in church cafeterias and community centers, walking the streets with my black Census bag, has definitely exhausted and disconnected me, even as it’s been affirming and invigorating (making money, being valued by the world in some way). I am hoping that I will be rehired for the next Census operation next month. But in the meantime, it’s back to the world of unemployment, guilt, and creativity.
Over 9 months of unemployment, even as I have lost much in terms of the means to be materially secure and proud of myself—and have wrestled a group of new poems from some inner necessity—I have shared a common fate with many other people in this country at this time, and I believe that is valuable...and provides perspective. A beautifully-dressed woman in her mid-50s who recently began working in my Census “crew” (only to be told, 3 days into her job, that we’re out of work) spent last week moving out of her home, which she lost after 3 years out of a job. “Now I live with my mother in the ghetto,” she told me. There was a kind of question in her careful but blunt tone of voice—why this, what now, why me?
I don’t know what the answer is for her, and can’t imagine being forced to make such a transition. For me, I am just trying to survive until August when I plan, if they’ll have me, to enter Loyola’s MS in Counseling program and from there—after years of homework, further debt accumulation, and a lengthy certification process—a new life and career I hope will carry me and my child forward for the long haul. One dream is definitely finished: while I will still write, I won’t try to live as a writer anymore. I won’t take jobs in coffee shops and bookstores, or volunteer at a holistic studies institute (I’m sure my mom still cringes at the thought of months I spent living in a tent in Rhinebeck, NY), in order to have the time and emotional space to write. I won’t pursue a creative PhD to be more competitive for academic jobs. I won’t market myself as a freelance editor or writer, making a business out of words and reading; or try to direct my skills into related fields such as marketing. And I won’t do any of this for the most impractical reason of all: my heart isn’t in it.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Monday, March 8, 2010
Outside the door
I seem to be entering, or revisiting, a depressing phase as a poet—the old struggle of should I keep doing this? This is coming up because in the first months I was in New Orleans, I was very productive and now find myself faced with a poetic “product” or body of work ready to be disseminated—in literary mags, to chapbook and book contests.
But I’m deeply tired of the public poetry world: the money part (paying to enter contests you won’t win), how you have to be grateful for a remotely positive rejection, the bullshit that does get published that I find tepid or otherwise uninspiring (I’m not saying all published poetry is tepid, of course, but definitely some). And for what? So a few other, um, poets—talk about preaching to the choir—will read your scribblings? Probably they’re also jockeying for position, of necessity thinking: is this work better or worse than mine, has this poet won more or fewer contests/publications than I have? Even if someone is passionate about others’ writing, she cannot help but position her work/herself in relation to it and to the larger culture and conversation, which includes competition and doors that either open or stay closed. Yes, I can write for myself and never publish. But in this world of instant connection to everything, such a pose does not feel appropriate or realistic. With so many opportunities to connect, why would I make a goal of creating in isolation and obscurity? But self-publishing or doing so on this blog just wouldn’t give me the sense of affirmation I can’t help but crave.
I believe in saying something: in speaking out, preferably in a way that can be understood/felt not only by a few who are within the same official poetry forum, but by some in the wider human community. I believe in the power of writing to organize and capture, or even bless, a moment or emotional process that otherwise would have bloomed, died, and gone unnoticed. And I will keep standing up for that. However, whereas in my 20s it honestly didn’t feel important that I had no significant success and recognition to speak of for my labors (and trust me, it IS labor), in my 30s it does, creating a feedback loop of: if this is not going to be noticeably valued by or useful to others, if these words are sent out into the wind, then why am I putting so much energy into this, what is the source that will keep feeding this vocation? It turns out I can’t be like Tibetan monks who spend days or weeks completing sand mandalas, only to immediately dispose of them. I want to hear a response from the world besides the one that basically says: “Thanks for your $20, which will promote the publication of another writer; but your poem/manuscript did not make the cut.” (And if I did hear a more positive answer, as sometimes happens, how satisfying could that possibly be given the narrow margins within which such success is measured and appreciated?)
Lately, not only does it feel insulting and crappy to accept this reality, it feels limiting to have—as a life goal—writing for a few, while essentially hiding from the people in your own family who will never understand or like your writing. Going forward, I would rather reach other people in a tangible, humble way than promote my “so smart, so artistic” self in a finite and less-than-hugely significant one. (Caveat: if this unassuming, real connection can happen through writing, that’s fine too, but in that case it probably won’t be poetry.) I am glad for the moments of connection and recognition I have felt over the years as a poet in a larger community of writers; and I have found folks I met in this sphere to be among the most compassionate and nuanced people I know. But the question of whether such rewards as are available can sustain my whole existential enterprise is, well, a question.
Growing up, thinking that I was intelligent and creative kept me from feeling like shit. I clung to this side of my nature in order to avoid the other things: being judged unattractive, unpopular, clumsy in my skin—a flawed human like everybody else, but somehow worse. It’s a classic story. Now, the thought of moving away from this identity—born of pain and a need for approval—and becoming a therapist seems to offer a way of having my voice actually be heard: of receptively entering into an intimate conversation with the world outside my door.
But I’m deeply tired of the public poetry world: the money part (paying to enter contests you won’t win), how you have to be grateful for a remotely positive rejection, the bullshit that does get published that I find tepid or otherwise uninspiring (I’m not saying all published poetry is tepid, of course, but definitely some). And for what? So a few other, um, poets—talk about preaching to the choir—will read your scribblings? Probably they’re also jockeying for position, of necessity thinking: is this work better or worse than mine, has this poet won more or fewer contests/publications than I have? Even if someone is passionate about others’ writing, she cannot help but position her work/herself in relation to it and to the larger culture and conversation, which includes competition and doors that either open or stay closed. Yes, I can write for myself and never publish. But in this world of instant connection to everything, such a pose does not feel appropriate or realistic. With so many opportunities to connect, why would I make a goal of creating in isolation and obscurity? But self-publishing or doing so on this blog just wouldn’t give me the sense of affirmation I can’t help but crave.
I believe in saying something: in speaking out, preferably in a way that can be understood/felt not only by a few who are within the same official poetry forum, but by some in the wider human community. I believe in the power of writing to organize and capture, or even bless, a moment or emotional process that otherwise would have bloomed, died, and gone unnoticed. And I will keep standing up for that. However, whereas in my 20s it honestly didn’t feel important that I had no significant success and recognition to speak of for my labors (and trust me, it IS labor), in my 30s it does, creating a feedback loop of: if this is not going to be noticeably valued by or useful to others, if these words are sent out into the wind, then why am I putting so much energy into this, what is the source that will keep feeding this vocation? It turns out I can’t be like Tibetan monks who spend days or weeks completing sand mandalas, only to immediately dispose of them. I want to hear a response from the world besides the one that basically says: “Thanks for your $20, which will promote the publication of another writer; but your poem/manuscript did not make the cut.” (And if I did hear a more positive answer, as sometimes happens, how satisfying could that possibly be given the narrow margins within which such success is measured and appreciated?)
Lately, not only does it feel insulting and crappy to accept this reality, it feels limiting to have—as a life goal—writing for a few, while essentially hiding from the people in your own family who will never understand or like your writing. Going forward, I would rather reach other people in a tangible, humble way than promote my “so smart, so artistic” self in a finite and less-than-hugely significant one. (Caveat: if this unassuming, real connection can happen through writing, that’s fine too, but in that case it probably won’t be poetry.) I am glad for the moments of connection and recognition I have felt over the years as a poet in a larger community of writers; and I have found folks I met in this sphere to be among the most compassionate and nuanced people I know. But the question of whether such rewards as are available can sustain my whole existential enterprise is, well, a question.
Growing up, thinking that I was intelligent and creative kept me from feeling like shit. I clung to this side of my nature in order to avoid the other things: being judged unattractive, unpopular, clumsy in my skin—a flawed human like everybody else, but somehow worse. It’s a classic story. Now, the thought of moving away from this identity—born of pain and a need for approval—and becoming a therapist seems to offer a way of having my voice actually be heard: of receptively entering into an intimate conversation with the world outside my door.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
My Honda is da bomb
Yesterday I received a letter from Honda recalling my driver’s side airbag. The letter stated, in calm language, that in my model (a 2001 Civic) the airbag inflator is under too much pressure and “could,” if the bag deploys, explode, striking everyone in the car with pieces of metal.
For 9 years, since purchasing my Civic new from a lot in Las Cruces, New Mexico, I have driven back and forth across the country over and over, an intricate criss-cross reflective of major life choices at different times. There was the meandering trip my fiancé-to-be and I took from Cruces to Seattle—his hometown—and back the first summer we were dating. (My car was “the safe one,” as his was a much older Accord; so we used it for all our travels.) After he moved to Virginia that autumn to upgrade his MA degree to an MFA at the venerable UVA, I soon followed, packing up my small adobe house—at the time, everything I owned fit in my Honda. When I developed a flying phobia after 911, I thought relying on my car to travel long distances was safer than getting on a plane to anywhere. And so I went: from Charlottesville to NJ and back for holidays with family, to Asheville twice a year for grad school, to eastern Pennsylvania for Chris’ and my wedding in a town called Washington’s Crossing, and then to our new life in, of all places, small-town Alabama—occasioned by his finally securing a tenure-track position. Two years later, the Honda followed a yellow Penske truck driven by my stepfather over a thousand miles north to Ithaca, NY and my eventual divorce. After two more years, with my boyfriend (now ex) at the wheel, it ferried our 6-pound daughter away from the hospital in her first carseat; and, recently, has delivered me back to the South and another uncertain future.
All this time I thought the car was my friend, my container, my vessel from life to life. It hadn’t hosted a first orgasm or anything (that honor fell to a battered ’77 Chevy Impala, on a hilltop covered in cornstalks) but it had pretty much been everywhere else, and gotten me home safe each time—wherever home was.
What can I know about the journeys of my life, what they mean, where they should end up? I’ve been driving around a bomb.
For 9 years, since purchasing my Civic new from a lot in Las Cruces, New Mexico, I have driven back and forth across the country over and over, an intricate criss-cross reflective of major life choices at different times. There was the meandering trip my fiancé-to-be and I took from Cruces to Seattle—his hometown—and back the first summer we were dating. (My car was “the safe one,” as his was a much older Accord; so we used it for all our travels.) After he moved to Virginia that autumn to upgrade his MA degree to an MFA at the venerable UVA, I soon followed, packing up my small adobe house—at the time, everything I owned fit in my Honda. When I developed a flying phobia after 911, I thought relying on my car to travel long distances was safer than getting on a plane to anywhere. And so I went: from Charlottesville to NJ and back for holidays with family, to Asheville twice a year for grad school, to eastern Pennsylvania for Chris’ and my wedding in a town called Washington’s Crossing, and then to our new life in, of all places, small-town Alabama—occasioned by his finally securing a tenure-track position. Two years later, the Honda followed a yellow Penske truck driven by my stepfather over a thousand miles north to Ithaca, NY and my eventual divorce. After two more years, with my boyfriend (now ex) at the wheel, it ferried our 6-pound daughter away from the hospital in her first carseat; and, recently, has delivered me back to the South and another uncertain future.
All this time I thought the car was my friend, my container, my vessel from life to life. It hadn’t hosted a first orgasm or anything (that honor fell to a battered ’77 Chevy Impala, on a hilltop covered in cornstalks) but it had pretty much been everywhere else, and gotten me home safe each time—wherever home was.
What can I know about the journeys of my life, what they mean, where they should end up? I’ve been driving around a bomb.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Russian, French, Chinese
I have noticed a number of writers lately taking a stand on the subject and experience of marriage. Cristina Nehring’s book A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century totally kicks the ass of “companionate marriage;” as does Sandra Tsing Loh in her Atlantic article “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” which narrates the story of her surprising divorce after a long union. Most recently, there is Lori Gottleib’s book rather provocatively titled Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough.
I find myself very interested in the discussion because I have been trying to conclusively decide stuff about marriage—or, the most intimate one-on-one relationships we can have, whatever their legality—in my own life. 12 years ago an astrologer (don’t laugh: this was an Ithaca astrologer: brilliant, had studied Sanskrit) told me that if I ever figured this issue out, I would die. I believe his words were: “Your marriage certificate is your death certificate.” After this prediction, I should not have expected any marriage I entered into would have a good outcome (to my ex-spouse, now happily remarried: sorry about that). However, what he meant was less dire, and more metaphorical: basically, that this area of life is a complex and passionately meaningful one for me—and, clearly, for so many other people—and in that sense it can never be resolved, in the box, finito. (I think he also described my relationship life as being “like a Russian film with French subtitles, dubbed into Chinese.”)
As I see it, there are two basic ways of thinking about the whole romance/marriage conundrum—not that these ways can’t overlap, but they can become very polarized. You can try to be wise, or to go deep. If you are trying to be wise, you want to approach the whole thing rationally to achieve the most positive and successful “result” possible. Dating websites, which I explored recently, are a good example of this kind of attempt. On such sites, you clearly articulate, or try to, just where you are in life and what you’re looking for: your qualities, the qualities of your ideal mate; your astrological sign, salary, body-type, who lives with you (dogs? kids?), what you do on weekends. You try not to be sucked in by the bad guy with tattoos with whom you could have bottomless, but non-practical, sex; instead, you look for a life partner, someone who will not emotionally body-slam you but who will nicely complement your life and goals. You say lucid, absolutely true things like: “No relationship is going to completely fulfill me, and there is no ‘The One’ (sniff sniff); I just need to be a certain percent happy and get X and Y needs met…I’m going to need to compromise and to work hard for the commitment I want. And listen to a lot of Dr. Phil…” You go out with the person who is perfect “on paper” (similar interests, intelligence, values, charm, perhaps a skilled and considerate lover), at “the same place in life,” but somehow does nothing for you from day one. You keep going out with him or her, even as that doesn’t really change. Eventually, you can marry this person—probably with the full support of your mother. I think you’ll be pulling your hair out soon enough due to repressed desires and a sense of suffocation. But go ahead…
Partial kidding aside, Lori Gottleib has the right to nurture this results-oriented vision of marriage and relationship, and so do millions of other people. Personally, I think this approach, if taken on its own, fails to invite a certain kind of depth (maybe why Gottleib is still unwed: she is, after all, not so compelled by her own idea of how such a relationship should come together). What I mean by depth is that you are listening to your real desires and irrational knowledge, the kind of knowledge that maybe “sounds crazy” at first, and makes you feel vulnerable and uncertain. This listening is not the same thing as what some may call perfectionism, or super-pickiness. It is being real and not lying to yourself, and I assert that whatever form it takes, it is the making of your psyche (or soul, if one cottons to that concept), drawing you into an experience with uncertain results; possibly ending in futility or “failure," if any relationship that doesn’t last forever is somehow invalid (questionable).
The force that initiates one to the unknown may be called intuition, imagination, whatever…madness, inspiration—Andre Breton’s Amour Fou. This kind of shit is outside the social structure. Maybe for some people, following such inklings in themselves actually leads to happy marriages with compatible partners. I imagine it could, maybe (certainly, the mojo could be expected to fade over time), if the people involved are self-aware enough, had healthy childhoods, or are just lucky. For me, following my romantic impulses has led to some pain and hardship that has come with divorce, and now, with being a single parent. I feel caged in relationships, eventually; and lonely when single. But after chewing this over for years, and trying to be wiser, I decided I am going to keep on. (If not, this blog probably would not be titled “Falling Over.”) The positive thing is that over time, living this way, you actually act less crazy and more intelligently, even as you are still guided by insane-making feelings and impulses…you aim to surf the turbulence and Do No Harm.
I can’t recommend that everyone, or anyone, follow my lead, though some already do and will recognize this kind of path (if “lead” it can be called, since we don’t know where we’re going). But I am aware that these disparate tugs toward eros and love—rational and irrational—are ancient. They’re not going anywhere. Many more books and articles (and blogs) will be written, and have been. In Russian, French, and Chinese.
I find myself very interested in the discussion because I have been trying to conclusively decide stuff about marriage—or, the most intimate one-on-one relationships we can have, whatever their legality—in my own life. 12 years ago an astrologer (don’t laugh: this was an Ithaca astrologer: brilliant, had studied Sanskrit) told me that if I ever figured this issue out, I would die. I believe his words were: “Your marriage certificate is your death certificate.” After this prediction, I should not have expected any marriage I entered into would have a good outcome (to my ex-spouse, now happily remarried: sorry about that). However, what he meant was less dire, and more metaphorical: basically, that this area of life is a complex and passionately meaningful one for me—and, clearly, for so many other people—and in that sense it can never be resolved, in the box, finito. (I think he also described my relationship life as being “like a Russian film with French subtitles, dubbed into Chinese.”)
As I see it, there are two basic ways of thinking about the whole romance/marriage conundrum—not that these ways can’t overlap, but they can become very polarized. You can try to be wise, or to go deep. If you are trying to be wise, you want to approach the whole thing rationally to achieve the most positive and successful “result” possible. Dating websites, which I explored recently, are a good example of this kind of attempt. On such sites, you clearly articulate, or try to, just where you are in life and what you’re looking for: your qualities, the qualities of your ideal mate; your astrological sign, salary, body-type, who lives with you (dogs? kids?), what you do on weekends. You try not to be sucked in by the bad guy with tattoos with whom you could have bottomless, but non-practical, sex; instead, you look for a life partner, someone who will not emotionally body-slam you but who will nicely complement your life and goals. You say lucid, absolutely true things like: “No relationship is going to completely fulfill me, and there is no ‘The One’ (sniff sniff); I just need to be a certain percent happy and get X and Y needs met…I’m going to need to compromise and to work hard for the commitment I want. And listen to a lot of Dr. Phil…” You go out with the person who is perfect “on paper” (similar interests, intelligence, values, charm, perhaps a skilled and considerate lover), at “the same place in life,” but somehow does nothing for you from day one. You keep going out with him or her, even as that doesn’t really change. Eventually, you can marry this person—probably with the full support of your mother. I think you’ll be pulling your hair out soon enough due to repressed desires and a sense of suffocation. But go ahead…
Partial kidding aside, Lori Gottleib has the right to nurture this results-oriented vision of marriage and relationship, and so do millions of other people. Personally, I think this approach, if taken on its own, fails to invite a certain kind of depth (maybe why Gottleib is still unwed: she is, after all, not so compelled by her own idea of how such a relationship should come together). What I mean by depth is that you are listening to your real desires and irrational knowledge, the kind of knowledge that maybe “sounds crazy” at first, and makes you feel vulnerable and uncertain. This listening is not the same thing as what some may call perfectionism, or super-pickiness. It is being real and not lying to yourself, and I assert that whatever form it takes, it is the making of your psyche (or soul, if one cottons to that concept), drawing you into an experience with uncertain results; possibly ending in futility or “failure," if any relationship that doesn’t last forever is somehow invalid (questionable).
The force that initiates one to the unknown may be called intuition, imagination, whatever…madness, inspiration—Andre Breton’s Amour Fou. This kind of shit is outside the social structure. Maybe for some people, following such inklings in themselves actually leads to happy marriages with compatible partners. I imagine it could, maybe (certainly, the mojo could be expected to fade over time), if the people involved are self-aware enough, had healthy childhoods, or are just lucky. For me, following my romantic impulses has led to some pain and hardship that has come with divorce, and now, with being a single parent. I feel caged in relationships, eventually; and lonely when single. But after chewing this over for years, and trying to be wiser, I decided I am going to keep on. (If not, this blog probably would not be titled “Falling Over.”) The positive thing is that over time, living this way, you actually act less crazy and more intelligently, even as you are still guided by insane-making feelings and impulses…you aim to surf the turbulence and Do No Harm.
I can’t recommend that everyone, or anyone, follow my lead, though some already do and will recognize this kind of path (if “lead” it can be called, since we don’t know where we’re going). But I am aware that these disparate tugs toward eros and love—rational and irrational—are ancient. They’re not going anywhere. Many more books and articles (and blogs) will be written, and have been. In Russian, French, and Chinese.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Just in time for Valentines Day
A man in a bar kissed my hand last night, and I am still floating. He is unavailable. But I am enjoying the feeling…which seems to encapsulate my emotions about New Orleans so far. I am bewitched, and the door is closed, all at the same time.
Houses all over the city now have their Mardi Gras bling up (as of a week or so ago), which consist of green, gold, and purple decorations. Often there are rows of beads slung over a black iron fence, or there are masks, the main Mardi Gras symbol. The other day I saw two shiny paper masks displayed beside each other on someone’s door: a happy and a sad face. It reminded me of the Tibetan Buddhist deities I learned about during my years working for a Buddhist publisher—there is often a duality to them, with one deity possessing several aspects (masks?), such as peaceful and wrathful. The wrathful face of the deity, which can be frightening to look at, is supposed to be helpful to meditate on in order to give a space to that part of one’s experience or emotions…and to channel that energy so it can be used to fuel something ultimately beneficial, not only to oneself but to all beings and all life. (Here are a few names I found, translated from the Tibetan, of some wrathful deities: “Hidden Sheet of Mail,” “Horse Neck,” “Great Black One”) If there had been a concept like this in Catholicism, maybe I wouldn’t have left. Anyway, seeing the side-by-side faces so theatrically and anonymously trumpeting the duality of the basic human experience, in this city that juxtaposes rich and desperately poor, celebration and mourning (as in the expression “jazz funeral”), I had a thought I jotted down in the notebook in my purse: sorrow and joy are masks of the true destination.
Houses all over the city now have their Mardi Gras bling up (as of a week or so ago), which consist of green, gold, and purple decorations. Often there are rows of beads slung over a black iron fence, or there are masks, the main Mardi Gras symbol. The other day I saw two shiny paper masks displayed beside each other on someone’s door: a happy and a sad face. It reminded me of the Tibetan Buddhist deities I learned about during my years working for a Buddhist publisher—there is often a duality to them, with one deity possessing several aspects (masks?), such as peaceful and wrathful. The wrathful face of the deity, which can be frightening to look at, is supposed to be helpful to meditate on in order to give a space to that part of one’s experience or emotions…and to channel that energy so it can be used to fuel something ultimately beneficial, not only to oneself but to all beings and all life. (Here are a few names I found, translated from the Tibetan, of some wrathful deities: “Hidden Sheet of Mail,” “Horse Neck,” “Great Black One”) If there had been a concept like this in Catholicism, maybe I wouldn’t have left. Anyway, seeing the side-by-side faces so theatrically and anonymously trumpeting the duality of the basic human experience, in this city that juxtaposes rich and desperately poor, celebration and mourning (as in the expression “jazz funeral”), I had a thought I jotted down in the notebook in my purse: sorrow and joy are masks of the true destination.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Chosen
I’ve kinda had a fantasy, of late, of becoming a Jew, as Charlotte of Sex and the City put it (it always sounds weird to say “Jew,” but this is the correct street term, yes?). And, unrelated but related: I just read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Committed. I admire her integrity in so clearly laying out her thoughts and feelings (mostly thoughts) about intimacy and marriage, and I enjoyed it, not as much as her previous book written when she was miserable…but one thing sticks out. She asked women of her acquaintance and, one assumes, high intelligence level and socio-economic status, why (God, why?) marriage appeals to them given all the bullshit that has gone along with it, and its high non-success rate. One woman replied that she just wants to feel “chosen” in a special way by someone, above all others, officially, and thus affirmed in front of the world (symbolized by the wedding day). It’s clear that Gilbert is a bit horrified by this desire though she makes polite noises about respecting it…as if such a wish is mainly immature, like a toddler’s temper tantrum that is all ME ME ME, CHOOSE MEEE!
Tonight I was thinking of my ex-husband…something about life lately has stirred up the specter of my failed marriage (not Gilbert’s book, in particular)…and I Googled our names together to see if any trace of our union remained in cyberspace. (I had read an interview with him in 2008, on the occasion of his winning an NEA or Pushcart, in which he cleanly omitted me from his biography, admitting only to his first, 14-year marriage. Soon after, he remarried; and I assume he did not want it widely known that this was his 3rd. Can I blame him?) I was strangely comforted to find one entry surviving: an old bio that accompanied one of his published works and stated that “he and his wife, Elizabeth Green, live in Alabama.” I was compelled to read the sentence several times, with tears pricking my eyes, just letting the “chosen-ness” soak in: I had been chosen. I was (and on this webpage still am) a “wife.” I was one of them! Someone had loved me that much.
In a life that feels like a bridge burning under my feet as I run (I assume I’m not alone in this feeling), this idea of a solid identity of some kind—one that binds me permanently to something larger, to the enduring social structure—feels necessary and poignant. I am always forlorn on holidays when there are no special rituals to mark them. Nothing I invent feels as if it has enough weight and texture behind it. It doesn’t count. Hence the idea of adopting a religion, a culture: so I can add a bunch of special days to my calendar and on those days, participate (with other people, ideally) in actions/events that humans have been performing, with their own individual nuances, for thousands of years. I want to be part of that club.
Tonight I was thinking of my ex-husband…something about life lately has stirred up the specter of my failed marriage (not Gilbert’s book, in particular)…and I Googled our names together to see if any trace of our union remained in cyberspace. (I had read an interview with him in 2008, on the occasion of his winning an NEA or Pushcart, in which he cleanly omitted me from his biography, admitting only to his first, 14-year marriage. Soon after, he remarried; and I assume he did not want it widely known that this was his 3rd. Can I blame him?) I was strangely comforted to find one entry surviving: an old bio that accompanied one of his published works and stated that “he and his wife, Elizabeth Green, live in Alabama.” I was compelled to read the sentence several times, with tears pricking my eyes, just letting the “chosen-ness” soak in: I had been chosen. I was (and on this webpage still am) a “wife.” I was one of them! Someone had loved me that much.
In a life that feels like a bridge burning under my feet as I run (I assume I’m not alone in this feeling), this idea of a solid identity of some kind—one that binds me permanently to something larger, to the enduring social structure—feels necessary and poignant. I am always forlorn on holidays when there are no special rituals to mark them. Nothing I invent feels as if it has enough weight and texture behind it. It doesn’t count. Hence the idea of adopting a religion, a culture: so I can add a bunch of special days to my calendar and on those days, participate (with other people, ideally) in actions/events that humans have been performing, with their own individual nuances, for thousands of years. I want to be part of that club.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
This is one of the most challenging times of my life, but there have been others. I was thinking this while walking through my subtropical neighborhood this morning with its narrow cobblestone sidewalks, having just broken off another friendship with another woman who disappointed me. I seem to keep paring my life down to almost nothing, then expecting to survive on the scraps. What is it in me that is so ferocious, and so hungry?
I recall being 22 and dyeing my Italian hair blonde “to own the glam,” I wrote in a notebook. Whatever that means. I was writing a lot in a notebook, in lieu of actual human contact. I had recently graduated college and ended a highly dysfunctional 1-year relationship with someone I was still in love with. I shared a house with 2 guys, fellow graduates of my school, who drew breasts and penises on our bathroom wallpaper, used a Victoria’s Secret catalogue as toilet paper once, and didn’t seem to like me very much. Well, one of them did climb into bed with me at 3 AM one morning, and we ended up smoking on the front porch both naked (but not post-coital), tapping the ashes into a tomato sauce can, in a moment I am not sure really happened. But that’s another story and for the most part the 2 men avoided me, and vice-versa. I read a lot of Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Khalil Gibran, as well as dipping into the Confessions of St. Augustine: not a good idea if one is young, female, and looking for reasons to live. Due to severe indecision regarding my future, I worked late-night and early morning hours at a hipster coffeehouse in Collegetown. All the regulars, mainly Cornell students, smoked and the windows—high up at the front of the atmospherically dark, narrow space—were tinted brown-yellow from it (this was just before smoking in such places was banned in New York State). I inhaled a pack a day of Camel or Winston Lights, not yet having become scared of actually dying—it seemed so far off, no matter my destructive behaviors. Yet there was a vivid beauty to that time, maybe because of its intense, on-the-edge quality. I remember walking home from work at 3 AM, after sweeping and mopping the floors to the pounding beat of Tricky and slamming dirty pint glasses into the 3 sinks behind the bar. I had an adrenalized feeling of just having accomplished something physical and real and having been set free into the night on my own, into a pure loneliness that was the blue of snow or water on those northern streets; trees and their shadows; streaks of moonlight on car windows that slid past on my walk up the hill to the Belle Sherman neighborhood, where all the families in the houses around ours were bedded down for the night together.
This patina of grace does not adhere to memories of London in the fall of 1995, when I lived there on study abroad, and desire and isolation made me feel I was on the edge of the earth alone. All I could think about was a ponytailed guy back in the States whom I had been orbiting for several semesters as he dated other women, talking about them with me at length (one of his most memorable musings was scatalogical: "I give part of a shit about you, part of a shit about Chloe..." and he went on dividing the imaginary shit between all of us women in his life, who would doubtless have been happy to receive it). My flatmates—students from my college, who had been friends before we lived together—were not so much speaking to me, maybe because none had been trained to deal with a clinically depressed person. They explored the city with its street markets and museums, gleefully stuffed the Thanksgiving turkey, dressed the male students from our group in drag, and otherwise acted like 19-year-olds enjoying a foreign country. I kept a bottle of Bailey’s under the bed, and had to call my friends in the States at weird times like 3 AM—10 PM back home—from those red outdoor British phone booths. It seems that I spent the 3 months either in a phone booth, with the Baileys in my purse; or in the darkness of the movie theater in Leicester Square watching the latest American films alone, night after night, using a Visa Gold provided by my mom (to her later rue). In retrospect, looking at it all through a rational lens, I’m aware that London is a fabulous, world-class city. But I didn’t see it. All I experienced was my misery.
I’ve lost days, months, even years of life to this dark force. Living with it is like hauling around a black hole, so that various holidays and events get sucked in and I wake up somewhere else: older, clearer about what keeps happening, but no more enlightened.
I recall being 22 and dyeing my Italian hair blonde “to own the glam,” I wrote in a notebook. Whatever that means. I was writing a lot in a notebook, in lieu of actual human contact. I had recently graduated college and ended a highly dysfunctional 1-year relationship with someone I was still in love with. I shared a house with 2 guys, fellow graduates of my school, who drew breasts and penises on our bathroom wallpaper, used a Victoria’s Secret catalogue as toilet paper once, and didn’t seem to like me very much. Well, one of them did climb into bed with me at 3 AM one morning, and we ended up smoking on the front porch both naked (but not post-coital), tapping the ashes into a tomato sauce can, in a moment I am not sure really happened. But that’s another story and for the most part the 2 men avoided me, and vice-versa. I read a lot of Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Khalil Gibran, as well as dipping into the Confessions of St. Augustine: not a good idea if one is young, female, and looking for reasons to live. Due to severe indecision regarding my future, I worked late-night and early morning hours at a hipster coffeehouse in Collegetown. All the regulars, mainly Cornell students, smoked and the windows—high up at the front of the atmospherically dark, narrow space—were tinted brown-yellow from it (this was just before smoking in such places was banned in New York State). I inhaled a pack a day of Camel or Winston Lights, not yet having become scared of actually dying—it seemed so far off, no matter my destructive behaviors. Yet there was a vivid beauty to that time, maybe because of its intense, on-the-edge quality. I remember walking home from work at 3 AM, after sweeping and mopping the floors to the pounding beat of Tricky and slamming dirty pint glasses into the 3 sinks behind the bar. I had an adrenalized feeling of just having accomplished something physical and real and having been set free into the night on my own, into a pure loneliness that was the blue of snow or water on those northern streets; trees and their shadows; streaks of moonlight on car windows that slid past on my walk up the hill to the Belle Sherman neighborhood, where all the families in the houses around ours were bedded down for the night together.
This patina of grace does not adhere to memories of London in the fall of 1995, when I lived there on study abroad, and desire and isolation made me feel I was on the edge of the earth alone. All I could think about was a ponytailed guy back in the States whom I had been orbiting for several semesters as he dated other women, talking about them with me at length (one of his most memorable musings was scatalogical: "I give part of a shit about you, part of a shit about Chloe..." and he went on dividing the imaginary shit between all of us women in his life, who would doubtless have been happy to receive it). My flatmates—students from my college, who had been friends before we lived together—were not so much speaking to me, maybe because none had been trained to deal with a clinically depressed person. They explored the city with its street markets and museums, gleefully stuffed the Thanksgiving turkey, dressed the male students from our group in drag, and otherwise acted like 19-year-olds enjoying a foreign country. I kept a bottle of Bailey’s under the bed, and had to call my friends in the States at weird times like 3 AM—10 PM back home—from those red outdoor British phone booths. It seems that I spent the 3 months either in a phone booth, with the Baileys in my purse; or in the darkness of the movie theater in Leicester Square watching the latest American films alone, night after night, using a Visa Gold provided by my mom (to her later rue). In retrospect, looking at it all through a rational lens, I’m aware that London is a fabulous, world-class city. But I didn’t see it. All I experienced was my misery.
I’ve lost days, months, even years of life to this dark force. Living with it is like hauling around a black hole, so that various holidays and events get sucked in and I wake up somewhere else: older, clearer about what keeps happening, but no more enlightened.
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