Bright Year

Happy Birthday 2 me (and you, whenever it is).

Oh! My mother must know that it is my birthday too.  How strange and yet bizarrely rewarding to have a relationship with someone that is so based on form and circumstance.

I mean this form and circumstance in the most unsentimental ways.  We will not exchange words, or wishes, this day.  I only know that I used her womb, I used her eating habits and interests, and love, and sense of purposefullness and being Catholic, for the vast part of a year.

I don't know at what point I turned into myself.  I was cells, and then a sea creature, and then a land animal with a tail.  But at some point I did shift over and become me, a person who likes to nap and never liked meat and loves affection and can write and learn languages well but struggles with math while it still remains a passion.  But I did this in her body.  Think about it, people: In Her Body.  And I know that she still knows, 21 years after nothing, she still knows, that this day her body issued forth me.  I feel so bad for her.  I wish I could make it better, but wish more truly that I could make it better without personal cost.  I was connected to her in a miraculous, singular way.

And then I wasn't.  42 years and a few hours ago today.  Right now back then, I was wet and purposefully, ferociously sleeping.  I know that people replace every single cell in their body every 7 years, but I also know that the cells left behind instructions because I know in every fiber of my being who I am.

Who I am was and is, someone who was held and rocked and comforted for hours.  Who had two parents who worried sick about my infant well being.  Everytime I easily accepted any physical affection from anyone, I knew always that it was their antecedents who left that for me, like Hansel and Gretel leaving crumbs to find their way home.  I know I received, very early on, concerned and frantic and confused and deeply bonded and cherished and connected.  In short, I felt what people feel on this planet when they call it love.  

I turned into myself though.  And though I've done nothing to deserve it, I do know that no matter how long the absence or what I've been doing, that people show up for me, on my birthday.  With gifts and hugs and kisses.

This is my message to you, dear reader: life is an impersonal miracle.  Human beings are crotchety and treacherous and thoughtful and kind and heroic.  For all of us.  

It's all a (really horrid) process.

Novels, even magazine articles, are filled with the a-ha! moments. And then ever after, the person is guided by that new insight, achieving new heights of greatness.

But real life and psychic processes are just like so much glue. You go forward, and back, and back, and forward. There is something about being human and possesed of a brain that includes the forever slide into dark moods, placing blame, fantasies in which one is always shown to be the reasonable rational one. It never ends well, or goes anywhere. It seems as if one must always husband the spinning ball, sometimes to good effect, sometimes for relief that only lasts a minute.

Ah, arg. Today is my birthday. It has barely occurred to me. It's a big day with a lot of tasks ahead. I'm grateful for the overcast sky, for this enormous icelandic sweater my downstairs neighbor gave to me, coffee, hands, the novel.

A Fictive Past

Like every other slob on the planet, I've been reading the new book by Exckhart Txolle (please excuse the misspelling, but as it turns out I'm just not a fan all the google drive bys one gets by mentioning a famous person). It has been mentioned as The Secret without the crass materialism (says she who doesn't want to be a Secret reader, yet doesn't she, with all her high mindedness, keep a 23 item long list of things she wants, which she collects at intervals and uses as a way of not making impulse purchases. Sure, I walk around thinking how telling a child that the universe will produce a bicycle or no line waiting privileges at Disney world is a really horrible, if not dangerous lesson. While at the same time I have no problems asking the universe to deliver me a cutlery set, new bed sheets, and so forth).

Ahem. Anyway, the book so far all seems like the repeating of one idea over and over, with a lot of exposition: you must give up ego-based lives on earth in order for us as as civilization to progress. It speaks of all the things that present themselves as real, but are simply illusion--the oppositional relationships we develop and nourish with out egos, the corrosive need to be right. Protection, protection.

I have, actually spent the entire weekend protecting myself. On Friday night, I was working away on the novel, and am introducing the main character's close friend, Huggins. They met in their early twenties and now are in their late thirties. Huggins has given up on love, entirely and with now great calmness, while the main character, Truman, is still seeking. But in writing about how they got to be friends, I realized that in their early twenties they went through a whole period of going out, and trying to get into relationships and experiencing bitter disappointments and betrayals. How they always misconstrued male interest. And now, years later, Huggins is shut up tight as a drum--if one were to meet her now, one would think she was always that resolute, and Truman is such a wreck from this she actually becomes suicidal at the end of the book. It was for me to write the narrative of how they got to go from young beautiful women who would let men into their lives to what seems like a version of walking wounded.

When I started this book (helas! three years ago) it was very much an autobiographical novel, which got me started with blazing great guns and then as I had to stick with pain and observatin over the months, just sickened me. By the end I felt pummeled and I swore that this would be the last fiction project I'd do so closely based on my own experience. Three years and three complete rewrites later, the book has come into its own, in ways that thrill: I have a character who went to public high school! Who has a brother, and a welter of life experiences I do not. But still...I am drawing from my own experience, and Truman's and Huggins' life in this past with relationships is drawn from my own. On Friday night, I tumbled into the first few sentences, and then it all opened up to me: what has gone so wrong. Review, dissect, discuss. And I could not. To go back to my twenties and chronicle all the follies, and the observations (how men seem to think that beautiful women in their twenties have so much power!). It hurt so much.

It was also no picnic to walk around all weekend, doing activities in prep for writing--going out for a drink, going out for coffee, reading first, etc--and the writing never came. I can never start writing after an absence when I feel so sickened and appalled.

It didn't cure things, but I was intrigued by ETolle's words on words:

"Words, no matter whether they are vocalizd and made into sounds or remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you. You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly believing that when you have attached a word to soemthing, you know what it is. The fact is: You don't know what it is. You have only covered up the mystery with a label."

Oh, I thought, why write. Then I read:

"Van Gogh didn't say 'That's just an old chair.' He looked, and looked, and looked. He sensed the Beingness of the chair. Then he sat in the canvas adn took up the brush. The chair itself would have sold for a few dollards. THe painting of that came chair today would fetch in excess of $25 million."

I perked up at that--not just the idea of the money. I know that these characters can say something about existence, it is only up to me to have the guts to write it.

Which I will find, but did not find this weekend. My old life is back, by the way. I went out for a drink and saw the cheery garrulous bartender I have not seen for six months. While waiting for him to open up, I started talking to a neighborhood local and a man stopped by for directions who is a classical musician I've seen in concert, and all three of us chatted. I was going to take notes while I had my drink but was happy to talk to him, and then eventually that faded as I realized. The aleatory life, it is back. But it isn't deep involvement. You have to slide off your chair and face the real stuff. A real person, not just a neighborhood oddity, with whom you have mess and complication and real characters, who are busy with their earnest mistakes and are asking you to honor them by telling their story, the truth this time.

Several Histories

"Oh, you know Flipper. She's a bitch. Everybody calls her Flipper because she flipped over her dad's Volvo, like, four times freshman year."

"I don't understand what this Flipper person has to do with this."

"Well, she doesn't have anything to do with it, Richard, you're just like that guy in 'Dragnet' that always wants the facts."

--The Secret History, by Donna Tartt

Like Judy Poovey, one of the great characters of American Literature, I too skip around and tell unrelated stories. Let me then first emandate yesterday's post to say that sorry sorry White House presidential bedroom did not belong to the not well fated fifth US President James Monroe, who served from 1817-1825 and died poor and out of favor while living with his daughter in Manhattan Island, in the neighborhood now known as Soho.

No, the empty rumbled pile below belonged to the only man to come to the White House as a bachelor, Grover Cleveland, who served two non consecutive terms, 1885-1889 and 1893-1897. In fact, his gruff bachelor ways, Augustan love plainer quarters and food, is entirely responsible for the unseemly appearance of this room.

I've gazed at this photo (in previous entry scroll down) alot for the past few months, so let me give some salient information here. So first, as a president, Cleveland was in fact a lot like Augustus, denying special favors and actually mercy at times: According to the White House website bio on him: "When railroad strikers in Chicago violated an injunction, Cleveland sent Federal troops to enforce it. 'If it takes the entire army and navy of the United States to deliver a post card in Chicago,' he thundered, 'that card will be delivered.'"

It is also worth noting that he served when the country was in a serious economic depression and this no doubt accounting all the more for his shunning luxury.

Also worth noting is that he lost a presidential election a la Al Gore: by winning the popular vote and losing the electoral college vote. He ran the next time around though, and won.

On a sort of grodie vs ah-well-what-are-you-going-to-do-note, at 49, Grover Cleveland got married to Francis "Frank" Folsom who was 21, which oh well, but then also he was friends with her father, and looked out for her after her father passed away, and in fact Cleveland bought the infant Francis her first baby carriage. Which is something that you wonder if they thought about while falling asleep at night? This was no pretend marriage either--Frank had five children and was at Cleveland's side when he died. She was by the way, beautiful, and an outstanding hostess, taking care to hold social hours on Saturdays so ladies with jobs could still visit.

Anyway, this was his bedroom (and not President Monroe's) no doubt before he married. He actually had a decent life, it sounds.

Unhappiness and the White House

What do you do when you're trying to write and everything that you stumble upon that has some energy and interest unlocks floods of pain? Why would I want to write about the love lives of two friends who in their late thirties are still single, after years and years of failed relationships, of heartbreak? Why would I want to go back in time and revisit youthful hopes and mistakes that did not end up, in the end, honored?

O life. I have an 87 year old friend that I have lunch with every now and then. He founded an extremely large company and is very successful and has had a good life, I think, he thinks. We get together and talk books and phenomenology. When he was younger, 80 or so, we'd talk politics. He actually knows people, but he also, now, has a thin voice so after Abu Gharib he said, "I've known Don Rumsfeld for 20 years, and..." and I couldn't hear the rest. We also used to talk about World War II. But now, we just talk about books and eternity. Lives lived in valor, with purpose are not necessarily happy lives, or lives you'd want. He told me at lunch that Mark Twain and Ulysses Grant were friends, "towards the end," my friend said, and Mark Twain, grown rich on self-publishing his work, forwarded Grant $25,000. "Grant was working on it, and then got cancer. He was writing up to the week he died. It was 900 pages, and only about the war. He was going to write about his presidency, but then he died." Later, when we were saying goodbye on the street in the sun, I said that it was kind of awful what happened to so many of our early presidents, how broke and alone they died. "You should read a book on what happened to all the signers of the Constitution," he said. "They were all considered traitors, and all of them lived terrible lives after the war."

Which brings me to the sure knowledge that I am a coward. If you do something hard, if a human being exerts enormous force, of will, strength, of duty or courage, there must be a place where one goes to rest. It is bright outside and if I write about lives that are in media res disappointments, what am I going to do with the rest of the day? Step outside on coltish legs, into sun I won't share with anyone, and what? Shop? Read? Go somewhere for coffee? When I write, really write, I am blissfully indifferent to my own life's shortcomings. But it comes back, and then there is the relationship between what I am writing and what I am. You can't flinch on the page, but I flinch into shudders in real life at how much I don't want so much of what has come to pass to turn out the way it does. And I am writing right up into that crack, pumping its serum into work, and it is painful. You try sticking a needle into a wound and rooting around.

Those other lives lived by other people. President Monroe used to buried on second street, in this neighborhood. He lived with his daughter, and kept sending bills to Congress for the costs of travelling to Europe when he was president, and Congress would not pay them. He had no money. He was out of favor. There is some online tour you can take of the White House and the presidential bedrooms over the years. Going back in time, they get sparser and meaner, until you hit 1888 and it's just this barren room.

I can think of things working up to not a great ending in a room like this (it's an anomaly, the bedrooms before were grander--the pillows in this picture aren't even arranged). I know that all lives have good and bad, but I cannot somehow accept that if one has done something big, great, and worthwhile, been president, or actually even been ordinary but tried hard to cultivate love and abundance--I can't quite accept that this good and bad won't be arranged as steady improvement. That in time things improve. That in time all questions, the ones that make it so very hard to write about the past, will not even be answered, but will be put to rest.

Go, now: Go.

1. Bix Beck was always and always the weird person at the office and in grade school. Both times, both places. She never understood it. Her lunches in both epochs were considered strange, even though she asked herself many times, how can a lunch be strange? But in fact people would say, "I can hardly wait to see what strange thing you brought today. In the sixth grade she liked sour cream, strawberries and brown sugar together, which she read in a food magazine at the public library. It was what you could have at a wedding reception in California, with champagne. But her lunch was weird. At first job out of college, someone came over and said, "I like your lipstick."

"Thanks," Bix Beck said. "I opened my desk drawer looking for a paper clip and found it, so I just put it on."
"You're so wacky!" the person said.
Bix Beck could handle being a loner at work because she was a loner in grade school. But what she did not understand is that later in life was that the people who thought she was odd attached themselves to her. They wanted to have lunch, they wanted to keep in touch after she left (she was always the one who was leaving). She liked them but she found the burden of carrying their need to see her as the office nut as burdensome. She never had the heart to lose her temper or snap, because though she never felt these people spared her unkind comments, she knew that if she told them she found them tiresome and to please go away that they would feel diminished. She did not know why she spared their feelings with no return, and it was only until Bix Beck turned 60 years old and it was her birthday and she was sitting in a house on Lake Michigan drinking a gin and tonic, and she finally, finally said, "It was pity."

2. By the time she was 35 Bix Beck had received 3 packages sent from exboyfriends and one mysterious letter from an exfriend, all of which contained items of hers. One of the boyfriends had meticulously gone through every cupboard and drawer and returned not just items that were hers, but also items that she had eaten or drank that he had kept around for her, and also it seemed a couple of books he no longer wanted. He had ended it. It was a jumble of objects, tea, pencils, a pair of shorts--Bix Beck sucked in her breath when she came across an unsheated exacto knife. He was a designer and knew how dangerous they were. She could have opened an artery, could have sliced nerves in her hand. Her stomach soured and she backed away from the box as if it contained an asp. He had ended it, but as a person who needed to be heroic at all times, he had rewritten history so that he had not ended it simply because he did not love her, but because she had said and done things that had made it impossible for he, a good and pure soul, to love her. His world allowed no guilt, he was currently receiving advice and comfort about how awful and mean and cruel Bix Beck had been from a female friend who had sent supportive emails and called when Bix was out, whom he moved in with several months later. Bix Beck went to bed shaky that night, thinking this: that the need of a person to save other people is actually destructive. In the obverse, which, at 35, Bix Beck knew was always present.

If you weren't having this thought before, I'll be you'd have it now: When is the next possible occasion when you can use the word purloined? There are a very few words in our language that force and demand archness and cannot be used in any other way except to strike an attitude. I plan to say it leaning against a doorframe.

My new favorite word is beset. I was talking to a friend who said, "I think x's besetting sin is a need to analyze and for all that, remain very dishonest." I am really enjoying my time with this word. It is less ostentacious than my trip with prolix, which I always found myself being a good soul and explaining. Beset is something you can figure out and sounds like you should know what it means. Plus I like how elegantly it describes a keenly felt human state.

I thought imbricate would be a good fun word but I just didn't have a lot of ways of working it in, and when I did, I sounded as if I were being obscure on purpose. I liked capacious but no one else did.

I never thought pellucid would do much for me--I thought that from the moment I saw it, and that has been pretty much what has ended up happening.

Bix Beck can't drive

Bix Beck received a phone call from her friend Lucy. "Do you want a birthday party?" Lucy asked.

"I'm in kind of a bad mood."

"Why?"

"Because I'm lonely."

"Don't you think you'd like a party, then?"

"Parties are the worst times if you are lonely."

"I'm not going to force you."

"Okay."

"Okay what?"

"Okay, a party then. Even though it's just because I'm old."

"You are not old. I am the same age as you. Do you want candles?"

"No!"

"Anything sweet?"

"No! Did I tell you I went to Whole Foods and was typing and someone asked me to watch his bag and I looked at it and then he went away?"

"Was he cute?"

"No."

"Well then."

"Detroit cake. It isn't a cake, like a recipe, but its something we had in graduate school. There were a few people from Detroit who all liked yellow cake with chocolate frosting, so we called it Detroit cake. I used to ask for it."

"Okay."

"If you're going to that, then I guess you should have candles."

"I knew you'd do this."

"I'm just trying not to disappoint people."

"No one is disappointed."

"I am."

"You know, I hate to tell you this, but you actually sound okay."

"Really?"

"Yes. I know you want it to be worse, but you actually sound pretty chipper, in your tone of voice."

"That's usually the sign that something bad is going to happen."

Lucy laughed.

Dear Novel,
I know that you are very upset with me. I put you aside because I decided to write an essay from scratch for a recent public reading, and then I had to do my taxes, and then I had to knit a scarf and hat, and embroider the scarf with a monogram (which you probably don't realize what a pain, physically and tactically that was, but uh, I'm thinking you don't care).

Tonight I have entered the room where you are staying. Oh, god. You have indeed become unwieldy. And recalitrant. You don't want to offer any insights or secrets. I understand. You think I'll desert you. For the musical. For fun. For any reason at all.

I'd bake you a cake, but that would be take me away from you.

There is sometimes nothing you can say, there is only what you can do. So we'll sit. And it will be hard and there will be distractions, but I won't leave.

I know this is right because I'm scared.

Queer, Atavistic Fears

Do you ever wonder about the nonsensical things that drive human beings nuts, where in the past some experience it got written into our genetic code, the instinct that to find certain things repulsive or irritating?

Let me put it this way: from about an hour after hatching, birds can identify the silhouttes of predator birds as distinct from nonpreditor birds. If an hour old chick sees the shadow of a raptor pass overhead for the very first time, it knows that the raptor is dangerous and will make moves to cover itself, and when a shadow of a non preditor bird passes over it won't try to hide. And here you have the miraculous translation from experience in progenitors passing into DNA coding, somehow, to descendents.

Experience eventually becomes knowledge, and then (I guess) if it's dire enough becomes instinct. Which brings me to ask about our horror at large containers of food.

Seriously, if you are at a cafe and they bring out a mega bottle of mayonaise or ketchup, don't you feel as if its unappetizing? Doesn't it make you queasy?

One time in Ithaca, at about one in the morning, I witnessed kitchen workers wheeling a big vat of pizza dough up that curvy street in collegetown going from the Chariot to the Nines. It felt clandestine and horrible. Someone in my party wondered if it should be reported. We just don't like large mass agglomerations of food.

And what happened to Us as a people in the past that makes us all so irritated when we are in public and while conversations maybe taking place nearby, a person talking loudly on a cell phone wears our nerves so very much?

We all recoil from spiders, snakes and rodents--but its a mystery. Call me crazy, but I propose that our instinctive dislike of both these things comes from the Western Middle Ages.

Do you ever wonder what happened to people you don't know in places you've never been that make you who you are?