Month: June 2003

Radical honesty.

I Hate Her

I hate her, as, I think, no other.

“Why can’t I fuck who I want?” she whines in a statement of purpose or manifesto of craving for validation masquerading as a poem — surely, it’s in lines, and steals some effects from a poem of Waldman’s that was never much more than repetitively and simplistically self-glorifying to begin with, but it never attains anything beyond a statement of that horrible, to me totally distateful, craving.

It’s a rhetorical question, because of course, quite blithely, she does. The answer, though, or one of many answers to such a manifestly selfish question, is that to routinely go marauding through other people’s relationships (this is her pattern, her script; she may as well be a robot) is to rip the social fabric, to do harm (certainly emotionally, and potentially physically) to all the parties involved (Buddha: “First, do no harm.”), and generally to rouse the sinister energies of the universe. It disempowers all. It’s a game of war, not of love. Look, I would say to her, if I felt there would be any value at all in doing so, we’ve all been hurt, tossed around, abandoned. Why do everything in your power to perpetuate that cycle? It will only come hurtling back at you with greater greater greater force, as for example, this deep, deep hatred of mine.

My hate’s not unmixed with compassion. That sounds weird but it’s true. The truth is that I’ve never met anyone who exudes pathos more palpably. And, therefore, I was always kind to her, even though I never felt any liking or affection for her, even though I thought she was a cringeingly awful writer and performer. I don’t think she could deny that I was always kind to her, as kind as I could be without getting sucked in to her whirlpool of endless neediness, that querulous falsetto voice fading away in self-pity. How he could have been drawn in to such a vortex is still a puzzle to me. Such is the nature of weakness, folly, and peccadillo, I guess.

Why, a couple of people have asked me, do you focus your anger on her instead of on him? It’s a valid question. He’s equally culpable, maybe more so, being perfectly well in possession of a delicate but powerful little word: “no.” He also gets the brunt of plenty of anger, believe me. But the fact is that I love him and he is my dear partner, my muse and companion and helpmate still — and I am coming to understand some of his motivations for doing such an awful thing that tests the very limits of my capacity to forgive. We grow, reach, stretch out our arms. Breath fills the bodies. Love! Not pure anymore maybe (my therapist says, “there is no pure love” — and actually she’s right — I say as much in _Swoon_: “We just keep opening up the same old wound.”) but love nonetheless. Take that, rapacious rapacious toxic strumpet!

p.s. May she be buried up to her neck in the metaphorical searing desert of her own making, and may the variegated stones of approbation be hurled at her for eternity.

It’s 3:27 a.m. Gary’s in Washington hanging out with Tom and Rod. I’m bleaching the bathtub. My hair is in weird twisted-up mouse ears (like a natural mousketeer hat) plus a bunched-up ponytail in the back, and I’ve got my red cat-glasses on. I look like I should be a character in Ghost World, or like a trendo-nerd (if an aging one) bumming around Telegraph Avenue in 1984. I’m up so late having first had lunch with Adeena, then come home and had a nap, then gone to Home Depot with Alex, our super, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Bollywood film star Shah Rukh Khan. I bought new handles for the bathtub– the old-fashioned kind with the four rounded… what would you call them… spokes, I guess, and the informative little “H” and “C” in the center. A new super-adjustable chrome showerhead with a long hose — a cheap and practical sex toy! We were at Home Depot for too long of a time, but I amused myself by grabbing masses of paint samples as I have long cherished a wish to paint the living room some other color than white, but I’m getting overwhelmed by the possibilities of not just color but also technique– put my colorwash brush to use again? Rag on? Rag off? Sponge? Add sand? Do faux marbling or veining or patina or… nothing. I can spend long times gazing at the paint samples, holding them up inquisitively, squinting my eyes this way, that way (that’s a Creeley allusion, folks, one I make over and over again — but does anyone ever notice?).

Anyway I’m bleaching the bathtub in preparation for its new handles — like giving it a bath (giving the bathtub a bath!) before it puts on its new clothes. I also wrote a sample unit for a textbook publisher tonight about a knife thrower who, in trying to break his previous record, accidentally (of course) threw a knife at his assistant’s head. The assistant happened to be his girlfriend.* Why do we hurt the ones we love? Ugh! I just typed “one’s” — I HATE that. Gary and I just noticed yesterday that my copy of Keats’ Poems (an edition from… I don’t know! It’s undated! But it has an introduction by William Michael Rosetti — does that give anyone any clue? I would put it sometime before World War II but really I have no idea) actually reads, in gilt letters on its cloth spine: KEAT’S POEMS. Isn’t that a little hard to take, fellow pedants?

By way of Keats to Kasey, who is my hero for championing Shelley and that glorious poem in particular. Ode to the West Wind, my friends, is *poetry* — to hell, I say, with high modernist austerity and low modernist colloquialism. Blah. Blecch. Sick of it. (As usual, I overstate my position to irritate my perpetually irritable readers into responding.)

I have been almost painfully resistant to blogging lately ((except for sending a naked photo of myself to JI(S)M)) for a number of reasons, not least of which is a deep shock of a personal nature which may be extremely obvious for those of you who read me with any attentiveness. It’s not an insurmountable shock, though, rather one of those kinds our good therapists deem “opportunities” — would that we could make some actual monetary profit off of them! Still, I find that in those rare moments my mind is left idle it has been flying to fantasies of theatrical revenge I imagine I’m much too dignified and enlightened ever to enact, but the feeling of not having any complete catharsis in this matter, particularly a purging of the psychic violence that churns in me around it, is most enervating. Sublimating it into poetry is probably the best option, but the problem is that the emotions keep getting in the way of the Kraft. I guess that’s what Charlie meant about the “subjective lyrical interference of the ego” — although I always took that to mean “femininity” in yet another instance of characteristic essentialist overreading. Like the (man)poet just wants to say, “bitch! leave me alone! i’m trying to write!”

So that’s been my major resistance. Another has been a course I’m teaching now at Pratt — “Text & Context” — nifty — here’s a list of some of the writers (and artists) whose work I’m teaching: Nick Piombino, Frank O’Hara, Mike Goldberg, John Keats, John Berger, Robert Smithson, Terry Williams, Gerhard Richter, John Taggart, Adrian Spatola, Diane diPrima, Ed Sanders, Sherman Alexie, Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound, Greil Marcus, Hugo Ball, Jackson MacLow, Clark Coolidge, Phillip Guston, Steve McCaffery, Maggie O’Sullivan, Tan Lin, Cecilia Vicuna, assorted comics artists, Euripides, Carolee Schneemann, David Antin, Yoko Ono, Adrian Piper. I’m teaching this material to a small group of visual arts students, all Asian (Korean and Japanese) except for one French woman. I won’t say it is not a challenge, but it is also a pleasure, especially when I get my students’ papers and reading journals and I see that they actually grok some of the central (and admittedly obscure) concepts I am trying to impart to them.

Those are the two main reasons for resistance… but I think, when I grope around in my consciousness, I can find another one… something about liking to play by myself sometimes. There are so many blogs now (and don’t misunderstand me, more power to all of them, of course) that the thought of having to engage with all that’s going on in all of them is kind of overwhelming. Rather like the thought of having to engage with All of History, as all of the children of High Modernism still seem to feel they have the duty to do. Just want… a little private time sometimes… in the dusty corners… of my thoughts…and feelings…

…if only so that I have more to turn inside out into gesture or declaration…? What about you, my friends, do you think the notion of “interiority” is just wrong, a wrong, misleading metaphor? And if it is wrong, why, why, why does it feel so right?

New topic: Here’s something that happened to me yesterday. I call it…

THE THREE MEAN GIRLS

Three mean girls got on the F train yesterday. One (Girl 1, in a turban and some kind of strange earrings) wedged aggressively into the corner seat perpendicular to me and the other’s swung around her, though there was a woman sitting in the outer aisle seat (I was in one of the seat facing the doors). First they accosted the woman: “You lookin at me?” — much impudent chatter, swinging around the poles, sticking out breastbuds in ratty tight t-shirts. When the person sitting next to me got off the train, I slid over one seat to the left. Girl 2 (broken tooth) , standing, looked at me disgustedly, “aww… I wanted to sit there.. She knew I wanted to sit there and that’s why she moved over.” (Although logic dictates that she would have wanted to sit next to her co-hoodlum.) I ignored her, so they all started to bait me. Girl 2 said, “What ARE you?” “What do you mean?” I said. “I mean are you Chinese or Irish or… what?” “Do I look Chinese?” “Are you being rude to me?” [Say what?] ” [with as much teacherly compassion as I could muster] No, actually, I was just wondering if you’ve been having a bad day,” to which Girl 1 found the perfect opening,” You the one having a bad day — a bad HAIR day [admittedly, what with all this ongoing humidity, my hair is out-of-control frizzy, but most people admire it anyway… I have to say, this stung, what with all the emotional issues that have been raging recently…but did I let it show? maybe only a little:] ” “I don’t see why I should talk to you guys, you’re way too mean.” Girl 2 checks out my shoes, and in a kind of verbal peace offering, “aww man, she wearing Diesel. That’s cool, she’s OK,” but then they all three started hassling other people on the train. An older woman sitting across the aisle, a real New York type, with rectangular glasses, loads of costume jewelry, a Louis Vuitton handbag (but casual rainy day clothes) looked at the girls severely, full of the elderly-person non-intimidated authority I for a minute really wished I had, and said, “You girls ought to be ashamed of yourselves, talking to people that way. You need to be respectful of people.” Then, very adeptly, she changed tack, telling one girl she was pretty and another that she was cute –“How come she be pretty and I just be cute?” Girl 2 said). Asked how old they are, said she guessed they were sophomores in high school. I stupidly piped up, said I guessed they were in 8th grade [only because I once had to teach a T & W class of totally obnoxious 8th grade hellions that these girls reminded me of]. Girl 1 turned to me and said witheringly, “Was I talking to you?” Girl 3, who was slightly nicer than the other two, said they were in 6th grade. 6th grade? Jeezus. By now the whole adult population on the train is in on the indignation at the freshness and near-violence (which sorry I haven’t really been able to depict here) of these barely-teens. An older man, quite portly, scolded them very powerfully and not, I thought, unsorrowfully, “Do You talk to your mother like that?” Everyone was shaking their heads. The New Yorky lady with the LV bag, who’d been humoring them, was preparing to get off at her stop, Bergen St.; “All I know is, if you live in my neighborhood, I’m going to kill myself!” she said perkily. Everyone laughed. The girls actually did get off at that stop too. I’m sure that the lady had too much fortitude to kill herself over such a thing as that. The woman with dreadlocks sitting next to me clutching a bible with gold charms of crosses, etc., in her hair, had some pithy words of condemnation for the vicious little maenads, but I can’t remember them. The guy sitting on my other side hoped they would be incarcerated as soon as possible. I just remarked that they would probably be sick or pregnant first, that they were unadulterated ID, that not only does “it take a village”, it takes the whole subway. The first lady they hassled made the mostly –but not entirely– true remark that it “was not their fault.” Yes, I said, that’s the sad part.

OK, it’s now 4:43 in the a.m., I have no signs of sleepiness, I’ve got to go rinse out the bathtub. Would you all please dissuade me from 1) staying up so late and b) getting into long digressive narratives?

Thank you, and goodnight.

*She survived, but it was all captured on live TV.

Here’s a faint and tiny excerpt from a song from “Koi Maneuver”, a tape I made in 1990 with Herman Bartelen in Japan. Love is…!audblog audio post

Nick Piombino writes,

To love is to return.

For a fuller discussion, see today’s -fait accompli-

Jordan Davis writes,

I was given the “love is” assignment in second grade — a line I

remembered from it was:

Love is a baseball card

But then I found a copy of the poem, which my composer ex-uncle set, and

which when it was performed at my grandmother’s church in DC appeared on

the cover of the program that Sunday, and the baseball card line was

nowhere to be found. What was there was this line:

Love is a feeling — your curiosity pulls you away.

I was seven.

Michael Magee writes,

MY ANGIE DICKINSON #58

Love is an R for Language —

Brave and Rosanna Arquette

Powerhouse — as a Mother —

To cope — with the disappointment

A struggling — Mississippi —

A funeral home heiress —

The Nature of Love is matress mambo —

“Big Bad Love” is Best

Love is a criminal — “trying” —

Affluent — codependent

Volleyball after Signing

Synonymous — with Jack Palance —

Love Is A Ball

Love is the Air

A timid henpecked Book — “keeper” —

Whose first Elke Sommer provides —

My lady love is coming down

In “Circles” — around a homeless Woman

Named Grace misquoting the Beatles —

Forgives me my pine needles

Jim Behrle writes,

love ism.

Lanny Quarles writes,

Love is an heliourobouros mantis-beast whose 40 rows of solar eyeballs

are all agog-in-pop-schlupping-spheroexcrescence (or radiant in eyeball-radiation)

or

Love is the explosion of seeing…

or

Love is Kara (my wife)..

Stephanie Young writes,

Well, I typed up a million ‘love is’ statements here and they all seemed

equally sappy and dumb and missed the mysterious ‘it’ by a gazillion miles.

Something in there about the quality of sleeping in the same bed with a

person. Falling asleep at the same time. Love is /as removal of the outer

dress: self consciousness.

Tommy, at free4freakyfun, writes,

My buddies and I wanted to build a website dedicated to M.I.LF’s. You know what MILF’s are, right? Mothers I’d Like to Fuck! We’re talking sexy, older babes that you’d give your left nut to fuck. We’re just average guys but we had an idea, a little cash and a camera. We went on a search of sexy M.I.L.F.’s that needed cock. You know, the type that are neglected by their husbands. We hit the supermarkets, shopping malls, playgrounds, beach, anywhere we could find some sexy mom’s that we could talk into having sex with us on camera.

You know what the poetic punctum of this priceless passage is, for me? It’s that stupid apostrophe: mom’s. What’s up with that [as the teenagers say nowadays]? I’m also interested in the synechdochic, apostrophized use of the word “cock” here, not to mention the arbitrary precision and jocular colloquiality of “you’d give your left nut to fuck.”

Unfortunately, he didn’t do the sentence completion assignment properly…

Kasey Silem Mohammad writes,

Love is a cat’s paw pressed gently against your nose.

It doesn’t matter how dumb it sounds, ’cause it’s true.

Henry Gould writes,

Love is. . . a word. A word is. . . a person. A person is. . . Love.

Tom Beckett writes,

Love is a landing site.

Jack Kimball writes,

Love is.

(but couched in all kinds of weird stuff)