Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Glissance


Be careful what you wish for...

"October 11, 2009
Wanderlust. Escapism. Noticing the bars on the cage. Hard to see the benefits of stability, every reminder of it becoming an unreasonable irritant. "I love yous" don't sound the same anymore that they have the ring of metal clanging shut. Irrational, foolish, spendthrift & wasteful. Baseless discontent...I don't want your care or concern, while you give your adventure away. I want space to breathe, and rage, and weep. I want my own adventures that have nothing to do with you."

"November 10, 2009
...once again disappointed at being acquiesced to, disappointed that my words are automatically assumed to be correct, when I am forming my ideas after the words have taken shape in my mouth. How can I be the smartest person in this situation, when I know so little?
I don't know what he knows, or feels, or falsifies; I am not permitted access. My effusiveness traps me, the only words and ideas I get are my own. Where is the other voice to challenge me, to help me define my thoughts? It gave up on me, it takes my words as ultimate truth - me, who was always the first to point out how ephemeral, how mercurial, how chameleon my words are. I don't know what I think if all I hear is me. I need counterpoint. I crave comparisons, connections, dispute. I do not want to be right, if it means I hear nothing new."

"December 21, 2009
...the siren call of my own solitude, the adventure I cannot quite peer from my place on your breast. What else am I missing, besides my time at sea? What does not wait for me out there, what wisdom, what truth, what new perspective, what experience I cannot fathom? I can only hear rustlings; your breath is too loud. Even a few steps away, I catch merely a faint hum, full of delicious promise."

"April 11, 2010
Recognizing my own need for solitude, to write, to think, to use words, reflecting and composing and synthesizing. And finding another who will interact with me in emotional language, hear me, and offer me new thoughts to consider."

When I am agreed with and believed, I want to be challenged. When I have a committed companion, I want to be free. Stability stifles me.

So, I think, I need more freedom. I will reconstruct my world to allow for discovery. And yet, when I have an adventure, I want to found a city on that adventure and put in plumbing. I love my vacation so much, I want to move there - not realizing the very quality of a vacation is that all of your pots and pans are someplace else.

"September 7, 2009
And I wonder, am I really strong enough to be vulnerable for both of us...?  Am I really so good at this and so powerful that I can throw myself under his feet again and again and be ignored, that which I hate more than anything?  It is intoxicating to think so, to think that I can make a difference.  And it is also true that I love without reason, because I can, because it is who I am, because once he was vulnerable and perhaps will be so again. He will come, or not come.  He will be leaving the whole time, if he comes.  And the child soul inside of me will cringe and cry to see him packing and leaving, and will think that there is a thing I can do to stop it, or delay him.  But he will pack and leave over and over everytime, using his power to hold off the world...[H]is power is to say no, and if his power is to say no, how will he ever say yes?"

"November 25, 2009
There is gratitude also for the outside force, the other entity, pausing me, providing me with the chance to gather my wits and consider my actions. As much as I want to control, and as little as I enjoy being denied, I can appreciate that without [his] flight I was ready to do mad things..."

"November 28, 2009
Do you think of them, those moments? When I have thought I knew your mind, I have always been wrong, reading emotion & analysis into you, because I want it to be there.
I think you do not consider those moments, of me. I have been packed away like a copper pan you never use, impractical, easy to jettison, a charming illustration when the bar chatter calls
for something shiny, if you recall it at all.

But perhaps the copper pan is more useful, perhaps it gets more time in your synapses. After all, the pan was a thing you selected, and have packed and unpacked, carried and stored. I am just a person, so much more disposable to you, and not someone you chose at all.
I wonder about objects I put into your world: the scotch, the case, the letter...But I don't want to hear the answer, that the scotch has been drunk by strangers & enemies, the letter discarded the moment it was opened, the case storing ten thousand other things that occupy your brain that never thinks of me, not even once for all the times I have longed for news of you."


I want growth, which always means wanting something I don't have. Is it better, then, to want something that is out of your control, than to want something you can have at the price of another's pain? Is it better to want in, than to want out? 

"Our doom, then: the inelegant dance of intimacy, closer, farther, turning around. Tightening our grasp till we meet resistance, flinging apart to recover."

Are there any other choices besides wanting in or wanting out? Choices that don't require violence to my own soul, remaking it into a grotesque caricature? I can accept that there is not growth without pain, no living apart from change. But what I do not know is how to enjoy the wanting in, or the wanting out. And if the only enjoyment comes from the slivers of time in between them, or from refusing for a time to think about the stage I am in...Horrible. I refuse to accept it. There must be a better way. 

I have always been a terrible Buddhist. I do not know how to want less. The wanting itself is beautiful to me - more of an Aphrodite-ist, I suppose. And maybe that is it, maybe I have to shift my gaze, just a bit, from what I want, to the desire itself. Maybe my most lasting joy and satisfaction is not from getting what I want -- a moving, impossible target -- but from the dance of wanting, itself. Feeling alive. Throwing my heart into the ring and seeing what happens. Isn't it wonderful to want, and to strive, and to enjoy the results of that desire? Sometimes it is caught, and it is joyful. Sometimes it falls, and it is awful. But it isn't awful in an ugly way, at least. Like Helga said, if you are going to be miserable, at least do it with style.

Maybe if I can take a step back, re-read my painful wanting-journal entries from the past and see how beautiful they are, maybe that is how I can find beauty in the moment of not getting what I want. 

Jason said something last year about the dance men do, to pursue women. He told me that my honest remarks to men I've just met about how I am never going to sleep with them are soul-crushing, like sweeping all the pieces off the chess board. The outcome of the game is not the point. The point is to play. 

"Let us pursue," he said. "Even if you know, we know, everyone in the room knows we aren't going to take you home. There is still a chance -- maybe the same chance we have of winning the lottery -- but we will still enjoy dancing and buying drinks and chatting and playing the game. We still watch recorded football games. Don't give us honesty, even if we asked for it; not that kind of honesty. Honor the spirit, not the letter. Let us be men."

Let us be men. Let Bartlet be Bartlet. Let growth happen. I don't read my journal enough. I always say this, and then I never read it when I need to. When I am happy, I want to stay that way, and don't want anything to snag at my silky happiness out of the murky depths of past insecurity. When I am sad, I think I might want to stay that way too - out of a fear of being inauthentic, or stuffing it down too soon, or being brushed off by my own past self who felt the same and yet did not waste away. 

But my journal is full of my own wisdom, and strength. It is my record of growth, the height marks on the wall. It is, more than anything, a tool to get out of my own head - and the most effective one, because it is still inside my own head. Nothing else available to me can give me the distance and perspective that my own journal can. 

The goal of a relationship is not to be stapled to someone. The goal of being happy is not to be frozen there. The goal of being sad is not to alchemize your pain into a time machine. The goal of everything, everything, is to grow. 

Happiness without growth becomes a bore. Sadness without growth becomes a tapeworm on your soul. When I am sad, I don't want to grow - I just want to go back to the way I was before I was sad. But my journal can prove to me, actually prove in a way even I can't argue - that I can make it through. That even when I don't get what I want, maybe because I'm not getting what I want, because I have to just step back from the want and look at it, take pleasure in the fact of being alive and having wants...I am rich. Desire is beautiful in itself, the way a summer storm is beautiful. All you need is a tiny bit of distance to shelter you, and you can enjoy its power.

"Sunday, March 7, 2010
You are my wealth. You, men whose bodies I watch, whose smells I encode in my brain, whose stories I record, who I will my body to charm, changing my DNA pattern if need be. You are my wealth, because you give stories, touch, sensory data, charm, patterns. You give texture. You make the day brighter for me than it is for others. My step sways for you.  
You are my wealth, my treasure, my secret. How do I smile so bright, how do I feel so much joy, how do I bounce? I bounce, for reasons that relate to you, and relate beyond you. I bounce, because I draw from this land, like an octopus, like a tree with tentacles into the ground, drawing from the water, drawing from the swamp land underneath our civilization sheen, the bog eternal, the unending richness of decaying vegetation, I draw from this depth, I find richness in the land, connected to this air, this temperature, these trees, this water, this location in the universe. I also draw from you, you men with stories of pleasure and adventure, high seas and victory, I draw from you. I can reflect this all back to you, with prisms and mirrors, I can amplify. I can give you Spring, I can give you your own joy tenfold. But you are my wealth, richer than children, richer than hearth, richer than family crests and lineage.  
Your wealth is glissance, glimmers of the unreachable. Charm is the word we use for the connection between people that touches on something vast and amazing. We are charmed not by the person, but by the connection, the possibility of something larger and unknowable becoming known. You men, whom I love, for yourselves and for that which is beyond yourself, to which you are only the gateway.  You are my wealth, for whom I will do anything, for you are precious and beautiful. Give me a story, give me a glimmer, I will give you the earth."

Friday, July 25, 2014

If I had Prince on speed dial

I hate being predictable. I don't like blending. I can't chase stars ("he's in town tonight!"), or even go to casting calls for extras that I might, on some level, enjoy. Too many other people with wistful faces, too much straining in one direction - it creates an irrepressible urge in me to do the opposite thing. Being swept along with the crowd pisses me off too much - I can't even tie my raft to the flotilla on Eric's river floats. Whatever act of spirit that has to happen to allow that merging makes me angry. I will deliberately stop clapping as soon as the performer asks the crowd to clap. Maybe I was a sheep that stampeded off a cliff with the herd in another life. Maybe I spent too much time in spiritual warfare sessions where everyone was yelling at Satan. I don't want to be one of D.H. Lawrence's nightmare strong-willed women, the ones his heroes feel justified shooting, but I have this feeling that I might be.

So if I did have Prince on speed dial, it would have to have been one of those totally normal things that happens when you are excruciatingly bored or trapped and have limited options. Otherwise while all the hundreds were swimming toward him I would have been swimming away. Say we both went to a terrible conference (I bet he goes to them all the time, for his 9 to 5) and ditched a bunch of sessions, and hid out in the bar with fruit smoothies and discovered we had some complimentary wavelengths in our mutual disenchantment toward lackluster presenters. And he was alone...because his entourage were all super interested in the conference. At least the ones that weren't trapped in the elevator. Totally normal. I bet he met half of his closest friends in similar experiences. Don't we all?

I've carried on lots of long distance, crazy close friendships with men, though I guess most of them were in high school, guys I met in summer camps or summer jobs, and we were all full of words, words, words in that way that teenagers are. I'm not sure if that happens in adult life. Or outside of fundamental religions. I miss it, and I like to imagine that if any adult man were capable of that kind of friendship with a woman, it'd be Prince. But you don't develop those kinds of relationships in the surface pile and smalltalk crush of crowded rooms - they are built lounging on opposite sides of the sofa, his feet by your shoulders and yours by his, past curfew at the fundie Jesus camp, with the boy who is struggling to balance his sexual orientation with his faith and sees a kindred misfit in the sexually precocious lipstick girl.

If I had Prince on speed dial, I would have called him today. Let's face it, I would have called him a lot in the last four years. If I hadn't allowed all of my crazy close men-dships from high school to die, out of a misguided sense of loyalty when I got married (or because they insisted my marriage was a terrible error I'd live to regret...true, as it turns out, but what IS that about men friends that they always want to torpedo your relationships?), I'd have been calling them over the past four years, too, all those guys to whom I wrote nonstop letters for years. There's something incomparably soothing in a man listening to your drama. Maybe because they never really get sucked in - either they are playing it cool, or playing a video game on the other end of the line, or whatever, but the calm, not-exactly involved tone of voice is very reassuring - lets you think out loud without having to worry about the reception. Maybe they just have the privilege of not living up to the girl-expectation of Showing Empathy, so they can just listen, and you can know that you have a friend because they took the call, wrote back, whatever, and not have to perform the little empathy seen-empathy accepted-empathy returned dance. Usually men can make you laugh, too, and say something mildly inappropriate, and suddenly the really horrible monster in the closet just looks like an annoying mess you can probably knock out with a day or so of work.

Prince would be good at making a girl laugh, of course, but he'd also be tender, and there's nothing you are craving more when your heart is breaking than a little tenderness. Wisdom, yes, and the scrubbed-sand clean peacefulness of emptying out your tears, but neither of them are much good without the tenderness.

It seems bizarre now to have those kind of friendships with men you aren't dating, though it seemed perfectly sensible in high school to talk for three hours or twelve pages with a single boy you weren't dating and had no intention of dating. I used to get home from school and immediately page the boy seven years older than me who worked in construction and put in my ceiling fan. I'd page him little messages for an hour or so, every day. I cannot imagine doing such a thing now, but maybe that is partly because I never forgave construction boy for marrying another woman. Not that I wanted to marry him, necessarily. But I certainly didn't want him to have anything better to do than to talk to me after I got home from school.

Those relationships don't fit into the whole married with kids scheme. I know that I didn't like being on the outside end of them, when it was my boyfriend taking the call. So then, it has to be an untouchable man. Someone so far outside of bourgeois expectations of morality, so far above me in station, that I could not possibly be a threat to his likewise rarefied wife/girlfriend, and the danger of annoying her is taken off the table. Prince seems like a good match.

If I had Prince on speed dial, I'd probably interrupt sometimes when he was working. Maybe he'd turn on the speakerphone so he could keep working a little at the piano while I blithered. There was a boy who did that once, let me sit next to him on the bench while he fussed over the song. I don't think I talked so much as held my breath - he was English, with the nice accent and the floppy hair. He sent me a demo tape with my song after he finished it, and he told me that I was unlike any girl he knew, which was also nice. Piano is good when you are sad, takes the sad and makes it seem noble. Sad with a purpose.

Sad with a purpose as in, I'll never see you again but I want to play piano for you. Like the man who picked me up in a bar once and took me to the Michigan Union to play for me. It was really just like how I became friends with Prince - this guy was bored, too, though not with a bad conference. I think boredom is how all friendships start - if you weren't bored you would be too in tune with your moment to notice anything else. Thomas? Theodore? was in from out of town visiting some local notables, Ann Arbor business nobility, I forget which family dynasty. He was from Berkley, of course, properly bearded and compact of body. I was reading Anais Nin's diary. He sent a drink to my table, we started talking. He wanted to play for me, and even though it was broad daylight the idea of leaving with a man I'd met ten minutes ago for a piano excursion frightened me. The female chorus shouted, "ARE YOU INSANE??" So I declined politely, and he nodded and walked over to the bar, and let me know he'd still be interested if I changed my mind.

About ten minutes more of Anais. Fuck the chorus. I want adventure. What happened to the teenager on the piano bench? And I liked that he had given me space to think. I walked over and told him I had changed my mind. He smiled. Took me to one of the large ballrooms, and played for the whole room. When I asked him later if we could talk, if I could have contact info, he smiled and said he wouldn't give it to me unless I promised to write, because no one really follows up. I promised. He gave me a tattered card. I never wrote to him but occasionally stab myself by looking at the card. What would I say? Maybe it's not the boys who have changed since high school, or the expectations of phantom girlfriend/wives. Maybe it's me - maybe I'm just not the same storyteller, the same original girl who'd break the rules for a good conversation, who'd assume friendship unless explicitly propositioned, and even then, would just say no thanks and keep on chatting. I was less considerate twenty years ago, I suppose, but also a lot less self-conscious, and less tortured.

Prince's card wouldn't be moldering in a basket, though, because he would have just entered his number in my phone and put it on speed dial at the juice bar. I think there was another boy who did that a long time ago, which doesn't make sense, unless it was the programmable corded phone in my mom's kitchen. Maybe I'm thinking of someone from grad school. Hazy, hazy grad school. A boy actually chased me down the hall one of those hazy days to pet my hair when it was newly pink, and when I tracked him down later and asked him out he was scandalized. I never learn, I guess - I'm still emasculating boys a decade later, not taking them at face value, still assuming that something like spontaneous pink hair-petting means something else. High school me would not have assumed anything - hair-petting is just that. He doesn't likeyou-likeyou unless he asks you to Homecoming.

The face of someone entering a number and putting it on speed dial is blank, but I remember the emotion - amused faux-outrage at his cheek. No obsessing for hours about what it meant that he put himself on speed dial, I would just have laughed and decided it was pleasurable and left it at that.  Until he announced he was getting married, anyway. I am really unhappy about construction boy getting married, it seems. I'm remembering how he helped me move into college my freshman year, and consoled me when my mother screamed at me that day. He was a good guy who really should have remained not married so I could be calling him right now.

It'd be terrible in some ways having Prince on speed dial, though, since it'd be torture not to call him constantly like that, torture to pluck up the courage to call now that I'm adult and know that men won't tell you they don't want you calling everyday after school, they will just marry someone else. Can't risk pissing him off, or he'd change his number, or his name, and you'd never find him. I'd have to have some kind of schedule or alarm clock or something, that would let me know when it was ok to call him again, when the window of "back off" time had passed. What would I say? You can't call someone up to reminisce about bad conference experiences. "So...whatcha doin?" Horrible. Prince's number would be moldering, on speed dial instead of the basket, because I wouldn't have anything to say, because I'm too adult to send upside-down pager messages about being sans boobs.

It's hopeless. I'm hopeless. Even having Prince on speed dial isn't enough to make me happy.

How would you build up enough intimacy so that you could call Prince when you really needed him? So that over enough years of friendship he'd draw me a bath? And brush my hair? It's very important to figure out how to build the intimacy enough to get to this stage, because it's nice to be soothed, especially by a man's hands. Adult conversations in juice bars are just not the same as the after-curfew church camp talks, they just don't automatically lend themselves to spontaneous offbeat physicality. You can get really creative when most everything is off-limits.

He'd have to employ me. He must need a librarian. (Everyone does). Or maybe he'd provide me with a breadcrumb path...like the offer to "come over anytime you want to use my new washer and dryer" on which I followed up recently. I'm a sucker for front-loaders, and a numbingly-normal chore makes the initial, awkward bit of the intimacy quest a little less screamingly awful.

Maybe no special transition is needed between the meeting and the spontaneous "I need a friend, my sails are in shreds" call. Perfectly wretched at basketball and table tennis, I am quite adept at negotiating how to sail my storm-tossed ship into safe harbor when needed. Probably anyone who's known me for more than a year has gotten one of those calls, whether or not the receiver realized that I was calling from my ship. You can't use the shredded-sails call too often on any one person - got to spread that shit out. It's exhausting, picking up that call. Not terrible, though - it's strengthening, in some ways, to know that someone trusts you like that, and to be able to see yourself as a nurturer, as a calm port, a sanctuary and shepherd and sage. But I know I've avoided the shredded-sails calls sometimes, so I know I've got to have a broad base of calm ports from which to choose, enough so that I'm not wearing out my emergency welcomes. Prince is almost old enough to be my father, but not exactly, so he knows a lot more about heartbreak. He'd understand.

If it was the shredded-sails call that poured concrete onto our bad-conference foundation, I'd still have to come up with other things to call Prince about, so he didn't always see my number flash up and roll his eyes knowing I was in a pity puddle again. I'm not sure we really have that much in common, though, so that might be tough. I'd have to keep notes on what he was up to, what projects he was tinkering with, so I could ask pertinent questions after his work and his pursuits. Again, I really don't think I did this twenty years ago. I said whatever I was thinking, and expected it to turn out great. Improvement? Deterioration? Surely being considerate is better, or why would I have changed?

Maybe we could swap stories about fundie religion and door-to-door witnessing experiences. I am kinda missing out on someone to debate Bible trivia with. I actually had to look up Absalom's story yesterday because I had forgotten who his mother was and why his Dad was so pissed off with him. That hilarious day when I thought I'd found a Bible debater, the Calvinist technology professor all the fashionable pessimists loved to love, despite their disaffection for religion and earnestness. I showed up after a day reviewing my aged Greek sentence arcs and diagrams, ready to take him to the mat...and saw him blanch. Another man I emasculated. He just wanted to have a beer with his adorers. Not deal with the ball of intensity carrying the briefcase.

If I had Prince on speed dial, I might even find I spend less time struggling with shredded sails, because I would be way more in touch with my intuition. Or more able to direct the misery in some channel that did not lead to sailing into friends' ports on the Yacht of Pain. He seems to be pretty decent at pouring his pain into securely buried vaults, or transmogrifying it. I need a bit more of that. In fact, that's how I got to this particular voyage, chasing after another master pain-wizard, who had this uncanny talent of seeming to always have shit together, no matter what, deflecting the storms that I'd absorb and suffer through. I thought he could teach me. Maybe he tried. Maybe I needed more distance from my teacher to be able to process his lessons. Maybe just more repetition and practice.

Pretty sure that having Prince on speed dial would be good for my psyche. I might be able to re-invest the money I currently funnel to mental health and chiropractic. And maybe I wouldn't even miss the booze. Able to transition off the doom track with my Prince-tutored spiritual acuity, I'd be better at letting go and embracing forgiveness and hope. No one cries at Paisley Park.

Maybe. Or maybe I'd just have a really cool deep-voiced friend, who'd make things seem better simply by not being a part of them.










Wednesday, July 9, 2014

The dance

Chances of staring at the walls are great. But the fear of being a wallflower is enough to stiffen my spine. I'll go out. I'm not backing down, sensibly cowering in my apartment though I'm longing to dance. Fuck them. I've done it before. The worst that can happen is I feel stupid, with a drink. Courage needs to be practiced - the fact that I'm afraid makes me more likely to do it. 
"I like your energy," they say in the beginning. Ah, yes. My energy. My fearlessness. The part they will mistake later for anger, for snobbery, for disdain -- a judgement of them and an affront to their dominance -- but which in the newness of time reels them in, seems exciting & fun. At once the creator and the destroyer of my happiness...my energy, which propels me forth into situations I fear, feminine charms blazing, lashes lowered, shoulders thrown back, hips swinging. Why I will always laugh at the things they say in the beginning, because I know, I know this very thing that captures your imagination and pulls you across the room is that which you will learn to hate in me.
My energy. A smokescreen to fool them into thinking I'm not afraid. Not beating, counting the minutes until I can run, under the forced prescriptions of a ruler of my ego which demands I not shrink, not hide, not cower. I will let the screams of the drunken man on the street wash over, a wind blowing reeds, safe in my music cocoon. No angry rejoinder from me. I am water. Hard as you hit, I simply absorb, disperse. My energy is the oil in my amphora, carefully carried into the loud and crowded bar, where I know no one, where everyone is younger than me, where my heart will not reach out to me, but another impossible charm boy will dance with me. Dance with me. Dance and tell me the parts of my face in Spanish. Dance and charm. Tell me you like my energy. My energy, the smokescreen.

Saturday, July 5, 2014

Masculinity, the emotional man, the man who needs me. My ability to take care of myself.

I have a visceral reaction to men needing care. Men needing me, or being soft. I hate it being there, but it is there. It is there, so I always will choose the calmest, most emotionally detached man in the room, and find him wildly attractive. 

wanting to be able to be a woman. to be with a man who is strong. but even then, i can barely relax, always looking for signs of weakness. and then, i want him to romance me, soften toward me, respond in softness. can only accept softness from a man i know will not fall apart on me. but those men are not soft, they will not fall apart because they do not experience the emotion that leads to both softness and sometimes falling apart. wanting both. wanting stability, wanting romance and emotional chaos. 


i am afraid of the emotional man. because i need to be strong. because she is standing in that room watching. because i can't be left by her, she holds my world together. loyalty. 

i am afraid of the emotional man, because i want him, but i feel like i have to choose between him and survival, and i know i don't need him. 

i am afraid of the emotional man because he is a luxury. he is in a tuxedo. he is a liability. he will drag me down, and then i will not be cared for, either. we will both be alone. Afraid if i start nurturing a man, it will not stop. it will bleed me dry, like a child.

I recoil from the emotional man because I do not trust him. Because it seems fake. But that is not my view - I am emotional, and I want emotion, want to trust it like I trust my own. I am smarter about emotions than about anything else, and it cripples me that I cannot talk emotions with men I am involved with, this thing that I am so good at.

Hating men needing me, hating them wanting care, like I hated my father for wanting me, mother - women who didn't want him. i wanted him to be strong, like mom - wanted him to move on, to show some spine. wanted him to play a masculine role, like she was. 

I need to be able to make choices with men that will actually get me closer to what I want, to what is good for me. That means I have to stop being afraid of emotional men, stop hating them, being ashamed of them, being angry and full of rage toward them. Because what I am feeling toward them is not about them. It is about being 13 and watching him act shamefully and then demand love for his actions, manipulating me by seeming pitiful.