254. WHAT'S IN A NAME?

From the Archives. (September 2006) There’s nothing like sitting in the surgical oncology waiting room of a major medical center to remind yourself of just how inconsequential a little burgundy Civic puttering along in front of you in the left lane really is.

It’s 10:48 AM and my dear friend and mentor Louisville and her partner and I have been at the hospital since 7:55 AM. We're here for Louisville‘s biannual breast cancer follow-up exams.

Have spent the morning thinking about the importance of naming things—perhaps because I’ve been catching up with my former undergraduate advisor/English professor/mentor, who introduced me to Adrienne Rich's Diving into the Wreck.

Or maybe it’s because I just read that Safia Amajan, a women’s rights leader in Afghanistan, was gunned down in front of her house yesterday.

Or maybe it’s because it's so hard to ignore the fact that our discriminatory marriage laws look at one kind of couple and say you are legitimate, then look at another and insist that they see nothing.

Or maybe it's because this White House administration is so clearly manipulating the names of things.

Bush, for example, interrupted a reporter who began On both the eavesdropping program and the detainee issues ... to say We call it the terrorist surveillance program, Hutch, with his customary Richy Rich sneer.

To quote the ever-intelligent Molly Ivins

If we stop calling it eavesdropping plus torture with kangaroo trials, will it stop being eavesdropping, torture and kangaroo trials, and become “anti-terrorist activity”? Who gets to name things?

Maybe Sidney Blumenthal does, at least when he’s astute enough to refer to our petulant president as a Mayberry Machiavelli.

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And let's all give a big hooray for those plane-spotters. Who knew that geek hobbyists fascinated with planes would corroborate the detainees’ stories?

Their amateur photographs and tracking skills were what first alerted journalists to the fact that the CIA was using commercial planes to transport prisoners to black houses, after all. And those commercials planes led journalists to identify the shell companies the CIA created to hide their apparent criminal activity. And the plane-spotters’ details, along with Google Earth, allowed journalists to identify the actual black house buildings where the detainees were held.

No wonder Big Brother want to put controls on the web.

And what has become of our democracy when our president follows the lead of Pinochet and gets himself and his goons retroactive amnesty for their crimes against humanity?

I am ashamed to be an American right now, ashamed to live in a land where people are too busy reading layering instructions for their fall wardrobes to register what we are condoning...

...yet I am complicit too.

For example, let me ask you a question: If women with big breasts work at Hooters, where do women with one leg work?

The answer? I-Hop, of course.

I learned that joke from watching a TV show called Two and a Half Men with Louisville and her partner last night because, after a long day of driving and worrying about whether or not her breast cancer has returned, we needed to veg.

And, before that, we watched Antique Roadshow.

That’s more TV than I’ve watched in the last several months (unless you count those L Word rentals), but my guests are TV watchers so, hey, when in my living room do as the paintings do, right?

LISTENING TO: Etta Baker, since she died at the age of 93 yesterday. Amazing that she didn't start performing until she was 60.

153. COLLABORATIONS

From the Archives

(September 2005) Here’s another piece from shock and awe: war on words. It’s Adrienne Rich—which means, of course, that she has odd line breaks and deep indents ... only I can’t figure out how to create those deep indents in HTML so you get it all flush left. She wouldn’t like that one bit, would probably come up with some kind of hyphenated obscenity with which to put me in my place.

collaborations
by Adrienne Rich

I
Thought of this “our” nation :: thought of war
ghosts of war fugitive
in labyrinths of amnesia
veterans out-of-state textbooks in a library basement
dark
didn’t realize it until I wrote it

August now apples have started
severing from the tree
over the deck by night their dim impact
thuds into dreams
by daylight bruised starting to stew in sun
saying “apple” to nose and tongue
to memory

Word following sense, the way it should be
and if you don’t speak the word
do you lose your senses
And isn’t this just one speck, one atom
on the glazed surface we call
America
from which I write
the war ghosts treading in their shredded
disguises above the clouds
and the price we pay here still opaque as the fog
these mornings
we always say will break open?

II
Try this one on your tongue: “the poetry of the enemy”
If you read it will you succumb

Will the enemy’s wren fly through your window
and circle your room

Will you smell the herbs hung to dry in the house
he has had to rebuild in words

Would you weaken your will to hear
riffs of the instruments he loves

rustling of rivers remembered
where faucets are dry

“The enemy’s water” is there a phrase
for that in your language?

And you what do you write
now in your abandoned house tuned in

to the broadcasts of horror
under a sagging arbor, dimdumim

do you grope for poetry
to embrace all this

—not describe, embrace staggering
in its arms, Jacob-and-angle-wise?

III
Do you understand why I want your voice?
At the seder table it’s said

you reclined and said nothing
now in the month of Elul is your throat so dry

your dreams so stony
you wake with their grit in your mouth?

There was a beautiful life here once
Our enemies poisoned it?

Make a list of what’s lost but don’t
call it a poem

that’s for the scriptors of nostalgia
bent to their copying-desks

Make a list of what you love well
Twist it insert it

into a bottle of old Roman glass
go to the edge of the sea

at Haifa where the refugee ships lurched in
and the ships of deportation wrenched away

IV
for Giora Leshem

Drove upcoast first day of another year no rain
oxalis gold lakes floating
on January green

Can winter tides off the Levant
churn up wilder spume?

Think Crusades, remember Acre
wind driving at fortress walls

everything returns in time except the
utterly disappeared
What thou lovest well can well be reft from thee

What does not change / is the will
to vanquish
the fascination with what’s easiest
see it in any video arcade

is this what the wind is driving at?

Where are you Giora? whose hands
lay across mine a moment
Can you still believe that afternoon
Talking you smoking light and shade
on the deck, here in California
our laughter, your questions of translation
your daughter’s flute?

(First published in The School among the Ruins: Poem 2000–2004, forthcoming)

107. NAKED BUT FOR THE STORIES WE TELL EACH OTHER

From the Archives

(June 2005) Tonight I almost made a silly friend spit her Coke out because we were planning a summer get-nekkid hot-tub party with some wild grrls from Louisiana and she asked what we should eat.

“Ladyfingers, of course," I said.

It’s interesting. I’m such an introvert in my professional life—too serious sometimes—but that just makes acting like a total goof with my pals all the more wonderful.

Despite my silliness, the man who killed himself (see previous entry) has been on my mind all day. Mostly I keep wondering why and feeling awful for his wife and daughter.

Maybe he was gay and deeply closeted and someone was threatening to out him. Or maybe he got promoted to the level of his incompetency and was about to be fired. Or maybe he got caught embezzling. Or maybe he was depressed, but hid this fact from almost everyone and most especially his family. Or maybe he was a closet alcoholic whose wife thought he was working all those hours that he actually spent in the bar, hitting bottom. Or maybe he was hopelessly in love with a twenty-year-old who left him for a younger and firmer medical student. Or maybe he was in love with a five year old (because you never know).

I hope, for his wife’s sake, that his life insurance policy doesn’t have a suicide clause.

•

Joy Harjo says in Reconciliation that we are “naked but for the stories we have of each other" and Muriel Rukeyser reminds us that “the universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”

I have toyed with the idea of upgrading my MFA to a PhD for some time now (AFTER I finish my novel) and have narrowed my area of expertise down to two main themes, both of which involve stories in one way or another: one is trauma writing/writing of witness (possibly focused on twentieth-/twenty-first century lesbowriters) and the other is a comparative look at the rise of the US's Religious New Right movement and the second-wave feminist movement.

(For the second topic, I would need to find a way to tie this into literature, because I just don’t want to do all the statistical analysis that a sociological study would entail.)

I’m fascinated by writing of witness and know so many artists who, for a variety of reasons, have a insatiable need to parse, compare, analyze, study, ponder, probe, recreate, and share the full range of their experiences by putting them in a larger context, a different box. Could be a metaphor or a narrative or a painting or a song ... or a blog, for that matter. It depends on the artist and the experiences.

This larger framework is where we transform isolated pain, observations, insight, meanderings, and so on into a larger creation—extrapolate a bigger world, a broader context, art. And, a common reality for many of us is that we and our audiences have encountered pain and violence and horrors.

As Adrienne Rich says, “A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.”

After reading one of my short stories at a bookstore a few years ago, a woman told me that I should preface my story with a warning that it contains emotionally disturbing words.

I thought about that.

Isn’t that what I WANT my stories to contain? Disturbing, as in breaking to reach the interiors of people who fuck and love and feel and long and are so much more than their mortgage payments and Dockers and studied conventions and the façade they wear in public.

I WANT to provoke an emotional reaction!

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Hav also been pondering the possibility that perhaps couples can only remain together until they run out of new stories.

My friend Kay got me thinking about my own catalog of stories recently when she said “tell me your water moccasin story again Medea.”

So anyway, off the top of my head, here is a sampling of stories that I seem to repeat—which I guess means that, on some level, here are the stories that make up who I am.

• The cop who shoved his cocked pistol into my left temple after he caught me parking with a woman
• My poverty month of one bag of grits and a single summer sausage
• Angel dust made MEDEA step out of a moving car
• That Canyonlands bathroom where the Mormon woman backed her daughters out against the wall after I entered
• Mark Doty telling 16-year-old me that I just can’t write (which became a self-fulfilling prophesy for at least the next year)
• Reigning champion of the great Rhythmfest nekkid water basketball match-up against the cheating rugby players
• My drowning (not to be confused with the excellent Jim Grimsley novel with the same title)
• Surviving an armed robbery after my stoned friend Louisvile just had to have that Sarah Lee triple-layer coconut cream cake at 1:30 AM on a week night
• Sinking my kayak (sob)
• The wreck that left those faces in the windshield

Jeanette Winterson ends her brilliant book The Passion this way:

I'm telling you stories. Trust me.

LISTENING TO: Thea Gilmore’s great cover of Van Morrison’s “Crazy Love”

READING: On Our Backs magazine’s "Are You A Slut?" quiz. The answer is a little misleading, since it doesn’t ask me to describe a timeframe, but I can report that I am apparently “wet and willing”: “Down, girl! Actually, you’re already there—down on, underneath, or on top of just about anything that moves. Buckle up and pass the lube: you’re riding a wave of fun and fucking that isn’t likely to break anytime soon.”

70. TWO BEEPING JESUSES & A SCENTED ORCHID

From the Archives

(April 2005) I was reading Refusal’s blog yesterday and came across this interesting bit:

I’m not sure if I mentioned the ‘two Jesuses’ theory before. This is rather like the Kennedy-shooting ‘two gunmen’ theory, except it assumes that the Bible combines the story of 2 Jesuses, one nice as pie, the other mean and temperamental. One blessed the meek, the other kicked out the moneychangers and told you to hate your parents. What worries me is the effect on the trinity. If there are 2 Jesuses, is there still 1 holy ghost? Two? Maybe three for a nice triangle? If you’re one of those people who likes to get stoned and discuss 4-dimensional space, maybe you have a theory about multi-dimensional paracletes.

Ponder that.

It’s 7:30 AM and something in my kitchen is beeping every 5 minutes or so and I cannot figure out the source. I unplugged the microwave and still heard a beep, unplugged the coffeepot and still heard a beep, turned my mobile phone off and still heard a beep. That leaves the oven, unless I’m missing something, and I have no clue how to make an oven stop beeping. Jezuschreeeesto! I gotta play my music louder!

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This is a horrible thing to say but I’m going to say it anyway. Mac released OSX a couple of years ago. We’ve now had Jaguar and Panther and now the Tiger upgrade s coming out. They have really limited themselves categorically by using big cats, however, and I fear that they will soon have to resort to associational upgrades—you know, like the Siegfried and Roy upgrade OSX.5.4.2.7.

•

I made a flowerbed by my front walk last night and put a flat of marigolds in around the rosemary plant.

They’re not my favorite flower and they’re not even native, but they’re good natural insecticides and my goal is simply to fill in the space until the rosemary bushes out. Then I’ll plant natives around it.

Next I’ll move the hostas and monkey grass that run beside the deck to a spot farther back in the yard where I put a wrought-iron table and chairs. Then I’ll plant butterfly bushes beside the deck so that, in a few years, I can sit on the deck and watch butterflies.

In other news, I have too many things I want to do on Friday night. Adrienne Rich is giving a free reading. There's an art crawl. An LGBTQ group wants queers to show up at a restaurant that was less-than hospitable to two bois, and to announce our group affiliation at every opportunity. And I promised a pal that we'd go orchid shopping.

Some places transform me when I enter the space, almost stop me in my tracks with their beauty. Hurricane Ridge in Washington state does. The Hoh Rainforest does, especially on a foggy morning. Butterfly/hummingbird havens do. Cathedrals do. And the greenhouse of orchids that we'll be visiting does too.

READING: Rodale’s Successful Organic Gardening

LISTENING TO: Bitch and Animal’s “ovumture (in Areola minor)”

SINGING IN SHOWER: How’s this for random? So I’m shaving my pits this morning and burst out with “5 golden riiiiinggggs . . .”

35. PENIS ENVY

From the Archives

(March 2005) My pal Christine is re-reading a thin volume of Adrienne Rich poetry that she read in college and realized that it provides a yardstick by which she can measure how much she has changed. The poems seem angry to her now but, of course, she has changed, not the poems. They're exactly the same.

Interesting how we often need to traverse that reactionary domain before we can settle into a place with less anger and more acceptance ... but with a firmer grasp of our beliefs, our convictions.

I had similar experiences with some of Muriel Rukeyser’s poetry and find some of it too strident now (although I admire her commitment to being a poet/activist).

So now an untitled poem by Alta from the No More Masks! anthology:

penus envy, they call it
think how handy to have a thing
that poked out; you could just shove
it in any body, whang whang & come,
wouldn’t have to give a shit.
you know you’d come!
Wouldn’t have to love that person,
trust that person.
whang, whang & come.
if you couldn’t get relief for free,
pay a little $, whang whang & come,
you wouldn’t have to keep, or abort.
wouldn ’t have to care about the kid.
wouldn’t fear sexual violation.
penus envy, they call it,
the man is sick in his heart.
that’s what I call it.

I believe someone should introduce Alta to some kind gay men. And to dildos. Yeah, maybe that woman Cloud from the women’s music festivals could introduce Alta to dildos. (Remember Cloud? Surely there are other lesbians out there who remember Cloud. She sold crystal dildos. They were beautiful. But what if one broke?)

LISTENING TO: ani defranco’s amazing “Amazing Grace”