111. INTERIOR GEOGRAPHIES

From the Archives (June 2005)

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains.

Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse.

I’m surprised at myself talking in this way. I’m young, the world is before me, there will be others. I feel my first streak of defiance since I met her. My first upsurge of self. I won’t see her again. I can go home, throw aside these clothes and move on. I can move out if I like. I’m sure the meat man can be persuaded to take me to Paris for a favour or two.

Passion, I spit on it.

That’s from The Passion by Jeanette Winterson, one of the most original and poetic writers publishing today. She may be my favorite living novelist in fact (although I also really like Carole Maso and JM Coetzee’s Waiting on the Barbarians and Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible and Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale).

Interview calls The Passion a meditation on pleasure and its limits, and it is—like all of Winterson’s work—almost breathtakingly beautiful. Raw. Also full of, well, passion. And insight. And longing. And lines of poetry set in paragraph form.

Winterson incorporates magical touches into her works brilliantly—better than García Márquez and way better than any living author that I can think of—places her readers in interiors that make us ache and yearn and remember and resolve to live life closer to the bone despite being so exposed there.

Once in New York City I sat behind Jeanette Winterson at a dyke film festival. I admired her hair and buff body, but failed to recognize her until she jumped up as the lights came on and ran out the door.

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Meanwhile, I went to a pal’s gig last tonight and really enjoyed it, Was hanging out after the performance and overheard an audience member saying "your music just spoke to me. X happened to me in 1981 and Y happened to me in 1987 and it was so hard, so devastating..," and then she proceeded to share her most intimate stories with my friend.

People confess to me at my readings too.

There are so how many people out there who need to tell their stories and express their pain ... and, sometimes, art provides a way for them to do that.

I used to get reader calls at home too—at least before I made my number unlisted.

Won’t you explain to me the pain of your life?

That’s a disappear fear line ... and something we seem to need as humans. So many of us are walking around stunned and we just need someone to listen, to help us heal, or at least process, our pain.

So tell me about pain, yours. And I will tell you about mine. Meanwhile the earth keeps spinning.

Meanwhile...

Who wrote that? I want to say Oriah Mountaindreamer inThe Invitation, but will have to do a little research on that later.

Elizabeth Bishop captured her pain in a beautiful villanelle that took her over fifteen years to write. It’s entitled "One Art" and she repeats a line that I repeated to myself for months after my marriage fell apart:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I've told myself that truth several times when I really needed to believe it ... and it wound up being true, but lawd knows it didn't feel that way at the time.

RIGHT NOW
by Kenneth Fields (from Classic Rough News)

It's nineteen years today since he last held
A drink in his hand or held his breath while smoke
Filled as much of him as he could stand
Till, letting it out, he sought oblivion
Of the trace of memory or anticipation,
And his life fell into a death spiral. Since then
He's been around folks like him. When he's been asked,
And sometimes, eager, when he hasn't been,
He talks to the ones who are not even sure
They want to learn how to stop killing themselves.
That feeling still seems close to him some days.
Right now he's okay, and that's enough, right now.

Finally, another favorite line from The Passion: “You may set off from the same place to the same place every day and never go by the same route.”

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(Well, yeah, as a matter of fact they are. They're multicolored too.)

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.”

22. HARD-ASS TEXTURE GIRL, IN OFFICE

From the Archives

(March 2005) I’m texture girl today in slightly nubby brown raw silk slacks, a moss-colored mini-wale corduroy shirt, a taupe silk jacket with a large shell button, and my favorite brown leather monk shoes.

Have been looking around my office because someone told me that she was once asked in an interview, “If I went to your office right now, what would it tell me about the way you perform and organize your work?”

Hmmm.. Well, a pal met me here last night and we wound up staying for a good thirty minutes because she wanted to explore all the art in here (and there’s a lot of it).

I have a large Mondrian-style rug comprised of squares/rectangles that are any number of shades of brown or orange or dusty pink. My window ledge contains an orchid that doesn’t look so healthy, a vase of fading daffodils, and a nude sculpture of a superhuman man that I molded out of concrete a couple of years ago. He looks like a ruin comprised of a gallic head, super-strong torso, and the tops of his massive thighs. His legs and arms are broken off and taper into fat coarse wire. I left wire in his neck exposed too so he looks a little like a massive Borg, eager to tell you that you will be assimilated.

A large Pollockesque painting that I made some time ago hangs on one wall and there’s a Mexican tile table and two simple wooden chairs beneath it. One chair has a red wool horse blanket that someone brought back from Texas for me hanging on it.

Twenty-four dried white roses in a large orange Mexican hand-blown glass pitcher sit on the tile table (and this is probably revealing more than I should tell ANYyone about me but here goes: I carefully taped the date of every month that Mud and I had been together on the stems of these roses for our second anniversary and attached a beautiful paragraph about love and white roses extracted from Jeannette Winterson’s Written on The Body to the vase.

When I broke up with her (after discovering her Yalie affair), she grabbed the roses and threw them into the trash can with a level of drama that only a red-headed actor can really pull off, then stormed out of the house. I salvaged the roses, removed the month labels, stuck them in the pitcher, and placed them in my office at work because, well, they look really cool here—or maybe I like punishing myself with bad memories.)

A large, Picasso reproduction hangs on another wall. A bookshelf covers a third wall and writing proofs and assignments that need to be graded line the floor beneath it. Each project has a chunky bolt on it to keep the papers and deadlines in place.

The shelf is mostly lined with books, but I’ve got a bottle of balsamic vinegar (for my salads) stashed in between them and an emergency stash of Thai rice soups, along with a couple of cans of mandarin orange sections—you know, emergency food for when I forget my lunch and don’t have time to pick anything up—too. There’s also a Russian harlequin doll from Malevich’s painting Sportsmen standing on one shelf.

Another wall is practically covered by a large 7-foot-tall cork memo board that has all kind of weird sh!t attached to it. My favorite is a large, chunky piece of sky-blue foam construction insulation with the HUD building code stamped on it that resembles a modern-day suburban fossil. Other items include a flyer advertising a long-ago Anne Sexton poetry reading at Harvard; a silhouette cut-out of MLK with his arm raised; a blue poster of Gandhi; and one of my favorite poems taht I scratched onto a piece of gray paper:

SENTENCES
by Nicanor Parra

Let’s not fool ourselves.
The automobile is a wheelchair
A lion is made of lambs
Poets have no biographies
Death is a collective habit
Children are born to be happy
Reality has a tendency to fade away
Fuck!ng is a diabolical act
God is a good friend of the poor.

Several magic-marker drawings that my nieces and nephews gave me, 2 Storybook People sculptures that I purchased near RISD, a CD that I wrote a poem on, a photograph of a billboard that says ”what matters most is how well you walk through the fire" (Charles Bukowski), a Guerrilla Girls poster citing all the tongue-in-cheek advantages to being a woman artist (“No. 3: Having an escape from the art world in your 4 freelance jobs”), a Rilke quote, a poster-size close-up of Shoney’s Big Boy, a short story that a friend’s child wrote entitled “The Mostr” (Monster), a photo of Holocaust prisoners below the words ‘Never Again’ (cut out from an ad for the Holocaust Museum), a “His toughest teacher has always been poverty” sign, another that reads “Now we know why guppies eat their young,” and another one that reads “A truly great sentence has music coming out of it”—Rhoda Lerman.

There’s also postcards of various paintings from various museum shops, a poster that asks “How Will You Know When You Have Enough?”, a picture of George W. Bush as Uncle Sam that says “I want YOU to attack Iraq while I sit on my well-exercised ass,” several holiday ornaments, a silver pine cone, nametags from various conferences, family photos, and a large curling strip of metal that came off the top of a eighteen-wheeler that drove under a RR trestle that was shorter than the truck. (This hangs from the top of the memo board over several pieces of art work.)

Who even knows what all that says about me? Maybe that I'm eclectic and like found art.