215. YOU CALL THIS A SUSTAINABLE WORLD?

From the Archives

(April 2006) Short, brutish, and dirty. Is that all life is?

Here I sit in my studio at 11:48 p.m. on a Thursday night on the eve of my trip to NYC. It rained all day (again) and my grass is suddenly very high (something I can do nothing about till next week).

My drive home from the theatre tonight was a journey through a foggy undifferentiated landscape that no more than suggested a sustainable world (whereas my pals' experimental Chekhov interpretation that I just witnessed squashed flat any possibility of a sustainable world).

My favorite local theater staged this adaptation of Two Sisters (On Ice), which they describe as “a passionate look at desire and disenchantment set in an Edward Gorey-like landscape with a Hawaiian soundtrack.”

(Ponder that.)

The male cast alternated between stiff brown uniforms and revealing tighty-whities and one sister masturbated whenever the subject of work came up. Oh I looooong to work. I really looooong for work, she moaned.

How could one possibly rise in standing ovation to a Chekhov play when his message has squashed you flat into your seat?

(And yet sex, in all its emptiness, does still offer at least momentary transcendence.)

Came home to play around on my keyboard and then stare at my cello and guitars and twenty-four-volume art encyclopedia set—at this stuff that can occasionally make my existence seem meaningful.

There’s The Life of James McNeill Whistler, sitting beside me on a shelf. And Vita Sackville-West’s letters to Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir’s biography, Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, Mark Mathabane’s Kaffir Boy, Kafka’s Trial and, because I live in the violent southland, Larry Brown’s Fay and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina.

Plato’s Parable of the Cave asks me to consider whether or not I am turning to look at the light and Warren’s Symbolism of Subordination reminds me that I have not chafed against black leather in entirely too long.

My worn paperback copy of Works of Love, Kierkegaard’s nonpseudonymous picture of his Christian faith, has been overtaken by the solid blue planes of Sartre’s paperback Existentialism and Human Emotions (since Sartre tied Kierkegaard to my easel some years ago and continues to lash him there as I cogitate, demanding that Søren face the implications of personal action in this purposeless universe).

Meanwhile, Daniel Chirot is bursting at the seams to explain in professorial terms How Societies Change as Jane Wagner shouts that reality is “nothing more than a collective hunch” y’all.

My Cherokee sacred calendar competes for space with Ken Wilbur’s Brief History of Everything and Carolyn Forché’s always nearby Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness.

Ernest Hemingway still sneers from The Sun Also Rises (a title, that, although the writer ultimately chose to end his life, nevertheless suggests hope) and shock and awe: america’s war on words offers cross-continental evidence that our bloody clashes leave us with bloated defense budgets even as we suffer from near-global and decidedly immobilizing post-traumatic stress disorder.


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Meanwhile, the dada exhibit in DC ends in two weeks and I have very little chance of getting there, let alone considering firsthand the artists’ interpretations of their culture-destroying world ravaged by war.

Bet my favorite fur-lined cup is there, too.

(Yeah yeah. I know this is an exhausted image now—just a symbol of a time and a place in which artists still had sufficient faith in humanity to be outraged by the fact that, left to our own devices, we have a tendency to sprout short brutish hairs on our fine bone china and pick each other’s bones and feeble attempts at meaning clean—or to at least satirize them wickedly well.)

Then there’s Foucault, iconoclastically exploring why we as a species feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex.

Meanwhile I am trying to figure out what to do with my two plastic tubs of organic broccoli florets, half a plastic tub of organic mixed herb greens, bag of Brussels sprouts (which I hope will still be salvageable by the time I return), an unopened packet of good goat cheese.

A good meal, but that’s probably more broccoli than I can eat in a day, even if I do cook it in some good sesame oil and garlic and have it with tempeh for breakfast.

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And now it’s morning and various experts are announcing that the possibility of frost is officially over for this season. I started fragile plants from seeds weeks ago and will plant them in earnest when I return from the city.

That’s not my worry right now though. For the moment, I just need to eat some breakfast and head to the airport.

So I’ll end with a poem:

WILD SWANS
by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)

I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over.
And what did I see I had not seen before?
Only a question less or a question more;
Nothing to match the flight of wild birds flying.
Tiresome heart, forever living and dying,
House without air, I leave you and lock your door.
Wild swans, come over the town, come over
The town again, trailing your legs and crying.

163. STATE OF GRACE

From the Archives

(October 2005) The Gnostics, like William Blake, believe that Jesus has already returned to Earth and that we already live in Paradise. Few of us recognize our always already perfect existence though. Instead we tell ourselves that Paradise will surely be ours in our NEXT life.

So much of our world is small and mean, with machetes and tires set aflame around fragile human necks and mind-numbing atrocities and grueling work and gnawing poverty. And there’s so much pain and injustice that, at some point, so many of us just become numb and morph into anger or autopilot, into permanent survival mode.

Nevertheless, we are—many of us—loved by someone whom we also love dearly and we manage to surround ourselves with kind and loving people who enrich our lives.

I don’t know about Jesus fitting into this equation, but do believe that we already live in paradise. The natural world is so amazingly crisp and beautiful and filled with beauty and wonder that it practically begs us to acknowledge it. And, if creativity is your religion (as it is mine), then there’s endless possibility of worship with only the need for (annoying) work and sleep interrupting our extended ecstasy.

This weekend, I hung out with artist friends. We had a big cookout on some friends’ farm, then hung upside down on state fair rides and ate bad-for-us food such as fried Coke and deep-fried twinkies (them) or fried Wisconsin cheese (me). Then we watched a magnificent fireworks display before having a big slumber party together.

Next morning, we built a bonfire and played guitars around it and made things in the studio.

Rosa said she’s been worried ever since she left the Peace Corp that she will get lazy and forget to appreciate every day that she’s alive.

One of the many reasons I value her as a friend is that we both recognize the wonder of the present moment. We recognize the grace involved in our being alive in such a beautiful and relatively peaceful place where we can live and love and cry and laugh and climax and gasp and touch and smell and hear and see and share our fleeting experience with others. And we recognize that this grace is fragile and can be fleeting.

I believe in my heart of hearts that it is only our ignorance of and inability to recognize this grace that keeps us removed from paradise.

130. SUBURBANIZATION OF THE SOUL

From the Archives

(August 2005) Just talked with my bestgrrl for so long that my ears are tired. She’s a city grrl in academic exile in the hinterlands who made the interesting observation that horses have old mouths. Their teeth and nostrils look modern, she says, but their mouths look very old, as if they belong in some other era.

I told her about my new short story involving a firefighter who spends his time extrapolating victims’ lives from the various items he discovers in their dwellings. She likes the concept and told me about a Russian artist who builds rooms that capture a person in his or her particular time or era.

We also discussed what items would encapsulate our childhoods, so here are a few: “Russian” Tea (which I believe the local UU fellowship refers to as Spiced Tea now, but it’s the same powdery Tang-and-cinnamon mixture that my mother served us so we could drink like the astronauts); Iceburg lettuce wedges topped with bright orange French dressing; Family Circle and Guideposts magazines; See Dick Run and Weekly Reader magazines and those hokey protect-your-necks-in-the-event-of-a-nuclear-disaster Super-8 movies with giant spools that invariably ran out and slapped the film against the projector for amusing minutes as the teacher tried to figure out what to do next; cream-colored utility trucks spraying DDT while we kids rode our bikes behind them (shiver); Kool-Aid popsicles made in Tupperware molds that we listened to as Crosby, Still, Nash and Young sang “Teach Your Children Well” in the radioed background.

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There is something deeply suffocating about life today in the prosperous west. Bourgeoisification, the suburbanization of the soul, proceeds at an unnerving pace. Tyranny becomes docile and subservient, and soft totalitarianism prevails, as obsequious as a wine waiter. Nothing is allowed to distress and unsettle us. The politics of the playgroup rules us all.—J.G. Ballard, interview in the Guardian, 6.22.04

A bumper sticker on the way into work today read “We ARE the rogue state.” Was pondering the Ballard quote when I saw it and concluded, sadly, that far more Americans can identify the newest Hollywood break-up than define a rogue state.

Also came across this jingoistic gem from AdBusters:

DON’T LOOK NOW
Listen: don’t you get it? This is the greatest place on earth. Nobody cares about the declining dollar, or the dwindling oil reserves, or the massive trade deficit. These are just words you hear on the news every once in a while. They don’t mean anything to anybody.

Look around you! We’re number one and that’s not going to change. It’s no accident we’re all fascinated with Paris Hilton. We’re her, she’s us. She’s beautiful, rich and fabulous—she has it all, everyone wants to be her. And that’s exactly what this country is like.

Yes, we’re in debt—what country isn’t? How much do you think Paris owes on her Visa right now? We get the Chinese to keep buying US treasury bonds and we’re golden. The important thing is: we have to keep our eyes on the prize. We can’t let the eggheads and nay-sayers get us down. These people aren’t in touch with reality.

Look: this is a beautiful place—we’ve made it that way. We can’t turn back now. We can’t give an inch. We can’t let it slip from our grasp.

We’ve just got to believe.

(Groan) A cross between bobbleheaded Gipperspeak and that ee cummings poem about the silver-tongued politician who spoke and then drank rapidly from a glass of water.

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Matthew Alper, author of The God Part of The Brain (due out soon), asserts that God is a coping mechanism and that we're hard-wired (to our detriment) to believe in deities.

Or maybe we’re just overworked and undereducated and hardwired to accept easy answers that will allow us to turn back to some easier topic that will makes our heads hurt less than economics or death or cancer.

Of course, as a species, we also tend to be spineless conformists who will do harm for no better reason than the fact that we believe that other people are also doing it. (psst. Don’t tell Cheney.) Then there are the Machiavellians and fucking Napoleons (to use ani’s phrase) and social puppeteers who manipulate us with our common fears and insecurities and need for pat answers. They’re adept at using God’s name to, say, build up extravagant riches in Rome, etc.

A recent review of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) contains this wonderful observation: “Art is the only god you can prove exists. Everything else is mortal.”

(Or, to encapsulate Medea’s worldview: “Creativity is my religion. It has saved me more than once.”)

The reviewer says that people who “get” Warhol understand that he was fascinated by the shallowness of personality, by its transparency.

Warhol recognized that Americans respect the infinitely reproducible better than the one-off creations, so he gave us what we wanted: 8,000 identical silkscreen prints of every-day tomato soup labels.

(What’s today’s equivalent? Maybe 8,000 identical hazard-yellow Humvees popping wheelies on the previously beautiful Alaskan wilderness?)

Warhol:

What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

Yep, we're a consumer culture all right and the corporate rich keep inheriting bidnesses that pay ad agencies to use their creative genius to convince the rest of us all that we must spend our money on their latest iteration of bling. It’s supply and demand American style: tell us what to buy in order to be happy, because we are so goddamn empty without the latest toy.

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In Videodrome, Professor O’Blivion says “The television is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore, the television is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch. Therefore, television is reality and reality is less than television.”

Meanwhile, Warren Buffett, whose personal holdings have outpaced the Dow Jones Industrial Average for over 40 years now, has a luxury yacht named The Middle Finger and Cheney's running hog wild.

Rogue state indeed.

So. Finally, an observation by Slavoj Zizek:

The planes hitting the WTC towers was the ultimate work of art: we can perceive the collapse of the WTC towers as the climactic conclusion of twentieth-century art’s “passion for the Real”—the “terrorists” themselves did not do it primarily to provoke real material damage but for the spectacular effect of it.

And so we line up for spectacles every day, digging the latest Fox sensationalism or exploding Iraqi city, because anything as mundane as an economics lesson is, like, so gawd-awful boring, ya know?

94. NATURE AND ITS PROCESSES

From the Archive

(May 2005) Have been re-reading Bill Moyers’ interview with Joy Harjo, who is interested in how our linguistic choices reflect our separation from the natural world and thwart connection. Our manufactured separations, she says, make it difficult for us to create a home for ourselves in the world and increase the likelihood that future generations will, like Shrub and Reagan, view nature as a compilation of resources to be plundered.

I study connection, contemplate how it might build bridges, because that, to me, is what good art does: it speaks across great distances and shows us our universality, our connections.

We use symbols, art, magic, pain—whatever works (and it all does)—to capture something that’s on the tip of everyone’s tongues (if we listen). We articulate what we recognize at a subconscious level, bring it out into the open and examine it.

This can build a bridge, create a connection with someone with whom we have no apparent connection, and thereby remind us that we’re all a part of the same big whole.

Harjo notes that these are “difficult times when the illusion of separation among peoples has become so clear.”

Moyer: You said “illusion.”

Because I think it is an illusion. I think this is more the shadow world than it is the real world.

Moyer: This world of alienation and of separation is the shadow world?

Yes, but this shadow world is also very real. There are many wars going on all over the world and each of them is very real, and the losses people suffer because of them are very real. I don’t mean to deny that at all.

Moyer: And yet there is something underneath that the artist sees?

Yes, but I think artists always have to include what’s apparent and real in that vision, even while we’re always searching for what makes sense beyond the world.

So, basically, she is simultaneously asserting that these separations are an illusion while acknowledging that they exist (gulp).

This is consistent with her poetry.

Europeans/Americans are separated from everything around us in Harjo's world. And we did this to ourselves. We're a sad collection of postlapsarian characters who stick our flags down into land and women and poor countries and whatnot, insisting that these things are MINE MINE MINE. Yet, in her big picture, we're all interrelated.

She also says that, since nothing exists, we are not really separate at all.

Bear with me.

Harjo's ultimate point is that we are not separate from the natural world at all, despite our insistence to the contrary. We exist in nature and its processes not as unique beings, but as one undifferentiated aspect of everything else. Even if we designed those clever little hierarchical structures and created that elaborate Great Chain of Being theory and the Judeo-Christian creator who defined us as separate, superior, the ones who name and have dominion over everything.

We’re related to everything, folks. We're interconnected and dependent, just one human mushroom in a giant steaming stew.

What strikes me most about this interview is that, when you think about it, Harjo has (as J. Scott Bryson noted before me) managed to have her ontological cake and eat it too. What she’s positing is that we’re all in relationship with nature but that we’re also separate from it, and by choice.

I make an obscure leap from that realization to folks with victim complexes, because this seems like another way that we humans create and maintain alienation, isolation, disconnection that we wind up propping up around us as protection.

Gotta ponder that one some more though and see if I can do something with it.

So think about it. We create the illusion of alienation from our environment and then this illusion creates actual alienation from our world and comes to defines us.

I don’t always feel a connection to people, but do always feel one to the natural world, and especially to water. Maybe that’s why I like Mary Oliver’s writing so much.

Oliver may be somewhat of a one-trick pony (as a poet recently announced to me), but she walks in the woods the same way that I walk in the woods and I feel that recognition in every one of her lines.

LISTENING TO: PARIS La Belle Époque: The Music of Gabriel Fauré, César Franck, Jules Massenet, and Camille Saint-Saëns, performed by Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott, currently Massenet’s “Méditation” from Thaïs. It’s very beautiful, especially when I stare into an orchid bloom and listen to that cello.

READING: still reading Carol Guess’s Switch and wish I had a block of time big enough to read the rest in one sitting. I like her awareness of working-class choices but wish some of her sentences were a little different.

SANG IN SHOWER: All right, I don’t know where these things come from, but this song came out long, long ago when I was maybe 10 years old and is now running through my head: It’s called “Daddy, Don’t You Walk So Fast” and I have no clue who sang it, but it’s running all ‘round in my brain.

BEST-OF SPAM SUBJECT LINES: Shed inches in minutes • It doesn’t hurt to check Alana

71. MESSY, MESSY, MESSY!

From the Archives

(April 13, 2005) I am tempted to poll my pals and see how many of them get my title reference, and maybe I’ll even offer them a Blenheim’s hot gingerale if they say it with the right accent.

So happy birthday Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney, and Eudora Welty—three excellent writers born on the same day.

The following two quotes are from today’s Writer’s Almanac. Since I’m a writer who worked briefly in advertising and took many advertising classes, I understand Ms. Welty’s reaction completely (see below). Odd thing is, I was actually good at creating those headlines and highly manipulative ads, but am so anti-consumer / disgusted by conspicuous consumption that, the few times I created them, I felt so dirty, so like a traitor to the human race, that I began caling myself Poetry Killer (and promptly found another job).

Ms Welty:

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.

And after she tried working in advertising:

It was too much like sticking pins into people to make them buy things they didn't need or really want.

So she became a writer.

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Today a Senate subcommittee holds the first hearing this year on marriage between same-sex couples. Wonder how many witnesses are going to use the Bible as a weapon to justify denying equal rights to their fellow citizens in a democracy?

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Meanwhile, a woman reportly reported to me that she covets my creativity, so she decided to start eating with her left hand and see what developed. It's been a few weeks and she can now report that she succeeded in becoming more messy, but not more creative.

69. COMFORT ZONES

From the Archives

(April 2005) I’ve been thinking about impressions today. Attended a board meeting last night in which we discussed diversity issues.

The minister from a local Imani fellowship told our mostly dyke board that her partner, a gregarious and oustpoken young woman, felt unwelcomed at our social events because she was black in a sea of mostly white faces. A wealthy, high-femme lesbian once said that she felt unwelcomed because some butchies kept staring at her make-up and nails and she knew everyone just assumed she was made of money. The young pierced grrls said that the predominantly middle-age dykes among them made them feel self-conscious and they were convinced that they would never be taken seriously in the mix.

Some straight women never returned because there were just too many lesbians for comfort. (Hey, welcome to the opportunity to surf our everyday experience in the world.) And some working-class women never returned because this mostly professional group sometimes plans outings that include out-of-town excursions or treks to plays or concerts.

I suspect that we fail to adequately welcome new people because, first and foremost, we are the primary social outlet for grrls who wanna have fun and who mostly already know each other. We let our hair down amongst our familiars and act in a manner that maintains this space where we can be ourselves.

This does not always accommodate everyone else’s comfort zones, however.

I wonder if members consider diversifying important ... and, if they do, if they are willing to do the work required to change these perceptions of comfort. We’ll have to do some exploration before we can actually open our arms a little wider.

An ethnographer on the board talked about a conversation she had with an African-American colleague. This ethnographer was stunned to hear that her colleague believes that she had to prove herself to her white cohort and faculty by out-performing everyone else just so that she will appear as equal in their eyes. This never even occurred to the white ethnographer.

That got me thinking.

I almost always assume that non-southerners who comment on my southern accent are making assumptions about my intelligence and perceived family inbreeding. (And could a West Virginia joke be far behind?) But does this really enter into their consciousness or am I just so used to this bias that I assume it whether or not it actually exists?

I spend most of my time with people who grew up in middle- or upper-class households and am extremely self-conscious of the fact that I am Other to them. They talk about their childhood memories of fancy vacations and semesters in Europe and summer lifeguarding jobs down at the country club and the private educations they received, and I can't help but recall the wrong-side-of-the-tracks public-school education I received that seemed designed to churn out millworkers with enough basic skills to fill out a timesheet or keep a bowling score.

If I didn't come from a family of voracious readers and didn't have a father who was curious enough to learn on his own and share his unconventional insights with me, then I would probably be a millworker right now.

I’m not, but do feel uncomfortable in professional settings in which everyone else seems to be speaking a common (except to me) language and assuming that their experiences are universal.

My professional pals who grew up working class describe similar experiences.

We glance over at each other in the same places when people participate in a larger discussion that is particularly classist or exclusive, while the speakers and common conversants go merrily along, seemingly unaware of their privilege that’s on display.

One thing I noticed in our board meeting that I don’t think anyone else noticed is that our president asked the Imani pastor to read her group’s mission statement aloud in front of the group. She didn’t warn her in advance and the minister was uncomfortable doing this. She joked and said I didn’t know I’d have to read all these big words to y’all tonight.

Meanwhile, because I’m an artist, these meanderings morphed into me thinking about these experiences visually, which made me think about impressionism.

Those soft pastel Monet posters aren’t really my style and some of them are garden-club suburban by today’s standards. But we forget that impressionism was radical, that the impressionists insisted on alternative ways of experiencing the world and documenting what they saw—said THIS is how light falls, THIS is how color is broken up; THIS is how the fugitive moment presents itself—to am establishment and public that responded with outrage ('cause everyone knows that leaves are solid green, right?).

Challenging people to see the world in a new way is, well, a challenge. Yet there’s always a reason to open our arms a little wider, to stretch our experiences out into a wider world that includes more than what we already know.

I'm thinking about this wider world in impressionistic term todays.

This change can grant our eyes new privilege and offers us the opportunity to concentrate aspects of our experience that were previously perceived as too disorderly, too freakish, too seemingly accidental in a manner that creates something beautiful that can cause us to see the world in an entirely new way.

How profound is that?

39. ARTICULATIONS

From the Archives

(March 2005) Last night was one of those nights when I put up roadblocks ... just to thwart myself, I reckon. Don’t know if this is some dysfunctional form of what I must believe is self-protection, if it’s residual stuttering crap, introversion, or what, but I do know that it’s frustrating.

I’m a fairly articulate writer but this doesn’t mean that I’m always verbally articulate. Sometimes someone asks me a simple question and, instead of replying, I just freeze and feel like a deer caught in someone’s headlights and the only way I can manage to speak is to act as if I’m me performing as myself.

A kind-eyed beautiful art therapist whose was displaying her autistic students’ art in a downtown gallery, for example, asked me what kind of art I make. A simple question really. But I froze and felt trapped and finally managed to mumble only something along the lines of “I draw a lot and build things out of clay, but have mostly been attaching weird things to canvas with wire lately.”

Great conversation starter, eh?

I feel passionately about what I create and much of it is truly interesting stuff, so what is UP with this?

The things I create are so personal, so tied into my emotional explorations, into what’s going on inside me at an unconscious level until the creative process brings them to consciousnes, and talking about these intimate terrains politely with most people makes me feel so exposed. Vulnerable. Naked.

I’m going to have to learn how to step back and speak about them in a university voice though (which you’d think I would have figured out how to do by now!), learn how to perform as me on demand again (as I usually do when I teach or give a reading or meet strangers at social events). I did this in grad. school, do it in classes, and do know the expected phrases that can be tossed out about my work: “I use blues juxtaposed against reds and yellows to suggest A...” or “through this composition, I am able to comment on our cultural propensity to do B...” etc. etc. ad nauseum.

23. THE TIME OF THE TURNIP

From the Archives

(March 2005) Have been thinking about the Dada movement. The urinal is the obvious symbol for this style and people latch onto it (although I prefer the fur-lined cup myself), but Dada is so much more than what is represented by either of these images. Yeah, it was an exhaustible style—and quickly so—but I love that it existed.

The Dada Manifesto that Hülsenbeck and Raoul Hausmann wrote in Berlin in April 1918 called for an “international revolutionary union of all creative men and women; for progressive unemployment through the mechanization of all fields of activity; for the abolition of private property; for the provision of free daily meals for creative people and intellectuals, for the remodeling of big-city life by a Dadaist advisory council; and for the regulation of all sexual activity under the supervision of a Dadaist sexual center. These proposals were put forward at what George Grosz called 'the time of the turnip.’”

Now I don’t know what I think about any council regulating my sexual activity, but I do recognize these artists’ disgust with the world around them. They experienced destruction in a way that is hard for Americans to fathom, knew that structures which had stood for thousands of years could be destroyed in an instant, how easily this destruction can result in permanent loss. (Think of those Catholic icons that were desecrated or destroyed in Shakespeare’s time, the cultural loss that resulted from the ruler’s need to force a particular belief system on a nation.)

The Dadaists’ disgust with the world around them symbolized their recognition of the fact that the visual images we hold dear continue to be subject to the whims of any slack-jawed pilot’s trigger-happy finger and our ruler’s good graces. That’s the point behind the Mona Lisa with a mustache. The Dadaists didn’t disrespect the painting/da Vinci so much as they lamented the reality that its existence is tenuous—that its existence is subject to the whims of people who could care less about art.

Dadaists confront the randomness of destruction in their works, and mourn a world where destruction is commonplace.

Duchamp’s Questions:
What is the irreducible element in language?
What would constitute a truly modern dictionary?
How should an index of all knowledge be organized?
To what extent can chance be given its freedom in the arts?
What are the verbal equivalents of colors that cannot be seen?
Should not every government have a Ministry of Coincidences?

Coincidences. Artists recognize the symbolic relationships between seemingly disparate elements, establish connections that some people simply can’t see until the artists point these connections out. This can resemble schizophrenic or delusional behavior, especially if the artist isn’t articulate enough or in touch with her unconsciousness enough to makes these connections resonate with others.

Now, between my mother and my sister, let me just say that there is too damn much schizophrenia in my family. Within the last month, for example, I have received a letter from my sister outlining, in detail, how her reconciliation with her ex-husband would bring about the end of conflict between Israel and Palestine, how their reunion will end the Iraqi conflict. I know that this is delusional thinking but am a logical person and therefore try hard to trace her connections, try to figure out how she reached these conclusions—which, for some reason, is important to me. And, even though it continues to be fruitless, I try to point out the logical inconsistencies in these conclusions.

My father’s approach to delusional behavior was, at first, frustration, but this quickly turned into appeasement. There was a period of time when my mother wrapped everything in plastic wrap. You’d sit on your bed and slide off it because she’d wrapped the mattress in plastic wrap (to keep some kind of evil something—germs?—inside it) when you weren’t looking. She had a witch hazel stage, too. And a tin foil stage. I came home from school one day—without a friend, thankfully—to find the entire piano wrapped in tin-foil and my father and sister and mother just sitting in the room there with it. Daddy was reading the paper across from the silver monstrosity, in fact.

There was this unspoken agreement in my family that we were supposed to pretend that the most extreme behavior was normal, that we were supposed to ignore that elephant sitting in the living room, but I could never do this. Excuse me, I inevitably said, but has anyone noticed that the fucking piano is wrapped in tin-foil!???

15. BODY HOLLOWS

From the Archives

(March 2005) Sunday night. I pulled out clay yesterday but never got around to sculpting anything. Have been wanting to shape something with my hands, which is a very different creative process than painting or drawing, less cerebral.

There’s something very satisfying about digging your hands down into your medium, getting them dirty, something very sensuous about molding a human form accurately out of clay.

Shaping it with your hands really makes you think about the hollows and curves of the human body, makes you pay attention. Tactile.

Or maybe this is just sexual frustration....

Guess I won’t get to experience this sensuous pleasure for a couple more weeks though, since I’m off to the lowlands soon and the process is really not very satisfying if you can’t complete at least the basic form in your initial sitting.

A sculpture is like a poem that way. I fine-tune poems to the nth degree after writing them and am always walking around with them in my head, trying to find a more precise word or phrase or image that will make them a little cleaner, a little tighter, that might scan a little better while providing deeper meaning, better music, nuance. Whatever.

I edit them on an ongoing basis, but really have to get the whole poem down on paper in my initial sitting or it’s lost.

Got up at 6 this morning and worked for nearly 7 hours on the second edition of my completely subjective compilation of poems that I think are good. The book is 200+ pages long and there’s at least one beautiful photograph on every spread.

I got the idea for the compilation a couple of Christmases ago after several friends said they would like to read more poetry, but wished I would give them some idea of where to start.

So I pulled poems together quickly, typeset the pages, made 20 or so funky leather covers, and handed the first, homemade books out as holiday gifts.

Like all rush projects, though, my initial edition contains errors (gasp!). I’ve promised books to other pals and some have reminded me that I haven’t yet delivered though, so it is high time that I finish a new edition.

This collection works very well sequentially, although the only real themes I used when compiling it were the moon at the beginning and rain at the end. I do cringe every time I discover another typo though.

Thought I could proof the whole thing and complete the rest of the updates yesterday morning, but I included some of my own poems in the collection and an unexpected result of proofreading was that I stopped proofing and instead reworked three of my own poems.

The changes are minor—just two words in one poem, a new stanza in another, and several new lines and phrases in the third—but improvements nonetheless, and two are already published in their earlier form, but at least I know they’re better now.

Have pondered one of the poems for a long while but couldn’t quite put my finger on what to do to make the meaning so clear that even an editor on the Sinister Wisdom collective would comprehend my meaning.

Now that’s not a very nice thing to say, I know, but the editorial collective of that fine journal rejected the poem and actually returned it to me with a condescending lecture along the lines of um, you probably don’t know this, living in the South as you do, but the word "nigger" is considered offensive in most circles and MLK and other activists worked and died in your region to make you people aware of how offensive you are when you use that term.

Guess it was clearly time they raised my consciousness about these facts since, excuse me, I’ve been living in a holler with all my barefoot and pregnant sisters and rapist brothers drinking moonshine these last forty-some years.

Let me back up here and say that a one-time colleague of mine actually founded Sinister Wisdom (the first lesbian journal in the US) many, many moons ago and she’s the one who suggested that I send this poem there.

The journal is run by a collective these days though, and I suppose those nice urban lesbians saw my southern address, saw that word, and didn’t even bother to determine what the actual poem said.

That’s the only explanation I have for their condescension, since over twenty readers commented on earlier drafts and not one of them had any trouble grasping that the poem actually comments on the damaging pervasiveness of racism and religious bias and poverty in the south.

The poem’s been published elsewhere now, but I guess it’s obvious that their letter still goads me and I pondered long and hard how to beat people over the head with my message without compromising the poetry.

Seemed obvious, once I figured it out.

Derogatory comments about Southerners (or poverty) rarely surprise me anymore, but they do offend me. You can practically watch a non-Southerner register your accent then drop their perception of your IQ score by 30 points.

Once, in the city, I was at a karate party with the great-whatever-granddaughter of—O hell, I’ll just say his name: David Hume—and little Maggie was so condescending to me that, after she said who her great-whatever-grandfather was for about the third time, that I said “O, who’s that?” in a smart-ass voice (to mostly amuse my friends and myself).

She replied “Where did you go to school?” and I told her the name of the southern state university where I completed undergraduate work—one that ranks consistently ranks among the top ten state universities, mind you, but she walked off shaking her Yalie head, satisfied that she’d just verified how backwards the deep South is and I didn’t even bother correcting her.

Now if she’d wanted to discuss the education I received in public schools prior to going to college, then that would have been another story....