274. INTIMATING POETRY

From the Archives (18 April 2007)

Take a step back for a moment and think about how frightening those shootings at VA Tech were yesterday, and then consider—painful though it may be to do so—that Iraqis face that kind of massacre every day, and they have done so for several years. ...

32 people died in Virginia on Monday and 65 perished in separate attacks in Iraq the day before. The latter hardly made the news.—Joshua Holland

Um. One example is a contained and theoretically safe place of learning with a safety department assigned to protect folks, and one example is an entire country that's at war being bomboarded by soldiers who signed up for the armed services.

But you’re right. Innocent people are dying violently and our public policies do drive (or at least contribute to) this continued violence.

Lawdgawd these are sobering times. And the sad reality is that survivors will now flash back to bloody VTU or Columbine or Amish classrooms when the slightest trigger reminds them of them of the slaughter they survived.

Maybe it's a solidarity thing, but the fact that the shooter was an English major—someone who wrote plays and poems, used a creative venue to try to give voice to the chaos and psychosis and violence that terrorized him—bothers me too.

"It was not bad poetry. It was intimidating," poet Nikki Giovanni said of his violent writing (after she kicked him out of her poetry class because he intimidated other writers).

Yeah. Psychotic people are intimidating. And potentially dangerous.

And NEED TREATMENT.

When the killer wrote, was he using language to sort through the chaos, to explore his anger à la Larry Brown? Or was he using language as a vehicle for creating a virtual world where violence reigns and paranoid megalomaniacal fantasies can run unfettered?

The jaded self-loathing part of me says, Well, at least the guy was trying to get in touch with his anger—which is more than I can say for this scattered writer, who paid boocoodles of money to complete graduate writing studies at a private institution and even dared to call herself a writer once upon a time, but who has since sunk into the tepid managerial workaholic waters that, way too often, numb my feelings in the name of higher efficiency (and the occasional night of sleep).

And what's my excuse for not updating this blog in so long?

Well, the truth is simple.

1. I am so freaking busy with my new boss that I don't have the luxury of insight right now;

2. Danishgrrrl sometimes reads my back entries and becomes upset by my descriptions of previous lovers, and then compares these experiences to our hectic life together while doubting my commitment to her;

3. I am too scattered to even think much these days and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight short of quitting my job.

My reality is that acclimating to life with Danishgrrrl (and her three kids, one dog, one cat, one bird, and frequent need to process) feels, in general, like an exercise in giving up all hope of time for reflection.

The trade-off is good though and I am drawing up plans for a poetry shack that will help me find some precious time alone eventually.

217. UNDERWIRE ALERT. QUICK! RAISE THE TERRORIST THREAT LEVEL TO RED!

From the Archives

(May 2006) I finally rolled into my driveway after a long day of traveling and, as my pal Cin (who picked me up from the airport) said, I can tell you’re completely exhausted, Medea, because your voice sounds different.

Yeah.

Mostly, though, it’s different because my reconstructed shoulder is hurting like hell from hauling a suitcase and laptop all over creation.

Lars and I left the Village around 10 this morning and I’ve been traveling ever since. Took the subway to Grand Central Station (while reading a scene in Carole Maso’s Ghost Dance that occurs in Grand Central Station), then hopped the express bus to LaGuardia.

Sat around for an hour and a half reading (after my underwires alerted security to the fact that I have big tits), then sat in the Atlanta airport for another two hours before finally touching ground here.

Cin took me out to dinner afterwards and we talked nonstop till she pulled up in front of her house . . .

. . . where we discovered that someone crashed into the driver’s door of my cute little car!

Fortunately, a young woman came running up as we were studying the damage and fessed up that her new-driving mom was making a U-Turn and hit me.

Whew!

•

So. Back in the nineties, the village of Chapel Hill produced a poster showcasing the coolest doors in town.

After staying at Shulamith’s apartment yesterday, I decided that someone should cop this idea and produce a Bathtubs of the City poster.

As any struggling artist (who isn’t subsidized by Daddy Warbucks) knows, the bathtub is seldom in the bathroom in low-income NYC apartments. Instead, it's usually somewhere in the general vicinity of available plumbing (and smack dab in the middle of the kitchen or living room, in most cases).

Shuli’s tub is by the kitchen sink and in clear view of any location except the toilet in her apartment (and, if I lived there, I would make a collapsible tabletop that fits over the thing).

Anyway, Lars and I stayed there last night because Shuli is currently in the hospital and we needed to take care of her cat this morning anyway.

(Actually, Shuli is not just in the hospital, but also currently believes that she OWNS her building and the two buildings beside it, and she demanded that Lars hand over the keys. She also said that Lars is dead to her and shoved her out the door. And she insisted that her own cat is dead, even after Lars showed her photographs of us petting the cat.)

Poor Lars. She’s a good friend and went back for more abuse today because she knows Shuli will remember the visit when she’s back on her meds.


So, understandably, I’ve been thinking about Kate Millet’s Looney-Bin Trip a lot today—especially because Shuli discussed the premise with Kate in detail as she worked on the manuscript.

They both assert that people with mental illnesses have the right to choose whether or not they take medication and both insist that medications blunt their brilliance.

This is a complicated subject for me, since my mother has an adult-onset suicidal paranoid schizophrenic disorder which caused her, at various points in my childhood, to OD in an attempt to silence the voices, and wrap the piano in tinfoil in an attempt to silence the voices, and douse her children with witch hazel or Lysol or whatever she believes at the moment would keep us safe from the voices at that moment, and to ultimately shoot herself in an attempt to escape the voices.

These occurred while she was off her medication as we were trying to get her help (but when she did not yet qualify for help because she was not deemed an immediate threat to herself or someone else).

We did manage to involuntarily commit her twice—a legal procedure that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy—and this forced her to take the meds that keep her relatively functioning and, frankly, the meds have kept her on a fairly even keel over the years, so I have to say that I disagree with Kate and Shuli (but understand their resistance to meds).

They see the meds as blunting their brilliance, but it seems to me that mental illness is the real culprit here and not the meds.

Sure, mania can convince you that you are filled with brilliant perceptions as you crank out reams of writing (been on mania-inducing drugs; done that), but it can also convince you that your neighbor's mailbox requires you to kill them.

We're all familiar with those sad statistics too.

And the fact of the matter is that Shuli is not brilliant when she quits taking her meds.

Instead, she overflows her bathtub until the ceiling below hers collapses and sets her living-room floor on fire and stands in the middle of her apartment screaming until the police haul her away.

What a shitty-ass situation all around.

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!???