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( ).
that's the way it is sometimes.
It's 3:30 some fall afternoon, and we're stoned, like we always are when the weather is fine and school is out and we're 16. Spirit is playing on the 8 track: "It's nature's way of telling you---something's wrong--" But it doesn't feel like anything's wrong. Because we're young, and school's out for the day, and we're riding in Bobby's van, and Bobby and I are in love. My best friend tells me it's Narcissus resurrected,because Bobby and I have the same hair, waist length and wavy, and we're both tall and skinny and wear flannels and Levis and big hiking boots that slap a rhythm when we walk the halls between classes. But it's not the sameness that attracts me to him. He's all light outside, but darker, and deeper than me beneath that. He writes me poems; thick, strange pieces I show to no one. He calls me late at night-- we plan it to the second, so I can catch the phone before anyone else knows it's ringing-- and he tells me stories, true ones that leave me shaky and lead to twisted dreams.
Bobby comes from New Mexico, from Roswell--and that part sort of figures, because he landed like an alien last fall in our tidy Midwest town. His long hair, his thoughtful writer father with whom he shares a fancy northside townhouse-- they both seem foreign to this predictable place. I fell in love with him the minute I saw him walking down the school hall, looking both lost and familiar at the same time.
Bobby's mother is still in New Mexico. His dad split from her and moved here three years ago, but Bobby hung it out a couple years longer. She's an alcoholic. Not a happy, sentimental life-of-the-party drunk like my dad, but a passing-out, throwing up, desperate and dramatic alcoholic like you read about in those novels in the Young Adult section of the library. The kind the kid has to peel off the kitchen floor, spatula in one hand and whiskey bottle in the other, when you come home from school. The kitchen's filled with smoke, and the cookies in the oven-- her aborted attempt to play out the expected suburban mom role-- stare at you when you take them out, angry briquettes. And you want to leave her there, thinking maybe she'll be embarrassed to find herself on the floor with a urine puddle spreading out from her wrecked polyester pants, when she finally wakes up. But you don't, because maybe a neighbor kid will show up, and she's safer in the bedroom, where you can close the door and go on with the afternoon, turning on the TV and starting a casserole. The smokey smell still hanging in the kitchen, an accusation.
Sometimes if it's late, and Bobby can't sleep at all, there might be a tap on my window, or two or three. Sweetgum balls for the tree round the corner, usually, because I'm on the second story and it's an old house, with thin wavy glass panes, so his aim better be true but gentle.
I usually tell him I love him, then tell him to go away-- I don't want to wake the house up, don't want to risk my father's wrath-- but tonight, when I hear the tap, and it's 2 a.m., he ignores my waving him on after I greet him. And standing in the moonlight, he looks like an angel-- a tall thin Michael, both martyred and blessed. I slip down the stairs, out the side door, the one farthest away from my sleeping parents, and run to the sylvan enclave where he's waited before.
He's not there.
I wait a moment, look around, come out of the trees and see his van, lights off, motor running, Bobby at the wheel with his head bent. He doesn't look up when I walk to the window. "Hey, Bobby?"
I open the door, climb in, and he looks at me, and I see his face is all puffy from crying. He doesn't say anything, just slips the van into gear, and we roll away, tape deck setting the background. It's Nature's way of telling you---
"What's wrong, Bobby?" I ask him. "Wait", he says. We drive in silence. He turns at the entrance to a nearby park, pulls the van off the road. We walk to the lake's edge-- Shawnee Lake, home by day to golfers, sailboats, and noisy, giggly children. Deserted now, it seems a somber, empty place.
"Well", he begins. "She called tonight, crying. Said she couldn't take being alone anymore. Couldn't take my being so far away. She was drunk-- of course she was drunk!-- and I got angry. Told her she'd ruined enough of my evenings in New Mexico, and I'd be goddamned if she'd ruin them now, from a thousand miles away. Told her if she didn't like being alone she could damn well stop running everyone off. And I hung up."
We sit a long time, on a flat rock by the shore, watching the silver light play on the water. Bobby's head is tilted up, as if he's listening for something. I don't know what to say, so I don't say anything.
"She called back. She always does. I didn't even bother picking up, just let the machine get it, but I think she knew I was there, listening. She started right back in, raving about what an ungrateful son-of-a-bitch I was-- then stopping to laugh at her own word play-- 'Son of a bitch, huh? Is that what you call me? Drunken bitch? Well, maybe I am, but I know enough to take care of family, not run off on them when they're down in the worst way---'
"I turned the volume off. I couldn't stand it. I went out, went looking for you, or for dad. He was out working I guess. Couldn't find either one of you. I needed to talk. Wanted reassurance it was reasonable for me to be angry. I've fed her pity for years--- and it's milked me dry. I ended up driving around, feeling alternately confused and self-righteous. After a while I drove home."
"My father met me at the door. I could tell by the look on his face something was wrong."
"He'd listened to the message, the whole thing. At some point -- well, first she screamed at me some more, then she started in on him for a while. At some point she yelled, 'Pick up the phone, you heartless bastard!' Then nothing."
"Our old neighbor found her. Dad called him up, asked him to go check on her."
Bobby's face is a marble mask in the moonlight. We sit together, silently. Bobby leans over and picks out a smooth stone, sends it skittering across the path the moon has made on the water. The path breaks where the rock touches it; like glass, like porcelain, like a heart.
bokowski, while a great poet, was also a misogynist. an alcoholic. likely a junkie, if he had enough money.
i went to see love, actually tonight. it's a sweet, coppola kind of movie. lots of swelling music and everything's fine in the end. well, for some. enough pathos to reflect it doesn't work out for all of us.
a lot of the blogs on this line are about love. new love that's looking hopeful, thwarted love that's not, and the messy part that's here for the rest of it. i'm of a mind that love is a choice. the choices are often difficult ones.
here's a package that i've known lately:
those who want to be desired yet not known
those who are known yet not desired
i have mostly known the former. the one time i think i really knew both wasn't the right time for me.
so: you make choices. one choice is to love even without guarentees. when it isn't all wrapped up for you.
that's the way it goes.
"been speaking later and later in the day
Most days I don't talk 'till maybe 8 o'clock at night
It keeps me whole, keeps me holy
Keeps me way up in the mountains even when I"m on the road"
--new american language
nena and i took our notebooks for a night out to a nearby city to see songwriter dan bern. nena nursed her beer the first set, while i wished they sold jack daniels and stared off a while. we sketched the crowd and made up stories while waiting for the show.
he's bigger than you think he might be, lots of muscles and sweat, and when he sings his face takes on the clearness of one who is doing exactly what he should be, and loving it. he played for hours, busting four strings, alternating coffee and beer, digging into pockets of politics, dreamscapes, strange dips into cultural references, both classic and those still in their 15th minute of fame.
"Shakespeare's got no use for thick black glasses
Who sit and dissect tragedies in college English classes
Shakespeare's sick of words, Shakespeare's sick of letters
Shakespeare watches videos, the dirtier the better"
his eyes are sharp, and there's no painful sincerity, no whiny-ass complaining, no pithy hallmark-card truths. some of his songs were little bits, sideway glances into a slice of time. others were introspective without boring us. his views on matters of the heart are not sentimental.
"For three years I did nothing except drive
I guess I needed to meditate
I guess I could have gone into a monastery
But they don't let you listen to talk radio
I read your palm, I said you will find love
But it might not be that important"
you hear someone who's a little weary, but not bitter yet.
"everything is changing faster than I can describe
All I really know to do is grab the wheel and drive
I look for love, and some adventure
And I try not to let my own breathing scare me off the road"
dan's a prolific writer-- over 400 songs, covering controversial topics like abortion and silicon implants, dylanic sets of talkin' blues, miniaturist ray carver songs about ordinary people and pop icons caught in tiny landscapes. he's all over the map musically as well, switching from sparse and gentle wrap-around backgrounds to string-busting pounds.
"And every place I go is one less place I could call home
And every girl I kiss, well I just cross her off my list
I don't go far, I just go crazy
I buried all of my old clothes out in some field in West Des Moines
sometimes I think the thing to do
Would be to get a nice place way out in Missouri
Put down as many months' rent as you can part with
Tell everybody else you went to France"
somedays I couldn't agree more.
you get a sense of him, but there's room in there for you to find a little of yourself too. that's what makes songs work: finding some piece of truth that sticks, no matter how small. that's why we need singers: someone who can translate our truths back for us, so we can recognize them out in the air. artists are our culture's boundary walkers, sitting between us and heaven, and letting us know what's happening when we lose our language. we get grateful.
"And there's a black tornado, black tornado
Spinning around in my body sometimes
Black tornado, black tornado
Spinning around in my body sometimes"
I can relate, nena writes in her notebook.
"Everybody's shifty
Some secret's in the air
Half of me wants to crack the code
The other half don't care
I wouldn't bat an eyelid
If right now someone said
Boy, the folks you're talking to
Have been a hundred years dead"
dan has a diverse fan base: punks, alt-country fans, folkies, intellectual politicos, arty readers of thick russian novels. What do you expect from a hillbilly intellectual kentucky jew? his music is in stuck in the non-descriptive "singer/songwriter" blackhole but he ain't your daddy's folksinger. check him out at www.danbern.com.
someone showed me this brilliant sight--
http://members.cox.net/impunity/endofworld.swf
which in reality should be more painful than funny, but when you can't cry much more, you might as well laugh.
but if you need something a bit more caloric than cathartic:
www.muffinfilms.com/psst.html
for joey. and others connected.
thomas mann, the german novelist, said: "if you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere. you even smell it."
my dreams about interrupted journeys. joey's nena, my nena. mothers everywhere.
when my mother died i saw bits of her everywhere during the time grief was so present i wasn't. seeing something of her shoke me back alive, over and over, until i was.
we look for what we need to see, and what we can't bear to see but need to, our unconscious pushes to us like an insistent mother:
"eat. eat!"
over and over we are presented with what we need to know, first in symbols, later in skillets on the head. finally we give up. "zanoog est zanoog." enough, already. we get it.
jung talked a lot about synchonicity, the idea of meaningful coincidence that could not be explained except by seeing them in a deeper, spiritual context. however, he didn't separate science from the spiritual context. for a longwinded bit on this, see
http://www.innerexplorations.com/catchmeta/mys3.htm, which begins...
"There seemed no way to explain them through the normal action of cause and effect, and yet it seemed wrong to write them off as pure chance...Jung...reasoned that if these events were not causally connected, perhaps they were the manifestations of some acausal connecting principle. He was encouraged along these lines because it seemed that modern physics, in developing quantum theory, had broken with causality, and "shattered the absolute validity of natural law and made it relative.. The philosophical principle that underlies our conception of natural law is causality. But if the connection between cause and effect turns out to be only statistically valid and only relatively true, then the causal principle is only of relative use for explaining natural processes and therefore presupposes the existence of one or more other factors which would be necessary for an explanation. This is as much as to say that the connection of events may in certain circumstances be other than causal, and requires another principle of explanation."
a more lyrical look at this: http://www.psiexplorer.com/jung_video.html
eventually, if the cigar is only a cigar, we are left looking at nothing but ashes. but if there is something else we are meant to find, the cigar stalks us.
sometimes we go into a deep, dark space, that feels like death. fall can feel like dying, winter like death-- but the cutting off of the outside light drives us inward, and eventually we stop distracting ourselves long enough to listen.
what is it we are hearing?
don't worry. even if we were distracted, it will come back. louder and louder.
sometimes we need a whisper. sometimes a grenade.
birthday intentions for my new year
--------------------
a few days past the point, but the intention is there...
these things take time to germinate.
-------------
last year's resolution was to be brave. and i think i made it, some-- cracking open here and there, to myself if not to others. this year: to go deep. to be more present in relationship. to listen harder. to not be afraid of my own fire. to not rein in so hard, so often, when i am with people who think they love me. to let myself not just love them, but depend on them some. to not always be the ear, but sometimes the voice.
spirit: to allow awe. to go to the woods more: i need it. it's where i breathe best.
to live more in my skin and less in my head.
to be more honest. with myself and with my friends and partner. to worry less and be here more. to take my knocks when i deserve them. to decline them when i don't.
to continue to acknowledge those who make a difference, and be grateful.
for the past few months i have had a recurring dream, variations on a theme of a journey started and interrupted. in each i am attempting to travel somewhere and must make a connection in order to complete the trip home. in each i am in a foreign or unfamiliar setting, usually accompanied. the person(s) with me are only serving to get me to the drop-off point though, and if and when i leave i'll be alone. there are always difficulties in obtaining tickets.
the settings vary. trains often, planes at least twice. last night it was a bus to get to the train that would connect me to the plane. i walked with my companion to the station. we were deep in conversation, juggling my luggage, weaving around the other passengers. we settled in for a wait and lost ourselves again. when i next looked up, the station was empty, and only the disapproving worker there with us, saying "i called the departure twice."
in the dreams i sometimes realize that my distractions-- the conversations with friends, the stopping for a last drink, the chatting up of strangers-- will keep me from getting home, at least for a long while.
it wasn't until this afternoon that i made the connection between this and a song written for my birthday a few years ago. when i first heard it i thought it so sad. also telling-- truer than i wanted it to be.
one verse went:
"Now you stand at the station and you look at the sky
And the train rolled in and it went on by
You had packed up your suitcase, you had saved up the fare
And you don't know why, but you're still standing there"
i am always starting things. and i am not very good at ending them.
"With your barroom poems and your Sinatra songs
With your twenty notebooks each five pages long
With your secret hideout made of leaves and mud
With your pocket knife and your roaring blood"
tonight i went for tea with nena. she asked if i'd been writing and i said no, not really. she grabbed my book and it had the same five pages from the last time we'd met-- the five i'd written that night.
i started a story and i don't know how to finish it.
10en20 (1o poems in 20 minutes)
ancient secrets
-----------------
deep in our cells is the dust from
exploded stars, some atoms carried
in a hot wind at the beginning of
time. no wonder we wander,
looking for that hot light we
know we were a part of,
long before we knew of knowing.
die trying
-----------
wax and feathers
and a wish for that return:
I don't pity icarus
or those who die trying
who's lurking
--------------
quiet shadow readers
don't think we don't know
you have a story
now you've done it
-------------------
now you done it
now you said it
there's cat, here's bag
and didn't we dread it
on board for the duration
--------------------------
not like you didn't have a choice--
a sophie's one, but hey,
it's a free country
except for the taxes
except for how you pay
Lurkin', and lovin'
------------------------
flowsy posy poetrix pie
scared the poets and made them fly
if winslow and amy would come to play
flo would shut her mouth someday
still out here on the porch
----------------------------
I rock because I like the sound it makes, wood on wood and sometimes
there are leaves get in there too, which gives a good rustling
sound. also rocking is exercise and soothes what gets broken in me:
after 20 years what do you expect from all these parts we got?
pie at st. ignace
-------------------
it's humble, which you expected
with a crummy crust
but all sorts of summer
in every red sticky bite
yank the baby
--------------
yank the baby gentle
rock the baby slow
sing the baby sleep
kiss the baby so
hush the baby soft
cry the baby sweet
love the baby long
give the baby teat
hold the baby high
sleep the baby low
wrap the baby snug
watch the baby glow
human vegetable
----------------
eve's garden
grew one
with a nixon nose
(winslow's turn)
Walter turned in his bed, looking to his left at the figure of the Ghost of Marriage's Future. And with that she softened into a column of mist. And then was gone. A coolness passed over his left arm, and he pulled it inside the warm rough blankets. Outside, the sound of carriages and the horse's clopping hooves began to soften, and he sensed that it must be snowing. The canon's roar receded, and he listened to a steed with jangling bells passing left to right, and he listened as the holiday sound softened into silence.
"Ah, and what shall I get my beloved for Christmas? If only FedEx was founded she could have it on the 'morow", he said aloud, to no one.
Or was it to himself? It seemed that only now was he able to and speak, and hear, and see. As if a huge cabbage leaf had been lifted from his soul....
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