Not really. But his work is packed so very densely with meaning, it really does feel like consulting a sage sometimes.
I've only mentioned him around the house two or three times in the past year because whenever I say his name, my partner gets visibly jealous. ^_~
(He shouldn't be.)
That, up there. That, from a man who hung himself. Makes me wonder if true love for humanity is incompatible with enjoyment of dwelling in its midst ("it" being that mindless, helmless, ever-crashing sea of people). Everywhere I look, love and fear comingle and intertwine, feeding on each other like AURYN in the hands of the Childlike Empress.
Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can't be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won't be squeezed into an either/or. With each clause, we're taken further and further from trite conclusions — or that at least is the hope — and away from reductionism, as if the writer were a dentist, saying "Open wider" so that he can probe the tender, neglected spaces in the reader (though in this case it's not the mouth that he's attending to but the mind).
My favorite musical memories from childhood are of times when I was sitting shotgun in my big sister's little red Mazda. No a/c, so she'd roll down the windows and end up getting a tan on her left arm from resting it on the door... and I'd get a lighter tan on my right arm from copying her whenever I was along for the ride. She used to take me to a park by an ice cream shop, where I remember reenacting those "BRAIN FREEEEEEZE!!!" Slurpee commercials and collapsing into giggles. Other times we'd go to the waterfront with a loaf of bread and feed ducks. She's 12 years older than me, and way more upbeat than I am, and I just thought she was sooo cool and fun.
Listening to Huey Lewis and the News is what I remember most of all. I think she had Hard at Play and Sports. If I had to pick one song that takes me back the most, it'd be "Heart and Soul".
Unlike my other favorite Huey Lewis songs, I haven't listened to it much since then, so it really helps jog my memory of what things were like at the time I was listening to it a lot. I doubt I ever saw the video as a kid, but I knew I wanted to grow up and be like the woman in that song. Or like the woman in Bonnie Raitt's "Nobody's Girl". Terrible, brainwashing children like that, haha. We're poisoned before we even begin.
I don't know why Huey Lewis has such a bad rap, though. Sure, the lyrics aren't the deepest... but that shit'll turn your frown upside down.
goddammit, i don't even.
I remember, too, the songs my father sung around the house. I didn't know who Bob Dylan was, but sometimes my dad would get this far-off look in his eyes and sing:
Buckets of rain Buckets of tears Got all them buckets coming out of my ears Buckets of moonbeams in my hand You got all the love honey baby I can stand.
He usually only ever sang the first stanza. And even if he was smiling, I'd know he wasn't happy at all.
I was looking for a different Weldon Kees poem and ran across this one.
---
TO THE NORTH
If I, like others in their burrowings,
Could find some acre of the past to praise,
There might be substitutes for noise and blurs:
The comforts of asylum, strict, assured,
That nourish when the light dies in the glass.
But the mind must crouch, suspicious, veer away,
And focus into idiot light the days
Of other whippings, exiles, sicknesses
Where the horror of history from cave
To camp to the coffins of yesterday
Burns to a single ash.
Where is the grave
Of Time? What would you picture for decay?
A horse's hoof, white bones, a lifeless tree,
Cold hemispheres, dried moss, and a blue wave
Breaking at noon on shores you will not see.
---
So melancholic. It doesn't fit my mood right now. But one of the most fascinating aspects of human memory, for me, is how we remember best the moments that align with the state in which we currently find ourselves. When I was in it deep with PTSD, or whatever you want to call it, all I could remember were terrible things. I knew, rationally, that my life had not really been a plodding circus train consisting of car after connected car, all peeling paint and full of shit and straw and artifice and broken animals. But it was hard to see much more than that. Sometimes impossible.
I am remembering so many sweet, happy things nowadays. :-)
Oh, and if (like me) you were thinking "That guy totally bit it, didn't he?" ...yes, he apparently did. Disappeared near the Golden Gate at 41.
---
Because I am moving, my garden will be someone else's soon. I don't really care much about anything there that hasn't already been harvested. I don't even care if the new residents care for the plants and eat them, or just let it all rot on the vines; I am done with it all and ready to be out of here. This house is haunted to me and to him, because our lives over the past three years have been so unhappy here. Not desperately unhappy, most of the time. Just leaning subtly toward stagnation and ruin.
A couple months ago I thought I'd have to learn to grow in place here, even though it felt stifling and I wanted to run. I didn't like the idea of growing in place... for some reason it's so much easier to change yourself when your surroundings change, too. And it's just a stupid impulse, too, a wordless protective strategy on some level. Like fleeing. Not always the guaranteed best choice in the end, but still something you might sometimes do in the face of challenge because you've got to do something. I am, after all, still the girl who ran from death all the way to another country, where I got smacked in the face with an even bigger serving of it. But I was ready to subdue my instincts and make this place work for me. Or change me to fit this place. Then--happily--circumstances beyond my control swung unexpectedly in a favorable direction and there was a way out after all.
Here We Go Magic - Alone But Moving
I planted miner's lettuce (also called purslane) this spring because it charmed me to think of my douchebag great-great-whatever-grandfather, who left his wife and nine kids to go to the Gold Rush and there died after many years idling about and cavorting with whores and perhaps munching on wild purslane to prevent scurvy, as so many miners did.
(His last letter home, paraphrased: "Lucinda, I do not remember the name of our youngest boy. So, if you please, rename him Edward after me. And send me some money. XOXO")
Anyhow, that was my favorite plant this year. It tastes lemony.
I also planted ground cherries (not the hallucinogenic kind!). They're such a mystical looking little fruit. I guess that's why there are so many legends about them. Mine were a yellow and green edible variety native to the US, not the ornamental variety above... but I think the orange ones (also called Chinese lanterns) are better looking. Some legends say they are a fertility symbol, others that they are lamps to guide the deceased. Myself, I planted them in part because I had a strange dream about a strange girl hatching out of one. I don't believe in the spiritual aspects of it, but it's still a pretty symbol to me.
That was the plant that meant the most to me to be able to harvest. I didn't think we'd get to have those, as they didn't look ready to turn even a couple days ago... but just in time the plant dropped off four little husk-wrapped bundles today, one for each of us. Not bad!
This is a dreadful question for someone who does not dance. And I'm afraid I would not, could not, do not dance. Dance like a child, yes. Dance like an adult, no... not without plenty of time, space, and loads and loads of patience. And I won't enjoy it very much, even with all those accommodations.
And not only can't/don't/won't I dance, I think I must have had a lobotomy at birth in my dance appreciation center. I just don't get it.
Modern party-dance is simply writhing to suggestive music. It is ridiculous, silly to watch and excruciatingly embarrassing to perform. It is ridiculous, and yet absolutely everyone does it, so that it is the person who does not want to do the ridiculous thing who feels out of place and uncomfortable and self-conscious... in a word, ridiculous. Right out of Kafka: the person who does not want to do the ridiculous thing is the person who is ridiculous... Modern party-dance is an evil thing.
That's from good ol' DFW, in The Broom of the System. Which I have not read. I can't add much of value to that. Although it isn't just modern party-dance that appears so strange to me, it's most dancing, period. Ballet? The alleged beauty is almost entirely lost on me. It just looks like an unnecessarily complex, dull, and conspicuous kind of social signaling, and a little bit of a straight-up status/mating dance.
I'm not saying I'm special for disliking this particular game. It's a game I could never possibly win, so of course I don't prefer it. And we're all signaling. I'm signaling right now. Aren't I so cute and special-after-all and smart and different, for a woman? (AREN'T I?!?!? lol) Aren't I such a valuable, perceptive part of my group? Aren't I totally irreplaceable?
Wallace signaled and he hated himself for it sometimes. And he hated himself for it verbally, in public, which was also signaling, and which he knew was signaling even though he also knew it felt compelling and honest and good and necessary and attractive as fuck. Attractive as the air we breathe.*
And he said so. And he said all of it. Repeatedly. More signaling. You could make an infinite spiral of this heartbreaking game of catching yourself being human, if you were going to live forever. In fact, if you did, I'd find that very attractive. This is all so messed up. Kind of funny, too. But mostly messed up. Mostly I don't want this, i.e., the way things are.
So I know other people notice things about me and my passions and the words I choose to use that would make me very, very uncomfortable to think about all the time. Just like I might notice theirs. It's just that this one (dancing) is not my bag.
I made the mistake a couple times of dating people who were very good dancers. They didn't seem to mind that I didn't dance so well (which was nice of them). But almost everybody likes to be genuinely appreciated for what they do awesomely. I wanted to be nice, too, so I tried to be appreciative... but I couldn't dodge the fact that inside, on some level, I really felt more like Condescending Wonka.
Oh, so you like dancing. Isn't that precious?
Not the greatest foundation for everlasting mutual devotion.
I didn't want to feel that way. It's not that I look down on dancing from an intellectual standpoint; I recognize that humanity by and large loves dance, that I'm the odd one out, not them. But can you make yourself be moved when you're not?
Or, contrariwise, can you make yourself not feel moved when you are?
(Actually, I think the answer to that second question is, "Yes, with great difficulty." At least in my experience. But I still don't know the answer to the first.)
I thought about answering something by The Brian Setzer Orchestra. Like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I don't mind swing too much. But it doesn't really make me dance. It just makes dancing tolerable when something else is the real motivator.
Sooo...
Bananaphone by Raffi.
Ding-a-ling-ling-ling-ling-ling-ling-ling!
---
*Sometimes I think about how Elliott Smith stabbed himself in the heart, Gary Webb shot himself in the head (twice!), and Wallace hung. I will never do any of this, mind you, but I feel I am most like those who walk out in the forest and wait for the world to kill them through sheer exposure to it.
...but back in my day we bought albums, not songs. Songs we stole from the radio on cassettes. My first album was Seal's second eponymous album. I bought it because of Prayer for the Dying. The album was released in 1994 but I didn't buy it until a couple years later, when I was 14 or 15. I almost didn't buy it at all.
Why?
There's a naked man on the cover!
I know, it's very pretty and tasteful, isn't it? Not exactly porno here. Nothing to be ashamed of at all. But my friends didn't drive yet and so I only ever went to the record store with my parents and I was afraid they'd think I was, like, into naked guys or something. (Which maybe I was, maybe I wasn't, but back then that was one of the dark, terrible secrets of puberty.)
When I finally worked up the guts to buy it one day at the store with my allowance (this took YEARS, remember), I felt I had to couch it like a confession.
I was so nervous, I was definitely sweating. I don't blush, but if I did, it would have been fierce.
And my mom glanced at it and was like, "Whatever. He's cute." Then she went back to browsing Doobie Brothers compilation albums or something.
The second album I bought was Pigeonhed's Flash Bulb Emergency Overflow Cavalcade of Remixes. I bought it shortly afterward and under similar circumstances (as in, I was chock full of unnecessary angst and nervousness). Only this time, instead of being embarrassed over SEX, I was embarrassed because I knew this was an album for Bad Ass Mutha Fuckas. I wasn't sure yet what the hell I was, but I was pretty sure I didn't qualify as one of those.
This baby, I had to track down. It was so fly, you couldn't even find it at regular record stores. When I finally located a copy, it was in a store that to me appeared to be populated entirely with people far, far older and cooler than my stupid self. My mom point blank refused to go in with me, so I was on my own. I had no idea where to begin to look for what I wanted and I had to ask for help from a guy in leather, with a real mohawk and tons of piercings, the nature of which I could barely comprehend. (Had he really driven spikes of iron through his flesh?!) He thinks I'm a nerd, definitely he thinks I'm a nerd or a prep, he thinks why the hell is a pansy ass little girl like this in my place of employment... my brain was a total bastard to me that day.
But Mohawk rung me up without betraying the slightest hint of a negative judgment (very unlike my asshole daymare premonitions of what would happen). As he handed me back the album he looked straight at my face and said, "You've got the best taste in music of any girl I know."
And that was the last time a boy ever said anything explicitly nice about my musical predilections.
See, there's a quiz going around. I'm a sucker for these things. Back in the heydays of Livejournal, I used to make fun of people who would post every silly little quiz that came along. Then I'd post a good portion of them, too.
I know. If I ever get a tattoo, it should probably be the word "hypocrite". In cyrillic script, because being vaguely cryptic is cooler than stating things outright. Not that I would ever do anything because it's cool. *cough*
(Speaking of LJ... remember when you needed an invite code to join the beta? I do. And I did. And, call me a crotchety half-luddite if you like, but things were better back then. You know--when the internet was still a haven for the disaffected soulful/intellectual types on the fringes of our culture and there weren't any image search services that can look you up by your FACE.)
ID THIS, BITCHES
Anyhow.
The quiz is about songs and pretty much goes like this:
1) What's the first song you bought?
2) What song gets you dancing?
3) What song takes you back to childhood?
4) What's the perfect love song?
5) What song do you want played at your funeral?
6) What song IS you?
What fun! I'm always making playlists like this in my head.
In fact, a big part of my "recovery" (bwahaha, riiight) from Unnamed Traumatic Event(s) involved making a sort of interior musical scrapbook. I used to work on this when I would go out running, especially. It was a bit like a memory palace. For each song I chose for this project, I'd pull out associated memories and images and mentally paste them on a page of the book. Sometimes I'd make a "video" to go with the song. These weren't necessarily negative images, just relevant ones, often symbolic interpretations and stories rather than literal memories.
When I was done with the book, I mentally put the entire thing in a fire. Now I don't have it anymore. I did not forget what occurred in real life that impacted me so gravely (nor would I want to), but I did succeed in making select maladaptive aspects of the aftermath into something apart from myself and therefore less poignant. I don't mean that I made myself unfeeling, in case that's not already starkly obvious from my ongoing bloggy tales of woe and uber-sensitivity. More like... on a scale of 0-100, with zero being a cold, affectless psychopath and 100 being the extreme level of emotional pain that results in attempts at self-termination, I rappelled carefully and slowly down from level 95 to, say, 71. Not from 100 straight to zero... which--aside from being undesirable--is probably in most cases impossible.
On a side note... oddly enough, I actually have forgotten virtually all of the images that I chose for the mental scrapbook, as if my record of it really were obliterated when I "burned" it. I find this a wee bit spooky, the degree to which we can hack ourselves when we really try (or when we luck out in the way we go about it, I suppose). But it's also very useful, so I'm not complaining.
I should note that I don't necessarily recommend this technique of mine. I made it up myself and have no idea if it would be harmful to someone else.
Whew. That was a darker turn. Let's get back to the quiz.
On second thought, I have so much to say about this, it's gonna be a 6-part series. Seven, counting this intro. Brace yourself.
All I wanted was to move past the negative experiences I’d had and work towards piecing my life back together. But I realized that the pain I felt was trying to tell me something: I would not be able to forget and move on as though none of this had happened. In a way, I think the disgust and pain we feel when we see or experience something horrific can be the greatest catalyst for creating positive change. When we experience something firsthand we are better equipped to understand it—and with that understanding we can educate others and give real support to those who are also experiencing it. We can see its flaws and weak points, and we can use this knowledge to criticize, discredit, and eventually destroy it.
How would you react if instead of supporting the American civil rights movement in the 1960s, you were told the major problem was that people were being affected by a mental illness called ‘post-discrimination stress disorder’?
These are the remarks of a man who has suffered an irreparable break with reality, a man who who has rendered himself unable to connect obviously related facts. If Obama genuinely meant these comments -- if he understood how these remarks apply with far greater force to him ("we may never understand what leads anybody to terrorize their fellow human beings like this") -- his realization of the monster he has allowed himself to become would reduce him to gibbering incoherence for the remainder of his life. In varying degrees, the same is true of any individual who remains in the national government at this point.
In a sense, these quacks have no more reliable allies than Stewart and Colbert. For the ultimate ethos of their television programs is this: the customer is always right. We need not give in to sorrow, or feel disgust, or take action, because our brave clown princes have the tonic for what ails the national spirit. Their clever brand of pseudo-subversion guarantees a jolt of righteous mirth to the viewer, a feeling that evaporates the moment their shows end. At which point we return to our given role as citizens: consuming whatever the quacks serve up next.
---
I think they have a common thread.
Granted, that thread may double as the yellow brick road leading to the shining, green towers of The Disillusioned City, where you're fated to pull back a pretty curtain and learn that the world is ruled by one tiny, mortal man, forever wanking.
Still.
They're all very good, but if you click only one link, let it be Arthur Silber's piece. His thoughts are very much along the lines of what was going on in my own head upon hearing our Dear Leader's reaction to what happened in Aurora.
I'm not sure what kind of reaction I want out of my fellow citizens at this point. A few months ago I was having thoughts like "If only they knew..." or "If only they were enraged enough... then they would do something." Those fantasies seem as far away as Oz itself now. Lots of people do know. And lots of people are enraged. And yet little of interest is occurring on our side. Are we actually unable to think up a viable plan to help right our nations' ill-mapped courses? Or are we (for whatever reason) unable to implement the plans we hatch? Are we too scared, too busy, too vulnerable, too sick? All of the above, I guess. Maybe we're all waiting on each other.
I'd love to change the world
But I don't know what to do
So I'll leave it up to you
As for me and my house, lately we are busy planning the coming insurrection playing the new Skyrim expansion pack. Well, that along with getting stronger, getting out more, and improving our gallows humor. I think I'm aiming in part to adopt the demeanor of my grandparents and great-grandparents, particularly their resilience and flexibility in the face of challenges.
I have a few stories to tell about the changes in my own neighborhood since the economy tanked, but I'll save those for later (they're not that great).
Oh, and here are the first two pea pods from my very own garden, built, planted, and nurtured by my own two hands. Pea blossoms look so demure until they suddenly drop a giant dong-like pod right out from the middle of their dainty little folds. Then the jig is up and the flowers fall off, having served their purpose.
In another few days those peas fattened up and we shucked and ate them raw.
