but you really should wear a helmet

I have been neglectful, forgive me. I permitted myself to get weighed down in the details of eveyday living. The details then become life, and at some point I stop seeing or thinking and only respond to "what's for dinner?"
I saw you riding your bike a few days ago. I nearly honked my horn but you looked so peaceful with those curls flying in the air.
How jealous I am of you at times. I too own a bicycle. It sits gathering dust bunnies in my garage, taunting me and making me feel guilty. I see you riding and I wish I had it in me to ride. I wish was the kind of person to order a salad because I actually wanted one. You do that. I want to take a book to a coffee house and sit and just read. You do that. I want to go for walks just because. You do that.
I wish I wish I want.
To be more like you.

forgive me

Neruda poem sent via email by G.

Forgive me
If you are not living
If you, beloved, my love,
If you have died
All the leaves will fall on my breast
It will rain on my soul all night, all day
My feet will want to march to where you are sleeping
But I shall go on living

(English translation by Donald D. Walsh )

No, perdóname.
Si tú no vives,
si tú, querida, amor mío, si tú
te has muerto,
todas las hojas caerán en mi pecho,
lloverá sobre mi alma noche y día,
la nieve quemará mi corazón,
andaré con frío y fuego
y muerte y nieve,
mis pies querrán marchar hacia donde tú duermes, pero seguiré vivo,
porque tú me quisiste sobre
todas las cosas indomable,
y, amor, porque tú sabes que soy no sólo un hombre
sino todos los hombres

I See Dead People

It appears that at least for the moment I can not escape ghosts. Do you see your own ghosts? I was at Jason's Deli the other night picking up dinner. I have been feeling guilty over not giving the kids homecooked meals, Jason's is close to homecooked I believe. I stood there by the cashier waiting and I looked over and there they were. My ghosts. I saw Eric sitting at the table eating gumbo, (this Eric ghost was well into illness and could barely eat). I saw two of the kids pushing another table to ours to accomidate all of us. I saw my little boy filling his drink cup with six different sodas. And I saw me. Happily fussing with the baby trying to get her chubby little legs to go through the insanely small holes of the highchair.
I saw.
My response to the apparition? I burst into tears. The man behind the counter looked at me oddly, but I knew no one would dare ask me if I was okay. A woman crying in public is a sure way to be left alone. I grabbed the food and took a quick glance at the ghosts, they were still there and paid no attention to me at all. I had a good carthatic cry the entire way home and then fed the children. We don't go to Jason's Deli anymore, we only get takeout. Now I know why. Too many ghosts. I try to avoid them when I can, and I am afraid of leaving them at the same time. My ghosts bind me emotionally and geographically.
You need to rethink that quote. Yes, I do believe it is better to have loved and lost...blah blah blah.
But loving is easy. The tricky part is finding someone to let you love them the way you want, and loving them all the more for it.
Ugh, all this talk of love and ghosts, I fear I am living in a Bronte sisters novel.
Maybe love IS a battlefield.
N, I really don't mean to make light of this, it is just at the moment I am sick of myself.

the dead and the living

I keep thinking about my grandmother’s house, snooping through my mother’s old notebooks and drawing books. For pages she had written over and over again, in variously stylized fonts, “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” I am not throwing that back at you, G, I am just struck by the irony of it, that you would have, could have (in a box, with a fox) loved and been loved so profoundly, and had that ripped away from you. Whereas I, and people like my mother, stumble through life with those phrases tautly poised about us in scripted artifice, stylized posturing, yet never love, never really being loved. Is there a God after all? Sometimes I doubt it, sometimes I feel that absence like a deep cold ache in my bones.

I thought about you this morning--I went out on the deck for my second cup of coffee and smoked one of my coveted, emergency cigarettes. Yes, I have decided to take up smoking to quit drinking. Smokers seem like accomplishers, whereas drinkers just slowly melt into a pathetic puddle of inaction. Maybe we can have one together sometime, and poke at this soft-bodied creature called longing. I will say, emphatically, that I do not cringe from your Eric-ology. But then I spend most of my time contemplating the dead. I look forward to your exploring to whatever extent--photos, memories, fragments of any sort that you might need to sew this shroud, or this ball gown to dance in.

W.H. Sebald wrote, “And so they are always returning to us, the dead. At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots.”

The Other Side Of The Nostalgia Coin

Do you mean to tell me that in eight months I will not be enlightened, self assured, and able to take the world on with a smile?
I don't believe it!
But in the meantime:
We cross ideas again at the same time and I am ever amused how differently. This is something I have been mulling over as future fodder for the book I am currently pregnant with.
Certain nostalgia makes other people cringe. I want to talk about Eric, I have to keep him alive in some way, I have my pictures and letters, and videos. I need to talk about him. To share him with others brings him closer to me. But I have learned that it makes people uncomfortable, even if I am laughing about a memory often people do not know how to react. I put this down to their own fears of mortality. Can I be selective in my nostalgia? I think some of it should be outlawed. Some things just should stay in the past, which lead me to think that there should be a law against year books, old journals, and especially any memorabilia of any sort. Polititians know this but have yet to learn it. I am tempted even to add photos to the list. What good comes of the 39 year old me looking at the 28 year old me and thinking, "Damn, I looked so good and did not even know it! I was so happy and had no clue!" Does it make me appreciate the 39 year old me that I am now? Nope. Will I look back on me now and chastise myself for not laughing enough or loving enough? Probably, but will that even change my future self? Doubt it.
As for journals, do I really need to re-read my teen years to see what an egotistical, self-righteous obnoxious person I was? Hell, I live with four teenagers now, I don't need to revisit my own teen angst, my house is rife with it. And having teens who are curious about everything, they will surely find what you have hidden away and will ask you, "Mom, who was Bobby McDade and why did he tell you to meet him at the mall every Friday?"
The other day my daughter came across a small bag of pins I used to wear in highschool. Before I could snatch the evil memorabilia away she had already claimed them. I gave in figuring she would lose interest. My past was not so easily dismissed. The next morning she proudly bore upon her shirt a few of the pins. THE DOORS...LOVE IS A BATTLEFIELD...I HEART ED (not sure who Ed was but glad I hearted him at one time...of course I also hearted JOHN, TED, and naturally BOBBY).
These pins I can handle, it wasn't until I looked at her adorned purse that I thought of the Law To Rid The Past. There on the strap were two bright blue pins. the first "WANNA SUCK FACE?" The second and most humiliating "IF YOU GET ANY CLOSER,INTRODUCE YOURSELF".
Seeing those pins brought back many memories of hours spent being a mall rat in New Jersey, making mixed tapes, getting my hair as big as possible while simultaneously trying to create bangs that appeared to float on my forehead. And swimming in all that nostalgia my only reaction was to reach for a Xanax.
Can we create selective memory N.? Or will I be forever doomed to a lifetime of prescriptive drugs?

a doctrine of nostalgia

this is interesting, because I have been so immersed lately in Husserl and Heidegger (which invariably leads to Nietsche and Foucault) and I have been deepy concerned about nostalgia. I am not sure how nostalgia fits into phenomenology, but for me, there is no drug more addictive than this--this sifting through photos and letters, travelling through the past on the timeless light beam of intention. That is after all what held the phenomenological reality together, the intention of our minds, which did not render the rest of the world non-existent, but subjugated to the ground, not the prominent figure.

Susan and I once identified a nostalgia for forty--we were, neither one of us then, yet forty, and we perceived that age to be the time when the world fell in alignment at your feet, when we answered to no man, when we obtained absolute, unviolable freedom.

I can hear you giggling, you of not yet forty years...

I am reminded of the beautiful British film, Truly Madly Deeply, where she would rather sacrifice every moment of her living existence for the fleeting, unsatisfying and incomplete experiences of her dead husband's ghost. We are always chasing after what is lost, like Ariadne's thread, trying to retrace our steps back to the place that is no longer; and I speak only for myself--not as one who has suffered the shattering loss of a loved one. I cannot imagine.

I love your nostalgia. And I love, that through these pouring outs of the love in us for what is gone, that we somehow redeem the world. Maybe I am mistaken, but I think that when I create my own philosophy, it will be the doctrine of nostalgia, and the active re-membering, through unceasing vigils, by the fearless at heart, for what is lost.

no title

Jeff Foxworthy Laughed.

I like that Sophie is looking for the right word. She is just learning the words for things whereas more often I am trying to remember the words for things.
Please watch Strangers In Good Company. Know that is in entirely unscripted and so beautiful. I think you will fall in love with the ex-nun. Escape into it.
My step son is here this week and as always it is bittersweet. He is so much like his father and neither of them ever saw a connection. How cruel that I am the one to see it. I wish they knew. It should not be me that gets to have him, it should be his father. I have inherited so much and I question daily if I am capable and worthy of it all. The Universe screwed up.
G.

secret codes

I have not seen that movie, but I am happy know of it because my life has been reduced to a series of hollow intellectual activities, and escapism is much closer to feeling real than I ever feel in my waking life. Why does any one of us do what we do? Dostoievski said that there is no meaning in anything--that searching for meaningfulness is an illness.

It is all the same anyway, just different codes for the nostalgia we feel for what remains unnamed. Your man dancing at the bus stop was a language for something you perceived about the world--even I could not really decode it, but I knew what it was pointing to was important and perhaps unnamable in any other tongue. You could be speaking sign language, and I could be watching, mystified, humbled by the beauty and poetry, though what you might be saying was something utterly simple, like, the water here tastes funny.

Sophie and I were walking behind Quacks the other day when she pointed to something on the ground and struggled to find the word for it--a box? I offered. No, she rejected emphatically. I thought harder. A crate, I said. She was visibly relieved--Yes, that’s it, a crate. Why is it that we feel such satisfaction with the precise word, the impossible exactitude of naming a thing?

Today I was walking and came across the syllables of another language--a litter of jasmine flowers strewn across the ground, with no jasmine bushes in sight. Then a walking cane, abandoned in the grass, then a few feet farther on a bicycle lock with no bicycle. I felt the nostalgia for what was named, I intuited somewhere inside me what these things codified, something like ineffable freedom, unlikely escape. Maybe the same phrase as a man dancing at a bus stop? No. There was no joy in these things, just randomness, release, for a while, from what had formerly held them meaningful.


Maybe I will try not thinking about meaning at all--but just being in this little skin of mine. Impossible. I am reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged right now, which seems to be a disturbing pro-capitalist treatise on exalting the human being above all else. I am confused, G, pretty damn confused. Who is Jeff Foxworthy?

you are write

In response to your last entry I have written and deleted at least three different versions of this blog. It does not help at all that I have a seven year old talking nonstop in my ear while I am trying to write. Kids fighting in the other room, at least 2 TV's on with contrasting shows, and a cat next to me that may or may not live through the night. I feel inept at times corresponding with you. What would letters between Jeff Foxworthy and William Blake look like?
So in response I am curious, have you seen a movie called "Strangers In Good Company" ?
G.

toward a phenomenology of radical departure

You won't know where I am heading here. Something about the man dancing at the bus stop -- what does he signify, what does he leave out? If I mention that I wanted to refer to this post as "erasure"-- of the things I would leave out and thereby posit as the ground (not the figure--that which is erased)...

Unknown we blink* to a paper on Derrida and Heidegger:
"One of the most important concepts in Derrida's analysis is the idea of "sous rature," (under erasure.) Heidegger often crossed out the word Being (Being) and let both the word and its erasure stand. He felt the Being was prior to and beyond signification or meaning, and hence to signify it was inadequate, though there existed no alternative. Derrida extends this practice to all signs. Since any signifier has as its signified another signifier, it always defers meaning and it always carries traces of other meanings. It must therefore be studied as defective, incomplete, under erasure."

Under the same title (erasure) I find this:

"He started to weep. He had told the story before, and had wept before. Each time it was like never before, he relived the pain each time. And, as thought leads to thought, standing there looking at the river, I felt an unexpected pang of my own. There was a sudden urgency in my groin, but her image flitted past quickly. Time, reliably, had dulled even that wound. It was getting cold, but I stood a while longer. How easy it would be, I thought, to slip gently into the water here, and go down to the depths. I knelt down, and trailed my hand into the Hudson. It was frigid. Here we all were, ignoring that water, paying as little attention as possible to the pair of black eternities between which our little light intervened. Our debt, though, to that light: what of it? We owed ourselves our lives."

This is from the lyrical writings of Teju Cole, whom I did not even know about until yesterday. What I am asking is this: what does it mean to say what we are saying, and what are we saying in all that we do not say, and what does it mean if what we say is crossed out, not mentioned, but still there, a visible, ghostlike shadow of a suggestion?

It would be a radical departure to dance at a bus stop, or to talk (walk--another erasure) away from who you think you are (your self erased) all the while your erased self gathers the force of Being from the echoes of graphite left on the page.

*Added: This was supposed to say "unknown weblink," but I learned long ago from Walker Percy that metaphor as mistake is the root of poetic meaning, so

unknown
we blink
to a paper on Derrida and Heidegger...

(instant beginning of a poem)

dancing at the bus stop

It is interesting that you mentioned cloistered life since just last night I dreamt I moved to a house in the mountains that was in walking distance of an abandoned cloister.
But what I would rather address with you is your self impressions. To me you are the one who gets out "there" and does things. I have always marvelled at how many people you know and have chosen to meet over the years. I recall one time having coffee with you and at least six different people came up to say hello to you. You need to give yourself credit for all the things you do and accomplish, it is much more than you think.
I came across an event recently that has had my head spinning with questions. I was in my car at a red light and there was a man at the bus stop. He was probably late forties, and he was dancing. Dancing at the bus stop on a Friday afternoon. He did not have an ipod or audience. At first I thought he must be on drugs (me of little faith), then I tried to think of other reasons that would cause a middle aged slightly chubby man to dance with abandon at a bus stop. It was Friday...was it pay day? Could a paycheck cause such jubilee? Maybe he just felt the urge to dance. And when was the last time I danced? I used to dance in my kitchen with E. He would grab my hand and twirl me, eventually moving in close to a slow dance. it made the kids giggle and me blush. I can even tell you the last time we danced and the song that was playing and that it was just a slow shuffling of our feet while I rested my head on his shoulder due to the fact that E. could barely breathe much less dance.
You dance. Your constant questioning is a dance. You may think of yourself thriving in a cloister, but I know it would not last long. It would only be a matter of time before I would be sitting in my car watching you dance at a bus stop.
G.

cloistered away

Dear G,

Your time in Florida sounds stimulating, and I am always humbled by your ability to glean from the most mundane events, some sublime jewels of humanity and humility. You leap into the fray of life, laundry, kids, and all, and dance with chaotic abandon amidst it all. I often feel like I would be happier in a cloister, writing and receiving letters from dear correspondents. I seem to have more difficulty with real life relationships than literary ones. This has always been one of my deep issues with Zen Buddhism--that it requires such restraint in the face of life's rich pageant, control of every aspect of experience, shutting the door on dirt, and tears, and bocce ball.

I would like to be more life-embracing and less at arms-length intellectualizing and philosophizing. It seems the same somehow, to control life through strict meditative practices and codes of conduct, and to control life through carefully crafted language and emissions of thought.

I would like some freedom, some running-wild-and-naked-through-wheat fields type of blessed madness, some un-reflective moments of arguing over the chick across the street who has horned in our bocce ball game.

N

Home Again Home Again

Friend,
I have reluctantly returned. My time away was what I had expected it to be. relaxing, funny, sometimes boring but mostly nice. Staying with my mother is always a pleasure. Seriously. One night after she had gone to bed I started going through her things in the room where I slept. Looking in boxes, closets etc. I amassed a small pile of items I would ask her if I could take. As my hand was digging into a drawer it occurred to me that I was doing the exact thing to my mother that is done to me at home. I dream of a house where items remain in the places I last left them, of opening my closet and finding what I am looking for hanging there and not on my daughter as she walks out the door. I felt immediate guilt and put the pile of stashed goodies away. Does my mom need a vacation after I leave?
I also witnessed a gaggle of elder women by the pool in a heated debate. I parked my towell by the woman sitting alone engrossed in a book. The debate of the other women was loud and I was without a book so I listened in. What could cause such a stir among these overly tan women? It seems that an outsider had infiltrated their bocce ball team! And by outsider I mean a woman who does not live in their development. But, the daring woman had already paid her dues for the year so an emergency meeting was to be called. The debate went on for about thirty minutes, tho not much of a debate really since they already seemed to have tried and convicted her. She is unaware of her fate. How was she found out to be an intruder? She invited one of the women to a Valentine party at her place which was not at all in the same development but rather "ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE STREET." Cries of shock and disbelief were declared. I damn near thought they would gather up torches and storm the lying bocce ball players condo!
I picked up my towell, smiled at the woman alone with her book and thought, "Please God, let me that one."
G.