feelingofgaze

a theme in my childhood & adolescent diaries is self-definition: endless lists of things about me. some of them were never true. many of them still are. this is from August 2001, the summer between my junior & senior years of high school.

I feel I should Describe Myself, to give you an idea of what you’re dealing with. I am seventeen going on eighteen. I love books. I love catharsis. I like brown mustard on my sandwiches. I wear shoes only when forced and almost never socks. I can’t count the number of times I’ve fallen in love, but I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve fallen out. I want to be an English major when I grow up, and to have Babies. I like high school. I’m a Virgo… I’m a Humanist and a Pragmatist and a Feminist and that’s about as far as I go with -isms… My beloved is a jeweler and a musician… She has a big heart which is the biggest compliment I can give anyone… I’m much too Quiet, and I eat too much butter… I like to make lists… I don’t listen to very much indie rock. I have long hair, and I never brush it… I like to take long walks (preferably with a cigarette in my hand) in cities I’ve never visited before. I admire Vonnegut’s prose style, and all of my pants are too big. I hate the word pants. I sometimes get a metaphysical tingle in my left shoulderblade. I’ve seen seven different therapists for varying periods of time beginning when I was seven or eight.* I want to get a tattoo of Hokusai’s wave print. I am in love. I am in love with a girl who I know is not the most beautiful girl in the world. I’m obsessed with oceans and words and my feet and food and love and love and love and the past and my faults. I have a little potbelly which I like because it reminds me of my favorite scene in Pulp Fiction… I’m a pen snob… I love to travel, but I hate being away from home.

*and none since high school.

“Above all he feared that most subtle form of gratitude which turns into doglike love. He did not want freedom, the only suit that fit La Maga, to be lost in any strong femininity.” - Julio Cortazar, Rayuela (Hopscotch), 1963/1966 (trans. Gregory Rabassa)

“The fire you like so much in me is the mark of someone adamantly free. But you can’t stop yourself from wanting worse, ‘cause nothing feeds a hunger like a thirst… I always wanted you. I only wanted more than I knew.” - Liz Phair, “Strange Loop,” Exile in Guyville, 1993

1. last weekend, I went camping &, while nightswimming under layers & layers of completely bonkers constellations, thought about how one of the most me things about me, one of the things that, as far as I know, differentiates me from my immediate family, is my tendency to take long, solitary rambles at every opportunity. before the days of cell phones (which for me didn’t begin until like 2005), this meant I was completely off the grid & no one knew where I was, sometimes for hours. I discovered all these places in my own neighborhoods that, for all I knew, no one else knew about, like the marsh that appeared every spring in the field behind my house in Milwaukee or these little “beaches” by the creek behind my parents’ current home. my thought was always, I have found a place to go & read (& later, to smoke cigarettes). that strikes me now as really funny, that that was how I saw these beautiful places, as if reading is just the main activity a person would be doing in any given place.

2. you know that feeling when you’re first falling in love with someone, where everyone & everything else seems so stupid & boring compared to them, and it just seems so tedious that you have to, like, have conversations & go to parties & go to work & go grocery shopping, like those things are obstacles standing in the way of just being with that person? it’s not even (just) that you could be having sex with them (& when I say ‘falling in love,’ I mean it in the broadest sense, so sometimes that’s not something you can/will/would ever even want to do with the person in question), but that you would be having a conversation, & it would just flow (or not flow) in this particular way that would just be so much better, so much more real somehow than whatever other activities you have to do or interactions you have to have. I feel that way about certain books. maybe you do too. right now, that’s how I feel about Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch. just fuck off, everyone. I need to spend the weekend in bed with this book.

“Philosophers, poets, painters and scholars! Debate all you want on the nature of beauty! Tropical plums. Wine in a rowboat. Clouds, babies and Buddhas, resembling one another. Bicycle bells. Honeysuckle. Parachutes. Shooting stars seen through lace curtains. A silver radio that attracts butterflies; a deja that just won’t quit vuing. Han-shan wrote, after a moment of ecstasy, ‘This place is finer than the place I live!’” - Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, 1976 (Sissy gets fingered)

“‘Well,’ he said. ‘Are you looking?’ My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything. ‘It’s really something,’ I said.” - Raymond Carver, “Cathedral,” 1981 (two men draw a cathedral)

there is a lot of I’m sure really great TV out there, but all I want to do is watch the one short season of Girls and the two short seasons of Lip Service over & over again. what this tells me about myself is that I have questionable taste in television & excellent taste in women.

& that maybe I should go read a book.

last night I stayed up til 4 AM last night Eating Wings With Bros (TM) & hanging out with my friend Meredith. I then returned home and fell into a restful slumber next to my spouse, B. & dog. when we all woke up several hours later, we shared the crazy, detailed nightdreams we had had about each other (the dog communicated hers through pantomime). the clearest part of my dream was this: a man accosts me in a park and hands me a stack of paper. he demands that I disseminate these flyers he has made about Ayn Rand and the Holocaust, and threatens to harm me if I don’t. I pass out the whole stack, but the man isn’t satisfied. he follows me into a house & I have to physically intimidate him & shove him out the door (remind me to tell you about the time I ejected a guy from a party at my old house in Portland). after I do so, my husband high fives me and says, “way to go, Poison.” the Ayn Rand guy tells us he has to go speak to a kindergarten class.

a (fictional) premise throughout the dream has been that B. & I have “superhero nicknames” (actually supervillain nicknames) for each other & think of ourselves as an outlaw couple like Pumpkin & Honeybunny from Pulp Fiction. my nickname is Poison (Ivy) (Uma Thurman is a theme here). I don’t know what his is.

since hearing about this, B has implemented Poison as an actual nickname for me. we discussed how it kind of goes with his college nickname, Razor. I say, “they’re both murder weapons.” he says, “they’re both ways to kill yourself.”

“I do not want to be a doctor and live by men’s diseases, not a minister and live by their sins, nor a lawyer and live by their quarrels. So, I don’t see that there is anything left but for me to be an author.” - Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1821

“I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.” - Lloyd Dobler,1989

this post is more or less inspired by Marie Howe’s poem “What the Living Do:” 

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you. 

1. I go to hot yoga pretty regularly & I usually try to get there early. I lie on my mat relaxing in savasana, meditating & usually slipping into sleep/lucid dreaming. about a month ago, in that state, I had this vision.

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I like:

how some people from Texas say “whenever” instead of “when”

how people from Texas say “Texas”

how people from Colorado say “Colorado”

how people from Wisconsin say “Wisconsin”

how people from Michigan say anything

Love, a Footnote

¹ The KGB Bar off 2nd Avenue in New York’s East Village, was a gathering place for the Ukrainian Communist Party, which explains the curious décor but not the frequent poetry readings.
² Red is evoked by the longest wavelengths of light discernible to the human eye. Red is long; long and slow. The curtains in the KGB Bar are not so much red as a history of red.
³ “Podium,” from the Latin, often confused with “lectern.” One stands on a podium. One leans one’s elbows or sets one’s beer, beaded with condensation, on the lectern.
⁴ In ventriloquism, the speaker’s voice seems to come from elsewhere. This doesn’t explain why he called his poem “The Ventriloquist.” Maybe something about the poet and the reader, but I don’t like trickery, anyway.
⁵ We associate red with heat, energy and blood, and with emotions associated with heat, energy and blood – such as anger or love. Ezra Pound makes his ideogram of “red’ with four signifiers: rose, cherry, iron rust, flamingo. I would use: blood, brick, cardinal, sex. Sex because, like red, it occurs in long, slow waves.
⁶ You sat next to me, though I didn’t know you at the time. It was red, dark and red, and there was so much smoke you could see the air moving around people as they moved.
⁷ I love words that can inhabit more than one part of speech, as in: a match or to match. The phosphorous smell off a just-lit match. Enough light for two faces to share.
⁸ Wallace Stegner’s comment about art as the communication of insight appears in various incarnations in his work but my favorite
is in Angle of Repose. You looked surprised that I had such a thought. I took it as a compliment at the time.
⁹ In Plato’s Symposium, Diotima tells Socrates the mystery of how to experience the ideal form of beauty through love. From our desire to possess one body, we sense eternity.
¹¹ An “angle of repose” is the slope at which granular materials come to rest at, say, the base of a sheer rock face. In Utah, owing to iron rust, the rocks are often red. The process is long, and slow.
¹² As with “match,” one can be patient, or one can be a patient. I have been both, but never at the same time.
¹³ Veselka is a Ukrainian diner in the East Village, near St. Mark’s Church. Very good pierogi. Many of the clientele have chic glasses, cases for musical instruments, and dirty hair. I like to sit at the counter.
¹⁴ Sake is a Japanese beverage produced by multiple fermentations of rice. Sometimes it tastes like heavy moonlight, sometimes it tastes like a neon sign that’s just been turned off. In Japan, sake is drunk from small cups called choku. In certain Lower East Side apartments in December, it is heated in a microwave and drunk from chipped coffee mugs that say things like “Happy Secretary’s Day” and “#1 Dad,” even though the person who lives there is neither a secretary nor a dad.
¹⁵ Feeling is a way knowing what you’re going to think about something. Example: I felt the thought,I could want you. Emotion as premonition. It is a mystery. It is the ideal form of beauty.

Rebecca Lindenberg, from her 2012 collection Love, an Index