Repat Blues

THE END

noreply@blogger.com (Repat) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 03:47:00 +0000

"WE HAVE AN OPEN RELATIONSHIP" HE SAID. HE SLEEPS WITH ANYONE

BUT SHE WAS THE ONE I WANTED TO KISS. SHE LEANED TOWARD ME AND SHE SAID HI. AND I COULD ONLY THINK OF KISSING HER LIPS AND THEN WE IMAGINED IT. AND I WAS THE OLDER WOMAN IN THIS SCENARIO. HOW OLD ARE YOU SHE ASKED. 39 I SAID. I'M 29 SHE SAID. IT FELT SIGNIFICANT. WE'RE SISTERS SHE SAID. I TRIED TO REMEMBER BEING 29 BUT ONLY VAGUELY SOMETHING OF THE WAY YOU FEEL YOUR LIFE MUST BEGIN OR YOU WILL DIE OF IT

OR THAT IT'S NOT WHAT YOU SUPPOSED IT WOULD BE. WHICH IS STILL SURPRISING AT 29

BROOKLYN IS DEATH FOR WRITERS SHE SAID

I UNDERSTAND

YES I LEFT. I CHOSE NORMAL OVER BROOKLYN.

HA HA

“I BELIEVE THAT ANY MALE OVER 35 SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO SPEAK IN WORKSHOPS”

"OR ANY MALE OVER 25 MUST WRITE HIS COMMENTS IN ONE SENTENCE ON A PIECE OF PAPER AND THAT'S IT"

HOW TO SOLVE MY WORKSHOP PROBLEM

ALWAYS THE MALES

AND THEN SHE TOLD ME THAT HER MOTHER WANTED TO KILL HER. AS A BABY. TO PUT HER IN THE DRYER.

ON THE DRYER?

NO. IN THE DRYER.

I HAVEN'T HEARD THAT ONE.

I LIKE YOUR MOTHER, I SAID.

BECAUSE SHE ALMOST KILLED ME?

THAT'S NOT WHAT I MEANT.

ALMOST FOUR ON A FRIDAY WALKING THROUGH COLUMBIA UNIV CAMPUS THE LIGHT SHIFTING AND MY AWARENESS OF MY EMPTINESS AROUND ME HOW I LINK IT TO THE GRANDEUR OF THAT CAMPUS WHERE I WALKED SO OFTEN IN A DEC AFTERNOON SUN. THE THOUGHT OF NOTHINGNESS AROUND ME NOT A SOUL TO HOLD ME IN THAT DARKNESS. THAT LACK

& THE MEMORY OF HOW IT WOULD DEVOUR ME HOW IT COULD THE AWARENESS OF A HOSPITAL NEARBY UPTOWN HOW THEY WOULD SEND ME THERE HOW I WOULD NEVER GET OUT BECAUSE IT WOULD NEVER BE SAFE TO WALK IN THE WANING LIGHT OF THE AFTERNOON

BEHIND RIVERSIDE PARK, MORNINGSIDE DRIVE. THE FEELING HOW IT SMELLS LIKE A HOSPITAL GOWN A SHARPS CONTAINER MY CLOTHES IN A PLASTIC BAG THEY GIVE IT BACK WHEN YOU LEAVE

WHY LET ME LEAVE DON'T LET ME BE LONELY

THIS IS WHERE I CAME TO DIE

WHAT A LOVELY WAY TO DIE WITH LEONARD LOPATE ON THE RADIO MY ONLY FRIEND I AM TRAVIS BICKLE WHO ARE YOU

ALLAN GINSBERG GIVES ME A HEADACHE MY STUDENT TELLS ME. I FEEL FOR YOU I SAY. I WANT YOUR HEADACHE I SAY

HERE IS SOMETHING

& THE THOUGHT LATER THAT I DON'T BELIEVE IN TIME. THAT TIME MUST NOT EXIST.

I WANTED TO CALL MY SHRINK WHEN I RODE THE TRAIN WITH THE YOUNG BARNARD GIRLS I WANTED TO SAY TIME DOES NOT EXIST JUST YESTERDAY I HAD YOUR MILKY SKIN JUST YESTERDAY I STOOD ON THIS TRAIN WITH THE OTHERS FEELING SO DISCONNECTED & CONVINCED THEY WERE ALL SO MUCH MUCH MORE WELL-ADJUSTED THAN I OR ME OR I

WHICH THEY WERE

WELL-ADJUSTED. NOT AN ACCIDENTAL TERM

I WAS NOT WELL-ADJUSTED.

I WAS UN-ADJUSTED

I'VE ADJUSTED

LEARNED

BUT HOW WILL I FIT INTO MY BOURGEOIS LIFE HOW WILL ANY OF US FIT SOME OF US ARE NOT MADE FOR THIS LIFE

DEAR DR DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN I WAS 20 AND YOU WERE 30 AND NOW I AM OLD AND YOU ARE OLDER AND YET WE WERE THERE YESTERDAY FACING A NEW YORK LIFE BESIDE EACH OTHER

I THINK OF YOU WHEN I COME TO NEW YORK AND I THINK OF B. WHO KNEW HOW TO LOVE ME

WILL I MAKE IT TO THE END OF THIS POST

I HAVE TO TELL YOU SOMETHING

HAVE YOU KNOWN?

THIS BLOG IS GOING TO DIE. I AM GOING TO KILL IT. BUT IT WILL EXIST AND BE REBORN IN A NEW WAY A NEW FORM IT CAN NOT EXIST HERE

IF YOU WISH TO READ STILL PLEASE SEND ME AN EMAIL. I MIGHT MAKE IT INVITE ONLY

WHICH MEANS THAT YOU CAN READ IT IF I KEEP WRITING

BUT I MAY STOP WRITING HERE

I'M SORRY

IT'S NOT WORKING ANYMORE

OR IT IS BUT I HAVE TO MAKE A TRANSITION

IT'S A GOOD THING

GOOD THINGS ARE HAPPENING

MY BOOK IS COMING OUT IN ONE YEAR

AND THEN OTHER BOOKS I PROMISE

I LOVE YOU

XOXO

noreply@blogger.com (Repat) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 03:21:00 +0000

Oh yes we read sappho and ginsberg and adrienne rich and and and and

they had this energy this self-selecting energy

I should write about yoram yovell. How many times I have written about yoram yovell.

That's what I mean. I had this shrink. I remember showing up at his office in a purple felt mini-skirt. It zipped up the back. Black tights. Doc martens. I don't know what else but I loved that purple skirt and my memory is lit up with the feel of it, the look of it. There is this thing with a young woman who wants to be the object of the gaze and then is disgusted by the gaze. You know. This is Kate's Green Girl. I remember one day in Yoram's office, he greeted me and he had the warmest smile. I felt something inside of me, that bone below my stomach. He looked at me and said how much he liked it—and I said my skirt?--and he said your whole gestalt.

And I remember the use of the word gestalt which is as significant to the memory as the purple skirt.

I also remember the feeling when I left his office, this aching. And I remember there was nothing that could fill it. Nothing. It was enormous I knew I must die.

But then occasionally, with Yoram, I felt so alive.

One day he told me that his office neighbor, Dr. Prince, saw me there in the waiting room. He saw many of the pretty young women who saw Yoram. And Yoram told me that Dr. Prince said, of me: “I feel sorry for you.”

We were known to be difficult, you see.

I don't know why Yoram told me that--perhaps later he regretted it or should have regretted it but it stayed with me for a very long time. Fifteen years now. My father was paying him so much money to talk to me for 45 minutes twice a week, to prescribe drugs, to occasionally call me at home, after rehearsals.

Were we really so bad?

(Were you angry? She asked me. Did you think “You son of a bitch”?)

One day, I was taking the train with a woman named Marigold. We volunteered together at Gilda's Club. We began talking about our shrinks in a general way and I told her that I had a small crush on mine, he was on the upper west side.

Don't tell me it's Dr. Yovell she said.

It is.

We were in the train, in the 1 train headed south. We both held the bar, gripping, standing close. She was tall, beautiful in that old money East Coast way. There was something about her, some confidence, that attracted me. It was something I decided belonged to east coast women but would never belong to me. A savvy. Despite her suffering, she knew how to be in the world in a way I did not. I was fragmented. I still am.

Anyway Marigold was stunned and stared for a long time. I'm very jealous of you, she whispered. He used to be my doctor. I broke our contract and now he won't see me.

What was your contract?

I was not allowed to have a drink. I had to stay sober to stay in therapy.

Oh.

One day, I was waiting for him, and I went to the bar down the block. On Amsterdam. I had a drink. Or more. I showed up at his office. I was really drunk.

He kicked you out?

Not right away. But later. He said we were through. I couldn't come back.

Wow.

I love him, she said.

Yoram was a short, balding Israeli doctor. He was not exactly sexy but I knew what she meant. He was seductive. He spoke in low tones, and looked into your eyes with an intensity. He would moan occasionally. It was like sex. Sitting across from him. His body and my body. It was better than sex. Sometimes he would talk about his days in the army. He would speak of the "dirty" Arabs.

Another woman, from a very religious family, told me how her therapist tried to get her to masturbate. She never had. And he said, I will show you how. He started to show her-- "like this" he said--but she left the office and never returned. I liked her. Devorah. I should have left. I was always too curious, too eager to see what would happen next.

I'm with you in Rockland

noreply@blogger.com (Repat) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 18:45:00 +0000

I watched the film of Howl the other day and realized what I'd forgotten: that Allen Ginsberg and I attended the same mental institution. The hospital of the Presbyterians of Columbia University. In the poem he changes this name to Rockland, which is more mellifluous. The poem is dedicated to Carl Solomon--a friend he met in the ward. A friend who got shocks and a straight jacket. I think he talked about how they spent much of their time inside trying to decide if they were crazy or the doctors were crazy. This had me thinking about Chuck, my friend from the Ward who de-friended me some years after we were discharged. Chuck was there before me. He had a wicked, powerful intelligence and sense of humor and exquisite artistic ability. Plus he was so sweet. He used to draw pictures of me. I still have one, with my long hair shading my face, my Doc Martens, my grungy ripped jeans. I was with him on the ward when we heard that Kurt Cobain had killed himself. I was with him when we heard that River Phoenix died. Chuck was the one who would see me reading Sade's Justine (for example) and make a joke. He was the only man on the ward, and often the only black person. Very often. It was a very white, female patient population. Chuck was from the Bronx. He'd been an art director at Rolling Stone. One day he threw all his art away, threw it out the window. And then tried to kill himself. And then ended up on the S.S. Mostly because he was so talented. Lyle sort of sought us out, recruited us. If you are a suicide with a high IQ I Want You!

When he de-friended me it was because I was sort of blowing him off a lot. I was blowing him off a lot because we were out of the ward and it was difficult for me to hang out with my fellow inmates, who reminded me of that place. And my status.

In one interview, Ginsberg talks about a kind of self-rejection, the way you internalize all that you've been told is wrong with you; how you bring that out into the world with you. That's what I did.

What I mean is that I needed to move on and moving on meant acquiring a real-world, non-mental-patient boyfriend. His name was Dan. This Dan, my first Dan, turned out to totally break my heart. For all of the reasons that he loved me, he couldn't love me. If that makes sense. I internalized this and extrapolated it as a rejection of me, as a referendum on my ability to be successful as an integrated human being.

Ginsberg says something about what it was like after he left. How he walked around seeking validation. How he had to get out of New York.

I did, too. Had to get out. But it took me a long time to accept that.

You see what Ginsberg knew was that the ward was a place for those of us seeking spiritual transcendence and yet the ward reduced or pathologized this search. Still it was a place, an alternative.

& we might find fellow seekers

Like Carl Solomon

Like Chuck

Sometimes I google Chuck and I don't find him and that makes me sad

The last time I saw him he was on the Bowery in a half-way apartment with two disabled men. A caseworker visited regularly. He went to a occupational rehab center.

Do you know what the severely mentally ill are like? Well they smell for one thing.

Plus they don't care what you think.

My first Dan was this guy who is now in SF with a baby and a wife who reads People magazine and is rather shallow. Or so he told me when I saw him two years ago. I was happy that I did not feel attracted to him.

Anyway I hurt Chuck and I've written about this many times and what I mean is that I suppose I took pleasure in it I suppose Chuck became symbolic of this place and system which had pronounced me defective and made me defective as part of what it called curing me. What I mean is that if you (and I mean YOU) were locked up for 3 years, what do you think you would be like? How would you feel walking the streets of Manhattan after that? How would you feel going to bed at night in your little illegally sublet apartment?

Well I don't know but maybe you would not feel safe in your own body. Maybe you would feel that your body was meant to be kept to be DISCIPLINED

Not a free thing

Or you wouldn't even want freedom anymore, not even the Jonathan Franzen kind

Especially not that kind

That's what I mean

Anyway this is on my mind. I'm teaching HOWL. I never cared for the Beats or any of this even though once I saw Ginsberg read in LA on USC campus in the early 90s--still I didn't care. But now I am old and I realize that his story is my story. That I too saw the best minds of my generation--

I will write about QUINN next--I wrote about him here once--

noreply@blogger.com (Repat) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 05:51:00 +0000

Ron Terada

I forgot what I said the other day about loneliness but so yesterday I found myself at Ron Terada's show at the MCA, which is prefaced by this idea from his compatriot Douglas Coupland:

Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.

It seems the central crisis of my life right now.

Which you know isn't so bad. I'm not complaining.

I was just thinking about how there is this thing when you are married. For example your spouse wants you to get a flu shot. This is not your primary concern. It becomes one of his & so each day building up to the day that he actually gets his flu shot is full up with this anxiety and anticipation and insistence: "I'm getting my flu shot." "Okay." "Do you want to come with me?" "No." "When will you get yours?" & so on. Though there are at least 18 things you'd prioritize before getting your flu shot, which is something in fact you'll never make a priority, you feel this pressure. Which you don't want to feel. Given that you have all variety of internal personal pressures of your own to regard. But then if you ignore this external pressure you are risking further conflict in your marriage--that large thing, that thing that has become larger than the two of you--which is one of your prioritized things to avoid. Conflict, that is.

Yeah so.

I'm difficult.

A student wanted to write a polemic and so she was reading Against Love by Laura Kipnis, at my suggestion. I'd resisted this book when it came out but now I think it's sort of awesome.

The other day I saw a play at a black theater on the south side in Stony Island, which neighborhood I'm somewhat embarrassed to say I've never before visited; I've only ever really visited Chinatown and Hyde Park on the South Side. Hundreds in the audience. Two white people. I sat with the other white man, also a critic, and we got to know each other a bit. I liked him.

We didn't mean to sit together; we were seated this way. It wasn't segregation.

I want to write about teaching. I'm going to write about having DW for a teacher and how that informs my teaching of Creative Writing even if I am a total hypocrite. As was he. I promise I'll write this soon. I also want to write more about my resistance to rape-scenes in student fiction. Which is not a resistance to rape in literature. Besides The Liar's Club, I am thinking of that sexual-abuse rape scene in Infinite Jest or Toni Morrison's* rape scenes. Which leave me feeling raped, in a totally devastating-bodily-political way. Her aesthetic. My students don't have an aesthetic. "I wasn't trying to be political." one told me. But it is political, I said.

We were having this conversation. About a book. A writer. We were speaking of the way the book the writer felt so honest and raw. We were talking and he looked to me for something. approval. What do I want from him? To be approving. I was understanding the way power shifts, that there is power from each side. I don't trust this feeling which falls away which is transient which is a moment. Which creates me. This is where I become a self. I feel less than trapped. What I mean is that there is nothing so attractive to me as someone who is searching, has sought. Someone lost, a certain registered suffering. I knew immediately that this person like me had lost a parent when he was a child. We are in this club.

*Also Toni Morrison writes of FREEDOM. She often writes of freedom, which is a kind of MADNESS, and she writes of it in a way that is far more subtle and complicated and life-affirming than the way that J Franzen writes of FREEDOM. She evokes the freedom of aging, for women. She writes of the body. She is one of my foundational writers—Beloved in particular—a writer who made me want to be a writer. One of those where I shiver, still. Even after she became beyond-famous, I feel this way reading her prose. But I'm afraid I can't teach her. I keep trying and I keep failing. It's okay.

noreply@blogger.com (Repat) — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 15:23:00 +0000

DO NOT ALLOW YOURSELF TO BE IMPRISONED BY ANY AFFECTION. KEEP YOUR SOLITUDE. THE DAY, IF IT EVER COMES, WHEN YOU ARE GIVEN TRUE AFFECTION THERE WILL BE NO OPPOSITION BETWEEN INTERIOR SOLITUDE AND FRIENDSHIP, QUITE THE REVERSE. IT IS EVEN BY THIS INFALLIBLE SIGN THAT YOU WILL RECOGNIZE IT. OTHER AFFECTIONS HAVE TO BE SEVERELY DISCIPLINED.

-SIMONE WEIL

Compensating

noreply@blogger.com (Repat) — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 02:01:00 +0000

I was speaking with an older actress whom I greatly admire and she told me that for her it became easier, after menopause. She told me that it was a relief. Once you don't have to think about having kids. There are so many secrets kept from us. That aging, or loss, might be a relief. No one spoke of this.

By the end of the day I could not take it any more: the way my four-year-old needed to sit on me or jump on me or whine to me. I mean no one said it wasn't going to be occasionally TOTALLY ANNOYING but it is. So there's that.

Particularly when I'm grading papers all weekend which leads exactly to a certain despair. A loss.

I do not want to think about my fertility. My waning fertility.

For example, the other morning D. read a news article out loud noting that women between 35 and 45 are more prone to sexual fury & fantasy--a desire for “casual sex or flings or one night stands” he read--all due to their waning fertility. "It says here that this is a response to a decrease in fertility; it is nature's way of compensating for that lack, pursuing more opportunities to procreate."

I know all about it, I said.

And then we ate cornmeal pancakes.

For example, when I was young, say 20, I felt as much and as deeply as I do now. I wasn't stupid. Or shallow. Or a drama queen. Though I like to imagine. Once in his first play Dread had a character in a mental hospital: “She's very deep.” It was a punch line. But for real, I was. But I sounded so stupid. And the stupidity of my verbal expression of anguish caused me even greater pain. That gap. I suppose I have come closer to bridging this. Lyle would say “We just have to keep you alive to 30” which is stupid but he had a point. I do not know that same anguish that I knew at 20 or 25. More excruciating because it was unknowable. Now it is like an old friend. Maybe I don't really miss it, but I recognize it.

This doesn't make sense.

Everything is so fucked up right now. I can't tell you.

I feel like I lost my best friend. Or that I don't have a best friend. I feel so fucking alone sometimes we are not supposed to talk about this do I sound like Elizabeth Wurtzel I don't care I rather like her or feel for her or whatever. Even if I find her a tragic character whom I will not emulate. And also she proves my point that it is best that I do not get published until I am at least 40. Which you know is well we won't talk about that. My age. What we will talk about is like that gaping ache on a Saturday night even if I have-- What I mean is the ache of FUCK wanting to create to find a certain pleasure. To be deeply felt is something. But I have been deeply feeling for many years. And maybe I am getting closer to--

What I mean to say is that the other night I was a finalist for a prize and I didn't win, I was the runner-up again, and I don't really care but it is odd to repeatedly lose to be the runner-up to the Billy Lombardos of the world. The James McPhersons. Or Van Dikes. Or whatever his name was.

I made pumpkin spice cookies.

I've begun acupuncture. I love my doctor, who sticks needles into my feet and head and hands. It is so much better than talk therapy. Why did I waste so much time talking. I wonder. Verbal. Yavvies. They used to talk about that: YAVVIs. The Woody Allens. Something like that. It was supposed to be a compliment. I'm not angry.

For example when I was young and sophisticated I did not like Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son or S Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted. I thought these were shallow stupid books. I don't know what I thought. But now that I am old and wanting I read these books repeatedly, I see each as beautiful and perfect in its own way. Stories of spiritual emptiness and longing. Of seeking. Of searching for something in this limited paradigm. And finding it. The search as the thing. I see the absence and the simplicity as profound. I did not think that once. Not long ago I found a letter I wrote to Dread noting how much I hated Girl, Interrupted. How stupid it was, I said. I will never write a book like this, I said.

Now I find it quite pleasurable. If I wrote one book in my life I would be happy to write that book, which contains that truth. Which has been reduced, glamourized, Hollywoodized, etc. but is truth, regardless.

It's a book about her privilege, and she doesn't cop to it.

Claudia Rankine said this of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. She's totally right. But it's deeply felt, that book. As is “In Bed” my favorite essay ever. I can't get over Joan Didion though I have no interest in her new book not now not right now.

I think I might never stop writing this blog post. Forgive me.

What I meant to say about my friend's wedding in LA—she wore this beautiful red dress. She was so beautiful. And she is this person, this total person with this complete aura of integrity, which I have never had. And I admire her so greatly, though she is originally the friend of D. She was in red and all I could think was how much more sense it makes to wear red on one's wedding day. How I loved the dress I wore on my wedding day but it was wrong. Still. I didn't care. It was playing dress-up. But I don't have an aura of integrity. I have an aura of playing dress-up. I just meant to say this. The dress. The beauty. The darkness was my lack.

We spoke of codependency. Attachment. Non-attachment.

After I read the other night, before Billy Lombardo was named champion, a woman came to me and said “I love your writing. I'll read your book.” and I said thank you and she said “Is it autobiographical?” and I said “no” but “I take things from life but it's fiction” which why do I have to say this.

On a student paper, I write: DO NOT CONFLATE NARRATOR W/ AUTHOR

Another student writes:

Life is meaningful because it does not go on forever, and while we are living love is the most meaningful thing in our entire life's.

Soon I will sleep and dream of a wild love affair with an inappropriate person and it will give me great pleasure. Right now I think about how difficult it is to teach creative writing. I want to write about this. I will return. I also want to write about how I felt my story had some sense of contempt directed outward. And it made me feel weird. That contempt. I told D. later and he said “Have you ever read Thomas Bernhard?” and I said I know but I keep telling my students to think philosophically about what they write. So far this semester three students have written stories depicting rape and violence against women. Cliché I write. As if. Not all students write realism but some, many, insist. And then a rape*. Why? I ask. I am almost crying.

*And I assure you these are not rapes as in The Liar's Club--not deeply felt, urgent rape stories--these are Law & Order episodes. But not as good. It consumes me. But then I hear myself read a story aloud--I hear the disgust and anger and darkness in this story and I wonder. What am I trying to teach them? I can't teach them to feel but I guess Yes. That's what I want to teach them.

They Say I'm Emerging

noreply@blogger.com (Repat) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 19:40:00 +0000

Sitting in a cafe in LA drinking iced cafe con leche. Behind me a model earnestly explaining to a friend: “They say I'm emerging. And you know, I decided I prefer that-- I'd rather be emerging than defined, wouldn't you?”

The appearance and reappearance of various tragic characters. So much plastic surgery.

All so bizarre and sad and funny in the way that LA must be.

I'm emerging.

I'm also emerging. I'll emerge till I'm dead.

A weekend. A wedding. Love. A sour feeling. The power of community. I have a literary crush on a woman I met. We sat close. We spoke of writing and desire and effacement and dybbuks. We spoke of doppelgangers. We spoke of longing. The subtle transmission of dark knowledge. And then dancing. Such dancing. And the mountains. Running. A sunset. Gelato.

I attended my husband's poetry reading and I love my husband but I had this feeling: I can not attend one more of his readings. I can not be a WIFE.

I'm sorry.

Dread and I: 20 years later the two of us in LA. He saw my future. His spirits. He saw me in a certain outfit, in my 40s or 50s. He saw women reading my book. But you have to finish it! He admonished. And I will. I will. I returned late last night with jet-lag and an insomniac desire to finish, to have it out in the world, to do my own readings, to perform my transformed self, to withdraw from the status of WIFE. Through literature, through art. To feel less oppressed by the status. I want to believe that LA is sinister, which it is, but it is also nice. I met some Pomona faculty. That was odd. There are writers in that town. I didn't know. I didn't know art could exist with that sun. Still, the morning fog. The smog. The ads for cosmetic surgery. So much self-loathing belied by the hum of expectation.

The wish to travel alone. To find my own taxi. To eat what I want.

The Pomona writer—last week, before leaving for LA, I met four of my students, my favorites, and we walked down Michigan Avenue. First we drank tea and spoke of various limitations and life, and then –also so beautiful, each one—we walked to hear Claudia Rankine read and speak--

I do not mean that I am not happy for my husband's success or that I begrudge him his artistry. I mean that my identity feels subsumed within his artistry. My work lesser, minor.

Perhaps it is too fragile. Perhaps I have had it. It's funny that I once found comfort there, in hiding. It's funny that it has taken me so long to feel urgent. To feel that I must speak. To want to be my own person.

A musician at the wedding telling me of his divorce. Amicable. His wife was not an artist, and for a while she thought it was cool—to be married to a musician—but later she resented it. The life of it, the mess. The musician suggested that D. and I were lucky—we can understand each other--this mutual understanding is vital, he said.

Jane Fonda was saying something about the desire for independence vs. the need to be loved.

I am going to New York in a few weeks. Alone. D. will go to San Francisco the following weekend.

I kept invoking Sontag: What would Beckett do?

I say: What would Sontag do?

Dread says, No! She was a witch. I see more of a Gloria Steinem thing happening.

But I have never had the articulation of Gloria Steinem. Nor the rhetoric. Nor the ability to sustain relationships. I have this broken thing deep down.

These are not good thoughts at a wedding. We spoke of codependency. One man said “I love them but I can not attend the wedding as my feelings about marriage are quite dark.” I agreed. I felt so dark. But I love them. And they are not dark. They are lightness.

Sontag: My GROTESQUE habit of chasing after those who don't want me.

I have various GROTESQUE habits, all leading to that final wish.

I am not suicidal.

I am rather awakening to a vague desire.

I am writing a syllabus around the theme of Awakening. Spiritual Biographies. Seeking.

If only there were jobs in LA. If only there were jobs anywhere.

I am not one to assert myself verbally. At times. I feel broken.

The Lover

noreply@blogger.com (Repat) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 19:44:00 +0000

Sometimes I feel overwrought. My writing. My story. A former prof of mine wrote a nice letter of recommendation for me, it made me so happy for one day. He wrote that I write about subjects that could easily be "bathos" and yet I am somehow innovative enough to avoid that. I don't quite agree with that assessment but it gave me something to aim for. At times I use form to avoid bathos, but often I think I fall into bathos. And it terrifies me. He wrote that my work falls somewhere between "domestic realism" and "meta-narrative".

Lately I just want to be in a torrid, violent love affair. Frankly. I had an insane moment recently of falling for someone I shouldn't. Who wrote so beautifully and incisively of The Lover--the link between love and death.

Only three students in the class have seen a dead body. I recalled a class at Barnard with Alan Segal, a professor of Religion. The course was called Life After Death--it included cross cultural readings on the afterlife. Aurelius and Gilgamesh and the Bible. One day he asked us how many of us had seen a dead body? A majority of us said we had. He thought this unusual, a reflection of the course's self-selection.

Also. most students just sort of tolerate Duras. They are not deadly. But I am deadly. I can't help it.

I can't help but go to class sort of shivering, saying omg I love this book. Though I know most will not share my feeling. But if one person does. I feel it's worth it.

And then I imagine a torrid, violent, impossible love affair.

I think only tortured and impossible affairs are satisfying to me, a need to externalize my internal reality.

Plus boys or men in my experience do not love The Lover.

Overwrought, they say.

Or the fragmented, fractured style bothers them, with their pallogocentric need for linear narrative. The women can desire the phallogocentric, too. One girl says something like:

"I think she has poor self-esteem."

I think self-esteem is overrated.

I quote from Hiroshima, Mon Amour:

I like sex, but I hate myself.

It is just this quote:

I think I'm beginning to see my life. I think I can already say, I have a vague desire to die. From now on I treat that word and my life as inseparable.

I said yes.

I wanted to say me too.

I have always been susceptible.

Susan Sontag was this way. I found this detail comforting when I read Sigrid Nunez' memoir. Many details comforted.

It makes me shiver a bit too.

It's okay to shiver. it's okay to be frightened. Goo used to repeat this over and over when he was potty-training. His little mantra. I suppose it came from me. Danny found it foreign, erudite. Our little language. The language of lovers is always foreign.

and yet we didn't, we didn't, we never did

noreply@blogger.com (Repat) — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 19:19:00 +0000

I was trying to tell Lisa about what it was like on the drug I've quit.

I wake up early. I feel I can't do anything. But more aware of everything I must do. A revving up. The engine. Go! Still, I know is merely an engine. It is not a self. Still a part of the self on empty. That part sort of still says: How will I leave the house today? How will I walk to school? To the train? How will I teach? I have knowledge of the challenge of the day and that is immense. I can not drug that part away.

One part says: I must grade, must write, must rehearse. Must run. Must do many things. The other part says: I can not do anything. Why do anything.

You ignore that part but it sort of hurts. To ignore it.

(The drugs are a problem. Maybe I haven't told you but I've been on drugs for the last twenty years. Life support. Sometimes they stop working. Sometimes I stop taking them. I imagined that one day I wouldn't have to take them. That I could live otherwise. Sometimes when I don't write here this is part of it. Sometimes my absence has more to do with various outside demands. I feel like I'm underwater right now. Can you tell? It is not the worst feeling.)

Let's talk about death now, Magoo said cheerfully the other night. I was doing the dishes.

Let's talk about what happens when we die!

Later in bed he tells me,

Maria isn't Jewish. Amy either. Leah is Jewish. Am I Jewish?

Yes, I say.

Are you Catholic? He asks.

Sort of, I say.

(This equivocation. What's sort of?)

Well I grew up that way. I went to church and catholic school. I prayed and did the sacraments. But I don't anymore.

Oh.

I still pray sometimes.

When?

When I'm in an airplane. or when you were in my belly.

Yeah. I remember that.

What

When I was in your tummy.

You do?

It was nice.

Oh.

A little squishy.

I want to teach Stuart Dybek's “We Didn't” to explore the literature of negation. Or Absence. But it is too sexy, even without consummation. We all blush. I was the DH Lawrence of not doing it. he writes. We argued about the poet who killed herself. "Maybe death was her triumph" you said. They all skipped that part, but I can't move away. That the dead women—drowned and suicided—haunt the lovers. It's always this way.

When I leave class or even before class I have this empty feeling. Even if I have a good class. I walk to the train with this emptiness. The sun is beginning to set. I don't want to force students to be in a classroom with me. I don't. I don't want them to read because they have to. I start to feel that textbooks and syllabi ruin literature. That it should be out of the classroom, out of control. Even though much came to me in a classroom, within the academy. I long for something wild. A different sort of transmission.

I say I hate longing but I must not really because I am so good at it. I told my husband about it. We were in bed:

I had this empty feeling tonight.

Mmhmm he said. He was reading. Sacred Cow by Diamela Eltit.

And I realized that this emptiness is tied to the feeling of longing. That I am so used to longing as a way to fill that void.

You know?

Yes, he said, still looking at his book.

And what I realized was that I will always long for something. You see, once I longed to be married. It was what I wanted. Now I have it. But I still have that emptiness.

Right.

And it is not that the emptiness is the same. It is relieved by your company, by the fact of being loved--

But it is still there.

It is a verb.

It is always there.

...

What do you mean a verb?

That that is how it must be. To satisfy it destroys it. So it moves elsewhere.

Yes.

Desire is a homeostatic system.

...

Push it down in one place it rises in another.

Okay.

I read that somewhere.

And then I told him about the woman in my class who writes these very sexy stories about her affairs with married men.

It really bothers some of the other students, I told him.

Too bad.

But I love it, I said.

...

You can have an affair if you want.

That's not what I'm saying.

It's okay.

Do you want to have an affair?

Don't deflect.

You deflected first.

I was talking about my student.

Okay.

This part still gives me goosebumps:

But we didn’t, not in the moonlight, or by the phosphorescent lanterns of lightning bugs in your back yard, not beneath the constellations we couldn’t see, let alone decipher, or in the dark glow that replaced the real darkness of night, a darkness already stolen from us, not with the skyline rising behind us while a city gradually decayed, not in the heat of summer while a Cold War raged, despite the freedom of youth and the license of first love—because of fate, karma, luck, what does it matter?—we made not doing it a wonder, and yet we didn’t, we didn’t, we never did.

Tunnels

noreply@blogger.com (Repat) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 21:41:00 +0000

They all wanted to talk about death.

I want to talk about how it increases the value of everything, Michael said. Even an actress like Brittany Murphy.

Or Heath Ledger, Ryan said.

There we were in those moments of pre-class levity, speaking of death. We couldn't let it go. Someone brought up Black Swan; someone else brought up Jack Nicholson.

He's not dead, I said.

I think he's dead, Ryan said, sort of breaking it to me.

No, he's definitely not dead! I said, reclaiming authority.

Why don't more people talk about One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? Michael wanted to know. It was so good.

Later that night, after reading The Velveteen Rabbit, thinking about how toys become real, Goo began asking me about death. This has been happening lately.

What happens to our bodies?

When?

When we die, he said. When our souls leave the bodies where do the bodies go?

Well, I said.

Into the tunnels? He asked.

No, no, I said. What tunnels?

You know, he said, in Chicago there are a lot of tunnels. Lower Wacker, for example.

Oh, I said. No, there are no bodies in the tunnels.

I didn't want to talk about cemeteries, not before bed anyway. Cremation--ash, dust--seemed even more confusing.

I don't want to die, he said, even when I’m really really old. I want to be me forever. And you to be my Mommy.

Maybe our souls will go somewhere else, somewhere beautiful. Maybe this isn't the only world.

I told him what my healer told me, that he and I were together in a life before this life, and that we'll be together in the next life, too.

He asked if God is real, even if you can't see him.

I told him that my mom is still with me, her soul is with me, even if she died long ago.

And then he asked me why people are still on Facebook, even after they die.

What?

Yes. Charlie told me that, he said.

About Facebook?

His father is still on Facebook, and he's dead.

Were you talking about this at school?

Yes, we were talking about people who died. And Charlie told us that his father died.

Oh, I said. That's sad.

His other father, he assured me, not his Daddy.

Oh, okay.

Will you sleep now, and try to think of nice things?

Yes.

I love you.

And then I told him what my mom told me, before she died: that she would never leave me, that she'd be with me always. I told him that I'd always be with him.

For a long time I hated that she said that. When I was 18 or 23 and really needed her, I hated that. It seemed empty. But now I know what she meant. Because it's what I mean.

Lately I wish I was still Catholic. That I had God and Heaven and Jesus and the saints and all the magic that consoled me as a child. Like prayer. Hail Marys and the Act of Contrition. Prayer was consoling. I remember discovering these things that Goo is discovering—that we are mortal, that there is an end, that we'll all say goodbye, someday, to each other, to everything. That nobody really knows what happens next, that maybe nothing happens next. That death is that which gives meaning to life. Or that life is what gives meaning to life. That life is the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of--

It's like telling him there's no Santa Claus, and I'm not ready to do that. Even if he goes to a Jewish school.

He's a poet, D. says later, proud.

I don't want him to be a poet, I say, I want him to feel safe, that he can trust us and the world. I don't want him tortured.

He's not.

How do you know?

I just know. Because after asking about death, he asks about Transformers. Or about his penis.

Well, it's very related, my sister-the-therapist adds.

His penis?

Yes. Castration anxiety.

It's true that he's wondering why I don't have one. Where did it go? he asks me.

Anyway I don't believe either of them, but I try. I couldn't get it out of my mind, the way Goo looked when he cried, “I don't want to die” How it echoes my own fears, my own awareness of mortality and evanescence.

Is it just a hole there, that you pee out of?

What?

That's what Liberty at school told me. That girls just have a hole.

Oh. Well. Not exactly.

noreply@blogger.com (Repat) — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 04:55:00 +0000

But perhaps women secrete their own despair in the process of being mothers and wives. Perhaps, their whole lives long, they lose their rightful kingdom in the despair of every day. Perhaps their youthful aspirations, their strength, their love, all leak away through wounds given and received completely legally. Perhaps that's what it is--that woman and martyrdom go together.

-MARGUERITE DURAS

Notes

noreply@blogger.com (Repat) — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:37:00 +0000

Woolf (1928): What is it to be alive in this moment? (her life's obsession)

The experience of being alive is exhausting. We all take in more information than we can process.

Myth: art makes you feel better

(merely gives you an inkling of how much energy it takes to be alive)

She does not believe in the impermeable self.

Being only one thing is a lie.

Life is a flux.

Yet if we have no firmness we go mad.

Joyce: born 1882 (the same year as Woolf)

(Woolf has become a SYMBOL in contemporary literature--from Albee's Who's Afraid to Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried--as much as she is a major figure of Modernism. Do male writers become symbols? Is it the fate of the feminine?)*

The novel: the form that allows for the most introspection (Jude the Obscure)

Form as important as content

What does DEATH do for LIFE in "The Dead"?
--a balance
--it allows forgiveness
--the knowledge of death for the living takes away the cruel lie of separateness

l'art pour l'art

Joyce saw that the people who romanticized Ireland would not speak to the Irish peasants

Leaves Ireland at 23 and never writes one work that does not take place in Dublin

(lots of embarrassment and shame in Irish--a consequence of idealism)

Gretta--the "object of the gaze" in Lacanian terms

Irish: champion mourners

Irish Alzheimer's: You forget everything but the grudges

*DFW will become (has become) a symbol. Of purity. Of sincerity. His suicide has rendered him feminine.

**which is what Septimus Smith's death does for Clarissa

More fun with rejections

noreply@blogger.com (Repat) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 21:22:00 +0000

This came in today*:

Dear [my name],
Thank you for submitting your work to [our fancy journal].
Wonderful, specific descriptions of patients on a psych ward, and the narrative voice is concise and convincing. I think it is well-organized, very well done, except that it falls short at the end, with the suicide of X. X as a character isn't well-developed, but perhaps more importantly, how the suicide affects all the others and the narrator is unexplored. The story ends with the suicide, and it seems to me, it should turn on that, rather than end with it. If you decide to revise, we would be happy to take a look at this story again.
Sincerely,
The Editors

& three days ago:

Dear [my name],
I enjoyed the fierce, elliptical detail of "Title of Story" but I'm afraid that finally it didn't seem quite right for [our extremely Conservative Journal].
Good luck in finding a home for this.
Yours, [Famous Scottish Writer]

*which I truly appreciate, feedback-wise; it's like being back in grad-school-workshop. Except without the sex.

noreply@blogger.com (Repat) — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 16:11:00 +0000

I am having a lot of trouble with the Internet. I wrote a post the other day into the Blogger template—which I've never done, I've always pasted it from Word or something—and I lost it. I went to post it and half was gone. I felt betrayed, violated; I realize this is simply a metaphor for my relationship to the interwebs—how we give ourselves and how our selves are taken/corrupted/destroyed--

Here's what left:

2. Kate writes: "I am now the woman who remembers" which is how I feel lately. The one looking back, the cannon fodder. About to lose my remaining parent, I am poised to take my place. The last in line. The younger ones. They are so young. I was not young, not so young, at that age. Never so young. Thinking about something Eileen Myles wrote about the privilege of youth. She stands in front of an auditorium of students, that precarious position of power. She speaks of the future--that we will be cyborgs. Our fingers will be attached to computers. A student replies: "Oh, I don't know. I'm sure we can find better things to do with our fingers." Something like that. (This is all paraphrase. You should read it from Eileen.) She is unnerved. This confirms it. The privilege.

3. And in a classroom the other day. With twenty-five new students. Some young, some not-so-young. A misogynist. Romanian. He will be a problem. I will work to ignore him, his provocations. His youthful anger and that chip on his shoulder. I begin the class behind the podium. By the end I have moved forward, to the table. We read Joe Brainard aloud and now I am sitting on the desk, reading Joe Brainard. I tell the students to make messes, to fail, to take risks. I ask them to begin a practice. I ask someone to read Joe Brainard and she is flushed when this leads to stories of his dick or the day he went home and painted with his dick. So much of his dick. I would like once to know what it feels like to have a dick. To paint with a dick. I feel I should have warned the students. This is not art school. They are shocked. I turn it into a discourse on the body, on the idea that we must write from the body, that the body is linked to writing, to words. A girl tells the story of how she almost killed her younger brother when she was a child, it was an accident, and how her mother saved his life. It is so easy to fail. We all feel it as she reads the story and I link this to Joe Brainard's dick, to the visceral response, the way we as a group gasp as we hear the story of her brother, the jawbreaker lodged in his little throat.

4. I made new rules for myself this term. The first is that I will not censor myself in the way I dress. I will not dress more conservatively to teach. I am old enough to maintain authority while wearing clothes that please me--tight skinny pants, tight skirts, platform heels, all that shit. I want to feel good and to be myself and I am tired of being guarded. Plus DFW was my age when he was my teacher and he wore shorts, cut-up sweatshirts/t-shirts. Etc. You know. Not that I'm him but I'm me and I'm sick of that thing that happens in the classroom, what Camille Paglia calls the corporatism of the academy. The podium. The precarious power.

The rest wasn't important. Something about how I signed with a commercial agent and now am back at this level of acting that reminds me why I left acting. Such as notices for WOMEN COMFORTABLE BEING PORTRAYED AS HOT SLUTS. This from a reputable network which I will not name but you can guess. I want to barf all over such things, even though I'm not even in consideration, I'm too old to be a (comfortable) HOT SLUT. I'm more the Midwestern Mom. But anyway. If I can make money off of this shit—what's left of my face/voice/body—I'll live with my disgust.

I'm reading LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN which is gorgeous--the kind of book that has me reclaiming my Irish/Roman Catholic identity. I plan to write a post all about the books I read this summer: Green Girl, Freedom, Pale King, The Ten Year Nap, Sempre Susan, um whatever else I can recall. Plus lots of scripts.

[If you haven't read Green Girl, you must. It is gorgeous, and I am a green girl. I have long called them the gauzy girls, these promising young women. Perhaps I identify overmuch, but this was an extremely pleasurable read for me, not least of all in the shock of recognition.]

I hope to read Pamela Lu soon, and others. And I will I will.

What I want to say is that I was thinking about the way whatshisname said of it (the Internet): IF I CAN GET OUT, THEY CAN GET IN and lately I feel this way. That too much is getting in. that I don't want to get out so much. Maybe it is because I have published some very personal shit lately that is now posted on the Internet and that makes me feel vulnerable indeed.

Or maybe it is because my dad almost died and all that. Which has me quivering.

Or maybe it is the start of the new semester which is so much agony.

I had this well-known local rock journalist come talk to my class some years back and I recall him saying: IF ITS NOT ON THE INTERNET, IT DOESN'T EXIST. Which I think he had a point. Which is why I had to update my academic bio to include my theater bio so that I'll feel more INTEGRATED but who cares? I guess my Internet identity is very important. If I'm not there, I don't exist. I guess. I hate this, of course.

So D. and I talk somberly and seriously of cutting it off at home, though we always have reasons that prevent us from doing this—work reasons. Not just day job work but acting/writing/translating work. We can't deny it makes life easier in these areas. But we are both so anxious lately.

This morning I opened my home page and there was some health news headline this way: MOST CHILDREN GET OVER THE SUDDEN DEATH OF A PARENT with a small print subtitle but 10% at risk for severe depression. And of course I thought about how and why or wherefore I managed to be the 10% in this of all things. Not that my life is so bad. The other night a friend and I got drunk and spoke of aging—like the real shit of it, the hard reality of it that you're not supposed to speak of. Like how irrelevant we are to our 20something students/peers, most of the time. And how we know it's all relative yet still, as J Franzen has R Katz think in Freedom: AGING ONLY GOES IN ONE DIRECTION. Katz ponders this profundity, of course, while considering the Fuckability of a 40something lover. Ha ha. Good times. I sort of puke as I read Katz. It was a compelling read, puking aside. I couldn't stop turning the pages. What will Katz do next? He doesn't kill himself. He only thinks of it, considers the beauty, the FREEDOM of it. What death would give, would absolve.

But for real lately all I think, as I told my friend, was how fucked up it is that aging only goes in one direction, that we are beginning to near the age where you line up at death's door, ready for the end. Once my Dad goes, it is me. And I must live to see my child live. And I love so much of my life right now—my child, watching him grow above all—that it pains me to feel how quickly (yes, cliché, I know) it moves along, and for a bit I would like to slow it down. Maybe stop, make it stop so that I could—I don't know--

That's not an option either. You get one life, you ride through it, you're done.

Magoo (in bed): Am I going to die?

Not for a long time.

I don't want to die.

You don't have to worry about that. You won't die for many many years.

I don't want to die even in many, many years.

I was stuck. I didn't know 4 year olds worried about such things. I felt so deficient. I wondered what my mother told me—I know what she told me, about God and heaven. But I can't tell him that. I wish I could.

P.S. How's that for chatty and tangential? If you read this far, I love you :) But also even if you didn't.

I love these very specific rejections

noreply@blogger.com (Repat) — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 15:43:00 +0000

Dear [My Real Name],

[Title of Story] teases and withholds, striking a light kind of first-person madness. It is a bit chatty and tangential though. We're going to have to pass on it.

Please consider sending us more of yer work in the future. We'd be more than happy to read it.

I have things to do

noreply@blogger.com (Repat) — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 19:43:00 +0000

So this woman we know and admire is pregnant with twins, and she told D. the other night over the phone as they spoke of something else (translations; difficult editors); he starting hopping and whooping and wowzaaing. I came up and danced around, too; later I decided that we should have twins. As if. What do you think? I said. It seems like the only thing the way to ward off all this death. If we had twins--

We'd have to move out of this house, he said.

If we had twins, I replied, but not until the next morning, over breakfast--

WE'D HAVE TO GET A MINI-VAN!! Magoo interrupted, thrilled.

His dream come true.

We're thinking of getting a dog. In fact.

I was feeling so proud of myself--so very Jonathan Franzen, really--that I had only one child/spawn on this earth & that this is what more people should do, under-produce.

Anyway the twin mother-to-be is older than me so I have hope again.

Anyway I will not be one of those people.

I had this thought this morning on the treadmill that it might be best to be published when I'm dead. I have two manuscripts to be published but I don't necessarily think it will be such a relief to be published. It will create new problems.

Whenever I read about someone drinking gin & tonics in a story or an essay (like that NYer essay by JF) I want to drink a gin & tonic. I want to be a person who drinks a gin & tonic. And then, when I do drink one, or have the opportunity, I don't like it.

This seems to be a trend: more literary references to gin & tonics; more passed-on opportunities to drink gin & tonics.

Yesterday in a fancy salon my littlest sister painted my hair and said: "It is consuming me. I can't stop thinking of it. Him of all people. That he is vulnerable."

I know, I said.

"And I have things to do. I have to stop being so sad. I have to do things."

I know, I said.

The thing is--I didn't say--I realize that a parent's illness or death or near-death reveals something of life, of mortality. As if a canyon appeared where all was flat. Even on my zombie-meds, which I shouldn't be taking but somehow have been taking for a year now. An opening into the void.

"You see, I feel like a part of me, of my heart, died, too. It is so simple, such a given--you live and you die, yes? there were no other guarantees--but to see him suffer that much was more than I could bear. His sadness. The world shattered."

I thought I'd achieved a certain DISTANCE from my dad, my family—but, all those hours in the ICU--I realize that I have not. That his death implies my death, a kind of death. That our mortality, that I have to watch this happen to people I love-

I told him, "You'll be okay. It's all going to be okay," but I wasn't sure.

I held his hand as he has so often held mine. I stood there as he received The Last Rites. I wished that I believed in God. In the Last Rites. I didn't mean to be the only one in the room, with the priest, but I was. So I held his hand. I pretended I could make it better.

I have said this already. I am disjunctive and depressive and repetitive.

We ate tacos and, as Magoo sent messages to his imaginary friends, I whispered to D. what I have been thinking for days: that life is just one big disaster... I knew it was not something to speak out loud, but the sentence had come to mind and I thought voicing it might relieve something.

You don't believe that, he said.

Yes but as I stood with him, I saw his fear, his very real terror. To the great unknown, that Hamlet speaks of, how scared he was to be on the way.

Yes, but look at all that he leaves behind.

It was like Ivan Illych, I said, not intending to turn this into a wandering Great Books symposium. (But this is our religion, I suppose.)

Yes, but Ivan Illych was dead his entire life. Not your Dad.

I wish I believed that that made it easier. To die, I mean. To lose everything.

Also, I sort of wonder if it is possible not to be Ivan Illych. I want to be Ivan: inured, more defended, than I am. Otherwise, how to get through the day. I turn to art to awaken consciousness, but lately life has me feeling over conscious. My nerve endings all lit up.

We went to see a play last night that disappointed me. It was about the 7/7 London terror attacks. This disturbed me but the play didn't justify the disturbance. And the walk home disturbed me, as there are shootings on that block and that's all I could consider. Plus last week while we were tending to my father someone entered our house and stole a bike. Our bike. So someone has been in my house. And then with my dad. I've had this feeling that everything--

My thoughts lately are way too depressing to explain. I have joy, too, like at the beach with Magoo this weekend, and in the pool, and--

Other things.

I'm just so sick of the pain in life defining the joy, to paraphrase Tennessee Williams, my love. I'm really sick of it.

I have things to do.

from last week, unposted

noreply@blogger.com (Repat) — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 01:40:00 +0000

It seems stupid to blog or post or whatever it is you call this, that is, unless I call it communication, in which case it begins to feel somewhat comforting or compelling or, if nothing else, momentarily distracting. Which is to say i'm in a hosptial with my dad, who had a major heart attack this past weekend--in the middle of the night, of saturday night—and the calls early morning and the stupidity of having to go to my show to perform this g-dfrsakin show to the miniscule matinee audience while he lay there in the ICU, in critical care, and how not-quickly-enough I sped out to the exurbs where he still lay, without relief, even after the angioplasty and the stent, which wasn't enough; how impossible it was to leave the hospital where he lay suffering; how stupid we all felt the next morning when the beautiful doctor named Said arrived to declare that this would not do that he would try something else, to open the smaller arteries, which had been continually “heart attacking” (which verb I didn't know). That he had been “heart attacking” all day (for 24 hours) and how much damage that did to his heart—that this verb can exist in the present progressive: “You are heart attacking” or the past perfect continuous: “He had been heart attacking all day” which I didn't know. My brother the calm one the pilot too calm in his transmission of the news: one quadrant not functioning, and how we—my brother, my stepmom, my sister—sat and paced and cried and texted. How I texted FUCK I am SO FUCKING scared. As if. And emailed even. And prayed without believing in prayer. How my brother told me that Said was sober, was straightforward--said it was a 50-50 chance he could open those arteries.

How I knew that it was not enough, that my 74 year old father has not lived enough, that we need many more years with him. That it felt like my own impending death. How afraid he looked. To not go gently. Not at all gently. No amount of pain killer or sedative or sleeping pill relieving the pain of an Attakcing Heart. Attack being the operative word. How fragile life is and how little we know of the heart, even with all we know.

That Said came back with two thumbs up, telling us it went better than expected that the blood was flowing that he opened those arteries. That we all cried and hugged and considered framing an 11X13 portrait of this doctor from the Emirates, our hero.

How he saved our Dad's life, who'd been Heart-Attacked for over 24 hours, who withstood a trial of pain that would have me in tears and screaming, but my Dad, a surgeon himself, ever the minimizer, the denier, would only rate as a “3”. How we all wanted to blame someone: the other doctor, the timing, god, life, nothingness. How it hurts still to know how he hurt, how alone you become in your body, how our bodies render us utterly and forever alone. This man who, my entire life, would and has gladly selflessly taken on ANY amount of pain (not to mention discomfort, inconvenience) to relieve my own pain. How, all things considered, I have been totally blessed in this regard. How fucked up it is to see your father suffer, how short life is, how abstractly I have occasionally considered the thought that he was not long for this earth (having endured a bypass 13 years ago) and the thought that I've been lucky to have him this long, and moreover—having lost my mum early on—it would certainly not be as difficult to lose my father.

This has been my occasional abstract theoretical thought.

That it couldn't be hard, considering all i've been through. And then how easily that fell away and how urgent and essential it seemed that he live longer, much longer, and how urgent and essential it felt for me to come to this dreary exurb to sit by his side, as if it would make him less alone.

Other thoughts: that I must hug my child, who is abundantly life-affirming (another not-accidental term); that I must have another child; that life is too short, too fragile; that my step-mum, who has forever been a supreme annoyance to me, is actually rather something of a blessing, not least in the fact of her total devotion to my father.

So that's where I’ve been. And where I sit. And his heart is damaged but he is alive and learning to live with something the meical-pharmo-complex calls The New Normal. Which is not on the map.

He almost died. I drove here from my stupid play and I stood by his bed, still wearing pancake makeup, and I held his hand and a family friend, a priest, came in—he'd been “texted”--with his ointments. And he did the Anointing of the Sick, and we prayed and held hands and I was like FUCK I’m not ready for this, and the sacrament freaked Dad out too, though I believe he—despite or perhaps because of his exquisite intelligence—has not lost his faith as I have, while I stood there thinking of the last time this was done, for my mother, 30 years ago. Though it feels like yesterday. I wanted him to leave and he did and my dad looked at me and said something feeble like “how strange” which phrase was wholly inadequate to communicate the vast universe of grief and loss and terror in front of him. Meanwhile, his heart attacking. And I said, “I know. It's going to be okay.” Though I knew not. He said Good-bye to me, and that he loved me.

He's still here and the new Normal means things like Heart Failure or Aneurysms are very real risks.

But Said stood before us, his son and 4 daughters—two just flown in from the coasts—and drew us a picture of my dad's heart, and told us what happened and spoke of the God Almighty which made my father cry, realizing how near death he'd been. He told us that he sees men in this ICU whose children want nothing to do with them, and that it said something about my father that his children were there, by his side. He did something right.

Which, my forever whinging aside, I can attest.

28 Things

noreply@blogger.com (Repat) — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 19:10:00 +0000

1. The dressing room is too small, and so many bodies. Often, I feel like a prop. A prop with a voice. With a face.

2. It could be worse. I've had worse. I've taken off my shirt in front of other men. Mostly, they try not to look. We stop considering each other that way. We are all body, sweat and heat.

3. Someone refers to "the bad kind of Jew". I don't say anything. Neither does C., whom he speaks to, who just made her Bat Mitzvah. The day after, she got her first period. I wait for her to take offense. As if it is her job. As if it might relieve my own.

4. I hear casual violence, how it lurks in language. The actor from Kosovo, always apart, never one of us. He works daily with a voice coach, hoping to lose the accent, to lose these traces of himself.

5. Another actor, on the other hand, arrived here from Russia at age 8. You wouldn't know. He speaks with the voice of a newscaster. I worked very hard to accomplish this, he brags, proud of my surprise.

6. I had this dark feeling, sitting backstage. The stage manager noting time. Half-hour till opening.15 till opening. Six. Three. The lights, the music. The accumulation of life. A memory years ago of an Off Bway revival, my first (and only) Off-Bway show, an older wise actor noting: "You measure your life by the shows you've done and the people you've loved." It was so sad, and true. That this will be one someday. A notch on my belt. Who do I love? What happens when you cease being able to love. Maybe I will measure, too, by my inability to love.

7. I made an actress cry. Or is it that she can cry on cue, which I have never been able to do? I speak to her of her mother, who has died. I tell her that her mother would be very proud. It is the sort of thing older women have said to me. "I wish your mother were here to see you now." and "I know she would be proud." Still. I reach out to her and I find this terrifying.

8. Another way to measure time: the lines (cracks) in my skin, on my face. I sit in the mirror each night, applying heavy stage makeup. The makeup reveals rather than hides the progress of my age. This line was not there last year, or was it? I try not to look but under the lights, there are no secrets.

9. To feel that the ones in their 20s are of a separate generation. To understand that 27 is not 40. To hear one note that it was a tragedy when DFW killed himself, but it would not be a tragedy if "any of us" killed ourselves. Yes, it would, I say.

10. Flies and sweat and polyester.

11. Driving home with a 21 year old. He tells me of his panic attacks. He is so young and troubled and I want very much for Goo to not be like this when he is 21. I want Goo to be one of the hard ones, preternaturally inured to life. That is, to be entirely unlike me.

12. Goo asks if the SUVs will get tickets. Why? Because they're bad for the environment. I wish, I say.

13. Last Friday I received notice that I am a finalist for another Fiction Prize. And yesterday, that I made the top 3% out of 800 for a major award. It is nice to be so close, but in some ways it is more painful to come close and to not actually win.

14. Still, I've long ago ceased waiting for something to make it all worth it.

15. That's it: the difference between 27 and 40: you stop waiting so hard. To make your future forget your past. You arrive.

16. You've already arrived, of course, but you begin to realize it. Finally.

17. I have an audition today. A major theater. To play an Irish Catholic Chicago girl. Who left town. From the suburbs. Left town but has "Chicago" inside of her. Seems more sophisticated than the others, superior. But still. You can take the girl out of... Kind of thing. I really want to work with this company and have been working on this callback. I become obsessed. I lose the entire day. I cannot focus on anything else. This explains the fragmented nature of these notes.

18. Another way to measure time: the days we've lost, the parts we didn't get, the books we didn't write. The life we haven't lived.

19. Each Christmas my dad gives me a page-a-day calender and this year has a popular-book theme. A book a day! Anathema to me, but still. Goo tears the page each day. Today's book: Brief Interviews etc. by David Foster Wallace. In case I was in search of A Good Read. It seems important but the way the book is presented, as a ready consumable, makes me shudder.

20. In Freedom, JF seems to make the same argument he made in the New Yorker essay. It is about envy and friendship. That DFW's death rendered him utterly pure, privileged him not to live in the messy world of the rest of us, the impure. No longer a sweaty body.

21. "But you're alive and he's not," I remark in the dressing room, celebrating life, become a cheerleader for the Living Poets Society.

22. It seems so silly, to celebrate life. Death is the most beautiful thing. The most poetical, in any case. That's obvious. The death of a beautiful woman. My mother. The death of a young-ish writer. The suicide.

23. Between scenes I read of Elizabeth Badinter in The New Yorker. The article offers jouissance, the valoration of an intellectual rock star, a woman. I want to move to Paris, where aged women might be intellectual rock stars. What else is new.

24. I am always looking for ways to age ungracefully.

25. Also, my father.

26. You might just begin to see loss everywhere.

27. I am no longer allowed to text backstage. Not even texts noting despair/boredom.

28. It is remarkably easy to let someone down. Onstage, under the lights--nothing could be worse.

noreply@blogger.com (Repat) — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 03:52:00 +0000

I LOVE ACTING. IT IS SO MUCH MORE REAL THAN LIFE. - OSCAR WILDE

I very often don't trust people. I used to think this was a problem of mine, but now I know that most people aren't trustworthy and so I trust instead my skepticism. If I trust you, it means something. Like the person I married. Even if we torture each other from time to time. He was a rare find. I occasionally get to know a person and then intuit the ways that this person is not trustworthy or safe--as an Ex used to put it (You feel safe, he said, though I'd prove him wrong)--and then I wish to distance myself from this person.

This is all to say that the other day a mother-friend person came by and drank two gin & tonics. What bothers me w/r/t this friend is that she becomes confident, assertive, rude when inebriated. Her partner was asking to read some of my recently published fiction, which he did, and then she did, and all she could say after reading was something like "So did X really happen?"

Which bothered me. Though of course it is a fair enough question.

The thing is. Much of what I write, or why I write, has to do with a working through--a telling and retelling--of trauma, points of crisis. That this is why I feel compelled to write. As if I could work it out, change it, rewrite my life. These are not things (these past traumas/moments of crisis) that I talk about with most people. Very few, in fact. And so when my friend asked this I felt disturbed--that I should be required to talk about The Real Event when what she'd read was Fiction.

I don't mind talking about the real event with someone I trust, someone sensitive or empathetic. But with someone sort of salaciously interested in the relationship between Reality and Fiction--this is offensive to me. If you don't already understand that that relationship is sacred.

I suppose I'm asking too much.

But I know people and their petty sense of scandal. Or judgement. Particularly the smug suburban bourgeoisie. And frankly, why should I be required to speak of my excruciating self-knowledge if you have not done that work on yourself. As this woman. Who drinks gin & tonics to gain self-knowledge. Which I find scary. Personality-change drinkers. Which my father for example.

Yesterday I heard a same-sex couple interviewed about what it means to be married. The women spoke of how they in part resist the normality of marriage. When you have been an outsider for so long, it seems wrong to fit in somewhere, to become part of a normalized structure. I could relate to this. This is part of why I often resist the married-couple obligatory socializing. It has its comforts, but I know that most of these people would find me weird/offensive/etc. If they knew me for realz.

That I am meant to fit within these structures because I have a husband/baby. I don't fit. I suppose most of us don't fit, but I chafe at the mantle.

Maybe I prefer being an outsider. As I've been for so long.

Someone on Facebook wrote a "joke" about what you should do the first day you arrive in a mental institution. He also "jokes" about getting out of prison. These are to him the two worst-case scenarios.

"This is what you should do," my young actor friend said last night, "Teachers who look like you should--"

He was telling me to shame the students in my class, to shame them out of texting. That my ample chest, curvy figure gets in the way of my authority. He has a point. What if I just bring you to class with me? Would that work? This is my confident-white-male-authoritarian-sidekick. See him for authority; see me for knowledge.

The other day a doctor asked me "What brings you joy?" and I was able to list so many things without thinking very much about it and this brought some satisfaction. That my daily life provides access to joy. This was not always the case.

One night recently I laid in a dark room with Magoo and his fellow 4 year old cousin as they tried to fall asleep. Every so often one would question the other, apropos of nothing at all: "Are there skunks in Pittsburgh?" or "Do old-fashioned cars go faster than convertibles?" or some other perfect bit of 4 year-old musing & inquiry and I wished for a moment that Magoo would be four years old forever, or that I could sit in this room with two four year old boys forever. It feels like heaven, sometimes. To have this life.

The doctor asked me why I was locked up for so long. I've forgotten how long it was, but I have an idea. Years. Sometimes I think it was less than three years. Other times I think it was longer. And then later to be told they were wrong. That the diagnosis didn't fit. It wasn't the place for me. To be told that it wasn't a good idea after all. To make a life after that. Were you treated well? she asked, worried. ECT? No, I said. Others had shocks. Not me. I don't think so anyway. Someday I'll get the records.

I know this is paradise

noreply@blogger.com (Repat) — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 02:51:00 +0000

I'm trying to figure out how to be married. I love my partner but after we fight, in a way that feels out of control--like we've become possessed--well, I begin to think I might not need the eggs after all. I'm always breaking the eggs. Is that it. Lately I think I'd rather sit alone in a room for the rest of my life, maybe drop missives down occasionally from a high window. Thoughts of high windows. What was that Larkin poem I thought I'd never be able to understand: I know this is paradise / Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives-- After we fight, it seems foolish to be in a relationship, any sort of relationship. Impossible and painful. I become depressed in a new way. There needs to be another word for this variety. I can't write about it here. How it becomes primal and absurd. I'm left wondering how people do this to each other, year after year--disappoint each other, hurt each other--& still find ways to keep it going. It is the most difficult thing I've ever done. And if I fail-- well, I don't know. I didn't know I could fail.

Of course it's possible but it hadn't occurred to me that I might.

A few months ago I had an audition for a Greek play and the director, whose work I respect, surprised me and my scene partner. We had prepared the scene and when we got there he asked us to perform in a way that had nothing to do with that. I was told to begin on my knees, to listen to my son's story and, when he got to a certain line, to feel oil dripping all over me, to "become Dionysus". I don't know what I did. He asked us to do it again but to take it even farther--and so there I was sort of touching myself and getting excited. It was strange but fun and later he asked me to play a woman slightly autistic. I became a puppet controlled by another actress. When I got home I told D. that it was the most valuable artistic experience I'd had at an audition. I didn't even care if I got the part (I didn't, but he asked me to be part of a project this fall.)

The point is I like being told what to do. I like trusting a director with a strong aesthetic vision and I like what I discover as a result. Maybe this isn't the point at all but I was thinking about it last night. My director lacks vision. That's my sense. The Assistant Director has much more to say, as does the Fight Captain. So there's that. But while things are coming along lately we are all rather terrified that one of the young leads is going to kill the reviews. Well, I know she will. She has been cast due to nepotism and she is neither trained nor talented (others in the cast are both, some are wildly talented, a joy to watch). She would be fine in a small role but she has a large role and we are all sort of looking at each other these days, worried that she can't pull it off. She has this breathy, understated way of speaking and the acoustics are not great in the theater and so she often can not be heard.

I'm not going to worry about it, I tell D. I can only do the best that I can do and let the rest fall into place. But of course I worry. I think it might suck.

This is so boring I apologize. I need to write, to memorize lines. I'm procrastinating.

Also here is something: I realize that I like to be passive and that this role --now that I have filled this PRE-EXISTING ROLE--that is, the maternal figure--requires me to be, well, maternal. I am maternal but I'm not matriarchal. And when I show up I must be active, must engage immediately with my Love Interest (I am trying to fall in love with him), while my instinct is to hide away. It is difficult for me, to drop these learned defenses. I am guarded. It is safer. It is my default. Maybe that is why I keep returning to acting, that I am able to make a connection, to love and be loved, with less of the risk, less of the pain.

We need the eggs

noreply@blogger.com (Repat) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 04:32:00 +0000

1. Some days I regret leaving the house. The things one might see. A father holding his daughter's wrist, not her hand. Holding it too tightly. Pulling her along. The mother walking behind. Too much space. The daughter saying Ow and the father ignoring this. Her jumping, happy, glad to be dragged along, happy to live within his insanity.

2. I was thinking about that thing Kathy Acker wrote about writing and suicide. That you can write instead of killing yourself. That it is one way. And finding this: My mother began to love at the same moment in her life that she began to search for who she was. This was the moment she met my father. Since my mother felt that she had to be alone in order to find out who she was and might be, she kept abandoning and returning to love.

3. All day I had this feeling: If you talk to her, you will feel again attached to her and if you feel attached to her you will feel loss, sadness. Discomfort, certainly. A moment or two, maybe more, of pleasure or comfort--yes--but is that worth so much. I drove home. And then I called her. There is something I was taught once, a coping skill: opposite-to-emotion action. I don't think this was it.

4. It occurred to me, while driving, that from a certain perspective everything that I saw was seeing might be beautiful. Might be considered beautiful. The billboards advertising casinos or gentlemen's clubs or pest control or all-inclusive resorts in Mexico. Someone somewhere might find this beautiful and I, if I had different eyes, might see the smog blocking the view of the Sears Tower as beautiful. The strip malls. The traffic.

5. At rehearsal two girls sit behind me, complaining. I hate people. Amy says. Me too! the other Amy replies. They go on this way, with a lovely earnestness: I really hate people! People are such a problem. I'm always thinking that!

6. Also at rehearsal: I am reminded of the supreme awkwardness that is rehearsing a love scene. A stage kiss. I have not kissed a man who is not my husband for nearly ten years. Yes. That long. Not even on stage because that was around the time I quit acting. But now I am in a play and I must kiss a man. The man who plays opposite me. My love interest. Originally another man was cast in this role, an actor I've been cast opposite before, but then he became overbooked and had to drop out. I read with some actors, including this one, and helped choose him. The director asked and because he was nice-looking with a warm personality I said I like him. You see I am shallow. Plus he seemed talented enough. And so he chose him. And now I am not so sure he was the right choice but that doesn't matter. He is too young. Younger than me. Eight years. And he is less experienced, though he does film work. He is very nervous to do our love scene and so spends a lot of time being silly & making a joke of it. The other couple in the play, the two young leads, spend much of the time making out, sucking face and so on. It is rather hot and I so admire how easily they transformed themselves to lovers. Professionally, that is. Last night I returned home to tell D. of the awkwardness and D. said "Do you kiss him?!" rather angry and horrified, though he loves that I am acting again and brags about it often. He had not considered this. The last play I was in my stage-husband was totally annoying and anyway the play was about a couple who'd been married for so long they never had sex. So, I didn't have to kiss him. I was just pissed off all the time. In this play I fall in love with a man whose deceased wife had an affair with my (deceased) husband. Now, in our middle years, we find love again. It is like that John Updike novel. Partner switching. Ha ha I've never read that novel I just wanted to invoke you know who.

Actually what I think is that I will have to seduce him, sort of, to somehow make it clear that he can kiss me, to get him past his nerves. To make it okay. Just look at me. So that it will work. Because it's not working. I'm not sure if I can do this. I've been wanting him to do it first, but he may not. Plus I'm the married one. God it's so complicated.

I remember a teacher once telling me: you need to love the person onstage with you--to find a way to love him--that that will be transformative, will make things happen. The most creative thing you can do is to love another person. Someone said.

An older actress, to a young man, her scene partner (he was trying to find a way to deliver his lines): "Honey, just look at me. That's all. I'll give you everything you need." An apprentice friend overheard the exchange at summer stock one year. We passed it around. It was perfect. Just look at me.

I run and listen to Lady Gaga. It gives me something. I am scared. Thank you for everything. Life is so short and superfluous. But I think I will live again and I think there will be time for it. For all of it.

Language will keep us safe from human onslaught

noreply@blogger.com (Repat) — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 04:57:00 +0000

Janet Frame:

But it is imperative, for our own survival, that we avoid one another, and what more successful means of avoidance are there than words? Language will keep us safe from human onslaught, will express for us our regret at being unable to supply groceries or love or peace.

There is more I want to say about that black dress. It was a thin sheer cotton material, breezy and long and I wore it in the winter with a leotard underneath with tights and a sweater. In the summer I wore it with very little underneath, a black bra and underwear. In the right light it was see-through. I loved this dress. I wore it to Lincoln Center one night, with Dread, to see the Amy Sedaris play. I wore it to audition for MFA acting programs, including the one which accepted me but I turned down because I couldn't bear the thought of leaving New York. Of leaving a certain person.

This is what I mean when I say that I am pathological.

The other thing about the man who wouldn't love me: he said that the problem with his wife, with their sex life--had to do with her incest history. That she could never have a normal sex life. I wondered what it would be like. I knew this woman Jennifer, in the hospital. It was this way for her. Sex was always submission, victimization.

Occasionally sex is not pleasurable and yet we pursue it. We need it, regardless. Even when it's not. When it's something else, something apart from pleasure.

I am very sorry I can't write here lately I am in this thick sick place everything becomes too much.

When I am not writing when I don't have time to write I want to cry. Everything inside of me that needs to be written strangles me I begin to scream. Which is why I was admitted to the hospital. A suffocating pain on my chest. This thing. Nerves, they tell me.

It is not that I don't like people it is that when I am with people too much I feel sad and lonely and I want to be alone so that I might counter that disgusting alienating feeling.

Sometimes I feel this boredom the days

even the beautiful weather

Which is why I quit acting, too. I don't know why I'm in a play again. I kind of love it.

You must forgive me. If this blog ceases to exist. I've been elsewhere. Not making love but don't I wish.

what I ate, what I wore

noreply@blogger.com (Repat) — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 03:07:00 +0000

I let people down. I have this memory. I had a boyfriend once. He was important. I was 26; he was 46. Now he is my Facebook friend. I occasionally see his updates, noting his television appearances. He is on shows I haven't heard of, but which nonetheless exist. Shows with names like CASTLE or JUSTIFIED. Also commercials for Southwest Airlines. It is good that I watch neither television nor commercials, which might leave me watching this ex-boyfriend and considering his place in my life. Facebook is enough, is too much.

It had to do with timing. I fell out of love. But when it began, he did not love me enough. This is how it felt to me. That he would not love me enough and perhaps that was where it was meant to stay—me wanting more, wanting him to love me more; him just out of reach. He was going through a divorce, is how he put it--and the concept seemed foreign, far away and dirty. His wife was 35 when they married. We looked good on paper, he told me. Which also felt foreign. The way New Yorkers care about paper. Marriage and 35 and divorce were all very far away. I read the announcement in the Times. I found it online. It didn't look good online.

Sometimes I want to write about fucking but mostly I want to write about love. This is why I write or have ever written. As if trying to love.

What happened was his soon-to-be ex-wife told him, the man I loved, that she never loved him. She told him this some years into the marriage. When he wanted children which she didn't want. Plus she stopped sleeping with him.

But what really destroyed him was that: that she'd never loved him. His suffering kept him from loving me as much as I needed to be loved but also it made me love him even more. That I could feel how deeply he suffered.

I'm not good at love, as J Franzen might note. I'm good at some things but usually I want all of the mutually exclusive things and I want them at the same time. You understand. This is normal. I will normalize my fuckedupness.

Once my friend described her partner's mother as “normalizing” and that was a very freeing concept for me. I have often felt oppressed by these women—the suburban normalizers.

Lately I consider myself from an objective 3^rd person perspective and I wonder if I am a fuck up. Or pathological. Certainly there are a number of people who, based on various evidence w/r/t my life, would deem me pathological.

Why this matters to me I'm not sure.

Though I too wonder if I am pathological.

Though what difference does it make.

It is good for me to be in rehearsals. There are many talented people involved in this show though a few worry me and today the director was sitting too close to me and annoying me. Plus making jokes about bondage which aren't funny and I couldn't be bothered to even pretend to laugh. Casts of actors quickly become dysfunctional families. Except for one man and today I had to play footsie with him and it was really grossing me out.

The point is that eventually the boyfriend did love me enough and yet by then I no longer loved him.

When I loved him, when he wouldn't love me enough, we went to see the Macy's fireworks display. This was the only time in all my years in NYC that I did anything for the 4^th of July. I was too unhappy to do these normal American things. But that day, going to see those fireworks, I thought to myself: I am happy. This is happiness. We stopped at a bodega and bought cherries and mangoes to snack on as we watched the fireworks. I wore a black dress. Why do I remember these details and not others. The food and what I wore.

half my life or all my life

noreply@blogger.com (Repat) — Tue, 31 May 2011 03:19:00 +0000

D. and I argue each morning, regularly, a thing.We fight about L's birthday party. I never wanted my life to resemble Kramer vs. Kramer but lately Magoo gets the ice cream out of the freezer on his own and I withdraw, forcing D. to play "bad cop" as he likes to say.

We argue about arguing, too.

We argue about couples therapy, which we've begun. How does one take it seriously, the way these women speak, the earnestness, the light lilting inflection to her speech.

"So how can I help you?" my therapist asks.

She gives me a handout, titled CONTAINMENT. This is not very unlike teaching, all these handouts. It is up to the student to read the handout, of course.

Learning to stay in control even when angry. Take time-outs. Challenge the myth that ventilating anger is healthy for you.

I want to cross out ventilating.

What does it mean to be sick? Is it to be always, forever, outside of it all?

Lately I do things that make me feel stupid, lost, out of control. I become abject, a fool. I fall for the wrong people. Like an idiot. I begin rehearsals for a show, sword-fighting workshops. I haven't done this since college, since Fencing I, my P.E. requirement. I'm back there again, with a sword, parrying, squatting. My mind can't tell my body what to do--there isn't a link. I've lost the link. The captain tells me not to worry. He is patient and kind. I want to be more like the girl playing my daughter, her enthusiasm, her lack of self-consciousness.

Now I'm the older woman, the mother, the widow. I have one minor fight in the play but the director wants us to bond, and he's right. I begin to like these people.

By day I teach in a way that I haven't taught in years. I can't coast. How will I do this? I ask D. It's like riding a bike, he tells me. I want to believe him.

The healer tells me she does not believe in marriage. There are other ways to love. And then, the so-called happily married, living like brother and sister.

It occurs to me that I seek books about turning forty, as if there is a way to ease me into this. Last summer it was Chris Kraus:

As I turn forty, can I avenge the ghost of my former self?

And now it is Claudia Rankine:

It occurs to me that forty could be half my life or it could be all my life. On the television I am told that I don't want to look like I am forty. Forty means I might have seen something hard, something unpleasant, or something dead. I might have seen it and lived beyond it in time.

I ask a friend how she did it.

For me it led to a certain crisis point. I became convinced that I had to sleep with someone who was not my husband.

It was the first time I felt desire as a clear antidote to death, to my mortality.

Did it work?

Not really.

My mother in law: That was a hard one, she remembers. She is now in her 60s. I don't ask for details, though she might tell. It is enough (too much) to consider what I know already. She met her husband when she was still a girl, 13 or 14. What would it be like, to know only one man, your entire life. How disappointing it would be, how sad. Others call this beautiful. Maybe I don't know anything.

noreply@blogger.com (Repat) — Wed, 25 May 2011 03:55:00 +0000

What I mean is that I'm trying to get New York out of my system, to leave feeling that I've had enough.

There was this apocalyptic rain. And I was in Times Square, which feels apocalyptic without torrential rain.

But then I'd have these transcendent, inspired, expansive moments. That thing that happens to me that doesn't happen anywhere else.

Well I suppose it happened when I traveled around Europe--

Sometimes I feel like a different person in NYC. A person who is very social. Who stays out late. Who enjoys staying out late. A person who sleeps. I even sleep in New York.

I am actually rather still slightly disappointed that I did not get the job in Rome or San Francisco, because I need to leave.

I am trying to stay still

to enjoy this moment

I am going to spend the next eight weeks thinking of Charlotte Bronte's diary, which she wrote while teaching in Brussels. She was so bored. I am going to think of this as I teach this summer. Teaching in the summer is often boring. As I recall. I have not done it since Goo was born but I need money. I like needing money and making money. How banal.

I read Charlotte Bronte's diary at the Morgan Library. I sat in the cafe, which is the perfect place to sit, I want to sit there each day, forever. Also Ruskin:

I feel greatly humiliated by the beauty of everything.

and V Woolf:

Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mounds of reflections.

and my favorite, from Stuart Davis' diary:

There are two things in the world--life and death. 'Art' is life. 'Not art' is death.