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November 10,2002
Overheard at an ACT UP demonstration in Manhattan circa 1988. A heckler shouts at us, “You people should all be transported to an island and left there.” Quick witted queen yells back, “Honey, you’re on it.”
After a long time you find a small place where you are comfortable and you begin to realise that the smallness of the place, contrary to what you might have thought, is not a hindrance to your enjoyment of those very specific contours, but a further comfort. You go about your daily life sometimes forgetting that the atmosphere of the tiny little planet is beautifully tailored to fit your whole biology. That many of the other inhabitants seem more like your own blood than those people you used to gaze at disbelievingly all thorough Christmas dinner as their sagging ear lobes betrayed the fact that they were actually a different species from you. One Saturday you take a train north, for a mere hour and ten minutes, and the trees are admittedly beautiful. But you understand with a deep shock that now you are in a very big place where the air has too much oxygen and the people, though friendly, seem more like that species you escaped from so long ago, and you don’t like it very much and you want to return, as fast as possible, to the small place. Some part of you is actually afraid. The part of you inside, still not grown, begins to gnaw from the bottom of the stomach and up into the throat; it is hungry and it is reminded of all the first days at other wrong places where you were irredeemably foreign. To be polite, you attend a ritual with your kind hosts, and you worry that you may spontaneously combust and blow a hole in the roof of the ceremonial building as you fly out like a fleshy missile, or fidget yourself down the aisle in a wild ecstasy of Tourette’s. You want to leave. So you do. In the middle of the night you bundle yourself into the trunk of a departing car with your knees up around your ears and breathing exhaust fumes. They dump you somewhere nearby the small place in the night and from there you jump into another car, and you travel down one of the beautiful arteries, a shining road, a sweet tunnel nosing its way under the river, or one of the heroic bridges jumping itself onto the island. You open the car window and you can breathe again, the sweat on your skin resolves itself into salt, your restless extremities calm themselves back into feet and hands. You are returned, drawn inexorably by those structures that are proud and wise, cognizant of their destination and of their duty to carry you safely back there. So inevitable that this is the only pocket of air and land that can support your peculiar morphology. This perverse farm of plenty. And coming through the door of the walls where you live you see the other who lives there sitting at the table. Where else would you have found this other. You resolve to stay a while.
October 30,2002
What is all this vigorous dreaming? My nights are filled to capacity with unlikely scenarios, adventure, and encounters. A vivid contrast to my days I might add. I awake exhausted, more tired than when I lay down the night before. My brain, or the part that dreams, feels like it’s on steroids. It is occupied with something, busy refurbishing its interior for some new purpose. Running through the reels at high speed in order to make room for new images. A mid-life brain cleaning. He was sitting there last night at a type writer, dressed in an outfit I actually remember him wearing. The flannel trousers, the pale pink shirt, the gray cardigan, the pointed, laced winklepicker shoes, like a post-war English poet who had, through some anachronism, familiarized himself with punk. It was a gratifying dream, even though it was made clear to me from the faded and tentative nature of his physical presence that he was a ghost. I was made to feel foolish in that there was an inherent obligation in the dream to tell his family that I had encountered this ghost of their son and sibling at a typewriter. The pleasure came from the recognition that he might have been a writer of some sort had he lived longer.
November 26, 2002
Dinner with the actress. Of course we are all in love with her. Immediately. There is no falling. One would expect a little self-respecting resistance when it comes to such things, but it is pointless to attempt even a temporary stance of detachment. I don’t want to stare at her across the dinner table, but I do. I’m afraid of occupying the seat next to her for fear I will bore her or attempt to monopolize her gaze. My husband is not afraid to sit next to her. Or to gaze at her. She talks about her babies, and makes it interesting. She makes me want to be a mother. She makes me understand what it is to be a good mother, that it is not impossible. There is no impossibility with her. Perhaps the genius of her beauty is in the palette she was assigned. She would have made Titian weak at his painterly knees. She is further proof that beauty is a form of intelligence, of a conspiracy of cells, a collusion of color, flesh, form, proportion, and the light that emanates from within all of those elements. She is thin, tall and strong, not that usual acterly miniature that has an easier time of making proportions perfect on film. She eats the apple pie I have baked; she likes whipped cream. She talks of her vegetable garden. We are truly lost to her now. We all want to move in with her. Into her house with no furniture and the fecund, walled vegetable garden. As the evening closes the four other women present end the dinner feeling more beautiful rather than less beautiful. The real gift of intelligence, beauty, grace, and talent is that being in its presence can make you feel connected to intelligence, beauty, grace, and talent, can make you feel that by witnessing it you have become a part of it. It doesn't exclude the observer, it beckons you into the walled garden where you can partake of all the bounty even if it is not your own. It is a generosity.
October 14, 2002
I feel such deep relief at being alive that I become absent minded about the actuality of living, living in the sense that most are involved with being productive, working, making money, being creative, parenting, accumulating, planning for the future. Out the window everything is shimmering in its own fall galaxy of light and shadow and there is more birdsong than you might think congruous to such an urban environment. I’m too pleased with the day’s perfection to commence “work”, too content with an irrational and unfounded conviction that everything will be alright. I can't regret anything, the present is too all consuming. The relish taken in an ostensibly empty day: too much looking. To love the interregnums. To be between. More than reading, the putting down of the book before taking it up again. To be in transit is the sweetest anonymity. To walk in this air.
October 11, 2002
This weather, endless rain, both troubles and comforts me. My gene pool is pooling around me. While walking my jeans start to suck up water like that early physics experiment on water surface and meniscus. Crossing the street I do that directionless dance with another pedestrian. It can be a precious moment, an opportunity to pause, realize the absurdity of our ceaseless velocity, and to smile into another’s eyes. But my dancing partner today was not of this mind. “To the right, to the right,” she yelled at me. I wanted to yell back at her that we don’t all automatically go to the right. Who the hell teaches you these things anyway? It’s the first I’ve heard of it. Besides, are we supposed to go to the left in countries where that is the side on which we drive? It left me mildly irritable, another fact of life, of navigating the world, that had passed me by. It reminded me of going to school that first day and the teacher discovering that I couldn’t read the time; my mother had never thought to teach me. She was too busy reading me great stories about killer witches grinding up their victim’s remains with a mortar and pestle. The witch in question also used her mortar and pestle as a mode of transport, seated in the bowl while utilizing the pestle for propelling herself through the air and steering. Was she always yelling to other mortar and pestle conveyed witches, “to the right, to the right!”?