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January 7, 2002
The window that was being bricked up yesterday in the apartment building that I see from my desk has been finished. However, rather than bricking up the whole area they have halved the window space and now a new frame and pane sits on one side of the original structure. It is now a New York bathroom sized window rather than a full one. When I squinted out across the snowy, sun filled parking lot to check on it this morning it took me a while to locate the new window. I was looking for an area of brick, window sized and slightly lighter in colour than the brick of the building. My eye was confused and had to scan all of the floors. I was both relieved and disappointed when I realised that some compromise involving the former window’s fate had been arrived at.
“The worlds whole sap is sunke:
The generall balme th'hydroptique earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the beds-feet life is shrunke,
Dead and enterr'd, yet all these seeme to laugh,
Compared with mee, who am their Epitaph.”
A Nocturnall Upon St. Lucie's Day, Being the Shortest Day
John Donne
Here in the bowel of winter
(I always loved those lines from Donne, if not the time of year)
I am speed reading my life, asleep, in dreams,
Feature length with terror and amusement in equal parts—
I sit with my mother in perfect company
Admiring her profile
And the full, dark Lytton Strachey-like beard
That she has decided to cultivate;
I note how well it suits her.
Driving in planes
That balk at becoming air borne—
And life drifts back in briefly during part of a day
With a book,
Or an animal,
Or Vladimir and Estragon, still waiting, this time on TV.
But opposite my desk they are
Bricking up a window;
A terrible omen in the urban lexicon,
And I wonder if some part of me has been
Diligently and thoroughly closed,
A bulb disappearing permanently,
Sealed in brick and hardening mortar
The smell of damp cement
That is not nature,
That is not entirely synthetic—
A token of senses
Once bulging through
Each window
Every crevice.
December 17th, 2002
Dublin is a small town. You might think that you would have exhausted all of its streets during part of a lifetime lived there. Recently, during a ten day visit there, I discovered new vistas, new corners, new junctions. Going up Merrion Street past Doheny and Nesbitts pub I take a left down a lane and another left and am back on Merrion Square where I have just walked through the beautiful park in the square. I am killing time before meeting a friend in the Merrion Hotel. This approach to the square gives you a head on view of the fine Georgian architecture of the National Gallery, Government buildings and the grassy splendour that surrounds them. All newly clean, reminding us of Ireland’s economy that continues, if a little more slowly of late, to grow like a cabbage. This town is, in many respects, so different from the one I left seventeen years ago, return is both endlessly familiar and reminiscent of visiting a European city that you have never been to before. There are portions of it that are etched into my head, as familiar as one’s own moles. Bewley’s Cafe with its stained glass Harry Clarke windows: I meet a friend for breakfast (weak milky coffee, rashers, cherry buns and Irish butter). There is a roaring fire in the fire place and the whole place is suffused with a golden light. How many afternoons in the past did I spend here? But now the city also supports wine bars, cheese shops, and business people dealing tête a tête or on cell phones. I am from here but no longer exclusively of here. I meet a man and am reminded of my own race’s entertaining and eloquent charm, the sturdy flesh and pale skin, am reminded how I was often oblivious to the appeal of my own when I lived here. My mind performs a temporal boggle: This man and I are married, we have children, I work at something other than I do in New York, we go to the West at weekends. You peel back the fragile skin of destiny to expose the bundled nerve endings of another life, a life deserted, and your whole being loses its equilibrium like a ship in a gale force with its ballast ripped out. People, especially outside of Dublin, now mistake me for an American. I stare at the new Euro coins like a geriatric trying to make change. I know the city streets but get hopelessly lost when trying to negotiate the ever expanding suburbs with their glossy new EU funded roads. Sometimes it seems that everything has conspired to make me an outsider, even in my homeland. But the grand tradition of universal homesickness is a privilege I enjoy.
November 13,2002
Just as you expect the tide of hormones to commence turning amnesiac leaving you to plough ahead efficiently, genderless and libidoless, there is the realisation that their last gasp is going to be stronger than anything preceding this mid-life watershed of sudden womanhood. Does life begin at fourty? I think not. But I might have just begun to emerge from the long chrysalis of some inchoate gender, a delayed blooming whose dramatically tardy arrival is likely to disturb the proceedings of the evening. The women, most of them, who appeared to have been in this state of full womanhood for far longer than I, were usually the women that men friends married. They were not the people I chose first as friends; I was never assured that I could converse in their language. I admired them in the way one does an incomprehensible mystery, watching their virtues, unable to navigate the synapses between their ability to be wife, mother, thinker, worker, friend, domesticator. I was relieved to go to the boozer with their husbands. A brief stint in Paris left me perplexed by the complexities of lingerie, perfume, and heels; bewildered by those gorgeous, genteel whores haunting bookstores. Now I want to join them. Heel-up, upholster my breasts, confit dug legs, and think. I want to be all of those things I scorned along with all of the things I value. The rigour of another language’s grammar has suddenly started to be less opaque. If I go missing you may find me dancing around a Maypole, my impossibly high heels gently pock-marking the grass, my clothing an uncanny symphony of drape and wrap, children flying out of my limbs. No irony in sight, merely the inevitability of a late onslaught of tertiary sexual characteristics.
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.