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I don’t know who you are but
The man who dines
At the prince’s restaurant.
But I remember an evening when we sat on
13th street and planned our demise,
not yet arrived—
and now it is too late
For anything except a mildly untimely death.
So dissimilar
And yet we had both been children
Convinced of death.
In Sanfranciso I swam laps convinced
I would survive alone—
Waiting for you.
Your date unused to high living.
Drunk I could dance because
I forgot the legion of things I couldn’t do.
Sometimes the only reminder of that landfill of time
Is the viscous fury that over takes
And bad behaviour reassures me of its remainder,
Storehoused like defunkt technology
Precious and useless
Had it’s uses
March 27, 2003
jesus, do you every think to yourself, jesus, I'm a complete fucking lunatic, jesus
and you don't even believe in jesus
March 22, 2003
I have been saved from war. They started bombing Iraq and Cordelia came to stay. Cordelia is eleven. Don’t think me some Sapphic Humbert Humbert—though we did visit the Butterfly Conservatory at the Natural History Museum —but pre-teen and teenage girls have lately reassured me about the future of our race. I have a certain sympathy for Brian Mitchell and his wife regarding their abduction of Elizabeth Smart. This misguided and wretched pair, however despicable, do seem to have had some sense that this golden creature was an antidote to what they had become, freshness in the face of a life desiccated. I have absolutely no idea what is going on in Iraq and have been studiously avoiding all media. I’m more interested in what is going on in Cordelia’s burgeoning world. (See the work of Marlene McCarty who has articulated all this and more so wonderfully in her drawings.) Cordelia has not yet put away childish things, she is as interested in stuffed toy animals at F.A.O. Schwartz as she is in knock off Prada bags on Canal Street, she likes the Beatles and Nelly as much as she does Henry Mancini and Jerry Lee Lewis. Let’s not “refine” our tastes, not put away childish things, resist specialising and selectivity, let’s broadband the world in an effort to circumnavigate the bear trap of the aging brain. She likes to make things as much as she does to shop for them. Her receptivity brought me back to boarding school and to classrooms where girls would capsize a room during prep by rushing to the windows in order to look out at a sunset. Adolescence was not a misery in my memory, it was a beautiful excruciation that I have been trying to recapture ever since. The company of young women reminds me of those precious nerves that grow up raw, wild, and function as the wide open transmitters of the world during these years. In the hot, damp, atmosphere of the butterfly conservatory, faintly scented with urine, I am surrounded by children of all ages and by butterflies. I find myself watching the children’s wonder more than the colours and shapes of the butterflies. We are re-told the familiar and fantastic lifecycle of these creatures, how they hatch from an egg, feed and fatten themselves as caterpillars to carry themselves through the rest of their metamorphosis, how they become pupae and break down their tissue and reorganize their whole beings to emerge as butterflies that live brief lives in order to mate and reproduce. We scrutinize the pupae in the hope that one will burst open, we are informed that it is a surprisingly sudden event and rare to witness, although we have just missed the hatching of a huge furry moth that hangs from the incubating case, trembling and raw but relieved. The green pupae fidget in their skins on the racks that they hang from. Maybe I can learn to clean my fuggy conduits and recapture some of that shining vitality from the company of Cordelia and her contemporaries.
March 11, 2003
I recently completed a year of medical treatment in a second attempt to refurbish my liver. I find myself not so interested in whether the treatment took, whether I achieved the coyly designated “sustained viral response” (the medical profession’s fear of the word cure is interesting) and more interested in the tidal surge of life returning to my body. My first encounter with the chemotherapy-like treatment of interferon, which you inject and supplement with red corpuscle murdering pills called ribavirin, was defined by my fixation on whether or not I could achieve a “cure” of the underlying condition. It seems unlikely that I have succeeded as the result of either of my year-long efforts (bloodwork reveals conflicting evidence that will clarify prognosis as the medication clears from my system; harried specialists console one with the highly untechnical sounding concept that one’s liver has been given a “rest”) but this seems surprisingly secondary. What I am focused on is saliva. Skin secreting sebum. Hair regrowth. A conviction that one has the newly acquired capacity to sense cells manufacturing energy in a time-lapse dance of excruciating pleasure. Muscles craving exertion. Appetite. Memory rescinding its intimacy with the contours of nausea. Even the occasional capacity to shape and articulate a thought, to read a paragraph. All of these phenomena were absent during the liver make-over. I am now luxuriating in a sort of Tourette’s syndrome of returned energy. I am not sure what to do with it all; my spouse looks nervous. Has a year’s absence of all physical energy been stored in some annex, some makeshift organ the body jerry-rigs in physical extremis? Is that storehouse of kinetic jubilation now being liberated into circuitry barely capable of containing the burden but, nevertheless circuitry shrieking with glee at the electricity burning up its pathways? It would seem so. I fear I may bark, yelp, dance, leap, commit acts of gross indecency I am so filled with the shock and pleasure of existing. The first indication of this great generosity of power returned appeared as moisture in the form of saliva. Let me say that saliva is a greatly underestimated substance. One of the side-effects of the treatment (documented in a neat little package with type so small and so demoralising in its content that I advise anyone tempted to read this mini-tome to bury the thing in the garbage immediately) is “dry mouth.” Now this term might strike one as an innocuous enough affliction and indeed it is not so difficult to endure. But the return of saliva, the flooding of the mouth with such sweet reassurance makes me feel compelled to kiss, eat, taste, drool, talk, and lick, to run my tongue around my mouth in an incessant appreciation of the body’s exquisite calibration.
Of course as the pleasure of these bodily functions fades into the knitting of daily life the problem of wanting more from that life returns. You feel better and a wet mouth is forgotten. When feeling ill the simplest of pleasures can fulfill one’s needs, the most mundane of tasks completed can feel like a grand accomplishment; fragility doesn’t only foster frequent irritability, along with it creeps in a tenderness and patience that I find is frequently absent from my hearty mode. Admittedly this softer, more compliant self may be the body’s endlessly calculating capacity to foster a future for itself: I’m so sweet, take care of me, but my compassion for humanity relished during the past year is fast being replaced with a ruthlesness and a rabid impatience to be done with all that is not essential. Neighboring the building that stores that year’s absent energy is the granary of a year that seems largely lost. So if I mow you down, yelping like a banshee and refuse to scrub the toilet bowl or wash the dishes, it’s because I’m currently attempting to live to the power of two and it may not be as alluring as Chatterton on his deathbed. Getting on with life is reassuringly vulgar.
March 10, 2003
Jean makes me want to smoke cigarettes. She makes me want to light the next one with the one I’m finishing. I haven’t really smoked consistently in seventeen years and it was never my biggest vice. But Jean could change all that. I see her twice a year at a mutual friends house. The house in question is a non-smoking residence (as is my own—depending on what you’re smoking) so we lurk in the kitchen with the window open and blow our second hand smoke out the crack. We sit on stools and talk to each other about our lives. About how winter kills us. How cooking saves us. About how our friends annual Robbie Burns night, where we always see each other, positioned in the calendar at the arse end of winter, drags us through this treacherous seasonal passage and girds our drooping loins for the onset of spring. Jean reminds me of why I took up smoking in the first place. At boarding school girls can be divided into two camps: the smokers and the non-smokers. Those that spend huge tracts of time in bathrooms with cans of ozone depleting deodorant gripped in their hands, behind the bicycle shed, sheltering under the cricket pavilion, negotiating the muddy paths of the nearby woods, all in order to have a smoke. I don’t know what the other camp does as I was never part of them. I suppose they went to the tuck shop, toasted white bread, chatted up boys, maybe even studied. But I was smoking. It takes a surprisingly long time to get the hang of smoking as any smoker will tell you. Hours of green gill inducing nausea on buses returning from away hockey matches, bathroom dizziness, head bobbing over the bowl, horizontal spins. All this was an initiation ceremony worth enduring for the pleasure of the company of women. A certain kind of woman. When I look at the smokers in my class, some of whom I am still close to, they are the ones still getting into trouble, still turning their lifes around in their hands looking for new surfaces, new shapes.
I know other smokers, but Jean is the one who instantly transports me back to this society that adopted a very specific ritual to denote it from all other lodges.
Lately I have been listening to Jean. When I hear her voice I want to run out and buy a pack of high tar smokes and gasp through them in quick succession. I want to brush my teeth, like I used to in school, and then light up in order to taste the tobacco better. Jean works as an interpreter at the United Nations. She has a voice that reassures one that all will be well with the world, and this in spite of the subject matter she is interpreting. She fulfills the requirements of her job with such grace, imagination and passion, converting the discourse of desiccated nations into an urgent poetry. If you listen to the Security Council hearings (my only concession to the impending war as I have couched my ostrich-like sloth in the convenient stance that I hate war-mongers, but I also hate the anti-war mongers: down with mongerers!) she is there telling you how important it is to talk. To sound the voice. Her Scots inflected speech can make you hear the time we are in. And it can convince you that whatever happens we must go on talking into the night, against the odds, channeling streams of sound into gummed up ears in the hope not of boring a passage to the brain, but simply because defeat is to lose one’s voice. To concede that we are rendered inarticulate is a fine admission, but silence is still a fair approximation of death.
All that smoking has only made her voice more beautiful.