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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!”?
October 6, 2002
I’ve been thinking about Jim’s new T-Mobile Sidekick. Do I want one? It appeals to me as I am seduced by the idea of digital exhibitionism, of trying to stream a written “day in the life” onto the web in a more accurate fashion. The verb “to show” comes to mind, to make a show out of simply showing you. The French verb “faire”, to make or to do — wouldn’t it be nice to make as one was actually doing? Or would it? You see, as with most things, I have both misgivings and enthusiasm for it. The ability to document your life without the intrusion of a camera crew, or a laptop, to convey it immediately without too much damn interference from all that fussing with equipment, or with subject, style, plot, editing, and those other unmentionables, is both modern and ancient. We are able to revert to a freer form of the old instinct by the facility with which we can now communicate. And this makes so much sense at this juncture, as where else can we go at this late hour in the day when the anxiety inducing suspicion haunts us that we’re just crumbing the remains from the table of all the great makers? Technology is, at some level, a compensation that permits us to be primitive again. Oral tradition is rampant, the peripatetic pedestrian can communicate her sightings instantly to a loved one; you can blog away until you’re blue in the face; stream your bedroom antics onto the web; concoct mini movies with video cameras the size of a box of sugar; e-mail digital portraits of your New York family to your Granny in Greenland. It’s both wonderfully liberating and a frightening democracy.
I couldn’t sleep on Friday night and sat in bed watching a documentary on “The Making of the Misfits.” Arthur Miller, in the interviews, seems so incredibly male, as does Clark Gable in the actual footage from the film. And of course Marilyn is there being so essentially female that it is somewhat shocking, verging on the indecent. And then there’s Monty. It’s a great heterosexual moment (how many can you cite after this?), in both the film’s ending when Gable leaves with Monroe, and Miller’s obvious appreciation in the documentary of his former wife. As Miller was flying back to the East Coast from the set, he hears that Clark Gable has died. (Miller’s marriage to Monroe has also ended.) Gable insisted on doing his own stunts. You get the feeling that he had to put down his manhood at the end of the movie in order to make his character’s departure from the cowboy life convincing. In some mythical way you could believe that this, rather than a mere heart attack from overwork, is what killed the actor. What’s this got to do with Jim’s new “mobile”? I don’t know, except that insomnia had me pondering the two things back to back, and one is a documentary and the other enables you to provide evidence of your own existence to an audience. It strikes me that this is what it’s all about really. It’s a deeply unoriginal thought, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to reiterate it, just as with the occasional compulsion to share the contours of a deeply unremarkable day. The documenting of a life, at whatever level of accomplishment and with whatever degree of invention, is integral to existance itself, and the undeniable urge to convey the human condition has always been with us from the earliest cave paintings, to Joyce’s Ulysses, and in everything in between and beyond. Should there be more or less people exposing their creative efforts? Edit or babble? Gag it or succumb to logorrhea? Suppress or publish? Self-destruct of self-preserve? Old chestnuts. I’m never sure. And grateful for the not knowing.