hamgirl

2009-10-26T01:24:00.000-07:00

Thoughts on Hybridity~

“My form is always an odd amalgam taken from painting, sculpture, theory, film, music, poetry, dance, mathematics, even fiction sometimes.” ~Carole Maso

There’s all this talk about getting rid of the “I” in our work. About staying away from personal material and first person narration. I suppose the idea is that somehow we ourselves aren’t interesting enough to write about and that to do so is self indulgent and boring.

Well, sometimes, yes. But also sometimes, no. Like Maso. She is unequivocally my favorite writer. And what’s more, my favorite works of hers are the essays she writes on her own experience. I have found a home inside her writing and through the telling of her stories, I’ve connected with my own.

“If its expression concentrated itself in the individual, completely saturating him with substance and experience garnered from its own loneliness, hen precisely this speech becomes the voice of men between whom the barriers have fallen.” ~Theodor Adorno

“The desire of the novel to be a poem, the desire of the girl to be a horse. The desire of a poem to be an essay. The essay’s desire, its reach towards fiction. And the obvious erotics of this.” ~Carole Maso

As I put this piece together, I realized most of the quotes and ideas I was turning to had to do with writing. This is a project on hybridity Allie, I kept reminding myself. And then, one light bulb moment later, I realized that to me, writing (the act as well as the product) is a hybrid. It is an amalgamation of thought, dream, language and the individual…not to mention the innumerable influences gathered simply by living. So really, what this project has become are a sampling of the things that have influenced me and then things that first jumped to mind when I asked myself what HYBRID means to me. And I share them not because I think they’re soooo important, and not only because I’m assigned to present and this is what I came up with, but because I relish other writers thoughts on themselves, their lives, and how their practice takes form and grows. I seek out and enjoy essays centered around an interesting “I” and feel perplexed when we sit around and pooh pooh writers who focus on themselves like they are self indulgent and limited for doing so.

Because it’s actually pretty hard to connectively write about one’s own experience. Or to connect to oneself in the first place. The “I” focused writing that flops is the stuff that’s penned without proper introspection, investigation, self exploration. Because just like a critical paper, just like a report, writing about the self takes research, if only the living of life and the feeling of feelings.

“We write to find what we believe or want to believe or think we believe” ~George Oppen

“You write it all, discovering it at the end of the line of words. The line of words is a fiber optic, flexible as wire; it illumines the path just before its fragile tip. You probe with it, delicate as a worm.” ~Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard. I read her for the first time in high school. Her An American Childhood is, in a way a memoir, but also, a collection of essays investigating the nature of memory. Of child’s time. Of the intersections of philosophy and feeling.

She writes with tactile care the details of growing up and I, reading her at the port of embarkation from my own childhood, internalized her words. They became part of my body and my work so that now, years later when I pick up her books, I find her memories have interwoven with mine.

What I’m trying to say is that good writing about oneself can pull readers closer to themselves and merge the gap between author and audience….create, in a way, a hybrid.

“Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so that we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered?” ~Annie Dillard

10.

“Cinema is not a series of abstract ideas but a phrasing of moments.”~Jean Luc Godard

2009-10-18T19:30:00.001-07:00

A series of impossibles hung over the railing.

We washed them with our underwear in the bathtub,

lay them on the window sill to dry.

Bleach spotted pink cotton next to potted begonias.

Magnolia was my name then.

I sprawled spread eagle on the bed,

sipped

Pamplemousse juice from the mini bar.

Fresh from the shower, wrapped in terry cloth, she picked up the phone.

Yes she said into it. Oh God we’ll fly home.

No no no no.

She shook her head.

Hung up the phone.

We stayed in Paris another week, as planned.

2009-10-01T00:52:00.000-07:00

Generosity

…with the written word:

Writing is, at its essence, a generous art.

It is, essentially, what I want to do.

But I feel like I’ll be wrong, no matter what I write.

Here’s a reason: the word, “FEEL.”

Here’s another: the word, “I.”

I can’t shake, can’t shake, can’t shake this sense of NOT ENOUGH. Of no match for your mind and the question of whether you’ll be kind enough to like me…to like these words I share.

‘Cause maybe you’ll call me gratuitous. Self involved.

Maybe you’ll ask, “Who cares?”

But I write anyways. Take the gamble that you will care. That you’ll stick with these words, these stories from my mind, my experience. Because through me, you may know yourself.

Because someone once said, “It is through others that we know or love ourselves.”

Don’t ask me who, I don’t remember. Can’t prop myself up on a history of other people’s words.

But I can give my own.

On Generosity with the written word…on Generosity in ART:

Art is generous. The turning of our insides out.

Why do we have to JUSTIFY our credentials to do so?

I feel my words into being, into shape. I cannot quote you Semiotic theories.

I can feel together a sentence or two.

Well what good is that? The inner critic asks. He is trying to bring me to a stop up. A halt.

All I can tell him is I’ll take the theory AND the heart. Let the two marinate together in my mind. Steep in generous juices then seep into the words I write.

On Generosity with the Written Word…with the Female SELF:

I want to be generous, loving with myself.

I want to be generous, loving with my reader. We are connected, you know.

Webster: “Main Entry: gen·er·ous

Pronunciation: \ˈjen-rəs, ˈje-nə-\

Function: adjective

Etymology: Middle French or Latin; Middle French genereus, from Latin generosus, from gener-, genus

Date: 1583

1 archaic : highborn
2 a : characterized by a noble or forbearing spirit : magnanimous, kindly

b : liberal in giving : openhanded c : marked by abundance or ample proportions : copious generous nose — Richard Zabel

The Latin stem gener– is the declensional stem of genus, meaning "kin," "clan," "race," or "stock."

In short, we’re kin. Kindly connected. Don’t ask me to prove how, I don’t find it important to try. What I do find important is generosity and the green light it gives me to write.

To write despite my academic (dis)qualifications. To write even though I’m a woman penning prose about her unconscious self and how predictable is that?

Carole Maso: “The future is feminine, for real, this time.”

I’ll take it. For real this time. Take the risk you’ll brand me. Brand me another emotive woman, writing only about herself.

The risk that if I muster all my memory and shape it on the page, you might find it familiar. Might use it to find yourself.

We are connected, after all.

On the Generosity with the written word and…

Its absence:

Too much academia, it worries me.

Perhaps because past a certain point I fail to understand its language. Start to see it mostly as consecutive strings of impressive, albeit wholly incoherent words. These words are the jeering boys at the back of the bus. The in-crowd designed to alienate, intimidate, include solely the Select Few.

Alongside the Select Few, I feel so small.

Recall old uncertainties – a decade’s dormant fear of the professorial red pen. Of disapproving notes scribbled next to disappointing letter grades. Quantifications of one’s mind applied to the contents of one’s heart.

Perhaps such is why I find the Academy applied to Art similar to the search for new paths with old maps, through aged lenses.

The use of new words to speak old languages.

Side note:

I had a professor not too long ago who continuously repeated the necessity of “writing for one’s readers” instead of for oneself. Sea, a student in his class, brought into workshop a stream of consciousness piece that was neither prose nor poetry. It was, for lack of a better description, more strings of senses (female urges, yearnings, thoughts) than scenes and as such, constituted a kind of unknowing rebellion to our professor, an Iowa-grown authority on traditional stock fiction. He was enraged, offended.

And so, the hybridity of Sea’s work was considered self indulgent, publically labeled as such and warned against.

I wondered why.

Now I think I maybe know.

Now I think Sea’s words shaped a voice less linear, more dreamlike. And believe it when I say many of us have bad dreams. Believe it when I say many of us don’t want to delve into our unconscious selves. The in-crowd in particular.

“You’ve given us too dense a word thicket” the professor said, referring not only to Sea’s writing, but to mine as well. He admonished us for ignoring our readers.

Maybe he was right. But maybe not. Maybe meaning can be made out of splices and sound bites pieced together. From motifs repeated and shapes formed with words more than lock stock sentences and fully fleshed out scenes.

And anyways,

Gertrude Stein: “I write for myself…and strangers”

Lesson Learned: writing that is necessarily Other is angering to containers of the norm. It is also an insurgence, a rebellion, subconscious or staged. In this case, a reemergence of the Female voice, in others, the song of the Oppressed.

What to do what to do?

Well, I am going to insist, yes, insist through violation of some unspoken academic contract that these words gain respect. And maybe by doing so, I can insist my way out of other reductive deals.

Maybe I don’t have to change my writing to undo the pigeonhole it’s shoved into. Maybe I’ve just got to quit apologizing for it. Start insisting instead.

Could it be so simple? That we’re all so afraid of exposure that we build up barrier walls? Prickly fenced defenses out of academic words, intellectual ideas?

That we ward off criticism with the very concepts, the very schools of thought most likely to critique?

To be clear,

I do not want to control you, make you think this or that.

I want to nurture you. Serve you generous potions of words, ask you how you like them and smile with your praise.

Simple, I know. Predictable, maybe.

Certainly not high minded.

Intellectual.

But I’ll tell you a secret - all this intellectualizing, all this masculinizing of the written word… it kills my buzz.

2009-09-16T13:00:00.001-07:00

It’s seven o clock and I’m straining noodles in my new kitchen.

Outside, kids are laughing, screaming, shrieking with glee.

They make cannonballs into still pool water, shattering brief moments of stillness with their splashes.

I go to put music on and realize I don’t want any.

I love these sounds.

Writers, has it ever happened that you become someone you’ve written of?

Maybe not wholly. Maybe only for a moment.

At night the sun sets like a blood orange in the sky, bleeding red and rusty over the blue. She watches it out her kitchen window while she washes her dishes, or full heads of lettuce, red leaf and dirty.

Tonight I strained noodles, listened to the kids laugh and later, put the dishes in the sink and walked barefooted out onto my balcony.

Squatting ripped seams into these old jeans, I cradled miniature roses in my palms and pulled them gently from their temporary pots. Separated root from soil. Transplanted. Settled them into a new home in the sun.

The roses are finally planted and she stands back to see them, symmetrical and soldier like, positioned in perfect proportion to each other. She is satisfied, despite her dirt encrusted body. Weeks pass and each evening, she slams out the screen door to see her plants. It surprises her, the degree to which the roses continue to please her, and not because they are so perfectly arranged, but because she’s put so much into their planting. Most likely, had someone else done the digging, wrestling, lugging and sweating it took to get the plants from their individual pots into the soil, they wouldn’t be so lovely. As it is, she waters them daily and watches them with care. They bloom beautifully for weeks on end, changing the timbre of their yellow, from pale to red rimmed.

Maybe that she was part of me. All along.

2009-09-09T18:52:00.000-07:00

The sun’s bright and these dark glasses, smudged.

Truckers honk at my bare legs stretched out like pale and slimy seals, sunning themselves seaside.

We drive through the early evening, watching with our progress, the sun waddle into the west and disappear.

The day began endless hours ago, miles behind us on the flat flax color of Nebraskan cornfields. Over the acrid coffee of the Ogallala jiffy mart.

My head ached with the bluntness of the light there. The parched stillness of the air.

The sun sits directly above us and begins, around midday to bear into our skin despite the tinted car windows and layers of steel.

Hours later, I look at my arms, my shoulders, my hands, and realize they’ve been colored unequal by long hours in the driver’s seat. Now, with one side of me singed red and blistered from resting on the plastic window ledge, and the other arm still white and shaded by the car roof and wheel, I stop for sunscreen. Pause to purchase protection that’s too little, too late.

The heat persists and we drive on through it, reaching Colorado with the sunset. Without our noticing, everything changes and when next I think to define what I see, I realize it’s all mountains and little corn.

Soon the difference is impossibly missed and we’re bobbing up and over mountainous green. This place is basic, but bowl-over beautiful. Like skin. The earth’s skin. Taught and brown. Blue veined. Varicose where it runs off and twists down hillsides in spiny purple lines.

The colors move with our car wheels, changing into coral colored mesas and dunes.

We reach the canyons. Drive passed vacant road stands and wind blown Winnebagos.

The Navaho land.

Dead dog on the roadside. Coyotes strung up like flags.

I am angry. How can they? I ask. How can they trash the most beautiful… it’s theirs, after all.

The earth’s skin.

What makes this earth so familiar to us? The fact that it is us, I suppose. Even if we lose connection and slip into man made masochistism and rage. Even when we splurge and purge until there’s little left to hold onto. To get back to.

The long lines of cars, pushing themselves in congested droves through the gateways of each national park. And once there, putting themselves behind camera lenses, camcorders. Distancing and disconnecting. Protecting.

The earth’s skin. The fear of our own.

It’s difficult to comprehend how we humans have the capacity to hold the knowledge of such expansive beauty inside these small, fallible frames. I would not want to live here I say aloud, thinking the land might break me if I tried. Thinking I might shatter like an opera singer’s water glass if I walked out my door each day to face such splendor.

This is a sentiment I’ll repeat over and again until the canyons become junked car bodies and California and I’m freed from the burden of beauty carried by grand canyons and rocky mountain roads.

The burden of beauty. The sun, the sky and the loss of time as it changes, makes clear it’s own illusion. Own invisibility over invisible borders.

2009-09-02T22:50:00.001-07:00

Iowa.

Somewhere outside Council Bluffs I start to really see. To look out the window and not at the road.

Not at the road and not at my own reflection in the rearview mirror.

I see that raspberries line the guardrail. That trees stand in shady diagonals on far off hillsides.

The sun’s bright and these dark glasses, smudged. Truckers honk at my bare legs stretched out on the dash like pale and greasy seals, sunning themselves seaside.

White windmills line the hilltops. Skeletal steel arms cutting wide swaths across blue sky.

Oil leases available, call 1-800 Dry Hole

Sunflowers line the dividing lane

These roads are like grey rivers that cars move over as vehicular water bugs or whisked up leaves and twigs.

And if the roads resemble rivers, the corn is oceanic, rolling and dipping in waves. Settling over the landscape like a thick blanket, like a rolled out rug of yellow tipped green and gold.

2009-08-19T20:14:00.000-07:00

Reading Carole Maso in Starbucks on a Wednesday afternoon.

In this shoreline town where I feel so much at home; so simultaneously displaced.

Girls come and go in boat shoes, in shorts.

“Rare butterflies,” says Carole, “nymphets by the pool.”

At the table next to me a man in blue scrubs and white sneakers talks to a woman wearing only beige.

When I was seventeen, sings Frank on the first of sixty Sinatra the Golden Years tracks that will spin through this Starbucks this Wednesday afternoon.

I’m a mess.

Sad. Scared.

Dreaming each night of losing something essential. Something that disappears just before I wake.

It was a very good year for blue blooded girls…

And so aware, so watched … if only in my imagination…by balding men in their forties, drinking heavily creamed, whipped coffee concoctions and fiddling with their laptops. Humberts, all of them, I say to Carole before remembering that I am no longer Lolita young and feeling with this realization the faint flutter of constricting heartstrings beneath these rib bones…this thin skin.

Makes me teary, the beige lady says, she…she just doesn’t deserve it.

The man in the scrubs shrugs and pulls at the straw of his six dollar smoothie.

I think about Her.

About how tiny she’s become. About how angry I am that she’s forgotten everything that happened when she stretched out beneath bleached bedclothes and fought for her life.

About how silly that seems now that it’s all over. Now that I’ll be driving the vast distance away from it all.

Start spreading the news, I’m leaving today…track two.

Every night I wait for sleep and fend off the oppressive fears that come with so much suffering, so much unknown. Watch as they meld into misplaced spots in my mind – today I am dying of some rare disease. Tomorrow I’ll be murdered, of this I am quite sure.

I’m gonna make a brand new start of it, in ol’ New York…in new L.A.

Girls sitting outside on wire chairs under wide umbrellas smoke Marlboros. They must be just eighteen. Must be full of that illusionary invincibility all young people are supposed to have. Why can’t I feel it too? No longer Lolita young but not dying either. Not now, but still so anxiously aware of my own impermanence.

“When memory goes,” Carole says, “it is replaced maybe with beautiful, floating free, out of context fish. Orange in deep blue with tails like feathers.”

When SHE goes what will I replace HER with? And when I go, will I leave behind these pages of words that nobody reads? Or a series of compulsions that have ordered my only world?

Will I leave this place restricted or full of feathery memories – fluttering around me.

The leaves of ancient beech trees, breeze shaken but thick veined and full.

All Carole quotations from Carole Maso’s, Ava

2009-08-12T22:30:00.000-07:00

I had dinner with an old friend the other night

His attention left me high and I glided back to my car, parked steadfast where I’d left it on the Friday side of Riverside drive, and drove home on the coattails of familiarity – the sort of superficial friendship easily slipped into after three sips of wine and two smiles.

I rode out of the city with the windows down – neither a part of New York nor an outcast from it and listened to three quarters of Court and Spark before the music became too maudlin and I unearthed a crud encrusted CD case from beneath my seat. Looking for something new.

I flipped over albums -old friends-whose songs weren’t enough for the moment.

It was one in the morning. The road stretched out, an empty grey chord ornamented by sporadic pools lamplight. Stillness settled over my speed and I needed to hear my own voice, singing along. Needed it to act as the deciding factor in the questions of loneliness and freedom now circulating my mind.

Balancing my eyes between the road and the assorted discs, I tried to read each title. But couldn’t and finally settled on a CD without one. With only the handwritten notation, “Blue Sky” across its face.

Track one: Nobody’s girl.

I am reminded of the times I’ve felt this way. I am reminded that once, I thought it romantic to do so. To be so. Lonely.

Now I only think it sad. She’s alone in this world, she’s nobodies girl. But I sing along anyways. Loudly.

Wonder, quietly, if I’ll stay nobodies girl past the point at which it’s still acceptable…and not sad… to be so.

I wait in suspense to see what might come next – like an unexpected old friend through the kitchen screen door. Like the next chapter in a book pointed at uncovering something essential – some central component of someone’s personhood. Yet in place of chapters, there are songs. Strung together, like pearls over plastic thread, the story. Note by note, recalling. Rebuilding.

Track two: Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes

She makes the sign of a teaspoon, he makes the sign of a wave and I do too. Steering with my knees as I roll both hands through the air, palms down, the movement recalling how I sat, cross legged on my bedroom floor, the scratchy green rug making imprints on my thighs. How I held my sneakers in one hand and a hot glue gun in the other and carefully pasted twelve plastic diamonds onto the bottoms of my Keds.

They all fell off eventually but not before the gym teacher banned me from class for inappropriate footwear.

Track three: Romeo and Juliet

Reminisces of first infatuations. Of the Thursday afternoon on which the first object of my first affections played this song for me. Of the deliciousness of first kisses and the angsty frustrations that followed.

Tracks four five and six:

New York Minute

Heart of the City

New York State of Mind.

I walked to these songs - these odes to New York – unleashed and invincible in the City. Infatuated with myself. With an imagined impenetrable skin, the likes of which we all assume, to some extent, in the years of our youth. Before something, or someone, punctures and deflates us. Brings us back to tears and our own tenderness.

Each cut at once an ode to the City and a note to myself. So cheesy but so pure in their messages of adoration. I try to picture myself, years ago, carefully picking these songs and placing them, back to back on the wings of New York butterflies. I was, in the earnest adulation I turned on each object of my affection, so pure, so endearingly innocent. And so dangerously unconscious.

I am not so today, a point I am reminded of by these songs. This album I made, sent out and found again, like a message in a bottle. A musical time capsule, penned in the past, played in the present to remind myself of the distance I’ve come.

Track seven: Blue Sky

Walk along the river ... sweet lullaby
It just keeps on flowin, it don't worry 'bout where it's going

2009-08-10T22:04:00.000-07:00

I am sitting in my childhood bedroom at one a.m. on a Saturday. Particles of dust are moving upwards in the pools of light made by two adjacent desk lamps, both with great bungee necks that stretch out, lording over the mildewed debris of a childhood not forgotten, but separated and distanced from.

I am at a loss inside this mess, this memory. I can’t sort it. Can’t figure out what to feel and where to put those feelings when, finally I find them. And this stuff - How do I choose what’s important. What’s worth holding on to.

I so rarely come back here – it seems foolish to hold onto what I’ll never see.

It appears to me now, amidst the mold and dust and exhausted artifacts, that I lived splayed out and split between two sides. Two stories. The her and the him and the opposing parts of me that align with each. They are so different, my parents, and in trying to transition fluidly between the two, I sacrificed essential parts of myself.

I did not know they are so different. Nor did I know I’d slipped into unconsciousness. Into resolute unseeing. And that is why, I think, so much of the past is opaque. All those years – after she left, after they split – are unlived in my memory. It’s as if I woke up here. Stepped into being and took their word for what the past was.

Ask him and it was one way. Ask her, another.

Ask anyone involved, but don’t ask me. I was too busy surviving to stow away the memories of it. All I’ve got is this stuff, damp and decaying. This body, brittle, bony and just beginning to bounce back. These records, these clues of a girlhood lost.

2009-08-07T11:31:00.000-07:00

"An infinity of forests lies dormant inside the dreams of one, tiny acorn."

~Not sure who said that...

But maybe I'm the acorn

2009-08-04T23:14:00.001-07:00

She looks so much the portrait of a girl in love. A girl, loved. And I smile as I turn the pages. Smile as if maybe that’s what I want too. Smile before I remember I can never have that. Before a subtle voice reminds me. YOU can never have that.

I challenge him, briefly.

Ask him, why not? And stick my chin out like a child.

You know why, he says and I am ashamed. Feel his reasons too tender to touch. To list here.

But he goes on anyways, punishing me for my defiance.

Because you are so different when you’re in love. So far from what you need to be to get anywhere. To become the woman you want to become. Or even to be happy. Because to love, to be loved, means you are wholly yourself with that Other. Means you are accepted for that, by them. And you know as well as I that nobody will accept you as you are. As you are this night – stripped down. Bare faced. Bare bodied. Hungry and human and so exposed.

2009-08-02T13:29:00.000-07:00

Friday night. I take the subway for the first time in months. It’s been raining and inside the air cooled car peoples’ umbrellas rest in pools of gritty rain at their feet. I’m not quick enough to a seat and stand instead over a rowdy group of girls, headed for the movies.

Let’s see the scary one, they say and begin to squabble over how to get in, none of them being over seventeen. I am facing the window and watch in its reflection the movements of these teenage girls. How they can laugh so loud, jostle for attention and still give away, with the subtlest of movements, some hint of their adolescence. Their collective self consciousness.

I wonder if they recognize this about themselves. And then, if they recognize it about me.

I ride the two past Times Square, to fourteenth where I get off and walk the remaining avenues over to Union Square, just to avoid the L. I do this not because the L train never comes, although it never does, but because I fear its passengers. All going somewhere, all important. All New York.

I am ashamed that I no longer am. Ashamed and relieved and I exit the train halfway between nostalgic tears and angry sobs of overwhelm. I used to strut. Used to glower. Used to do these things, in part, as a self protective necessity. But now that I no longer do, that stormy glamour has been replaced with a confidence that doesn’t translate in the city. Only makes me feel so small when I smile, when I try to forget, as I used to years before, that it’s my nature to do so.

So much as been discovered and I am left wondering if I should bemoan or celebrate my separateness. Because I worked so hard to make New York a part of me, and went with out the rest to do so. Starved myself of some essential piece of who I am to mirror a city that will never love me back.

And so I feel lonely where once I felt invincible. Maybe that’s just the down side to moving on. To the bravery it takes to look across the subway car, at ones own reflection, and see past the perfectly painted layers. These two hundred dollar ksubi jeans. This expensive gold watch. This handbag. These accessories picked carefully to define a girl I’ve never been. To fit me into a place where these items might matter.

….

I once thought New York was the city where everyone fits. Now I am not so sure. Because so much of that armored shell is gone now, exposing a tender underbelly I worked long years to prove I didn’t have. But with its absence. With the removal of that push to feel like I fit, comes the energy always freed when a fight comes to a close. The energy to hoist oneself up off the floor. To exit the ring.

2009-08-02T00:49:00.000-07:00

Oh it gets so lonely
When you're walking
And the streets are full of strangers
All the news of home you read
Just gives you the blues

Oh, but California
California I'm coming home
I'm going to see the folks I dig
Ill even kiss a sunset pig
California I'm coming home

Joni Mitchell, 1970

2009-07-22T20:47:00.001-07:00

I went for a walk with my dog tonight

On this road nearby our house.

The sun began to melt, like warm butter over leaves and long blades of beach grass.

We passed big bellied couples in running shoes and shorts, their tight white t shirts pulled taught over wide guts that marched in unison down the path, like identical hard boiled eggs attached to spindly legs.

Some of them nodded at me as they passed. Some of them said “hello” and when they did I realized this felt strange to me, New York still having four years on this place's one.

A thinner, older pair came up on our left at a good clip. Where should we take our vacation? she asked him as they passed. I watched from their wake as he absentmindedly took her hand without looking up, his focus remaining fully on the road ahead.

The sun slipped closer to the water, all runny yolked, all sudden in its going, and I voiced a silent hope that it be so beautiful in California. Every night I dream it will be.

Young parents corralled the exuberance of their toddlers towards the sand. Plastic buckets clacked and flip flops slapped as they hurried to keep up with little bodies, little legs.

And I watched all this.

And I thought, this is heaven.

And then, how strange of me to think so, considering the summer it’s been.

But I do, think so. If only for this moment. This twilit gift. This sunset sky spilling over and on top of me and kissing, a million times, my sea shell shaped soul.

2009-07-20T16:37:00.000-07:00

I pass days inside this numbed cocoon.

An orb of muted feeling. Of life in low gear.

I wonder what it feels like otherwise and this, more than anything, frightens me.

Because if the memory of real life goes, how can I move on? I need it to. Need it to fit like a plywood plank beneath a mud rutted tire. Need it to coax my lurching body up and away. To ease the transition from stuck to mobile.

But it’s a thick muck, this. All mired in her eyebrows, furrowed and afraid. In the toothpick forearms she pushes towards my hands.

She was once all bustle, all life. That feels like such a long time gone now, two months in.

But I hold her toothpick arm. Smile a brave mother’s smile, artificial to this childish face. Draw tight the sheets around her shoulders. The folds of my own muted cocoon, obscuring this terrible question.

This fear that where I’ve got her shell, that bustling spirit won’t return.

2009-07-17T19:59:00.000-07:00

I spent six hours yesterday sorting through stuff that wasn’t mine.

Learning about old photographs, lockets and locks of hair, all linked to the history of someone else.

And I walked away wondering how much I really mattered.

Because I myself known nothing of my BLOOD. Of the others who share it.

Still, sometimes…and these days in particular…I think I may known more than most about what makes a family. And where to find the one you’ve been given.

And in these moments, I don’t think twice about whether or not the same STUFF passes through our veins.

…It’s just stuff anyways….

2009-07-04T22:50:00.000-07:00

“Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.”

—

Scout Finch, To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Sometimes the very best comfort comes from our old friends. And likewise, old friends come in different shapes, sizes and forms. In this case, the old friend I’ve turned to is embodied by the immortal words of Ms. Harper Lee in her, To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s a novel I read for the first time in grade school after which I was never the same. Her words have shaped my own and continue to do so each time I trace their shape across the page, finding within their familiar lines, new lessons and old loves.

2009-07-02T11:06:00.000-07:00

The novelist imagines…

Youth

Beauty

Brilliance

Brains

And pushes for their contradictions.

What it’s like outside ones own skin.

What goes on inside that woman’s head.

I’ll admit, oftentimes I look around and think, very quietly and to myself alone, that other people seem oh so unconscious.

Occupied so immediately with the PRESENT PROBLEM…which is always immediate, albeit limited to hunger and rage. It’s this every shifting entitlement of our age that has, I sometimes think, caked over and buried any capacity for collective, connective thought.

Such has been unlearned over the years and people now waddle about in a state of frantic want.

And isn’t that sad?

For all of us. Even for me, poor writer, who sits back with her pen and thinks herself superior. Acknowledges the thought and feels sorry for it. Pushes on, examines it deeper and admits that it’s all fluff. All rubbish anyways.

Because her job is to imagine life inside another person’s shoes. And deep down, she fears herself too anxious to lace up and live in discomfort, anxiety and fear.

To stay there without the protective walls she’s built up, for longer than the length of a poem.

These split fragments of feeling. These seconds of insertion into distant hearts. Into the ambiguity of the Other. The road to creativity that moves in circles and ends at its beginning.

Ends with the realization that all hearts are familiar.

2009-06-30T22:11:00.000-07:00

Time spent in the hospital, it teaches you things.

For example:

There is a certain impass reached between nurses and their patients. Theirs is the difference between feeling and doing. Between emotion and form.

Also:

We dream ourselves medically advanced and yet sick patients stretch out on stretchers, lining hospital hallways, waiting for rooms to empty out.

For someone to die. Someone else to heal and head home. Such is the difference between precision and reality.

We shake our heads in dismay. We say, “This is unbelievable, the system is broken.” But we join the queue. Spend long hours waiting like everybody else.

Surrender to the difference between perfection and humanity.

It seems to me now, at five o clock on a Tuesday morning. On a new day dawned after a long night spent standing still by her side. Watching chaos whirl around us in one million cacophonous intersections of incessant beeps and bed rolls. That all these symphonic routines are pointed at obscuring a single obvious aspect of our lives: the unavoidable fragility of the human form. The helplessness of our collective condition.

2009-06-21T19:20:00.001-07:00

I approach your body with the same mix of fear and adoration with which I face my own.

The same care.

Concern.

Fascination and pride.

It’s a sense of responsibility, I suppose. A sense of accountability. A sense so different from the blind curiosity I turn upon a lover.

Or the fuzzy edged lens through which I see my friends.

Each night I run my hands over both our skins. Trace the dips of my own. The lines and ligaments of yours. Places I’ve touched a million times before. Places I return to time and again. Savor when I can and yearn for when I cannot. The way a child wants for a warm blanket. A parent’s arms.

I could chart years over the terrain of your body. Find myself, no matter how long I’ve been missing, in a moment blinked by in the abstract reflection of your eyes.

Time moves with the same fluidity as your hair over your skin over your bone. Over thick lines of vein whittled gracefully to thin. Each one charting challenges I took on. Stages I traversed. Rebellions I staged.

Still you stand on. Aged today in details but reminiscent in whole of this life I cycle through. The person I remain despite it all. The way old maps confirm foundations of a place even after, with the passing of years, new houses have been built and new ground has been struck.

I am determined to explore old frontiers. Traverse new ones. Holding you, as I unknowingly have each time before, as my map.