Taking A Lap (I)

I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who’s now in her 90s, but she’s been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, “run like hell.” And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn’t be fast enough, so she’d be running and running and running, and she wouldn’t get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it “for another poet.” And then there were these times — this is the piece I never forgot — she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right? So, she’s running to the house and she’s looking for the paper and the poem passes through her, and she grabs a pencil just as it’s going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first.

-Elizabeth Gilbert, from her TED Talk.

I sometimes feel that “happily ever after” is like that. Sometimes, at Point A, you see this beautiful Point B with someone, and have no idea how to get there. And that’s fine, Point A is where you are now, it’s the only place to be. And you just hope to hell that, when Point B comes barreling over the landscape, you and your love are running at the same speed in the same direction and on the right trajectory.

(Maybe that’s why polies run in packs.)

This Type (I)

Zen few-liners, part 1 (H)

“If we each told each other our deepest, darkest secrets, we would laugh uproarously at our lack of originality.” – Stephen Levine (as quoted in Edward Brown’s talk “Telling Our Deepest Darkest Secrets” from at the San Francisco Zen Center, available through iTunes but I can’t find any other link to it)

“Patience isn’t so much about for something–that’s basically impatience.” – Jack Kornfield, “10 Perfections“

“And this is, you know, a gift we can give to each other: ‘How are you doing? Tell me about it. What’s in your heart today?’” – Ed Brown, “Relying on Something Great” (from SFZC)

“You have to have a calm mind to see virtue in others.” – Suzuki Roshi, as quoted by Steve Stucky, “Appreciating Absolute Value” (from SFZC)

Much The Same (I)

Outside of my family, the following people have seen me cry: my best friend from high school, my three relationships, my friend Jordan, my friend Lisa (only once), and Hope. This discounts middle school stuff where someone makes you cry in public, and incidents where I have cried to an intimate and someone else happened to be present. I suppose it discounts psychotherapy as well.

I’ve been re-reading Craig Thompson’s travel journal, Carnet de Voyage, written while he was on a book-signing tour of Europe. The loose, spontaneous brushwork is gorgeous, very different from his very meticulous linework in his graphic novels. He spends most of the book lonely, missing his ex-girlfriend, wishing for a companion, drawing a lot of pictures of girls. In the last few pages he connects with a Swedish girl in Barcelona named Hillevi, and they spend his last days in Spain romancing.

The day before he leaves she says to him:

You and I are so much the same… You have so many layers that you can peel away a few, and everyone’s so shocked or impressed that you’re baring your soul, while  you know it’s nothing, because you know you’ve twenty more layers to go… But we’re the ones that are most scared, and need the most love. (p. 216-217)

I’ve had conversations with people I’ve just met where I can talk about the most painful things that have ever happened to me, and I can even say “it still hurts today.” But they don’t get to see it. I look so goddamn mature and removed, talking about pain as if I’ve left it all behind, and in that moment it’s sincere; I have grown and left much of it behind. But they don’t know about the other times when it rushes back on me. Very few people get to the inside of the onion.

And it’s not a matter of trust. Maybe some mixture of tact and insecurity and a small dollop of self-loathing; I feel like that onion core is simply more of myself than most people would want to see. And like many artists, it becomes the most important thing to express, because it’s the thing most inexpressible. “Needing the most love.” I made a film recently, about my vow of silence, where I cry on camera. Because I know I’m too afraid to cry in front of most people, so it becomes important to share a document of. “This happens.”

Yesterday at a dinner with Hope’s family and friends of family, I watched the way Hope interacts with all these different people and counted the layers she peels. Impressed with the way she’s willing to take casual conversations to the subjects that really interest her, where my instinct assumes my deepest interests are probably more than polite company is interested in. It’s something I’ve been working on, and it’s pleasant to see someone do it with more ease than I have.

It’s common to notice most the traits you admire in someone else, but I don’t think it’s really envious. There are areas where she peels more layers than I do, and I’m sure there are some areas where I peel more layers. From our first conversation, what drew me to Hope was the ease with which she peeled, and comfort with which I peeled, us two potatoes in a restaurant kitchen. I felt a similar drive to delve and reach equal depths. The skills she has that I admire stand out from a lot of commonality. I get so used to the similarities I don’t see them anymore.

And I think that’s been the case with most everyone on the list. The people who get to the middle of the onion, the only place where I cry. What’s better than to cherish your commonalities and admire your differences?

Regression (I)

My first week at the Children’s Museum we trained, mostly by playing. It reminded me of the warm-ups we’d do in my acting class (“Be a bear! RAAAAWR! Be a chipmunk! Ch-ch-ch-ch. Be a bear with a chimpunk’s head! Ch-ch-ch-ch. Be a chipmunk with a bear’s head! RAAAAWR!”). The ostensible point is to teach us about how the children play by having do the same thing, but largely is about keeping us from being self-conscious. We’re going to spend a year playing with kids, we can’t let ourselves feel foolish. And it’s about bonding with each other by playing. And about not taking ourselves seriously.

There are some games where we were supposed to act like 9-year-olds. It’s strange to me how long I spent in an office and never could feel I knew how to interact with these people. They didn’t seem terribly grown-up, just like a bunch of teenagers playing Office Job. Bickering about peers behind each others’ backs, quoting entire scenes from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia.

At the museum, someone says “be 9″ and it’s the most natural thing. I’m 25 and I can still say I’ve spent most of my life being a child.

I remember, doing it, what a solitary child I was. We idealize childhood I think, it’s natural for even lonely kids to feel like making friends was easier then. I think now that the reason I’m sometimes solitary is because, back  then, I didn’t always need anybody else. I could usually entertain myself. But there was always that aching want for friendship, irreconcilable with the times when I just didn’t need anybody. I didn’t join; teachers would yell “everyone respond: MARCO” and all the students would yell “POLO” but me. I understood they were just trying to get my attention and gave it to them. I didn’t need to participate. That instinct to stick to myself runs under everything since. No matter how much I want connection I know so well that I can survive without it, and not everyone can.

But childhood is still so simple and freeing, and there seems little of life, outside of just depth of thought, that needs to be as complicated as we make it. I remember a passage from Heavenly Breakfast:

In a communal situation bisexuality has to be of at least passing interest to everyone. (That’s assuming both sexes are represented.) The standard bohemian/liberal education teaches you quickly not to take offense at someone else’s desire. If it pleases you, you move toward it; if not, you sidestep politely as your individual temperament allows. At the Breakfast I learned to move withing the circle of other people’s desire, and to be at ease as I generated my own. And I would strike one of my senses before I would part with that knowledge.

-Samuel R. Delany, Heavenly Breakfast, p. 18-19

If he wasn’t speaking specifically about sex, he could be talking about kindergarten.

Find what interests you. Move towards it. Sidestep what doesn’t interest you, politely. There’s little justification for anything needing to be more complex than that; it just gets deeper as we grow.

addendum: When To Push? (I)

One afternoon, when Marilyn was out working, I sat in the kitchen with Dave, telling him about this fear of falling – under a train, off a roof, out of a window. Suddenly Dave put his coffee cup down and said, “Hey, we’re gonna try something.” He reached over mine and took my wrist firmly. “Come on. With me.”

“Huh-?”

“Come on,” he said. “How does that feel? I’ve got you real tight. I’m bigger and stronger than you, right?”

“Yeah…?”

“So you probably couldn’t break free even if you wanted to. Or at least it would take you some time if I really fought you.” We were standing up now; Dave walked me toward the apartment door. “Come on outside.” We went into the hall, and Dave started up the steps.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Upstairs.”

“Huh…?”

“To the roof.”

“Oh, man,” I said. “You don’t have to do-”

“No,” Dave said. “I’ve got you. I’m holding you real tight. You may get scared. But you know it: you won’t be able to fall. And you won’t be able to pull away and jump. I promise you. Are you frightened now? Go on, tell me.” He halted, halfway between the fourth and the fifth floor.

“No…” I said carefully, behind him. I looked at my arm in his grip.

“Then come on.” We went up the next landing, and then again up toward the metal door that led to the roof.

In front of it, Dave stopped again. “Are you at all frightened now?” His fingers around my wrist were hot and rigid.

“No… I don’t think so.”

He pushed the door open on blue sky. It grated over the sill, the weight that had held it closed rising on the chain that ran through a metal ring high on the left. We stepped outside onto tar paper.

“Are you frightened now?”

A roof away, a pigeon coop waved gray feathers from its chicken wire window. A year ago, I’d come here to watch a scrawny kid with his tortoiseshell glasses, his ballooning and collapsing T-shirt, and his limber baton wave his flock around and across the sky. But I hadn’t been able to for months. On another roof a few stories higher, a water tower’s stilts rose under the laddered barrel.

“A little… now.” I took a breath.

“Are you very frightened?”

“No.”

“Think about the fact that I’m holding you real tight.” Still holding my wrist, he put his other arm around me and gripped my far shoulder. “I’m not afraid of heights at all. And because I’m holding you, you don’t have to be – you can be if you want. But it doesn’t matter. Come on. And you tell me how you feel.” He walked me toward the roof’s edge. “Don’t look down if you don’t want. Look up, at the clouds, a the sun.”

Three wild pigeons swooped from the blue to drop below the cornice.

“It’s… nice up here, in October like this,” I said.

“Yeah. I really like to come up on the roof in this city. When it’s Indian summer. You can breathe.”

Slowly we walked along the edge, and turned at the corner. There was just a little wall there, maybe eighteen inches high. Dave was on the outside, I was on the inside.

He said: “Tell me how you feel.”

I breathed. “Actually,” I said, “right now I’m so scared I could shit my pants.”

“Yeah, you’re sweating. I can see…”

“But it’s okay…”

Dave laughed. He made his grip firmer. “If it gets too bad, you just say something. But remember I’m holding on to you.”

We got to the next corner and turned.

“Okay,” he said. “We’ve been around the whole roof – we don’t have to overdo it. You’re really shaking, huh?”

Then, deliberately, he walked me back across toward the door, releasing his grip on my shoulder but not my wrist. As we stepped through to the sheltered stair, only flakes of blue coming through the fouled skylight, Dave said. [sic] “Hey, you okay? What’s the matter? What’re you doing?”

“I’m crying,” I told him. “What the hell do you think I’m doing?”

Then we went back down and returned to cold coffee in cups on the kitchen table.

-Samuel R. Delany, The Motion Of Light In Water, p.331-333

How do you know when that’s the right thing to do?

addendum: WASP (I)

Brothers and sisters, I’m here to tell you that I charge the white man. I charge the white man with being the greatest murderer on earth. I charge the white man with being the greatest kidnapper on earth. There is not place in this world that that man can go and say he created peace and harmony. Everywhere he’s gone he’s created havoc. Everywhere he’s gone he’s created destruction. So I charge him. I charge him with being the greatest kidnapper on this earth. I charge him with being the greatest murderer on this earth. I charge him with being the greatest robber and enslaver on this earth. I charge the white man with being the greatest swine-eater on this earth, the greatest drunkard on this earth.

He can’t deny the charges. You can’t deny the charges. We’re the living proof of those charges. You and I are the proof. You’re not an American, you are the victim of America. You didn’t have a choice coming over here. He didn’t say, “Black man, Black woman, come on over and help me build America.” He said, “Nigger, get down in the bottom of that boat and I’m taking you over there to help me build America.” Being born here does not make you an American. I’m not an American. You’re not an American. You are one of twenty-two million Black people who are the victims of America.

You and I, we’ve never seen any democracy. We ain’t seen no democracy in the cotton fields of Georgia. That wasn’t no democracy down there. We didn’t see any democracy on the streets of Harlem and the streets of Brooklyn and the streets of Detroit and Chicago. That wasn’t democracy down there. We don’t see any American dream. We’ve experienced only the American nightmare.

-Malcolm X

Being A Man, also: WASP (I)

I want to talk a bit about how and why being a 13-year-old boy is hard.

Yes, your hormones are raging. Yes, your social skills are lacking. But I think it’s hardest for boys today, harder than it was in previous generations, because there’s a more pressing need to find out who you’re supposed to be.

There was a time when everyone was supposed to be what I was born: white, straight, male, middle class, and Protestant. Speaking for me and my kind, I have the highest median income, I hold the most positions in government, I grow 90% of the country’s food… Louis CK maybe said it best:

If you’re white and you don’t admit that it’s great, you’re an asshole. It is great! And I’m a man! How many advantages can one person have? I’m a white man! You can’t even hurt my feelings! What can you really call a white man that really digs deep? “Hey cracker!” “Ugh, ruined my day, boy! Shouldn’t've called me a cracker. Bringing me back to owning land and people, what a drag.”

I never asked to be in a position of power, but am I really going to cry that it’s been thrust on me? For centuries there was “WASP” and “everything else,” and “everything else” didn’t matter.

Nowadays, being a white straight male is akin to being vanilla. (I used to work in a gelateria, and I hasten to remind people that vanilla is indeed a flavor; plain gelato is Fior di Late: it’s nothing but milk and sugar.) The world outside of us has gotten a lot more interesting, and a lot more specific. It used to matter to be straight when there was only “straight” and “deviant.” Now we’ve got gay, bi, lesbian, homo- and heteroflexible, trisexual, pansexual, sapiosexual, the dreaded pomosexual (which I won’t say out loud), asexual romantic, asexual nonromantic, and that all-encompassing “queer” which is basically a catch-all for “not straight.” “Not straight” is a hell of a lot more interesting than straight these days.

Across the board, too, with the gay rights and women’s rights and minority rights movements, there are fascinating developments in what it means to be gay, what it means to be a woman, what it means to be black or latino or asian in America. Not many people are writing about what it means to be a WASP. It’s not interesting.

My friend used to identify as “a dyke,” and she says she has trouble going to Pride some years because she felt abandoned by the scene. I don’t feel abandoned by the WASP scene; there is no such scene. What sense of community is there among white straight men other than the Klan? What can we take pride in? If we were the assholes we sometimes are and threw ourselves a parade, what would our floats represent? What did we do that it hasn’t been shown could have just as easily been done by gays, blacks, women? Could we omit centuries of slavery, the nations we destroyed, the people we denied rights to, the ones we still say can’t marry?

Again, I’m not crying “oh it’s lonely at the top.” I saw an amateur comedian perform in San Francisco a while ago, and he said he was a Republican. And to the icy silence that followed he cracked “yeah, you want to know what it’s like to come out of the closet in Texas, admit you’re a Republican in San Francisco.” I wanted to smack him. When was the last time a Republican got dragged down Market Street from the back of a pickup?

Being a WASP today means slowly becoming aware that the identity handed to you is getting smaller every few years. We realized piece by piece “this is no longer yours for free,” and “this is yours for now but it will likely go soon.” Maybe it’s why we cling to marriage rights, abortion rights, flip out over affirmative action; we don’t want what power we still have taken from us. Whether or not we want to be WASPs, it’s the only identity we’ve been shown.

Most of us don’t understand what it’s like to be anything else. We think the anger we feel when we can’t get a job is comparable to the anger felt by the black community when entire neighborhoods of people can’t get hired because all the employers are white. Or that a woman’s drive to succeed in the workplace is no different from a man’s, ignoring how much harder it is for a woman. This has been illustrated plenty by Michael Douglas movies from the 1990′s.

So yes, it’s hard being white straight 13-year-old boy. You are nothing until you recognize how much harder it can be to be to be around one. Whatever identity we’re going to have, we’re going to have to forge it as individuals. Whatever we’re struggling with, it’s a personal struggle. We don’t know what it means to struggle as a mass of angry people. Like the world needs another white movement.

Rodger spells his name with an R-O-D-J,
receiving A’s only in ROTC,
front-row seat sociology class,
when the teacher was asking about affirmative action
he said, “why do black people get all the attention?
my grandpa never did no lynching, he’s a Frenchman.
it’s beyond my comprehension, you talk about the sting from the lash,
my own people call me poor white trash!
yeah I’ve got some peach fuzz on my upper lip,
eat my supper quick cuz there isn’t much of it
and now you’re making me furious.
who’s living worse? I’m curious.
Huxtable homes are lookin’ mighty luxurious.
yeah slavery was bad, selling folks by the tonnage,
but just because I’m white why should I get punished?”
I don’t even know how to answer that kid.
great-great grandaddy, look what you did.
you’ll never know the damage, you’ll never know the ruin,
you’ll never know the spectrum of the evil you were doing,
cuz you and all the rest were trapped inside your tiny minds,
that’s why I’m being more than just a product of my times
so I tell Rodger he’s still better off than poor blacks,
I try to put my fingers in the cracks, but damn,
I think we’ll be known as devils til we all act to the contrary,
passing off the radicals but honestly they want very
fundamental things, so use your reasoning,
fix the liberty bell and let freedom ring,
see, I’m angry about all the ways America has failed
but I’ll never be an angry white male.

-Jonny 5

Aggression (H)

What the fuck is it? Hopefully once I digest a bit of Lorenz’s book on it, I’ll have a better answer but here’s what I’m thinking on.

Sometimes when I’m training, I get angry. I like the people I train with, I’m even getting close with one of them–but I when I’m thinking of how best to hit their skulls so as to break bone, when I’m going for the knees, sometimes I get angry. There’s a purity to it, a simplicity, it is not anything to do with discursive  thought. And it hurts: anger is fucking painful. Not just the tension of it, but the rest of it too. I want to cry when I feel it in a simplest form rise up because, I presume, my body is doing what it connects with anger.

And the anger’s a focusing energy. And the times I’ve trained when I was angry to start with it, it throws me off, I feel all over the place, I can’t focus. It’s different from the anger that comes when I start out calm and it  builds up.

A friend says: aggression is like a laser beam. The other thing, the anger, is like a strobe light. He tells me, aggression comes up all the time. And I know this is true for him; it’s one of his biggest motors, or fuels. He says, aggression is everywhere. That when you feel competitive, that’s aggression. When you’re trying to seduce someone, that’s aggression. And that observation struck home: I refer to  it as hunting. Writing this, the term “going for the kill” came to mind too. Another friend, joking about seduction, used the term “I win you.” Which we agreed was hot–but there’s something else to it, too.

Is aggression all about getting? Or taking? Does it just mean: wanting power? Acting with power? And is it always acting in the power system of power over rather than power with?

Is it all about taking? Or am I just thinking that because the most aggressive person I know is also the most taking? What is the content of it when it’s not anger?

There’s Only Alice (I)

Alice: It’s the only Tom Waits album I know very well, a joint release with Blood Money, both soundtracks to musicals he scored that you can’t see anywhere. Surreal lyrics loosely based on Through The Looking Glass, and about Lewis Carroll himself and the actual Alice that he loved.

There’s a song, Fish & Bird, that used to make me cry every time, about a bird that falls in love with a whale:

She said “you cannot live in the ocean,”
And he said to her, “you never could live in the sky.”
And now the ocean is filled with tears,
And the sea turns into a mirror.
There’s a whale in the moon when it’s clear
And a bird on the tide.

So please don’t cry,
Let me dry your eyes.
And tell me that you will wait for me.
Hold me in your arms and promise we never will part.
Though I’ll never sail back to the time,
I’ll always pretend that you’re mine.
Though I know that we both must part
You can live in my heart.

Humanwine’s cover of the title track: