Addendum: Dreams (H)

 

 

Warmth, friends, women,men, or somewhere in between or somewhere else, warm and breathing and heart-beating all around me. We are respectful of each other’s space to learn, to grow, to make mistakes, to figure out our own paths, and we are reflexively generous. With our ears, with our hands, with embraces, sympathy, support, sharing of experiences and food and our soft old clothes. We practice gratitude; we apologize; we acknowledge each others strengths outloud, bolstering them. When one is having a rough time, we gather around her, each in our own way, with offerings: text message jokes, a night out, a quiet cup of tea, a dog-eared book. When one of has a triumph–it can be big, or simply the daily triumph of an interview that goes well, a project completed, an act of bravery–we celebrate. Joy is bounced off of one face and reflected in and off each other, and it builds and and bubbles and leaves us ecstatic and full. Sometimes it becomes so much that we have to dance, and we do, laughing, and when we are spent we fall asleep, some on the couch, some in the bed. We are familiar with each other’s breathing and bodies, whether there has been sex or not, we know and hold each other in our gazes.

and/or “Angry Friends” (I)

Writing of Camus, Susan Sontag once said that the most dangerous emotion a writer’s texts can evoke from the reader is love. That’s because, she went on, when we fall out of love with a writer, we feel betrayed; we feel that, indeed, we were fools ever to have been taken in by them in the first place… [O]nce we are through with a writer whose work we once honestly and directly loved, we really are through. If we do go back to those texts, it’s only to explore the more or less painful (or, indeed, sometimes charming; but always, ultimately, unsatisfactory) traces of our earlier vulnerability, naïveté, and immaturity. And that writer’s new works, to the extent they have not grown as fast (or in the same direction) as we have, return us to all the torture of our own earlier failings and blindnesses.

-Samuel R. Delany, 1984: Selected Letters, p. 224

Part of a letter Chip wrote to his friend Mog, in response to a letter she wrote saying that their friendship was becoming more painful than pleasurable and that maybe they should declare “a moratorium” on it. He had included her name in the dedication of his most recent book, dealing directly with the then-recent outbreak of AIDS, a book which had not yet gone to press, and she had taken issue with some of what he’d said in the book and wasn’t sure she wanted her name in the dedication.

His response is an impassioned and (true to Delany’s form) very lengthy sharing of all his relationships that have ended during his writing career, and how surprisingly violent the endings have been. The saddest, and the one that hits closest to home, was this :

Well, there were people who asked to be disassociated from Dhalgren too, because they Didn’t Approve. While I was working on the middle drafts in the Albert Hotel, I had one friend whom I saw almost every other day for nearly a year. He kept insisting – often when I would urge him not to, because I thought he was forgetting his own concerns for the sake of my book – on reading all my new pages, and discussing them, and being very supporting and offering many helpful criticisms. (I was using his last name as the book’s title, back then, though there was nothing of his character in the book, save an exchange he’d once told me about between him and his therapist, which I’d changed some…) One night, as I frequently did back then, I took him out to dinner at a little Greek restaurant above 14th Street. I thought we’d had a perfectly pleasant time. But the next morning, I found a letter waiting for me at the hotel desk. He wanted to break off all relations with me, disassociate himself from the book, and wanted me not to use his name as the title. He felt that I was sapping all his energies from his own life and his own work. Though I wrote a letter back, bowing to his wishes, I was very hurt. As I had often told him, I would have been quite willing to do without his reading and criticism, but the withdrawal of his friendship was wounding. For the next three-and-a-half years, he refused to see me again or speak to me – though several times, I later learned, when he found himself outside a mutual friend’s loft apartment door and he heard my voice inside (and several other times when he only thought he heard it), he turned around and left. (p. 219-220)

Among the rest:

A friend’s lover. The lover accused Delany of never having liked his work as much as the friend’s, and having always condescended to him. And as much as Delany swore, honestly, that he’d always found the lover to be the better writer, the lover would only believe Delany was lying. He and the lover still had no contact, despite Delany staying close with the friend.

Fellow sci-fi writer Thomas Disch. He stated after the publishing of a certain of Delany’s books that, if they were to remain friends, he needed to never read any more of Delany’s work.

Multiple editors and publishers. A recurring theme was people demanding to know, what, just what was this book (whichever new book it happened to be) about? People, usually people who had loved Chip’s earlier books, seemed offended by a newer work, could not fathom where he was going with his career, and often thought he was ruining himself, or becoming an arrogant navel-gazer.

After laying all this groundwork, he got to his point with Mog:

I don’t wonder if – I know that – rehearsing all this, here, now, is a self-protective strategy on my part. But to write about anything at all, Mog, is to risk losing people who are close to you – because you’re not writing the right things about it; while the new audience you get comes to you precisely because you’re writing about that and not something else, regardless of what specifically you are saying about it. Indeed, the new audience is as happy to disagree as to agree; that’s what makes you a rich writer for them.

I care, deeply, about the world; about AIDS; about language…; about art. And no doubt because of what I care about, I pick friends who care deeply about the world, AIDS, language, and art too. I write what I can, and I bust my ass doing it. And part of the ass-busting means being as honest as I can bear to be with myself. And that’s often painful. (Where you read “self-critical” in my various discussions of series stories, if you want, you can simply substitute “personal agony” and/or “angry friends.”) I do the very little I can do – write the very little I can write – because I care (and because I couldn’t stand not to); but because my friends also care so much, and because they would like to see it done their way (and often those would be very good ways), what I do has always been painful to them. Part of my own pain, if you will, is to listen to their angry and articulate criticisms and, the ones that I can understand down in my language pit…, try to do something about them, even if it means forcing myself to grow into a different kind of person… (p. 223-224)

Not all creative relationships are collaborations. I’ve known many artists and many brilliant creative people of other stripes as well, but in only one relationship has art, and the making of things, been absolutely central to our friendship. We rarely made things together, but we’d known each other more than half our lifetimes, discovered that we wanted to be creative people in each others’ presence, and shared everything we were working on with each other in a kind of peer review. I would say that the reasons we became who we are now, both in terms of being, both of us, artists, and in the rest of it as well, had much to do with each other.

Relationships where creativity travels back and forth, one feeding on and into the other, are relationships built on a kind of tension. Between one person and the other, between friendship and creativity, and between what you make and everything else. You get your art into your friendship and your friendship into your art.

The breaking point is the moment at which you stop growing in the same directions, but keep growing.

I’m no expert, but I feel like these tensions are at the heart of some of the most famous creative collaborations we know, like Lennon and McCartney. Reading about how vitriolic The Beatles became during the Let It Be sessions, I see four brilliant people who used to feed off of each other, but somewhere they became less of a unit, turned into four individuals, and doing what they used to do became agonizing. They brought their wives and girlfriends into the studio for the first time, because those were the relationships that mattered to them now. Those bands that snap, years later they maybe have a reunion, and the only way the reunion can happen is with that tension gone.

At least, that’s a way of looking at it.

Objects under tension eventually (usually, maybe not always) break or go slack. Too many stories of bands that put out brilliant music and lead pained, miserable lives. The first album where they say “for the first time, it’s coming easily, we’re all getting along, it’s all coming out so fast and so free,” that’s always the album where something integral is missing from the music. They went slack.

Mine broke. And I felt like it nearly killed me.

Sometimes I wonder if I can still call myself an artist. Because I doubt, if situated again between what I make and who I care for, that I would choose the art over the relationship. And I feel that may be why I invariably work alone; when I’m in a collaborative situation I do not assert my perspective, I pick a subject that neither side is terribly invested in, and I try, mostly, to make the other party content with what we made together. It’s easy, because there’s very little at stake, and what is made in the end doesn’t have “my stamp” on it.

But I question whether I can go it alone forever. Something will probably have to change, and it will change when I accept that it may mean more breaks along the way. So the time would be now to cultivate a skill at maintaining a perfect tension, one that doesn’t break, but doesn’t bend.

(He wrote me a letter. He wants to come to Providence. We shall see how this goes.)

Play (H)

consider the generosity of the one-year-old
who has no words to exchange with you
and instead offers up her favorite drooled-on blanket,
her green rhinoceros as big as she is,
her cloth doll with the long blond pigtails,
her battered cardboard books, swung open on their soggy pages.

If you were outdoors, she would hand you a dead beetle,
a fistful of grass, a pebble,
by way of introduction or just because.
And if, a moment later, she wanted it back,
it would be for the joy of the game
that makes of every simple object an offering:
This is me. Here is who I am.

In the same way, sun
drapes a buttered scarf across your face,
rose opens herself to your glance,
and rain shares its divine melancholy.
The whole world keeps whispering or shouting to you,
nibbling your ear like a neglected lover,

while you worry over matters of finance,
of “relationship,”
important issues related to getting and spending,
saving and hoarding,

though you were once that baby,
though you are still that world.

–Alison Luterman

Re/Creation (H)

From Leah Stewart’s The Myth of You and Me:

I don’t know how long I sat at that table, listening to myself breathe. What was I supposed to do now? I’d been taking direction from a man who didn’t exist. Maybe I didn’t exist, either, with no one to bear witness to my presence, no one to testify that I had combed Oliver’s hair, felt the warmth of Will’s skin, stripped my clothes off and plunged naked into the water, twirled in circles with Sonia in her backyard. I sat there until I began to feel that if someone didn’t touch me I would slowly disappear.

I crept upstairs as quietly as I always had when Madame Grey was there…

Sonia was perched on the edge of her mother’s bed, her back to me… Then Madame Grey lifted her hand and touched Sonia’s head, and  I knew what Sonia was doing here. Her mother had tried to kill herself. A large white bandage was wrapped around her wrist.

I wondered how she had done it. Had she threatened suicide on the phone to Sonia and then nicked herself with a razor, or had she cut her veins open, lengthwise, in the tub, and watched the water turn red? Had she only wanted Sonia’s attention, or had she really expected to die? I wanted to ask Sonia these questions but I knew she would only look at me, incredulous, and ask me what difference it made. Her mother needed her, and here she was, no matter what the woman had done. Was that weakness on Sonia’s part, or strength? Her whole life, she’d loved a person who gave and withdrew her affection at every turn. No wonder she thought of me as a coward for fleeing the moment something went wrong.

As I watched, Madame Grey began to stroke Sonia’s hair, and Sonia bowed her head and submitted to her mother’s touch. She let out a long, shuddering breath. “Je t’aime,” she said.

Here was the secret of this house, the thing it took bravery to face–that to go on loving someone means to over and over allow the necessary pain. Standing there in the doorway, I had a moment of empathy so total I felt I was Sonia–we were, finally, singular, as we’d once imagined ourselves to be. For the first time since we met I didn’t just witness Sonia’s life, I lived it. I struggled, between my mother’s blind hatred and my father’s blind love, to figure out which one I deserved. I heard my own mother say she wished I had never been born. I watched as my best friend abandoned me. I felt what it was to be negated in that way, and I understood that if hatred can negate us, love can create us, and when we lose it we don’t know who we are.

Philadelphia (H)

From David Lambkin’s The Hanging Tree:

In contrast, Tregallion enhanced my life. For the first time I knew a love that was at once profound and uncomplicated…

He set me free. Even Marion and her happy acceptance of homoerotic passion had not released me as Tregallion did. His love seemed entirely unconditional. He accepted me as I was, leg and all, and loved me heart-whole. I remember him saying once, quaintly: “I’m good at love. I love long and hard and solid. I can out-love anyone.”

He was the only man I’ve ever met who had freed himself from his past. His love was not driven by fashionable psychoses: early nipple deprivation, an unfair share of nourishing breasts or frustrated Oedipal longings. I was no mother figure burdened by his chaotic infantile needs. I carried for him no rag-tag baggage of psychological projections. He loved me: unreservedly and deeply. And I loved him back.

Protected: An Anatomy of Healing, part 2 (H)

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Ways of Thinking (H)

Diane is a photographer. She’s got a mess of curly hair, dark, chaotic and warm, mother’s hair, lover’s hair. I watch her face get (even) prettier the longer she speaks. I ask, and she confirms my guess that she thinks in pictures.

And Pablo is the most scientist of a person I know. Sometimes I think it would be difficult to spend a lot of time with him, that it’d be hard to connect emotionally with someone whose emotional life seems so immaculately regulated. I spent a long time trying to have the type of control he seems to have, but for me that amounted to ordering myself around in the manner one might speak to a dog. I’ve abandoned that goal, which for me was a freedom of which Rumi writes:

“At times I would say I had self-control/ At times I felt like a prisoner of myself/ All that’s passed. I’m no longer captivated by myself.”

Pablo, I guessed, thought in naked concepts and patterns, something almost numeric. Senses, he says, and pieces. I picture three dimensional objects being rotated, finding the different ways their blocky arms click in together. He experiences thought as another sense. This is congruent with the Buddhist understanding, and something that I am working towards; difficult after a lifetime of conditioning that privileges thought and rationality above any other forms of, or ways to, knowing.

To him and Diane, words are this thing that it’s necessary to translate ideas into in order to communicate them to other people. It’s frustrating–why do I have to go through this part after I’ve already completed the thought? I imagine it is the equivalent of when I write with pen and paper: I can’t do it fast enough, and my hand is three sentences behind my head and it’s frustrating. There’s no discovery process; it’s just a boring, irritating repetition.

Of the way I perceive, he says: I imagine it like red/gold branches, almost like the way lungs branch, but more of a web, round, all of it connecting, light flashing down different parts of the web. Meaning that the emotional part is always present and integrated with the rest of the perception. That everything is contextualized. Whereas for him, emotions are these sharp pointy things that he has to be wary of so they don’t poke him in the back of the eye. His decisions are made by: what is the next most logical step from right here? Out of context, history, time.

I tie my sneakers, close the door behind me, and start running towards buildings I recognize. There are narrow doors between some of the row houses, only as wide as my hips, and I’m in Jaiselmair. The street widens with an island running down the middle, and I’m in Bogota last June, listening to Jack Kornfield, eating dulce de leche cake while it rains. I see Johnny Brenda’s, and I’m in Chris’s old apartment, the dirty bathroom, his pretty face at dusk. I still have a shirt of his, never washed. I keep running towards the buildings, until I am sitting on the windowsill of my apartment on JFK Boulevard, Simon and I watching the lights change. My stomach turns. Pema writes to go until you are vomiting with fear, but today is a rest day, and so I slow, then start on my way back.

Looking out the window he asks, do you have to translate that to words to experience it? Dark red paint. Dark windows. And I don’t. I can have pure sensory impressions, and pure emotional experiences, but to make them sensical, to incorporate them into a narrative or logic, to return to them in memory, the structure of words–even when they are simple, paltry, can do more than create the barest frame–is necessary, and automatic.

The Goal (H)

From Martin Buber’s I and Thou:

“The relation to the You is unmediated. Nothing conceptual intervenes between I and You, no prior knowledge and no imagination; and memory itself is changed as it plunges from particularity into wholeness. No purpose intervenes between I and You, no greed and no anticipation; and longing itself is changed as it plunges from the dream into appearance. Every means is an obstacle. Only where all means have disintegrated encounters occur.”

(Incidentally, if you’ve got an English translation of the entire work, please lend it my way.)

Medicine (I)

By my junior year of high school there were, I’d guess, at least 25 of us in my acting class. We met on Fridays after school; I’d been with my teacher since I was 8 years old.

This one day he had us do an activity. I’m still not sure what the point was; he was a method actor and taught us along those lines, so maybe he felt we needed more trauma in our lives so we could call it up onstage.

He had us stand in a circle in Theatre 2 and gave us this scenario:

“We’ve all gone on a plane trip to a faraway island. The sun is warm, the weather’s incredible, and we’ve been enjoying ourselves for the better part of a week. But the news has just come to us: the local water we’ve been drinking carries a fatal disease, and we’ve all contracted it. Everyone one of us will die without the antidote. Fortunately, we have medicine for everyone. It takes four doses of medicine to survive; there is enough medicine for everyone to have two doses. Walk around the circle and pick two people to give your doses to.”

And that’s what we did. We had to look every member of the group in the face and say, to two people of our choosing, “I have medicine for you,” at which point the person had to announce “So And So got medicine!” And to everyone else we had to say “I have no medicine for you.” I was among the first people to go round the circle, so not much gravity of the situation had sunk in yet. I didn’t feel terribly guilty about the people I didn’t give any to, and even made little whispery jokes to my friends, “I have no medicine for you (but don’t you worry, you’ll get plenty).” I gave my two pills to my best friend and this close friend that I’d been in love with for some time.

Now that I think of it, neither had any for me. My friend held my hands with this horrible guilty look; the girl had tears in her eyes because she’d already given hers away. In the end, I think maybe three people had enough medicine to live.

Most of the group was crying, and in the talkback they sobbed out that it had nothing to do with living or dying, it had to do with loyalty. The girl sideswiped me with a giant hug on the way into Theatre 1, and my friends and I all sat in a pile supporting each other.

The weekend rolled by and on Monday I came to school with a gallon-sized bag that I’d filled with multivitamins (my cousins sold them for Usana and had given us dozens of free bottles). And everyone I knew, without context, I handed a pill and said “I have medicine for you.”

To the people who’d been in the class, I added “in real life there’s enough for everybody.”

You + Me (I)