What is NOT a drug anymore??

“No century from now on will ever manage without caffine or jazz.” -Joseph Brodsky

All our odes to melancholy

“Melancholy carries a red sky and our dreams are blue boats no one can bust or blow out to sea.  We ride them and Tingel-Tangle in the afternoon.”  -John Wieners

“The poet is at the disposal of his own night.” -Jean Cocteau

“When you’re melancholy, you tend to step back and examine your life.  That kind of questioning is essential for creativity.” -Dr. Thomas Srlos

I think there are only two kinds of happiness-collective satisfaction or well-being, and mania.

Me, I’ve got mania.

I used to wonder how anyone could be satisfied with a 9-5 job, that really you could come home and have a few beers and watch your American Idol and climb into bed with your husband-really, could that be called happiness?  Those small rewards, a good meal, a funny show, is that enough for anyone?  There is that kind of happiness.

Then there is my kind of happiness, that edgy terrified happiness that is constantly driving me toward SOMETHING IMPORTANT.  Unsure if I’ll ever be able to write, if I have something important to say, but certain that I will and must.  “Why do you think I’m living,” asks a character in Tennessee WIlliam’s The Important Thing, “except to discover what The Important Thing is?” 

I realize this all seems very vague, general.  The Important Thing?  Damn, there’s tons of important things in life, tons of movements and revolutions.  The danger is that feeling that something is always MORE important than what you’re currently doing.  I’m writing a story about a line-ride operator at King’s Dominion who’s dropped out of school and I’m thinking about how many more important characters there are to address, what else I could be writing about.

My sort of happiness can be useful-it IS useful to creation, but it’s also destructive.  There’s nothing worse than the nights when, a little drunk, I click through Microsoft Word files and read all my started stories.  And every single one begins as a way of pulling myself out of melancholy and dissatisfaction. 

We’re driven to think of happiness as a series of short term things, consumerism.  A night out, a shopping trip, a vacation, while meanwhile you trudge through that job that’s always waiting in reality.  The world of work.  Because we’re seeking happiness, not satisfaction.  Seeking escape.

I feel a lot like Vronsky, in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina:  “As a tool I may prove useful for somthing.  But as a human being, I am a wreck.”      

   

 

The unexplained satisfaction of “WTF”

“‘When I use a word’, said Humpty Dumpty, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean.  No more, no less.’” -Lewis Carroll

In the book “Uncommon Arrangements” that I discussed in an earlier blog, it’s amazing to see how often Virginia Woolfe figures into each of the seven famous married couples’ lives.  “Virginia Woolfe said” became a frequent catch-phrase with Roiphe, and to the reader Woolfe becomes this ubiquitous god-like presence, commenting from behind the scenes of real life.

I told my friends about this and somehow the phrase got going with us.  Whenever one of us says something pretentious or know-it-all, one of us rolls our eyes and follows up with “Virginia Woolfe said”. 

I love thinking about the morphing of language, how important inside jokes are to us socially and among an age group.  There’s a commradery that comes with our catch-phrases, something satisfying about speaking a lingo that only WE as teens or WE as middle-aged people or WE as waitresses, or literary people understand.

“But multitudes succumb to the sorrow induced by an inexact vocabulary.” -Franny Howe

And so the common vocabulary of any time can be dangerous.  I remember driving a coworker home one night and on the drive, he made about six phone calls, and had the exact same two minute conversation on each, every one ending in “A’right.  Peace.” 

“Wow,”  I couldn’t help saying aloud.  He looked over at me, almost apologetically.  “I never thought I’d end up in a fraternity, but you know.” 

Having an individual voice is integral to knowing your own personality.  If you hear yourself sounding like everyone else, how can you possibly think of yourself as significant, different, how can you fail to lose yourself or expect anyone to love you more than anyone else?  For this reason, writers search for their poetic voice, that inner vocabulary wherein every word means precisely what you want it to mean.  No more, no less.  Because it’s associated with all the levels of experience YOU’VE had. 

At the same time, we love the voice of our culture, the ya’lls and the ain’ts-even the WTF’s.  But like a wonderful professor once said-”You know me.  I can use ‘fuck’ and ‘ubiquitous’ in the same sentence.”

What IS wasted time?

“People whose gift will not break live by it their whole lives:  it shadows every empty act they undertake.” -Kay Ryan

I once wrote an essay about what it means to leave an art-in my case, classical piano.  There is no feeling more debilitating and helpless than when your muscles and ability atrophy-for a sport, for an art.

When I gave up classical piano, I still owned a grand piano.  Walking by it sometimes, I’d feel an incredible anger, or when someone asked to me play and I knew that I hadn’t in months, that it wouldn’t come naturally anymore, I’d feel angry.  For as long as I can remember, I have expereienced loss through anger.  Never sadness, just anger.  

So I used to run to assuage this, write or read.  I couldn’t play just ‘for my own enjoyment’-it was all or nothing.  Dedication is like that for me-everything not involved with my work is a way to ‘pass the time’. 

As a writer, though, everything can be part of the process.  You read, you analyze.  You go to a theme park, you observe.  You listen to music, you articulate it.  Use it as an excuse to live well, I tell myself.  Nothing is an empty act.

Science of science

“There is a theory that states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something more bizarre and inexplicable.  There is another theory that states that this has already happened.”          -Douglas Adams

Song and Dance

“You must sing to be found, when found you must sing.”   -Li-Young Lee

“Love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you.” -Rilke

“Most songs say but one thing:  My heart aches.” -Liam Rector

When my brother’s fiance, and my friend was found dead this summer, I realized that my brother is in love with being in love.  Jacob has never NOT been in a long term relationship.  He doesn’t know himself outside of one. 

Loneliness, I tell him over the phone, is natural.  It’s the rising action of your life.  It’s what makes you keep going, thinking something’s gonna happen, you’re gonna meet somebody great.  He’s torn between wanting to remember her and searching for someone-he hates that he needs to be with someone, but he hates himself alone. 

This singing, poetry, is what I’ve found in solitude.  Vonnegut said you practice an art for the same reason that you sing in the shower-to make your soul grow.  If this ’soul’, this part of you that wants ‘the beautiful’ is large enough, you can sing about things and people which have nothing to do with you.  Even the dead.  Who can’t give back. 

When Robin died, I discovered ‘the ugly’ in being a writer.  You experience tragedy and your mind says-’oh, tragedy.  Something to write about’.  I spent a few weeks in this edgy, angry mindset, and then I wroter her an elegy.  Poetry is a weird kind of dialogue, really.  “It is the way we tried to teach our memories to run together in life”, I say in the poem.  Now, her picture sits next to my computer and I can look at it.  There’s relief, though I’m not sure why.

I don’t believe in a conventional afterlife, but I believe in language and I believe that metaphors are cathartic.  Literature, being immortal by nature, is my religion.  Robin had a horse farm, and wanted to raise horses one day.  The elegy for her ends with me imagining her ”placed in the window of all my memories,” one of me falling from a horse, and only remembering the wild run across the field.  Not the fall. 

“To move toward light is not great thing.  What is great and beautiful is not the Ave Maria, the flowers, but the horses your parents will sell.  How the beasts will remember your thighs and the names you gave them only when they run.  How they will always remember you when they run.”

Robin knew a lot about impatience, indirection.  She didn’t know what she wanted.  She loved The Iliad.   With this singing, I am still in dialogue with those things about her.  I don’t know how it heals, singing, poetry, but it is so much better than silence.

God knows what Bathsheba was thinking

“It takes very little to make us happy, and more than is contained in heaven and earth to keep us that way”

–Bathsheba in Joseph Heller’s God Knows

“Us” being women.  “Happy” being: God knows.

Anyone who ever studied (or was forced to study) Old Testament history will have a blast with this novel.  It’s a hilarious parody of the life of David, told from his perspective (and strangely reminiscent of Yossarian). 

Me, I can squeeze feminism from a turnip, and this whole Bethsheba character was a turn-on to all my old imaginings in Sunday school, one of numerous reasons I left the church.  What were those friggin concubines THINKING when David’s son just takes them on the roof and has sex with them–that’s right, sex.  Not rape, sex.  “Hmm…possible usurper of power.  Let’s go with it!!”  What were they thinking?  God knows, old Joe.

And you gotta remember the honorable Lot (though we’re told to “remember the wife of Lot” aka Mrs. Pillar of Salt) who offered the lusty Sodomites his friggin DAUGHTERS when they came banging on his door demanding that he give them his male guests to rape repeatedly.  These same daughters were so obsessed with the idea of continuing the male line (which seems the only goal of any character in this twisted nation) that they got Lot, their own father drunk so they could have sex with him and get pregnant.   And this was seen as noble, seeing as they’re continuing the family line and all.

Or think of Sarah, offering Hagar to Abraham when she couldn’t get pregnant.  Or Ruth, hooking up with Boaz just so her and Naomi would have a providor. 

Or poor Leah–her dad tricked Jacob into taking HER instead of a sister so that Jacob would have to work another seven years just to get Rachel as a wife.   And during the whole marriage, Jacob always loved her less.  Well, at least Leah seemed to give a shit about that.  But still, that night, what was she thinking as he’s calling out Rachel’s name in bed??

Or how about Solomon’s thousand wives?  They each get one night in three years with them, assuming that he loves them all equally. 

And then we wonder why the patriarichal marriage model is so entrenched in our society.  I’m certainly never getting married in any establishment wherein that crazy book is within a hundred feet.  No siree. 

With Joesph Heller’s portrait of Bathsheba as the manipulating woman, trying to get Solomon named as heir, he turns her into the modern manipulator woman–superficially ‘in control’.  It’s only funny because we know she was so radically NOT that.  For God’s sake, David had her husband killed just so that he could marry her, plucked off her rooftop where she was bathing one day so he could sleep with her.  And apparently she was okay with that.  They stayed married, God killed her baby and they called it even.  

The modern manipulator woman that Heller tries to turn Bathsheba into represents a different kind of female subordination–the manipulating woman as opposed to the “ooh, choose me!” woman of the Bible and fairy tales (yes, I’ve got beef with Cinderella too).  Make me happy, keep me happy.  This modern woman is no more in control than the ancient one, though, reminding me that both used and user are dependent.  And repulsive.  We remember Bathsheba as a whore.  Yeah, she’s in the sacrad lineage, she’s still a whore.

God knows what any of these people were thinking, but Joseph Heller gives us his version.

Third wave Feminisim???

“It is useless to tell a woman that she is man’s victim, that she is his plaything, that she is cheated, downtrodden, kept under, laughed at, shabbily treated in every way–that is not a true statement of the case.  She is simply the victim of her own vanity, and against that, against the belief in her own fascinations, against the very part of herself that gives all the color to her life, who shall expect a woman to take up arms?”

–Eliabeth von Arnim

These days, what I’d call ’short term relationship’, you’d call ‘fling’.  ‘Affair’.  Microfiction love culture.  This summer, a marine, a rugby player, next door neighbor.  I’ll never escape the fascniation of beginnings:  in those first spontaneous conversations when you’re trying to say who you are, you are the most fully alive.  The next morning, they’ll find an ashtray full of cigarettes, and then begins the ugly.  The ‘being on-call’. 

My third wave feminism?  I will not be on call.  An insecure woman is someone so in love with herself that she needs to believe others are too, snaps at every opportunity to ‘bring color into said Marine’s sad little life.’  And so I wait, I don’t call, but I’m always available, and then, after a week of weird dates (and great sex), I’m bored and have to give the ‘you know this isn’t serious’ talk.  As in, call me whenever, you know, but I’m not in love.  Great, he says maybe.  Me neither.  Let’s just see what happens, you know??

And you lose that part of yourself that you briefly found, that most-fully-you part when I talked about physics on the roof of your car.  Talked about Peter Singer.  Talked about God and weird nightmares I’d had.  And then I go off and try to write about it, wondering what I did wrong. 

And the thing is, these relationships don’t end.  Their lives keep spilling out in my head, somewhere else, or unfortunately with the neighbor, just downstairs and with 3 am text messages.  This is why, I tell myself, people go on DATES, you know, to movies or bowling.  You’re supposed to MANUVER into relationships, not throw all of yourself out there is drunk conversations so there’s nothing left to discover, so you’re bored after a week.  Just breathe. 

I found the quote by Elizabeth von Arnim in the brilliant book by Katie Roiphe, Seven Portaits of Married Life in London LIterary Circles, all these interconnected crazy writers sick of the idea of monogomy, trying to find an escape from traditional marriage, trying to rationalize with jealousy.  H.G. Wells made his wife change her name to Jane because it sounded more housewifely, and then brought another writer Rebecca West to live with them.  Nobody knows what the HELL Jane was thinking this whole time. 

Elizabeth von Arnim, a writer who’s been compared to Jane Austen, had a significant affair with Wells, which he ended when his mistress began to complain.  Her marriage to Frank Russell was a disaster–he was manic and started having open affairs which she tolerated with the idea of ‘letting her marriage wash over her’.  She’d come to believe that although there were many women in his life, SHE was the one he truly loved, the special one.  It is this ”belief in her own fascinations” that led von Arnim, as no doubt it led Jane Wells, to stay.  To tolerate being used.  Becoming a user.  Eventually, Arnim did leave him, took him to court, in fact, and found graceful solitude at the end of her life.

So many harmful relationships–long and short term, are based on this ‘belief in one’s own fascinations’.  We’re all victims of our vanity.  This third wave feminism is really relationship-ism.  Finding out that maybe, men and women are functioning WRONGLY together somehow.   Finding yourself in solitude, I guess.

Writer’s Summer

phoenixinflight2 Says:
August 10, 2008 at 1:35 am   edit

“I have been imagining something that I would live.”  –Joyce Carol Oates

On one of my many manic trips to SOMEWHERE ELSE this summer, I literally stumbled on a Joyce Carol Oates Q&A session in a NYC bookstore. She’s fascinated me since I heard her in interview last January. “I’m like a glass of water,” she said. “I find myself so…uninteresting”.

Don’t we all, I thought.

At the Q&A in NYC, Oates talked about her new book “My Sister My Love” based on the JonBenet Ramsey case. Based on something she found in a tabloid. Calm, self-assured, soft-spoken, she gives the impression of being elsewhere, and as a writer, I find that reassuring.

My friends and I joked about what we could say to her, something interesting enough for her to use. We’d look for ourselves in her next novel, we said.

I thought of the Chuck Palahniuk preface to Stranger than Fiction: Together, alone, together, alone. That’s how we do it as writers. We ingest and live, but meanwhile everything is simply an experience that we can use later in our writing, something to explore.

Is this right? Is this the right way to live? I don’t know, but for the people who can’t be ‘present’, this is the way we survive. I have been imagining this summer–at the beach, in the city, theme parks–imagining like a glass of water.

I am a better person for having read Oates’ EXTREMELY varied short stories. The strange thing is that I don’t feel that I know her better, the way that if you read Henry James’ novels, you feel that you come to know him. And I like that. I think that’s the sort of writer I want to be. The glass of water, imagining the different ways that people live.