writing – Landing

We May Sink and Settle

June 22, 2016

Someone told me even numbers of bamboo stalks are unlucky, so I bought another pot with three stalks, bringing my total to 9. I had 3, that was good, then 6, disaster, now back to 9.

“What does that have to do with?”my coworker asked. I was carrying my bamboo.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Chinese numbers?”

Because obviously my life is ruled by Chinese numbers.

“You just have to be careful with it,” she said. “It takes over.”

“You seem unhappy,” someone said. Unhappy, and suffering, is not the same as inauthentic. Like at the end of the “Muppet Movie,” “We did just what we set out to do.” I set out to be a New Yorker, because I knew I was one, I am one, it fits.

Everything else has been disastrousish: deserts of loneliness, boiling panic on 7th Avenue, back on the “rescue” drugs, back on the antidepressants– not that I mind the antidepressants, so much, they did me so right before, and going off only taught me they had no ill effects, and that going off them was easy. As long as sertraline and I fall back in love, I’ll stick with him forever.

You lose your job but have to keep doing it for months, you get bad doctor news, you sell hard your life’s work: a lot for a brain.

This time I knew to keep my eyes low, not to look up at tall buildings, of which there are, you know, a few, in Manhattan, and this time I was cool enough to walk through an Old Navy and look for t-shirts. I was at 9. Last time an H & M overstimulated me so bad I wanted to rip my chest open like Superman rips his suit off. I was at 10.

When I said I wasn’t that bad, that with my first bout of anxiety I was afraid to leave the house, my therapist said, “Let’s not let it get that far this time.” Right.

This round is much easier, as I understand the drugs, and the drugs help. To do what I intended to do, just do it with medicine. To not let my brain get the grooves carved that say, freak out here.

I have a brain that acts out this way. And I don’t give in to it. I still move to a new city, I don’t quit my stressful job, I don’t stop writing. I get medicine. I don’t know if therapy for this has helped me at all, but I like therapy, so I go.

I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me. – Virginia Woolf, The Waves.

I marched in the Mermaid Parade last weekend. Marched? Walked with everyone, stopped and started, blew bubbles, waved ribbons around. I painted myself blue, which was much more work than I thought it would be, four big tubes of blue, four layers of paint. I had trouble with my face. I am experienced with Mardi Gras, and Mardi Gras always means masks. My sister helped make my face something. I didn’t know how to feel, there, handling the chiffon tails of my costume, the gangbusters of people, my first time at anything I am so self-conscious. I wanted to be the sea.

Sequins are still being found on the bottoms of my roommates’ feet, and in the cat’s litter box. For a minute I was the sea.

Image: “Ocean Swells,” Arthur B. Davies, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Get and Take

June 9, 2016

The woman was pleased that I was buying an umbrella. I had just splashed through Rockefeller Center, in three inches of rain, this made me laugh. Nothing was making me laugh at all, only actually wading in my sandals, running between the buildings there.

“Once we sold almost every umbrella we had, to this whole bus of people from China,” she said. She was so pleased, and so pleasant, I wondered if she had stock in the store, or the umbrella company.

That afternoon I was going to meet all these agents who could either tell me my life was worth living or not. So I thought I would try to calm down.

Under the red umbrella, I crossed the street to the cathedral. They were starting a service. I didn’t have time to stay for the service. I stopped at the St. John altar.

I did not believe in anything, except maybe I did believe in St. John, I felt nothing was his fault, not that I was again without a job, my career a mess, or that my ovaries had given up, or that, the previous evening, after I got home, I flossed and a crown popped right out of the row of my teeth. I don’t belong here! the crown said, just as I had crowned a whole afternoon of def con anxiety and thirty read-throughs, editing every other time and making marks for pauses and longer beats, then careful ingestion of exactly one and a half glasses of wine while I waited to go on so that I could stand in front of people and look and sound spontaneous and fresh and people could say to me, “You’re a natural performer.”

They were being kind, I know, but I was ungrateful and wanted to hear, “You worked really hard and persevered through the train you wanted to take not running and having to walk extra blocks, as usual, going the wrong way first, in the rain, in heels, on the brick and uneven streets of downtown, and you showed up late even though you thought people who are late for their own readings ought to be shot, what disrespect, what disrespect, why can’t you get it together?”

The sign at the St. John altar said candles $2, I realized I didn’t care what the sign said, I took out all my change and plunked it through the slot and took the candle and lit it, and God, the church universal, or St. John himself could take it up with me later that it wasn’t $2.

I got a pew and started the service with everyone, sang the parts.

I lost my St. John medal about six months after I moved here.

On my way out of the cathedral, I turned into the gift shop and in a revolving case there was a St. John medal, a heavy one on a heavy chain, right there.

I went to the counter and asked for it. The woman brought back a Joan of Arc medal, which was more than a little weird because the novel I was trying to get an agent to want to sell, thus telling me my life was worth living, the novel is about Joan of Arc (obliquely).

“No,” I said, “John.” Then I wondered if I should have bought the Joan one.

She brought back the John, I gave her a credit card because I am so out of my mind with exhaustion my checking account has too much money in it, I don’t know why, but I’m expecting that means any moment I will be overdrawn because of something I forgot.

I went back to the agent meetings. They went well. I enjoy talking about my work.

At the end of the meetings, a woman I had been talking with was suddenly a friend and we walked to an outdoor cafe and ordered drinks. She talked very fast and so did I and we had plenty to talk about. The waiter asked us to pay because he said it was about to rain. Then the heavens did open up, we leaned back under our umbrella and still we were misted. Heavy rain in New York City means nothing. When you are from tornado territory, nothing less than Shiva-level destruction impresses.

I got back to Brooklyn and in the last block before I was home, I looked over at a huge rainbow, I could see because there is a school across the street from us, an open piece of land, giving us some sky, and a huge rainbow.

Happy postscript: the crown that fell out was just a temporary one. Dentist stuck it back on in five minutes and $50.

Image: “Man With Umbrella In Times Square,” Ted Croner, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Strangers

July 23, 2014

When we came out of the bar in Iowa City, there were still twenty people on the other side of the street. They were holding signs and chanting in front of the Old Capitol. We had had nice cocktails at an upstairs bar. We had participated in a round of applause for the bartender called for by someone we thought to be a regular, a guy I would later learn had actually never set foot in the bar before. It was still light outside.

We looked, we didn’t look. Someone said, “It’s so complicated,” and we looked and didn’t look, and people wondered what each other were thinking, who might feel sensitive about this, and we were tired and cheerful and going to dinner together and a little in love with each other and ourselves since we had brought our novels and no one cares about your novel, but these people did, they read part of it and talked to you about it– if for years you had vivid, poignant dreams every night and no one, ever, ever wanted to hear about them, but then, someone asked and actually wanted to know, it was like that.

I can only speak for myself but I was not in the mood to deal with world affairs, in fact, I was pretty pissed that the people of the middle east could not hold off on their insanity while I was on vacation, goddamnit.

They chanted and chanted. We waited to cross the street, but I don’t know why. It is a college town, and three-fourths empty in July. I wanted to go.

After Iowa City, I stopped in Hannibal, Missouri. I looked at the river. It was too hot to look at it under the sun. I walked up and down the road by the river and the train tracks, looking for a place that would sell me an apple. They were all antique stores and ice cream shops and empty places. I went into one tourist shop and they did have “fresh produce”: ears of corn and tomatoes.

I ate a sandwich and corn chips on the deck of a restaurant that was closed and a wasp floated in a corner.

I asked a couple to take my picture in front of one of the preserved buildings, Mark Twain’s dad’s law office. The man took my picture. He put his finger over part of the lens. He asked me to take their photo. I did.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Russia,” he said.

“Oh, far from home. How is your trip so far?”

“Good,” they said, and immediately walked away. I wondered what they knew about Mark Twain.

I went into the gift shop and while I was looking around, a man told the woman at the counter that they were going to open the floodgates tomorrow, and I realized I didn’t know what that meant, that it was a real thing to do, open the floodgates. I took a book and some stickers to the counter and the woman asked where I was from.

“Brooklyn,” I said.

“Oh,” she said.

“But I used to live in Kansas City, so I was nearby.”

“Oh,” she said.

I took my book to the coffeehouse down the street along the river, ordered a latte which came in a handmade mug. I washed my hands in their bathroom, and the sink was handmade pottery, too, a shallow round bowl with blues and browns. I opened my new book and read this:

The human being, like the immortals, naturally places sexual intercourse far and away above all other joys– yet he has left it out of heaven!…From youth to middle age all men and all women prize copulation above all other pleasures combined, yet it is actually as I have said: it is not in their heaven; prayer takes its place.

I had to pee for a very long time of driving across Illinois, and pondered stopping and peeing in many, many cornfields and ditches, but finally came to a town barely big enough to have a gas station. There were fifty motorcycles parked around it. I rounded the corner to the bathroom and there were already six women in line.

The line for men was even longer, and a guy with patches on his leather vest that said Iraq, joked, “We knew that blonde lady would be coming in, and she really had to pee, so we all rushed in here and lined up.”

I asked where they were going. He said they were on a ride to some memorial for someone who had died. I was too shy to ask about this person who had died, but I liked that everyone there was in some informal community.

A little girl walked by, stood next to her mom, and the guy said, “You gotta get some on this wrist so you won’t fall over.” He was pointing to her bracelets. She didn’t say anything. “You know, so they won’t be too heavy.” The mom smiled and the girl didn’t say anything. The girl walked away.

“Someday she’ll be like, what did he mean?” the mom said.

Eventually I got to pee and I thanked God that I had gotten to pee and didn’t buy anything at the Casey’s. I just left.

Twain quote from Letters from the Earth, edited by Bernard DeVoto HarperPerennial, 1962.

Magritte

November 16, 2013

Magritte made me think about vocabulary.

Magritte works in trunks (the human kind), tubes, clouds, wood, ball bearings, music, chess pieces, rocks. Blues and browns and blacks and greys.

I work in animals, stained glass, shoulders and brown hair, houses, and glasses (the kind you drink out of). I work in fairy tales and Bible stories. There’s sparkle and glow and never a pastel in sight.

What you say is maybe less interesting than what you use to say it.

Once I got a rejection letter that read, “I think I know what you are trying to say, but I have no idea why you’re trying to say it that way.” That’s right up there with, “Why don’t you tell us a story?” I hated that teacher, cried twice a week after his class, and proceeded to spend the next twenty years following his advice.

My imagination is too active to like surrealism. I have to work to get into this world, to touch real things. I don’t need to be pulled out of my body, except for comfort. Surrealism is supposed to be jarring.

Magritte paints a neck as a leg, a neck as a concrete pipe, and rearranges limbs in a way that reminds me: this is not inevitable. The integrity of the body is delicate, always delicate in a way we don’t want to admit. The hands of the little boy are growing, and the shoulder will bend forward, down.

What does he mean about trees, though, trees being made out of music? How does he get away with superimposing his music trees in front of regular old painted trees? With a shoe filled with hair instead of a woman?

Just playing with his vocabulary, perhaps.

The vocabulary becomes the precious thing, too. Emily Dickinson’s garden, her flowers and bees and grasses. John Irving’s bears and condoms.

Hard to know, though, when you are trapped in your usual materials, when they are crutches, when you have to go looking for new ones.

I went to St. Patrick’s after seeing the Magritte show. It is nearby. St. Patrick’s is choked with scaffolding right now. When I walked in, a man handed me a bulletin and I found a plastic chair behind the wooden pews that hadn’t yet been removed.

Once I sat, I saw that I had chosen the same row as St. John’s altar. I was going to go by there anyway.

About twenty years ago, I was in Manhattan, and my shoes started to give me a blister. Oxford kind of shoes, black ones. I bought some espadrilles, because they were cheap. When I got up to leave, I accidentally left my old shoes. I always wished someone was sitting there praying for size 8 shoes.

Image from MoMA lobby on that same visit. The Magritte show doesn’t allow photos. Link below to images of show.

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1322