I am not moving. I was moving, had to, levering myself up out of school debt and despair via the only available course: sell the farmhouse bought and loved for seven years. so. I did the requisite mourning, did the requisite boxing and packing and cleaning and “de-cluttering†for house shoppers and realtors with no interest in farm auctions and secondhand store effluvia, with no pets, no inclination to look past initial impressions–to make a show place–because everything hangs in the balance of making that fast sale during the short slice of season (june, half of july) while the market is happening. there was the minor complication of lack of money–for paint, for boxes, for perennials to plant in pots on the front porch. many trips carting carload after carload to consignment stores, shopping them my wares, trying them out one by one, then goodwill with the leftovers. checking in regularly on accumulated cash to be picked up– $20 here, $11 there–and used. there were friends who helped out through the thinnest period, one in particular, poised between med school graduation and start of hospital residency, who devoted several days to working beside me, helping me buy supplies, do things–without him, I literally wouldn’t have managed it. seems small. was huge. I was unanchored and falling, reached out and held to him for those few critical days–the hinge that rights you, restores balance–for a moment, for a couple of weeks. because balance, always with me, seems to be a thing struggled for, only provisionally attained, always slipping, always negotiated. after that there came rounds with buyers, with lawyers, with inspections and repairs–round and round, august first an unimaginable distance inching closer. meanwhile teaching. meanwhile a class I’ve taught three times before and for the life of me can’t figure out how to do Right, do smoothly, gracefully–do other people? am I simply a terrible teacher? and so I continue to reengineer in midstream. now, maybe for good this time (there is no for good), I have it troubleshot, vastly improved–only I won’t be teaching it again. now I will be teaching something new, completely new, completely unfathomed. what am I doing? what am I doing here at all? where am I going? what do I know at all? need to be writing the dissertation. not writing. stuck on precipice. deadlines creeping up and slipping past. precipice of quicksand. also jobs are going to be posted soon–I need to look, assess, prepare myself. but what do I know, who am I anyway? what am I even still doing in grad school, I’m in the wrong program, every thing is wrong, I am wrong, wrong wrong wrong. spinning out of control. all that accumulated time spent worrying eats away. borrowed equilibrium leaches out. too much time by myself. my self. my problematic self. so: meltdown, vortex. wanted to die. hated. shook. could not stand feeling of food in mouth. could not sleep more than few hours. or slept too much. retreated into novels and hated myself for reading, while reading. felt like if I had to speak to one more person I would fall apart, if I didn’t speak to someone, anyone I would fall apart. read a memoir by a pole who said americans perpetually disassemble and try to reassemble identity. yes. that helps. perspective. this is losing perspective. go back on the meds–crazy for awhile still, then plane out gradually. still little freaked out person inside, but the feeling of crumbling precipice diminished. I am not moving. house sold, I get to rent it back for a year. all those boxes just sitting in the garage may just continue to sit. inevitable delayed by ten months–but at least, the hope is, then I’ll be moving toward something–very different prospect from now. can’t imagine how to get there, but working to rebolster the tiny voice, almost damped, that says I can get there. I am not moving–not writing–paralyzed and terrified of shadows that loom. all loom bigger through not doing. not writing does this. I am not moving anywhere very quickly–am moving in circles, little advance, retreat, tiny steps, stumbling, falling, more circles–oh, how I move in my crazy dance.
another summer friday
it just occurred to me how nice an old folks’ home might be, minus the “old” part. I was turning over in my mind for the forty bizillionth time how to start up a standing games night when it hit me– man, if I just lived in an old folks home, well, there’s always an agenda of activities and even a room devoted to people sitting around playing dominoes and spite and malice. and it struck me how nice that would be. cool glasses of iced tea. if only you all weren’t just waiting around to *die* or for something to break. a friend of mine whose grandmother just fell and broke her back was talking about that yesterday– how the places she’s been in are swank, like prep schools with salons and big squishy furniture, but with an evil-smelling fissure down the middle of disappointment and death. ick. that’s not really what I want. but just everyone kind of around– less of this busy-busy hyper-scheduledness. to be able to wander (*wander*! what a concept) around the corner and maybe pick up a game of ping pong. that would be cool.
a rant against the country that I love
last night a few dear friends and I took turns preaching to our own collective choir: we all feel our country, this country, the u.s., is in the midst of a very strange, very selfish, and extremely paranoid period right now.
it all started with some grousing about a student who failed to show up for her piano lesson for the fifth time in a row, offering only the most superficial “apology,” little seeming to realize that azi’s livelihood depends on the consistent income from that teaching work or reflecting on the frustration she must have felt waiting there at the appointed time for a student who never arrives. “I forgot,” or, “I had an appointment I didn’t know would run so late,” but no call, no courtesy– just the prevailing performance of a sense that the world is there to serve her, at her convenience (an attitude I see all the time in my own students– the sense of privilege, of entitlement, which seems unaccountable and outrageous to me until I begin to hear what an old fogey I sound like– “when I was a kid, a B was considered a good grade and we respected our teachers…”). because we were already conveniently grousing, it was easy enough to launch into five-part harmony against people in restaurants who demand of servers “gimme this or that” without any apparent awareness of another person’s dignity or common politeness.
and someone– actually, I ohso modestly interject, I think it may have been me– made the bold leap to speculating that the thing these behaviors have in common is a (currently) typical american ugly sort of indvidualism– the spirit of looking out for number one and letting the rest of the world (different–>muslim–>terrorists–>evil) go hang. now, I realize this is quite a leap (mine, I mean– the reasonableness of the other one I leave it to you to wrestle with). perhaps not to excuse but to explain it I should go further into backdrop and other bits of the conversation.
one piece is mimi’s work with indonesians (many muslim) and in particular last year living day in and day out with indonesian migrant workers in korea (before that she worked with indonesian students in canada, looking at how women access higher education). and yesterday mimi met with the president of our university, who is planning an upcoming trip to indonesia– to court better relations, since the numbers show enrollments from asia down 60% in recent years. there’s no doubt that this trend has to do with trickle-down policies in bush’s america, where fear and patriotism are synonymous and the media and average people persistently equate muslims with terrorists. for inhabitants of those countries why *wouldn’t* australia begin to look like a better place to go to school?
another piece is my recently having watched “hotel rwanda”– a pretty good flick in which the awesome don cheadle portrays “an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances”: a hutu hotel manager who struggles to shelter over a thousand tutsis in his hotel during the ethnic cleansings the country endured while the west simply fled. the biggest take-away, for me, from that movie was some degree of chagrin at our, at my privileged western complacency– at one point joaquin phoenix’s journalist character essentially pricks the bubble of hope don cheadle’s character has been puffing into when he reasons, with anguish, that even if people across the oceans do witness the grim footage he’s captured of people being slaughtered by machetes in the streets, they will merely shake their heads, say, “that’s terrible,” and then go back to their bowls of wheaties. which is exactly what came to pass, with that instance of genocide as with many others before and since. life goes on, I guess, but still there seems something deeply wrong. like, if this is the effect of global media, what good is it doing us? if our only response to the delivery of so much devastating information is overwhelm, rationalistic thinking, and going on with the daily routine in any case, remind me why it is we’re all so all-fired determined to get the latest feeds and downloads? anyway, I threw “hotel rwanda” into our discussion last night as a link back to brian’s several years working in africa– and it led him to tell us, firsthand, about arriving in rwanda just after the “cleansings” depicted in the film, of the devastation. which leads to a declaration of the entire continent of africa’s going down the shitter, while we just sit by over here, munching our wheaties. sorry, bono.
which a few minutes later led mimi to draw the parallel up out of historical events and into the present– to mention a television report she’d seen recently in which a bbc reporter managed to broadcast from north korea– and in the course of the broadcast one car passed in what would otherwise have been a bustling city street– because kim jong il has sent all the people into the countryside to help the farmers because the country has no food. I mean, yikes. I’ve been operating on a pretty severely curtailed budget for the last five months, but as bad as it gets, there’s always stuff I’ve squirreled away in my cupboards and freezer that I can eat. despite my mom’s worries over the years to the contrary, I have in fact never gone hungry. two blocks away is a grocery store whose shelves are simply brimming with plenitude (reaped from industrial agriculture and monoculture crop farming and archer daniels midland’s whole “supermarket to the world” whitewashed approach to multinational monopolization– but that’s a whole other gripe– which I should get to sometime and maybe even will). meanwhile, all we hear about north korea is whispers of, gasp, nukes— which, by the way, don’t we have some of those ourselves, despite various “nonproliferation” treaties past and present? oh, but we’re the good guys, right? we’re not going to go off half-cocked like some religious extremist third world nation– or that’s the common argument, anyway. striking me just now like an extremely convenient rhetorical position.
another piece of backdrop is that we’d just been to a matinee of “star wars episode iii: attack of the clones”– which, I’m sorry, niall, but I feel was just a lot of simplistic, binary, and, it seems to me, particularly american claptrap. now, don’t get me wrong– I *loved* the original “star wars” and even more so “the empire strikes back”– they were big and glorious, eye-opening and paradigm-shifting. and then I saw “return of the jedi” and decided the magic, for me, was pretty much gone. I didn’t even bother with either of episodes i and ii. and it’s not about jar jar binks, excess muppetdom, or racist stereotyping– it simply seems that the lessons the lucas industry had to deliver to this audience got delivered– and now he just keeps churning out tired retreads. that particular ship of innocence in film-going has sailed. and it’s very hard to swallow– 20 years after “empire”– all this hooey about “the dark side”– such an uncomplicated delivery of bad guys who dress like history’s fascists and the fighting-monk-like-agrarian good guys. maybe it’s just me who’s gotten excessively cynical seven years into grad school– but I found it impossible to get behind a portrayed battle between Good and Evil in which I was intended to sympathize with a character who was supposedly struggling with a gruelling ethical decision and yet found it possible to snap to and slaughter a bunch of kids. maybe it’s like porn– which I also can’t stomach, due mainly to its lack of subtlety. but I’m getting off-track– my point was my sense of a kind of americanist propaganda the movie seemed to be lobbing– all that “fighting for democracy” crap. it just rang too familiar.
but I’m typically somewhat uncomfortable making such big political proclamations like I’m doing here. I mean, for one thing, I’m always acknowledgi
ng to people how I live in a self-imposed media blackout (aka “assume ostrich position”). every time I start reading papers– even just reading headlines, let alone once I start delving into the prose text and begin to wonder about the positioning of the journalist, of the paper that pays her wage, of the editor that chooses the pieces to run, etc.– I get pretty quickly overwhelmed. which is why I’ve so determinedly, years ago, staked claim in this little itty bitty area of focus, the inside of my own head, i.e. navelgazing. not that I’m convinced that it’s the most noble or courageous approach, only knowing that we all have our strength and limitations, I’m trying to mobilize some of the former of mine. and mitigate against the latter– because I tend to be all too aware of how inflated my own postulating positions and perspectives inevitably are and how limited my point of view is– and this feeling just undermines any effort to be effective I do make. I see all the holes and reasons why I’m wrong far more glaringly than I feel any conviction in my rightness. my boy willy b. once again hits it on the head: “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” though really… “best” and “worst”… there again, I dunno.
anyway lately I’m re-reading one of my all-time favorite writers, david james duncan (author of _the river why_ and _the brothers k_, fab books both, plus a couple collections I haven’t gotten to yet, but really should soon, and, damn, but once again I wish I had it in me just to sit down and write fiction, for godssake)– and looking up what he’s done lately online, I come across this piece he published in orion magazine now like 2 1/2 years ago, declaiming bush’s “patriot act,” aggressions against iraq, and general lack of reason– and in addition to being struck once again by how goldurned articulate the man (duncan, right, not bush) is, I was also struck by the date– two and a half years ago and it’s already a catalogue of the ills the people in iraq were suffering back then on account of our “patriotic” military actions (malnutrition, radiation poisoning)– how much worse must their lot be now? which of course makes me realize the answer’s probably out there somewhere in all this vast plethora of information at my fingertips, the marvel-ous worldwide web– and then I stumble on an article in today’s cnn.com (along with a particularly gorge-provoking photo of our commander and chief) that describes how shrub is now lobbying for the renewal of the patriot act– cuz it’s just worked so durn well! and then I realize I’m at the end not only of this diatribe but also of my limited powers of peeking out from inside my little ostrich hill– and my head’s itching to get stuck back inside.
for lack of a better use of this vehicle…
I’ll just come right out and say it: I fucking hate blogs. today, at least. and, yeah, yeah, I know this is one, but not that kind. I hope. I tried to convince a friend this morning that blog was merely a vehicle, that saying, “blogs are ____” is just like saying, “books are ____”– that books, like blogs, can be any sort of whatever– variously conceived, written, used– and I personally feel that there are better and worse ways of doing them. of course, my “better†is possibly somebody else’s worse, and I’m okay with that. point is, I never liked playing games of telephone—always you pretty much get it wrong, which, okay, yeah, is the point, but still it takes me awhile to stop wiping invisible egg off my face. can’t say I’m overly fond of gossip or circle-jerks or he-said-she-said. and when specifically directed to read someone’s blog, whom I do not know, I can stomach it for perhaps five minute before the wash of nausea swamps the effort. and it’s kind of even worse when reading the inside track of someone I tend to call friend. I end up feeling, just, dirty. okay, too, I know I’ve vented a version of this before. we all know by now I’m not great at parties, I lay prompt claim to dwelling under a rock. plus I happen to be super-cranky today. living like this in the midst of dropcloths and paint drips, carting load after load of stuff I actually like to mildly snearing consignment ladies, and that woolen blanket still hasn’t gotten replaced by a bottom sheet. downward spirals can sneak up. I’m in the midst of one. and all that crowing about climbing up out of depression. in the past when I’ve cycled down I’ve simply, mainly, gone dark here. but now… I guess, here you go. served up piping stinky. this, I fear, is the sort of crap ‘n’ kvetch that blogs and online diarists traffic in. I do not want it to be what I do. what do I want to do? geez. from down in the spiral it’s hard to tell. why so disaffected? why rain on other people’s parades? maybe because I’m supposed to kvell to the yammer about poetry this-n-that, who’s who, what’s what, yadda yadda yadda— and frankly I’m slightly appalled that all it does is make me want to hurl. why did I go to the iowa writers’ workshop, again? what the heck am I doing with my life, again? someone please please please stop—or spare me from— the parade of little egos in this little fishpond or the next. all the kazoo trumpeting and prancing. someone hand me a level latitude. paolo, where are you? artfarm in the bloody boondocks can’t happen fast enough for this particular sarah-head.
with any luck, however, I’ll have shaken it off and fetched a different one tomorrow. maybe I’ll even be able to make some palatable words come out of it. which would be nice. given that I’ve abandoned that little bouncy ball off in some forlorn corner, too.
the dreams right now are unbearable.
too many days sine linea
I lose track. I loose track– rails running all over the place, box cars clattering, precarious, full of everything under the sun: piles of dust, tilting coat racks, stained kitchen sinks, out-of-date vehicle registrations, vegetable drawers of dessicated fruit, a bed with a knit blanket in place of a bottom sheet, so many post-it notes, the wrong type of cat food, answering machine messages of robotic voices saying, please call us as soon as possible at 1-800-…
where are words in all of this? somewhere down underneath the debris. but I’m still waking to the occasional lightbulb. this morning’s revelation was that the university hasn’t actually paid me for the course I taught this spring. which seems like a pretty big one.
but anyway. consider this a place-holder. lameass, but the best I can manage. something just to say, hello. kind of like tapping the spacebar to keep the screen saver from kicking in. meanwhile, we will continue circling, waiting for a break in the fog.
sister.
today I wrote a letter to my neice, who is also my sister, and another letter to her mother, my brother’s wife, whom I also love and whom the law calls my sister. and I spoke with my very only sister on the telephone, and she was not, as sometimes she is not, a friend to my mind, but sister nonetheless. and we did not mention our mother, who cannot see us and who, while her sister lived, loathed her, not flesh, not blood, but by circumstance sister nonetheless. we spoke of our brothers, who in effect define me, as precocious one, as little sister, belonging. and then I was speaking to my therapist, who is smarter than any sister and has about a thousand sisters herself (I see them at the movie theatre with their children and outside the ice cream store downtown), and she set my head to right. I spoke to her about the friends who are not sisters and the friends who are sisters, here, and there when I wish they would be here, who mend me, who help make up my mind in various ways, though it is always work, it is always work with women.
Suspension of Disbelief
Reach for the rabbit and all you get is the foot,
keychained and spent of luck, oblivious of kicking
as you’ve been kicked in the groin by adulthood
and gradeschool classmates alike. Softness yields
to steel-toed workshoes of tough kids like Rick
and Tony who never learned to aim higher.
The quickest route to victory best, and you
spitting blood (probably bit your tongue) and
seeing black and so you learn the hard way.
The way that pain tells truth, needle to the lobe,
direct and vivid. Softness yields to nothing lasting,
all flummery and bosh, sleight of hand,
hose that run, colors that run, amok in the wind
that blare through the small of every night,
pillow under your head ablaze and saturated
with wakefulness and possibly vermin. You
imagine their microscopic legs scaling you,
plated bellies grazing your ears now, your
cheek, now your eyelids– you’ve heard
how fleas drive for the eyes once in every
twenty-four hours to drink from your tears.
This is salt, and you scratch it in, search
for another cooler side. And for a moment,
before it goes stale, you imagine you fit,
tucked snug inside that top hat. You can hear
the audience’s howl and hunker down
where it’s dark and safe in here, for now.
“Tell the truth.”
most provocative bumper sticker I’ve seen in awhile. maybe ever. which says something about the extent of my relativism.
black block letters on a white background on a white honda odyssey. and little itty bitty microtext in a line below that, goddamnit, I couldn’t from my seat inside my vehicle get close enough to read, even nudging practically right up against the bumper. not even any other accompanying stickers or decals of affiliation or positionality to give a girl a clue as to context. blank fuckin’ slate.
I mean, come on— whose truth, for starters? which truth? are you talking Truth, buddy, like the bible-thumping variety? or the kind-of opposite, verifiable scientific certitude? geezo, that dang thing could mean so many simultaneous contradictory things…
and even so– even if we’re just talking the everyday variety of factual accounts, what he did then what she said– tell the truth always? and all of it? don’t you think there are some cases where that’s arguably the least constructive approach to communication?
it’s just so fuckin’ bald, that imperative. so impossible. that’s what pisses me off. of course, it’s probably meant well, crafted and marketed and peeled and stuck on the fiberglass with the best of intentions. but seriously. nothing’s given me pause like that in days.
which is probably precisely its rhetorical point.
postscript:
yikes. if it’s this, well, then I guess I have my answer. I guess it makes sense that I got so pissed off without even knowing exactly why. black and white. exactly. fuckheads.
what is this?
whatever it is, it is changing. maybe indeed that is one of the few defining characteristics. also that it’s stuff I’ve written, stuff I’m writing. kind of all scrambled-up together. the stuff that collects in, say, a navel. but it used to be more coherent– used to be primarily dream-narratives– the words I wrote down in the book I keep beside the bed after I woke up, then typed-up, revised, “polished” for public consumption, somewhat. then, with the advent of the blogger tool, it changed dramatically. became more declarative, more… discursive. not to get too academicky or anything. but it fits. the words accumulating seemed– because they *were*– more directed toward an audience. from the get-go. and now what change do I have in mind? well, cross-posting, to be blunt. because it’s bugging me that my attention directed elsewhere necessarily causes this, my primary sarah site, to languish. so I’m thinking I just might gather up and re-post here stuff I’m writing elsewhere, like the topic project. not only does that let me feel like I’m at least somewhat actively keeping a hand in here, but it also begins to concoct a kind of collection of diverse bits of writing, if only for my own consultation. so as not to have to hunt and sift later. or that’s the rationalization. anyway. so there.
antiques
So sure, of course, there’s the antique clock guy with the Civil War replica cannon out in front of his two bedroom ranch with the drawn curtains and the little narrow walkways between piles of old newspapers—newspapers on the floor and on the couch, newspapers all over the kitchen table and counters, piles of newspaper stacked up in the sink. But the truth is I’ve never found a successful way to write about that guy. About finding his terse little ad in the classifieds, “Clocks repaired,†and calling the number listed, penciling down the painstaking directions by phone—“You’ll know it when you see the cannon out frontâ€â€”knocking on that water-damaged, laminate-peeling front door and standing out in the August heat and cicada-buzz, while the uncertain seconds ticked, my old schoolhouse clock balanced against my hip. That place was back out behind the dead mall, the ghost mall with the synthesized music playing to no one and a saturating air of failure all but discouraging every last shopper from venturing too far inside—back on those little windy, forgotten streets off the old highway, streets all named for trees that don’t grow around here anymore: Sycamore, Hickory, Slippery Elm—streets lined with identical ranches, postwar era slap-em-up sheds for the working man, Sears aluminum siding, trompe l’oeuil shutters, same after same modular layout, only a half-barrel full of red geraniums or an inert facsimile of armament to set one place off from another. But no. I can’t write about the clock man or leaving my clock behind and never going back for it, it spooked me so. Well, not “spooked†exactly—not like he seemed dangerous at all—though Hollywood would cast him that way, a shut-in serial killer indulging in light cross-dressing and bondage—but this guy was gentle, and kind, I’m sure. A little acid. A little old fashioned and seeming all out of sync and maybe disgusted with the times, with the people bringing their busted quartz movements to his doorstep. All those winding keys with nothing fit left to turn. Weights unstrung and no chime following. He didn’t spook me so much as leave me with a lingering bollix, a vague, disquieting sense that the glossy facade of things was fundamentally ruptured. That newspapers leaked out. Men living in twilit rooms under low ceilings, rarely glimpsing another human being. Old clocks going unrepaired and silent, still. But I don’t know how to write about the clock man—
So instead I’ll write about ants. Ants and their hymenoptera antics—or if you’re frenchy-wannabe, their antiques. So the ants, God bless their little soulless carapaces, are slaughtering themselves upon the altar of my Britta water pitcher. I’m not quite clear on the why and wherefore, what everlastingly irresistible pleasure obtains from climbing a slick plastic tower and shimmying your tiny ant self down through crannies and charcoal filter to, lo, ultimately drown yourself in a reservoir of just exactly what you could find in any old puddle outdoors. Every day I have to dump and disassemble the entire contraption, washing in the process hordes of tiny black cadavers, and squirming live ones, down the drain. A less sadistic person might just put out chemical traps already—this routine’s been going on for a couple of weeks by this point—but I just keep hoping some simple dissuasion will serve—or for the weather to turn at last and put this first-spring frenzy of self-sacrifice to an end. The thing is, it’s not even like we’re parched—like they’ve got a really good reason to crave the water. Back in the drought days of San Francisco in the early ‘90s it made some amount of sense when the ants paraded in and couldn’t seem to slake their thirst sufficiently at the kitty cat’s water dish. I thought at first, back then, it was the food that drew them, like picnic ants in cartoons on t.v. I watched their progress and noted the route, attempted a number of dissuasive measures before settling on one that worked: finally rigged a whole trapeze apparatus out of twist-ties and a rectangle of cardboard out of the recycling. Elevation proved the key. Those few centimeters of air served conclusively to flummox the whole ant regiment—turned ‘em around to head back into the wall and out to wherever else there might be the next source of hydration. To be honest, I don’t know why I don’t just break down and buy some traps—not like I’ve never used them in the past. Not like I have some philosophical goddamn position against offing the little pests outright. I mean, I’ve squished plenty fast enough with my finger when I’ve caught lone ones scooting along the counter. And it’s not just the disinclination to bring poison, however contained, into proximity with my drinking water, either. Somehow I just feel I owe the critters—as blind purpose-driven and incomprehensible as they may be from a homo sapien vantage point—a fighting chance. At least to make a different choice, not tricked, who’s to say if the right choice particularly—just different. Seems the least I can do for my fellow planet inhabitants. Least indeed. Every time I turn that pitcher inside out under the faucet my stomach takes a sick turn at the sight of all that scrambling. Maybe it’s just plain time I kept my water in the fridge.