Dear W - I can read your blog and I'm happy about this: but I can't find a way to comment, anonymous or otherwise. You've genuinely piqued my curiosity regarding your "big change"; maybe you could drop hints like little stones? I enjoyed reading your poem, for its sparseness and precision, and its interweaving of your love relationship/illness/body. I'd like to comment in more depth but I may have to just email you.
*
(Said the Double Negative in its Creamy Chrysalis)
“There are many here among us, who feel that life is but a joke... Let us not talk falsely now; the hour is getting late” - Dylan
"Seems like only yesterday
I left my mind behind
Down in the Gypsy Café
With a friend of a friend of mine
She sat with a baby heavy on her knee
Yet spoke of life most free from slavery
With eyes that showed no trace of misery
A phrase in connection first with she I heard
That love is just a four-letter word" - Joan Baez
*
There are many ways to live. The power of positive thinking/faith, no matter how we resist its triteness, its contrariness to our fearful human natures, will always aid. I have met beautiful, poor families who refused to crumble under society's sneer—-as well as many rich people who were miserable. I prefer, and extract energy from, a clean environment even if it's shabby and small: but many people keep immaculate “spaces” and are nonetheless neurotic and cruel; it's important, as everyone says, not to judge too much on appearances, though they of course matter.
My Uncle John has never reproduced but has been a father figure to several people who needed him (when I visited the day before yesterday, the house of my father's, and, to a smaller extent, my own, youth, reeking of bachelor and bird feathers, the heat on 52, he proudly displayed a beautiful photo of him walking his long-term, man-hating celibate girlfriend's daughter down the aisle); took care of his mother in her last years (something quite beautiful and unusual happened when she, my late grandmother, the great friend of my youth, died: she left the house to all five of her children, and they unanimously signed it over to John, the only one who did not already have one. He will live there, I think, to the end of their days. When I was seven I lived there for a year with my parents, and so it is nice to be able to visit, since most of my homes were unremarkable—though even unremarkable places are remarkable, when you live in them—fleeting apartments); takes a two hour walk every day; and provides a great deal of meat and vegetables from his extensive hunting and gardening. I think it's safe to say he is fulfilled.
Good friends of my brother, the Fortiers, are, materially, practically destitute, though healthy and happy, and a joy to those who encounter them. I met the mother, Angelina, when I went to live with my brother after my gunshot wound. She was tiny and frail though six months pregnant, with no make up and homespun clothing, always in layers of skirts and scarfs and almost robes, hair always covered with a headscarf, with light brown wisps escaping: huge, breathtakingly sincere, pale blue eyes. Her two children - nine and seven at the time, I believe- each brought me a rose as I pined in the bed. Though pregnant and poor, she carried huge bags of my bedding, patched and washed it for me. They brought me little snacks and treats, and I actually spent my 21st birthday with them (their father brought me a beer, the kids brought a balloon).
The Fortiers met when she was 26 and 23 and working on a farm together. Abraham (Abraham and Angelina are their Orthodox names) had decided to go live in a monastery at the end of the summer. He believed there was no point in looking for a wife: "You could waste your whole life doing that," he said. Angelina was also considering the convent. She was very pious, from a Methodist background, and had suffered a broken engagement. The two used to discuss and argue about theology. They rather got on each other's nerves, but a sense began to grow in Abraham (probably aided by Angelina's beauty), that he was supposed to marry her. Thinking this was absurd, he prayed about it, and decided he would simply propose to her. If she said no, he would go to the monastery. So, as he put it: "It was great if she said yes, and great if she said no."
He went to visit her in the cabin where she was staying. He began with this statement: "I don't love you."
He went on to explain that she was a pious woman, that she would be a good "co-struggler, wife, and mother of his children." He asked her to marry her, and she said, without pause:
"Whither thou goest I will go
Whither thou lodgest I will lodge
Thy people shall be,
My people.
Thy God shall be my God."
Quoting from the Book of Ruth, of which apparently Leonard Cohen did in one of his songs. (Did he have children?*)
*
My mom drives me absolutely nuts sometimes, but I forget why. I'm starting to ease into my “condition.” I really hope D will become more responsible. In truth, he has everything he needs: has in the past worked full time while taking a full course load, and done fine. He's flunked out of several semesters of school by now, racked up some debt doing it, and walked off a couple jobs. This is not a death sentence. He just needs to stay positive, and avoid what one “moon sign” book called “the twin demons” of alcohol and drugs; I, for my part, need to remember, over & over, that I can only directly influence my own decisions and attitude. He has a lot going for him in terms of intelligence, extended family, and health. As my brother's gf said, “He has a lot of potential.”
Later, driving home from the beach at dusk, D got a little outspoken, with the boldness and verbal clarity that sometimes comes from the driver's seat (they let him drive both ways, which was good, though he was reluctant and insecure about it, he really is just fine, better than me probably. What happened was this. When D was six months old, his father's first born, D's 18 year old half-sister, who was gorgeous and feisty, died in a car accident. His parents have always been squashingly protective of/morose about D, through no conscious fault of their own, I'm sure. He is the only of his old-enough siblings to not drive; his 20 year old brother started driving right after he turned 16; D, by contrast, was only allowed in a car with his really-not-so-safe friend R, all through his teens. His parents really let him do nothing, to which D responded by doing less & less. I, for my part, never felt like I had the stability and affection that I needed: but now we are adults, and despite the vows I started to make in early childhood about NEVER being like my parents, I inevitably will be in fundamental ways. But it can get better, yes, of course)
My attitude has been less than positive / steady. This morning, when I woke up, I felt like a normal person for the first time since I "found out" (goodness; gracious) 9 days or so ago. I've been struggling with a real heaviness, a new level of despair—- because now I really may have done it.
Yesterday my brother, his gf, D, and I went to a branch of Popham Beach, though not one I'd ever been to. We had to walk almost two miles through the woods to get there: a healthy and illuminating excursion, though I spend most of my time bitching at D about his friend Gilmore and his cigarette smoking, and perhaps the latter is a battle I ought not to pick. My brother had stored several boxes of cherished (also: expensive, obscure, and of a deeply spiritual nature) books at the huge, rotting abode in which D lives, and D was unable to find them for a couple days and thought Gilmore may have taken them- accidentally – when moving out of there (the latter & his gf lived there for a month in October). I was distraught, because it seemed D could not not eff up a simple favor for my benevolent brother, and I knew that if Gilmore had “accidentally” taken anything connected to me, he would likely cling to those things like the final egg, and there would be no hope, because he is like that, building strange altars, and being impossible.
And life never stops, it changes: until it does, and then: who knows?
I'm trying to consider the new challenges—which I myself, willfully and almost defiantly signed up for—opportunities for greater creativity, which they are. I have no problem with frugality, with stealing snatches of time, with finding friends in dusty corners. Besides, no matter what anyone says, no one can convince me that poetry must be all of one's life, rather than an extension of one's way of seeing; Dylan said a poet was probably anyone who didn't call themselves a poet.
(My mom left me when I was ten and sometimes I have paranoid and highly inaccurate fantasies regarding people's intentions; I was sure Gilmore stole the books, for the sake of villainy, for example, and sometimes, to this day, when my mother doesn't answer the phone, I imagine intense cruel feelings going towards me, from her.)
Last night, eating late night snack with D, I said, in the way I often do—thinking out loud, trying to convince myself of something—that what God thought was more important than Castaneda's idea about reproductive diminishing luminosity, yes? D said, Oh yeah, and he also said: What the hell is luminosity, anyway? Have you ever seen this egg, which tears? I told him that having a child of your same gender drains more energy, and since I am 99 percent positive the baby is a girl, this is good: because I have more energy than D. (In some ways, but not all, of course. And what does that even mean? He did walk to Camden one night. He did walk to Richmond in a raging storm, to talk to my brother, at a time when he didn't say a word to me. “What makes you think you didn't pursue me?” I asked him, the other night, driving my brother's gf's car with him, our first time alone in a car—you should have seen how baffled we were, at the pump, and we had to ask for help—“We just have different styles,” I said. And speaking of styles, today he told me I should channel my flair into looking more “womanly,” less like a “teenage hipster.” Well, tact has never been his strong point/your criticism is my mirror/ it's not, really, cruelty, and anyway I was seeking his honest opinion regarding my eyeliner quota. So. Battle selection, a more abstract kind of frugality.
*
Bjork had a baby at 20: Can anyone accuse her of luminosity - defecits?
