to post something about what my living room looks like these days.
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Should modesty allow us
I think I've reshaped a full ripeness of self, thank the gods of spinning gyroscopes and other tryst-made visions. I'm feeling settled and *present* and energized in all the right ways. Clarity sharpening on my research project from my time with the slyly perverse phenomenologist in Houston, present in my most physical joyful self from the new connections made (at what point do new characters start to debut here? So twisty when I know they might read it), words on pages that make sense, and God!, sunshine and a marketplace that includes the strobe-lighted punk band last night (too amplified but joyfully full-throated) and a loud singalong of "I saw the light" this afternoon. The voices all twine up and twist me into them, molding me into someone I can finally really feel stepping forward.
Someone on my online forum asked the other day where "queer" fit into my list of how I describe myself. "Is it in the top 3?" These conversations pop up like annualsat Fielding, workshops on identity where we all list these long descriptors. It always amazes me when so many of my fellow students -- Americans all -- list phrases like "I am a Child of God" in their first tier. Perversely makes me want to say "I am a Sexual Being!" No one ever says things like that, the dykes all focused on marriage and families, the fags trapeze artists or secondarily claiming that identity, the straight people all earnest. I don't think I have a hierarchy -- I claimed fluidity of identity in my life list my first week at Fielding -- but I do know that being fully physically connected needs to be part of what I live into. And it feels *good* to be able to spend an afternoon in bed and feel deeply connected but not tethered.
A couple of weeks ago, I was reading Lynn Crosbie's extraordinary book Liar (a book length poem about the death of a relationship). One couplet felt like a cautionary tale:
I am peering through the slats of a truck, shank to shank
with everyone who has mistaken their life for a prelude
It feels good that I am living into Stephin Merrit's much more playful world: One kiss from me/and you'll be overjoyed and overwrought/one kiss from me/and you'll see god
Someone on my online forum asked the other day where "queer" fit into my list of how I describe myself. "Is it in the top 3?" These conversations pop up like annualsat Fielding, workshops on identity where we all list these long descriptors. It always amazes me when so many of my fellow students -- Americans all -- list phrases like "I am a Child of God" in their first tier. Perversely makes me want to say "I am a Sexual Being!" No one ever says things like that, the dykes all focused on marriage and families, the fags trapeze artists or secondarily claiming that identity, the straight people all earnest. I don't think I have a hierarchy -- I claimed fluidity of identity in my life list my first week at Fielding -- but I do know that being fully physically connected needs to be part of what I live into. And it feels *good* to be able to spend an afternoon in bed and feel deeply connected but not tethered.
A couple of weeks ago, I was reading Lynn Crosbie's extraordinary book Liar (a book length poem about the death of a relationship). One couplet felt like a cautionary tale:
I am peering through the slats of a truck, shank to shank
with everyone who has mistaken their life for a prelude
It feels good that I am living into Stephin Merrit's much more playful world: One kiss from me/and you'll be overjoyed and overwrought/one kiss from me/and you'll see god
Saturday, April 29, 2006
Like the wind needs the trees
I’ve been reading Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters, the astonishing series of poems he wrote about Sylvia Plath… to her? To commemorate her? To make meaning of his life story as it intertwined with hers? All of those?
I am struck by one line: "your worship needed a god." Hughes captures here something I’ve been buffeted by through the end times of my life story co-written with B – we only are what we are as we are seen to be that by someone else -- what we make in relationship. (Stephin Merrit got it so well: “you need me/like the wind needs the trees/to blow in/like the moon needs poetry/you need me”). This is a deep and profound truth to me, and the essential focus of my academic work on relational identity. B reviles it, seeing in it an erasing, an obliteration of an essential her. Our subversive loop.
Yesterday, in a writing workshop, my lumpen stuttering paragraph about this core idea was critiqued in front of 20 or so colleagues. I realized with simultaneous placidity and sharp recognition that I do what Judy pointed out, wind my core ideas round with tangles of cord like the abrasive string I use to tie newspapers for recycling, the kind that breaks if you pull it too hard the wrong way and leaves rope burns in your palms. I rewrite. We make and remake ourselves and each other in our relationships. We make and remake each other most profoundly in our intimate relationships.
In the airport today, I realize that this is the first trip since B and I broke up where I haven’t been dragging a metallic, unbearable yearning for my home and life lost along with my always-too-full suitcase, the bulging swiss army bag she called my Red Buddy. I’ve flown seven times, taken the train and driven the 401 multiple other times on my own since last April, and this is the first time I haven't, in the silent liminal space, found tears.
Walking across the (vast, of course) parking lot on a truncated quest for tamales last night, I realized there was no one I needed to find a little trinket for (replaying the ritualized "I was thinking of you" that marked my grandparents' return from every trip, the floppy cloth sunhats with little wicker dolls on them from some sun spot, the grey T-shirt from Raffles in Singapore that conjured up Sahib Grandpa as post-colonial industrialist and which made me sweat in a nasty manner). No one to coordinate with about airport pickups, with the inevitable miscommunication or delay on either side. This was something I just noted, with no yearning. That there are people who are glad to see me home, with whom I sing forward into connections -- and, there's no One Person in the World whose home is incomplete without me. I can be remade in multiple smaller spaces... and today, tomorrow, this is just fine.
I am struck by one line: "your worship needed a god." Hughes captures here something I’ve been buffeted by through the end times of my life story co-written with B – we only are what we are as we are seen to be that by someone else -- what we make in relationship. (Stephin Merrit got it so well: “you need me/like the wind needs the trees/to blow in/like the moon needs poetry/you need me”). This is a deep and profound truth to me, and the essential focus of my academic work on relational identity. B reviles it, seeing in it an erasing, an obliteration of an essential her. Our subversive loop.
Yesterday, in a writing workshop, my lumpen stuttering paragraph about this core idea was critiqued in front of 20 or so colleagues. I realized with simultaneous placidity and sharp recognition that I do what Judy pointed out, wind my core ideas round with tangles of cord like the abrasive string I use to tie newspapers for recycling, the kind that breaks if you pull it too hard the wrong way and leaves rope burns in your palms. I rewrite. We make and remake ourselves and each other in our relationships. We make and remake each other most profoundly in our intimate relationships.
In the airport today, I realize that this is the first trip since B and I broke up where I haven’t been dragging a metallic, unbearable yearning for my home and life lost along with my always-too-full suitcase, the bulging swiss army bag she called my Red Buddy. I’ve flown seven times, taken the train and driven the 401 multiple other times on my own since last April, and this is the first time I haven't, in the silent liminal space, found tears.
Walking across the (vast, of course) parking lot on a truncated quest for tamales last night, I realized there was no one I needed to find a little trinket for (replaying the ritualized "I was thinking of you" that marked my grandparents' return from every trip, the floppy cloth sunhats with little wicker dolls on them from some sun spot, the grey T-shirt from Raffles in Singapore that conjured up Sahib Grandpa as post-colonial industrialist and which made me sweat in a nasty manner). No one to coordinate with about airport pickups, with the inevitable miscommunication or delay on either side. This was something I just noted, with no yearning. That there are people who are glad to see me home, with whom I sing forward into connections -- and, there's no One Person in the World whose home is incomplete without me. I can be remade in multiple smaller spaces... and today, tomorrow, this is just fine.
Friday, April 28, 2006
Death and Life of American Cities
Jane Jacobs died this week. I read this in the USA Today that was delivered to my Houston hotel room. An interesting counterpoint, since what I've seen of this city embodies everything she reviled. The place is an inhuman scale -- vast distances across heat-shimmered parking lots to get a coffee, sidewalks for "decoration" that go nowhere, zebra stripes under enormous chrome arches across the street that seem to render pedestrians invisible. An enormous mall that the locals are very proud of -- The Galeria! -- that sells kate spade bags and $800 manolo blahniks but no advil or sunblock. I ask someone to help me ("I'm Canadian and don't know these brands -- which of these stores is a drugstore?") -- and hear "oh, you won't find something like that in this fancy mall."
I went for a 40 minute run my first day here and literally encountered only these people on the street: a mexican nanny with a plush white baby; mexican men trying to jump start a decrepit truck; one white guy training for a cycling race; one older white man exercise walking; sherrifs directing traffic. The place is shiny and hard-surfaced, and people are affable and friendly, and it just gives me the willies.
It's been a good school week, though. Very rich conversations about my dissertation project, and I'm starting to hone in on what I need to do. It's bizarre to me how the container for these conversations is always these portals into unexamined US society -- gated communities, affluent neighbourhoods that are completely dependent on illegal immigrant labour, class and race polarization. I caused a fight on my online forum after the quasi-anxiety attack I felt in that Galeria by pouncing on a Texan's smug "I love my SUV" comment. I start to understand eco-psychology when I spend time in these places -- the notion that we are so distanced from our embodied sense of self/connection to the earth that we don't know how to make systemic or thoughtful decisions. I feel like I'm struggling to figure out how to make that framework more articulable -- and it's unbelievably alien in this environment.
I went for a 40 minute run my first day here and literally encountered only these people on the street: a mexican nanny with a plush white baby; mexican men trying to jump start a decrepit truck; one white guy training for a cycling race; one older white man exercise walking; sherrifs directing traffic. The place is shiny and hard-surfaced, and people are affable and friendly, and it just gives me the willies.
It's been a good school week, though. Very rich conversations about my dissertation project, and I'm starting to hone in on what I need to do. It's bizarre to me how the container for these conversations is always these portals into unexamined US society -- gated communities, affluent neighbourhoods that are completely dependent on illegal immigrant labour, class and race polarization. I caused a fight on my online forum after the quasi-anxiety attack I felt in that Galeria by pouncing on a Texan's smug "I love my SUV" comment. I start to understand eco-psychology when I spend time in these places -- the notion that we are so distanced from our embodied sense of self/connection to the earth that we don't know how to make systemic or thoughtful decisions. I feel like I'm struggling to figure out how to make that framework more articulable -- and it's unbelievably alien in this environment.
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Freecycled fragments
As I look for my own new narratives, I have a steady stream of novels-in-one-sentence pouring into my in-box through freecycle.
A story of spiritual quest and abandonment:
OFFER: Bible Study Materials
These must go as one lot. Will wait 24 hours before gifting. Please do not respond if you don't intend to pick up or at least contact me if plans change. Thank you. CDs: Putting up With Each Other; Self-Guided Bible Study; How the World Will End According to the Bible. Books: Jesus The One And Only; Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; Eve and Rehab; Divine Plan of the Ages
A tale of attempted transformation and hard-fought retreat:
I have one box of Nicoderm Transdermal stop smoking patches for Stage 3. The package is unopened, but the box has been kinda beat up. Pickup only near Bay & Wellesley.
A yearning for vicarious talent:
WANTED: I would like my sister to learn the flute and she can't afford one... would love to give her a flute for her birthday, if you have one you are not using -- would consider it also as a loan for her to try out and would return if you like. Thanks!!
Threads of connection, possibility, new lamps for old.
A story of spiritual quest and abandonment:
OFFER: Bible Study Materials
These must go as one lot. Will wait 24 hours before gifting. Please do not respond if you don't intend to pick up or at least contact me if plans change. Thank you. CDs: Putting up With Each Other; Self-Guided Bible Study; How the World Will End According to the Bible. Books: Jesus The One And Only; Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; Eve and Rehab; Divine Plan of the Ages
A tale of attempted transformation and hard-fought retreat:
I have one box of Nicoderm Transdermal stop smoking patches for Stage 3. The package is unopened, but the box has been kinda beat up. Pickup only near Bay & Wellesley.
A yearning for vicarious talent:
WANTED: I would like my sister to learn the flute and she can't afford one... would love to give her a flute for her birthday, if you have one you are not using -- would consider it also as a loan for her to try out and would return if you like. Thanks!!
Threads of connection, possibility, new lamps for old.
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