Interiors

"#179 When I imagine a celibate man-especially one who doesn't even jerk off- I wonder how he related to his dick: what else he does with it, how he handles it, how he regards it. At first glance, this same question for a woman might appear "tucked away" (pussy-as-absence, pussy-as-lack: out of sight, out of mind). But I am inclined to think that anyone who thinks or talks this way has simply never felt the pulsing of a pussy in serious need of fucking- a pulsing that communicates nothing less than the suckings and ejaculations of the heart."

Be careful carrying these books around with you. They’re small, and perfect for casually reading, a few minutes at a time, when you find yourself commuting on the subway or waiting for someone to bring you food in a small cafe. Perfectly sized for your handbag, or to carry to work, and spaced out evenly so that you can pick them up, put them down, and even read out of sequence throughout the course of your day. The caveat though: you might end up crying in public. It’s an odd sight, at 3am, on the L train heading home after work to see someone crying holding a book of poetry. It even makes the drunk young people uneasy. Especially alarming to the people sitting next to you in a cafe, watching big, heavy, mom-sized tears rolling down your face. 
Bluets by Maggie Nelson is a perfect read for anyone who’s ever had their heart broken. Or has had to break someone else’s heart, or has been in love with the world too sharply, or fallen out of love with it, or even been in love with a word, as something as simple as a color. Her meditation on Blue is a compelling exercise with theme: each bluet is numbered, and while one might mention flowers, the next will pull the thread, maybe it will be about the painter who talked about the flowers. So there is extreme precision of flow, of each short prose block (or poem) leading into the next. As a whole, it should still be considered a book of poetry, but alone, each bluet could be a poem or a short essay. There are things I always think of as being blue, but Nelson also brings up all these other blues, like the underside of her friends foot after an accident. 

"#198. In a 1994 interview, about twenty years after he wrote, “Famous Blue Raincoat,” Cohen admitted that he could no longer remember the specifics of the love triangle that the song describes. “I always felt that there was an invisible male seducing the woman I was with, now whether that one was incarnate or merely imaginary I don’t remember.” I find this forgetting quite heartening, and quite tragic, in turns"
 
So many people are represented in the book, from Cohen to Thoreau, and not just Americans but also French painters and Greek philosophers. An incredible amount of research must have gone into Bluets, and yet the book reads as simply, and is as digestible, as a perfect, light blue macaroon. 
Perhaps a more traditional book of poetry, but still following a much longer narrative than it might appear for such a small book, is Kimiko Hahn’s The Narrow Road to the Interior. In Bluets there’s a loose narrative of a heartbreak, of a severed relationship, but the narrative in Hahn’s book is her as a mother, and even her as an adult woman balancing divorce and lovers, how that still reflected on her motherhood. Most of the poems are incredibly simple, “I’ve decided to climb the rocks beyond the stand of pine to find the insect that clicks like an old-fashioned toy.” Highly steeped in nature, most of the things written in this book are thoughts she’s had while outside or while apart from her daughters. This is a form of Japanese poetry called Tanka, single lines and the use of seasons and nature. Most of the writing seems to be reflections of Basho, Kawabata Yusunari, and Shikibu. Writers I’m not familiar with, but understand to be tied in very closely with the author's identity as a writer. It’s a beautiful collection of poems and often left me in tears late at night, too late to call my mom. 

"This afternoon H heard something in my voice and asked me, What’s wrong? Anything wrong? And I said, I miss my mother. But I think I’ve always missed my mother. Sometimes I just lie down on the floor and cry, Mommy Mommy."

As a woman with a close relationship with my mother, and as someone who doesn’t know if they will be able to have children (timing, not biology) the book resonated with me. It’s an amazing portrait of a complete woman, with her desires, her annoyances, shortcomings and loves. And just as all these things are complicated, different, incongruent, so is the style of the book. Poetry, journal entries, private and public thoughts, and prose, all complete the final picture. 

Dragging Anchor

When a sailboat drags anchor you wake up in your berth you wake up with the wood around you but you know something isn’t right you’re still in your berth but it’s like when you sleep with someone for many nights and when they turn you turn with them and when they breathe you breathe with them when they get up in the night to pee you feel that they’re missing and you know something isn’t right

so you wake up in your berth and you feel the wood around you and the smell of canvas which isn’t just salt air or age or sunlight it’s sails that carry those things but also time

you know the smell it’s the smell that all your father’s sweaters had and all the beach towels laid out for you in the summer it’s the smell of years on the boat but also something else

you’re in your berth and there’s the wood and the canvas but also the sense of time passing, too quickly, maybe you see the stars moving too but mostly you just feel it, so you get up and leave everyone else asleep you go outside and even in the middle of the summer there will always be that first chill of you alone, above deck, with the rest of the world sleeping and you see that the bow has turned around the wrong way starboard so you pull up the chain and it’s so easy, so light in your hands, and you pull it in and feel the boat really pull with the current now, it could just float so easily out to sea but you look forward and throw really throw the anchor out the other way left to the channel and wait for the anchor to catch and it does- the boat makes a small tug and you’re awake and everyone is still sleeping so why not slip

into the water with the chain, hold onto it and let your body also float along with the current, held against the steady weight of the anchor and see all the little creatures around you light up like magic, your mom taught you the word, phosphorescence 

your first moment that you can remember that was completely yours and years later

your mom is remarried and you aren’t in a ship but in a small house on another river and you want to go into the town to buy pickles so you ask your mom if you can drive and you’re driving and you ask about the journals, the years you all spent sailing, and why her voice isn’t there and why you can’t read them, and it’s not the first time you asked and she says

I burned them 

it terrifies you and you’re afraid to ask and you think about nights you spent awake at night alone, other nights where you’re sure someone should have been awake and who knows

what really happened

but your mom got remarried and you like him and you can all have dinner together in that little house on the river and at night you go to bed and you hear the wind howl and it’s a sound you almost remember and early in the morning she calls your name and you answer, that’s a sound
familiar like the wind, pushing against wood, against canvas, pushing the body of a boat out to sea. 

The wind on the river is different, fierce and Northern and it carries with it the smells of evergreen trees and the haunting mating calls of Loons, their red eyes glowing on the river which you can see from your small window in the house, so like a ship

and you wake up in the middle of the night to its sounds and walk downstairs and the rest of the house is sleeping and still and you know that’s it’s impossible for a whole house to drag anchor. 

A Truer New Year

"Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, and perhaps even depends on it. I mean that mirage of dominion over our own life that allows us to feel like adults, for we associate maturity with autonomy, the sovereign right to determine what is going to happen to us next. Disillusion comes sooner or later, but it always comes, it doesn't miss an appointment, it never has. When it arrives we receive it without too much surprise, for no one who lives long enough can be surprised to find their biography has been molded by distant events, by other people's wills, with little or no participation from our own decisions. Those long processes that end up running into our life- sometimes to give it the shove it needed, sometimes to blow to smithereens our most splendid plans- tend to be hidden like subterranean currents, like tiny shifts of tectonic plates, and when the earthquake finally comes we invoke the words we've learned to calm ourselves, accident, fluke, and sometimes fate. Right now now there is a chain of circumstances of guilty mistakes or lucky decisions, whose consequences await me around the corner; and even though I know it, although I have the uncomfortable certainty that those things are happening and will affect me, there is no way I can anticipate them. Struggling against their effects is all I can do: repair the damages  take best advantage of the benefits  We know it, we know it very well; nevertheless, it's always somewhat dreadful when someone reveals to us the chain that has turned us into what we are, it's always disconcerting to discover, when it's another person who brings us the revelation, the slight or complete lack of control we have our own experience."

               Growing up, I realized not too long ago, involves doing a lot of the things you'd swore you'd never do when you were younger. I'm far more like likely to say, "I'll never do that again," than swear off something initially. Some of these things are fun, wild, irresponsible parts of being alive, like traveling to another country where you don't speak the language, swimming at night in the ocean, going on a blind date, etc...but more often than not they're more harrowing experiences, the kind where you actually learn the depth and dimension of consequences that stick with you for a long time. Like the decision you make early on in the evening when you realize you're about to have sex with someone other than the person you're dating, and it just sort of washes over and you and you think, this is going to be fine, this might still work out, and then later in every subsequent relationship knowing it's not other people you have to be watchful of, but yourself. Or losing touch with a best friend, and knowing there's been too much time to ever repair the distance between you, in years of miles, and remembering in all your other friendships after the importance of a letter, a late night phone call, a simple text touching base. 

             Sometimes there's also the reversal of things I've sworn off of, you know when you say you'll never talk to so-and-so again but then you slowly forget why you were so mad and you become close again and the cycle repeats itself weeks or months or years later. I'm bad at holding grudges. Which I think is mostly a good thing. It feels good to forgive someone. It's easier to forget slights and perceived insults than to let them simmer in the back of your head somewhere. And yet...

              Around this time about two years ago my dad wrote me a letter, outlining not only the ways I've fucked up as an individual but also with the weighty end note saying that he would rather not have a daughter than have me as his. We were very close when I was younger, but after my parents divorce and then my very hard-headed adolescence we went through years of spotty communication, to put it lightly. Every time we got in an argument I'd say, ok, that's it, I'm done, and then a year later I'd end up talking to him until we would have another, eventual blow out. The letter he sent me sent me on sort of an emotional tailspin, as you might imagine, and all our communication ceased. I was on tour maybe 8 or 9 months later with my band Rose Cross, and my step-mom called to tell me my dad was in the hospital, and had just had a heart attack. I didn't tell any of my band mates, until we were in Pensacola. 

              We were partying after the show, in a steep two story apartment that two really nice kids invited us home to. I can't remember their names for the life of me, but I remember being so cold that I kept waking up in the middle of the night to try and get their dogs to lie on the bed with me, and ended up sleeping under orphaned jackets and backpacks. Lying awake, so troubled by the cold (I remember it was a very cold winter because our Atlanta show was canceled because of an ice storm and all the roads in and out were shut down), I turned to my drummer and just said, "there's something I sort of need to do in the morning." We had been up doing drugs or drinking, or both, it does't matter, but Jon and I woke up and drove our dodge conversion van to the hospital there. I have no idea what he did while I was in the hospital, but it meant a lot to me that he woke up early and took me there, and then didn't tell anyone else in the band later when they asked where we went ("oh, just out for coffee"). No one in the hospital said anything to me, I remember thinking how wild it was that no one stopped me, and I wandered through blindingly white corridors until I found where he was suppose to be, connected to tubes and bandaged and gowned (he had ended up having some sort of open heart surgery, but it was only vaguely explained to me, in passing, months later). And my dad, Parker, who I really did like so much for so many years of my life, just laughed and said, "fancy seeing you here!" So that was that. We never talked about the letter. We exchanged some weird hugs, and then we resumed our normal, strained communication. 

              Recently we got into another fight, and we aren't speaking again. He insisted that I was a loser, and wasting my life, or ruining it, something to that effect. Coincided so perfectly with fall, when I'm already filled with a sort of shadowy, intangible nostalgia, like the creeping deep shadows that get colder and fuller, when there's something about the chill in the air and the smell of fires that makes me sad. I start thinking of all the ways I have fucked up. All those letters unsent. Rejection letters from the few graduate schools I actually wanted to go to. People younger than me moving on with their lives and having different adventures and experiences when sometimes I feel like I'm stuck on the same page, living the same story as four years ago. I think I know enough now not to say I'll never talk to him again, but I think I at least know better than to mail him the letter I wrote in response. I'll just tuck it away for now. I wrote him a letter explaining all the ways I'm not, in fact, taking anything for granted in my life and how even though I might not be any sort of a professional anything, there's at least a lot of things I enjoy doing and am lucky enough to have a good group of people around me who care about me...but why bother explaining anything to him? My biggest fear as a kid, and the one thing I can safely say I have sworn to never do, is that I'll never be like him. Still, the dialogue in my head, where I'm telling him everything I've done so far in my life and everything I still have a chance to do, and how lucky I am and who-the-fuck-wants-to-be-a-lawyer-anyway, all that? It's pretty good motivation. 

"They're all useless questions. There is no more disastrous mania, no more dangerous whim, than the speculation over roads not taken."*

             

             Maybe this is just a season for regret. My mom sent me an envelope full of essays I wrote as a kid about what I wanted to be when I grew up. Always an artist. Always a published writer, from a very young age. Reading those sloppily written essays, on faded, grey elementary school paper, touched a nerve in me for sure. I imagined schools I never went to, places I never moved to, opportunities put off or missed completely. Then, the weather gets beautiful all of a sudden. I read a few good books, went out walking, took a bubble bath, cooked dinner with my boyfriend, and everything once again seems alright. Fall once again presents itself, like a truer new year, full of possibilities and things to be learned. 

*The Sound of Things Falling, Juan Gabriel Vasquez