Oh Daily Om, so timely, always

Unearthing Your Roots
Knowing Your History

Each of us is a piece of a larger puzzle. We are all born into the unique and complex network of individuals, settings, and circumstances that constitute our heritage. Whether or not you are aware of your ancestors, you family’s country of origin, the cultural history of your people, or the trials faced by the people responsible for bringing you into the world, these forces have had a hand in shaping your values. Knowing your family history and reflecting often upon your own personal history as it relates to your heritage empowers you to look at your life in a larger historical context and to understand that you are a vital part of an ongoing drama greater than yourself.

crazy legs

Conversations on yr bed about ancestors remind me of my grandmother dying somewhere in Northeast Philadelphia, where I have not visited her for over a year. So far, I have chosen to ignore the mythology of my initial tribe. It’s in here somewhere, in ways I can’t know because the only stories I know involve goats & greed, how to be rational & cold. I’ve done this, been this.

As much as we visited my grandparents growing up, I never felt a sense of family, only a sense of how to toughen up. It was as though I knew that blood was temporary, a stain to be cleared up.

…I do not know what my grandmother knows about me, what she thinks about me, whether she cares. Whether I care.

Honestly, when I read Grey’s poems, I think of her for an hour, move on. Do I allow this to be okay?

Never much time digging into why I am the way I am… acknowledge history, sure, but so much taping dildos & pomegranates & tubas & rabbits to my body. Sculpture to which the root is obscured. A choice.

The history that came before me is silence. Is never articulating beyond cruel or abuse so often expressed in retrospect. Always thinking we can do better

better, different. Romantic (this is a dictionary for another day…)

What am I going to let define me? What do I bring to the table? What do I actually have control over?

Why can’t I write my grandmother when so desperately right now I want to write her…

***

I’m not confused, just uncertain of articulation.

***

tiny religions of relationships. who grants me permission? Sartre. Freedom. fragments–

***

Two poems at Ducts.org

oh how things line up…

(Unprompted by my usual connection of these subjects, Laure-Anne sent me this Sartre excerpt after getting in a conversation about the ability to question being linked to happiness & freedom…)

Freedom not only requires us to bear responsibility for our life choices but also posits that change requires an act of will. To be responsible, to make a choice, is to “be the author of,” each of us thus being the author of his or her life design ….

we are free to be anything but unfree: we are condemned to freedom

J.P. Sartre

Delays, Flight (Change)

Dear Salt Lake Airport: you do not understand tofu. It should not taste this yellow, cold like leftover egg. Scrambled with potato chips. I wanted to pretend this choice was healthy, though this wait has been lubricated half-beer, half-cappuccino

Want to be in New York. Want to be in a language that accounts for all shades

of monogamy, technically not the right word choice for the unmarried…

I want to know how I feel, to have it appear to me in figures. Concrete as soybeans, concrete as a ring…

What was it that Anais Nin said about risk? That we quoted at 16 to justify our deviance?

Destruction, too, is a creative force. & circles again.

Between poems, I forget how to write them, don’t know how to put forth that particular energy, the particular need for form. Something less like vacuum guts.

Could be the title of this blog. Vacuum guts.

I am suspended in the air somewhere between Salt Lake City & New York, where everyone is learning the consequences of change. Action as opposed to inaction (which too, has consequences. Uncomfortable comfort, I’m looking at you).

Everyone else seems to easily dismantle their subjectivities & I feel hopeless, in terms of the lyric. Maybe I need a list poem. To re-envision that poem as a list.

Rarely can we predict reactions…

I need to be writing something. I thought the tofu was the ticket, but what does that say besides cultural divide. Or feeling misunderstood in everything.

Start with a story. Exquisite transgressions. The image I occupy which never fit. Never much for amputating my actions. The actions I call mine. What about the ones I disown?

How can I know what I have disowned, what I have omitted from myself? Can someone else tally– is someone else tallying… ?

Forget how to write. Claim a need for more sleep as though sleep would bring clarity.

I would say I just need more time to write but what is this flight if not time to write even if no voice is coming out, just fuzz of my eyes. Wish for interesting developments on Facebook.

Maybe tomorrow.

Almost pumpkin pancake time.

PS, I want to take a long walk in the mountains & braid Devin’s hair because he is as beautiful as ever & still doesn’t always realize it.

Besides the cats, I am the only one awake.

Still so much mystery about why I’m drawn to Boise when its slightly oppressive (oppressing?) history is so light…

something about the mountains. The communities. The river, which the people here have made sacred. Not like the Hudson.

couldn’t stay here (I don’t know this), but need to come back (perhaps to find out why?)

 

something illuminated by a projector

if I land in Salt Lake City & the mountains make me cry

& I’m not sure whether this is because I feel overjoyed to see them or because I feel oppressed by them, by what parts of my life here stood for…

…if I publish this, am I dealing with these feelings? It feels like releasing them. By putting them out into the world to an anonymous audience, it makes the ambiguity feel okay. To this writer.

…if I never tell anyone, did it really happen, or are the mountains just weighing heavier on my heart? The guise of control over this weight. Guise of control over the situations in which (I) someone may feel vulnerable, be forced to question..

& I want to encourage people to question because I think disassembly, the way I disassemble my life is the universal way to happiness?

I think I have to believe it is a way to happier

richer, that it can be a way to art, which can be a way to something mystical

which can be a container for lack-of-control, a way in & out of control, perhaps…

Again, I question why I do this. Why I blog. What do I mean by transparency? Why choose it? Out of laziness? As a way of breaking down closetedness? If I admit something, am I assuming there is already a closet there…

I avoided using the word closeted at dinner last night to avoid having to speak as a queer person. Though I clearly was, speaking as one. Did my knowledge speak for myself? The experiences which I shared, did they carry weight without categorization?

Devin said I was a hit at dinner, that what I contributed to the conversation made people think, question.

This is not a stable position. Again, I have diverted– questioning why I do this again. Is there a theoretical standpoint or is it just an impulse, an itch that needs to be scratched…

a way of being safe that is not quite….

Article in the newest issue of Bitch about the “new narrator” in fiction. Blog-inflected. The new narrator shares her transgressions– things that she does in an attempt to be loved, or to have experiences. Nothing is hidden– not necessarily tattooed across her forehead, but available. Rather than being shamed, the new narrator, is, well, unchanged– she continues to be what the article called overexposed.

The narrative for women is no longer adventure/impulse, then embarrassment/shaming, then assimilation/”happiness.” New narrators are no longer married off. Or, divorcing from unhappiness to adventure to finding strength in oneself which is often rewarded by money &/or the love of a new partner…

Does the new narrator/narrative give the character/reader who may identify with character the power to engage beyond received narratives, to be within what is really the slow, sometimes joyful, sometimes painful, often cyclical (non-linear) process of self-awareness?

What do I mean by transparency? Open to what society deems oversharing. I still choose the same way someone who shares nothing chooses.

…if I put all this out there, does it become useable? Any future employer could make a caricature of me from what I put on the web & that doesn’t discourage me…

I welcome being a caricature.

I’d rather be honest with my feelings than nice in the long run (but that of course means that I have to continue this slow process of getting over always feeling like I’m imposing on space as an invasion, that to think my thoughts & experiences are valuable to share in casual conversation is somehow evidence of being uncaring or self-absorbed (but who isn’t) or not aware of dynamics between people, the delicate balance it takes to make something new, new questions, new experiences of others…

if the goal is always growth, I feel so good about Thanksgiving dinner. Not only because Devin’s mom & family & friends may have encountered new questions (how arrogant of me to assume!) but because I am laying here at 8:29 am & thinking again about what it is I get out of this…

I have new questions.

more & more I realize my paradoxical relationship to safety

what is it that I want to avoid? If someone veils me with the term arrogance, does it make me completely inaccessible? Or only if I identify with it & act with the entire history of the word…

why look at this only in terms of gain / loss? What is gained when we perceive gain? Whose rules am I following, whose happy life am I emulating? Or is this my space for building, for attempting to shatter the narrative of the happy life in which this blog will either take me to the illusion of end point or not…

I do this, this process, this ever-mutating definition of transparency because I enjoy it, because often it FEELS better than not seeing my thoughts/feelings/inklings fleshed out before me in comprehensible signs, the containers of language. The reason is more of a poem than a thesis or a standpoint. It may have something to do with control, but I’m not sure how. I’m not going to tell someone else this is the way to happiness, because happiness for another individual may be safety or something else, a whole list that I have not imagined or have & cannot or will not flesh out here.

However, even when I am confused or anxious, I love my life, the adventure of it.

However, nothing exists in a vacuum. If this blog contributes to shattering the received life “narratives,” if it prevents me from choosing something so I can be happy without examining it or thinking about what I want or what the environment I want demands, doesn’t it create that possibility for others? Can’t my poems do that, too? Is that what people have meant? Is that what it is, to be moved by art? In part, I think so.

& sometimes, I can be embarrassed by how I used to keep myself at a distance from art or life, be ashamed of tears as a sign of weakness (femininity! I was (am sometimes) so ashamed of being feminine because it meant that I was a target, someone easy to keep down so others could feel powerful…)

To feel it now. To come to a place of finding strength in vulnerability.

This, in part, what I want Adrienne Rich to have meant by freedom. In this space, I feel free to build my own life. To take risks, to put my heart on the line, to allow experience or growth or feeling to define me rather than keeping things. Than keeping the image of something always being the same & therefore always exciting (because it won’t be. The moment has passed, it was excellent to have felt it, now find something else to give you another glimpse of joy…)

Keep something, hide your heart. Keep happiness (or joy or whatever its more dynamic cousin…), consult it, co-create with it…

perhaps. I’ll work for this for now, I may change, strip these thoughts from the internet where readers don’t know me entirely– but all we can ever get of someone is a glimpse. We are those glimpses. The I as an affect of the moment.

… & you do not know how passionately I talk with my hands.

Notes for myself on a poem I won’t post

What does it mean to have permission? (The question is, who do I allow to grant me permission?)

What is the difference between permission and consent? What is held in the worlds of these words? I see it as permission is dependent on a dependent relationship. If someone is granting me permission, they hold some kind of power over my actions.

Consent implies a power relationship as well, but of a different kind…

According to the dictionary, permission is formal consent.

Still, the question I’m grappling with is “who grants me permission?” Nevertheless, this comes after a violation in the poem.

rather than as opposed to or

My breath is held so I don’t do something without permission from a sort of corporation– constructed body– without the permission of a previously held agreement, or a third person who does not appear in the poem.

***

inconvenient time to feel creative. Have to make packets for LUMINA, comment on my classmates poems…

thinking about ownership & use of the article. When we grant the person who is spoken of agency or when we make her the passive recipient of circumstances. Or when we can build a tension between the two…

or, yes, she wants, she wants many things but not violation…

***

I just want to write but I have to be responsible now & hopefully class will be open to me altering or to rather than before we discuss the poem…

expectation

VII.

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

What atonement is this all about?

–and yet, writing words like these, I’m also living.

Is all this close to the wolverines’ howled signals,

that modulated cantata of the wild?

or, when away from you I try to create you in words,

am I simply using you, like a river or a war?

And how have I used rivers, how have I used wars

to escape writing the worst thing of all–

not the crimes of others, not even our own death,

but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough

so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem

mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?

Adrienne Rich, from “Twenty-One Love Poems”

Thank you for the reminder Adrienne.

***

Last night I dreamt that my mother died & at first I reacted to it like I react to most death– calm, accepting, wondering too soon what I might be able to learn from it. Soon after, my entire body longed for her, to still be part of her. I couldn’t breathe & sat up in bed…

My poems would suggest I am still learning from my father’s life & death. My mother’s death would lead to the kind of mourning I usually write off as selfish… every death, in a way, is the death of a part of self, but if my mother were to die…

***

I am constipated with this poem & I know forcing it out isn’t doing any good, but the terrible reality is that I need one for class & I have no idea what is blocking this poem or other poems from happening this fall but I am terrified that I will stop writing, stop having poems come to me.

Fear of not writing is preventing me from writing.

***

What I might want to say: this means: I am okay with being the person you have dreamed of me being if only because it gives me the opportunity to find new ways to subvert it...

***

Reading Adrienne Rich on the bus this morning, I realized

nothing. Mere reminders of why I write, how it might be impossible

for the poem to give me freedom. To construct does not equal to control.

To reveal my desire isn’t to blow it out         to say what I want doesn’t mean

I will receive it.             Drunk at Macy’s, I told my mom I want to be a priest

sometimes, in church, the worst burning in my ribs. Since I was ten. I want

nothing of Christian history, no stake in its future but better living through poetry, better living through community, though singing together, through finding out what love actually is, whether it has room for drones killing families in Pakistan or my questioning the bounds of my relationship with Devin or how much space I can take up. Whether I’ll let myself be more than

a ghost (if I can assure everyone else is satisfied I can go without satisfaction because I never figured out what it is I like besides the satisfaction of others…)

this is changing. I try to change it.

***

Since I have stopped meditating, I act with less caution.

Each moment less controlled. Probably less considerate.

What is it to be considerate? How much to I want to consider?

***

How does caution serve me? How do I serve caution?

(Who would you be w/o yr story:: Byron Katie, I would be nothing because that’s what the my I is: the history stored in my body, the degree to which I reveal that to you, what you intuit from what I choose to tell & how I hold my arms when I tell you.)

(Would I be at peace to be nothing or be bored? I am already aware that I have so much freedom to imagine & construct. Not control. I just have to keep pushing this further to see where I can take it without inflicting deliberate harm on others…)

***

I want to tell others what I want without feeling shame for wanting it.

I want others to be able to tell me no without feeling guilty about not giving me what I want…

Ultimately, I cannot control others, cannot anticipate response…assumption…

***

I am haunted by the image of fallen orchid blossoms in the puddle of Jack Daniels on the sill above my sink.

I want to make a zine this weekend not because I have some fabulous idea but because I crave the action of cutting things out & making something new.

I hope to go see some queer experimental films.

I hope to be open to this poem.

***

Really, I want to lay in the middle of a meadow with Devin. One hour phone conversations haven’t been enough. I feel further away from him than I ever have. At the same time further away from everyone. Not unhappy, but incapable of articulating (or even seeing) what I want/need right now.

Hesitation

construct doesn’t mean control, though sometimes I wish it did, that I could choose

what my projects project, make yr I eye my I the way I build her

in poems. You see her differently than I see her & who is the I who sees

my I oh there is only winning in crafty use of we–

I – tupperware of my entire history. Little drips out.

Some one/thing/entity watches the watcher–

halfway to saying it doesn’t matter I’ll just envy those who question composition & keep on pretending I am consistent in my actions that they’re draped on this character– she makes sense…

***

Poem stuck. How, dear poem, can I create the best environment for your birth?

(patience)

***

Every poem an apology for not having control.

Wishing these almonds were M&Ms

Wishing I could climb a tree

Wishing I weren’t alone right now (look at me! look at me!)

Want to lay in a field somewhere & stare at clouds & not worry about whether they can turn into poems

Need to do something awesome / otherworldly / that I’m not afraid to write about

(is it fear or maybe it has been all along)

***

Poem, I am open to you–

Questions, maybe the legible kind.

Can we say that tolerance isn’t love? Does “tolerance” imply a stopping, an endpoint to the striving to accept? In what ways to I accept tolerance?

In what ways am I complicit with homophobia? With racism? With sexism? With classicism, with status-based oppression? What inside of me has not be overturned yet?

How to I enact my wealth? What stories have I told myself to get there? What stories haven’t I told others, about a former reverence for prestige, for wanting more or different than what I saw around me in Pottstown? What gave me the idea that I could go beyond / be different besides myself? Who pushed, who helped? Was it something I read? That I identified with?

Can I remain strong against the ease of falling into the isolation of (essentially) heterosexual monogamy? Can I go someplace and build a community, a new family structure that will keep me active in accordance with my imagination, with my worldview, in my relationship with Devin? Can I have children & a long-term partner & not reproduce what I see as oppressive forms of family? How can my worldview redecorate the history of the word, of the concept?

How can I begin to crack open & be honest with myself about my issues & complication with my body? After so many years of pretending I’m badass & fine, that sometimes I’ve been genuinely accepting? (I had a past of having no faith in the abilities of my body, of not believing that it could go/do/perform. I’ve been breaking these down recently…) How can I face that I have food issues, even though I associate these as weak/feminine? (I hate that pairing, cuz I think femininity has its own kind of strength that I haven’t entirely accepted yet.)

How can I actively challenge the homophobia of my friends’ families? When they don’t really want anyone to?

Can I change someone, really? Can I compel someone to change? Is it worth it, or is it a violence, an intrusion? What about in the context of dialogue? Am I open t0 changing, to being changed? In what ways can I change that is an opening & not a closing, a regression, a safety? When am I choosing comfort & passivity over adventure & creation? (FALSE DICHOTOMY!)

Why have I always assumed this is better, that my life means more because I’ve thought it out this way? It doesn’t mean that. It means its better for me. Maybe my artmaking, my relationships make it better for others? Why why why why why? Do I want a cookie for complication? Is the goal always to be happier, more happiness? More peace? More to share, to display, more richness? What else? Why else?

I will die someday– what is the best way to live my life & interact with others & be true to what I observe & my own inclinations that rose somewhere between “natural” & “artificial”?