Told myself I’d freewrite for 45 minutes today because after being so generous the visitation has been incredibly elusive& I’m feeling a lot right now, have been all day, mostly& I need a haircut, horribly, I don’t know if my hair has looked this bad since high school& dreadlocks are cultural appropriation, maybe– I don’t want to do that I have privilege enough. & I miss my best friend (the Molly one) terribly, & I think there’s a poem about her stuck in me somewhere (God& my mom totally handed it to me, actually, but I don’t have anything except the coincidence that halfway between Ann Arbor & the Bronx stands the hotel that I’m sure was the last place we had sex before the LBD or whatever set in).
I’ve actually been relatively focused lately, but it’s weird because it turns off between 6:30 & 9 completely& I feel incapable of doing anything but sitting around & feeling slightly nostalgic with a tinge of sadness. This time last year birthed so much beauty– Devin& I started to deepen our relationship but it still had that irretrievable freshness, Molly had forgiven me, mostly, I took lots of walks in Boise& Caldwell, lots of swing sets… this year could have beauty, too, but I miss these people who I’ve let dig past my word-self, into the whatever is there that can’t represent itself in poetry or even staring contests.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately– the inadequacy of verbal communication, in general. This does not have to do with my relationship with Devin, per se– we are both verbally adept& I have faith that we present ourselves to the other in ways that are as honest as words can signify. It has to do with a moment of existential aloneness I had a few weeks ago that I refuse to recount on here for reasons I am choosing not to present. It also has to do with some of the art that has inspired me lately– Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses, Brakhage, poetry of Larry Levis& D.H. Lawrence– it’s Lawrence’s “The Snake” that gave me the idea of existential aloneness, or the class we had today on it, where I became quietly obsessed with doing a queer reading of the poem. Suzanne insists that the parts where he thinks “if I were a man, I’d kill it” are simply a red herring– the poem, at its core, is about desiring one-ness with nature& the inability to do so… she thinks Lawrence wrote it but simply didn’t get it, but I think the two readings can be combined– no, he didn’t get it, but maybe he couldn’t? I mean, I spent the whole class thinking about how the snake is a terrific phallus& the “bowels of the earth,” jeez, buttsex allegory. I feel incapable of digging into this more deeply right now, but I intend to in the future. Anyway, I need to read more D.H. Lawrence– Camille Paglia talks about him a lot in terms of sexuality, & from what I’ve read so far, I feel like I agree about his ideas about sex/the bodily bringing humans closer to nature– what is not verbal, tied up in signs.
In the wake of this, I’ve become curious about how Devin sees me. Literally. I was watching Fuses last night & I found it compelling how Schneemann filmed herself vs. how James Tenney filmed her. & the film makes the penis look beautiful, sexy, compelling, in a way that it never, ever is in porn or other films I’ve seen with penises. I want to play with cameras on my own, photograph Devin, have him photograph me.
& it’s not just seeing as another way of knowing, it’s about touch, & maybe about dissociating language, the signs we associate with ourselves. I keep being drawn back to the following section of the Larry Levis poem “Our Sister of Perfect Solitude”:
One of my pastimes then was savoring the casual emptiness of names, any name,
Even the name of that stranger I said over & over in bed until her name
Slipped itself from all moorings, & her body became like wind stirring itself,
Until, free finally of its name, it would do anything.
And the next time I called her by another name, deliberately, just to see…
And repeated the name over& over until her body belonged to no one, to neither
One of us. It came to the same thing: without a name, the body could be anyone’s,
Open to any suggestion.
This fascinates me. This time last year, Devin called me by one of my best friend’s names while we were drunk at a party (not having sex, thankfully)& I flipped shit. Now I don’t know if I’d react in the same way, or maybe I would. It would be an interesting experiment, though, if I could be made just my body, a body, though it would still be me (could it really be anybody’s?) Could I be known in a different way if momentarily I were divorced from my name, its tail of associations?
I feel like I can’t hear myself right now. I have the entire new Neko Case album playing in my head rather than my inner monologue& this makes writing messy& near impossible. I might put off doing revisions until this weekend& be sure to make time to meditate tonight because that’s what makes me hear the clearest.
Yes. I feel emptied but still ringing& unsatisfied. Sometimes this is hard. Maybe it will be easier after moving on to other things.
1 Comment
April 11, 2009 at 7:08 pm
OMG. I also was thinking Lawrence’s poem could have been read as his suppression of homoerotic desire….TOTALLY.
heck yes for Larry Levis!
And yeah, sometimes the non-verbal says the most. But who bears witness to that.
Sometimes, I just want to sit in my aloneness for days. Not even write. Sometimes, I think words and writing don’t even get to that place, if they every really could….