The title of this post sounds too depressed for how I'm feeling. For the first time in months I feel, as the buddhist would say, "sane." Being in contact with him has been a shock, it threw me outside of time for a few days, in the nonspace of trauma relived. We continue to be nice to one another, but that deflated balloon feeling still predominates. The crisis for me came Tuesday night, when I was finally washing the serving dishes from Kevin's birthday party. Kevin was sitting at the computer, in our back porch office that's connected to the kitchen, I was a few feet away from him, enjoying the warm "natural/non-toxic/biodegradable" soap suds, when all of a sudden I had a full-blown panic attack, something I've not experienced in ages—racing heart, dizziness, feeling faint—and I realized whatever was going on with me and the buddhist, it wasn't rational, that rationality was of little use in my coming to terms with him. The attack only lasted a few minutes. I said to Kevin, "Mind if I put on some soothing music?" I clicked on one of the shakahachi albums I have loaded into iTunes, and continued with the dishes.
After that, my emotional reactions to the buddhist diminished significantly. I've also been doing visualizations that Tiffany, my psychic, taught me, to release unwanted energy. Tiffany is wonderful. See a rather frail, birdlike woman, throwing open her arms and exclaiming in a New Zealand accent, "Who gives a fuck what people think of you!" I haven't done visualizations in years, but I'm floored by how effective my recent use of them has been. This combined with my hyper-rational therapist works well for me right now.
The buddhist is depressed and tired, so this is what we've been emailing about, which made me realize that when things were most stimulating between us, those early days of effervescent newness, much of what we talked about was his depression. He calls it melancholia. I've been depressed; depression is terrible, but after a while, how sexy is that? My therapist says he's seen, over and over, the pattern of a depressed guy pulling someone in there with him, and once that person is hooked, he withdraws. My therapist has worked with both the depressed guy half of the equation, as well as the person drawn in. My therapist says the buddhist is emotionally abusive, and that, based on the battered women he's worked with, it's very difficult to leave an abuser. My therapist says that having a meditation practice, no matter how serious, doesn't guarantee it will have any impact on a personality structure. He told me about a friend who's practiced buddhism for 40 years, goes on all sorts of retreats, and when he returns from a retreat he's still as fucked up as ever. Though my therapist himself has benefited from his own Zen practice—he's less depressed, can focus better, and feels more compassion towards others. These days for me, the urge to meditate is like a physical craving. Afterwards I feel more centered. That's all I want from it. My therapist says its about clearing out the "noise."
I guess what I'm feeling about the buddhist—and I use the words "I guess" on purpose, because all opinions these days feel tentative and fluid—is that I'm fine that the balloon has deflated. To extend the metaphor in ways I would tell writing students to delete, there are plenty more balloons in the world. I'm going to a New Years party on Friday night, I'm going on a road trip next week, I want to pleasure fully in that. The buddhist and his depression feels like the opposite (EXTENDED METAPHOR WARNING!) of a shiny bouncy balloon—more like a weight around my neck. I don't think I care about him anymore, and, more importantly, I don't care if he cares about me. I wrote to him, "Seeing that we're each not monsters feels like a great step forward, and perhaps enough for now, as far as figuring things out?"
I've been patiently and tediously copying buddhist blog posts, pasting them into a Word file, and reformatting them. Then the editing of the book begins. There are so many choices to make, like exactly which posts do I include, what images (something that needs to be discussed with Colter and Wayne Smith, the book's designer), what do I do with reader comments, and the larger general issue of how much should I rewrite/edit. I guess that strategy will arise as I touch the words, and they touch me back. Unedited, the manuscript is 33,625 words, 53,674 characters (without spaces), 187,996 characters (with spaces). Kevin said the other day, that I may want to cut the manuscript way down, and I wanted to say to him, leave me alone. But, as always, I'll ask him read it, and he'll say lots of things about it I won't want to hear, and I'll argue, and in the end will take almost every one of his suggestions.
The buddhist and I have been emailing since the solstice, which is inhibiting. It doesn't feel right to write about him while we're in touch. He's given me his blessing, as far as the book goes, sight unseen—something I don't understand, but I'm not going to argue with it. Things between us are tentative. I don't know if we'll ever speak on the phone. I finally agreed, and then he backed off. We're being nice to one another, but our interactions feel a bit like a deflated balloon left over from a glittery party. Is this better than abject longing?
"Happy Kevin's Day!" That's what I heard people saying to one another last night, at Kevin's Christmas Eve birthday party. We do this every year, but this year I actually had a good time. The roll of hostess can be nerve-racking and exhausting, but last night I decided to go with bohemian chill, so when early comers arrived and I hadn't finished dressing, I chat-shouted with them through the bedroom door. Then I sat at my makeup mirror (located on a bookshelf across from my computer, so I can just swivel around in the same chair I'm sitting on as I type this) and smeared on eyeshadow and mascara, directing them as they toiled away on the unfinished vegetable platter. I declared I was having an interactive party, not one of those boring parties that are ready when the guests arrive, and then people stand around with nothing to do. Joseph Lease and Donna de la Perriere deserve gold stars for their generous assistance.
But what made the biggest difference for me this year was our party favors, necklaces made out of cherry tomato sized Christmas ornaments, hung on black cotton/tencel yarn. Here's some revelers wearing their necklaces, leftover ornaments in the foreground:
Glen Helfand, Margaret Tedesco, Neil LeDoux
I put a necklace around the neck of each of our 38 guests. This was surprisingly intimate, each person chose their ornament, I'd thread it onto a length of yarn, reach around their neck and hang the necklace, check its length, then my hands would flutter against their back as I tied the yarn into a bow. When I finished, I would pat them lightly on the shoulder. It was this mother-child tenderness. I could tell people liked the attention, liked being passive, acted upon, liked being touched. I thought of body workers, the insights into human need they must have. Towards the end of the party, as I sat on the couch laughing with a roomful of amazing, creative people, the buddhist came to mind, and I thought I don't need him. (Photo by Karla Milosevich.)
Towards the end of The Double Mirror, when Stephen Butterfield drops out of his Tibetan Buddhist sect, he finds Buddhist truths everywhere—in other religions, philosophy, and in the "great" writers of the Western poetry canon. Butterfield argues against the aesthetic of spontaneity in American Buddhist poetry, in favor of carefully wrought verse:
"Letting go of thoughts is an excellent technique for encouraging the raw material of a poem to emerge; but to turn raw material into a masterpiece worth memorizing, as Yeats, Milton, Shakespeare, Donne, Pope, Keats, and Byron well knew, requires months and years of sustained effort and discriminating judgement."
"Great" art, for Butterfield, is created with a commitment and rigor similar to the tantric practices. I think back to an earlier blog post when my friend Rainer called me on my differentiating between "real" writing and blog writing. I realize now the difference isn't about value—one form isn't more valuable than the other—the difference is about labor and intensity. I do a certain amount of fudging and editing for the blog, but with "real" writing I sit with it for hours—or days if necessary—until the writing opens to me, until the world itself opens to magic and synchronicity. The blog is about dailiness, catching bits of whatever's passing through my life. All writing for me is a pouring of myself onto the page, both an emptying of self and a removed observation of self. It's not necessarily about emotions I'm currently having—like method acting, I invoke emotions, some so painful I feel like I'm being flailed, then I step back like some Nazi scientist and chronicle it all. Studying and rearranging the words, sitting and waiting in a sort of calm manic state, for the perfect combination of words to appear to me. Many writers have spoken of how if you stick with it, you enter a gloriously crazed state where you tap into bolts of energy and inspiration you can barely imagine in ordinary life.
Even though I took issue with his fetishizing of the Western literary canon and his belief that the point of art is to evoke beauty, the more I read The Double Mirror, the more enamored of Butterfield I became. Writing is so much about love—we fall in love with the authors of our favorite books—even if, as the case with Butterfield, they're dead. I fall in love with anybody I write about—even if he's a gay nudist with 24-hour surveillance cameras trained on himself, even if they're two Iranian teens publically hanged for being gay. I fell in love writing to the buddhist. I continue to love the buddhist, writing about him. In honor of the solstice I emailed him a love letter of sorts. I said I was sorry I hurt him. He didn't answer. And then he did.
Winter solstice—it's time to wind up the buddhist vein, to pack up my bags and move on. There is a point to the path of excess—do something until you can't stand it anymore and then you can truly transcend it—I can't stand writing anymore about the buddhist, yet I want some kind of pull-it all-together ending, but what can I conclude other than this whole process has led me over and over to the conclusion that in the psyche nothing ever concludes. I'll never figure out how and why this person came into my life, who he was, how he vanished, what was my role in any of it. Am I better or worse off for knowing him? Has he changed me at all? There is no one way to look at the buddhist—when I try to touch him, he dissolves and reshapes just beyond reach. With him I simultaneously experienced profound alienation and profound tenderness. Maddeningly, I bounced back and forth between desire and anxiety. In the end the anxiety won out.
The past couple of weeks I voraciously read Stephen Butterfield's The Double Mirror: A Skeptical Journey into Buddhist Tantra. The buddhist told me he practiced tantric Buddhism, but he would never tell me what that was. Butterfield went through advanced tantric training then dropped out. The Double Mirror is odd in the cult survivor genre, in that Butterfield is an intelligent, sensitive writer, and he never turns his back on the teachings—just robotic adherence to cult doctrine. His book is a precise account of a person going through rigid spiritual training while grappling with doubt. Doubt is the monster in the closet in all closed systems, a dirty little secret that the group member needs to hide in order to be allowed access to arcane teachings, and in order to not be humiliated. Butterfield ultimately decides doubt is vital to keep teachings alive and meaningful. I recognized so much of the buddhist in the pages of Butterfield's book, down to his body language, his knowing smiling and laughter at my foibles. Butterfield discusses elitism in his sect, its rigid system of hierarchy, the usual sexual and substance abuse scandals, the promiscuity encouraged in the early days (promiscuity serves the same purpose as enforced celibacy, to break up couple bonding), spiritual one-up-manship, and the difficulties he had developing intimate connections within the group. When Butterfield explicated Buddhist ideals of relationships, I realized I was a really bad Buddhist girlfriend, but I wouldn't want to be a good one. Through Butterfield's deft explanations of Buddhist principles and the sociology of (Americanized) Tibetan Buddhism I could understand the buddhist's vocabulary and where his criticisms of me sprung from. I also understood his compliments, like how when I'd say something he approved of, he'd call it "sane."
At first it was a traumatic read for me, but eventually I got into Butterfield and his book in their own right. The Double Mirror is a wonderful example of weaving personal experience, critique, and reportage. He's generous with details of his own life, his insecurities and fuck ups, his lung disease that makes the physical demands of tantra all the more excruciating. It's through a highly personal lens that he explains Buddhist principles and the complex Tibetan panoply of gods and spirits; he does so with a clarity that I found very helpful. I hate explaining things, even describing this book is agonizing, I always long to jump headfirst into the messy nuances, but part of writing is committing to the scaffolding. The book shines when Butterfield describes the series of rigorous tasks he undertakes for his advanced training, beginning with 108,000 prostrations, which takes him three and a half years to complete:
You fold your hands in anjali, touch them to forehead, lips, and heart while repeating, "I take refuge in the guru, I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the dharma, I take refuge in the sangha," and prostrate full length on a mat or board, with your arms and legs stretched out and your forehead touching the floor surface. All this time you are supposed to visualize the lineage tree in front, your father on your right, your mother on your left, and your worst enemy behind you. At the end of a prostration, you rise and count off one bead on the mala. Only 107,999 to go.
Tasks as overwhelming and tedious as when Psyche separated the roomful of lentils, beans, and grains into piles—while doing them Butterfield experiences doubt, rage, exhaustion, and ecstasy. I followed Butterfield's psychological and spiritual extremities with the same fascination with which I read, in an oral history of Vietnam, accounts of how POWs survived living in bamboo cages. There's a heroism in intense commitment. Butterfield compares the tantric tasks to boot camp, meant to break down the ego and make one a good Buddhist warrior. He says that the thrill of boot camp should be more widely discussed. Now that I know the vocabulary for such practices, trolling around online I discovered that the buddhist leads retreats in them. The more I read Butterfield's book, the more Other the buddhist seemed, like I had been trying to be lovers with an extremely focused, elegant praying mantis.
An hour before the eclipse began I sat down to meditate. Since I'm all jet-laggy, it was hard going for the first half hour or so, as far as staying awake. But that phase passed and I eased into a comfortable rhythm with my breath—and then, without warning, my heart twirled open. I had the image of a lump of coal being hurled away, and I felt such love, a generalized love, and then I thought of the buddhist and I loved him as well. Behind the hurt and the rage I felt this core of love that's never changed. Then my 20-pound cat Ted crawled in my lap and started kneading my inner thigh—painful, it felt like he slowly drawing bruises—I tried to ignore him, figuring he'd settle down and take a seat, but he kept kneading, adding a flourish of banging my forearm with his nose, as if to fling it up and onto his head. So I gave in and cuddled Ted. He was quite passionate in return.
Here is a photo of the eclipse taken from my front landing, about a half an hour into it. The shadow doesn't show up, but it's there.
I'm sitting at my desk in San Francisco, trying to write with Sylvia constantly jumping in my lap. I'm listening to Wynonna Judd singing "Anyone Who Had a Heart," her version puts all versions to shame, even Dusty Springfield's—and it's hard to compete with Dusty. "You couldn't really have a heart/ And hurt me/ Like you hurt me/ And be so untrue/ What am I to do." The last time I had a broken heart, which was 15 years ago, I'd sit and listen to Dusty and cry and cry. She's good for that. And I don't see anything wrong with listening to Dusty and crying, all this bullshit about detachment. More and more I'm weighing in on living life to the fullest, and if your fullest expression of life at that moment is crying over Dusty, then I say go for it. More and more this hierarchy of higher versus lower feelings or attitudes is bullshit. Strange how the lowest feelings are those that tend to come easily to women, feelings that women are known for. The silly second class flutterings of the secretaries on Mad Men, I love the pre-feminist secretaries on Mad Men, their bitchiness and their breakthroughs of awareness that they squelch in order to not go insane in a system that's stacked against them. Just listened to Dusty's version of "Anyone Who Had a Heart," and she captures an abjection that Wynonna lacks—not because she seems to feel the song more, it's more the quality of her voice, a husky yet sharp vibrato that calls out to you to sit home alone all boozy and weepy. Now I'm listening to the Dionne Warwick version, which is too sophisticated, with the arrangement overpowering the tragedy of the song. And now Shelby Lynne's version, which is too smooth. Perhaps the most interesting video is Cilla Black's version:
Cilla is one of the stiffest white girls I've ever seen. In the video she's posed so exposed on the stage in a dress that looks like a nightgown, occasionally making robotic arm gestures before an audience that looks bored, her big big voice in a body that doesn't seem to know how to contain it, and the weird way she screws up her mouth. Anyone would love me. Why won't you.
Kevin's at a evening of videos at Artist Television Access, and I didn't want to go out so I made myself some miso soup and basmati rice. The miso soup was awesome—onion and carrot with chickpea miso and a dollop of raw almond butter, a splash of tamari. Perfect food for a cold, rainy night. When we got home, Lindsey Boldt was just coming over to feed the cats—Lindsey's a great catsitter—so she and I fed them together and talked a bit and Kevin drove her home. A half an hour or so after he left, Kevin called and told me he was on his way to ATA, and I said that's nice, and then he said he missed being with me, which was one of the sweetest things anybody ever said to me.
To follow through on Hotel Retreat Day 10, Kevin and I picked up Sheree Rose and we went to Parker Jones Gallery in Culver City to see Lee Maida's show. Maida took a seminar with Kevin at CCA this past semester.
Maida is wonderful at mixing textures to create a visceral impact. This piece here combines organza silk, steel, and lichen.
Next we stopped by Western Project, a space that's been around for 20 years; this is the gallery at which Sheree will be showing in January. While we were there we found ourselves seduced by the highly inflected work in painting and sculpture (and neon) by an artist new to me, called Aaron Sheppard. The press materials said that he was influenced by Myra Breckinridge and by Antony and the Johnsons so that's enough for me! The work is garish and crazy, but the more you pay attention to it the more it seems intelligent, giving, nuanced, almost revelatory.
As I mentioned, Western Project will be featuring Sheree in a group show that opens in January, of the work of herself and Bob Flanagan, with two other artist pioneers of the sexual underground—Kim Light and Johanna Went. Sheree had an impromptu meeting with gallery owners Cliff Benjamin and Erin Kermanikian, so Kevin and I walked across La Cienega in the rain to Blum & Poe. We hadn't seen their new gallery, which is so giant you could turn it into a high school. Even though sometimes videos/films in galleries make me antsy, Stop.Move., their exhibit of four very different explorations of stop motion technique, made us Stop.View. We stood there on the uncomfortable concrete floor and watched a couple of the pieces all the way through, piecing together their narratives, which were open enough to allow us to project ourselves into them. I'm a sucker for work that trips up my safe distance as observer. I was wonderfully disturbed by Nathale Djurberg's "We are not two, we are one" (2008, pictured at the top), a silent claymation narrative of a scrawny girl fused with a ravenous wolf. Need I say more? Also engaging was Robin Rhode's "Canon" (2006-2010), in which Rhode paints objects on a wall (a TV, a handgun, a cannon) and then struggles to move them around. The objects resist, jump about, and eventually fade into the wall. It's a frustrating film to observe, like you want to run up to the wall it's projected onto and start helping him push.
Then the three of us met Christine Wertheim at the Beverly Soon Tofu Restaurant in Koreatown, where we feasted on soon tofu and bibimbap. Christine had spent the day in a Korean spa, and I've never seen her look more relaxed. Since Christine was raised in Australia, Kevin talked with her about Australian movie stars. They both agreed that Sigrid Thornton was beautiful. Christine thinks Thornton is the most beautiful white woman she's ever seen. (An echo of Steven Spielberg's famous claim that Sigrid Thornton has the most beautiful face of any actress.) When Kevin said that he thought Nicole Kidman is beautiful, Christine screwed up her face and said, "She's a scrubber." "What's a scrubber?" I asked. "Just what it sounds like, Dodie."
Kevin's supposed to arrive at 10 this evening, but it's raining here in Los Angeles as well as in San Francisco, so his flight keeps getting delayed. The latest update estimates a 3:40 a.m. arrival, which may be a total fantasy. He said he'd take a cab and asked that I have a room key waiting for him at the front desk.
After my workshop ended this afternoon, I met my friend Lamar at the Real Foods Daily in Santa Monica. We sat and talked for three hours, and then Lamar's husband Jim joined us for another hour. We continued our conversation from last June when I stayed at their home in Topanga for a few days—Antioch, writing, books, movies, news of the Dark Shadows movie Johnny Depp's supposed to make, Lamar's family, their plans to open a solar farm, Kevin, teaching. I was writing to the buddhist while staying at her house, but I'd never told Lamar about him, so over winter squash and apple bisque, I spewed. She was all ears, and I went into full lurid detail rather than the cryptic tidbits I've revealed online. It was odd to be talking about him. Based on this blog, I'm sure it sounds like I'm talking about him all the time, but I don't. I was feeling melancholy about the whole situation today—and there it was again, the unshakable longing that I keep thinking I've shaken—like the eternal return, it comes back again and again, its quality essentially unchanged. When the longing strikes, I get this romantic sense that the buddhist is feeling it as well, that the longing connects up across time and space—as soon as I think this, I squelch it, think you're an idiot, Dodie. It was good talking with Lamar, such humor and comfort, when I'm with her she makes me feel like family.
Jim and Lamar were heading to downtown LA for an art opening their daughter's in, but not having gotten much sleep the past couple of nights, I bowed out. Instead, I walked around Santa Monica, carrying the Antioch umbrella I bought at the school bookstore, with alternating wedges of forest green and white. It was a misty rain, which made the air impossibly fresh. Not many people were around as I sauntered along the 3rd Street Promenade past one chain clothing store after another. None of the stores appealed to me, but I fell in love with the topiary dinosaur fountains.
I find them utterly delightful, they're so extravagant and confusing—are we supposed to take them seriously as public art? They're cute and sinister at the same time—a combo that always excites me—these giant extinct beasts in the midst of a garish capitalist monument, spewing. That the dinosaurs have plant tendrils creeping up their legs and winding around their torsos implies that nature itself is uprising—no more oil spills, no more deforestation, no more raping of the ozone the seas the land—and when all the shoppers are tucked in their beds and all the chainstore lights in Santa Monica are shut off, the dinosaurs will lumber off their mounds, crash through plate glass windows, knock down display racks in Anthopologie and H&M, and spew and shit and roar, NO MORE!
Further down the street two men with saxophones were jamming—one guy was dressed in a Santa jacket and hat—they were improvising all over the place, a sophisticated and elegant jazz, and every now and then the melody of a Christmas carol would break through.
Walking to campus this morning, the sky was huge—vivid blue and fluffy clouds. In the lawn of a corporate park that borders the sidewalk I noticed a mushroom growing, then another mushroom and another, it was a small forest of mushrooms, ranging in size from an inch to three inches across, flat and darkish brown like shitakes or portobellos. Some of them were unearthed and lying upside down with their stalks in the air, which reminded me of cartoon images of dead dogs, lying on their backs with their legs straight up in the air, and why would cartoons have images of dead dogs with their legs in their air, this is an ancient memory, so it's totally out of context. The mushrooms startled me into regression, I felt like I was shrinking down to their size, entering a fairy tale realm where they would surely be called toadstools, and then I passed some pine trees with super-long needles, like foot-long needles, which give such a lacy effect, they reminded me of the pine trees that grew near the ocean in Sarasota, my friend called them Australian pines, and suddenly I flashed to being in my early 20s, in a grove of Australian pines, their delicate needles brushing my skin, soft as a breeze, and the light tinged green and the ground fine pale sand, the effect bright and airy, not dense like a forest, and then I'm back in Culver City, climbing the stairs to the campus and long strands of grass, long as the pine needles, are bent over and wet, and in the sun the beads of water are sparking like diamonds, thousands of diamonds in this long, long grass, and my eyes are drinking it in, and then I pass a tree whose twisted trunk looms into vision, and it's all so beautiful I'm starting to feel uncomfortable, I think back to my 30s when I had drug flashbacks, which would begin with things suddenly looking too beautiful, and I read that Virginia Woolf's breakdowns also would begin with things looking too beautiful, which made me think that all intensity, no matter how much you long for it, is painful, that opening oneself to beauty is a sort of altered state, it always involves a releasing, a part of you enters whatever it is that calls out to you—uncontrollably—you always lose a little of yourself, and thus the terror. Then I went to my office and met with students.
Today the longing came back. It first raised its ugly head during meditation, and I let it rip. Usually when it comes up there, it's near the beginning and it passes, but today it was more about waves—throughout the meditation, and then after my busy busy day, in the evening when I was finally alone it flooded back in. Perhaps longing is the wrong word, more of a sense of loss, and a frustration at my inability to talk to this person. Do I even want to contact him, if I dared hurl myself against his wall of hostility, what could I say, I guess I'd say, "Don't you miss me?" I miss you. My missing him wouldn't matter that much to the buddhist, he'd see it at a passive-aggressive accusation, I had this realization before I came down here, my caring for him mattered much less than my appreciation of his caring for me, what excited him was my delight in his performance as paramour, at the end he complained about my lack of appreciation, said he'd never felt less appreciated, he tended to use the words "never" and "always" when referring to me, which I imagine, from my amateur understanding of Buddhism, to be the opposite of the position he must teach to all those hundreds and hundreds of little people who go to those woodsy meditation retreats, he also told me he didn't like nature, so the woodsy retreats must wash over him, but he did frequently write to me about the moon, so maybe his not liking nature was a momentary impulse, we were at the ocean when he said he didn't like nature, he had his back to the ocean and was fondling my body, the moon he wrote to me about because we shared it, it was something we could both look at and discuss, no matter where we each were at night.
Memory is so intimate, so piecemeal, a fragment of a body, a blur, the most mundane moment is heightened, but somehow you never feel totally alone with the beloved, or maybe it's you never feel alone in your love, all these competing memories and emotions contradicting every impulse. There's a tenderness to mourning that one longs to cling to, why have I switched to this distant one when I really mean me, how I wish there could be fondness rather than pain in remembering what a few months ago thrilled me, and why am I unloading this in public, why not my journal, why not answer Bhanu's last letter, she's been very generous in holding my ramblings, why do I long to speak to no one and everyone, why hurl my thoughts out into the vagueness of a mostly unknown audience, not totally unknown, there's a handful of you dears who read whatever I put up here. I'm thinking of when I finished The Letters of Mina Harker, which in its original version, all the letters were written to writers I knew—and sent—so there was this edge of risk in that, I'd say things—or my avatar Mina would say things—to my friends I never would in real life, it was a performance of saying the forbidden, one person at a time, and when I finished the book and was faced with refocusing to non-epistolary writing, I felt like I was standing on the brink of the void, how could I possibly write to a vague unknown audience, I visualized such an audience as this misty blobby thing, and now I seem to be turning my back on specific persons and wanting acknowledgment and love from this blob. Oh my dearest blob, do you love me, will you love me the way the buddhist refuses to do? Is blob love something that will never go away? Interesting how similar blob is to blog.
I know it doesn't sound like it from my tone here, but it was a good day today. This morning when I was racing over to Antioch to teach my two hour seminar on collage, as I pulled my champagne-colored Hyundai into a space in the parking garage, an instrumental heavy metal version of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" came on the radio, insanely bombastic, layers and layers of drums and guitars, a dissonant typhoon of Christmas cheer, and, even though I was nervous and in a hurry, I sat there and listened to the entire thing and laughed.
The nightgown I brought with me is getting funky so I bought another one at the Nordstrom Rack at the Howard Hughes Center. Being a Princess and the Pea type person, I cut out the tags so they wouldn't scratch my delicate nature as I slept.
You gotta love the middle, WARNING: KEEP AWAY FROM FIRE tag, and its lame attempt at a comforting afterthought: ALL FABRIC CAN BURN. Like they're trying to convince you that this nightgown isn't particularly flammable—it's more of an existential thing, more like every time you go to bed you're in danger of combusting into yet another Anima Sola, running through the night, heartbroken over the buddhist, engulfed in tonguey orange flames.
She must have bought her nightgown at Nordstrom Rack too.
This evening when I went out to dinner with a friend it was brisk and clear out. By the time we left the restaurant, fog had set in. It was blowing across the road in wisps—something I associate with San Francisco, not Los Angeles. I drove down a lot of side streets, with holiday-decorated front yards. Christmas lights in fog are very atmospheric. I'm dreaming of a noir Christmas. On the stretch of Rose Avenue between Walgrove and Lincoln, there were few cars and I could only see a few feet in front of the car, so it looked like I was driving into nothingness. It was thrilling, with a tinge of anxiety, like when driving along the coast highway from Santa Cruz at night. Burrowing into the dark.
Kevin got some art back from the framers. Here's a video chat photo of a piece by Jason Jagel.
Here's a piece by Kota Ezawa done on film, of Rick Jacobsen and Karla Milosevich.
Dodie posted a blog entry in which she prescribed the act of envisioning a rose in the mind with eyes closed and feet firmly planted on the floor. Once the rose has been created the practitioner places all negative energy coming from an abusive person in the rose and then blow it up and send all the negative energy back. I sat on the toilet and sent my girlfriend all of her negativity. She had just dumped her days worth of stress on me and I could no longer bear her pain.
Looking back on journal entries during our last weeks together, I felt extremely beaten down by her constant verbal harassment. Every morning I awoke to her getting angry and trying to tear me apart, and the same could be said just before sleeping. I had had enough of being yelled at and talked down to, so I withdrew and let go of the negativity she had placed upon me.
Shortly after the act I noticed her tone shifted, she was suddenly pleasant and we had one of the nicest two hours together we had had in weeks. I burned a CD for her performance, gave her insights as she practiced, I made us cocktails, we got dressed together, kissed, everything felt good, I hoped that our energy had reconfigured and we no longer would place negative thoughts first. Instead we’d focus on the hardest ideal, the ultimate ideal – love.
Once it was time, we headed to the club she where she was scheduled to perform. She dances with and breathes fire. When we first started dating, I laughed at myself for having decided to date a woman and a fire performer. I’d always considered fire performing a hippy-circus, burner shtick, but she changed that, leaving just about everyone I knew needing much explanation as to why I wasn’t with a man—a confusion that disgusted me since I have always believed love is unaware of gender. It’s important that a lover change a previous misconception, just as it’s important to remember and reflect on why you loved a former lover – she’d often get held down by spirits in her sleep and cry out for me to wake her. I enjoyed waking her with kisses and holding her close to me. I’ve always felt myself to be extremely haunted and I found a perverse connection in sharing dreamscaping with someone that encountered equally immense visions in sleep. Her beauty is truly unmatched and when she dances it fully woos her audience. Watching her control fire is major, and since I’m a Leo I probably should have been a bit more careful with the giving of my emotions. She is a Cancer and has a need to harness an intense life form; fire breathes, eats, and dies, the determining qualities of a life.
If I were a democracy this would not be written, because the majority within me wants me slugging whiskey and choking down cigarettes. It’s like I’ve suddenly been told that I’m a schizophrenic, your reality wasn’t real, man. In fact, the girl you were so devoted toward was plastic that you molded into the perfect tits and ass and she is gone because you stopped taking the required dose of street drugs to maintain the illusion. Just had to go talk to a psychiatrist and now it’s all fucked up. No more love. No more fantasy. Just boring ass fuck reality.
The feelings get progressively worse as time drags, so you exchange them with Ben and Jerry’s Fro Yo, replace sorrow with the cheapest and greasiest deep fried Chinese Food, trade rage for double bacon cheeseburgers and extra large diet cokes. Suddenly the archetypical obese Midwestern body type that always disgusted seems sane, relatable – moving to a small Michigan town with zero population and a plethora of fast food options flashes in the mind brighter and gaudier than any childhood interpretation of the golden gates.
After the burn out solitude trumps all other states. The disgust for all people leads you to solitude's green eyes and pale white loving skin, you let her hands cradle you, allowing you to weep without judgment. She reveals to you visions of growing old; broke in your later days and unable to afford botox and other age defying necessities you allow the tears to come ever more torrentially, balding gives way to bad skin and then there is the cancer diagnosis. With little will to live your life pulse flat lines. Never again will your eyes meet a romantic gesture for you’re no longer someone’s ‘mon cheri’ pal.
The antics of romance give way to anxiety as the face of your plastic doll begin to appear on the face of everyone; suddenly everyone has her power, one strong enough to devastate. I don’t see how we can say it’s over now that I see my plastic doll in everyone. Trying to forget but remembering every detail, we survive only to be destroyed by another. And now that I see her face creeping into the gestures of the face of every stranger, I see how truly connected we all are, I should have learned this lesson as a child in Sunday School when I was taught to seek LOVE in everything. But I’ve never been one for Spider Webs.
I rarely engage in deeply intimate relationships because my reputation frightens most people away and only a select few really capture my attention, so living on the losing end of an infinite numbers game has given me few opportunities. Unfortunately my fetishes place independent, intellectual, physically beautiful, domineering people upon my highest pedestal. My desire for excellence and prowess in a partner isn’t due to me being entirely submissive; aspects of my personality suggest a level of submissiveness, however I do have a fiercely independent nature. All this considered, it is of little surprise that I fell to my knees for the femme fatale I met last spring.
Traditional views of femme fatales place her in a negative light, however my respect and love of strong individuals leads me to idolize the femme fatale’s ability to entrance and hypnotize the men she allows into her life. Also I find the beauty, charm and sexual allure femme fatales traditionally use to ensnare to be fine pleasures capable of transforming the mundane aspects of life into sublime achievements.
We made such a mess together.
Feeling like my heart has been stabbed into a dream.
Luckily she texted me telling me love was enough for her when she was younger but now it’s not… I never wish to be too old for love… She texted me so many cruel things in the days following our break up, she refused to leave my psyche and I kept envisioning the rose and blowing it up. Everywhere I looked I saw her violence. I consulted my friend who has very keen insights into psychic magic and she suggested I not only stop deflecting her negative energy but also channel her positive energy.
Who’s going to wake you when ghosts come for your body in your sleep?
I don’t care why you want to move on, I’m going to box up my heart and stare off into the darkest recesses of space, into the purest, sweetest black. Despite the fact I hurt, I am happy that I followed my heart.
The hot weather we spent the summer hating together gave way to snow.
I learned I don’t want to live my life alone. I want a partner. I want someone who accepts me as a whole person. I want someone understanding of my past.
Unfortunately I didn’t fully realize the woman I gave my trust and love to was a femme fatale until too late. I gave my trust and love fully after numerous incidents on both of our behalf, that qualified, in my mind, my complete devotion. After giving myself completely I reached the heights of happiness.
For once I felt what it was like to be “the luckiest guy in the world”.
Sending her positive energy when all I wanted to do was sing along to Of Montreal’s anthem “Famine Affair” seemed so impossible, the world seemed at odds with positivism.
After the show she bolted for the bathroom and my world went hazy, I don’t remember exactly how it all played out but I packed up the stuff and ran to the bathroom as fast as I could, knowing something terrible had to have happened. As soon as I got to the bathroom I found her weeping, she had burns on her upper cheek and beneath her lip. Immediately she placed all blame on me. She told me it was my fault she was burned and that I was a horrible boyfriend, an alcoholic, evil, and destructive. Her blame and judgment of me was the most painful moment. I wanted to console her, not be her whipping boy. Her demeanor completely changed, she seemed completely empty of humanity as we rushed out of the club into a cab home. In the cab I tried to comfort her but she just raged and raged. Once we got home I asked our roommate, her best friend, to calm her down so we could resolve the situation, then went outside to smoke cigarettes. I waited for what must have been twenty minutes till they came upstairs to smoke. I was curled up outside listening to them chat about the drama, she seemed a little better so I asked if I could come in. She gave me a bitchy yes so I entered profusely apologizing hoping with all my hope she’d feel better enough to let go of the pain she was pushing onto me, instead she looked at me as if I was her devil and beat me down. She kept verbally pushing and yelling as she got into bed, I quietly absorbed her negativity as I brushed my teeth and prepared for dreams, then she ordered me to leave the room, she demanded I couldn’t sleep there, that I had to go elsewhere. I refused and said I wouldn’t leave. I began to get angry. I didn’t hurt her. It wasn’t my fault. So I told her no, I’m going to sleep in our bed, she needed to calm down and deal.
As I sat down on the bed it was over, she jumped on me and strangled my throat. I’m PTSD so I immediately started screaming, grabbed my phone and called my friend, he told me to get the fuck out.
In spite of all this, I don’t want our time together to be remembered as an act of violence.
The majority of our nights together were spent painting and entwining our bodies as tightly together as we could. That is what I want to remember. It’s hard enough knowing someone I love tremendously blames me for the mark on her face that could very well be her reminder of me for the rest of her life. It’s even harder knowing someone I trusted could violently attack me. I don’t need to add to it by mustering up hate. Trying to focus on the love we shared and not give into a deep anger is my vision.
She texted me a lot of very cruelty in the days following our incident. According to her I’m completely pathetic and everyone at the club knows her burns are my fault, everyone hates me, despite the fact that a few of her friends texted me the day after her accident offering love and condolences. The saddest statement she made was, “Sometimes when you love someone it turns to hate. It has for me. I hope it does for you too." I don’t want to hate her. I can’t believe I’m now using my very limited life energy to contemplate the fact she now hates me and wants me to do the same. Just days ago I would do anything I could for her and now she is trying to demand I hate her. I refuse to be a monster, we are human beings with complex emotions struggling to achieve the dreams we have constantly aspired toward and unfortunately what we had was leveled by a mishap that was not wanted.
The connection we had was intense from the beginning, she seemed a soul that I had always known and I am sure our energies have been in communication throughout the centuries, she is a goddess and I am a worshiper of the divine and will always look forward to the time when my worship will be respected again.
Her eyes were completely vacant in our last look. She had her body positioned in an attack stance; if the cops weren’t escorting me when I returned to the apartment a few days later to get the rest of my things and return the few things I accidentally took when I sped off she most likely would have stabbed me. The cops were funny, they reported to the station that the house had no guns but there were plenty of flogs and whips to beat people with. I felt like such a wimp and truly I am one. I looked up at her staring down at me just before I left as the cops filed the report and saw how truly androgynous the human spirit is. I saw the necklace I gave her for Chanukah around her neck. I saw the Goddess I worshipped. I saw the demon that ripped us apart. The demon I always knew was there but thought I could defeat with love. It’s true that all energy is neutral and it’s the power of human emotion that transforms energy into negative or positive. And it’s the spirits amongst us that pull our strings and lead us to choose how we wish to manifest our energy. But the spirits are never to be trusted for at any moment they can leave and we are left alone.
There was a time when we frequently told each other we loved each other and I hoped we could morph into the same being for reality would then be that much simpler, both of us staring through the same eyes at the world we were too stoned to conquer.
Now it’s memories and the new celestial creatures that wish to unite with me.
As a parting gift I gave her “Just Kids” by Patti Smith. I first gave it to her a couple months ago when we were happily together but she never wanted to read it. Originally I was going to go to her apartment with my best friend to exchange belongings. I texted her telling her I was nervous and hoped we could be civil and quick about the exchange. She told me that she’d refuse my friend entry into her house so I said it’s either my friend or the police because I didn’t feel comfortable being alone with her since she’d strangled me. When she texted me that she thought I should come with the police I started shaking and asked the two girls I’m currently living with if I should still give my ex my copy of “Just Kids."
The previous night I had decided I surely should give her the book and I wrote a note in it. But seeing how vicious she was being in regards to exchanging our belongings made me question whether or not I wanted to give her such a gift that means so much to me. I handed the book to one of the two girls and she fell silent after having read what I wrote in the cover, then I handed the book to the other. The first blurted out, “You have to give it to her. It’s you. It’s your truth.” And the second concurred.
Here’s the passage paraphrased:
Reading is one of the most empathetic acts a person can do. It allows the engaged person to go into the lives of others and pull from their secrets. The fact that you refused to read this book is very telling of why we’d never work. In the pages beyond what I’m writing is one of the most beautiful accounts of love and magic and what it means to engage in the sacred act of love. I never wish to give up on love. And if I ever do succumb to hate it will be my greatest regret. Within these pages lay the compassion that you refuse to comprehend.
Read and take flight! My love is ever lasting.
Stephen
She gained and I lost… she took my bed, my furniture, all the furniture we got together, the furniture I painted and built, the many sex toys we worked together to acquire, my magazines, a few of my books (very sadly I must report my copy of Ariana Reines “SAVE THE WORLD” is being held hostage), the money I gave for rent, my coffee maker, my necklaces, all my long sleeve t-shirts and jackets …. GONE GONE GONE ….
A few years ago I wrote a novel in which the main character basically loses everything, in the beginning of the novel I quote a line from Jean Genet that I want to quote again, “the celebration of nothing”… It’s just a few words. But again I must learn how to celebrate nothing. I left my parents at seventeen and a half to escape abuse, to be free, now I’ve realized the cycle has continued to be; I do okay for awhile and then something really traumatic happens and my world falls apart.
I want to escape trauma.
Whenever trauma happens I come undone.
The need to consume.
Voraciously swallows me.
My money flees.
I don’t want to feel like another New Yorker that has made a bad investment so I’m listening to one of the songs off the latest Antony and the Johnsons album SWANLIGHTS over and over and over and over and demanding that this song be my truth.
The song is called “I Want To Thank You For Your Love.”
Watch the video and picture me on the edge of the river slightly disheveled casting all my radiance into the ever expanding circle we call the universe.
I took the photos at Primitivo, a tapas restaurant in Venice. I went out to dinner with visual artists Audrey Mandelbaum and Susan Silton—I met Audrey through Antioch, and I wrote an essay for Susan's women's whistling troupe project. It's a grand coincidence that Audrey and Susan are also friends. We talked about therapy, the holocaust, our childhoods, and narcissistic men. The three of us are good together.
Kevin and I were old fashioned the past couple of nights, and used cellphones rather than video chat, so no video chat photos. Kevin said my mom's (and now my) cat Quincey shit on a pair of my shoes. He described them to me, and fortunately they're shoes I should have gotten rid of anyway. She's helping me declutter. A friend is very involved in Clutterers Anonymous and he's using it to clean up his messy bedroom. They have call-in phone conferences where you can put the meeting on speakerphone and clean house while you listen to others share. So everyday at 5:00 my friend calls in and cleans house for an hour. He says it's working miracles. I so want to check this out when I get back. I would love to live a life with the organized simplicity of hotel living. The problem is, who can I get to come in each day and make my bed?
It was a really good day today. I felt happy and energetic, and I also need to get to bed, so this is a short post. I got up, did my morning stuff, meditated, and walked over to Antioch, which takes about 20 minutes, and worked in my office most of the day. It's wonderfully warm here, in the 70s with a cool breeze, glorious weather. During my walk I soaked in the lovely California plants, most of which I don't know the names of. Nature for me will always be the Midwestern maples and oaks and elms of my youth. Here's a lily (I believe) on campus that called to me.
In the evening I had a perfectly lowkey dinner with Matias Viegener. We each ordered a bowl of pho and split one of those divinely greasy Vietnamese crepes you wrap in rice paper with mint and lettuce and sauce, and try to eat without the whole thing falling apart in your hands. I'm glad I was eating with an old friend who's seen it all. I made a total mess, used up tons of napkins. Then we went back to Matias' and drank peppermint tea and talked on and on. Matias is part of the social practice art collective, Fallen Fruit, which "began with creating maps of public fruit: the fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles." Here he is in his kitchen. Note all the fruit on the counter behind him. Matias loves fruit, and always has interesting varieties. He gave me a Chinese pear to bring back to the hotel. It's like a Japanese pear, but pear-shaped, a very pale yellow. It's good, mild and hardly sweet at all. There were a couple of German art books on Matias' coffee table, and the last name of the artist was Viegener. I asked if it was a relation, and Matias said it was his grandfather. Matias' grandfather was the only one of his relatives to stay in Germany during the Third Reich. He wasn't Jewish, but his wife, Matias' grandmother, was—and she stayed as well. She survived by hiding in the coal cellar. The Nazis knew she was there, but when they came looking for her, she would tunnel into the middle of the room-sized heap of coal, and remain buried there for hours. I asked if his grandfather was punished for helping her, and Matias said he wasn't allowed to show his art.
Then I drove home. To get from Matias' house to here, you get on the 101 South at Silver Lake, then take the 110 South, then the 10 West, then the 405 South, and exit at Slausen. It used to be when people here would rattle off these lists of freeways I would feel panic, but now I'm all oh yeah, that's easy. And it was. At 7:00 it took an hour to get to his house, and at 11:30 it took 20 minutes to get back to the hotel. Zoom zoom zoom. It was so much fun.
Video chat photo for Friday night: a handmade Christmas postcard from Anne McGuire.
I'm sitting in my hotel room in jammies, listening to shakuhachi music on iTunes. I have two albums of it on there, this one was a gift from Karen, my chiropractor, who I have wonderful, soulful conversations with about love, spirituality, trauma, and glutenfree cooking (she makes a yummy glutenfree peach cobbler) while she's holding me and moving my body in strange, vulnerable positions. Mostly she does osteopathic manipulations, which are so gentle and relaxing, I become a noodle in her hands. She must have very clean boundaries, as our interactions are intensely intimate, both physically and emotionally (the emotional part isn't part of her services, we've just become friendly over the years), but it never feels sexual. It's a joy to have such innocent pleasurable physical contact. I'm reminded of a fantasy another female friend and I play around with—should our husbands die and we're left alone, she and I would get married, and spend our old days as lesbians with dogs—sex is optional in our fantasy, we'll see how we feel about that when the time comes. She said we'd sit on the couch and hold one another. Occasionally one of us would pat the other on the head and say, "It's okay." It sounds like a good life to me.
This morning I had a longish phone chat with Colter Jacobsen about our collaboration at SF Camerawork. There was some upheaval and drama around that, which we needed to take care of. The whole exchange went so smoothly—we weren't exactly fighting, but there was tension—it was a pleasure to release the tension and it moved us into a sweet intimacy, and on to other topics, such as the class Colter's taking with Paul Discoe on Japanese no nail building. (Disco constructed Greens Restaurant.) Colter said the secret to no nail building is that it uses nails, but unlike Western building that's nail crazy, no nail building uses them sparely. Colter and I talked about how it was an incident that wasn't important to either of us which caused our tiff—I said I knew from the beginning it wasn't important enough to get in a huff about, but I blew up anyway—and then we examined our (and most people's) tendency to get all riled about something they know isn't important, like when you get upset about not getting invited to a party you wouldn't want to go to in the first place. Afterwards, I thought about the disaster when the buddhist and I tried to reconcile a few weeks ago, and how I did with Colter everything the buddhist wanted me to do with him. I went into the conversation with openness, with the desire for us to work something out that we both were happy with. I was not defensive. I listened as much as I talked. Granted, Colter and I are not having a romance, and our upheaval had much less at stake emotionally than my upheaval with the buddhist, but the main difference in determining my behavior was that I felt Colter was approaching me with heart. The buddhist was so concerned with protecting himself and throwing around the jargon of openness, that no heart connection, no true vulnerability or openness was evident. This doesn't mean that his intentions weren't honorable—but with a heart connection the whole enterprise probably wouldn't have blown up in less than a day. I'm not saying I'm blameless in all of this; I'm saying I wasn't comfortable with the buddhist's approach.
Online I found a quote from the buddhist about a workshop he co-led. I was going to quote it here, but I googled the first sentence and the first hit was the pdf where I found it. The author of the article had asked his opinions on how the weekend went, and the buddhist gave a response that was so doctrinaire, so loaded with buddhist buzz words ("golden ground of basic goodness," "healing waters of compassion"), that it reads like a press release rather than an individual response. When I read the quote, I felt such sadness, like I could see into the core of his alienation, his insecurity, his terrible aloneness. I thought, vainly, as if I were speaking to him—you need me more than I need you. My heart hurt with his hurt. It was the most compassion I've felt for him since we fell apart.
Teaching writing I'm frequently given glimpses into wounds in student psyches. Sometimes the students are aware of what they're revealing, sometimes not. If they're aware, I try to help them go deeper into their vulnerability, to help them more clearly express that vulnerability, to set the right tone for the piece. If they're not aware of what they're revealing, I may make some gentle nudges, but for the most part I act as if I haven't seen anything. Teaching writing I sometimes have to hold some intense stuff with and for the student—but always keep the conversation focused on writing (this is not therapy). One time a woman brought in an amazing piece about a suicide attempt she made when she was younger—it was powerful writing, well crafted, beautiful even—and after she read it, the class fell silent, stunned. So I spoke up and said that it was hard to write about depression and make the writing interesting, to write about being stuck but to give the writing momentum—and I was impressed with how well she did that. After class I thought that was the most inadequate, dumb ass response, like I got all clinical with her, when I should have first approached her from the heart.
So here I am in the Courtyard Marriott in Culver City, the first of 10 nights. I'm too exhausted to think, but not to type, apparently. I hooked up a portable speaker to my laptop and listened to a live Joni Mitchell/James Taylor album that I discovered on the computer, have no idea where it came from, recorded apparently when they were involved. When Joni tells stories in between songs, she calls kindred spirits "freaks." Supershuttle picked me up in San Francisco at 8:30 this morning and I arrived in my rental car in Culver City at 3:30. (SFO apparently doesn't allow planes to take off when there's fog.) It wasn't as hellish as it should have been, I sat at a table at the airport and did work I was behind on, probably got more done there than if I'd been at home, then read on the plane, pleasure reading. I was "chill" (since I'm still reeling from Joni Mitchell speak) until the rental car company, then the bitch started to emerge. Then the faculty meeting (I'm teaching in a low residency program) and the jolt of needing to switch into friendly mode, but that's easy to do as I work with some great people here. With it being low residency, nobody seems invested enough for all that godawful one-upmanship and hierarchy that can go on in academic departments. Then off to Whole Foods for supplies, then unpacking and talking with Kevin on Skype and then Gmail video chat—we were doing a comparison, and I think I like the Gmail better. This is so dull—all the thoughts that I find interesting I'm not writing down, I'm censoring myself here, and why is that? Because I'm tired? Does tiredness make me feel like I need to be more cautious? Like I'll zonk out and say something I'll regret? Thoughts of the buddhist have been creeping up. Before our fallout, he was going to come visit me here, he would have arrived late this evening, and leave Sunday morning. Such a bad idea, this being a work situation, and in a work situation one doesn't need extra intensity or any potential combustibility. He really wanted to come hang out in the LA art scene. It feels like I'm back in junior high school, when the Beatles and everything London were all the rage, and there was this nerdy girl who claimed to get backstage at every rock concert held in Chicago and who had a ring wrapped in angora that she said was given to her by her English boyfriend. We loved to hear about her English boyfriend, though I don't think anybody really believed he existed.
I took a few screen shots of our video chat session. Here's Kevin holding up this year's Christmas card from John Waters. Kevin says that in real life, in the drawing John Waters' teeth are gold:
In the mail today, Kevin received two giant catalogues of the work of artist Ugo Rondinone. Kevin has been commissioned to write a poem for Rondinone's current show at Gladstone Gallery in NYC. Here's Kevin holding up the giantest catalogue:
And what would video chat pix be without Sylvia, like how could anybody possibly keep her out of it. I like this one because it's the most dramatic:
I enjoy the simplicty of hotel living, my few things, I bring one fork, one spoon, one knife, a tuperware bowl and the top layer of a stainless steel tiffin. I splurge packing space with a beautiful wool shawl that I lay on top of the bed and sleep under. I bring a 3-inch statue of Quan Yin and a citrine crystal. I have some hummus and carrots and ground flax seed in my teeny refrigerator. I'm drinking chamomile tea. Brought my yoga mat—have two half hour yoga sets copied to iTunes. The window opens so I have fresh cool air wafting in. I talk to Kevin for a hour each night, which always feels a bit like we're dating, the intensity of our chat time as opposed to the more diffused interactions of living together. He'll be here a week from tomorrow. And when I pick him up from the airport it will be a bit of a shock, the materiality of his being, that he really does have physical embodiment, which is a rather sexy realization. I'm reminded of when he and I, after an exciting and agonizing year, finally got together—it was something I wanted badly but didn't think would ever happen, and for the longest time I'd have this eerie fear that I was in some Twilight Zone type dream, and I would wake up and he wouldn't be there. But, 25 years later, he's still there.
In response to my discussion of her True Love video, Kathe Izzo posted the following comment:
but the gaze was for you or could have been . . that film was made years & years ago but i meant it . . i was the only one holding the camera . . & the gaze was for me & you & all of those emotions were as you called them, self conscious of course, what can we do . . i once said to a love patron who called me a liar because i wouldn't love him the way he wanted to, prove it, prove it that i am not loving you right now . . thank you for taking the time to look at my work, much love dodie xo
Kathe, thank you for this! My mind has been buzzing ever since I read your note. As I'm sure you're painfully aware, once we create something and put it out in the world, we have no power over how viewers/readers will receive the work. The whole viewer as co-creator thing. Regardless of your intentions, which I'm convinced are honorable, to be exposed to "true love," and then have it end in a few minutes, can't help but bring up a profound sense of loss. Your video performs an act of adoration that even those of us who are lucky to be in loving relationships only experience in brief flashes throughout our lives. Such a gaze, which to me reaches all the way back to the undifferentiated mother bond, turns claustrophobic quickly, but there's a part of me who longs to gorge in it, who would willingly drown in it. Watching your video I flash on all the times I've lost that gaze, as well as my suicidal impulse to lose myself in that gaze.
Your eyes peer out, not towards a person, but at a camera lens. You're not seeing me or any individual, you're seeing this behemoth of collective desire. Could I ever be satisfied by eyes that don't see me, no matter how loving they are? Kevin gave me a copy of Bettye LaVette's Interpretations CD, in which she sings hits from the 1960s British Invasion. LaVette's R&B-inspired covers radically defamiliarize the music. Lyrics I never paid much attention to become "oh my fucking god" poignant. Every time Bettye belts out lines about her desire to be seen, to be really seen—and her agony at not being seen, I get all yes, yes, yes. I'm just a soul whose intentions are good/ Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood. To watch your video is to be seen by eyes that are essentially blind—it's uncanny, like a romantic horror film where the lovers are in two different dimensions (the living and the dead, the here and the beyond), straining to touch through a gap that can never be bridged. See me once and see the way I feel/ Don't discard me just because you think I mean you harm.
The love that you're projecting in your video feels very personal, and that's confusing. It's not the clean, unconditional love of Amma the hugging saint, for instance. When asked how it was possible for her to "embrace each and every one in the same loving way, even if they were diseased or unpleasant," Amma replied, "When a bee hovers over a garden of varied flowers, what it beholds is not the difference between the flowers but the honey within them." When Amma hugs, she's not hugging you as a individualized flower; she's hugging your honey within. Perhaps all love, in a sense, is about perceiving the honey within.
More than one woman has complained about the buddhist's messy boundaries regarding the personal attention he gave them. Very mixed messages—his putting out attention that feels romantic/sexual to the women, his acting as if nothing is going on, and the women feeling like they're going crazy. He was that way with me at first, but I called him on it, and things shifted. Once it was acknowledged we were having a romance he wanted us to read together Christina Nehring's A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century. He proposed that we use Nehring's book as a theoretical basis to discuss this romance thing we were going through. "This thing has a life of its own," he declared more than once, and he approached with a sort of scientific fascination all the emotional upheaval both of us were going through. I tried reading the book but never got past the beginning, where Nehring gripes about feminist critiques of romantic love, and prejudices against female writers who indulged in it—during which she tells stories of one woman writer after another who got royally fucked over by terrible men. I found myself siding with the feminists, plus the dickhead side of the buddhist was starting to emerge in flashes and I didn't want to think about what a fool I was, so I abandoned the book in Vancouver.
Why read about love when you've got it right there staring you in the eyes, or at least its email surrogate? Kathe, I love your video. That so many layers and contradictions and discomforts arise for me when I watch it is a testament to its brilliance.
Sunday afternoon, the local psychic healer I'm working with taught me the rose visualization. Here's how you do it. You sit in a chair, feet on the ground (shoes optional), and you imagine a rose in detail, its petals, stem. If you like, you may move your hands through the air as if to touch it. Then you place in the center of the rose all the buddhist's negativity and all the soul-destroying things he wrote to you—when the rose has fully absorbed them, you blow it up. Poof! You give the fucker back his energy. Do this over and over until your aura feels clear. To the left is a powerful female warrior relaxing amidst a bower of buddhist roses. Whenever those roses gets unruly POOF! she will blow them up.
I've been thinking a lot about Bett William's recent blog post about feminist performance artists Kathe Izzo (The Love Artist) and Carolee Schneemann. Izzo is best known for her True Love Project, a performance for one during which she "will freely fall in love with you, unconditionally and with unmitigated passion, for one day. On this day you will be in energetic contact with Kathe throughout the day. You will not be rushed and you will share your day with no one, unless you choose the advanced love option. There is no need for any physical contact. Satisfaction guaranteed."
Izzo provides a sample video of her performing true love, a simple piece consisting of a ultra-tight closeup of Izzo's face. No soundtrack. Wearing a red woolen scarf, Izzo runs in some outdoors environment as a handheld camera tracks her face, her gaze continuously locked on the lens/viewer/lover, registering desperation and excitement. Then Izzo pauses and beams with joy that melts into serious intensity, with flashes of vulnerability that suggest insecurity, then more beams of joy, more frantic running, pause, beams of joy. At times she looks like she's going to cry, she's so overwhelmed with her engagement with the viewer. Izzo's True Love video is profoundly disturbing and moving. She looks at us/the camera with a longing and tenderness that we all crave. Her engagement is so intimate, it's difficult to maintain your distance, to remember that this gaze isn't meant for you. And when you do remember, you're thrown back into a primal, Lacanian sense of lack. The more I watch the piece, the more tragic it becomes. It pushes so many buttons that at times I'm pissed at Izzo for her cruelty. I'm all for the blurring of art and life, but when it gets this blurred it's terrifying.
Her deep soulful gazes and quivering defenselessness remind me of the first time I saw the buddhist in person—we met on a Friday evening in the Castro at a seafood restaurant called Catch. After a friend introduced us via email, we'd been intensely emailing and talking on the phone for five months. As to be expected, there was lots of excitement about his visit. That morning, out of the blue, he started sending me weird, alienating emails, and in the afternoon we had a screaming fight on the phone. I almost didn't go to the dinner. None of it made sense. Looking back, what I think was going on is that the buddhist gets a charge out of seducing, but I was too eager to be seduced. Pissing me off created the resistance necessary for a conducive seduction atmosphere. He took my hands in his and peered at me over his glasses with adoring puppy looks that begged for forgiveness, looks that both captured and suggested total surrender. He would sometimes raise his eyebrows almost exactly the way Izzo does at one point in her video. Much of the time he would fall silent and sit there holding my hands, rubbing my palms with his thumbs, hypnotically locking my gaze. The buddhist said that every time he left the house he gave a performance—and here I was with him, outside the house, believing I was the adored exception. What I don't know—what I'll never know—is how much of his feeling was real and how much of it was, like Izzo's project, a performance.
The last time I was in New York, writer Bruce Benderson told me that in the future people would fall in love with machines, that there would be machines designed to love you. Bruce said, how do you know if somebody feels love for you? Because they tell you so. A machine could do that—with more reliability. Those hundreds of doting emails from the buddhist—what was I heart-throbbing, a man or a word machine?
When I said to Kevin that this buddhist blog was a performance, he said he saw it as an industry. When I defensively asked him what he meant by that, he said an industry is when you have one thing and you make twenty things out of it. Like the Spicer industry, all the material by and about poet Jack Spicer that just keeps spinning out and out. "It's not the same thing as during the Industrial Revolution. Look it up." Industry or not, I feel what I'm doing here resonates with the history of feminist performance art. When I think of performativity in prose writing, I turn to Kathy Acker, her aggro assertion of female subjectivity—aggro deconstruction of female subjectivity—aggro fuck you to received notions of female subjectivity. From the scroll Carolee Schneemann pulled from her cunt in her Interior Scroll performance: "if you are a woman (and things are not utterly changed/ they will almost never believe you really did it/(what you did do)/ they will worship you they will ignore you/ they will malign you they will pamper you/ they will try to take what you did as their own...." Time collapses: ten years ago I met Schneemann at a party at Leslie Scalapino's house. Saturday night I played "Girl 1" in Small Press Traffic's production of Leslie's and Kevin's collaborative play, Stone Marmalade. As "Girl 1," I said:
Eurydice says the structure—as it's in reverse her being—in death per se
and there not being juridical space in which Orpheus comes to her, there.
The buddhist was someone I could say anything to, be any way with. He had a wry sense of the comedy inherent in the most outrageous emotions. There was much I never trusted about him (his not telling me about his sort of wife wasn't a good start), but I trusted his acceptance—and then he turned all Jehovah on me. That is his biggest betrayal, his judgment. How I went from such cozy unconditionality to being condemned, not only for what I did, but for things I never even thought of doing. My mind goes over it and over it and over it, churning the past from various angles that never come into alignment. I'm unable to come up with an official version of what happened, of who he was. Did he love me? Did he reject me? Just these overlapping, mechanistic flashes of memory blurred with interpretation. My mind stutters like a series of Muybridge stills. When the buddhist ran towards me with love in his eyes, did both feet ever leave the ground?
