Month: June 2017

between dog and wolf

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I have read this poem a million times in the original and translation without ever giving much thought to the expression “entre chien et loup”. It suddenly hit me this time; ever the wonder of translation. (Incidentally also led me to read Sasha Sokolov’s book of the same title.)

Waiting
–Christiane Baroche
Waiting
savagery of love just lent

Waiting
divert it and at once no longer love
so much.

Tumble from loss to loss
moments occupied in being occupied elsewhere
Great chasms where love remains
at the edge
shivering
guard-rail of impatience

Wait ah
open up to minutes weighed down
to longings gone gluey
to blunted desire
like an old frayed sail thinning
with time…

I hurt in this man I’ve ceased
waiting for
he’s dying
in the murky light
backing slowly away
unfaithful memory abrasion of his features.

And you, you don’t yet know
that drab mounting-up of defeats
when no one waits for you any
more.

Original

Attente
Attente
sauvagerie de l’amour juste prêté

Attente
la divertir et déjà ne plus aimer
autant.

Tomber de perte en perte
de moments occupés ailleurs
Grands vides où l’amour reste
au bord
frileux
Garde-fou de l’impatience

Attendre ah
s’ouvrir aux minutes alourdies
aux envies qui s’empoissent
au désir émoussé
comme un vieux gréément s’ébarbe
au temps qui passe…

J’ai mal à cet homme qui j’ai cessé
d’attendre
il meurt
entre chien et loup
il recule à pas lents
mémoire infidèle abrasion de ses traits.

Et toi tu ne sais pas encore
la morne addition des défaites
quand on ne vous attend
plus.

Dreamed death on the Jumbotron

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I try and try to make the shot, and even when the ball goes in, no points are scored. My goal was never to die on the Jumbotron – no one would ever think to plan for that. But now I have done that too – died for the whole arena to see.

“Look at the bright side,” my evil inner voice said. “Now that you are dead, all the children you lost can follow you in your misery. You have your ‘family’ – the one you wanted, just not where or how you wanted it.”

Photo by pepe nero on Unsplash

out of time

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Time Reminded Me
–Julia Uceda
To remember is not always to go back to what was
for memory holds seaweed dragging up
wonders,
alien objects that never floated.
A light racing through chasms
lights up earlier years I’ve never lived,
which I recall like yesterday.
About 1900
I was strolling in a Paris park… it was
enveloped in fog.
My dress was the same color as the mist.
The light was the same as now
after seventy years.
Now the brief storm is over
and through the pane I see people walk by
near this window so near the clouds.
A time that is not mine
seems to rain inside my eyes.

Original

El tiempo me recuerda

Recordar no es siempre regresar a lo que ha sido.
En la memoria hay algas que arrastran extrañas maravillas;
objetos que no nos pertenecen o que nunca flotaron.
La luz que recorre los abismos
ilumina años anteriores a mí, que no he vivido
pero recuerdo como ocurrido ayer.
Hacia mil novecientos
paseé por un parque que está en París -estaba-
envuelto por la bruma.
Mi traje tenía el mismo color de la niebla.
La luz era la misma de hoy
-setenta años después-
cuando la breve tormenta ha pasado
y a través de los cristales veo pasar la gente,
desde esta ventana tan cerca de las nubes.
En mis ojos parece llover
un tiempo que no es mío.

Dual contracts

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“The weariness of being loved, of being truly loved! The weariness of being the object of other people’s burdensome emotions! Of seeing yourself – when what you wanted was to remain forever free” -Fernando Pessoa

Do you feel at the edge of something life-changing? Or maybe that everything has already changed, slowly, almost imperceptibly – to bring you to where you are?

Sometimes I feel close to that edge – like something that will alter or maybe even has altered everything is within my grasp. Other times, like tonight, back home again, as others celebrate Midsommar, I find myself alone watching the sky get dark around midnight, working even though this is still technically my vacation. And I think, sitting in encroaching darkness, “Nothing has really changed at all.”

Glad Midsommar
Swedish summer
In the forest

Some things do change, though, in surprising ways. I think frequently these days about how, as kids, as adolescents, our parents want to know everything we do, going so far as to snoop and spy on our secretive young selves. And yet, as an adult, it’s like they just don’t want to know. And don’t ask. Much of my life, how I feel about things, is in a public-facing blog, but my mom has read maybe only two entries in her life. Not that it matters if she does, but it’s funny that it does not interest her at all now, but in youth… what parents would not have killed for that kind of unfiltered access to their teenager’s mysterious thoughts?

Sometimes I feel like I embody the duality of both the furtive, cagey adolescent, hiding away my real thoughts, feelings and life’s events, and the concerned parent, questioning my own thoughts, motives and feelings.

 

Birthdays

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Birthdays
–Hilde Domin
1
She is dead

today is her birthday
that is the day
on which she
was disgorged
in that triangle
between her mother’s legs
she
who disgorged me
between her legs

she is ashes

2
I always think
of the birth of a deer
how it sets its legs on the ground

3
I’ve forced nobody into the light
only words
they get up
at once
and go

Original

Geburtstage
1
Sie ist tot

heute ist ihr Geburtstag
das ist der Tag
an dem sie
in diesem Dreieck
zwischen den Beinen ihrer Mutter
herausgewürgt hat
zwischen ihren Beinen
sie ist Asche

2
Immer denke ich
an die Geburt eines Rehs
wie es die Beine auf den Boden setzte

3
Ich habe niemand ins Licht gezwängt
nur Worte
Worte drehen nicht den Kopf
sie stehen auf
sofort
und gehn

And you give yourself away

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Birthdays are a funny time when you hear from people you never hear from; often people you have never heard from or actually talked to in your entire life, thanks to the wonders of invasive Facebook (of course it is only invasive because I let it be).

A guy with whom I had no actual acquaintance in junior high (and even less in high school), never sharing so much as a single one-on-one conversation but perhaps shared a handful of sarcastic group conversations, mostly arguing the (non-)merits of U2 (with whom I was abnormally preoccupied as an adolescent, steeped in the mania of the freshly released Joshua Tree album), popped up in my Facebook messages.

Back in junior high, my then-best friend and I were certifiably obsessed, and preached full-on religious zealotry like televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker at their zenith: Deliver U2 to the ignorant heathens: “THROW YOUR MONEY AT THESE IRISH LADS!” (I find these ‘lads’ in their past-middle-age incarnation to be rather sanctimonious, just as they were then – but a 12-year-old girl can’t see shit through the rose-colored glasses and distant, mystical music that plays silently when you mentally mythologize the Irish in any context.) That’s not to say that I don’t find The Joshua Tree to be an end-to-end marvel of aural achievement – only that my interest in U2 as a group dissipated along with most of the persistent drilling of teenage madness. Never again have I been as fervent a defender or ardent fan of anything, despite my wide-ranging passion for music. Perhaps after the U2 period, I moved fluidly into a ‘Madchester’ and shoegaze phase, but the musical palette continued to expand (and continues to this day), so U2 is a kind of speck on the horizon, even if they were the spark toward painting that multi-hued horizon. (And are, apparently, atop the list of anodyne sounds programmers report listening to while they work.)

But the point, though, was that this barely-an-acquaintance guy, who seems as an adult to be a genuine, cool and lovely person, but who had seemed in our youth, however vaguely I ‘knew’ him, like a too-cool, textbook-definition total dick (but this may well have been surface-level bravado; how many times have I written about the surface versus what’s underneath? We were all assholes at times, me included.), wrote to wish me a happy birthday and added: “U2 is still touring and playing the Joshua tree album, I was wrong in 8th grade and you were so right.”

In some weird way, I was touched, and this (here I am laughing) ‘vindication’ of my aggressive passion (he and his friends slagged off U2 at the time, but I don’t know if that was just to be contrary the way teenage boys are when they don’t have any idea how to actually communicate) was like its own happy little birthday present.

Is it you?

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The Only One
–Elizaveta Bagryana
Was it you yesterday?
Is it you now?
Will it be you with me tomorrow?

That face I see
against my closed eyelids,
that silhouette with a changing shadow
walking with me always,
that voice at the morning
Wakening me, making me sing,
that name I call you by –
are they yours? are they yours?

Is it you or is it
the image and name
of my thirst,
that waits trembling
like the thirst of the fruited earth
for a rainbearing cloud?

Is it you or is it
the image and name
of my grieving
for that one,
eternal,
faithful companion –
as the moon is to earth.

Is it you?

Bless the eyes and hands of experience

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“If thought is really to find a basis in lived experience, it has to be free. The way to ensure this is to think other in the register of the same. As you construct yourself, imagine another yourself that will one day construct you in its turn. Such is my conception of spontaneity: the highest possible level of self-consciousness that is still inseparable from the self and from the world.” –The Revolution of Everyday Life, Raoul Vaneigem

I cannot look at a lifetime of previous experience and find anything but something to be grateful for. How I could find fault with, judge or castigate someone for the things that made him who he is now, brought him to this point, where he feels, breathes, walks, runs, lives, sleeps, fucks, eats, moves in this way that is so precisely tuned to the ‘he’ that I know now?

What we should…

“You should never fall in love. Love will bring you unhappiness. If you must love, let it be when you are older, after you are thirty.” –The Setting Sun, Osamu Dazai

“The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.” –Middlemarch, George Eliot

Maybe the door has been opened, maybe my middle age has made my brain into mush. But we must use the time we have to absorb what is in books, to touch each other, to eat or revile coriander, to hear our voices reach each other and rise above the hubbub and cut through the chaotic din of our other lives to be able to say, do and be only the most uninhibited of things, to walk through the forest or along the river, to nurture and coax the best of each other, to lighten the dark path we each tread sometimes, to dare to be silly or mundane and find beauty in it, to watch a lone cat sit patiently and alert in the middle of an overgrown field before pouncing on its prey, to sing – however dumb we sound – songs that come into our heads, to fall in love (after 30 or even 40), to give and give and give until exhausted, sore and dizzy, to transform and be transformed. We can blink our eyes, and find suddenly that it is over.

Suffering is sweeter still

“but on days when I fear disappointment, I prefer to look on the dark side of things, it pulls me together and keeps me one step ahead of suffering” –So Much for that Winter, Dorthe Nors

And how sad that would be if we didn’t render our own off-key renditions of “Lover Man” while lying entangled in bed or let ourselves cry in the joy of simple closeness, in the tenderness and care of bringing a cup of coffee in the morning, or in the loss of some small thing we barely noticed when we had it, or in the beauty of how glossy and liquid fountain pen ink can look on a page (I noticed this most of all in a recent episode of American Gods – not at all surprised by the tantalizing visuals there). And how empty life could be if we (or I) only grabbed cheap ballpoint pens, cast books aside to watch Law & Order reruns, or as I was recently cautioned against doing – discarded the best person I ever knew just because I don’t know how to be with someone who is undamaged.

But where, indeed, does experience end and damage begin?

“It feels like nothing matters in our private universe.”

 

let it be hard and bloody

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If I’m to Live
–Julio Cortázar

If I’m to live without you, let it be hard and bloody,
cold soup, broken shoes, or in the midst of opulence
let the dry branch of a cough jerk through me, barking
your twisted name, the foaming vowels, and let the bedsheets
stick to my fingers, and nothing give me peace.
I won’t learn to love you any better this way,
but abandoned by happiness
I’ll know how much you gave me just by sometimes being around.
I think I understand this, but I’m kidding myself:
there’ll need to be frost on the lintel
so the one taking shelter in the vestibule feels
the light in the dining room, the milky tablecloths, and the smell
of bread passing its brown hand through the crack.

As far apart from you
as one eye from the other,
out of this affliction I’ve taken on
will be born the gaze that deserves you at last.

Original

Si he de vivir sin ti, que sea duro y cruento,
la sopa fría, los zapatos rotos,
o que en mitad de la opulencia se alce la rama seca de la tos,
ladrándome tu nombre deformado, las vocales de espuma,
y en los dedos se me peguen las sábanas, y nada me dé paz.

No aprenderé por eso a quererte mejor,
pero desalojado de la felicidad
sabré cuánta me dabas
con solamente a veces estar cerca.

Esto creo entenderlo, pero me engaño:
hará falta la escarcha del dintel
para que el guarecido en el portal
comprendala luz del comedor,
los manteles de leche,
y el aroma del pan
que pasa su morena mano por la hendija.

Tan lejos ya de ti como un ojo del otro,
de esta asumida adversidad nacerá la mirada
que por fin te merezca.

Memoirs & McKagan

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In between the more grueling books I’m juggling, I make room spontaneously for “spot choices” – something that I am reminded of in the spur of the moment, something I would not necessarily seek out eagerly (Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality and the Struggle for Oral Health in America, anyone?) but which might be interesting in some way. This is, as I have mentioned before, how I come to read most contemporary autobiographical memoirs. They share some background information about admired (or not) musicians or celebrities, but don’t usually set my brain ablaze. Sure, from the thoughtful writing of Carrie Brownstein and Kim Gordon, both seemingly effortlessly cool public figures, I glimpsed that seemingly universal truth that no matter how cool, aloof, nonchalant and in control we seem on the surface, there’s an insecure, wants-to-be-liked person underneath.

Even the memoirs of “regular” people (which, of course, all of these books underline: we all are regular people), such as the pleasant-enough Shrill by Lindy West and the charmingly self-deprecating All Over the Place by effusively expressive Geraldine DeRuiter (and I am dead serious here: if you don’t already read Geraldine’s Everywhereist blog, do. Also follow her on Twitter; one of my favorite Twitter feeds), forge this kind of ‘we’re all in the soup’ of humanity by sharing their everyday experiences. (Or maybe now that I look at this as a pattern, I read all of these because there is the Seattle connection to all of them but Kim Gordon.)

That said, these kinds of books are rarely ever deeply challenging, will be fast and easy to read. They may make us smile, laugh, nod in agreement and approval or even get angry or feel sympathy for the writer. These are very human books. It was in this way, in one of these palate cleansing frames of mind, that I came to read Duff McKagan’s How to Be a Man.

I don’t know how Duff McKagan ever ended up being someone on my radar, bookwise or otherwise. Somehow since junior high school in the Seattle area, he, despite my not being the Guns ‘n’ Roses ‘type’ (whatever that is), stuck out (probably being a local boy and all helped that visibility). Later, I think I was impressed by the fact that he went back to college after the heyday of GnR and worked on finding his sobriety and ways to maintain it. At another point in my life, I would not have picked up this book; in fact even if I had, I don’t think I would have taken anything away from it. But this time, having had the experiences of the last decade, I approached it differently.

But this is what I will say about it: Despite the fact that it struck me as slightly disorganized (some parts more organized than others), slightly random (although some parts were considerably slicker than others, which made me think the editing was choppy), neither of these things made the book bad. It in fact inspired the feeling and sense of sitting and listening to the guy reel off stories and opinions about his life and his experiences. Maybe that was what he was going for – the relatable (well, in tone, perhaps, not in all the activities – although let’s be clear, as Duff most certainly is – all Seattleites DO live with the ticking-clock on summer, and the damn deck/lawn/painting/housework can only be done in rain-soaked Seattle in that limited window) and conversational.

The book was entertaining and perfectly served the need I had at this exact moment:

*It flowed quickly, even if, as I stated, the editing didn’t make the content flow all the time.

*I liked the random lists of stuff, particularly the diverse variety of recommended albums and books. I would probably add more must-hear albums/artists (today I am overly influenced by the songwriting genius of Neil Finn/Crowded House and the longevity and wild creativity of Robyn Hitchcock). I would also add many books, but who wouldn’t? There are too many books in the world to be able to do justice to a must-read list, which McKagan himself acknowledges, describing his propensity for populating his personal library both in digital and paper formats:

“But a bookstore is the ultimate way to immerse yourself in what’s new. You can browse, and you can ask around, something you can’t do as well in the cocoon of e-commerce. It can be the littlest hint or clue that sends people looking for a book and thrusts their life briefly in new directions. It can be gossip you hear in line for an espresso or a movie you see on espionage. The direction of your reading can very well influence your life for a while.” –How to Be a Man

Clearly he gets what most passionate readers get:

“This is every reader’s catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven’t read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing. There is no way to finish, and perhaps that shouldn’t be the goal. The novelist Umberto Eco famously kept what the writer Nassim Taleb called an “anti-library,” a vast collection of books he had not read, believing that one’s personal trove should contain as much of what you don’t know as possible.” –My Life with Bob, Pamela Paul

*On addiction and sobriety, he didn’t have anything new to say that I haven’t heard or read from recovering addicts or specialists in this field. But it’s nevertheless key to see some of the resounding themes: resentment and regret; again, some of this same lack of self-esteem and assurance that the other memoirists listed above have expressed, e.g. learning to like and trust oneself; that, as cliche as it sounds, it’s a one-day-at-a-time process. And sometimes the things that pull you through are unexpected and maybe even the smallest things that then go on to have ripple effects. In his case it was his ‘latching onto’ Jim Rome’s radio show, and when he appeared on the show as a guest, this prompted other listeners to take steps to regain control of their own lives. This too could sound cliche, but the kinship of addicts, and the power of these small sparks to inspire, is the same kind of things I have seen in trying to understand and connect with recovering alcoholics in my own life:

“This life is crazy. It’s the little things that can be absolute game changers.” –How to Be a Man

*Seahawks, Seattle sports and the constant, indefatigable cheering for the (hometown) underdog. Need I say more?

*Seattle. Yes, Seattle. (Do I sound all homesick? I swear I’m not! I left so long ago for a reason!) That place that suddenly became visible in the 1990s, from which its veil was slightly lifted with the mania that surrounded Twin Peaks during its first go-around (even though this was not technically Seattle, you’d still have to go to Seattle to get to the real-world equivalent of Twin Peaks). It is hard to believe now that Seattle was ever this unheard-of place that McKagan describes.

But true story: in junior high, I had a pen pal in California (this was 1989) who phoned me once and asked not only what time it was in Seattle (says more about his ignorance of time zones and geography than Seattle’s invisibility). He seemed surprised to learn that I had ever heard of Depeche Mode and even that I had a phone. If I recall, it was the same year that Time magazine covered the insular nature of Washington state and its ire at “rich Californians” showing up to scoop up all the land. Hmm. (I did go back to see if I could find that issue of Time, and it was, as a side note, interesting to see the cover stories – Donald Trump on the cover in Jan 1989, taunting readers that we would all be “green with envy” about his wealth – or a headline: “The New USSR?” – or Kevin Costner, just releasing Field of Dreams, or Pete Rose, just being tossed for life from baseball. Oh, hilariously, there was a cover featuring the Rolling Stones, including a headline about “aging rockers”… and we thought they were aged then?)

Back to the point. Seattle was on no one’s radar. Not in any appreciable way, at least. Not until Nirvana came along:

“I used to brag to anyone who would listen that these guys were from “my town” and that soon the rest of the world would realize that people didn’t live in tepees in Seattle!” –How to Be a Man

While McKagan framed the singular Seattle “way” within the lens of sports (and a bit in music), it is on the whole accurate about the city’s attitude and evolution.

It is a place of some stoicism, insularity and a bit of an outsider’s “fuck ’em” attitude. Claire Dederer posits in her own sort of memoir, Love & Trouble:

“Seattle is not a big city for crying. Seattle, in fact, is famously emotionally stoppered. There are many theories as to why this is the case; some say it’s because of our dominant genetic and cultural heritages: Norwegian and Japanese. Whatever the reason, Seattle is a place where you are not supposed to emote. You are supposed to endure. In Seattle, where rain and traffic are two snakes twining, choking the body of the city, forbearance is an art. We don’t cry, we just put on more Gore-Tex or maybe use the driving time of our commute to listen to a self-improvement book on tape. Though “driving” is a strong word for what happens when you get into a car in Seattle. And yet suddenly there were these crying hot spots.”

“When you visit other cities, get asked about Seattle. The people you meet want to move there. No one used to move to Seattle except aeronautical engineers and, like, rabid fishing enthusiasts. No one used to know where Seattle even was. They thought maybe it was in Oregon.”

And this obscurity from which Seattle was lifted has made it a too-hot, too-desirable place, in which most mere mortals cannot afford to live.

So… bottom line, I don’t know if I would recommend that anyone read McKagan’s book. I will, though, be giving a copy to one person who will be able to relate, and I think in that way it will help him. And perhaps that is the most one can hope for: reaching one person, especially when they need to hear your particular message, one day at a time.