Memory demands so much,
it wants every fiber
told and retold.
It gives and gives
but for a price, making you
risk drudgery, lapse
into document, treacheries
of glaring noon and a slow march.
Leaf never before
seen or envisioned, flying spider
of rose-red autumn, playing
a lone current of undecided wind,
lift me with you, take me
off this ground of memory that clings
to my feet like thick clay,
exacting gratitude for gifts and gifts.
Take me flying before
you vanish, leaf, before
I have time to remember you,
intent instead on being
in the midst of that flight,
of those unforeseeable words.
Fully occupied with growing—that’s the amaryllis. Growing especially at night: it would take only a bit more patience than I’ve got to sit keeping watch with it till daylight; the naked eye could register every hour’s increase in height. Like a child against a barn door, proudly topping each year’s achievement, steadily up goes each green stem, smooth, matte, traces of reddish purple at the base, and almost imperceptible vertical ridges running the length of them: Two robust stems from each bulb, sometimes with sturdy leaves for company, elegant sweeps of blade with rounded points. Aloft, the gravid buds, shiny with fullness.
One morning—and so soon!—the first flower has opened when you wake. Or you catch it poised in a single, brief moment of hesitation. Next day, another, shy at first like a foal, even a third, a fourth, carried triumphantly at the summit of those strong columns, and each a Juno, calm in brilliance, a maiden giantess in modest splendor. If humans could be that intensely whole, undistracted, unhurried, swift from sheer unswerving impetus! If we could blossom out of ourselves, giving nothing imperfect, withholding nothing!
of forest Elders, tread
their moist rugs of moss,
duff of their soft brown carpets.
Far above, their arms are held
open wide to each other, or waving
what they know, what
perplexities and wisdoms they exchange,
unknown to me as were the thoughts
of grownups when in infancy I wandered
into a roofed clearing amidst
human feet and legs and the massive
carved legs of the table,
the minds of people, the minds of trees
equally remote, my attention then
filled with sensations, my attention now
caught by leaf and bark at eye level
and by thoughts of my own, but sometimes
drawn to upgazing-up and up: to wonder
about what rises so far above me into the light.
I hesitate to cite Levertov any longer, as her work seems to punctuate (oddly) so many things in life that have gone awry or simply that evoke feelings, some very old and some very fresh, that I don’t need to give rise to. I wonder why it’s Levertov’s work that defines so many moments. She was never a favorite, never particularly important in my poetry discoveries. And I don’t even find her works necessarily the most powerful. But they take a bite in those precise moments, much as certain songs form the soundtrack of pivotal life moments – whether or not we like those songs. It cannot be helped.
I remember being taught about slippery, misleading false cognates when I first started learning a second language: a word means something in one language, but the same word means something else in another. I return to this idea of false cognates again and again, but more in terms of life and how related things are (or are not). I wrote about this – the things that pop up repeatedly, seemingly coincidentally, but without any connection. But somehow even randomness can be wrapped together to make something thematic. (“As Laplace has pointed out, to discover is to bring together two ideas that were previously unlinked.” –Advice for a Young Investigator, Santiago Ramón y Cajal.)
If an interdisciplinary-style university education taught me anything, it’s that interconnectedness can be woven from very little. Sometimes the connections are more subtle but reasonable – we, even without thinking, curate the things we are open to by the choices we make. I may read one book, then watch a talk show, reflect on a book I read some time ago, have a conversation that all strike the same chords. It’s unconscious but guided by the things that keep feeding and forming us.
False feminism?
Case in point: A woman acquaintance who never shuts up about her feminist bona fides and is fairly judgmental about approaches to feminism (because, she stubbornly asserts, women can and should do anything!) that do not align with her views on How Feminism Is Done and What It Means to Be a Liberated Woman. She also does her job based on her ‘instinct’, despite the fact that what she is doing should be informed by readily available data. This leads to expensive mistakes and a lack of results. Part of her ‘instinct’ (which may well be correct in this case) is that the company she works for must have all its videos and voiceovers done in men’s voices. She is certain that this will resonate with the core audience (mostly developers) because no woman will sound authoritative and credible. That might be true, but isn’t that also a part of feminism? Working to change what is perceived as credible (so that women are not automatically discounted as “not credible”)?
I’ve seen this happen in many companies, even in my own job a couple of times; I happened to see this article about how most companies’ video/marketing ads are centered on and make use of men to create “the impression that marketers aim their technology products and services at adult, white men and that these images serve to reinforce the association between masculinity and technology.”
“According to the researchers, the emotionality and passivity of women in most of the advertisements analyzed perpetuates the idea that women are not in control of the creation and usage of technology.”
Sure, there’s certainly something to be said for what’s realistic, what’s expedient versus lofty goals of changing minds one tech video at a time. But it’s also a miserable failure of follow-through to never challenge stuff like this, particularly if you’re a vocal mouthpiece of this need for equality. Demand that women in tech be taken seriously, but don’t bother to inject women into your outward-facing communications efforts?
False face, fucked filter
When I write that we ‘curate’ the reality around us, it’s very much the same concept as people who end up reading only news or ideas that confirm their bias or worldview. Sometimes it works for us (opening us up and guiding us to new and interesting places) but often works against us (letting the walls close in, making a truly fucked-up filter through which to see (or not see) the world and its realities). I’d guess my own ‘curation’ (a word/concept that is so overused that I hate using it here) is strange and eclectic because I want to ‘taste and see’ (Levertov) everything. Even the stuff that hurts, even the stuff I vehemently oppose.
But the point here is that even the most casual path taken generates its own trails of interconnectivity. Against this backdrop of ‘false/when-convenient feminism’, I had just read Roxane Gay’s Hunger, which in and of itself is not a ‘feminist’ book (she has written a much-read book on the subject, though, called Bad Feminist) but deals with issues germane to the subject (identity and ‘sub-identities’, e.g. being black, being the child of immigrants, being female, being queer, being a victim of sexual assault, being fat, etc.). It’s not a vast leap to go from Gay’s book to Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud by Anne Helen Petersen, which explores various aspects of behavior that have been off-limits for or criticized in women. Petersen examines ways in which a handful of famous women exemplify these “too much” traits, getting at the heart of the fear that comes with stepping outside the lines and being (or being perceived as) the “unruly women” Petersen cites in her title. Petersen begins by discussing “acceptable” female celebrities who cultivate a tightly controlled brand (interestingly, I read this on the heels of Naomi Klein’s No Logo, which was written at a time when ‘personal branding’ was in its infancy) as a counterpoint to the women who do and say what they want and in doing so become points of “fascination and disgust”, e.g. Serena Williams, Lena Dunham, Hillary Clinton, Madonna, Nicky Minaj, among others). It’s a lot more nuanced than that. I suggest you read the book.
“This Is How Much America Hates Women. Not all women, of course. … In other words, unruly women—the type who incite Trump’s ire, and whom millions of voters have decided they can degrade and dismiss, simply because they question, interrogate, or otherwise challenge the status quo.” –Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud
(As a side note, while most of her observations on Madonna and aging were astute and valid, it felt a bit like Petersen, while not eviscerating Madonna, really took her to task in a way that felt out of place given the subject matter and the more thoughtful and laudatory tone granted to every other person in the book. It was intelligent “breakdown takedown” and analysis, but felt like the writer reserved some extra ire to heap on Madonna, well-deserved or not. Also, Madonna: French women, and some other Europeans, have aging with quiet sex appeal almost down to a science. No one needs a regressive Madonna trying to create something like that when it exists in nature already.)
What happens if you do tell your truth or story as a woman? What if you don’t play your role? In these unruly women we see both the good and the bad. But the central theme in the end plays out like you, as a woman, are always damned if you try, but equally damned if you don’t. And you are double damned if you try too hard, try too late, try at the wrong time, and try while being any number of other ‘wrong’ things according to society’s skewed standards. Especially in America.
I happened to revisit Frankie Boyle’s proposal: America Hates Women from American Autopsyat the same time as I was reading Petersen’s book. As long as misogyny runs rampant in men and women both, and even in the double standards of purported feminists, I’d agree: you can’t win as a woman. You’re hated on some deep, dark and often unacknowledged level. And these days, it’s open season – so it’s not deep, dark or unacknowledged. The Twitter feed of the current president of the United States is a good place to find a whole lot of that darkness raging right out in the open.
This poem in its simplicity gets me every time. It cuts right to that vaguely poignant but pity-filled realization that dawns when some variation of the following occurs. Invariably, some character from the long-distant past, about whom one was whipped into a frenzied lather so very many years ago but whom one has almost entirely forgotten in life’s ensuing whirlwind, reappears. In the ‘old days’, this character had been aloof, cool, compartmentalizing. I belonged only to one sliver of his life, for example. And I would agonize. This character never really cared, or at least never showed it then.
This character appears again long after being rinsed away, eroded from conscious memory. And suddenly in this twilight between the last moments of clinging to some semblance of youth and the outer edges of middle age, this character remembers me in alarming detail, which I can only regard with some curiosity and dispassionate distance. I’ve never believed in living in the past or revisiting it, although the way this poem is written cleverly ignites mild nostalgia without making its narrator succumb to it.
“Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you’re going to die anyway.” -from Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
Erica Jong’s heroine asks in Fear of Flying: “Would most women get married if they knew what it meant?” She follows up by stating that perhaps in middle age, marriages would work better. It’s hard to say, of course, but seems reasonable enough to presume. But then maybe it’s more likely that a second or third marriage would work best, regardless of how old the participants are. The book’s protagonist is already stymied in her second marriage and seeking comfort elsewhere. Much ado has been made about “starter marriages” and the likelihood of future marriages working because you learn from the mistakes of the first. I don’t know what to make of this. It too seems plausible – but not applicable to me.
If this is true, what of middle-aged people who never married and got no “practice” other than in a collection of short or long-term, ultimately dead-end relationships? I cannot say because I am in this demographic: middle-aged and never married. I have had a couple of long relationships that never held any future promise and a lifetime, otherwise, of flings and experiments to which I would scarcely be able to apply a name or formal distinction. In between there have been shorter and longer periods of just being on my own, which have always been the happiest and most content times of all.
Confronting the ‘more’
While it’s true that being alone and – by extension – independent has given me a lot of joy, there are moments, often more frequent than in the past, that I imagine my calm life could be enhanced by the presence of someone else. I’ve already written before about not wanting to invite in ‘the wrong element’. After all, as Doris Lessing wrote in The Golden Notebook: “What’s terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don’t need love when you do”. It’s a delicate balance: you may finally confront the fact that you want and need to love and be loved, but to do so, is second-rate enough? Do you fool yourself into thinking that second-rate will do it for you? Can your view become so blurred that you think the ‘wrong element’ could be right? I’ve concluded that it’s most important to recognize the need for love – and go from there.
The ark of the ache of it
Many times I have cited Denise Levertov’s “Ache of Marriage” – and given a lot of thought to the ache one must feel within a marriage – but what about the ache you have without it? It’s something you feel without ever having had the missing part in the first place. It’s not constant but comes in waves. It can look so miserable when you look at it from the outside. Mundane, like a constant sacrifice of one’s own identity and preferences. What is it that softens us … age? The right element? The sunset? The need for warmth? Previous experience (which can also harden us)? The desire for daily soup? (Soup would really do it for me.)
A recent experience, brief enough to be like the blink of an eye, has contributed one significant thing to my life. It opened a long-closed part of me and made me realize it made no sense to close it again. I had so many times before let previous experience influence me, to close me off, to shut emotional responses down. And now… maybe it was this recent experience, maybe my age, maybe all the previous “practice”, maybe the starker-than-ever realization that there are only so many sunrises and sunsets ahead, maybe a combination of everything that convinced me to stay calm, and stay open?
I’ve known a few people who behave as though an overly enthusiastic interest in sex and uncontrollable sex drive confers an identity. I have often thought about how withering this is, when all actions and the entire personality is dominated by the sex drive and the drive for sex. This might seem scorching – glowing with promise and excitement – in a person who is young, experimental, but at some point it starts to be sad and macabre. It is not that older people should not be sexual (I’ve written plenty about this – there’s no age limit). But the clinging to youth that often comes with this personality trait can be humiliating for the person who clings to it too long, and eventually the “sex bomb” explodes in their face.
From Desperate Characters: “’Don’t. She doesn’t know what’s going on. I don’t tell her much. She’s like a demented Sherlock Holmes tracking down the ultimate clue. Sex is at the heart of everything, so morbid and so banal. I haven’t got anyone to talk to.’ ‘You’re talking to me.’”
When a person is abnormally obsessed with something – sure that other people are deceiving them, stealing from them, using them, cheating on them or whatever – it is often because s/he is guilty of those very same things. That is, if a person is a liar, a cheat, a thief, his paranoia that others are perpetrating those very things on him is heightened. I wonder about this. That person can also justify all of it. He may not have directly lied – he may just have misled or omitted facts. He may not think he stole when he feels he has just re-appropriated resources. Either way, he’s fooling himself and others – and has crafted his whole identity, whether he knows it or not, around this obsession.
As Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters highlighted, sometimes the ache of marriage is so slight, you barely notice it day-in and day-out … until you look at it either under a microscope or from a big-picture view, asking, “What have I done with my life?” And yet, many of us are conditioned to define ourselves and our identity through those relationships, however stale they become. Who would we be outside them?
“‘You don’t know what’s going on,’ he said at last. ‘You are out of the world, tangled in personal life. You won’t survive this…what’s happening now. People like you…stubborn and stupid and drearily enslaved by introspection while the foundation of their privilege is being blasted out from under them.’ He looked calm. He had gotten even.” -from Desperate Characters
“I’m sending you this photograph of me in my new car but I hate to say I miss you cause you don’t need me any more you’ve politely say, “I miss you,” but we know you don’t mean that any more”
-Foxygen, “No Destruction”
And then there are hipsters who define their whole being in ways that annoy everyone else around them (other than other hipsters). They are probably very similar to the peripheral characters Fox writes about in her book, despite pre-dating the existence of the hipster (what would these annoying characters have been called then when the book was written in 1970)?
“‘Look how late the light stays now!’ ‘The days are getting longer. I hope the locals don’t start up with their goddamn bongos.’” -from Desperate Characters
