I woke up wondering what it was that I found confounding -- what chink in the armour I thought mismatched. Mystery is a large part of enigma-charisma, and I suppose it is that result we share from somehow similarly conflicted backgrounds. "I can't quite figure you out. I can't quite get how you can be so many different things at once. That's what makes you so ... interesting. That's what makes you so fascinating. But will I ever fully know you?" I think I've heard that before, indirectly in dreamy, aside looks and lop-sided smiles sitting opposite me in intimate conversation ... I've answered with the usual droopy-browed universalist "I love you as a person" and the resigned self-acceptance: oh Mel, by what you say and how you say it you want to draw them closer but you only send them away -- a pleasant trip, but away ...
He:
A total lack of disenchantment. No space for it. No tolerance for it. But not even a space for disenchantment with disenchantment. No reflexivity.
Boyish glee. Mischieviousness. Contrasted with: something noble, although that is not the right word. Something "blessed"? (bless-ed, two syllables, in the uniquely post-Elizabethan sense of the word and not in its pan-religious potentiality) What in a white man would be pooh-poohed as "entitlement," but in the post-colonial tickingly relished as "self-respecting." Still not the right word.
Together, charming. Again contrasted with a quiet hint of inner conflict. "People like us are screwed up," he proposes, and I welcome the commiseration as authoritative, brotherly yet commandeering. But in the taxi later he surprises me with a quick but certain joke at his being "pathetic", or "you find me pathetic", or something like that. This was the intriguing chink. For someone so monstrously confident, where did this moment of effacement come from? There is no god for him, there is no sense of lurking retribution requiring penance for his women, his entourage, his success, his power, his gigglish enjoyment of it all -- but is there still that glance in the mirror at a well-established, deserved, hard-earned ego, that yet sees itself as a mask? Is there still that? "At least I'm not as bad as you," he jokes, and I agree laughingly, seeing myself still sometimes in my disembodied, self-voyeurisitic way as the lowest of the low. But my intrigue ensues because perhaps I am not so far off the mark in musing that people need more than lovers -- that they need love, and that love is so often the chance to ask someone you trust, "Am I worthy?" and for them to reply with, "Actually, you're a creep!"?
...MISERY LOVES COMPANY (does company love misery?)
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Um of the Pneumoment
Maybe it's a little embarrassing to stay at a hospital where so many more people are sicker than you (and not all within its walls). With the room's pasty turquoise finishings and too-white too-yellow single stalk orchid, 4141 in italicized Times New Roman font, this place feels too much a roadside motel, a 70s dream. I know, there's the ankle fracture down the hall and there's just a hacking cough right next door, but somewhere, somewhere else in this building, there is sickness, real sickness, mind-blowing destroyers inside bodies that can't help themselves. Maybe it's more embarrassing to have these languid, waxy, over-educated contemplations about sickness. Because then again, I wouldn't know sickness if it punctured me in the gut and waggled a tutting finger back and forth kidney-to-kidney, or, proverbially, slapped me in the face.
I understood (shouldn't I say: felt?) sickness emotionally. I experienced my worst symptoms of pneumonia like a break up. First, the fatigue, the weakness. Already too many over-heated nights believed to be "a bad flu" (romantically, the down of the ups ands) had led to a general wash of tiredness, and it was starting to be all I could do to stand up straight. Sitting down on marble, my sitz bones start to chill. My legs start to chill. And gradually, imperceptibly, like the frog (not a particular frog, the entire genus, apparently) which stays in a pot of boiling water until its cooked if you just turn up the heat slowly. The freeze went transparently from the floor to my sitz bones to my legs, a clarity and logic I at that moment appreciated, but then it just conquered me, ravished me with not so pleasure as the nymph in the embrace of Zeus in a cloud. No, no classicist references here. By the time my attack was at its peak, I felt as in Trainspotting cold turkey, hoodied and huddled on the elevator landing (to be outdoors, only minutely warmer than indoors). My lips were blue, my fingers were numb, and deep inside I felt a vacuum in my intestines, I felt an emptiness emptier than empty -- "empty" at least prescribes a container within which there is a space that could be filled -- that made me cry like a schoolgirl having lost her first love. That space is unfillable. That space is invisible. That space only existed in the context of the thing that filled it, not the other way around. And even deeper than that, in a tiny knotted kernel sits all your energy of love resting at the cusp of that vast diminishing plateau, but you shiver and shake more because you feel like nothing will make that nut grow again.
The last time I fell in love I caught myself asking that question of how many more chances I could get at this thing.
I might once have considered this an "adolescent" feeling (said most likely as an adolescent dying to grow out of adolescence into some imaginary and powerful adulthood, swift, controlling, useful), and I caught myself again trying to rationalize myself out of the feeling, but all in all and for where I stand currently in a strange confluence of multinational journeying and dispirited attempts to find a vision and an embrace of myself inside of that vision -- I feel graced and honored by this viral visitation and its emotional rupture. I am also very glad it ended. I am also surprised at just how "out of it" one can be during a fever yet still so cogent, such that you only realize what it means to be "in it" only when it's all over. The difference of 2 degrees centrigrade is the hazy boundary of function to unfunction, awareness to brain-prickling no-idea. Just 2 degrees. I wonder how many lives get changed on that boundary of 2 degrees, since I imagine that some of us are in fever or have a heatedness of some sort non-clinical, which changes both perception and behavior, and therefore, relationship and consequence. I wonder if I can write a short story about that. I wonder if I will ever stop talking about writing a story and actually write a story. Oh, but I am.
***
It's Day Seven of this trip to The Pneumoment, my self-ordained secondary coming of age ritual whereby, having spent months recollecting old friends, memories, angsts and disappointments, I fall immensely and stubbornly sick in a process of self-cleansing.
...LIKE THE PHOENIX FROM ITS OWN SWEAT AND ASHES
(the fable doesn't speak to the sweat beneath its feathers before the mythical bird roasted in its own barbecue, for it was the sweat, mind you, that weighed her down)
I have to say that I am enjoying being weak, and before any ambitious horsemen take offence, let me qualify: I am enjoying being weak for the quiet and willingness it gives me. I am in this state becoming my own counter-stone, the sapphire to my usual ruby red, the opal to my obsidian outlook. I don't feel like a rocketing pinball with no sense of how it finds a way out (chance, very possibly, a little bit of physics). But mind you, I am also not yet fat. Nothing like a lost figure to make you rally against sedentariness for its unwelcome aging.
***
I understood (shouldn't I say: felt?) sickness emotionally. I experienced my worst symptoms of pneumonia like a break up. First, the fatigue, the weakness. Already too many over-heated nights believed to be "a bad flu" (romantically, the down of the ups ands) had led to a general wash of tiredness, and it was starting to be all I could do to stand up straight. Sitting down on marble, my sitz bones start to chill. My legs start to chill. And gradually, imperceptibly, like the frog (not a particular frog, the entire genus, apparently) which stays in a pot of boiling water until its cooked if you just turn up the heat slowly. The freeze went transparently from the floor to my sitz bones to my legs, a clarity and logic I at that moment appreciated, but then it just conquered me, ravished me with not so pleasure as the nymph in the embrace of Zeus in a cloud. No, no classicist references here. By the time my attack was at its peak, I felt as in Trainspotting cold turkey, hoodied and huddled on the elevator landing (to be outdoors, only minutely warmer than indoors). My lips were blue, my fingers were numb, and deep inside I felt a vacuum in my intestines, I felt an emptiness emptier than empty -- "empty" at least prescribes a container within which there is a space that could be filled -- that made me cry like a schoolgirl having lost her first love. That space is unfillable. That space is invisible. That space only existed in the context of the thing that filled it, not the other way around. And even deeper than that, in a tiny knotted kernel sits all your energy of love resting at the cusp of that vast diminishing plateau, but you shiver and shake more because you feel like nothing will make that nut grow again.
The last time I fell in love I caught myself asking that question of how many more chances I could get at this thing.
I might once have considered this an "adolescent" feeling (said most likely as an adolescent dying to grow out of adolescence into some imaginary and powerful adulthood, swift, controlling, useful), and I caught myself again trying to rationalize myself out of the feeling, but all in all and for where I stand currently in a strange confluence of multinational journeying and dispirited attempts to find a vision and an embrace of myself inside of that vision -- I feel graced and honored by this viral visitation and its emotional rupture. I am also very glad it ended. I am also surprised at just how "out of it" one can be during a fever yet still so cogent, such that you only realize what it means to be "in it" only when it's all over. The difference of 2 degrees centrigrade is the hazy boundary of function to unfunction, awareness to brain-prickling no-idea. Just 2 degrees. I wonder how many lives get changed on that boundary of 2 degrees, since I imagine that some of us are in fever or have a heatedness of some sort non-clinical, which changes both perception and behavior, and therefore, relationship and consequence. I wonder if I can write a short story about that. I wonder if I will ever stop talking about writing a story and actually write a story. Oh, but I am.
***
It's Day Seven of this trip to The Pneumoment, my self-ordained secondary coming of age ritual whereby, having spent months recollecting old friends, memories, angsts and disappointments, I fall immensely and stubbornly sick in a process of self-cleansing.
...LIKE THE PHOENIX FROM ITS OWN SWEAT AND ASHES
(the fable doesn't speak to the sweat beneath its feathers before the mythical bird roasted in its own barbecue, for it was the sweat, mind you, that weighed her down)
I have to say that I am enjoying being weak, and before any ambitious horsemen take offence, let me qualify: I am enjoying being weak for the quiet and willingness it gives me. I am in this state becoming my own counter-stone, the sapphire to my usual ruby red, the opal to my obsidian outlook. I don't feel like a rocketing pinball with no sense of how it finds a way out (chance, very possibly, a little bit of physics). But mind you, I am also not yet fat. Nothing like a lost figure to make you rally against sedentariness for its unwelcome aging.
***
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