Awe Studies: LINER NOTES
This piece is part of a series that responds to the theme of the 2024 Cleveland Humanities Festival: “Awe.”
LINER NOTES
Sister tells me our mother is drinking again. All of us are talkative and mean. My mother has given K a pair of white coffee mugs for Christmas because she doesn’t really know him. It’s almost 5 am and I’m awake listening to K breathe. Sister is telling our mother where she’ll be at age 90. Stepfather: And what about me, where will I be?
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The German word Brandung. The German phrase Mythen des Alltags. It’s not a question of smart or stupid. It’s a question of understanding your particular strength of seeing.
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Garbage bags mounded on West 52nd become one with the snow. Orange streetlight. Two slugs, sleeping next to each other. Noticing things as I walk (“radiant vision”) a way of reminding myself I can be in love. Eye contact through a window: a woman in a red jacket, security. During the play tonight, the thought: is there ever really a moment when it is too late? I was going to go to the party. I went to bed. I will get up tomorrow and I will still have missed the party. Sunlight on my skin in the park. In the formal garden, behind a chain link fence, a cherub. “Maybe it was part of the divine plan. It was written and the ink was dry.” And shrugged. (Man on the bus.)
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I write in weak language because English shouldn’t put itself at the center anymore and anyway there are other better ways of saying things. Whitehead: a vegetable is a democracy. The word prehend. Lying in a messy bed, feeling the day slip away. Hate the messy house, the dirty kitchen floor. Depressed and restless. K picks a fight to give his anger a container. I’m reading Chekhov. Am I trapped in an unlucky marriage? What am I doing about it? “One unfortunate in my carriage had his trousers taken off and chewing-gum rubbed in his pubic hair. He screamed a lot but I think he really enjoyed the publicity” (Welch). “...intrigues being born and dying within us, many generations of them during our single lifetime...” (Butler). “And this of course is a novel of my whole life. Built on and then and then and then and how everything kept becoming different” (Yushi). I’d like to be the sort of person who orders a specific type of tea online. The greatest joy: a messy bed on a rainy Saturday afternoon. The light coming in the window is gorgeous: the most delicate pale blue. The light is green. The light is gray. I get up because I can’t stop coughing. Put on some rice with a tablespoon of butter. Jock strap. Delicious moments the other night I forgot to record. His old apartment across from an enormous Catholic Church. I don’t trust beauty. I make with a destructive spirit. The room feels so empty with you gone.
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Dream: Wasting disease. Park Slope mom marks you with a Sharpie and you waste away. Dream: Sarah Schulman’s uncle is being fired from NYU, he’s a biologist. I swing a pole, everyone is swinging a pole. I suspect that everything I do or say after 11 pm is lunatic. Panic about it at 5 am. In real life a police officer shoots a man twenty times in his own backyard. Is there someplace else to stand? No. (Shaved pubes.) Sleeping w 22 year old boys. J says they are the first generation to grow up with school shooter drills. A middle-aged man standing, eating out of a takeout container, in a whole vast second-floor apartment. The light is lurid and red. What is there to look at but a screen? How nice it is to be fucked, my face smashed up against a wall, on someone’s leather couch, imperfectly covered in a blue sheet. Am I sad about a potential breakup because the story will be uncontrollable, might go a way I don’t want it to? A handsome boy with a smooth face and a deep voice and an ugly acquisitive twitch. He takes pleasure in letting us know that he may have given another boy gonorrhea. I want to say it feels like we’re in a poem together: incompatible idioms, lumpy in the lines. Was I never young and stupid? Was I always hardworking and afraid? “When that story ends...” is R’s way of saying that his mom will die. I am learning to leave dramatic tension at the ends of my scenes.
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I am learning not to need reassurance, or to offer it either. The movie tonight was full of beheadings and immolation. Everyone kept giggling. Boys wouldn’t stop talking. I covered my mouth with my shirt. E pierced her ears. Little pink studs, she says, against her pink skin. Dear MJ, I’ve started living again. With one boy I watched pigeons swirling over a Brooklyn roof—then landing on the coop like cotton candy on a stick. With the other I sat by a Victorian swimming pool in a towel as the rain came crashing down, my little bag in my lap, beach umbrella pummelled, we could barely talk, just marveling at the force of the sky and our little shelter. Everything’s in motion. It never settles. The best I feel I can do is pause long enough to say a blessing. Is that the lesson? Forget lessons. Spontaneous psalms. Riding home in the drizzle, it seems to me everything I’ve ever written is a lie. Online your face looks distant, obscure, and bearded. Desires have gotten outsized. How to bring them back to the scale of objects on a table? Probably you have to shelter them from narrative. Muggiest night of the summer I droop on the porch with a cigarette. Damp butt in cheap underwear. Looking through the door at the warmly lit floorboards of my apartment. It occurs to me: Oh! I’m “thinking about my life.”
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I love him most when he makes fun of me in entirely precise ways. A completely sentimental story—sentimental like Americans writing about gay longing in foreign countries. Riding a bus through a thunderstorm to the city where the boy I have a crush on is waiting for me. Golden hour and the sounds of fans. I’m fresh from the shower. R is sleeping. A bird crosses the blue expanse of the window. I can’t see you from here, but I know the upper part of your back is sunburned. A season in my life when I realize there is no living right or living wrong, just living, mistakes as alive as the pleasures. Bus clears traffic. Amitav Ghosh. Sore ass. Bending road. All indeterminate with K. “I am human, nothing human is alien to me.” (Latin?) And sometimes we come up empty, sometimes we are mistaken. Like putting a hand through wet leaves where you thought was solid ground. The cackling laughter of the middle-aged rabbi beside me at the play. Comes out as gay at age 60, big scandal in the shul. He looks at me for mutual recognition, for a communion between homosexuals. “That happened to me at the pool last week,” he says. “Literally.” Looking out at the beach, high, a saturated corrugated evening, cool cigarette kiss down my throat. I wonder at the too-muchness of the world. I can’t quite access the thought now but it came at me from all sides.
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Good writing is knowing when to stand up and leave the room of each paragraph.
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Hits me now, 1:35 am, how dishonest I’ve been—afraid to puncture the lovely otherworldliness of this thing with the choice to move to Cali. Maybe when I am clear w R I will be able to speak honestly to K. Because as of now everything I told K was beside the point and I couldn’t tell why. The white fantasy of living in the everything. The white fantasy of living in the both. After the call with R, I smoked a cigarette. Then I vomited, then I showered for the first time in several days. Green boxer briefs, limp and wrinkled. Train to the hotel, drop off the psychiatric meds. Backpack full of weed deliveries I may have to make. Pretzels near Wall St. That made me feel better. Getting back in red sheets on the futon on the floor feels like entering an open mouth. And not just the color. Woke the morning of my birthday in a panic over computer security. Total craft is deadly. The way is made by much seizing of accident, and pleasure sometimes in the flat foot. New rule: Don’t spend money after eight o’clock. Showering after fancy yoga I think, When was the last time I was naked in Williamsburg? “Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something” (Haraway). I have trouble sometimes remembering (registering?) that this life is my life.
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I am tired of all these boyfriends. I want you. You I want. Is there another way to say it? This pleasant outdoor cafe is swarming with bees! Everyone is angry at me. Why do I do this? Arriving at the Airbnb I have a feeling like: this Airbnb host gives all his guests blow jobs and then either murders us or implants chips in the backs of our necks. In the morning, he knocks on the door of my bedroom. Come in, I say, dreading it, excited, and yes, I was right, honest to God, there he is, the Airbnb host, naked. The lightswitch and mirror decorated with little felt hearts. Book on the table: What Every Body is Saying (FBI interrogator unpacks body language for you). “You’re all sweaty. You don’t want to take a shower?” I dream that our cat has died. Pick him up and he is an empty sleeve of fur. The woman’s pointing arm. I am sore and sickish. Toothpaste on the bathroom mirror. I do my thinking on roads. Not by driving on them, but by looking at them and the landscapes around them. “Isn’t most poetry writing about… making the wrong choice again and again and again?” (Hallberg) My father asks me, “Why are you wearing a hat? Just for fun?” Hung up the phone with R and I knew our summer fling was over. “Are you okay bb?” “Yah just laughing at something in my dream.” Darkness hangs on all the objects. Strange figure passing in the hallway. I wasted my best years not getting fucked.
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THE KIND OF WRITING THAT FALLS LIKE LEAVES
THE KIND OF WRITING THAT PILES UP QUIETLY INSIDE YOU
THE KIND OF WRITING THAT ALWAYS TEXTS YOU BACK RIGHT AWAY AND YOU WISH IT WOULDN’T
WRITING LIKE DRIED-OUT MASKING TAPE
WRITING LIKE MICROSOFT PAINT
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Mental tests of my own affection: Which mug do I give him? The one I like best? How do I know which one I like best? Melville is interested in the exception, the one who would break the system. Timothée Chalamet’s shaky instagram camera work makes me feel close to him, reminds me what closeness feels like. A shack in Bed Stuy (photo). I am missing winter. Am I becoming a dishonest person? I think I am unhappier than I like to acknowledge. A bump behind my ear that’s very sore. Halloween. Told you I wanted to start estrogen. I couldn’t finish any of my sentences. We’ll part as dear friends. Once I transition I will be able to let go of the quality of prose I don’t like in my own writing. Maybe I’ll just be like Susan Sontag then. In my dream, someone says: They all go away at first. Then, eventually, you meet the one or two who will stay. For years now, I have been shouting from a great distance away.
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Eyebrows done. Novel: I become a woman while living in a famous writer’s apartment. “Find your feet. Find your tail” (Emezi). I am afraid but that doesn’t mean I’m not walking in the right direction. “Anger is a short madness” (Horace). The sculpture the ice cubes make in a glass of water when they melt, cluster, fuse. “The fear of pain and causing pain is, no doubt, a sin” (Sarton). I’m sorry, sister says, I know I’m not supposed to say this, but it just doesn’t make sense to me. I could understand someone who was just so unhappy, so tortured by it. But you seem happy. I guess I’m not that happy, I say. A girl at the party shows us pictures of a beach house where she went to have sex. Out there is the ocean, someone told her, but she couldn’t see because it was all darkness. Trey likes listening to vinyl and watching The Office at the same time. Last night of Casa Diva. A novel that describes a book yet-to-be written, permeated by the life that is hypothesizing it. A short story about a girl who writes rosy community musicals (me) but she gets a new roommate and he’s a nightmare. She can’t sleep and decides all the other people in her life are betraying her. Is it better to get a written agreement? Is trust a feeling or a choice? Keep my women’s clothes in a little cardboard box. Dream: man presses his thick tongue into my mouth to correct my Hebrew. Scott, who pours hot water through the whistling hole in the tea kettle. The mirror at the end of the hall shows me breasts and belly through my shirt.
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At some point I’ll forget what happened today. Watching the sky change in MacArthur park, the soccer players, the men carrying off the goals; the darkness, the tables and the pupusas, the ride uptown on the scooter—I’ll forget it all. And even now K comes over and says, I don’t want to work, I want to go to sleep with you. This night when the rain keeps starting up and stopping. I read these poems when I was a teenager. I didn’t understand them but knew I loved them. I want too much from my life at the same time. How do I spread it all out. How do I think like a plant, or better yet like a gardener. I pretty consistently now think of myself as a girl. Dream: I carried in my pocket the small black box that I knew would blow me up. A carpeted classroom. Something pure about it. I have been so sad lately. But also tired of reporting to others on my feelings. When I tell a friend how down I am I end up feeling embarrassed and bored. I worry I am squandering the best years of my life. Put that line in quotation marks and give it to an annoying character.
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I’m not happy. I feel unhealthy. I am running around too much. I did see the moon tonight it’s true. The girl in the rolly chair has to stop speaking because she is going to cry. “I feel like such a baby. But then I wonder if that’s what I’m able to contribute! Because if you can be passionate and excited and honest and willing...” she trails off. I think she’s only a year or two out of high school. Two close friends gradually move in different directions: this is the most heartbreaking story. Would I feel this alone if I lived here by myself? Am I old and tired all the time now? Are we just punishing each other? Does the word “sensible” have a cultural meaning anymore? Notre Dame burned today. I’ve been “chanting for money” all week. And then: $6 blowing down the highway as I waited for the bus outside the DMV. Girl on the bus is making a list in a notebook: “How to change.” It was like a weary pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares (?). I was a child who didn’t like other people’s saliva on my silverware. I want to be less dutiful. CB asks how I’m doing and I can’t think of anything to say. I got all these emails full of love and basically weeping but now that I have time to reply I am in a dry and administrative mood. “Memory heals into imagination” (Hillman). My lover sits naked on the couch, in a towel, trying not to cry. I’m fixated on the dust underneath the couch.
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THE KIND OF WRITING WHERE YOU FINISH THE SENTENCE AND REALIZE YOU JUST SAID SOMETHING TRUE. O SHIT. I’VE GOTTA MAKE SOME CHANGES IN MY LIFE.
(CAN I EVEN PRINT THIS NOW?)
THE KIND OF WRITING THAT IS JUST TRACES OF A LONG SERIES OF MISTAKES
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THE KIND OF WRITING THAT HAS A DIFFERENT VOICE AT MIDNIGHT, UNDER THE COVERS
THE KIND OF WRITING THAT CAN SIT ALONE IN A GAY BAR AND DRINK A NONALCOHOLIC HEINEKEN
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THE KIND OF WRITING THAT TICK-TICK-TICKS LIKE A SERIAL NUMBER
RUSTS LIKE A LOCK
SMELLS LIKE A HARDWARE STORE AISLE
THE KIND OF WRITING THAT SMELLS
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LITERALLY LIFTS UP YOUR ARM AND SMELLS YOU
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WRITING LIKE OKAY BUT
WHERE ARE WE SUPPOSED TO GO NOW
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BUT REALLY
? WHERE
?
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ALL I EVER WANT
IS TO SPEAK IN A CLEAR, SIMPLE VOICE
LANGUAGE LIKE WATER
LANGUAGE LIKE LIGHT, STIRRED BY SHADOW
ON A CURTAIN
A WALL
A FLOOR
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ALL I EVER WANT IS A CLEAR SIMPLE VOICE
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Am I just antisocial? I want to go to sleep early. Little sex drive. Not much sensual pleasure in life, beyond watching the sky and craving pizza and beer. The nine year old at the climate rally shouts into the mic: “All of us... we have to be our best!” Made me want to cry. I can still feel TSA hands on my breasts. Airport bar. I know several people in Atlanta. If I were to run into any of them, I’d have to tell them that I am drunk and have tits now. My lover does not feel comfortable going on a walk with me tonight because I am hiccuping too much. A book called, “Nazi Love Letters.” I am not sure if I know what love is. Not sure what is sentimentality, or attachment. Is love like writing? Is love righteous? T’s almost whispered voice on the phone tonight, what fine-fingered leaps. I have been rushing through. Maybe the only thing I can say about love is that love is not-rushing. Certainty that something will come. Or even now I’ve overstated it. Love is a painter in the desert. This will be the year I become a mystic. Yesterday I prayed twice, morning and evening. This morning I meant to pray, but then I got on a call about a grant application and then had to rush and shower for work. Need to stay home tonight and wrestle with my heart. Maybe clean the shower. We hold each other close, side by side. But it has been a long time since we met each other face to face. My skin these days is smooth and dusty and unsexed. Spikenard! Yum.
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When I look at the messy bed I start wailing and crying. Go back to the apartment to drop off clean laundry and get overwhelmed again. Leaving, it’s cold outside. The feeling is that I’ll never be warm again. The ones who cultivated their lives as an aesthetic. As opposed to those of us who are lost in our lives, who float and fumble. Laxative pill: Fuck! Never again. Stopping by the apartment and crying again. I don’t know if I was ever overwhelmingly happy here, but it was the most real life I’ve ever had. The indignity, then, of going to Crossroads to find a jacket to replace the one K urged me to toss. One salesperson whispers to the other: I never trust a person with a lanyard. And me with K’s lanyard trailing out of my back pocket. Sunset in Tennessee. Crickets and frogs and a gray sky above the trees. “Look! Mauve. Mauve? However you say it. Purple.” The others go inside. Count four vultures overhead, one with a notch in her wing. Hear the rain against the roof before I feel it. “In the end, the bone has to come out of the soup” (Pinckney). A box on the street in frigid Somerville, an offering of books in an empty Amazon carton: hardcover and paperback. All about tax shelters. I feel no contact with the world. I am surrounded by convenience and preference. “None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.” Probably unwise to reread my whole relationship through the lens of Nightwood. Going to CVS for lipstick, eye liner, eye makeup, sponges, estradiol, alcohol swaps, syringes, needles. To write poetry all you really have to have is the gumption to sit down and do it. How to talk to my children about death? No, how to talk to my parents. Their faith in growth, their passion for comfort. To live my lamp-lit future, surrounded by dying poor people and expensive bunkers. “What blessed tears, if they’re not just for you.” My touch is naive again, and slightly afraid.