This is everything I look for in a music video, from the era in which I was raised to the gender bending I crave! from the get-the-message-out placards to the narratively necessary male crotch shots. And O! for unstructured dresses, her voice at 1:31, music from my childhood, lyrics I know, 1989 video quality so clear, abandoned boxcars in bad neighborhoods bespeaking the abandoned dreams in our hearts! Alas, for graveyard gambols like the ones in Now and Then; alack, an audience in raptures like the audience in raptures in my fantasies; alay, anger and elation in equal measure.
But enough poeticizing. Let us auspicate more proselike stylings…
I sort of have a bandleader jacket like Amy’s. I feel I can call her by her first name because we grew up together. At camp. When she was being sung by the older girls in the lodge during mealtimes. And I didn’t know they were singing a song by the Indigo Girls. I just thought it was another camp song like Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog and Put Your Foot On the Loud, Loud, Bang, Bang Pedal. How was I to know? I was young. It was 1996. I listened to Enya and KDWB. How was I to know? How far I would fall?
And breaking me up, and drifting my continents all over the earth
The little I know about plate tectonics has always made me terribly sad. And can’t you see why? Solely from this lonely, dark hued graphic? Wholeness disintegrates, intimacy crumbles, the east coast of South America is obviously supposed to be cosmically kissing the west coast of Africa, as seen from space, forever. When I visited Mount St Helens, I became pretty mystically obsessed with the eruption (blame plate tectonics! and by extension, the world we live in), manifested mostly in memorizing the date and time of the eruption (May 18, 1980; 8:32 am) and buying lots of before-and-after picture books. Something about a stately, pretty pastel reposed mountain erupting with a “force comparable to that of a hydrogen bomb” and forevermore existing without a snowy peak but a crater, pluming ash all the way to Idaho and Alberta made me think less that it was an active volcano in the Pacific Rim of Fire and more that it was terribly sad.
I guess I just started thinking about this again with the apparent two tectonic plates upon which Port-au-Prince sits (Caribbean Plate and Gonave Microplate), grinding and smoldering for hundreds of years before exploding. I know my interest is obviously drawn of my pesky reflexive humanness, and my species’ ability to anthropomorphize (Alright, I like what they said in the Community pilot: “People can connect with anything. We can sympathize with a pencil, we can forgive a shark, and we can give Ben Affleck an Academy Award for screenwriting.”).
Clearly I can connect with a mountain and plates, and I don’t want to be broken apart! I don’t want to explode or be reduced in size from 9,677 to 8,365 feet! I’ve just had a nightmarish interconnected Haiti-and-Helen fantasy of metaphorical personhood and I’m going to share it: A mountain like a person, seethes for centuries, explodes lava and steam, pumping ash and magma for miles, collapsing Presidential palaces, cathedrals and shacks in a dust bowl of rubble and blood and swamps and oil but then time imperceptibly passes and screams die, motion stops and silence stultifies everything in a frozen dreamscape-within-a-dreamscape of white noise and darkness, nauseous loss, all in darkness, soundless and then drifting like a continent for millennia, soundless and forgetful. Till one day you wake up coughing, with a headache, sad over visuals of Pangaea breaking up and sleepily remember that you too were once a supercontinent and a mountain and a luckless Caribbean country and the long-repressed retrospective sadness builds, the indignation over former connectedness (mother and child, fetus and womb, in utero idyll), now irreparably topographically, geologically, temporally separated by oceans and the state of being born and the necessity of growing up and not having prospects; you think, man, wouldn’t it be easier to be a mountain…
But o! the east coast of South America can never be reunited with the west coast of Africa, ancestrally marine rocks sit thousands of meters above sea level in the Alps and everything drifts, breaks and explodes. Acceptance, sadness, resignation, reality (I am not a volcano, I am a writer of WordPress posts (or, I am no longer a perfectly symmetrical volcano for my tip has become the massive Crater Glacier, sunken and concave as a fallen souffle, but still I soldier on, full of icefall and contested in name by the U.S. Board of Geographic Names)).
I seriously cannot stick with one linear thought. Someone please elect yourself to be my editor. I’ll pay… in words.
Womanhood, in a dozen free associated phrases or less: lipstick, sports bras, skin tone underwear, wilfulness, not daintiness, porcelain, pathos, pelvic thrusts, clitoridectomies, humiliation, limitation, a Hasid who becomes a matador. Sarah and I are starting a movement. A womanly movement.
It’s hard to keep a simple narrative linear and cohesive, right? No? That’s just me? Here’s what I wish I could do:
“Since Paul had led his parents to believe that school lunches cost a dollar, though the actual cost was only seventy-five cents, Paul gave Maundy the profit. In order to avoid being beaten up. So Maundy waited for him every day, making jokes like Hey, Paulie, we’ve got to stop meeting like this! HA! HA! HA! HA! Then Maundy moved into the academic arena with Paul. Coming down the long hallway that ran along the gym, he would break free from his platoon of handlers and harass Hood over by the water fountain. Pass your test over to me during math. Just do it. Maundy always smiled during these demands, as though he were engaged in an act of philanthropy. Paul wished, as in after-school specials, that he had lived to see Maundy brought low, or that he would learn of some terrible tragedy in the Maundy family–his father’s cancer, his mother alcoholism–that would explain their son, the thug. But Paul never told anyone about the situation. He never turned Maundy in. He just took it. Wendy also lived with the responsibility of isolation in public school. He had seen public school kids turn away rather than talk to her; he had heard her called whore and freak by the children of judges and social workers. In the dark, under his tweed jacket, Paul got stuck, all over again, on his parents and their chemistry. What kinds of genes gave him a life like this?”
I took my love to the olde cow patch
The cow said “Moo”
And I said “Catch!”
I threw a stone he did not see.
That cow is dead because of me.
So I’ll keep scoring
With chicks
Til I die.
But for the cow I killed,
I cry.
*this poem was inspired by a Facebook post and does not reflect the attitudes or ethics of its author. You could even say, in a certain light, it is but the antithesis of my long-cherished beliefs. You could also say, in another light, that it is the work of my alter ego, who represents my devilish lady-plowing id which only exists as an internalization of my enemies and compensatory identification with the aggressor. Really, you could say a whole bundle of things.
an invigorating entr’acte of poetical proportions from my heart to your computer screen
Odorous of swine, naked, begrimed! Dolores crawled neurasthenically to The Downing Ivory, chanting ceaseless, inaudible gibberish. Black, matte chimney shapes hovered dreadful in the distance as blunt pastel sky layers floated frailly in midair. Her journey over, her vim would recover. What sand she had! They’d tell her story, retrospectively, with great admiration for her dedication to the cause of salvaging her reputation! A lush sort of ceremony tumbled out of the backlit doorway and Dolores watched catatonically the streams of genteel ladies holding bouquets in white satin bunting, before chandeliers and red roses, black pianos, strung by pearls and diamonds, forming tight, concentric circles, wielding shiny instruments. Dolores murmured her semiconscious approbation, dazedly. Men in white satin yarmulkes kept tight, psychotic posture under glossy black hair, glassy expressions and dark, beady eyes. If they kept their mouths closed, they were very refined. They were phlegmatic partygoers, Judeo-German gentlepeople; uncreative, earnest social climbers, poorly-worded peasants, rich in resources with Hebraic fakery. It was veryWeimar, but Dolores had seen it already, seen it all (seen the horrors, shaming, opalescent, encrusted old baboons. She had harbored no delusions of surviving the dragoon). At least she was home; she was finally home. Now if only she could shake herself. But to her nauseous astonishment, Dolores spied Rita, a fellow Madeiran, wide-eyed and seemingly sound-minded, in a corner, scooping fruit punch from a silver bowl. In black velvet and loose curls, the only pair of blue eyes, standing, as if reasonably, at this garish gathering. Dolores shuddered, her eyelids fluttered. She turned with held breath to see an Egyptian sex goddess lie languidly on hot sand with a tight, shiny chestnut updo and a dark-eyed snow princess in white satin and stone face, nibbling Turkish delight. She said “I am Dolores, come from the dead…!”
how faint the line of demarcation was between the normal and neurotic person
Now, not to shift with unnecessarily disrespectful haste to a lighter topic, but I’ve never been good with tasteful WordPress transitions, so Voila! Here are some other interesting phobias, arranged in clearly compatible pairs:
Euphobia: Fear of hearing good news; Eurotophobia: Fear of female genitalia.
Caligynephobia: Fear of beautiful women; Dikephobia: Fear of justice.
Ideophobia: Fear of ideas; Ithyphallophobia: Fear of seeing, thinking about, or having an erect penis.
Judeophobia: Fear of Jews; Ouranophobia: Fear of heaven.
In middle school I used to get angry that everything circled back to sexuality, that there were friendships based on flirting, that it was impure and imperfect and biological. I thought it was reductionist, too easy, too adolescent, too petty, too dumb, too physical, too earthly.
I was ethereal, I had standards, I was the feminine ideal. I was flimsy and far-seeing and righteous and, and…
Then I discovered that people don’t respond positively to feminine passivity, that it all circles back to sexuality, all the time. But can limitations be freeing? Or do we only think as much in justificatory retrospect? It’s only sex, it’s only biology, but it’s also the crux so that makes it everything! My first novel will be entitled Sex and Self-Esteem. My second: Stanching the Wave of Melancholia with a Dike of Ejaculate.
Maybe.
But like I was saying: My story has no duplicates. I am a special, solitary Digg article; I am fragile and what I call humble but actually just fearful. I am 14 and I want to go east where I will be free of my Minnesotan shackles, free of the creepy familial cabal with its claustrophobic Jews and their refugee neediness and their wastefulness. I will go and live among civilized savages with good taste and barbaric facial hair. Ideally they will be British Freudian Sephardim-descended but I may come into a thing for blondes and hope that they wear swastikas just to make things more morally dubious and HOTTTTT. I will get into concerts free, make my own moonshine and bottle it in stainless steel receptacles so as not to get infected by all the carcinogens that did me infect when I carted my rum-and-coke concoctions around in plastic. I will feel perfectly at ease on Coney Island Avenue and try to think less at present about burqas and clitoridectomies because they get me down too fast; aye, for the nonce will I wonder only at wholesome sexuality and unpretentious common sense.
You see, Andy (or Sarah, or whoever you are), I attempt to advocate relativism in everything I do, so sure, I aver, our stories have no duplicates but we are not unique! Nay, importance is relative; everything is important if it matters to someone. In my younger years, my motto was So Long As No One Gets Hurt.
I wonder if by accepting limitations, what is cordoned off, we can transcend the cordons, storm the barricades, symbolically stand alongside the Columbia River in red cotton mail-order Victoria’s Secret shorts billowing in the late 90s wind, pretty free and 14, crying cathartically into the summertime haze that My story has no duplicates! I am unique! And, and…
This is the second half of my Realism tract. You can’t tell ‘cause I made it a separate entry but I see the links. Can you? Maybe what I’m half-flippantly, half-insistently trying to say by asserting the ‘limitation’ of sex being the crux of our mental lives (or by extension physicality in general) is just to acknowledge reality. Maybe there are no limitations at all. Maybe it’s just seeing things with uncovered eyes. Why do I feel I so fervently have to CONVINCE anonymous millions of this? Why do I think I’m the medium? Who gave me the message!? Damn it, I’m so idealistic.
“… when Max sets sail… you intuit his pluck and will from the close-ups of him staring into the unknown. He looms large here, as we do inside our heads. But when the view abruptly shifts to an overhead shot, you see that the boat is simply a speck amid an overwhelming vastness…”
“Optimism really has no place in psychotherapy,” said the woman on the podium that temperate October night. Over the wails of a particularly ponderous, pedantic old eristic, she gently continued with a saucy touch of arch, “What I’m trying to say here is it looks worse than it is.”
I like psychoanalysis and I like ladies so it makes sense that my views on optimism and realism are, to my wish-fulfilling mind, aligned with my idols.
I’ve been dogged by deeply depressed optimism-pushers all my days. They weren’t all the same. One was a manic, ecstatically passive-aggressive fireball. Another was blinded by an intoxicating cloud of mushy fakery; he couldn’t see or understand anything outside himself, drugged as he was in order to function. Another worked well with me when the conversation was superficial. I think I reminded him too much of himself. ‘Optimism’ under the auspices of the mostly males who have presented it to me has always seemed a needy, desperate, flimsy, candy-coated levee holding back an endless, restless torrent of hatred in all points directed.
And I like my hatred in the open. I don’t want to cap it so it explodes. In my experience of the world, acknowledging pain dissolves pain. Realism not negativism is the name of my prospective game. Realism heartens, optimism obfuscates. Optimism is fake. Realism is optimism.
There’s something so beautiful about staring into the vortex of sorrow, the disconsolate, destitute keening of despair! and accepting it and being humbled by it and made stronger by it, and kinder by it and that, if nothing else, is the goal on the eve of my four-and-twentieth year, notwithstanding erotic freedom.
I’m looking for a less retroactive, psychobabble-y substitute for “acting out.” But it’s hard to soberly search when I’m acting out. So if anyone you know could act as my academic other half while I histrionically and/or symbolically flail through the moonlit streets, slathered with a thick cake of sludge and trussed, hog-tied and faggoted up with rotting crab grass and ringlet butterflies while slithering over splinter-rich stockades and into the arms of myriad prickly, poison propane-expulsing insects, for god’s sake: make me privy. Perhaps I can repay them retrospectively.
