On the coat rack, there are a pair of pilly mittens, a pale blue angora hat with a hemlock twig stuck to it, and a black-and-white knit scarf. Hat on scarf, mittens on hat. They are piled on top of one another like the Bremen friends – the donkey, dog, cat, and rooster of the old fable. They have the initial forlornness of those animals, though not (yet) the wild and wily freedom. It is Memorial Day – a cool one, after a few days of relentless heat. It is a forlorn time to be an abandoned woolen thing on the coat rack in a café in Vermont, though if these things stick around a scant five months more, they will once again have a chance to be of use in the world. Memorial Day pisses me off. It feels like an essential part of the mechanisms of war. Cow everybody into sacred gratitude, and then you can be doing whatever you like, under the table, in the dungeon, raiding the public treasury, safe from all resistance. You can be siphoning young lives into your machinery, using them up, training them to deploy your weapons, and then to carry the awful consequences of your unfelt plans. You can be righteous and brazen. You can make anyone who questions you into a worm.
If you’re going to live in my country, You had better respect my flag. (or else…) I know all about this dynamic, of course, because it’s the one that turns me virulent towards Memorial Day, and towards my husband as an outpost of the patriarchy. Which in some sense he might be, but he’s also someone tenderhearted, whose feelings are easily hurt, and he takes time, feeding our two beloved dogs their breakfast, and hoping this time, their tremendous powers of farting will settle down. Ideas and ideals are difficult. They form the frameworks through which we see the world, and they make us blind. No feminism, no way of sniffing out the craziness that places a publicly-funded shrine to war on the town green, insisting on it as revered sacred space, meanwhile harassing homeless veterans who have set up camp on public land. Too much feminism, no way of sensing into the shrine-makers’ need to make sense of hardship and violence. There’s a middle way. There’s a way of toggling between seeing the scarf, mittens, and hat, lurking around in late May, as just piles of fibers; and seeing the forlornness of what we no longer need, in its refusal to simply dissolve and be gone. Those we send to war refuse to dissolve and be gone. Those whose countries we make war in also refuse this. Instead, they stack up, and remind us. Here I am, the donkey who brought your sacks to market, till I grew lame. Here I am, the dog who guarded your house, till I grew deaf. Here I am, the cat who chased your mice, till I lost my sight. Here I am, the rooster who knocked up your hens, till you decided I was too ornery. Here we are, a cook from Mosul, a teacher from Kirkuk, a mother from Sulaymaniyah. You left us to stack up among the rubble you made in our cities, but instead we moved into your robbers’ house. Boo! Here we are, stacked up at your borders, and you can’t say you don’t know how we got here. I can’t say I don’t know how my back pain, my rage, my distracted exhaustion got here. I know the solution isn’t indefinitely to go away from the world of ideas, but I am grateful to have to develop the capacity to do just that. I drop out of horror and ire, into the body, where I can recognize this is what horror and ire feel like. I can feel, I and all beings, experiencing fear, anger, and self-righteousness, making ironclad US and THEM into the shape of the whole world. Pale blue angora hat the color of a cloudy horizon, you seem very innocent, and I worry a little bit about you, hanging around in cafés. Where did your girl go? Didn’t she need your warmth? She left you when the spring arrived, between 10 and 11:15 AM on March 15th. She let the new breeze ruffle her short cut hair, and hasn’t thought about you one time since then. Here you are, the color of a cloudy horizon. Putty-colored mittens, you’re a different kind of story, knit row by row by some lecture-attending woman, who thought mostly of her son, as resolutions made and unmade themselves, in the hardback pews of the town meeting hall. Like most knit mittens, you’re awkward – warm enough for maybe November, but no match for the deeper cold of February. You’re bulky, and you’re honest; and now, you’re infused with weeks of tasteful James-Brown-inflected soundtracks, kebab-miasma, and coffee-aroma. You’re pretty neutral about waiting, not even counting it as waiting. Just being. The son and the knitter carry on, elsewhere. Scarf, I don’t know what to think of you. It’s conceivable there’s a school name worked into your pattern. You have that look. Cheerful student flying around the ice. She comes in here for a cappuccino, and, suitably warmed, leaves you on the slat-backed chair. Everything I owned in college has evaporated, or more likely, stacked up in some thrift-store-dump netherplace. Memorial Day is about deciding the way things are stacked up, and telling everyone, it’s like this, dammit. If you’re going to live in my country, You’d better respect my stacks and fit my stories. Yesterday, I took my husband to church. It was a crazy idea, of course, sitting through the children’s storytime and the announcements, just for the chance to hear a young woman who served in the Army say, When people thank me for my service, I die a little bit inside. She talked about moral injury – the injury sustained by those who go to war, and by those who send them. She said, It’s not enough to say the line and walk away, absolved of all injury. I have very mixed feelings about what I did, would you like to hear about that? I have very mixed feelings about Memorial Day, would you like to hear about that, or would you prefer to post Facebook gifs of waving flags, and go eat some pulverized animals? It’s all up to you. It’s all up to me, also. In this world, it’s wrong to stay stuck in any fixed identity. The Bremen friends were themselves once bullies, and the robbers will grow old, learning for themselves what it is to be discarded. In my feminist outrage, I can easily (and often) become a bully. When I identify fixedly as a woman, I ignore the masculine in myself. I fail to see the stack of beings that I am, and that we all are. Five hooks down from the woolen stack there’s a blue bandanna hanging, and in between, a dark green fringed velvet scarf. Remember: we are all everything, stacked up in unique and recognizable configurations. When we war with one another, we do so in denial of the basic fact of our own inseparable connection. Remember this next time you turn to excise another, or some part of yourself. None of it ever goes away. It can only be transformed through recognition, collaboration, and love; through the soulful braying of abandoned animals joined together to make this found planet our home. My thumb twitches with the effort of writing, and I am done. *** {Thanks to Wikipedia for the image used above, and also to Gerhard Marcks, for making this beautiful rendering of the Bremen Town Musicians.} Is he French? Is he a Frog? Shall we define our variables? Let's not. Let's let this green felt muppetoid this 1970's memory this golem, this homunculus let's let Kermit be Kermit. Just as, let's let whatever it is that we are, just be. Yesterday, in meditation group, my friend describes the sounds of the peepers, the many million frogs fucking in the ponds and puddles all around her house. She says, they are out there, doing the nasty, and they will be doing it all night. It's so beautiful. That sound is magic, and reminds me of something that's so remote, and at the same time, so close by. The French frogs fucking. A field of bliss-sounds. Why let ourselves think that this is remote, when it is in fact just here, just right here? Yesterday morning I rose late, after rising in the middle of the night to the dog's distress-barking. Took him outside to poop, or really, to croak out some juicy farts under the full moon. Brought him back in, went back to sleep. Rose late - dogs out, husband out, father-in-law out, mother-in-law in the bath - and left the house. Authentic movement is the movement of French frogs fucking en masse. It is the dolorous sweetness of an exiled mother walking desert streets, knitting together what beauty she can find, in the blowing garbage of nowhere. Nowhere to turn but to the sweetness she can find where she finds it, caught in the binding-straps of refugee tents. Authentic movement receives Facebook messages daily from Maryam-in-the-camp, Maryam Not Her Real Name, who lost her unborn firstborn, trying to sneak into a truck to the UK. Maryam who sends me heart-and-puppy stickers, and also horrible trauma-videos of dogs being abducted women being abducted men having their heads beaten in with clubs. RUN! Authentic movement runs. It limps with the left leg, and then with the right. It has a wounded wing. It stomps along with the shuffle of duty burden heavy fucking routine, and then lets go of all that, to come home to the enjoyment body, field of French frogs fucking in Canaan, NH, of all places. peep peep peep peep peep peep peep peep peep peeeeeeeep A whole field exempt from here we all are, making things terrible for one another, missing contact with one another, entirely too preoccupied with our ideas to see one another. Maryam-in-the-camp is with her husband, though no longer with the unborn baby who liked it when she ate sweets in the the camp tea-tent. Maryam's smuggler wants to rape her. Maybe Maryam's smuggler is raping her, and that is why she sends me horrible videos via Facebook. She hasn't heard of the etiquette rules that prescribe cute-animal or liberal-indignation videos only. Even though she is in France, Maryam is living in a field where it is hard to listen for the French frogs at the edges of the world, those faithful fuckers, not trying to get anywhere at all. The camp I worked in was caught between speedy tracks: a cargo freight train line to the left, a highway to the right. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you. And of course, all of the people also speedy, all desperate to be somewhere else. The Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (in Lawrence Durrell's translation) writes: You tell yourself: I'll be gone I first heard this poem quoted in the audiobook version of Kim Stanley Robinson's amazing novel, Aurora, in which the descendants of a group of human beings sent out on a 170-year colonization journey decide to return home with the help of their increasingly sentient starship. They have come to see It was badly done. Even if their ship was equipped with French frogs, it was still no place for them. The travelers have come to see that either:
I know, I know. It's not that simple. My own story is a story of seeking French frogs elsewhere, having started off in France. Born in Switzerland, to immigrants on both sides; emigrated to the US, then Hong Kong, France, Ireland, England, Scotland. Even when I am in one of the three countries whose passports I hold, I feel like an immigrant. The French frogs like me OK, but they're not so sure I'm French. In the US, I can pass for some version of American, and so, after being briefly deportable, I've stuck around. Marion Woodman says that becoming an orphan through leaving the incestuous atmosphere of the family is the gateway through which we open to the transpersonal. I think Marion Woodman is one wise frog. Still, Maryam-in-the-camp, with her rapey smuggler, her miscarriage, the alternating photographs of herself as a blonde glamor-lady, and the videos of callous violence. My orphanhood is not the same as hers. Our orphanhoods are important in their connection. I have no idea what to do next, except: not disconnect. Kermit the French Frog is the bliss-body, the body of enjoyment. Even if Miss Piggy's rendition of Peaches' Fuck the Pain Away recasts their relationship in a startling light, I believe Kermit can handle it. Kermit knows that you don't get to the bliss-body by excising and smiley-facing your way across the surface of this orphan planet, with its woes. You get there by knowing all of it, and finding the heart of compassion in its midst. The morning after her miscarriage, and her most recent failed attempt to reach the UK, Maryam comes to the tent we've shanghaied for a popup beauty space. It was the mosque, but fuck it! Today we're massaging hands and feet. We're waxing lady-mustaches and cutting hair. Today, ladies are eating dates and plums, and having rainbows painted on their fingernails. Tomorrow, someone will burn the whole tent down. Fuckers! But for now, there's lovingkindness here. There are plump babies rolling on the mostly clean carpet, and there are some fine-looking orphans taking care of one another.
Today, we're finding the sweet spot, the frog pond, not on the edges of the camp, but right in the middle, two doors down from the rapey people-smugglers who wait to shuttle pain to more pain, or to less, depending. |
AuthorJulie Püttgen is an artist, expressive arts therapist, and meditation teacher. Archives
November 2019
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