Foiled again. Bright tinfoil chocolate Christmas mice, hanging by golden string tails. Foil wrappers flattened into 10G rodent squish. The foil inside of a pretzel-fish bag, of a Pringles can. Foiled again into eating things that aren’t strictly speaking food, to meet a deep-seated, deep-seeded need. Foiled and feathered. Toiled and tethered.
I sit at the table and think of foil mice. I bite a foil mouse into quarters, savoring the chocolate melting on my tongue. Foiled in the happiest of ways. Foiled again into the holidays, which seem less serious with each passing year. While my parents take a nap, Timothy and I step out to the charity shops on Leith Walk for a box of assorted metallic ornaments and some strings of battery-powered lights: golden stars, nutcrackers, plain blue-white LEDs. We pull the fake ficus to the center of the living room and push fake gerber daisies (also latent in the apartment’s décor) between its boughs. A Christmas tree appears without planning or expectation, pulled together from What Is, shimmering with foil Christmas mice my parents brought from Switzerland. The holidays were never not-here. I unfold the sheet of golden paper I brought from home and wrap two re-painted thrift-store sheep, a box of chocolates, a small pot of witch’s balm, some tea, a felt heart, a found Santa Claus. It is all small, all emerging from the world’s pre-existing bounty. I love my parents without being foiled in this love. My parents give us Bluetooth beanies with built in headlamps and earphones. They are silly, they are perfect, Fats Domino comes walking through woolly hats into our ears and hearts. What if Christmas and all the other high holidays can be foiled simply by not falling into a trance of specialness? Ordinary-extraordinary, whether the calendar says December 25th, or March 11th, or anything. You can find beauty and generosity or lack and abandonment, anytime. Foiled: one side is shiny silver and the other is a matte-gold mouse-face with little ears, whiskers, a nose, bright eyes. Wrap this around a vaguely peanut-shaped chunk of chocolate, add a string tail, and voilà! Foiled again. We are all here for so short time. Do not wait for something special to occur, for some special place to arrive, for some special state that precludes boogers and dog poo riding the automatic gate back and forth without end. Do not wait for a barfless sidewalk. Do not expect the shoes to come in your size. Do not let perfection be foiled in these ways. Foiled again: I think I am going over there and fail to notice that I have arrived. I do not walk in, do not accept the invitation, the gift, the advice of two old women traveling together. I grow irritated by what does not need to get under my skin. I forget the foil has two sides. I forget my tongue sits happily inside my mouth, even without a chocolate mouse melting on it. I hesitate when I don’t need to. Foiled again: is it peanut butter or tunafish in there? Turkey with mayonnaise, or chicken salad? Who knows? Eat it fast, and you can make yourself a tinfoil hat to block FBI transmissions. Tinfoil hat, sandwich hat, overthinking the complexities of the world’s ongoing abundance. Tinfoil crisps Tinfoil Easter eggs Tinfoil twists of salt for hill-walking Tinfoil potatoes in the campfire Tinfoil reflectors for tanning the underside of your chin Accordion tinfoil windshield covers for roasting-hot beach days Tinfoil survival blanket rustling all through the Himalayan night I have made a deal with the universe that says, Please foil me over and over and over again until I turn to you with an open heart, no matter what is showing up. I call on the universe as Supreme Foil to all my nonsense. Foil me, my Love. Replace my obsessions with wonder and my fears with awe. Unwrap me and show me always the loose layers of You. Sheets of smoked salmon pulling away from a bright foil base. Onion skin curling under the knife. Banana Tarte Tatin dropping to the plate from a hot dish. I am being peeled. Experience unwraps and glows with particularity, not-needing more, better, elsewise, less, or anything. The foil wrapper is infinitely expandable, infinitely shrinkable, fits any occasion, and goes with anything. Ta-daa! Foiled again by being unfoilable. When we are drawn to one another, what in fact is happening? You are the perfect foil for this unexamined part of myself. I am living under a foil-me-forever dispensation, but I can’t assume the same about you. You might still just be looking for a good time, and that’s fine, except Miss Foiled Again here is unlikely to be the one to deliver it. I am an agent of the Great Foil, without trying to be. My allegiance is ultimately neither with your pleasure, nor with mine. What does that make me? A Christmas mouse with Nothing/Everything filling. A 3PM sunset. The North Sea at high tide with gulls flying in the dark. A sidewalk bin of made-in-China cashmeres, curled together like bats. Foiled again and again. Pull the golden ends apart – bang! A flat plastic car, A flat plastic frog, A tissue paper crown. A love letter written on every puddle the world has ever lapped. Would you like a sprig of mint on top of that existential dilemma? How about some parsley, fresh ground pepper, or grated Parmesan?
Yes to all of it. Yes to extra cheese. Yes to dressing the whole thing up with some festive zing. At least sometimes. In my backpack I carry two versions of lip goo: sprig of mint and plain. Sprig of mint has some mica in it, and a little pinkness that earns it the name Peony. I bought it at the grocery store after maybe a ten-year lip-color fast. The Peony leaf-buds had just started showing red above the mud-season ground, and I thought, Why not? So when my lips feel chapped – which in the winter is almost all the time – I have a choice. Sparkle, or non-sparkle? Right now, sparkle. Notebook Club could definitely handle either, but my sense was, Why not? I like the sprig-of-minty taste of it, and the way it sticks a little as my lips meet. That’s the thing, isn’t it? I’m mostly happy with showing up feral, but I don’t have to, just like I don’t have to show up groomed. Last night in the sauna, I met a woman who started talking to me as soon as my feet were comfortably up the wall. She’s new to this remote place, a recently transplanted New Yorker who works from home. The gym is her one outlet for connecting with other humans, and thankfully, she says, the sprig of mint quotient here is very low. Her hair can be however it is; her swimsuit can be whatever it is; no one is going to worry about it. This is a sprig-optional community, we agreed. I notice this most in the contrast I experience when I travel back to Atlanta. There, so many women have their hair Done, their skin Done, their hairless bodies Done. For me these encounters feel like interactions with another, proximal species. I feel uncomfortable in the presence of so much sprigging, and I suspect they feel dismissive of so little. Sprig of mint in my julep Sprig of mint in the finger-washing bowl Sprig of mint on the sorbet Sprigging and sprogging, Frigging and frogging. Aho! Last night I took a photograph that unnerved me. How it happened is: I saw a flash of the red comforter I have recently added on top of the large paisley one on my bed, to keep out the zero-degree nights. I went upstairs, found a place to rest the camera, set the timer, and let the body guide my gesture in the ten-second gap between button and shutter. I did this a few times and each instance elicited a slight variation on a back-turned, self-soothing curl. The one I gravitate towards has me in a sprigless crunch, hand at the back of my neck, hand on my shoulder, balled up below the large Five Elements thangka painting from Bhutan that I sleep beneath. In the moment the gesture felt comforting, and yet at a distance there is something braced, bracing, broken in it. Don’t hurt me. I’ve been hurt, and I am caring for that hurt. There is no sprig of mint in the wide world big enough to cover that truth. I feel you seeing me, and I will not meet your gaze. The New York Times has been semi-regularly running reader response stories from men reflecting on MeToo. Some of it feels interesting to me. I don’t have other access to the dating traumas of eighty-year-old men, or the landscape of their sense of remorse. Other parts feel deeply frustrating and familiar. I’ve been a good man all my life and respected women. Don’t blame me for those scoundrels over there. Really? Are you ready to talk about how misogyny has benefited you, even if you (unlikely but possible) never actively participated in its rituals? Are you ready to call a sprig a sprig? Would you be willing to trade places with me, letting go of your privileges if you could? That’s a process I’m having to go through with respect to whiteness. When I was younger, my feeling was, I’m an immigrant. Whatever racist horrors you people have cooked up in your national past, they are nothing to do with me. Don’t talk to me about my sprigs. They’re mine, and no one else’s, and that’s that. I didn’t want to think about how the territory I occupied, even as an immigrant, was sponsored by systemic oppression. I didn’t want to be connected with Bad People, and I didn’t want to acknowledge the ways my ease came at the cost of others’ dis-ease. A sprig in every pot. What would that look like? My favorite grocers – a small, scrappy, independent place – has just announced that they’re going to close. For me, that’s going to be deeply sad and hard, like losing a vegetable-church community. We can afford to get our sprigs elsewhere, if we have to, but I wonder about all the financially-struggling families I see there, all the East and South Asian restaurants that get their supplies there, all the new immigrants who depend on this place for vegetables and fruits that remind them of home. No one else is going to have fat sheaves of garlic chives for $1.75. No one else is going to stock fish sauce at wholesale prices. What will become of us without wide-leaf mint in plump bags, when we want it, at prices we can afford? In some ways, the store is sprigless – they don’t take produce out of the cardboard crates, they don’t take credit cards, and the only packaging they provide is the boxes that everything arrived in, to begin with. At the same time, it is the very Kingdom of Sprigs, stocking watercress, curry leaves, basil, cilantro, and rosemary – abundant, essential, and alive. I wonder what it might take to save the store? The owners are physically exhausted from their work and ready to retire. But how about someone else? Money’s needed and also the physical strength and willingness to drive a truck through the night, load it up, unload it, and stock the shelves. That’s apparently a sixteen- to seventeen-hour day, and not everyone’s going to be willing to take up its call. I just wish the someones who would take joy and pride in it, who could make a living at it, would appear in this narrow window while there’s still a chance. Sprig of mint to my nose on a hot and dusty day. Sprig of mint gifted to me by cooking friend that now occupies most of a garden bed. Sprig of mint growing spontaneously where the ground has been opened up for latent seeds and roots. Essential, strong, irrepressible. Mint will grow to meet the space offered it, sending out spreading, galloping rhizomes with little white centipede feet. It will come back once the winter ebbs, telling its stories of freshness distilled from frost-stilled mornings and soggy November afternoons. It will hold its essence, sprigged, chopped, muddled, or infused. Fairy dust. Dust bunnies. Dusty old tales of yore.
Dusty is the household life, a rubbish heap. Washing the dust from His feet. Washing the dust from Her eyes. Angel dust. How long it will take for this body to turn to dust? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Taking handfuls of that young man’s ashes and throwing them into the brisk English air. All we are is dust in the wind. Snot, oil of the joints, undigested food, oil of the body, hair of the head, hair of the body, teeth, nails, skin, marrow, stardust, stardust, stardust. Anything I pick up in my studio tells me dust-stories about just how long it’s been since I last picked it up. Two weeks? A modest sprinkling. Two years? Elaborate dust-spires have formed, and the object is transitioning to a kind of dustful rest. I can sweep it off, but the truth is there: From dust you have arisen {paint-rag} and to dust you shall return. In the monastery, there was a formal way to request that whoever was assigned to give that evening’s Dharma talk surrender the goods: Brahmā cā loka tipati sahampati, Kat añjalī andivaraṁ ayājathā, Santīdha sattapara jakkha jātikā, Desatu dhammaṁ anukampimaṁ pajaṁ In English this is roughly, From the realm of the gods came the world-ruler Sahampati, requesting with joined palms that the Buddha teach the Dharma to those with but little dust in their eyes. No dust? Not a chance. But some beings, the request suggests, have not gone too long without shaking themselves of the terrible ideas that afflict most of us, most of the time. For me it varies day by day, how much dust I think I have in my eyes, how much is actually there. This morning I woke lazily, but cheerfully, ready to meet experience without ill will. OK, stove, let’s do this thing. OK, bread, I think there’s time. OK, dogs, let’s go skid around on some crusty snow. OK, book, I’m getting closer to having you figured out. Who knows, really, but the feeling is of less dust. Not because there’s no pain and everything is solved, but because there’s less resistance to what's there. More love for What Is means less dust? That seems plausible. Nadia Bolz-Weber, sort of a rock star in the Lutheran world, talks about the distance we tend to imagine between ourselves as we are, and ourselves as we should be: Dusty Mofo Me, and Dustless Me of the Future. She makes the obvious but elusive point that What Is is always in relationship with what we actually are. Of course. It’s not called What Is for nothing. But meanwhile, if we distract ourselves in relationship with what should be, we miss the opportunity to be loved. We fret about dust and forget innate wholeness. The way she describes all of this is moving and self-evident. Don’t imagine that God is waiting to love someone who will never exist. Don’t allow dust to disconnect you from the deep sources of your worth. When I was a student, the sculpture building at Yale was far removed from campus, a vaguely alarming post-industrial warren of dangerous equipment opening into cavernous spaces. My TA, let’s call him Matt, was a deeply devoted resident of this building. One day I came in for Sculpture I (a kind of study-abroad for painters like me), and someone had block-lettered MATT IS A DUSTY MOFO across the back wall of the studio, in what looked like drywall compound. It struck me with the force of love. Someone sculpture-loved Matt, just as he was. It’s stuck with me, and sometimes a voice that sounds a bit like JULIE IS A DUSTY MOFO rises up grinning from the ground of being to fill me with delight. Dust is funny: it can mean neglect and also acceptance. I reach behind the seat of our small red car and grasp a ball of dusty dog hair, dried leaves, and pine needles. Neglect plus acceptance. How likely is it, given fifteen free minutes, that I’ll deal with this, instead of making myself a cup of tea and reading something random online? Not very likely, until it is. I now know there’s a gas station nearby with free air and free vacuum. Someday, everything will come together, and that dust-wad will get sucked into wherever gas station detritus goes. Meanwhile, I’m not too worried. Holy, dusty places. Dusty, holy places. Some of my first exposure to both happened in central Tibet. There’s very little water, lots of places, and it’s cold, so laundry’s just not something people do a lot of. The wind whips mountain dust into tall, whirling devils, and all the colors outdoors are mediated by a fine coating of the world’s disintegration. Holy, dusty world. I remember going around with the bandanna tied over my nose, Annie Oakley style. I remember dust in my ears, in my eyes, my nose. The Himalayas thrust upward each year, while the winds sand them down to dust. Sometimes I can feel parts of myself being ground down and polished by those same winds. My ambitions and resentments soften; my mistakes feel less grave. This morning I accidentally squirted out way more of my expensive face cream from the tube than I needed, and the first thought to arise was, Let us celebrate the festival of roses! I smeared the fine-smelling stuff into my face, neck, chest, and hands. Life is too short to get testy about flailings like these. So what if the sheets are a bit dog-dusty? We all slept so sweetly last night, and this morning the sun has a better chance than usual of piercing through December gloom. I’m on the last page of the Brothers of the Sacred Heart Sexy Jesus Calendar that my nun friends gave me last year for Christmas. Instead of ordering another one, I think I’m going to collage my own this year, pasting the radiant heart of Jesus over sandhill cranes, polar bears, and urban parks. I’m going to put the Sexy Jesus back into nonprofit environmental conservation and birdwatching, as my reminder that all that is dusty is not lost, and all that is lost is not dusty. He will smile at me for another year, dustless, stainless, smiling, and secure. I’ll smile back, remembering JESUS IS A DUSTY MOFO who loves me just as I am. No smoking is going to resolve the dread that seeps up into your bones in that house.
I mean: you could smoke lots of stuff, and temporarily visit some other realms, but not one of them is going to go right into the heart of the dread and say: Hello, You’re part of me And while I don’t like that one bit, I recognize you. Hello, smoking dread, like an eel steeped in the fumes of whatever smoldering fire cooked you up slowly. Applewood-smoked dread, or hickory. Perhaps ancestral-mahogany-smoked. Smoke-and-mirrors-smoked. What’s that smell? Nothing. Stop being so sensitive. What’s that taste? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why does everything have to be so complicated, with you? No smoking means no gesture to deflect whatever is showing up like a hollow in the belly. I used to admire smokers on train platforms because they were the only ones who truly looked like they had something satisfying to do. Me, the reader, notebook-scribbler, photographer? None of those seemed nearly so self-contained. The smokers stood staring squint-eyed down the track, absorbed in their own slow cooking. Smoking – casual smoking everywhere. I have childhood memories of almost all the men in my family smoking, and even occasionally my glamorous aunts and rebellious cousin. Pipes and cigarettes, hand-rolled and pre-made, in holders and between fingers. My father smoked till I was maybe eight, then quit one day without telling anyone. It was a while before we noticed. No more whirling ashtray with a central button to send smoking mess down into an inner compartment. No more smoky TV golf. My grandfather, though, never quit. It stayed with him till death, and through tuberculosis. A steady diet of Benson & Hedges Lights smoked through a black Bakelite holder. Luckily, I hated the taste of these, even though I tried very hard to take them on as a rite of passage into adulthood. It was easy to steal a few from the square Swedish cut-glass holder on the dining room table, or from the sweet-smelling, red-felt lined silver box in the living room. Cigarettes were like fizzy water or butter: a condiment, a necessity of daily life. I lit them in the orchard and failed find any sense in which joy ensued. Plus, I knew my lungs were vulnerable to bronchitis. I quit before I started. Smoking is now a blurred category. Timothy’s students vape in the back of the classroom, from devices they charge on their laptops. You don’t need to smoke, anymore, to get high. Chewable, skin-transmitted, ingested, snack-formed, cell-phone-analogue forms of high are increasingly everywhere, and in some sense that’s great. Physical pain and anxiety respond to these, and soothing comes to places that have never been other than jangled and horrified. But still the dread. What about it? This morning I didn’t want to leave the house, didn’t want to deal with the snow-covered car or the slick roads, but the dogs are non-negotiable. You can’t give them something to smoke and expect them to feel satisfied without real forest-time. So I skidded up the hill, released the monsters into their beloved freedom, and spent a long while walking, listening to the snowfall, noticing how very joyful the whole thing was. And surprising. My moods are by now fairly well-known to me, but the world continues to be full of wonder. If I'd stayed home, if I’d gone into some other kind of work-pattern, I would have missed the opportunity to be with this moment of surrender to snow, animal-nature, and quiet. I might have tried to smoke my dread away, when all it really wanted was to get outside of itself and touch the world. Non-smoking is relatively new. When I was little, you could smoke on the plane, as a matter of course. I don’t have clear memories of what that was like, but it must’ve been awful. You could smoke in the airport, in a restaurant, at someone else’s house. You could smoke in a meeting with your kid’s teacher? Maybe not, and not in church either. But basically, it was assumed that smoking was strongly related to breathing for some people, so you just had to put up with it. Smoking was standing up for yourself as a woman. My mother read Redbook, and among the cookie recipes and child-rearing tips, the Virginia Slims ads were lone beacons of feminist rebellion. I’m smoking to show them they can’t boss me around. In Time magazine, which my dad read, it was more like, I’m smoking because your rules can’t contain this rugged outdoor man. Or, We smoke together because we are just that kind of irrepressibly fun bunch! When Stephanie went to Ireland as an exchange student at Trinity, she started smoking in earnest. Marlboro reds, unfiltered. She lost a lot of weight, on her special cigarette/potato/butter/sex diet, and bought a beautiful golden satin dress, which looked amazing on her. Later, when she was ill, the oncologists wanted her to stop smoking, even though the cancer was in her brain, not her lungs. She did, but she asked them to tell her if or when it was clear enough that the cancer was killing her, so she could go back to smoking. They did. She smoked a lot in the last year of her life, squinting into the backyard with that same look I’d admired on the train-smokers, years before. It helped with the dread, I imagine. It brought her out into the backyard, where she could watch her dog Bettye enjoy the sunlight and the grass. I wish smoking were something more people could do from a place of abundance, and less a place of compulsion. I have grown this plant, tended it, seen it go through its phases, and now I’m rolling it up, for soothing, for contemplation, and as an offering of gratitude to all that is good. In theory, that’s happening more often these days, in Vermont where people are allowed to grow two cannabis plants for personal use. (Is that a per person, per year quota? Do children count as part of the household? Does a single mom with a toddler get four plants?) There’s something forty-acres-and-a-mule about this scenario, or at least in my imagination there is. It feels different from the gas-station or grocery-store transactions I witness from time to time: expensive, impersonal, unsatisfying. I don’t smoke, but that doesn’t make me immune from compulsive patterns. Listening for the various alert sounds my phone makes, triple-checking Facebook after I post a story. These are reflexive gestures overlaid on some deeper need for soothing and connection. I come back to belly-center, heart-center, wisdom-eye-center. All of it is smoking with the fires of birth, old age, and death – and simultaneously radiant with What Is. I dive back into the roots and span of this awake body, and find vastness to contain whatever dread has come a-calling. The monster is under the bed. The old stories are under the bed. My fears of being cast away in the midst of Thanksgiving are under the bed. Meet me under the bed. Hold me under the bed, until the under and the over don’t matter anymore.
Under the bed and under the boardwalk and under the weather. Actually, right now I am flying well above the weather, over maybe Nova Scotia, and it is looking pretty fucking cold out there. Frankfurt to Boston in what amounts to a flying bed. I would hurt myself if I tried to get under here, plus I would miss all the tasty snacks that Nina the therapist-in-training and her colleagues keep bringing my way. Snow drifts in wide valleys. Cat-belly clouds rippling over the surface of the earth like there are no borders and no boundaries. There are no borders and no boundaries. Under the bed is where Elliot’s and Chloe’s and Timothy’s and my hair all drift together in silky dust-cloud nebulae. Under the bed is where virgin carpet lives, never harassed by vacuuming, never stained, never worn down by feet or paws. Under the bed is the preserve of old watercolor paintings of flowers by Timothy’s Nana, that I once thought I might draw on top of, echoing a cave wall’s accumulation of layered mammoths and deer. I have not done this. Under the bed are Nana’s untouched Japanese ladies and roses. We are flying over a giant breach in the clouds, through which, more clouds can be glimpsed under the bed. Someone’s pulled back the covers, and underneath are more covers. It’s covers all the way down, except it can’t be. Nova Scotia’s down there somewhere. My home is down there somewhere, and my bed, and Chloe and Elliot at the Puppy Hoosegow. We fly over cover of cloud. We fly under cover of sky. Thanksgiving brings monsters out from under my bed. Instead of feeling thankful and producing perfect pies, the parts of me that have never felt loved in this world come forward to declare their griefs. I’ve never been wanted here. You can’t see me unless I wear the ill-fitting clothes of my ancestors. I am not a ghost. I am here, even if you don’t want to see me, and I feel like an idiot for traveling all this way to see you. This time, I understand these parts aren’t going to find what they need, alone. I text my brother, I know in some way this is silly, but could you come see me? I am downstairs, under the bed, having a hard time. He shows up. He listens. The exile parts feel a little less unpresentable and alone. My dad joins us. It’s an under-the-bed conference. It doesn’t matter whether what I am saying makes sense. I say it and am heard and welcomed back. We all go upstairs and eat together. We are flying over two more long rents in the clouds. Maybe it’s important for ruptures to arise, so that there’s some airflow between the over- and under-the-bed realms? Otherwise they would forget about one another, and drift apart. I have just finished reading a friend’s long memoir, which reads in part like a long invitation to come under the bed, or stay under the bed, or welcome him back out from under the bed and into the light. There are sections where I read and am asleep, and sections where I read and am electrified by the strangeness or power or resonance of what I am receiving. We are flying over the covers. By the time I finally reach home, I will feel like a monster who needs a bed to crawl into, not under. It’s possible my whole driveway is a sheet of ice. It’s possible I won’t even be able to drive in and will need to pick-axe my way home. Possible but not likely. Once, I saw bewildered anguish flicker across a friend’s eyes. I must have let my desire show, he said, before shoving the whole thing back under the bed. How do we decide who and what lives in our beds, or under them? Under the bed can be OK for a little while, to release the pressure of remembering all the lines, up top, but it’s really no place to live. Fuck the script. Fuck the fucking-script, especially. Let it go. What do you feel like? More kissing. This. Not that. You. Not you. Tenderness. An end to the sense of being alone in my monsterhood. What happens when desire goes under the bed? Snacking. This new phone. My calendar. Proxy-wars, both internal and external. My head tells me that I exist, but the signals from my body are weak. I can’t get through. I feel mean. I notice how people swallow and laugh nervously. I forget that I clear my throat and am nervous, too, when I feel there’s no space for desire to emerge openly in the world. I forget I snore. Desire can actually be quite friendly in its chaotic intensity. I might not get what I want, but there won’t be any doubt I’m alive. The clouds part for good and now we are flying over a snowy landscape tunneled and riddled with roads. People are down there. I can’t see where they live or where their beds are, but I can see the tracks of their desires in the paths snaking outwards from a river basin across huge white fields of snow. No one can stay under the bed forever, and once we’re out, our migrations dance the shape of the world. Shoulder pads make women into linebackers and linebackers into tanks.
Shoulder pads could double as codpieces or bra-pumper-uppers in a pinch, but usually don’t. In the 1980’s shoulder pads were key: many of my memories of moving from girls’ clothes into women’s involve them. The jackets of course had them – big meaty ones – but then also the V-neck cotton sweaters, dresses, and coats. It became possible to wear two or three layers of shoulder pads on top of one another, like some upper-body Pea Princess bracing against the pain of the world through her foamy, foamy armor. The pads folded in half along their vertical axes and were covered with slippery polyester material. It was easy to get them bunched up in weird ways, even when only one layer was involved in that day’s outfit. Pads of any kind share this property: the ones inside swimsuits and cheap bras; the ones I wore between my legs until the Gospel of Tampon came to save me from misaligned adhesive and innocent pubic hairs ripped out before their time. Pads depend on some static notion of the body, improved. Don’t move so much! We are addressing your flaws, lacks, and leaks. Be still. We know what is best for you. I had a fuchsia mohair coat with a huge black plaid pattern early in high school – it was obnoxious and I loved it. The lining was silky raspberry-colored stuff and the shoulder pads were legend. I have distinct memories of wearing it at debate tournaments, paired with a striped gold lamé skirt my aunt had made for me, and some kind of giant hot-glue-gunned bow in my hair. I needed all that to enter into the high-speed bouts of verbal sparring that were four-man cross-ex debate. I needed them for a field where smart girls were encouraged to enter, but not to win. If I looked flamboyant enough, maybe I could tell myself the visual assault was what cost my partner and I the match, and not the many ways our gender disqualified us from being taken seriously. If I’d showed up straight, and still lost despite getting it all right, my heart would have broken. Fight for a crappy plastic trophy in ridiculous shoulder pads and lose – you can write the whole thing off as a nerd’s game you were never really in. Fight in earnest and lose, when you know the judges and odds were always stacked against you – and real pain will find you. There are no shoulder pads in my clothes anymore. No room for them, really. In this climate, with the number of layers required for survival rising daily, everything needs to be streamlined to fit together. Which are the under-sweaters, and which the over? Which are the under-coats? I tromped through this morning’s slush and rainfall in two pairs of pants, two sweaters, and two jackets. And this is only the beginning. Till at least May, I will need layer upon layer of unpadded clothing to keep me safe. Besides the climate-related reasons for going padless, I also feel something shifting around the kinds of pain I expose myself to and the ways I respond to it. Today, you’d not find me at a South Georgia debate tournament, barking away the weekend on a sporadic diet of cheese dip, NoDoz, and Diet Coke. You’d not find me trying to argue some kid into submission over proper US policy in Central America, or sitting through a bleary-eyed ceremony were neither winning nor losing offer relief. There are places I won’t go these days, and South Georgia high school debate tournament are some of them, even though the grownups are supposed to come back and serve as judges. Then there’s an unpadded way of being with pain. Last night I went to see Bohemian Rhapsody, the film about Freddie Mercury and Queen. I went because something about Freddie Mercury’s embodied joy and sexuality interested me – because in his unpadded Live Aid performance, his body told me something of my own potential. And, oh my goodness, I cried. There was a choice point: hold the tears in check or melt into them. I melted, and they rolled down my cheeks to soak the inside of my collar. Some deep nonverbal grief arose – for how hard it is to be human, for how hard it is to live one’s truth and stay connected to others, for courage in the face of the death sentence we all carry, but seldom account for. I cried a bucket of tears in the movie, then more in the car, and still more at home. I took the precaution of surrounding myself with fur: my fake fur bolero, my real dogs, my newly-acquired old mink cape. Some unpadded sobs came wanting voice and I gave them voice, till they subsided and I noticed I was hungry, empty, and free. Sobs, then avocado and fake chicken nuggets. That was the unpadded order of things. Still there are some forms of padding that feel non-optional. Nipples are forbidden, so padding in the bra. Straightforward female wrath is forbidden, so carefully couched, nonviolently communicated requests. Drop the first, and your chest becomes an outlaw state. Drop the second, and the relationships you hold most dear feel in danger of rupture. What have I done? Nipples out, wrath out, is there a place for me in this world? Maybe, maybe not. Freddie Mercury’s nipples were pretty much out, and there was a big place for him in this world, until AIDS cut his life short. This week I took a daily-practice photograph of myself in my Suit with the zips undone to my waist. My nipples aren’t showing, and yet, it’s pretty unpadded, in a way that many men wouldn’t think twice about, with regards to their own bodies. Bare-chested at the beach, at the picnic, while running. Why not? Natural. Duh. But for a woman, bare-chested in the USA in 2018 Means Something. It didn’t in France in 1978, when I was a child, but here and now it does. I am the Madonna of 108 Eyes, breasts unpadded, Suit unpadded, unsure of where this places me within the cosmology of my connections. Will Facebook take this down? Will my friends wish I’d kept a little more padding on, or think I have finally gone too far? Risk, padding. Risk, padding. So it goes. I warm my being at the fires of nakedness, getting as close as I dare, without going up in flames. Vermin’s just another word for nothing left to lose
And nothing’s all my drawers left me. Vermin good was good enough for me Good enough for me and my mousies, you see. La de da La de da de da de da da I like mice, and mice like me. If you live in New Hampshire, any sane rodent is going to do her best to find her way into your house. Negative twenty-two degrees, or the spoon drawer? Duh. Eternal snowfall of the endless winter, or curled up in a boot in the basement? Honey, please. I like mice, and mice like me, my house, and the places formerly assigned to hold cutlery and kitchen implements. It’s not like I’m a mouse-hoarder, or anything – I don’t precisely collect them – it’s just that I don’t despise them and destroy them, either. A few times we used a hav-a-hart trap in the middle of winter. There would be a sweet brown field mouse in the morning, bright eyes, little delicate hands and feet. Now what? I would scoop up the cage, an old sock full of walnuts and raisins, and head up to the forest at the top of the hill. We would scout out a hollow among tree roots – I’d stuff in the woolly bits and food, do a little chanting, and release the creature with best wishes. That was all pre-dogs. Now the mice don’t leave the cover of their wall-dens and cupboard-fortresses. They hunker down and do their dances far from where we can see. I know they’re still around, because new turds appear in the drawer where we keep clips and rubber bands – things that are three-quarters of the way to being garbage, without ever quite arriving. Twice, we’ve reached for the glass pitcher we use for water when guests come to visit and found a dead mouse inside. Mostly what I feel, then, is sorrow. Dear furry one! What a terrible way to die. I hope you did not suffer, trapped, alone, for long. Now we keep the mouth of the pitcher covered in cling film. It’s a weird thing to have to remember, but not hard to do. Vermin is a word that can only be used without an understanding of interbeing. You need a hard and fast (and false) understanding of life to be able to thrust any living creature into so toxic a category of Other. Is your toenail vermin? Your nose? Your mother? No? Well, neither is that mouse, who’s been your grandmother millions of times. To whom you’ve given birth. Who’s fed you. Vermin is as vermin sees. My friend sent me a recording he made of Brian Turner's poem, “Hwy 1,” which evokes the convoy routes of the war in Iraq as the descendants of the ancient Spice Road, and scries traveling ghosts, both old and new. In the poem, a soldier casually shoots a crane from the road. Was the soldier seeing vermin? Did holding a gun put a vermin-filter over his eyes? Did going to war change what and how he saw? How did my condemnation and indifference bring soldier and bird together in this way? Before, I would never have asked this question. Being against the war in Iraq made me incurious about what happened there, and I didn’t want any of it coming close enough to my heart to contaminate it. Stay away! I put up a vermin-filter against Bush, the war, and military violence. That is changing. Some kind of veil is lifting, pulling away with it my resistance to seeing male suffering and male experience. It’s risky, because my former anger and rejection were ways of shielding myself from experiences where I felt treated as a paradoxically seductive form of vermin. Not whole, not human, not interesting and complete and worth knowing. I decided over time not to come close to male worlds because approach felt unsafe. Not safe from the outside. Not safe from the inside either, harboring as I was a whole ancient, enculturated register of poor boundaries. Serve the men. Seek the men. Attend the men. Fuck all that. I would just stay away. I would vermin them: seductive, but dangerous. This is an exaggeration for sure, but it is a way of describing the Othering I engaged in. Mutual assured destruction, said the foreign-policy of my youth. Mutual uneasy distance, said the best strategy I could manage, for much of my life. And now, part of what I am working with in this moment is the courage to stand in a certain kind of brotherly tenderness with men, that also incorporates owning desire and its unpredictable flows. I have a kind of creepy ex-cop neighbor – or at least, I’ve seen him as creepy ever since he came unannounced to my studio at night with his Doberman bitch on a short leash. She peed on my floor. No one else was home (again – pre-dogs), and as he explained how he’d been watching me build my space over many weeks, the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. Now I see maybe he thought he was reaching out to a fellow artist, and couldn’t understand how his behavior could be perceived as creepy. Anyway, I saw this same neighbor again today, standing outside our polling place, holding signs for himself as a candidate. As I walked up, he thanked me for coming to vote, and I greeted him. For the first time I could see the valiance of his endless candidacies in a staunchly Democratic town that will never elect him. I could see in his quest something akin to my own stubborn practices. True, I will never vote for him, or for anyone whose approach to abortion rights is that “women have the right to become mothers,” but I don’t see him as dangerously Other anymore. I see someone willing to be vulnerable and public about what he believes. My vermin-veil against him is thinning. Is that what the woo-woo contingent means, when they say The Veil Is Thin? If so, I’m all for it. Let the veils thin. Let the cheering be for something other than separation and scorn. My friend, a veteran, spoke to me from outside a Trump rally this weekend. He wasn’t especially close, but I could still hear the roars of approval as Trump’s voice stoked and thickened vermin-veils at stadium scale. Maybe tenderness doesn’t work at that scale? If you ask someone about Millions of Mice Invading Our Homes, or Those Immigrant Hordes Coming to Take Over Our Country, they’re likely to respond with more horror than they would to that little creature with the hands so much like mine, or that nice man who’s been feeding me all these many years. Contact, tenderness, and specificity, are all risky, and the work of building up confidence to embody them is its own deep path. I swing a sword, dance like a Valkyrie, speak up when it is uncomfortable to do so, and pay attention to what does not fit, all so I can come closer to interbeing with others, without being overwhelmed. The air has been leaking slowly out of my tires for weeks now, and so last night just before closing time at the tire bazaar, I finally went in to have them checked. The man at the front desk sloughed me off. He called me, “Miss,” which, as a forty-six year old, six-foot woman wearing a mechanic’s jumpsuit with eyes sewn all over it, had me wondering about his veils. Then he tried to sell me on buying new rims. Whatever. Because I actually noticed the all-caps warning clause on the paper he asked me to sign, he grudgingly told me to come back the next day, to have the lugs on my wheels checked. In the morning Front Desk Man called me “Miss” again, and then uttered a magical sentence: Ask any of the guys out there for a re-torque and a re-learn. Exactly, I thought. That is what I am after. I stood for a while, watching a man about my age whale on my wheels with a wrench, so hard the whole car shook with each effort. Something in me was touched by the physical effort he was making, the commitment of exerting his will so completely for something that was just a routine part of his workday. That was the re-torque. The re-learn involved a more mysterious and nuanced dialogue, which at first didn’t seem to be going anywhere. More men gathered around the car, clearly wondering about something. I left the safety of my observer’s stance and came forward with what I’d noticed in my own explorations. They listened. I listened. More checking. None of us knew. We huddled together not-knowing, noticing how similar our hands were to one another’s, taking one another’s side. In that moment, there was no space for vermin, only beings, tending to one another along the endless road home. I am allergic to Cipro, which causes elephantiasis-hives in my hands, groin, and armpits.
I am allergic to the word “panties.” I am allergic to the word. I am allergic to the feeling. I am allergic to the mindset that created the word. I am allergic to my own lazy thinking, and yours also. I am allergic to either/or, and all the ills that spring from it. I am allergic to Trump. I am allergic to the collapse that Trump induces in others. I am allergic to the puffing-up that Trump induces in others. I am aware that allergies are battles. I am aware that battles give the body a sense of aliveness. I am aware that my body is alive even when I don’t have grapefruit-sized hives or virulent disagreements, but that either of these can have a tonic effect. I am allergic to the brown dust coating anything that stays unmoved in my studio for more than one day. Where does it come from, this Lebanese dust? It is the crumbling of unmoved things. It is dog-fur powder, and the earth releasing from between muddy dog-toes. It is whatever was on top of the rafters that didn’t get sealed in when the insulation guys turned the whole place into a snow cave. I am allergic to the reminders of what a big fucking mess I am likely to leave behind, stuff-wise, when I die. Also, the big fucking messes everyone in my family is likely to leave behind. When my husband and his friend parked the moving truck with his stuff outside the house and opened the rolling door, everything had tumbled into a heap, because our street is so steep. I took one look at that heap, and could only imagine setting fire to it, right there, right then. I was having an allergy to the idea of cluttering up our new house with old crap. I was having an auto-immune response to domestic life. I am allergic to the itchy feeling at the back of my throat. I am allergic to the middle finger on my right hand turning grey the minute the temperature drops below thirty-five degrees. I am allergic to being soothed. Don’t try to soothe me when I’m feeling allergic – it will go poorly. Once when Timothy was having an allergic reaction brought on by hiking through chest-high grass and we didn’t have any drugs along to help, I lay him down on a sleeping mat to cool off. I helped him breathe more slowly and held a damp cloth to his forehead. Slowly he brought himself out of the panic of allergy. Slowly his body remembered the existence of something other than battle. Elliot is allergic to the propane delivery man, who came this morning. It’s confusing to him when I don’t endorse his sense of the apocalypse. One part of him is geared to attack, remove, protect. And then another part wants to align with what I’m telling him, which is, Shhh. It’s OK. I can see in his body how hard this is: his hackles are up, his teeth are bared, and he’s whimpering. I tell them to go in his crate and lay down. When he can do this, the fear passes. He doesn’t need to be in charge. The battle ends. He stands down. But it’s hard. It’s hard to let go of a good allergy, once it gets going. I’m allergic to this election. It’s true. In one week, another round of we’re-not-sure, but… and late-night elect-o-meters will begin. When I’m having an allergy attack to election results, the worst possible feelings about other people show up as a symptom of battle. How could they? How COULD they? Giant hives form on my brain, and I need to lay down. What is hypoallergenic? Do a bunch of rabbits always have to be recruited into battle, to figure this out? What if I committed, no matter what happens a week from now, to not think the worst of everyone? I would need to lay down in a hypoallergenic place like a safety closet and curl up with my dogs (who don’t care about elections). There, my hackles could come down and my whimpering could subside. I would learn there how not to gloat or grind my teeth, how to reflect on the vulnerable imperfection of our human systems. I wonder how much discomfort I could commit to, towards undoing the allergies I have harbored all my life, the ones I’ve caught from others, and the ones I cooked up on my own? It could be like a dance-a-thon. Each minute I spent sitting in the fires of snotty-nosed not-liking would be a dollar for a good cause, a balm, an ending. All night, loathing by loathing, I would burn, and you could join me. We would wear our best itchy costumes and support one another through the shivers, swellings, shit fits, sneezes, wheezes, and barks of the detox-process of laying down arms. The buffet would be covered in everything we hate. We would nibble our way through canned mandarin oranges, green kool-aid, frosted lemon cookies, lima beans, sauerkraut, cottage cheese, and gnarly fruit taffee. We’d emerge exhausted the next morning, emptied, cleansed, and free to move around unhindered by what we once thought we could not abide. Shilly-shallying makes a lot of sense, when the other options are hyperventilation or total collapse. Some forms of shilly-shallying are in fact quite pleasant, and even useful. Feeling paralyzed by that email you really need to send? Fear not! The anemones, raspberries, and roses need cutting back. The dahlias need digging up.
I dug up the dahlias that my friend at the women’s advocacy center gave me this spring, in the form of a brain-sized clump of root. When I put them in, I really had no idea what I was doing. I broke off bits and buried them here and there – among the tomatoes, behind the lavender – proceeding with all the deliberateness and expertise of a squirrel in a nut-frenzy. Then, also like a squirrel, I forgot all about them. There were other things to shilly-shally about. Gradually, dark-stemmed, frondy-leaved creatures started to poke up in a kind of circle-chorus around the garden. I did nothing for them, just watched. As everything else started to die off this Fall, they gained momentum, eventually shouting a deep-red chord of impossible complexity and grace. Then the frost came, and they withered overnight. I dug up the dahlias and saw that each original root-bit had transformed itself into a multi-breasted fertility goddess, nodes and nodes of dahlia packed together into yam-like clusters of useless, harmless beauty. I loved them even more then, knowing that what I had taken for the dahlias’ shilly-shallying period was in fact root-building, storing up for the wild blooming yet to come. Get it? I’m a little annoyed at myself for this metaphor, but it seems inescapable. Plants I took to be meh-meh shilly-shallying while the lilies and peonies Made an Effort were in fact following their own fertile, invisible cycle. I dug up the dahlias yesterday to keep them safe over the winter, and found that my friend’s gift had quadrupled during its obscurity in the ordinary-extraordinary ground. Next year we can have dahlias out the wazoo, or I can give dahlias to everyone I know. Either would be fine. I will keep the roots in the dark, unfreezing cellar for their long winter’s rest. In fact, my own shilly-shallying can be a way of quietly working out the steps between where I am now and the places that scare me. Maybe my fear of that email is actually grounded in not yet having the tools and resources I need to elicit the responses I wish for. Better to wait, to grow root and depth, than to send another ill-formed squawk into the already-crowded airspaces of the world. I look for ways to find relationships with what’s already here, to ask rich and squirrely questions, without hope of immediate reply. My friend, in a similar place of transitions, says, “I know my rhythms.” Yes. Sometimes I do, too. I do the Shilly-Shally Samba and the Shilly-Shally Shake. I learn Shilly-Shally Stillness. Out the small square window of this library room where we write on a cherry-wood table, some late leaves cling to the tops of otherwise bare branches. Who’s to say whether they are shilly-shallying or not? So much of what I call standstill is actually ripening. So much of what later appears in imagination begins imperceptibly. Here I am, laying down under gradually thickening covers, to sleep, clench my teeth and elbows, and dream. What will that accomplish? My mother, a chronic insomniac, complains of the waste of time that sleep (or in her case, serial novel-reading) represents. I don’t feel that way, welcoming instead the opportunity to breathe, to let go of control, to dream of beautiful old houses, handmade weapons, and communities fully-formed without the slightest conscious effort on my part. I sleep, I dream, my soul’s roots grow deep and fertile as the breasts of a grape-bodied goddess. Soon I will be shouting in flowers. Soon I will wither to the ground. Soon I will be dug up for storage, and planted again when the ground is soft enough for shoveling. This weekly writing itself has a quality of shilly-shallying, of lingering long enough in the company of my own experience to allow its cycles of growth and dying back. Often I finish with a sense of not-knowing how any of what has come through my hand fits together. Then I read it out loud and find: Yes. There is a thread, a chorus, a weaving-together. I did not know how word would follow word, or what form the finished creature might take. Only generous shilly-shallying has revealed what is here. Only time, space, and acceptance. “I’ve never regretted time spent on the cushion,” says my Art and Dharma friend, and I know I’ve never regretted the kind of shilly-shallying that parts the curtains of intention, opening itself to listen deeper than thought. My shrinking hat won’t fit over the new realities that are swelling up like shaggy manes from the ground of being. That hat doesn’t stand a chance, now that a full-grown Buddha-bump is sprouting and swelling its way up through the confines of my formerly-stable skull-pan. That hat’s going to need a glide-out, like those RV’s where the dining room sort of ectoplasms its way out into the neighbor’s campsite, once you’ve got the generator hooked up. It’s going to need an elasticized panel, a pregnant princess’ tasteful bulge-suit. Really, we called those things blight-outs when we traveled near them. What’s the point of going camping if you need so much crap around you that you’ve basically just re-created your whole cluttered lair in the great outdoors?
My shrinking hat may not actually be shrinking at all: just yesterday, when the afternoon air felt raw and it was time to go out in the woods, I pulled it down from the shelf and found that it still fits. My grandmother knitted it for my mother when she was a girl, I think, which means it’s maybe sixty years old, and there it is – still fitting. It looks like something that a peasant in a Brueghel painting would wear while shitting behind a log, except it’s red. Same floppy earpieces, same central seam across the hemispheres of my brain. I try not to shit in the woods on dayhikes, but I pee gleefully, enjoying the opportunity to contribute to the forest ecology. My hat is also a scarf, thanks to my grandmother’s ingenuity. It’s like being a bloodhound with long floppy ears you can choose to tie under your chin. Or like long floppy breasts you can choose to throw over your shoulders while you run. Even sixty years from now, when I am hundred and six years old, I don’t think my breasts will be able to do that. Maybe, though. You never know, when you’re talking about crone-powers. My shrinking hat is made up of all the stories of what should happen, but can’t. This email, that clever initiative, this undone task – all of these knit themselves into a sort of matted cap that does its best to keep the Buddha-bulge from bulging. It’s a head-erection-preventer. Luckily, in the last few years, I’ve learned a secret: I can take off my shrinking hat! I can forget about tasks, brain-expansion, enlightenment, or the password to that thing I need to take care of. I can let it all go. Sometimes being Without Hat is the best plan. To keep my hat, my head, my heart from shrinking, I need to keep coming back to what’s actually happening, a surprising percentage of which is painful, at least on first exposure. It’s painful to be stuck with whatever longing shines through, and painful to abandon that longing. It’s painful to come out of dissociating and painful to meet what’s behind it. Here is this wanting to be seen and attended to, this tender ache for contact. Here I am, X marks the spot, in one role: longed-for. Here I am, longing. Aha! Now the whole dynamic can be seen without shrinking. This is what it is like. This is what it is like. Hat on, hat off, here in the burning quality of being alive. My friend posted a series of snarky, and yet more or less kind, photo-commentaries on the fashions at a recent royal wedding. At such events, hats are apt to shrink, to mushroom, to mutate. One woman wears a tiny bull’s-eye out, of which seven or eight blue, plumed arrows appear to be jutting. Another sports some significant section of a bear. Knock knock, writes the commentator, Who’s there? No one. Why do I love looking at these pictures so much? Because, finery. Because, beauty, and an escape from my own daily jeans and clogs. What is certainly shrinking is my willingness to be inconvenienced in any way by my clothing, but I admire in some sense those who wear arrows jutting out of their heads for the sake of style. That same woman’s dress is so cut-through with lacy openings as to give the distinct impression of a darkness between her blonde legs. A dare is being made: I dare you to look at me, in my arrows, in the shrinking area of my dress, and see me as whole, unblemished, and clear. Who gave us the power to shrink one another’s hats? Who said, one day in preschool, Your jobs with one another will be to impinge on space and expression in such a way that joy, vitality, loud feathery squawks, and abysses of grief are no longer possible? Not the children themselves, but those placed in charge of larger numbers of them than can be lovingly corralled at once. I used to watch the long lines of SUVs dropping off children at the school where I taught, and wonder, Really? What is it about me, about us, that gives you any sense that we will do a better job of spending time with your children, these many hours, than you yourself could? I watched the tides of dropping-off, the tides of picking-up, with a sense of how we shrink our days, our lives, into shapes that, while moderately convenient and (in a teacher’s case) deemed necessary for survival, do not honor the wholeness of what we are. Not that homeschooling is much better, necessarily. Just: what the fuck are we doing, shrinking ourselves into geometry classrooms and early-morning devotionals read from stapled-together newsprint journalettes? My shrinking hat is a MAGA cap sitting on the head of Kanye West as he freestyles his way through and obeisance to Trump. My MAGA cap is my wish to be taken seriously and paid some attention in the world. Good attention, bad attention: it doesn’t matter. What matters is not to be shrunk into oblivion. What matters is to expand into voice, crowd, channeling fear into a collective wave. What matters is that greatness is the opposite of shrinking. Under this hat, anything could happen, so you’d better watch out. There could be armies in here, whole mountains of rich coal, the obedience of millions. This hat refuses to shrink, or to tell anyone what greatness really is. I won’t take this hat off for anyone. It’s here to stay, and all your mushroomy hippie-hats, your lady-hats with arrows sticking out of them, your grandmother-hats, and any other hats having to do with shady dealings south of the border, can go fuck themselves. This hat is a pre-existing condition. This hat is a caste-marker. Some people still travel with hat-boxes: beautiful Black church ladies, Orthodox men, and probably people who go to royal weddings. I’ve seen the first two personally, and the last one is a guess. Royal wedding fascinator-boxes might look a bit like the tubes that single-malt bottles come in, except taller and featherier. Timothy and I have talked about trying to fly with Chloe and Elliot, not as companion animals, but as fashion. An Elliot hat. Knock knock. Who’s there? Big teeth. A Chloe coat with a tail. Neither of the dogs are willing to shrink, so these plans are unlikely to work. |
AuthorJulie Püttgen is an artist, expressive arts therapist, and meditation teacher. Archives
November 2019
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108 Names of Now