Creative Destruction - Manhattan 2002-2003
Thursday, 27 March, 2003
Wow. What IS this? I just have NO patience for chatter, noise… people who live on the surface, who are lost…
And it's not just judgment of them. I really am not comfortable around it. I am so hungry for the other stuff, that I feel… how? Bored out of my mind?? I just don't want to listen to it! I don't want to clog my mind with it when there is so much real stuff to do.
I guess my soul is so hungry now, and so aware of what is out there for it: Dance, and real exploration of questions that matter. That anything else seems such a waste of time, and I start to feel constricted when I'm around it. Like the life is being squeezed out of me, like I'm drowning… missing out on life, on the oxygen that keeps me alive… gasping for air.
What a strange reaction this is.
I also find myself getting angry at people who are slovenly: who dress like slobs, who pop their gum, who sit on the subway and chew gum with their mouths open like they were raised by rodents. People who are fat, people who walk slowly in front of me. And it's not an opinion. It's a visceral reaction. I actually feel personally offended that these people are this way. WHY??
I feel like I've suddenly become violently aware of how useless this "place" I've been in is to me. Of how it no longer serves me, how crappy it's been all along and I'm just now realizing it. How it's time for me to shoot up to a new "place."
Wednesday, 26 March, 2003
At the "Lotus Art de Vivre" reception
So, here I am… the usual cocktail party stuff: drinks, snacks, meandering aimlessly, feeling for a moment like I shouldn't be here. But then it passes. Quicker than it ever has done before. Because I know I don't belong? And I don't have to pretend? I don't know.
My question now is: Can I get past my own judgments of this "scene"? Of who these people are, what's important to them, who they are trying to be, who they're trying to impress…
And who am I trying to impress? For literally the first time in my life, I feel like it's NO ONE.
Monday, 24 March, 2003
There is a moment in making love, where the tables turn, and you are in control, you have power over me. All my defenses are down, and I let you take me. And you do take me. And in that moment, you "own" me.
With this kind of "ownership," comes a huge responsibility: You now have my heart. What will you do with it? Ignore it? Take it out to play only when YOU want to? Tire of it and move on to other things?
You now need to take care of this heart, or it will die. That's the responsibility that comes with this ownership.
And my responsibility, right now, is to not let someone own me until he understands the responsibilities and has taken them on.
Sunday, 23 March, 2003
The Day of Three Good Things
1. My apartment is rented!
2. I spent the afternoon with the first man I've been really attracted to since Daniel.
3. I took the pointe class M. was subbing, and she asked me when I was going to put on pointe shoes, and I said "I don't have any - I'll get some." And she said "yep, it's time."
Wow.
We did some partnering practice, and she said it was good to practice with a man instead of a barre - to practice the way nature intended, to practice what comes naturally. That, when you do that, you realize that you can't cling to it the way you might with a barre. Her saying that made me realize, you have to be a partner for the man who is lifting you up, and hold yourself up. A real man is not a barre that can be gripped tightly and clung to for support. He is instead something that - IF you can already stand on your own - can lift you even higher.
If M. were teaching welding, I'd be there every day.
Wow.
I'm going en pointe.
Wow.
I'm gonna be a dancer.
I'm gonna perform.
Thursday, 20 March, 2003
On the N train downtown:
"Mommy, I'm scared!"
"Why are you scared all the time lately, honey?"
On the R train out to Sunset Park:
An old man reaches over to the seat next to a young Asian man, and picks up a crumpled bag lying there.
"Is this yours?" he asks.
The Asian guy shakes his head "no."
The man - wearing a cap that says "USA" with stars and stripes, and with a pin on the side with more stars and stripes and the number "50" - takes the black and gold paper bag that looks like it's held fast food, and carefully folds it up. Then, he puts it into his jacket pocket.
A few seats away from him, a broken-hearted woman in a trenchcoat writes it all down in her notebook.
Thursday, 20 March, 2003
First day of war
I walked by the DuBuffet sculpture today - the one we walked by on our first "date" - and the fences were up again. The security guy told me they put them up whenever "we" are on high alert.
His heart is locked off to me. There is nothing I can say now that will get my love across to him. And I guess it's been that way for a long time. I used to blame myself - and I did a lot wrong - but it wasn't all me. It takes two people to connect, and two people to not connect. He has hardened his heart to me. I can't change that.
I'm downtown again for the first time since I moved. I've lost the boy I loved more than anything in the world. I don't know where I'm going to live. I owe rent on a place I can't live in, and need to find someone to take it over. And "we"'re bombing Iraq.
And what makes it so horrible is that I know it can get worse. Lots worse. So I can't even comfort myself with the feeling of being at rock bottom, of laughing so hard because "it can't possibly get any worse!!" …because it can.
Should I still be here?
Wednesday, 19 March, 2003
On the C train to Jeanne's
A young man in a yamulke covers his eyes as he listens to the intent words of the man on his radio. I can't hear what he is saying. At 42nd Street, he gets off the train.
Monday, 17 March, 2003
Later, home
I'm sleeping in a seven-year-old's bed. And when Joan tells him it's time to stop playing on his Play Station and go to bed, he says "no, wait, I have to show her how I play this!"
And I sit there, and watch him play his game, watch his little creature run and stomp and jump and try to get the crystal, and I think "how different is this from how I've just spent the last year?" and I wonder what it is about men that they find this kind of thing so fascinating. I loved the child in him. I still do. But children can hurt you more than adults can, because they don't understand the power they wield. They don't have an appreciation of what life means, how fragile it is, and how some things don't come back to life after you stomp on them.
All they understand is what affects them. They can't yet understand that they also have an impact on the people around them. That they can cause pain as well as feel it.
Monday, 17 March, 2003
Later, on the subway home
Waves of pity and sadness at the young kid in my yoga class. Young and fresh and skinny and sensitive. Vulnerable and a little lost, vulnerable to he knows not yet what. And he hasn't fought for HIS spine yet. I don't want to be around to see when he has to. It is too sad.
God, it's all so sad.
And the men in camouflage in the subways, with big, imposing guns. Camouflage?? Why CAMOUFLAGE??? In a SUBWAY?? Did anyone think this through? Did anyone point out that there IS no underbrush in a subway?
So why do I stay? Paul Pope says he'll leave when we start bombing Iraq. Will I? I don't think so. And here's why:
1. M.'s ballet class.
2. Jivamukti yoga
3. And the emptiness that will follow me through my whole life if I let Daniel die alone here. I know it doesn't make sense. I know he is not in my life anymore. But still, I can't bring myself to leave him here to die alone.
(Shit. Am I so convinced we are doomed?)
The people in the Lavalife online dating ads look like corpses.
"Sign up for advanced chemistry."
Is THAT the kind of chemistry he wanted? The cheap, glitzy, surface-level stuff? The chemistry I felt with him was a warm glow that suggested an unknown fiery heat below.
Monday, 17 March, 2003
Waiting for ballet class
"Fight for your spine!" M. yells, as we all try to balance in passe.
I don't know who I'd be if I hadn't been in her class this past year, but I know I wouldn't be this strong. And I realize now that these are the days I've been training for all this time.
Some day in March, 2003
We only exist in the people who know us. So, when we lose one of these people, a piece of us dies. The piece that only that person knew.
Friday, 7 March, 2003
I've learned to do impossible things in M.'s class: lift my leg straight up in the air - well, not perfectly straight, but shit, LIFTED, for God's sake! I could never do that before. And bringing my leg into a passé, from attitude en releve, or up to passé, then out to second and back to passé… all en releve…
These are all things that were impossible to me when I first tried them. Not just difficult, impossible. And on Wednesday, I actually did a fouette turn correctly. Not great, but RIGHT, for the first time. Now I have something to work from.
I told Daniel early on that what we were doing was impossible. I don't think he really heard me. But the things worth going for in life ARE impossible. Until you do them. And then they aren't anymore.
I want a partner who is up for going after the impossible. And that's what dance is. You start with a lot of hard things, and a few impossible ones, and you practice and practice and practice, and you keep trying the impossible ones, even though you've never managed to get them before, and if all you listen to is your past, then you know you never will.
But then after time - say a year - you find that even if you haven't mastered all that you practice, and you are still faced with impossibilities, you find that you are really dancing sometimes. That some nights, the music just picks you up and you fly with it. Or you balance in an impossible pose and then reach higher, and you are flying that way. There is nothing in the world like it. You are then in that moment a pure channel for God.
There are some things in life that are worth doing anything for. Dance is one, for me. So is love. It is worth practicing and practicing and practicing, and when you fall flat on your face you don't just stay there. You come back and try again. And again and again, until you get it. Ideally, you keep trying with the same person.
Because there is no other way. You'll never succeed by bailing out.
I want someone who is up for the challenge of trying and failing and trying again and failing again and trying and trying and trying. I want someone who believes in the impossible.
Friday, 28 February
Later
Sharon said, in yoga yesterday - in her beautiful talk about sunflowers and trees, how the sunflowers don't have to read a book in sunflower language that tells them how to position their bodies to meet the sun, how and when to turn, and that we have this ability too, but we've forgotten it - she said that if our INTENTION is clear, and our channels are clear - if our bodies, minds and souls are a clear channel for the life force, then that intention cannot help but be realized.
Friday, 28 February
I look out my window at the familiar street - the street I will always associate with Daniel - and I think: In two weeks, this will all be gone. And then correct myself: No, I will be gone. I will be in my new house, never again to look out these windows at this street.
When the reality of what I am hits me, it knocks me over: How fragile our human souls are - here and then not here.
But I can't bring myself to pull down the blind. I need the window open now.
Thursday, 27 February
…and just the other day, he was talking about how most people don't have "real" problems. They aren't starving to death, or being bombed. They're just upset because things don't work out the way they want them to, or the person they wanted to love them didn't…
And I asked him why he was trying to compare people's suffering and how could he think he could judge it. And he said he wasn't judging, just stating a fact.
But now I wonder something else. Why do people - especially men - need to belittle love? Why do they need to insist that it's not important, that it's nothing compared to the need for survival, or physical pain and suffering?
Do they ever ask themselves what is the point of fighting for survival in a world with no love? And does it occur to them that maybe if we didn't belittle love so much, there wouldn't be so much of the other kinds of suffering? Hunger, war, crime?
Tuesday, 25 February, 2003
And then it was over. I felt his heavy words pound down on me and I knew. I knew there was nothing I could say to get him to feel differently, to want from me what I wanted from him. And I knew he loved me. I knew he meant it when he said I was his best friend. I knew I was inside his child's heart just the same way he was in mine.
I told him I wouldn't try to talk him into working on something he didn't think could be worked on. I told him his assessment may have fit his experience, but it didn't fit mine. I told him I didn't love him just because I thought he was such a cool person - I told him that I was really in love with him and still am. I said I didn't want to say I couldn't be friends with him - but I couldn't now. And I saw him become a child again and I cried and barely got my voice out "I love you so much" as I hugged him and cried.
As he went towards the door, he turned to me and lost his face. He opened his arms to hug me - not wide, but still holding them close to his body like broken wings. As he turned to me, he broke out sobbing and so did I and he hugged me hard and I hugged him back and I had never loved anyone or anything so much.
God, if I've ever loved anyone this much I don't remember doing it. You'll have to remind me because I sure as hell don't ever remember feeling this much before.
When he walked out my door, his shoelaces were untied and I knew they stayed that way all the way home, just like his face.
Tuesday, 18 February, 2003
Sitting in a cheap café, waiting to hear back from the real estate agent about my new place, and listening to an ad on the radio for Moran's Pub - my old place.
I really hope I get this apartment. If not, I won't be crushed, but I'd really like it. We'll see…
When I was in Florida, I realized how so many people are in the business of selling love… We walked into a really nice jewelry store - affordable, but really creative, beautiful stuff. And one of the saleswomen - young and beautiful, maybe in her early 30s, but packed down in so much foundation and powder it looked unnatural - said "this one is called Aphrodite."
And that's when I realized what it was all about. Selling love to women who are afraid they're too old to get it.
And while I can stand outside of that category for now - thanks only to the circumstance of when I happened to have been born - and say "how sad" that a woman fears her own age, and believes that love - sexual love - comes only to the young… that fear is inside me too.
When I see a grey hair sticking up too prominently and pull it out; in my moments of deepest insecurity, I DO fear that I will never again have that kind of love - or that if I do, it won't last. Or I'll remember that I've only really had it in sporadic bursts anyway. The idea of being able to count on it, the way I count on being able to eat, or see my friends, isn't a reality for me.
And there are people out there making their livings on this fear. Creating baubles and bath products that promise to give a woman the inner light she needs to attract a mate.
Do I go to yoga for the same reason? Am I nurturing my soul and helping it to come out, to express itself, just in order to GET something? To "get" love?
Well, no, of course that's not the only reason, or maybe even the driving one. But I can't deny it's there. I can't deny that part of my doing yoga is out of a LACK. A need to fill a void in myself and even to better get someone else to fill that void.
But here's something I've learned in yoga: Even if it does help me to get the love from someone else that I want so badly - IF it does (and the only way it ever can) it will only be because that desire is no longer a void to be filled. Because I will have already filled it myself. And what's left is not a void, but something else.
But shit. I thought I had already gotten there. Shit. Is it just a never-ending battle with my weaknesses? Moving up to new levels, maybe, but never ever ridding my life of these essential issues?
"Issues." I never quite got the context underlying how that word is spoken in the therapeutic sub-culture. Never really sure what people REALLY mean when they say it.
My feet are cold and wet. Should have worn boots in this 4th biggest blizzard New York has ever seen. God, it's beautiful! Pristine white drifts in lower Manhattan because traffic still can't really move yet - and like a Japanese woodcut when the softly floating clumps fill the air. So quiet. So peaceful. So white.
Saturday, 15 February, 2003
Play-by-play of anti-war demonstration
I take the subway up to 51st, from where I plan to walk down to 49th and 1st. I get out of the train a little after 12:00 noon, and am stunned for a moment when I see that the subway station is jammed full of people heading patiently to the exits. When I finally step up onto the street, it too is jammed full of people, carrying signs and slowly heading east toward Third avenue. A few cars sit helplessly trying to crawl forward through the sea of marchers.
When we get to Third, the crowd is moving north and I go along. There is shouting of anti-war slogans, and every so often the crowd erupts in a collective cheer. Someone with a radio says that there are between 1.5 million and 2 million people protesting in London, and over 2 million in Rome. Someone else says that our own crowd - a wide avenue of people walking shoulder-to-shoulder - stretches back for fourteen blocks.
When we get to 54th, I hear police with megaphones at the intersection telling the crowd to get back on the sidewalk. I look at the guy next to me and we both laugh - this crowd barely fits in the street! How could anyone even think of trying to get it onto the sidewalk. The crowd ignores the policeman, and continues walking slowly north.
It soon becomes clear that any attempts to go east - to 1st Avenue, where the Rally is being held - will be thwarted. At each side street, the entire intersection is barricaded coral-style, with police inside the coral, not allowing anyone through unless they can show that they live on the block or have business there.
At 58th or 59th, we encounter cops with riot helmets. A few demonstrators try to talk them into letting us march through, but they don't budge. "Who bought your helmets?" Shout some in unison, "we did!"
The police tell someone that we can get through at 61st, but it's not true. 61st is also blocked. "You lied to us," shouts a black woman, "…again!"
We continue on to 62nd. There are cops there too, but either no barricades or fewer barricades. By the time I get there, people have started walking through. "First one," a guy near me is telling someone, "and then another, and another, and then… poof!" The cops just stand there and let us all through. Yay! We're now on 2nd Avenue.
At the intersection of 62nd and 2nd, we encounter a police barricade to 1st. The crowd converges on the cops, shouting "let us through! Let us through!" And "whose street? Our street!" One woman starts banging on the police van near the metal barricades. The cops look nervous.
Finally, people start heading down to 61st. Amazingly, the police are just getting there. So a bunch of us are able to get through before they close it off. I jump between two barricades as a cop is closing them. As soon as I get to 1st though, I look back and see many more coming through.
The crowd has thinned out a bit up here, and I walk down past 60th, where a giant video screen broadcasts the rally, to 59th, where the streets are barricaded into little "pens" where the demonstrators can stand, but cannot move forward down toward the rally.
I try walking further east and then down, but everything below 60th is closed, except for 57th. "You can't walk on 1st," says one of the cops at 53rd. "Not till later." I go back to 1st from 57th and across to 2nd, where the intersection appears to be packed. But no, it's just a massive row of police on horseback.
I continue on to 3rd Avenue, and then head down. At 53rd and 3rd, there are more police on horses. They start yelling at the crowd to get up onto the sidewalk. The crowd is not as thick as it was on the way up, but it still pretty much fills the street. There is no way it is going to fit on the sidewalk. The crowd starts shouting back at the police. Then, unbelievably, one of the mounted police begins driving his horse into the crowd.
People scream, as they are crushed back against each other. It is impossible to move except to be pushed by the wall of people, and I am pushed back towards the walls of the buildings on the street. A young woman reaches out, grasping for her friends, her eyes terrified, and then her face disappears beneath the heads in front of me. I just keep breathing, and try to forget that I have a terror of confined spaces. People are shouting "Shame! Shame! Shame!" as the public esteem New York police officers earned by rushing into the burning twin towers begins to dribble away…
The tightly packed crowd slowly disentangles itself and people walk away, shaken. One woman yells at a police officer standing at the barricades lining the street: "I hope you're proud of yourselves! A woman dropped her baby in there!"
I cross over to the other side of 3rd, and we witness the same thing happen to another crowd that has spilled into the same space. "The whole world is watching!" We shout from across the street. There must be a dozen mounted police officers, and they become more aggressive in driving into the crowds - on the side of the street, and then in the street itself. I know horses won't trample people if they can help it, but seeing horses coming at you, rising up and stomping the ground, can be pretty intimidating. Watching the police do it to people right in front of you is stomach-turning. For a moment I am weirdly disoriented, as a part of me tries to remember which third-world dictatorship I am visiting.
"Show me what democracy looks like!" Shouts the crowd, "this is what democracy looks like!"
Finally, the horsemen come to our side of the street and yell at us to move north and west. So they are no longer simply clearing the streets. They are now breaking up the demonstration. "The rally's over!" Shouts an officer on the ground. "Move away!" Across from us, on the north side of 53rd, a mounted officer rides quickly into the crowd on the sidewalk. I imagine there's some kind of city ordinance against riding horses on sidewalks, but it probably wouldn't do any good to bring it up now. We watch from the other side of the street, yell at the police, and then eventually realize that there's no point in staying: This part of the demonstration has effectively been broken up. We head west.
When I finally get back into the subway, it is past 4:00 and the crowds are still thick in the 50's. I can't help comparing the experience to the demonstrations in Hong Kong in support of the protestors in Beijing in June of 1989 - the Sunday before, and then after, the Tiananmen massacre. For two Sundays in a row, demonstrators took over some of the major thoroughfares in the city, bringing it to a standstill. Yet the then colonial and far from democratic government allowed it and even facilitated it. There were no stamping horses, no barricades keeping demonstrators from where they wanted to go, and no police yelling at people to get on the sidewalk. Those demonstrations were peaceful - just as ours had been at the beginning. There is no good reason it couldn't have stayed that way.
Tuesday, 11 February, 2003, later
I am enraged by how my country is becoming a police state, how Americans are being trained to be docile and obedient. But I am also sad when I look at the faces of the people enforcing this. They represent fear. And I can't help believing that at some level, they understand how hopeless it is hat they are doing. There is a sad desperation about it all. Because I think most of them mean well. I think they really do think about what they are doing, and what is at stake.
But then don't they also think about what it is they're fighting? The causes of terrorism? And don't they know that the nature of air terror has changed forever? Don't they know what any would-be terrorist knows? That never again will a plane-full of passengers sit passively by as armed fanatics take control of the plane?
Don't they know that that horse is already out of the barn? Yet spending on barn-door reinforcements is at an all-time high.
I hope that there is better Team B analysis going on behind the curtain than what we see - that really, all of these efforts are not going to seeking out sharp metallic objects and bombs in shoes - that really the efforts are being directed at what terrorists might actually attempt next and not what they already have.
I am angry at the perpetrators of the WTC disaster. I am angry at those who have made our lives less safe, who threaten our lives and civilization itself. I am angry beyond words at these people.
These people are not the terrorists themselves. They are the politicians and power-brokers who have created this situation. The ones who would sell our lives - and humanity itself - for a little more power, a little more money, a little more of the illusion of control.
Were I more enlightened, I would say that even they are not the enemy. That the enemy is ignorance - kleshas - and yes, that's true. But right now, I see this ignorance manifested in a group of people trying very hard to rule the world. They are the enemies of the rest of us who just want to live our lives. It is they who threaten civilization, and even the human race. It is the politicians and power brokers on both sides who don't care about my life, or Silke's new baby, who want only to be on top, and who will drag the rest of us down with them when they fail.
Tuesday, 11 February, 2003
Super Shuttle ride to Denver International Airport, listening to Rush-Limbaugh- wannabe, goading, inciting, hungering for conflict, sparking it and salivating when he hears it start to flare. This is what is meant by "rabid." I could almost see the frothing at the mouth as the adrenaline of conflict rushed through his veins.
I know that rush - I know what it's like to be drawn into conflict, to get sucked into an argument that has no point, to hunger for that rush of adrenaline.
I also know how empty it is. How it is little more than two tin can people banging their defenses against each other and never getting to what is inside. Let alone resolving what the conflict is supposedly about.
Like a feeding frenzy. Feeding and noise. And the more they feed, the more noise there is. And the more noise, the less you hear.
Saturday, 8 February, 2003
The Butterfly Pavilion, Denver.
If a butterfly - with no neocortex, mind you - can manage to make itself look
like an owl peering around a tree trunk, then how much power for transformation,
for being something new, do I have that I'm not using?
These huge luna moths that just sit on the trees laying eggs have wingtips that look like snake heads tinted with blue. There must be blue-tinted snakes where they come from. And then they have these little transparent patches in their wings, through which a predator sees whatever is on the other side of the moth.
The adults have no feeding mechanism - they live only long enough to lay their eggs. The eggs hatch, the caterpillars eat lots of leaves, and then curl up into their cocoons and come out as brilliantly disguised parents of future caterpillars… It just doesn't seem right - all that sophisticated camouflage and they don't even get to eat.
Wednesday, 22 January, 2003
On the R train home.
An old couple comes in and sits down across from me. After a moment, the woman gets up, mutters something to the man - she seems unhappy with the seat - and comes to sit near me. He doesn't say anything, but looks after her with wide eyes and a trembling mouth as she moves away.
She smells of macaroni and cheese. And old, old cupboards that haven't been cleaned in decades. Cupboards that have accumulated all the weight of everything that went on during all those years. Cupboards from a Scandanavian fairy tale gone stale.
His entire body language suggests resignation. His head shakes sometimes, and it's hard to tell if it's from palsy or despair. His eyes look like those of a baby animal, wide and bright, and incapable of understanding deliberate harm.
She is not happy with him. But she doesn't understand. He wants her to understand, but doesn't know how to explain: A man's love is different from a woman's. He does love her, and he needs her to be with him. But she can't see that, because his love doesn't look like hers. He doesn't do the things she does, or say the things she says.
She wants something from him - wants hit badly. Has wanted it for so long that it's covered in cobwebs and dust, sits there unused in that Grimm's Fairy Tale cupboard, and even if he gave it to her now she wouldn't be able to use it.
Why did she change seats after they got on the subway? To tell him "you're not giving me what I need. I need more than this. Maybe my moving away will make you see that and then you will give it to me."
But the truth is, she doesn't even want it anymore. All she can do is be angry because she doesn't have it. But could she be happy because she did?
His sad, little boy/old man face - withered with wrinkles, but bright, open eyes. Eyes that catch the sadness when it's there. I look over at her face, and it's one of pudgy, ignorant righteousness. She really does believe she is right, and her piggish little eyes just aren't big enough to see anything else.
I want to shake her, and say "don't just live with this stony silence! It's ossifying you both! It's turning you into a big solid, pasty wedge! Clean out your damn cupboards!! For God's sake!!"
Monday, 20 January, 2003
Coming home from teaching yoga uptown.
Seeing the "XXXADULTXXX" sign across the street hits my stomach like a big steel ball, and I sink a little.
Jesus! All these men - so desperate for they don't even know what - for love, but they don't know it. For physical love. And so are women, and we aren't getting it either. It's fucked up.
And then I get into the subway station and I'm heading to my train and there's a couple dancing to Salsa music on a boom box and collecting money from the crowd. I look at them and then see that it's just a man, dancing with a life-sized doll in a slinky blue dress and realistic black hair. There is something horrific about the image, and my nerves are jolted. I feel myself tense up - so the shock doesn't get in any deeper, and make me physically ill.
Is this what it's like to feel? Is this what it is to be fully awake? Fully alive, to feel everything? I know it's better than being asleep or numb - I've been there and I don't ever want to go back. I'd rather have suffering than nothing - than numbness.
But does it have to be so painful? Do I have to let all the ugly things in as well as the beautiful? I guess, for now anyway, the answer is yes.
Sunday, 19 January, 2003
Don't bang on the door to God. Just open your own doors - the doors to you. The more you try, bang, and shout, the harder you try, the more tightly closed your own doors become. Just open your own doors. God is already there.
Friday, 17 January, 2003
Musings over dinner alone at an Italian restaurant on 9th and 53rd after picking up tapes from A.M.
On a night like tonight, I just feel so fucking hopeless. And I think, there's nothing for it but to be a poet. Not that that solves anything. Poetry doesn't solve things. It brings them to life.
So… if I'm going to be miserable and deprived, I may as well be fully alive for it. What a waste not to be. (Oh God, just as long as I don't start needing the misery and deprivation in order to feel alive! That would suck!)
* * *
A man gets on his knees in front of a woman in a chair, as the waiters are singing and passing out tambourines. I don't know if he's going to propose or do something obscene. Finally, his face comes up and he's got some kind of party favor between his teeth, and whipped cream on his mouth.
* * *
OK, I'm boring! I have a boring life. I am boring because I don't let anyone close to me. Not even my boyfriend. Especially not my boyfriend. And it's killing me.
* * *
Sometimes, the brain cells gotta go…
* * *
They're laughing and having a good time. They don't want to be intense and serious right now. I understand.
Yeah. Damn right. Celebrate. Fucking A. 2002 is OVER!! FUCKING CELEBRATE!!!
Thursday, 9 January, 2003
My parents call early today, and my father asks if I got any birthday cards. I say yes, one from Suzanne and one from my grandmother and one from each of my sisters. And he says I'll be getting another one. So when the mail comes today, and there's a card from my father, I think "there it is" and I think there must be something special in it, or he wouldn't have mentioned it. The thought occurs to me that he might have sent me money - they know I'm broke now.
I open it and read the front. There is something inside. And the front reads:
"For your birthday, you may choose one of the following: Gift #1: All expense paid trip to the destination of your choice; Gift #2: $1,000,000,000 cash; Gift #3: (open this card)"
And I open it and there's a big picture of me at age 3 months. Inside, it says:
"What?! You passed up a trip and a million bucks just to open this card?! Boy are you easy to buy for!" and then "Happy Birthday, Your Father."
And the God's honest truth is that I was happier to get a picture of me at 3 months of age than I would have been to get money. Yes, even a million dollars. I would have liked it, of course! But happy? Coming from my father, it would have left me feeling empty.
I realized that for a second there, I had actually been afraid that there might be money inside. Afraid. When what I really need and want is love.
And that's what I got.
Friday, 13 December, 2002
Like the sisters in "The Virgin Suicides," we are all prisoners, shut off from each other by the walls of our selves - our fears, our identities, our illusions.
And we all send out desperate messages in bottles, cries for help in secret codes. We seek out pen pals - someone who can break the code, someone who can hear our soul, and speak to it. But without the danger that he will ever touch our soul.
Because real life is too scary. Face to face means risk, and the walls come up whether you want them to or not. And they become thicker, higher, more impenetrable, the closer someone gets to discovering your secret - who you really are.
…and maybe too, because real truths, the language of the soul, cannot be spoken in direct language. Maybe the soul needs the secrecy of coded tongues, messages in bottles, encrypted love letters. Maybe without their protective coating, the soul is too raw, too exposed, and thus unable to reveal itself.
Wednesday, 4 December, 2002
Brooklyn Museum of Art
"Exposed: Victorian Nudes."
Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party"
And she
Gathered all
Before her…
And she made for them
A sign to see…
And lo
They saw
A vision…
From this day forth
Like to like
In all things…
And then all that
Divided them merged…
And then
Everywhere
Was Eden
Once again.
Welcome to
The Dinner Party.
Oh my God! I've just remembered! I am a woman first, a goddess first, an artist first - MYSELF first - and THEN a lover, wife, mother. It can't be the other way around, or I have nothing to give, I sink into a downward spiraling pit of myself. And all becomes need and scarcity.
Jealousy - worrying that a man feels something for someone else that he doesn't feel for me - just doesn't fit. As a woman, I am devoted to the success of other women, other goddesses, other artists. To cut any one of them down, even mentally, is to cut myself down. To fear one of them is to lack faith in myself. And to need a man more than I need myself is to forget who I am.
Men will either love us fully, honor us, devote themselves to us, or they won't. And we have to trust ourselves to know the difference.
Tuesday, 3 December, 2002
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The soul of the artist is the soul that knows deep, deep loneliness, and longs to bridge the gap between herself and all the others who are alone.
Avi, in Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" says that the greatest thing one can devote one's life to is ensuring that there are no more holocausts.
I couldn't disagree more. Preventing holocausts is a worthy goal, and I applaud and respect and am indebted to anyone who devotes his or her life to that cause.
But fighting evil is NOT the greatest thing we can do with our lives. Creating good is. And that's a lot harder. There is no enemy to make your path clear to you. No urgency of saving lives or running from demons - only the urgency of getting your thoughts and vision of beauty and good out for the world to see before you die. And facing, rather than running from, the demons in your own head that prevent you from doing so, from being happy, from loving those who mean the most to you, from being fully present to this life.
That is my goal now. To unclog my soul, unblock my nadis, allow the spirit/my spirit/god to move through me freely - to come in freely, without my blocking it out of fear or pain, and to go out freely, as pure expression.
Friday, Nov. 22, 2002, 5:53pm
The older man in the ballet class before mine, is he an aging hippie? Gitano? I am so happy to see him dance, and I feel that maybe the worst tragedy that ever happened to him was that he loved a woman with all his heart and he wasn't able to get it through to her. He couldn't express it, or she couldn't see it, or didn't believe it.
Yet, he still dances. Years later, he has found a way to dance with joy in his face.
Tuesday, 5 November, 2002
An artist's goal is to see magic where you didn't see it before, and where nobody else sees it. And then to write it, paint it, dance it, so that others know it's there.
Thursday, Oct. 24, 2002, 6:41pm
When I was about five or six, my mom explained to me how babies were made. She told me that the man put his penis in the woman's vagina, and he left something behind that combined with something in the woman to make a baby. Somehow, out of this, I got that the man left a piece of his penis behind, and that any men who had children had fewer penis parts than those who did not. I don't quite remember how or when this notion finally got corrected.
Following my mother's explanation, I asked her why you needed to keep the father after this little exercise. I knew that the baby grew inside the woman's body, and that she fed it from her body. So I didn't really see the point of the man, once he had left a piece of his penis in you. So I asked her about that, and her response left me unsatisfied. She told me that you needed to have the father because he made money to support the mother and children, so that they had a place to live and could eat.
I was too young to be disgusted by this at the time, but years later I couldn't believe my own mother had said this to me. Now, I know that she was going through all kinds of horrible shit at that time, and she probably couldn't even bring herself to think about the real reasons she had married my father - the things she had dreamed of and hoped for, and now had probably given up on without even knowing it.
If I ever have a daughter, I hope she won't have to ask why I've kept her father around. I hope that she will see and feel it for herself, so that the answer is inside her later on when she needs it for herself. But if she ever does ask me, here is what I will tell her:
Men and women need each other. Not for material things, and not just physically, but in our souls. We need to feed each other's souls. And in a way, we become two pieces of one soul. We complete each other the way that cooking ingredients like yeast and flour complete each other. Each is already "complete" on its own, and they combine to become something entirely new. We are like that. We come together to be something that we were not before, and that we could not have become on our own.
Monday, Oct. 14, 2002, 2:02pm
What most men don't know about women is that sex is our favorite thing in the world.
It's the most amazing, thrilling, beautiful trapeze ride you can take us on.
It is also the scariest. There is SO much fun to be had there - and I think we're
all a little pissed off that we're not having more of it. But you can't have fun
with a trapeze unless you know that your partner knows you can also fall and
break your neck.
The trouble with most men is that they like to pretend that there's no danger. They tell us that falling is no big deal, that we should just relax and not worry about it. But it is a big deal to us. We can break our necks. Maybe they can't. Maybe they really don't understand that sex can have deep and powerful consequences. Maybe they don't get hurt.
I don't believe that though. I think they're just pretending. I think they can break their necks too, but they're terrified to admit it - to admit that something else could ever get the better of them, that they're not in control.
The irony is that if they'd just admit it was a serious deal, we could have a lot more fun.
Wednesday 2, October, 2002
"Religion" is what you give yourself to even when you don't feel like it. My religion is dance.
