Penelope

All week I have tried to write my relationship with WM. Obscene drafts have taken roots in my blogger inbox. Terrible. Writing. What is it but deferral, denial of the ephemeral nature of everything? I want a narrative, the carefully chosen details, an arc of meaning, a measure of resolve. I dont have one.

I have a loom and I weave as I negotiate with new suitors. And then I unravel my work as I sleep diagonally in my bed.

Its the oldest story. How a woman waits. How a woman waits without encouragement. Without acknowledgement, without.

Its everything. I know that too. Its Penelope always unweaving, that is the story. Its the persistent thread in the fingers, the touch, each ending the possibility of new endings.

Self-Portrait as Hurry and Delay

by Jorie Graham

So that every night above them in her chambers she unweaves it.
Every night by torchlight under the flitting shadows the postponent,
working her fingers into the secret place, the place of what is coming
undone,

to make them want her more richly, there, where the pattern softens now,
loosening,

to see what was healed under there by the story when it lifts,
by color and progress and motive when they lift,

the bandage the history gone into thin air,

to have them for an instant in her hands both at one
the story and its undoing, the days the kinds and the soil they're groundcover
for

all winter

against choice against offspring against the minutes like turrets
building the walls, the here and the there, in which he wanders searching,

till it lifts and the mouth of something fangs open there,
and the done and the undone rush into each other's arms.
A mouth or a gap in the fleshy air, a place in both worlds.
A woman's body, a spot where a story now gone has ridden.
The yarn springing free.
The opening trembling, the nothing, the nothing with use in it trembling--

Oh but it is wide enough to live on, immaculate present tense, lull
between wars,

the threads running forwards yeat backwards over her stilled fingers,


the limbs if the evergreens against the windowpane, the thousand hands, beating them touching then suddenly still for no reason?

Readers, minutes:

now her fingers dart like his hurry darts over their openness he can't
find the edge of.
like the light over the water seeking the place in the water
where out of air and point of view and roiling wavetips a shapeliness,
a possession of happiness
forms,

a body of choices, among the waves, a strictness among them, an edge
to the light,

something that is not something else,

until she knows he's here who wants to be trapped in here,
her hands tacking his quickness down as if soothing it to sleep,
the threads carrying the quickness in on their backs,
burying it back into there, into the pattern, the noble design,
like a stain they carry past a sleeping giant,
the possible like kindling riding in on their backs,
the flames enlarging and gathering on the walls,
wanting to be narrowed, rescued into a story again, a transparence we
can't see through, a lover

approaching ever approaching the unmade beneath him,
knotting and clasping it within his motions,
wrapping himself plot plot and denouement over the roiling openness...

Yet what would she have if he were to arrive?
Sitting enthroned what wouls either have?
It is his wanting in the threads she has to keep alive for them
scissoring and spinning and pulling the long minutes free, it is

the shapely and mournful delay she keeps alive for him the breathing

as the long body of thebeach grows emptier awaiting him

gathering the holocaust in close to its heart growing more beautiful

under the meaning under the soft hands of its undoing

saying Goodnight goodnight for now growing upstairs

under the kissing of the minutes under the wanting to go on living

beginning always beginning the ending as they go to sleep beneath her.

What Now?

I finished my SOP and my WS four full hours before my self impossed deadline. These documents are now in the hands of volunter proof readers ( who didn't suggest that I "watch") and now I just have to wait.

Surely, there will be corrections. And I do have to fill out all those forms online tomorrow before I mail the supplemental materials to departments. But I am essentially done with the work part of the application process.

What Now?

Or

What all the while? That is more my type of question.


A few things happened while I was finishing my writing sample.

I felt compelled to read my favorite Sylvia Plath poem, a kind of literary preparation for the uber reading SMR and I are going to attend on Tuesday.


Event-

How the elements solidify!--
The moonlight, that chalk cliff
In whose rift we lie

Back to back. I hear an owl cry
From its cold indigo.
Intolerable vowels enter my heart.

The child in the white crib revolves and sighs,
Opens its mouth now, demanding.
His little face is carved in pained, red wood.

Then there are the stars-- ineradicable, hard.
One touch: it burns and sickens.
I cannot see you eyes.

Where apple bloom ices the night
I walk in a ring,
A groove of old faults, deep and bitter.

Love cannot come here.
A black gap discloses itself.
On the opposite lip

A small white soul is waving, a small white maggot.
My limbs, also, have left me.
Who has dismembered us?

The dark is melting. We touch like cripples.

May 21 1962

This poem was written during the same time she wrote the group of poems that would later be collected in the famous Ariel. However, this poem was not published with them and can only be found in the more general collected works.

Over the years, this poem has been a comfort to me. I have memorized it at different points. This afternoon as I read it, I began to pace the the small expanse of my living room/kitchen and tried to recite it from memory. I would pause and glance down at the broken bound book, committing to the words. And I realized, this is my father's project.

My father has been a minister for over 30 years in the Advent Christian denomination. He would have us memorize scripture as children. He has committed large sections of the Bible to memory. But not just to memory, he has committed them to his body. My father believes that to memorize the word of God is to bring the word into your body, for safe keeping, for nurturing. And even though I left my family and church, I realize I believe every word of what he said. Though I resisted my parents regimented and bewildering parenting, I cannot deny the importance of my father's work, his life.

Rather, for the past few months as I have had my books stacked on the kitchen table, my journal articles well marked, my drafts "organized," I have often felt that I was peeking into my father's study. His was my first library. He was my first scholar. His impressive collection of critical concordances on Paul's epistles, his one of a kind documentation of the 19th century Welsch revival, the Biblical Greek anotations, all shelved perfectly, lining the walls of the red tile study. And he was there, an inked stained shirt, glasses perched high above his ears, the constancy of the red type writer, the house's heart beat. And here I am, my critical theory texts, the dogged ears of my well worn novels, my lap top always open, another draft, another sermon. What couldn't I say in my statement of purpose? That being a scholar is a way for me to be my father's daughter.

But the absence of faith, the absence of my faith, separates us.

There will never be the comparison of our work, our lives.

But still.

There is Language. There is the Body.

Girls Girls Girls

Tonight, I hunkered down with a bottle of champagne and my GRE Book/Must See TV. A few hours later, a blog entry.

1) I bought a piece of chocolate cake at the neighborhood, not local, neighborhood, coffee shop. I cannot drink coffee. I wish I could. I love the taste, the whole experience of finally ground espresso and steamed milk. However, one of my many therapists ( circa 2001) finally broke me of my meager one cup a day habit; with the sleep disorder ( since birth) and the anxiety, ( 1985 on) its just not worth it she would say and she was right. But I go to this spot for tea or hot chocolate ( a new boyfriend must find it charming that I order hot chocolate in July) or a piece of cake which I take home and eat while I drink camille ( sleep inducing) tea. But at this coffee shop, a neighborhood institution, there is a girl. She must be an undergraduate at the local art college. She is blonde and smiles alot. She wears comfy clothes and ties her hair back. She always nods her head enthusiastically when I order the Brooklyn Blackout Cake, which I always order. I have a crush on her. I have a huge crush on her. She is definitely not a professional lesbian which is to say its not for sure she would like me to ask her out. She is not definitely straight...but who is definitely straight unless they still identify with Greek Letters and Draft Beer? Sigh. I haven't been with a woman in years (2). And I have never had a girlfriend. Considering that every time I sleep with a man, ( more than one, dear readers, more than one) at one moment I think, man, I might be a lesbian ( one glaring odd exception), that's shocking. No, its not shocking, its disappointing. I like this girl. We briefly chatted about how my out of the way neighborhood coffee shop is now *wireless.* And I envisioned ( alright, I have a totally detailed storyboard) bringing my new *wireless* compatible laptop ( for grad school, damnit) to the coffee shop and we would talk and then over a few weeks I would ask her to get a glass of wine and it would be great and we would have so much in common and then we would go home and watch DVD's and well, it would be great.


2) Netflix sent my DVD of Out of Africa. A few days ago, I blogged about watching Cool Hand Luke with my brothers. All true. But another favorite movie, another example of how the cinema shaped my childhood, my adulthood, is watching, repeatedly, Out of Africa. I love Meryl Streep's accent in the film, I love the panoramic views, I love the complex marriage with its complex compromise that I intuitively knew, at age 11, would be my own. I love how she learns that no one belongs to her. I have known this forever. And the only time I am unhappy is when I momentarily forget. Its really beautiful. My father brought this home for me, from our small town public library, probably on one of the same weekends that he brought home Cool Hand Luke for my brothers, to watch. I was a severe child and I think he hoped the love story would soften me. It did. He brought this movie home to his daughter because he thought she would like it. And I did. When I opened my mailbox at the Base of my Brooklyn Brownstone, there was this DVD of a movie my father had shown me 14 years ago. Before he asked me to leave, he tried to make me understand, he tried to ask me to stay without asking me to stay.

New definitions of Obscenity

Love's Obscenity

2. Encounter with an intellectual in love: for him "to assume " (not repress) extreme stupidity, the naked stupidity of his discourse, is the same thing as for Bataille's subject to take off his clothes in a public place: the necessary form of the impossible and of the sovereign: an abjection such that no discourse of transgression can recuperate it and such that it exposes itself without protection to the moralism of anti-morality. From this point of view, he judges his contemporaries as so many innocents: they are innocent, those who censure amorous sentimentality in the name of a new morality: "The distinctive mark of modern souls is not lying but innocence, incarnate in lying moralism. To discover this innocence everywhere-- that may be the most disheartening part of our task."

( Historical reversal: it is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental-- censured in the name of what is in fact only another morality.)

3. The lover raves ( he "shifts the sentiment of values") but his raving is stupid. What is stupider than a lover? So stupid that no one dares offer his discourse publicly without a serious mediation: novel, play, or analysis ( between the tweezers). Socrates's daimon ( the one who spoke first within him) whispered to him: no. My daimon, on the contrary, is my stupidity: like the Nietzchean ass, I say yes to everything, in the field of my love. I insist, reject all training, repeat the same actions; no one can educate me-- nor can I educate myself; my discourse is continuously without reflection; I do not know how to reverse it, organize it, stud it with glances, quotation marks; I always speak in the first degree; I persist in dutiful, discreet, conformist delirium, tamed and banalized by literature.

Early Morning Poetry Post

Wake

Tess Gallagher

Three nights you lay in our house.
Three nights in the chill of the body.
Did I want to prove how surely
I had been left behind? In the room's great dark
I climbed up beside you onto our high bed, bed
we'd loved in and slept in, married
and unmarried.

There was a halo of cold around you
as if the body's messages carry farther
in death, my own warmth taking on the silver-white
of a voice sent unbroken across snow just to hear
itself in its clarity of calling. We were dead
a little while together then, serene
and afloat on the strange broad canopy
of the abandoned world.

Unmailed Letter

Joy Harjo

It's noon. I can hardly stand it.
If anything touches me, I am ashes.
Your laugh and I considered myself
resurrected, but then made the correction
for space and time and it still added
to an irrational number.
Its elementary. You can't add
apples and oranges. I've mixed
faith with your distraction.
But I was never good at math
Or with any test that meant jumping hoops
of water. This is how it is at specifically
noon. I am fire eaten by wind.
I drink water for a cure
that will teach me the fine art
of subtraction.

On Your Own

Tess Gallagher


How quickly the posture shifts.
Just moments ago we seemed human
or in the Toledo of my past
I made out I was emotionally illiterate
so as not to feel a pain I deserved.

Here at the Great Southern
some of the boys have made it
into gray suits and pocket calculators.
I'm feeling end of season, like somebody
who's hung around the church
between a series of double weddings.

Friend, what you said about the terror
of American Womanhood,
I forget it already, but I know
what you mean. I'm so scary some days
I'd run from myself. It's hard work
having your own way, even
half the time, and having it,
know what not to do with it. Who
hasn't thrown away a life or two
at the mercy of another's passion,
spite or industry.

It's like this on your own: the charms
unlucky, the employment
solitary, the best love always
the benefit of a strenuous doubt.

Instructions to the Double (1976)

Tess Gallagher

So now it's your turn,
little mother of silences, little
father of half-belief. Take up
this face, these daily rounds
with a cabbage under each arm
convincing the multitudes
that a well-made-anything
could save them. Take up
most of all, these hands
trained to an ornate piano
in a house on the other side
of the country.

I'm staying here
without music, without
applause. I'm not going
to wait up for you. Take
your time. Take mine
too. Get into some trouble
I'll have to account for. Walk
into some bars alone
with a slit in your skirt. Let
the men follow you on the street
with their clumsy propositions, their
loud hatred of this and that. Keep
walking. Keep your head
up. They are calling to you-- slut, mother
virgin, whore, daughter, adulteress, lover,
mistress, bitch, wife, cunt, harlot,
betrothed, Jezebel, Messalina, Diana,
Bethdheba, Rebecca, Lucretia, Mary,
Magdelena, Ruth, you-- Niobe,
woman of the tombs.

Don't Stop for anything, not
a caress or a promise. Go
to the temple of the poets, not
the one like a run-down country club
but the one on fire
with so much it wants
to be done with. Say all the last words
and the first: hello, goodbye, yes,
I, no, please, always, never.

If anyone from the country club
asks if you write poems, say
your name is Lizzie Borden.
Show him your axe, the one
they gave you with a silver
blade, your name engraved there
like a whisper of their own.

If anyone calls you a witch,
burn for him; if anyone calls you
less or more than you are
let him burn for you.

It's a dangerous mission. You
could die out there. You
could live forever.