Some notes I took during Carole Maso‘s reading at the &Now festival, which was amazing. Many of these snippets are straight from or paraphrased from her forthcoming novel, Mother & Child. Discovering a writer like her for the first time gives me so much hope, the giddiness of it feels just like falling in love.

introduction:
the still to come
the future is beckoning to us, is lonely
stay open to this appeal — Derrida, The Taste of the Secret
sensitive to formlessness
not to define it or pin it down or conceptualize it, or it will recede and vanish
the Now Point
what is really
the future is already moving through us
cannot be pre-comprehended
if we think on it too much, it evaporates
to be open to our own fear that we will end — attraction to the future
moving from the immortal column to the emphatically mortal
vulnerability
porousness
the future streams through us NOW
not one day is promised to us

mother & child:
all effort passes
if she could only verify their existence
all time, all space, rushed to her side in that tiny, indelible moment
coffins vs tables vs hair of children
a soul in transfer
the image is stabilized on the retina only at the moment of death
and the flames and the heartache
suddenly, gravely, inexplicably I feel important
the quality of the smallness
art is rehearsal for the future
how strange is that present with all the past seeping in and all the future streaming through
all was in coexistence; there was no way around it
dark matter really exists, but so does luminous matter
I can’t wait to get there
liquid water… I can almost taste it
you might as well stay here, the child says, a while longer
seeds : protected until the end of time
after the end of the world, there is another world
frozen suspended animation
the global seed vault, seed crib, at the north pole

(and, next to me, Roxi picked pomegranate seeds in her purse)

Palm Sunday, 2010.

He says he needs me to go ahead and do it — to reclaim myself. He says it is important for the world. I dream that he’s telling me the secret, he’s telling me how to do it, but I cannot remember when I wake up. I know I already know. I am so stubborn. The story of misery remains so attractive. Today I am carrying palm fronds in the rain, afraid to show my face in my own church. The priests wear martyr’s red, and I will not even submit to be seen by unstrange eyes, afraid of the questions that may be asked.

The same notebook, next page, a year later:

I have had nothing to say for a length of time now.

I find myself trapped in spaces that I can no longer see because I have spent so much time in them that the objects have erased themselves. They have been erased from every angle, they have not been rearranged in so long. I do not touch them, not even with my eyes.

I cannot leave my cell because the lady will see me go and she will know that I was here and she will ask where I am going and I won’t be able to explain why I am going now and why I did not go before.

These objects used to have meaning to me, they used to remind me who I was. I think if I could still see them, they might tell me again.

I have stopped trying to remember. The one thing I remember about the secret is that it cannot be remembered — you have to rediscover it for the first time.

They say sadness does something to your memory, it goes in and cuts out all the joyous bits and sews all the dark bits together so well that even the seams don’t show. Would you believe I have been so happy I’ve frightened people away?

My father says when he was seized by joy the whole world looked different, the colors more vivid, a walk through the woods became an incredible sensory experience.

The things they tell me to do are so simple: turn on this light, look into it. Cut out a white square, tape it to the wall, try to see it without distortions: just a square. See the distortions.

Right now the only thing I can remember from my entire childhood is the sting in my palm from running it backwards up a sprig of baby’s breath. A handful of petals. I threw them into the air, they landed in my hair like snowflakes, like a wedding, did it over and over again, I never ran out of flowers, my hand was pink and raw but never bled. That, and the grasshoppers we had, the ones that were the size of your hand. Everything in relation to hands, to the body. But haven’t I told these stories before and isn’t that what it is I’m remembering?

Did you know I have not cooked a meal in 9 months, that I haven’t made love in nearly two years. It is so strange how much I used to want everyone to know everything about me, but at the same time I’ve always been so secretive, I’ve always been afraid, I’ve always been hiding, afraid of being seen, afraid of the questions that will be asked.

If I hadn’t had so many choices, would I have been better off? With a 9-yr-old, a 6-yr-old, can you imagine? The other thing I remember is standing in front of my mother and grandmother in a room in the Holiday Inn, they were smoking their cigarettes and drinking their coffee and wear their beige and white colors and I must’ve been one of those ages myself, my performance was standing before them listing everything that was wrong with me until I cried. One eye is bigger than the other. I do not love anyone as much as I want to be loved. One thing after another until I was sobbing, and they would ask what else, and they could not help but burst out laughing. The told me they loved me as they laughed at me. Remembering this, my mother said I was one of the only people in the world who could break her heart and crack her up at the same time, and isn’t that what life is all about, isn’t that the secret to everything?

It really seems that all art now is about time, about the future.

My mother misses discovering new books all on her own, without reading anything about them or their authors in advance. When she was growing up, she chose books off the shelves at the Marietta library based solely on the titles on their spines. There were no pictures on the covers or blurbs on the back or “about the author” pages. She read Of Human Bondage in the fifth grade because she didn’t know what the word ‘bondage’ meant and by the end of the first chapter she was so involved that Maugham became one of “her authors” and she read all his other books too. She started reading Faulkner in the eighth grade because she liked the sound of Sanctuary, and it wasn’t until she was at college and started asking other people if they’d ever read anything by this guy named William Faulkner that she discovered that he was a famous, “great” writer.

. . .

I am still thinking about my habit of thinking that I need to erase or hide the mess of my past in order to start fresh. This has many negative consequences, including the fact that my files are such a disorganized mess. Every time I have an urge to clear off my desktop, I just toss all my old files into a folder labelled “old stuff” and hide it all somewhere, so I can get them out of the way and start my new, organized life with a fresh set of empty folders. After decades of this, it’s terribly difficult to find anything I’m looking for. I have so many different files labelled “writing” or “photographs” or “web” from so many different years, all nested inside each other in a cryptic structure. And my constantly changing web spaces and email addresses and so forth in order to reinvent myself on a blank canvas when I was a teenager also directly lead to my losing vast amounts of data when my abandoned email accounts and Geocities/Tripod accounts and LiveJournals were deleted and purged without having been backed up.

I have the same habit of withdrawing much too completely from “failed” relationships in order that I can “move on,” which I think is related to some of the difficulty I have in remembering the way things were. I throw away much more than is necessary.

One consequence of having my archives organized so opaquely is that when I do start digging, I often discover things I haven’t seen in years. I went on a mining expedition through my hard disk last night and found so many files from 1998 and 1999 that I didn’t realize I still had. All the meticulously hand-coded versions of my first domain, Sarasvati.org, from the days when I wanted to be a web designer. Journal entries that never made it into any content management system later on. Here’s an except from one I wrote when I was fifteen, that clears up the mystery of one of my first online flirtations somewhat:

“‘…no idea if you’re a guy or a gal, hopefully the latter cuz I could love you, and don’t feel like struggling with my sexuality these days, too damn old and busy, heh.”

This quote is from the first email R ever sent me. That was almost a year ago. The email he and I exchanged (in between the day he discovered that loving me could likely land him in prison and the day he ran off to Vegas and married an old friend of his) could easily fill a book. Or two. I’m still planning on publishing (and making a fortune off of) his half, when he dies. He’s quite well worded and interesting. We certainly don’t exchange five or six emails a day anymore, but we still communicate every now and then…”

I don’t have any of that old email anymore, so I am out of luck making my fortune from it. R was more than twice my age, so perhaps he had better back-up habits in 1997. It might be worth trying to contact him (and any number of other people I had intense email-based relationships with before 2003, when I registered my current domain) to see if he still has our correspondence saved on an ancient disk or server somewhere. Though my assumption that the public at large of the future would have an interest in these records was incredibly naive, my self of the future certainly does.

All this is tied into my thinking about making my old journal archives public again, which I am feeling more and more inclined to do (actually my previous wordpress site, with entries back to 1999, is already available, I just haven’t merged it with the present one).

I have several girlfriends I’ve kept in touch with since our very earliest days of writing on the web, in our teens. Some of them no longer have websites at all. But, of those who are still posting journal/blog entries and art/photography on the web, very few of them still have their material from the old days online. They talk of being embarrassed by their early work (even though the rest of the world still seems to love it, me included!) and of no longer feeling comfortable sharing such personal details of their lives with strangers, opting to stick with more focused and less risky material in blogs. Maybe this collective move away from the confessional is a consequence of getting older and less self-involved and more integrated with the world at large. Maybe it’s because now our parents and extended families and employers and students and potential new friends “IRL” and (most especially) the people that we’ve written about are all online, and we want to protect them and ourselves from the consequences of too much information and the “wrong impression.” Those are certainly key reasons I’ve had for taking down old online journals and photos or redacting and password-protecting things. But, for me at least, it’s also related to this (mistaken) idea that who I am now is somehow being defined or constrained by what information from my past is available to others. I want to be in control of all the information out there pertaining to myself (which is, of course, impossible), and I have a deep-seated fear that if everyone knew all my secrets, disaster would fall and I would be adandoned by the people whose love, affection, and respect I desire.

On one level, all of this obsession with my personal archives, much like my thinking (even jokingly) at fifteen that someday I could publish my personal emails as a book and make money from it, is silly, because, of course, no one, except possibly me, has much interest in sifting through all the ephemera of my past and making all sorts of judgments about the present me based on it, and even I (even unemployed!) do not have the time for that. There is too much new work still to be done, too many new stories I still need to write, too much art I still need to make. But I do believe that it is important to continue to examine these strange habits I have in thinking of my past (ranging from feeling oppressed/doomed by my mistakes to thinking that all my “best days” are behind me), because I can’t let go of them if I can’t see them.

(The truth is: in the kingdom of heaven, everything is included.)