the habit of being

For someone who believes desire to cause suffering, I am desirous of very much:

First, to be a still pool of water, with no knowledge of hydrogen bonding, unaware of adhesion, cohesion, surface tension (It is no one’s fault that the Jesus lizard so rarely sinks beneath the surface and drowns). Then, a white porcelain serving platter, shiny and so clean that running a finger tightly across the surface produces a high pitched tone like an out of tune piccolo. And I’d like to be the symbol for an integral, the thin S shape that is just as sexy as a sand dune, and worthy of nearly as much respect. To be blank and wide open simultaneously, to lose the calendar and symbol system for daily passages.

Or to be gone, with nothing remaining but a single photograph, taken on a day when I was smiling and uninhibited. For everyone to believe that one image to be the sum of me, not to know any better.

Transient or transparent.

- - -

Two virgins, tangled. It is three in the morning, and this is their intercourse, which is not sex, but just as real:

The first, lying on side, makes a capture, a long hand, thin wrist, and pulls in near, smuggling it quickly under all weight, rolling on stomach to keep it near and trapped below. A triumphant smile in the dark.

The second: “That is my hand.” Lying on back, staring at ceiling or wall or darkness, with a smirk.

The first: “It is mine now. I have it.”

“But it is my hand, and my wrist, and my arm. I need them.” And the second tries to regain these treasures from the thief.

The first holds tight, brings the stolen hand close to face, holding, cherishing, possessing. “It is had.”

“You can’t have it. Perhaps it has you. I have you.”

At this, the first rolls over again, close to the second, covering the second, even, weighing down. “I have you. You are had.”

From below, “No, you are had, and you love it.”

“I like to be had.”

“So do I.”

- - -

It is Christmas day, and the air surrounding the volvo station wagon is chilled, even in Georgia. The way I am thinking, as the cement flows a grey river, splitting a marathon of trees giving chase, one after one after one, I may as will be in the shower, drenched in steam. My mother sits beside me, presumably thinking on some other abstract notion.

Previously, we have been to Perry, with the sweet and simple, happy and nonjudgmental relatives of our Ray. There, we are giants, with our long legs and silly ponderings, visible even from the outside, with such comparison. We play endless games of Skip-Bo, and we smile, and we pretend we are not so awkwardly out of place. And we leave, with a sigh of relief, to the silent ocean of the interstate that will take us to Atlanta, to the life we never had. We smile, share an “I know” glance, and I turn on Diana Ross.

We arrive at the Ritz Carlton in the early evening, collect our room keys, deposit our things, and descend to the lounge for drinks. A dry martini for my mother, and curiously good fruit juice for me. She takes out a complementary copy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, scans the movies playing at Phipp’s Plaza. I stare out the window, this time at outlines of huge buildings, one after one after one, and few motion blurred trees. A woman walks in, wearing a mink coat, tight black sequined dress, that diamond solitaire necklace from the DeBeer’s commercial. Maybe the man with the eyes gave it to her. I smile in her direction, she doesn’t notice.

Maybe we will go see that movie, the one that would never play at home. Perhaps we’ll return to our room, to the mints on our pillows, and order the Caesar salad from room service, with creme brulee for dessert, and the city lights shining in our huge window will welcome us into the fold…

(From an essay I had to write for school, actually, on a “family holiday tradition.”)

- - -

Notes:

metaphase

Ruby

gold coins
kohl + eyes = saucy.

signs of the times
cap and gown

tuxedo. violins.

I can’t decide whether to be Salome or a communion girl today, so I guess I’ll just be me.

Hormones, like a sine curve on acid:

Scene One, Knowledge: Oh I am giddy, high on my own fantasies and so glad for everything suddenly. I want to dance and to scream. Science is a pearl and we are energy and you make me feel like an excited electron in the light reactions of photosynthesis. The fog lifts and there is nothing left to desire. Remember: sex, laughter, safety may be all.

Scene Two, Confusion: My whys get reversed and the word beauty starts to grate against the insides of my mind, screaming and knocking back and forth, mad from overuse less understanding. Faith is probably so simple after all and easy, I never should have admitted anything, the hardest states to achieve are those of least external complexity. And blasted art and science, what the hell, what are they, which is what and where’s my definition, where’s my reason, where’s my logic and my resolution?

Smart People Write in Third Person:

A little girl in jeans and a tee-shirt and long wavy hair sits on a blue sofa in the middle of the student union center. There are stairs in many places, but signs say not to sit on them, hence the sofa instead. (Sad that even Southern universities will not allow stair-sitting; someone could get in the way.) She wonders if anyone notices her, and if so, could they perhaps, just maybe, think she is a college student, or a child prodigy even, if her baby eyes give her away. She’ll take her chances, yes, but she is careful to leave a sign reading “Don’t Touch!” on her notebook and novel, when she ventures away from the sofa-not-stairs, blue, to the game room or the bookstore or the TV lounge. One exclamation point is enough, two could seem childish. Try to stand up straight, you are tall enough to be one of them, at least.

At the vending machines, as she is getting a Mello Yello, three college boys approach, looking at her, and the walls of the nook seem to close in. One of them asks if she wants a piece of candy, and she backs away, staring at the floor. Who are you kidding? Someone tosses a peppermint at her feet, they all laugh, and start to walk away. One boy murmurs “listen to mommy.”

She looks at her watch. “Mommy” is in class. Fifteen more minutes, and she decides to head toward the picnic tables in front of the biology building, after retrieving her things and her sign. There’s an owl in a big cage outside the biology building, and an eagle and a hawk too. She can look through the bricks in see them sitting on their perches, with eyes that cut things and talons, how she gazes at the tight little talons. Classes begin to file out the doors.

The picnic tables. Mother and Friends sit and discuss class. There is Danny, who started his own computer company, made enough money to buy a Porsche and quit work all together to do back to school and become a doctor. And Natalie, of “Natalie and Petra,” the girl’s second known lesbian couple, who plays tennis and card games. Lynn, who is iced tea with lemon personified, sweet, with her funny eyes and funny voice, even her funny house out in the country. Anne, who is in the coast guard and can navigate using the stars. The guy, what is his name, who once without on a date with a girl who jumped him and said “hurt me.” All these people are familiar yet strange, and the girl sits and listens to them talk science.

Again, today:

I dreamt we were bathing together, and you were washing my back with a yellow sponge, when suddenly you just stopped and laid your cheek against my spine. The whole scene just froze like that, and it was perfect, that simple. Maybe the heat lamp was on, maybe everything was red. (I wonder if we associate red with passion because we were taught to do so by example, red roses on Valentine’s Day, etc., or because there is just something innate about the color).

It really would have made a lovely photograph, too. Though I hate for a thing to be flat, and I couldn’t tolerate a glossy finish.

The Girl is Me, Obviously, and I Hate Third Person:

Anne teaches at my school now, but she’s been out for a while because her son, my little brother’s best friend, has brain cancer, and he was not doing well. He’s going to make it, though, for now. So thin, so pale.

She wrote me a letter of recommendation, and talked about how she remembered me sitting at that table when I was so young (4th, 5th grade?). She said I could grasp concepts then that were hard for college students, and sounded so sincere in her letter. I don’t remember grasping anything though, it was long ago.

There was more to come. As a graduate student, my mother taught Human Anatomy and Physiology laboratories, and she had a key to the bio building and we’d go late at night to set up her labs for the next day. There were dark hallways and empty classrooms and lecture halls, microscopes (slides of whitefish blastula, I actually remembered that) and refrigerators full of things I wouldn’t dream of eating, fetal pigs cut open and all sorts of creatures in jars, skeletons of cats and birds and people alike, and drawers and drawers of bones, labeled. “Oh, will you put this in the fibula drawer?”

By that time I was in middle school, but it never dawned on me, even when I got to use drosophila in my 8th grade science fair project and blew everyone else away, that being brought up in this environment, watching people dissect cats when I was 8, getting to hang out in the neurospora lab when I was 13, was anything abnormal or interesting. I never liked science classes in school, because my teachers were always incompetent (Miss Martin told me mitosis was too hard for 6th graders). Not until I got into AP Biology did I even realize I was good at science. And it hit me, I’ve been seeing this my entire life. I love biology so much now, and there was a time when I could have feasibly gotten to use a scanning electron microscope, if I’d shown any real interest at all, and I was so young, and I didn’t even realize, I took it all for granted, the biology building smelled bad.

I always strain for an opening line. My favorite: “In an old house in Paris, covered with vines, lived twelve little girls, in two straight lines.” Madeline doll, wherever she hides, is stained with cat piss now, and I don’t even know where the books went, but I still adore little French girls in uniforms, nuns, scars, and foreign words thrown into stories for effect.

She was the bravest and the smallest of all, with red hair and no appendix. The smallest one is always best in children’s tales, the smallest is always hurt but always perseveres, is not afraid, even of tigers and circuses. We are taught early on to take up as little space as possible, as it will make our achievements all the more incredible. We are taught to feel unworthy of the volume of air we breathe. I too have compassion for stars, for their mass and their heat, and envy them still, for I’ll never get the chance to reduce to a point of almost nothing.

When playing house, it was always desirable to be the youngest child, the most needy, therefore the most loved by whichever girl was taking on the role of Mother. We’d stand in the wading pool at day-care and fight for the honor of being the baby. It was disgraceful to be the oldest (huge), but even that was no horror compared to being forced into the middle role. I fear mediocrity to this day, would rather be fully terrible than just alright. As a child, I never seemed able to shout “smallest!” quickly enough at the start, and was thrust into a state of awkward medium even in games of pretend. And oh, those other girls were awful, they stole my Barbie clothes.

My mother would assure me, on dropping me off at Miss Diane’s at 6 AM each morning (She worked the early shift at Willingway Hospital, so we could afford pita pockets and the Franklin’s spaghetti special on Tuesdays, before we had a man to take care of us, before we had TV, before I knew what a Happy Meal was.), that she would always come back. I had my blanket with me always, and it smelled like home (It stank, she told me, but I couldn’t stand for anyone I wash it, it was my blanket, it reminded me of my mother, it made me safe.), so I believed her. It was really rather nice, despite never getting to be the baby, for I considered the head bitch (a beauty queen, daughter of the woman who ran the day-care) my best friend. We’d bonded on the first day I came, sharing the sofa as our bed, and poking our toes through the knit throw. By the time I was ten, I thought I was quite in love with her, with her straight blonde hair and her more-girly figure, more pubic hair and perkier little breasts, her make-up, fake Cindy Crawford mole, all her trophies. Little Miss Everything. She graduated last year. We hadn’t spoken for six years.

Sunday school was worse than day-care, to be sure. I can only remember a brief period in my life when my mother went to church, I’m not sure why. Maybe it was a month, maybe it was a year, but I sat staring through the window of the children’s room at First Methodist Church, waiting for her to walk out of the chapel, with its huge stained glass windows and constant up and down mechanical congregation. I could be persuaded to play with no one, I looked through that window constantly, throughout the entire service, watching the door, waiting for her to come back. Maybe it was a day, maybe it was a week.

Now my younger brother, Wayne, after spending a few days at grandmother’s, asks why we don’t go to church. My mother and I assure him he wouldn’t like it, you have to get up early and get dressed up, and it is like school without any other kids. (I went to Vacation Bible School once when I was a kid, I came home thinking I was going to Hell, a God’s Eye in one hand and a bookmark for my Precious Moments Bible in the other. I went to Jennifer’s church once, and I cried all the way home. It wasn’t just because she was so beautiful singing in the choir.) Wayne says you have to go to church so you can “learn about Jesus and stuff.” Mom tells him she and I know a little about Jesus, and we’ll tell him. He’s already heard the Christmas story, so we tell him other things, how Jesus could perform miracles, heal people, and “make five fish into a gazillion.” I tell him how Jesus got pissed at the money lenders and knocked over tables, and once he made this “really cool speech” called the Sermon on the Mount, and that was the best part. Told him what a disciple was, and how a Bad Woman washed Jesus’ feet. He was betrayed, they put a crown of thorns on his head and killed him. “I know this part!” Wayne pipes up. Mom says she can’t remember what the “exact charge” was, and I say it was because he said he was the son of God.

Mom launches straight into how “some people believe all those things in the Bible really happened, word for word, Jesus really could make all those fish appear, and he really could make blind people see again, and his body really floated up to heaven after he died. There are a lot of people who believe that around here, and those people are called Fundamentalists, but there are lots of different kinds of Christians, and some of them believe that the stories themselves are not the important thing, but the morals they illustrate. In other religions, many of the same stories are used, only with different characters playing the roles.” On about how when things get passed down over time they get modified, and how people need drama to illustrate a point, and sometimes it is just errors in translation, a virgin or a young lady, and Wayne is staring out the window, watching the trees go by.

I read the Gospels twice, thinking of Jennifer singing in the choir, and I thought it was beautiful, heathen that I am. I think it is all so pretty, and that is the problem with me. I could cry for the beauty of it all, thinking of how she read Ecclesiastes to me, and that is so much more important to me than anything else, than any of the words on the page. (For clarity, as needed, I speak here of faith, as a power stronger than religion itself, something more profound, when it is honest, educated, and not just something blindly accepted as true. That concept held me in awe, true belief in something that cannot be proven. If it exists, it is far more miraculous than any fish-trick. Her singing, her reading, I found more touching than anything she was singing or reading about.) But I was never a Christian, not even for a little while, not even when I was little, and when all those church ladies with their huge cross necklaces talk of those dregs of the world, led astray by Satan, who have never seen the light and never been saved, those poor souls they pretend to have sympathy for, the ones destined for eternal hellfire, that’s me they’re talking about. Nine out of ten of my classmates at school think I am going to hell. My grandparents all think I am going to hell, whether they know it or not. Even Jennifer, when she was reading me Eccl. and introducing me to her friends from church.. I couldn’t keep that thought out of my head. It’s probably worse in the South.

I guess I’ve never been able to justify that, thought I don’t blame poor Jesus for the actions of his followers; after all, that Sermon on the Mount was one kickass speech. And there must be bad Buddhists just as there are bad Christians, but I didn’t grow up being condemned by them, and there isn’t that layer of trash obscuring the message.

I think about meiosis, and it is a religious experience. Really.. that is not my attempt at wit.

Once, art was only words written in boxes outlined in black and pasted on mirrors, so the viewer would be sure to realize the work reflected himself. (Which words would I chose? Most commonly searched here - beauty and cock.) I believe it may just be headed that in that direction once again, and all the better, though it makes me nauseated, my hands aflutter.

Step down from the podium, and, a brief update: I’ve stopped reading Tolstoy, begun playing Parcheesi. Last night I got teary thinking about how beautifully perfect a cell is (and I said “I’d just like to listen to your heart beat for hours, and I’d like to tell you about cells”). That is what I respect most about myself, as funny as it sounds. According to online tests I am a Theravada Buddhist and a stoic, but we shall see. I am moving to New York City in August, and I see myself standing still and going all at once, because that is the impression NYC made on me the one and only time I visited, and that is what I need. I try to love lightly and with fervor. I feel good carrying my box of paints, and playing the piccolo part in “The Marriage of Figaro.” Lightness does not come easily. (And I forgive you all, even your pretending not to know vanity as I do.)

Once, art was only contrast, line versus color, space versus subject, light versus darkness (light versus heaviness, lightness versus weight).

Sitting on the yellow air-mattress, flipping through that art history text, fetched from the closet, I knew the relationship between brilliance and humility before Capitalized Concepts. There were hand dances, a language in gesture; I cannot remember the word for it. The bones in his hands are most exquisite, yet it slipped my mind completely that on the way back toward home, I wrote the word “intense” on his palm. How these things are odd.

Latest revelation: as humans, beings, we are overprone to confuse beauty with sadness. I see they are not always the same, and are very unlikely to be, really.

Sameness, complexity, is something I’d like to explore. Ellen tells me history is a fractal and it is not a hard concept to understand. Take a cross section of any part and you’ll find a microcosm of the whole. Those who do not learn from the past are destined to repeat it, practically a formula, it is, to become folk-knowledge, yet a thing studied by immaculate academics in air-tight think-chambers.

- - -

Ways of seeing. I’d aspire to create detail so profoundly. James photographs a hanger that could be fragile hips to hold, a light switch all too genuine. I feel my the centers of my hands running, falling down leaving invisible loops and arches on the plain white walls, and tiny bumps, flaws, tickle me, and my nerves. Axon, synapse. I am the anti-sterility. To move weakly. I’d like to be inspired, I’d like to see the atoms when I look at an object. The small will draw me in, as always.

I think you see the small in everything, and that is what makes the difference. My body wants so to be small. The rain may very well not have hands so tiny as I make mine out to be. Yes, I’d like to think Cummings would write a poem about me. Someone once wrote a sonnet about me; I think I might have it saved on my hard drive, but probably not.

- - -

I have a list of environmental things to write about, later. Godiva chocolate will not pacify this craving of mine. I long for the beach and the sun baking me alive. Even for the burn I want the pressure of heat. Hansel and Gretel should have, perhaps, pushed me into the oven. Sylvia and I would then at least have something in common, thought she has been so long stolen and remote from me.

The blue lines keeping my black words in place are fading fast, for I splashed water on my notepad. I’m writing in the tub and I look down for a minute to see my body stretched out under the water, my legs so long with my feet under the tap (so far away), and minuscule bubbles clinging to my pubic hair, and my navel a shallow pool. It is all very calm, and I will not drop my pen, and I will not worry about the spitefulness of others. I will stretch and breathe again, all sympathetic and alone.