Anatomy of a Dress

In this case, as in [Maxine Hong] Kingston’s, an unalterable fact about the body is linked to a place in the social order, and in both cases, to accept the link is to be caught in a kind of trap.

Before anybody can be snared in this trap, an equation must be made between the body and the world (my skin color is my place as a Hispanic, menstruation is my place as a woman). This substituting of one thing for another is called metonymy in rhetoric, one of the many figures of thought, a trope or verbal turn.

The construction of the trap of shame begins with this metonymic trick, a kind of bait and switch in which one’s changeable social place is figured in terms of an unchangeable part of the body. Then by various means the trick is made to figure invisibly into the landscape.

…Meaning is contingent and identity fluid, even the meaning and identity of one’s own body.

In 1952 Cage had a chance to visit an anechoic chamber at Harvard University, a room so fully padded that it was said to be absolutely silent. Alone in the room, Cage was surprised to hear two sounds, one high, one low; the technicians told him these were the sounds of his nervous system and his circulating blood. At that point he realized that there is no such thing as silence; only sound we intend and sound we do not intend.

Lewis Hyde

…which makes me think of Matthea Harvey telling Michael Silverblatt about her method of constructing the “Future of Terror” series in her newest, Modern Life. Unable to get the poem started, she moved through each letter in the dictionary starting with F and ending with T and collected words, then strung them together and let the words become a series of nightmarish fairytales.

Find the link to the interview here.

It is especially by our likes and dislikes, [John] Cage says, that we cut ourselves off from the wider mind (and the wider world). Likes and dislikes are like lapdogs and guard dogs of the ego, busy all the time, panting and barking at the gates of attachment and aversion and thereby narrowing perception and experience.

Furthermore, the ego itself cannot intentionally escape what the ego does–intention always operates in terms of desire or aversion–and we therefore need to practice a discipline of non-intention, a way to make an end run around the ego’s habitual operations. Zen Buddhism, Cage says, suggests the practice of cross-legged meditation: “you go in through discipline, then you get free of the ego.”

What do you want for lunch, a hamburger, a falafel or a taco? Flip a coin and the decision will have nothing to do with your habitual tastes. Would you like silence here, a sustained flute tone, the noise of traffic or a car alarm? You might hate car alarms, as I do, but with Cage’s method “you” and “I” do not get to choose.

Cage says: “I have used chance operations…in a way involving a multiplicity of questions which I ask rather than choices that I make…If I have the opportunity to continue working, I think the work will resemble more and more, not the work of a person, but something that might have happened, even if the person weren’t there.

Cage was fond of repeating Meister Eckhart’s assertion that “we are made perfect by what happens to us rather than what we do”.

Ibid.

…the creative spirit must abandon its own designs, the kingdom of our intentions being so cramped and predictable.

Lewis Hyde

Wrote a new poem a few days ago. The impulse to write exclusively about love affairs has been fairly recently and extremely powerfully replaced by the impulse to write into formative memories (the bird head, the golden retriever with the tumor in its mouth, &c.) The poems are coming out as pretty pure narrative — the struggle is to allow lyric elements. sudden music, onomonapeia, interruption, mimicry, etc. I don’t know exactly how it’ll work, but I think I know what my first and biggest project will be.

Also…I am not going to post the poem here. Keep it private for a change. Email me if you’d like to see it.

You don’t have to break it. Just give it a little
tap.

tap tap. See,

there’s the crack. And if you pry it a little
with the flat end of that spoon,

you’ll be able to slip yourself through.

–

To the woods where you’re walking. Crushed ice above you
like a layer of sky–

Some sun under it making it gleam.

Some snow under it bloodless and bright

in the fissured heart, the winter morgue of its imagined
land.

–

Where you can find her–

Sprawled, face down, in the snow–

Bracing herself up, a puff of ice at her chin, then seizing
and dying all over again–

Automaton. You prop her up.

And it’s like shaking a doll, How dare it, How dare it–

What

–

good is she for, there in her dying machine?

You push her shoulders back against the trunk of the tree,
her chest’s so cold it cracks—

so you can slip yourself through.

To the woods she’s been walking,
wondering where the living have gone.

Dana Levin

Appeared to her in Sioux Falls. Lime, lemon, orange.
And immediately,

vertigo rushed up like an angry dog
to a fence. She went white, fell down the well

of herself and wept.
Late at night, in the motels, when she’d fallen

asleep, I cried too. I whispered curses to the awkward stacks
of white towels. Hating anything out of balance. Hating

her, her new failure. In the mornings,
my checkbook voice returned, low and soft. For an angry dog

whose yard you wished to cross.
We both hated my balance, hated her imbalance, needed each.

Sudafed, acupuncture, allergist.
Yoga, chewing gum, Chinese tea.

She was afraid of going blind. She constantly described
colors and shapes, as if I had gone blind.

They turned purple. They floated. They darted.
We went arm in arm, without passion, like elderly French.

Internist. Neurologist. Ophthamologist.
Otolaryngologist. A different neurologist. Psychiatrist.

She would not allow the warm towel over her face in the MRI.
The nurses seethed. She set her jaw and vanished

into the gleaming white tube. The machine banged like hammers
on a sunken ship’s hull. She listened to Bach through headphones.

The magnetism passed through her mind in waves,
like wind through the sycamores, touching

everything and changing nothing. Her courage! If courage
is what rocks have. My God, how I loved her. Badly.

The spots were like metaphors. They told us something
by showing us something else. And so for a time

we could go on believing things were what they seemed.

Joel Brouwer

I think I am finally starting to appreciate Donnie Darko.

Moving to Riv’s — no internet, so there’ll be plenty to journalling, just no place you can see. Until after I die and they publish my unabridged journals, NATCH!

If you need me, call. If I need you, call.

Farren: I think I finally decided what my karaoke song is going to be, but I’ve forgotten it.

Colin: um, is it Shoop?