field notes; week of september 17, 2018
wow, it’s really been a month since i sent out a fresh batch of field notes, huh? apologies. see, i’ve been navigating a personal crisis, and at the beginning of this week i felt myself beginning to really buckle under the stress, so i decided to take off for the ontarian countryside, spend a few days on a nice little bed and breakfast on a farm. so imagine my shock when, two days into my relaxing vacation, i get a text from the government explaining that a tornado warning’s been issued for this idyllic patch of countryside, and i need to take shelter immediately. reader, i am writing this from the basement of a b&b, the skies gray, rain spattering the redbrick, gale-force wind whistling overhead. the actual tornado warning was lifted some twenty minutes ago, but it’s still looking pretty scary out there. so if i die, at least i died as i lived: being a pretentious, melodramatic bitch on line.
as always, feel free to hit reply if you have anything to say about any of these notes, or simply to wish me good luck in not dying in a tornado. if all goes well, i will make the marcella hazan tomato sauce tonight, with fresh tomatoes from this farm.
anyway. let’s get into these field notes.
two hundred and twelve.
for 18+ years my brain was a child tracking device, the way even in sleep you are wondering if they have come in for the night, the caring freedom of letting them go anywhere but always knowing where they are, then this new spatial detachment. parenting was about time (how it was organized, the compromise between yours & theirs) & about space (sharing it, parting, reconfiguring), the gentle structure making that wld reduce coercion or disappointment (this is all of love, too, probably) & everything you think you don't have the strength to do for yourself you tell yourself you do for them, the parents' perpetual self-deception of causality (or at least the young parents)-- but surely I wld have learned to pay the rent w/out her. but my lie (half lie) was that I am/was a helpless daydreaming reading-too-much flower-picking falling-in-love nothing of a person that was made something by the spatial/temporal/material rigor of having to keep another person alive. guess we will all find out soon if I disintegrate into a over-imaginative nonmateriality of a barely-a-person rudely & self-destructively ignoring the demands of time, space, & money now that I am on my own. or perhaps in learning to keep her alive I learned to do the same thing for myself.
-- anne boyer, 2018
that sounds like the sort of thing you should strive toward, doesn’t it: to become a day-dreaming reading-too-much flower-picking falling-in-love something of a person.
two hundred and thirteen.
he was this close to me. he held his hands to describe the closeness. it seemed for a moment he could almost touch his friend, could speak to him as he were there; enkidu. enkidu. but suddenly the silence was deeper than before in a place where they had never been together. he sat down on the ground and wept: enkidu. enkidu.
-- epic of gilgamesh, tr. herbert mason
someone who once touched you with love will never touch you again. you take down the pictures of your arms around each other. the place on your waist where his hand was, a laceration now. you feel so stupid. you write the sentence, “you feel so stupid” and you feel stupid doing it. your friend comes over to help clean up and she holds you until her shoulder is wet.
two hundred and fourteen.
right now, there is someone out there with a wound in the exact shape of your words.
-- sean thomas dougherty, why bother?, 2018
weird how the truth is simultaneously wound and suture.
two hundred and fifteen.
losing everything also means having the freedom of getting to choose what comes next without the crushing weight of expectations... the truth sets him free. it also kicks his ass… the bracing clarity that comes in the moment after the truth is revealed. the truth can ruin your life. it can ruin many lives. but only once you’ve owned up to it and to who you really are can you begin to understand what it will take to change your life, to begin the journey to being a more whole, fuller, happier human being… when honesty arrives, it’s terrifying, but it’s also freeing (as anyone who’s ever come out of the closet or confessed to a terrible misdeed or admitted a betrayal to a friend can tell you)... one must finally let go of the fallibility of the self and embrace the infallibility of that which is beyond us.
-- todd vanderwerff, mad men: “in care of,” 2018
when you tell the truth and it sets you free, you’ll resent the freedom. you’ll long for the comfort of the iron falsehood you built. you felt so safe there that you almost ceased to think of it as a trap.
two hundred and sixteen.
you see, i take the parts that i remember and stitch the parts together to make a creature that will do what i say or love me back.
-- richard siken, litany in which certain things are crossed out, 2006
you’re old enough now to realize how monstrous this is. you don’t love to be loved in return. more important, most important: free will.
two hundred and seventeen.
death makes you a baby like love does: don’t go.
-- mira mattar, not(e)s toward i know not what (2), 2018
you buy a stuffed elephant from the baby aisle, fine grey fur, beanbag in the butt. five months go by and he’s matted and woolly with love. you cozy up in bed with the little guy and you watch bert & ernie do their thing on sesame street. you’ll be 25 next week but the years live in you like matryoshka dolls and the part of you that’s 2 needs something soft to hold, something kind to witness.
two hundred and eighteen.
it was like high school, after the crash, when even close friends had failed to ask about it: afraid, i think, to remind me i was grieving. they hadn’t known it wasn’t possible, since i didn’t, at any point, forget.
-- r.o. kwon, the incendiaries, 2018
the grieving mind won’t let you forget. a word, a sound, a letter pulls you back. it feels like a cruel joke until you understand the brain’s intention: this made you happy once; think about it again.
two hundred and nineteen.
i kissed him, again. i didn’t stop until he turned back to me, still so trustful: like a child, finding solace with the person who’d hurt him in the first place.
-- r.o. kwon, the incendiaries, 2018
tfw you’re hurt and he’s hurt but you’re the last person in the world who can help him and he’s the last person in the world who can help you! am i right, ladies
two hundred and twenty.
paradise still burns his eyes, but he can’t get back in. it would be hard to witness others’ faith; he tried so long for his own. though he’s lived in a state of lack, people often take what he’s lost to be nothing, a joke. even his mother still thinks it’s a phase. his childish rebellion. he grieves, the absence more vivid to him than what’s present, while being forced to pretend he’s fine. it’s possible that, with time, the mask has sealed itself upon his face. john leal says i should stop living with will. but if i moved, i’d join the list of all those will loves who failed him. one parent in florida; the other ill, preoccupied with christ. the god-shaped hole, will calls it. he hears the church bells sing, but not to him.
-- r.o. kwon, the incendiaries, 2018
let me take a break from these miserable interjections to say that the incendiaries is a really goddamned good novel & u should believe the hype
two hundred and twenty-one.
he who learns must suffer. and even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of god.
-- aeschylus, agamemnon, 458 BC, trans. edith hamilton
good god, this week’s field notes are depressing. if it’s any consolation, the tornado warning’s been fully lifted and i’m back upstairs in my little room, ready to make the marcella hazan tomato sauce as soon as i’m done with this.
two hundred and twenty-two.
i know that you think you already know but --
wait.
longer than that.
even longer than that.
-- what the silence says, marie howe, 2017
that old ukrainian folk tale, our goofy, slavic spin on rapunzel: the princess held captive in a cave; the formidable, fatherly bear holding her there; the village boy who loved her, who was too small, too weak, to ever slay the bear. he finds his way to her, at last, underground. she’s grown to love the cave, the safety it provides. he doesn’t haul her out of the cave, kicking and screaming; he tells her that he loves her, that he hopes he’ll see her above ground someday. he leaves the way he came. the story ends on the village boy waiting. i used to think he was stupid, a coward. i know now that he did the right thing.
two hundred and twenty-three.
i write because i feel an emotional compulsion to write -- to give form to fantastic or impossible color and shapes as sound and as pleasure -- and, yet, when i write, i am intensely aware of the fact that i am setting up and taking apart a code… i reject any dichotomy that pits the analytic against the emotional.
-- trevor baca, 2018
word uuuuuuuuuuuuuuup, my man
two hundred and twenty-four.
to write you existed me would not be merely a deaf translation. for there is no sequel to the passage when i saw -- as you would never again be revealed -- you see me as i would never again be revealed.
-- forrest gander, epitaph, 2018
the pain of loss obscures the joy of having had. you make a vow in your journal to resist regret, embarrassment, shame. you won’t betray your younger, sweeter self.
two hundred and twenty-five.
“arthur, this book,” robert said, taking off his glasses for effect. “it’s an honor to be in love with you.”
-- less, andrew sean greer, 2017
less is nice but it’s still SOME BULLSHIT that it beat out the idiot for the pulitzer, which i just learned today is pronounced PULL-its-er and not PEW-lit-ser. now, if you’ll excuse me, i have some tomato sauce to make. the rain is coming down outside in great grey sheets. be well.