Mexico City, via Paris. Conference.
Washington, D.C. Family, and major U.S. holiday.
York. (No, not the New one, just York.) Conference.
And then back. Perhaps I shall have interesting things to write about at that point....
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9 posts from June 2007
Wrong mountain
David Hirson has written two plays – and only two: La Bête (1991), an extraordinarily peculiar tour de force in rhyming verse that actually reached Broadway before flopping and is often done by the braver regional theaters, and Wrong Mountain (2000), a bitter but brilliant piece on devoting your life to the wrong goals (i.e. climbing the wrong mountain).
There must be a story there, though an Internet search doesn't give me clarification, only more mysteries: a young playwright, no longer really young; two brilliant but extremely bizarre plays that got a lot of attention, if not quite what you would call success, and were published together; and nothing else. He apparently shows up at festivals and such, and you can't help thinking – how peculiar does he seem there, how does he justify having just a play a decade? Is there going to be a third play in his career – around 2009, at this rate? Will it be brilliant, will it be a success, or another complicated tangle of success and failure? Does he do any minor plays at all, does he ever sketch anything, or does he burn everything peripheral before anyone sees it?
Of course it's plausible, given the monumental nature of each of the plays, for him to take that long writing each of them – it just seems so bizarre that each is so huge, so ambiguous in its relation to the current American stage; you would think they would be either simply failures by an obscurity, or near-successes by someone who has written other things that didn't do even that well. Because both plays are also sort of about bad art, about people who devote their lives to the artistic and either fail or do something worthless with it, the resonance is especially disturbing.
***
As I try to work my way through the presentation I must give next week, which is embedded in the subject matter of the book I am promising to write during my 2008 research leave, I find more and more things wrong with it, things that just don't link up, or make the sense I had formerly asserted, or really seem to matter at all. And, in the middle of the night, as I get more and more stressed, I am wakeful because I can't help thinking that the planned book, itself, might be – before it is ever written – a load of nonsense, a pointless exercise. That it is not a book I can make sense of, not a book I can do well – nor a book anyone would really want, even if it could be done well.
Wrong mountain: the idea that you would spend enormous effort and all your ability to make something, and it would be forgotten, not because the world is unfair and people are unkind and you aren't properly appreciated, but simply because the thing itself is junk.
And if you know that a difficult piece of work is not going to be worth doing – and know, not merely in the context of the usual insecurities of the writer, but because you realize how essentially unimportant the shards of your life are, to other people, and even to yourself – how can you possibly make yourself actually do it – actually scale the side of that mountain?...
Of course I have spent most of my life driving myself to make some kind of book, and of course have long realized that such drive, such obsession, is no guarantee that anything larger I might finally, someday, finish would be any kind of success. But thinking it through this way: to do your best, and realize that it isn't really very good: this is something we can easily imagine happening to other people, even to most other people, given human limitations; but to experience it happening to oneself – especially in the face of all that has been given up, all that has not happened in the place of this thing, that is not in itself particularly good – this is so huge, so appalling in its entirely plausible and ironic finality, that it is almost impossible, emotionally, to compass....
The Exodus
(fragments from an ancient manuscript)
[This was, strangely enough, my first published poem, back in 1990; at the time it was an obvious response to the disintegration of arts funding under the Reagan and Bush administrations, and the trials of artists who were regarded as inappropriately shocking to be funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (especially Tim Miller, whom I knew at the time, and Holly Hughes, who remains one of my favorite performance artists to this day). Of course, the genre and structure are the strange bits. Even writing an extended epic – with sci-fi surrealism, an illusion of fragmentation, and a steady, square, pseudo-Eddic meter – was peculiar enough; the fact that I wrote and published it in Los Angeles, where poetry is dominated by image, personal story, and alternative identities, was even more bizarre. I remain proud of it, though. This is a shorter version, about two-thirds as long as the original, which moves a bit faster and deletes some of the more peculiarly conflicted lines....]
from III. The collapse... until the dark hand fell,
and the Endowment was no more.And in the months to follow, when
the Art Laws first prohibited
all images and words that seemed
subversive or obscene, before
the first Secession of the West,
before the MOMA Massacre,
they heard the fear in lyrics, saw
the hints to flee encoded in
small gallery exhibits. They
began to fondle airline schedules,
barter brushes, typewriters,
connive for private grants, beg for
inflated dollars to escape
the ties that held them to the place
that once was called the land of freedom...
VII. The flightThe exodus began: the painters
(trunks of leaking tubes, hair tangled)
flew to Roman villas, Bauhaus
spaces in Berlin...The novelists defected too,
since it was clear that angry letters
merely caused arrests at three
a.m., and empty, bloody beds.
The poets did not leave until
the third Secession, and the first
of several civil wars. By then
they noticed all was not all right;
they dashed to rickety last planes,
too flimsy to be commandeered
by warring military camps
for strafing runs and bombing of
disruptive types, the poor, and others
whose allegiance was unsure.They were almost too late, because
at last the axe fell. We all still
remember tales of crippled dancers,
blood and paint enmixed, brave mothers
hiding teenaged poets, and
the film directors who refused
to leave director’s chairs until
machine gun bullets tore the fabric...
XII. The last waveThe artists who had not escaped,
the ones remaining who had thought
that martial law was temporary,
those who tried to play the game,
and those who hadn’t quite believed
the newscasts, hid in unmarked vans,
dashed towards borders driving borrowed
cars without a license, dodging
armored tanks and barricades.These desperadoes gathered in
the airports and train stations, foul
bus depots and freight-crowded docks
(some fell into the wine-dark sea)
and fled, their faces turned to watch
behind them, hoping not to feel
the black guns’ tearing fire just
before the closing of the doors.They crossed the borders step by step,
miles won toward safer lands, and miles
away from home. They offered prayers,
original in style, to all
the muses and the rebel arts,
in hope of reaching safety...
from XIII. The empty trap... And in the space they left behind,
life gradually collapsed to two
dimensions: distance, and expense,
and all was measured by those rules.(Black uniforms, dark limousines,
assassinations, murders, the
explosive reds of gunfire, and
the brighter reds of terrorism -
striking subjects for the painters,
but the artists all had gone.)Some journalists and actors stayed
sequestered by the government;
they could not guess their futures, and
perhaps that was more merciful.
In any case, the veil is drawn
on civil wars, the battles of
succession, and three hundred years
of the American Dark Age.
We sing the wanderers, the fleeing
artists, and their transformations.In far lands, artists found their ways,
bizarre and separate, inventing
gorgeous memories, forgetting
bloody turmoil to recall
a golden, grand America,
a vision made to order from
pre-revolutionary views...
from XXI. The new viewThose who settled tropic islands
saw their arts grow gentler and
more sensual. Tahitian poets
reinvented enchained sonnets,
cheerfully creating without
ego’s signatures, in groups
that gathered around huge bonfires
on white beaches...Slow, bright musics made with flutes
and electronics in New Zealand,
silver orchestras of gongs
and new steel instruments in Guam
played through long, warm nights in constant
rhythms. Singers moved in boats
across the ocean, scarves protecting
throats that glittered with the jewelry
of a hundred islands, warming
up to sing recitals under
palms, near dead volcano’s rims.The painters of Antarctica
began an art of subtle whites;
they forged more than a hundred words
for delicate degrees of difference
in the empty canvas, seeking
distant memories of faces
that had vanished in the snow.And we know their colleagues, the
Saharan desert painters, blending
waves of sandy hues, the sculptors
working with the winds to make
the dunes across vast distances
change shape. The desert-bound musicians
learned the ecstasy of numbers,
let their sounds evaporate
into a silence full of meaning,
hearing glory in the winds
and empty skies. No vacuum, though,
can last forever, and the poets
of their tribes began to chant
their lyrics, making songs that rang
across the world, long, fluid lines
of notes and words that taught the beauty
of the sands to greener countries...
from XXIX. The ReturnIn later centuries, when the
cruel Baptist-Islam wars were over,
when the long-lost artists came
again to colonize the land,
and when they rebuilt New New York
on a much grander scale, with golden
buildings, crystal domes in clear
blue air, some ancient images
by Mapplethorpe were etched in alloys
all around the city walls.Children in small boats, who watched
the sun set on the bay, would argue
for their favorites: naked flowers,
men’s dark torsos, and the perfect
faces of long-vanished women....
[Los Angeles, 5/19/90-12/6/91]
Looking for a Place
[1991]
This is the third apartment I’ve seen today; it doesn’t look too bad, the rent is only mildly outrageous. The paper with the landlord’s number is damp and crumpled in my hand, and the backs of my thighs are so tired; it’s clear that I’ll have to give up on my Los Angeles hamstrings – chiefly made from working out with the brake and accelerator pedals – to work on the powerful legs, those fine San Francisco butts, made by the high, cool hills. But it’s like coming home, the air is clear and people are friendly, and I can almost imagine that Reid is still alive and will call me tonight. He lived just over the hill, I remember that, and the bus that goes to his old apartment leaves from the next corner, I can see it from the doorway.
I like the tree that stands near the front window, thick and green, with light leaves; perhaps it is birch or ash. The room I grew up in – my own room in my parents’ house – was on the second floor, I looked straight out into a mass of Virginia green, great oaks and chestnuts, and it was like living in a treehouse. There was a peace and completeness about that world, at least as long as I was facing away from the door, looking out the window into green. I always wanted to fly out into it, to be held up by the leaves, by the fragments of light that held them apart.
The landlord opens the door, and he has some trouble with the key. I’m going to live here now, and give up on all my other cities; the people I love in Los Angeles will finally be left behind, just like those in the cities of the east and the north. Sometimes it seems as though everyone moves away, and no one ever moves towards. I’ll never live in New York again, that’s a little sad, but also a relief. I remember Sid’s tiny, bizarre Village loft; I know now that his cheery notes were love letters, but I didn’t pay enough attention, I was too young and I didn’t know. And he’s dead of cancer, and I never told him how I felt. And there were so many others there, the fastest city I’ve ever lived in, the most painful. Holding men during long nights, trying to rub the city out of their tense shoulders, but I never could quite do it. I remind myself: the disorientation, the loss of not living in New York, of being away from the light and sound of the violent center of culture, it must be less than the pain of living there.
And Los Angeles, I’m sorry to lose the sun and heat, but I can’t stay there anymore. The decision is made, I tell myself firmly, but silently, trying to look interested in the cabinets that the landlord has been showing me. He coughs, a hacking cough, and I move away, trying not to show revulsion or my instinct to protect my fragile immune system. He is certainly different from the landlord of my first San Francisco apartment, who came out, tanned, sweating and covered with paint chips, to show me the living room, then the bedroom, and I brushed paint chips out of his chest hair while we made love. He later gave me a teapot, something chic of Milanese metal, as a housewarming gift; perhaps it was intended to keep me from blabbing to his lover. I wonder if he’s still around anywhere.
The living room has that bright peace typical of empty rooms in sunlight, with no furniture cluttering it, couches and tables that speak of living and of time. The floor is hardwood, and there is some damage in the corner; I make a show of examining it, although I have no idea how to fix the marred spot, and I know I’ll just put something over it. I always liked hardwood best, another legacy from my parents’ home. The Los Angeles apartment, the bedrooms and the living room, all with the old wood that was so kind to feet, that made me feel as though I was touching the earth. Mornings when I would lie on the living room couch, reading, wearing the gray cotton robe, and maybe Patrick would drop by during his run. It was later that he packed up and moved to Houston, or perhaps Dallas, I never heard from him again. I go into the bedroom, and the door creaks as I open it.
The closets have doors with pine moldings, small echoes of Ron’s house, the wood A-frame full of light and air, and when we were lying in his vast waterbed in the morning sun he said he loved me. But I couldn’t stay there, he was handsome, affectionate, I can’t understand why I couldn’t bear to see my reflection in those adoring blue eyes. Last year I wrote to a national association of graphic artists, and I asked them: Where is he? He’s not in the phone book anymore. Tell me he’s still alive, tell me he’s moved somewhere where I can’t find him, please find him for me.
Back out into the living room, and I go across to the small door that leads into the kitchen. An empty space where the refrigerator should be, that is annoying. I don’t want to bring the refrigerator from Los Angeles, the broken thermostat has been freezing vegetables and mustard for seven years. The relief of leaving the Los Angeles apartment, which is so worn out for me now, full of crowded and exhausting feelings, although no one else can see it in the sunlight across the living room floor. Actually it was almost like the apartment in Washington, so long ago now, from the time that I was fleeing from my parents into the city. At first Randy and I shared his bed, but I wandered too much and moved too fast. When I saw him at Christmas, he looked so athletic, so grand, as always. He and his lover are both utterly healthy, and I’m glad; I wouldn’t want to worry about them. But I can’t understand why he looked at me with a faint, distant suspicion, as though he wondered what I really thought, whether I ever cared about him at all.
The kitchen has shelves all along one wall, like the kitchen in Steve’s apartment. I would have been so happy to live there, I dreamt about it for several years. I would visit him in the large, open living room, and occasionally see the dark, small bedroom, which looked so warmly comfortable, like the lair of a big, clean animal. I wanted to spend time in that room, in the large, loosely made bed that smelled faintly of his skin, his arms; but by then my life were already falling apart, the skies were darker and my flesh was visibly ruined. Mornings when I looked particularly bad, I would walk alone, cushioned in a silent, unending rage. The polarity of me and other men had changed, it was no longer that they were asking me and I was forgetting to answer. I was the one asking for attention now, and I didn’t want to listen for oblique, embarrassed refusals.
The bedroom is all right, a little small. It has none of the charm of my last San Francisco apartment, an efficiency in the Castro, hardwood floors supporting rows of bookshelves, and the garden, which was kept up by the man from the third floor who wore his leather vest while digging around the plants. Right outside my glass window, there it was: a tiny green sanctuary with a high wall, like a monastery garden. On festival days, when the Castro a hundred yards away was packed with handsome bodies, you could only hear a faint roar, like a seashell, and I would think: out there, he’s out there somewhere, all you have to do is go look. And then I would go look, and my resolve would collapse, and I would be lonely, walking past people as though they were great, silent buildings, and I were lost in an unknown city.
I check my list to remind myself of what to watch for: plumbing, electric heating, is it on the ground floor? But the real questions, the ones I won’t ask the landlord, are: can I put a table with books and medicines in easy reach, can I get to the phone and window from the bed? Which means of course: could I be sick here, could I die here? As opposed to going home to the room in the trees, where I would be with my parents, so well taken care of, but so far from all the other people I love. Every place I go has more empty spaces than full ones, there is no city that isn’t drenched with the loss of those who don’t live there, or who don’t live anywhere anymore.
I go back into the living room. The landlord is standing by the door, peering at the heater, which is hammering strangely and sounds broken. I gaze away from him at the walls, seeing in the cracks faces and rooms, the air of many places, people who have passed by and have vanished. I pivot slowly on my left heel, and I feel my face making a bright smile that’s just for him. “It’s perfect,” I say, “I’ll take it.”
[Los Angeles, 5/3-7/91]
Good things
(a) A second meeting with Melinda, the psychologist from the HIV clinic and my friend. (There was a long delay between our first and second meetings this time, because her mother died; when we were walking out we paused in the summer sunshine and she told me, tears in her eyes but calm, about her mother and her death – a strong-willed, unafraid woman, who knew what was coming and was very direct about it.) Melinda wants to do some relatively simplistic/behavioristic stuff with me, which should be interesting; as I've said, the opposite of my old Jungian work, but such pragmatism seems useful now.
(b) Returned to the gym, after ages away; a nice return visit. They have redecorated and, although things don't look terribly different, the equipment is actually hugely different – and better; and a friendly, helpful sort of regular guy as trainer. And, thank heaven, the piped-in music is now far less obnoxious, far less loud.
(c) And made raspberry chocolate brownies just afterwards. (I note that there seems to be a disparity in values between (b) and (c).) They didn't solidify well – too many raspberries I think – but what the heck they've got chocolate and raspberries in them, so they're not exactly unappetizing.
(d) A wonderful hour-long chat with Mitchell in Los Angeles, who is huge fun and I miss him greatly. Perhaps we will get to stay in frequent contact over the summer. Tomorrow I will call Trisha on her birthday – another major, faraway, pillar of my emotional life.
(e) Arrangements for travel and seminars are lining up a bit more neatly; there is still too much to be done, but the structure and connection to what I want to do is a bit more under my control. And two trips are invitations, which makes me feel a bit more successful, less of a failure, less of a patsy to the system; which is of course good.
Summer, long days... maybe continuing to do things will get me – somewhere....
Weight
I apologize, again, that the entries for the past month or so have been so distinctly unhappy. Of course that is in a general context of me as a depressed, disappointed, angry person who has been especially upset by my life circumstances over the past five years (even more than in the other dark stretches of my life, and unfortunately there have been several rather long ones). So perhaps these entries are no surprise; perhaps it is simply the way I am about things, about life.
However, what seems different – and, for me at least, always analyzing my own psychological moves, interesting – about the past month is that I am not really depressed per se (i.e. not numb, unfeeling, or inert). Being unhappy, being disappointed, being angry, are more present for me than they have been for years – I think the combination of changes in medication (i.e. the reformulation of my HIV antivirals from last November, which has given me somewhat more physical and mental energy than I've had for a long time) and an increasingly direct confrontation with certain aspects of my life have allowed me to feel more than I have for some time. Those feelings are not amusing – they are not terrible of course, I don't have an awful life, just one that is disappointing – but they do seem to impel me to move forward, somehow.
Such movement will probably not be massive and exciting. I'm not going to get a job in London, or New York, or Vancouver or Barcelona, any year soon; and no handsome, pleasant man is going to show up on my doorstep. The world will probably not transform in an instant, become brighter and more positive; I suspect that some of the stasis of the past five years has been due to me foolishly waiting for such a transformation.
However, the struggle to move certain things up a few notches – to finish pieces of writing, to get some exercise, to avoid agreeing to useless and problematic activities – seems at least worthwhile. I have a certain determination to improve things, even in the face of the various minor messes and dull, brackish backwaters that make up my life these days. There is therefore a function in being upset, in being unhappy – at this point anyway, it may help me move forward, out of some of those backwaters.
***
This morning was frustrating: having finally spent far too much money, and effort, on a trip to a conference in Mexico City – one that does not even interest me; but I am going to give a paper written by V. and I, so there is a responsibility-to-those-who-have-passed-on aspect that can't be avoided – I discovered that the conference program, finally distributed today, has scheduled me for two presentations about six hours before my flight lands. Just grand, I thought, frantically e-mailing people to ask for changes. And the small conference after it, seminars this fall, and a mess of meetings and distractions and minor requests – the sheer weight of all the things that I don't even want to do, all of which demand attention and money, is absurd. In a year when I'd sworn to myself that I would be increasingly free of nonsensical demands, there are more of them than ever.
This weight pushes my imagination in somewhat new directions: which has resulted in a distinctly strange, and new, kind of dream. Although I have had dreams in the past where I was singing on stage, forgetting words and not knowing what to do next – a barely exaggerated version of experiences from my years of singing cabaret and musicals in the 1980s – this was different. In today's dream, realizing I don't know what to do, realizing I'm not ready for a performance, I simply refuse to do it at all: facing whatever fury from the woman organizing the concert, contempt or surprised anger from the audience, I tell them I'm sorry, I'm just not going to sing tonight. Or ever.
A refusal that is frightening, but exhilirating. I wonder if I can do more of that in my life: to just cancel some of the demands....
Small broken things
The weather is beautiful, the past three days. Clear, sunny – not at all hot of course, it's barely 70 or so, but ideal. For the locals they think this is hot – one said to me yesterday that it was tropical: I just rolled my eyes and said, no, this is not tropical. It's like a pleasant April day in Virginia, or in San Francisco, or like a day in Los Angeles anywhere from March to May, September to November; life should therefore be ideal, as this is in fact the kind of weather I have missed for years, wanted to return to, in a prelapsarian Californication of the imagination.
Unfortunately, I'm not having quite the right response – or having only a pallid version of that response: hope, confidence, the aim to live, to grow, to move. Last night a key broke on my Powerbook; my reaction was surprisingly dark – the sense of things broken, of small things cracked and not working: the television program's digital freezes, my unhealing psoriasis despite the warmer weather, dust on the books, gnats in the houseplants, a headache for no apparent reason....
Becoming aware of that interpretation, of my life as a mess too damaged to be worth repairing, resulted in strange shifts and sea-changes, waves of interpretation and perception that seemed to shift as I slept or woke. I know that my life is cocooned, indulged, easy – but also relatively inert, directionless, dulled – interpreting one way or another is purely a matter of suspended virtual images, of the labels and names for things rather than the things themselves –
what glue, what small clamps and toothpicks, would repair these small, broken things?...
How to save a life
It is perhaps less than impressive that I should be so enamored with The Fray's 'How to Save a Life'. It is, after all, a current big quasi-alternative hit, by a Coldplay clone; and Rolling Stone considered it yet another expression of rather self-indulgent teen angst (the truth is, I did hear it for the first time on Grey's Anatomy, which show I still mostly like, despite its increasingly sloppy soap opera plottiness – and how in hell do they get any surgery done in that atmosphere?). So: not really something a savvy musician should be impressed by.
(There is a very unpleasant new street lamp three feet from my front window, which is pouring bright light across the entire front room.)
But I like it. The video is exceptionally teen-angst-y – which makes more sense when you discover that the lead singer wrote it based on his experience of counselling teens at summer camp, which means that their deeply felt tragedies and instant heartbreaks are the whole point. And there's a version by the Piano Tribute people which, though mostly rather pedestrian, has a very nice middle section where V is held through all the chords – a nice dissonance that recalls all that rich post-Copland American Romantic music, with its big, complex but not subtle, feelings. And the lyrics – again, very Coldplay-clone – partly clear, partly mysterious, all very feeling-oriented and yet intellectually metaphorical.
(The sheer annoyance, the glaring unpleasantness, of the street lamp and its actinic glare: like an East LA boulevard, the lights like those in a prison, meant to keep the crime down. A nasty, heartless quality imposed on this formerly pleasant neighborhood.)
As it happens, I had the same listen-to-it-over-and-over response to Vertical Horizon's 'Everything You Want', which involves a fairly similar broad-spectrum controlled anger in response to an inability to understand or manage personal relationships. These are therefore, perhaps, nerd's songs, expressing the frustration of a thinking type faced by the complexities and changes of a dense emotional situation (not only central to much contemporary 'alternative' music, but also to the entire rise of the prestige of the thinking-oriented introvert, especially after twenty-five years of home computers). Perhaps not surprising, then, that I should like songs that express this kind of frustration, this resentment that things haven't gone my way. It's also a bit like Moomintroll, in Jansson's Moominland Midwinter, when he sings his enraged song against winter: a bit childish, but a way of expressing anger, resentment, frustration, that has been held in for too long....
(That damned street lamp: if I spent more time on it, perhaps it could be the basis for a pastiche of the first pages of Nabokov's Pale Fire, where the disturbed and unreliable narrator is gradually revealed to us through unexpected interpolations in his scholarly treatise: 'There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings'....)