Notes from the Interior

Through Yourself

2011-04-23T14:08:00.001-07:00

I talked to Edward Albee on the phone a couple of weeks ago about his work for a short piece I was asked to write for a website.

The most interesting thing he said -- what sounded, actually, as if it may have been the first time he actually said this one thing (a lot of the interview felt automatic -- the talking catalog of the mind from taking too many interviews) -- was how one should never write about oneself, how writing about oneself is boring, how you can't be objective when you are the subject, and how, for him anyway, his writing was much more interesting than he was.

But, you write through yourself, he said.

And as much as I think that's true, I also think that the postmodernist -- he is a postmodernist, his plays are postmodern plays -- would think that the writing about oneself is only pure subjection. But, it isn't. I think the memoir is a way of honoring what once felt instinctual and to touch language to the logic of that.

And I think it's an argument about whether feelings are facts or not facts. Yvonne Rainer, the great choreographer, wrote a book called "Feelings are Facts". It was a book about herself, and herself as a dancer, which for Yvonne Rainer is one in the same.

I don't know where the ego plays into this, but the ego plays into this.

I think that's what Albee was saying by not saying writing the memoir was about the ego.

And even if you are removed in whole from the impulse to record your own life, everything you write is about your own life because it is you thinking about what life is and you thinking about what life is is you living a life in the writing which others of us will read or not read.

Borders

2011-04-20T11:11:00.000-07:00

Ricky Ian Gordon and Marie Howe and Jean Valentine and I all shared a common space in public last night at Border's Bookstore in strange monolith known as the Time Warner building (I think that's what it's called) to celebrate a new CD of Ricky singing songs that we all wrote the poems for. It was a great reunion because I think the last time we were all in the same room together was, maybe, at a birthday party I had in Provincetown one summer when I turned 200 at the home of a friend that is no longer the friend that he was the summer I turned 200.

The fullness of time, Marie said during a pause.

And it was: the music out of poems and the music put into them. And thinking back to the last time Marie and I and Jean were all in the same room: Staten Island, I think; Snug Harbor; link in the long chain of AIDS inspired poetry readings. We smoked cigarettes then -- Marie and I -- and were far from walking into the most crucial and heartbreaking times of our lives.

Ned Rorem was sitting in the first row and all I could think of was reading those diaries of his when I was in my 20's and thinking, my God, how do people have lives with so many people in them? And now, in my own life -- never as many as Rorem's, but if you add the ghosts to the ones that are living the number may be close to Rorem's.

These events are strange because a piano is hauled in from somewhere musical (a bookstore is many things, but musical isn't one of them), and somebody who has other tasks, I'm sure, is assigned to present an evening that -- you can see the soft mystery flicker across their face -- they don't quite know the reason for. And it's a crowd, mostly, of stragglers and a few real fans here and there.

My favorite sight -- and this always happens in seemingly perfectly measured intervals of time -- is the person looking for a book in the section right there while you're reading or performing.

My favorite sound was hearing Jean say: "bullshit" in one of her poems through the microphone which -- as it is at every large bookstore reading -- was being carried all the way over into the children's section.

Human

2010-08-12T08:12:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to figure out as I watch each episode of "Trueblood" and, less likely, "The Vampire Diaries" (the best one of all may be "Being Human" on the BBC) what -- aside from the obvious eroticism of blood and teeth -- the latest fascination with life as a vampire is really about.

Could it be the fact that we're dwindling down as a species and simply no longer interested in being human?

The world (west of the Third one) has, of course, dictated who we should be at every opportunity (and it never matches what we see in self-reflection). But maybe we're way past that now. Maybe, in our minds, we are already ascending from the ashes and so associate with the vampire not only because he can't see himself in the mirror, but can't see his life there, either. Maybe we've collectively realized that nothing we do -- no pill, no knife, no salve, no food, no recovery, no God, no mantra, no practice -- will change who we essentially are: human beings in human bodies who die from something called life.

We watch the vampires because we want to live forever -- past the end of the world.

Better than merely wanting blood in the power hungry dark is drinking it.

Caleb

2010-05-27T13:12:00.000-07:00

Our beloved cat, Caleb, had to be put down today because he got diabetes and we couldn't get his sugar down and he was pissing all over our apartment and we went in and out of dealing with it as best as we could and then not dealing with it because our lives were getting overturned and Andrew, my steady rock, was dealing with it more than anybody was dealing with it because he was home with it, because he's not working now and that cloud of not working and the cloud of Caleb changing day by day, hour by hour, made us decide and call the vet to ask what she thought and she supported the decision of letting Caleb go out of this world and then he did go out, so quietly with his paws wrapped in his Caleb way around Andrew's arm and left us and left Andrew in the first minute of a different world with an empty carrier to take home.

I said to Andrew hours later it may have been better just to take him over the vet in his wild nature, not in the carrier because as Andrew's friend, Greg, pointed out, he would have to take the empty carrier home.

And he did. He carried the carrier which was lighter now all the way home.

And Cyrus was there, Caleb's brother who until now has been with Caleb every minute of every year that added up to eight years and now is alone and when we aren't there he will be in the alone of the alone -- the alone that is the same as where people are when they are alone: nothing in the way to see the open Caleb-less road.

I wonder what Cyrus will find in the world without his brother?

And if he will bring it back to us.

Please bring it back to us, Cyrus, whatever it is.

Florida

2010-04-02T19:53:00.000-07:00

I love how quiet and empty the streets are in Coral Gables, which is where I am and where I have been talking to students at the University of Miami about my writing and what I think about queer life (marriage, bi-sexuality, writing objectively about sexuality, sex and friendship). I've been to various "phases" of Florida (which I think they are rather than places because the Sun is the real place down here), and the University of Miami campus is very beautiful because it is so circuitous, and there is a lake and little bridges and dorms that look like old motels and there is a swimming pool in the middle of the campus where, in the middle of the day, people are swimming. How strange it is to see people swimming on a college campus -- a real like-in-a-movie moment. I was hit in every direction by how outside life is here and how cinematic.

The fact that all the architecture feels a little soul-less may be due to the presiding fact that no one spends anytime inside -- except to sleep, which is still not really spending any time inside.

Inside the hotel where I am staying, there isn't nearly as much pubescent youth as I have been seeing streaming through campus. It's families, mostly and pre-youth swimming in the rooftop pool, and downstairs, a woman sitting at the grand piano in the lobby eating a sandwich. I suppose she'd strayed in from the street. She looks like Bette Davis in "Pocketful of Miracles". And compared to all the vigor of campus life, she's a reminder of the second fact of life in Coral Gables and southern Florida in general.

The sun sets.

Older

2010-03-26T19:10:00.000-07:00

My knee was having a sparking feeling and I went to the doctor and found out from looking at the xrays that my right knee has osteoarthritis. How strange it always is to see the inside of your own body, lit from behind by a light that hasn't changed through time.

That couldn't be my body, I thought, looking at the simplistic black and white reverse photograph that showed how the top bone in my right knee and the bottom bone were touching each other because there's no cartilage there and how different that looked from the left knee that remains, as the nice doctor explained, perfect.

Then the doctor said, listen to your body. How many times have I heard that in my life? and yet now, staring at my black and white leg, I know which part to listen to. (A lot of the other parts don't talk as loud).

And it may be 20 years, but someday you will need a knee replacement, the nice doctor said. For now, it's a matter of keeping you out of pain. Then he explained the various ways I could keep out of pain and about physical therapy and about what I could and couldn't do next time at the gym. I just started with a personal trainer, too, so that was a good story to tell him at the next training session. No flying up and down the stairs, I told him.

I don't have any pain -- not really. Sometimes, like I said, the knee gets a sparking feeling -- that twinge that never really progresses past ignition stage -- but it's not really a pain, and I've had it for a few years and I'm only limping around in the morning, getting out of bed, when I feel as though everybody I've been dreaming about aren't finished telling me their stories and they're still making it hard for me to move through blessed daylight without feeling some kind of dark, some kind of pain.

It's hard to stay in this body a lot of the time because it has gone through so much beauty and damage -- young beauty, old damage. If only I had ... but my knee was going to fall down anyway. I feel that I've always been bearing down too hard on the right -- mostly in my drunken '20's, walking horses around the barn.

It's hard to look that picture of how my right leg looks from the inside knowing that it will look like this for awhile and then it will look worse.

How terribly obvious injury is.

It's not just the heart and mind that make us emotional creatures.

It's resisting, resisting, until we absolutely have to -- staring at the bones.

Lucky

2010-03-20T10:54:00.000-07:00

Andrew and I had a week the other week in which a lot of nice things happened: the cottage that we own on the beach went from only being seasonally habitable (a condo board ruling) to year round; I got invited to come to Miami and talk to graduate students about a book I wrote that has for most of it's printed life felt as though no one were reading it; and something else good happened, but I forget what it is.

The flurry of good made me think of Richard, my ex-boyfriend, who, after a failed suicide attempt in his early '20's, felt that he could only be with people who made him feel "lucky". Whether or not that's true -- the big idea of true: that lucky people can apply to anyone -- is a mystery to either be discounted or celebrated. But there are weeks, even days, with someone in which you feel their very presence makes you lucky. When the fact of deciding not to go it alone has a kind of benevolence that keeps signalling back to the union and giving it power.

Of course, without knowing it, I was the lucky designee assigned to "luck" in Richard's lucky life. But now, I think both Andrew and I are the holders of the spell. Love is not only lovelier, the second time around, but luckier.

Crying

2010-02-26T20:13:00.000-08:00

I've been crying a lot lately.

I'll be watching something, or listening to something or remembering something while I am looking or hearing or thinking about something and I will start crying just for a minute or so, as though thinking by itself isn't enough to stay with something and in order to really see the inside you have to lubricate living a little in the eyes that you are living with and I am not a cryer, per se -- though I've had my moments. I've had my visions.

David Cromer's production of "Our Town" made me cry a lot. Looking at people live is something very moving in the particular way that Cromer presents this material to us.

And crying at other things, too: that shot of L.A. and Janet Leigh in "Psycho" blown up 1,000 times in a scene from "A Single Man" where Colin Firth is talking to the most beautiful man.

When I cry, and if I'm with Andrew, he puts his hand around my wrist as if to keep me down, as if crying could make me go away. I've been crying a lot lately because I am always letting go. And I've started therapy again. The last time I was in therapy I met Andrew. I wonder what will happen this time?

When the poet, Jason Shinder had a memorial reading of his poems at the New School a few months after he died (was it only a few months? It could have been days), William Wadsworth got up and started talking about how Jason was such a good memorizer of poems and how one of his favorite poems was Auden's "As I Walked Out One Evening" and when Wadsworth got to that part of the story -- when he seemed himself to be holding back something that could have been tears -- I became hysterical in my chair -- suddenly and practically convulsively. Two of my friends had to hold me. Again, it was almost too much for me to stay down.

The extraordinary thing about crying is how closely it brings you into your life -- as though everything that happens outside the gravitas of that particular human act is, well, outside your own life. And along with pain, coming and sneezing, it's the realest thing that gets set off in us.

How different a world it would be if we all had to cry at some point in every day.

How refreshed we'd become, slightly weary of having to keep going back and forth from hard living to deep living to light living to living with the lights on and living with the lights out.

I want people to cry more.

I want other people to see them as I have seen them.