vox alter's blog

In the Sun

It looks like, since this is the first post I clicked "publish" on when Vox announced it was closing, this will be my first post here in TypePad.  So … I find myself once again listening to these words and wondering how much I will find my way.  How much I will find you.  If I even have a way.

And I don't know anymore what it's for, I'm not even sure;
if there is anyone who is in the sun,
will you help me understand?

 

 

I am trying to find my way
but along the way I keep running into
your ghost.

a work in progress.
be kind.

 

 

In the Sun draft2

 

 

O Oriens …

The antiphon for today begins "O Oriens," an invocation praising the rising star of the east.  Rising dawn.  A new beginning.  Shine the splendor of your light, the star of justice, down upon us, and come.  Come to claim us back from the tenebrous place where we have fallen, in the shadow of death.  Lift us back to grace.  Fulfill this long promise that we can hardly remember.

A fitting antiphon for the shortest day of the year.  That was yesterday.

I feel I've been waiting for this day for months now, while a love too beautiful to be anything but fragile has shuddered faintly in every strong wind and finally cracked.  A huge fissure right down the middle and it has fallen apart, the two halves split like a gash in a lip that is too deep, for the moment, to bleed.  Blood will come later.  For now it is just numbness and waiting for pain.  And, I won't lie, a sense of relief.  The thing about crash-landing is that afterwards, at least you are on the ground.  (Or digging your way up toward it, from the crater your collision has created.)

Halves are not even.  This is no optical-illusion vase that you can still fracture into two discrete faces, each staring the other down from across a divide the eyes try to understand, feeding the image to the brain, upside-down and trying to right it, to join or cleave it into reconizable shapes.  No.  This is messy, your aunt's antique porcelaine thrown to the floor and each shard holding the shape of another shard.  Things are still entangled.  Is it over, for good and all?  I don't know, and don't want to test the fragments to find out.  They point jagged edges at one another.  The accusing broken bits could cut your finger, if you came too close.

And now I am trying to remember who I am.  I am not the same person who fell in love with him, a year and a half ago.  I have betrayed much of what I believed - about love, about faith, about myself.  I am not sure I will get beyond this angry disappointment and trust another person, am not sure how I could even think of being able to do that.  People lie, a voice says in my brain.  They cheat, and they lie, and all they care about is covering their own butts and it doesn't matter how they hurt you.  Doesn't matter to them.  I know this voice is only as true as I allow it to be.  Some nights that means very true indeed.  Tonight both sides of the equation - what the voice says, and the fact that I keep hearing it - frustrate me.  Maybe everyone lies, or maybe I watch too much Dr House.  Maybe I never truly mattered to him and this thing I've been calling "love" was just a midlife crisis, a way to pass the time, an infatuation.  Maybe I should have listened to myself when, months ago, I was teaching Jane Eyre to a class of freshmen and thought, hmmm.  Who does care for me?  Like Jane, I care for myself, and all my sea-anenome signals are in overdrive right now, telling me to close.  Protect myself.  Back away from the whole species.  And I might.

But then ... O Oriens, I read, in the liturgy I have not been following as assiduously as I should.  And I can't help this longing that surges forward in me like its own grey-gold winter dawn, tinged with rosy orange, light over a snowy riverbank.  And I sit here humming to myself in the quiet of the first night after the shortest day, and think this new dawn is precisely for the disillusioned, for the broken, for the on-the-verge-of-jaded.  It's not a dawn of new love in the romantic sense.  It's a dawn of new love within, a reacquaintance with the self that might just, this time, finally, lead to greater love for self and other that is stronger than any retributive protective reaction.  And so I am greeting the night - this longest night - with a kind of peace in my heart.  It's not the joyful peace of wartime Christmas movies, the hero reunited with his wife and whild, the bell ringing on the tree and Clarence's copy of Tom Sawyer mysteriously inscribed at just the right moment.  It's a bare peace, the peace of walking alone through snowy fields as light begins to seep over the horizon.  The peace of silence and austerity and small lights that in darkness become huge, and then are content to fade as bigger lights come into view.

There are bigger lights in view.  This I believe.

The Lawn and Garden Show

Part of something, I don't know, else.  Bigger.  Finding its shape.

*****

i dream a chapel filled with blue light and the austere hum of late afternoon
one narrow blade of white light from a crack in the stained glass, long thin line of white that catches the gentle dust motes in the air and makes them shimmer
and i am remembering the song of a candle, the song of a campfire, the blue center of fire before the white heart of the flame

in the unsilence, for the first time in months, the fist that has been squeezing my heart loosens its grip and i take one deep breath after another.  i close my eyes and i can feel the glimmering dust flow into my lungs and out again, one by one and all together, and i can feel the rush of this hum of this place, coming through my pores in golden waves, like honey.  or like amber, and in these moments of breathing i see myself cradled by the golden liquid.  and i think how sweet it would be to find permanence here, in this place, cradled forever inside a wave of semi-precious tree sap, held in a position outside history and all its implications, in an attitude something like prayer.

prayer.  what one does in a chapel.  am i praying?  i am watching the blue glow from the stained glass, and the slow spinning blade of the white light that has pierced it, and the slow sparkle of dust in the surprise of light.  i am dreaming, i am floating like the dust.  my self has gone infinitesimal, i am only slightly heavier than air, heavy enough to fall through the light but light enough to fall so slowly it hardly feels like falling, more like floating, more like praying.  this is how it must feel to be a soul, nothing but soul.  no squeezing heart-grip, no burdensome memories of a body that betrays me, no bruises, no constantly battling the heft and drag of regret.  just - floating in occasional white light that comes in through crack the size of a pinprick.  and i think this is prayer, this is having prayers answered, and my dream-voice says we need a new church altogether, one where the soul can levitate in glorious bursts of unexpected illumination and not feel guilty about it or wonder if it is real.  i do not question if this prayer is true.  i am floating, i am singing with the hum of dust.  particles of light lift off my body and join the swirl above me, and i raise my arms and swim back toward the blue, through the luminescent silence.  i hear one voice singing, chanting, the gregorian "ave maria."  it is my voice, thin but confident in the dust-light, and it grows stronger and the blue takes me in like the robe-folds of a lady i have never met but always known, the mother who heals despite her own deep hurt.  i see the wise sorrow in her eyes, an ageless, ancient wound and weariness, made luminous by an even older peace and joy.  i am singing, i am floating, i am nothing - and it is grace itself.  i wake smiling and stretch one limb after another.

the voice on the radio gives careful instructions in how to graft together stems and branches of plants that were damaged in the tornadic winds of last week's storm.  louis miller is his name, the radio man who hosts the lawn and garden show, and he will not speak the word "hurricane" ; he says merely "storm," or else gives it the human name the national weather service has chosen.  as if the hurricane were a prodigal son, a member of our own family.  always with us though sometimes disgraced.  as, indeed, perhaps it is.

***

Goodbye to all that …

The house is now clean and (mostly - except for the kitchen) empty.  I am getting ready to power the computer down for real and load it into the car.  Tomorrow (and subsequent days) I'll have to come back and collect things from the frigo, then clean that and the oven … but otherwise, my time here is over.  It's a bittersweet feeling.  In this house I …

… said goodbye to a life and a place that I loved, and learned to let go little by aching little of the man who kept part of me there
… became a runner "for real"
… opened a vein by accident, by dropping a knife into my foot, the night a 19-year-old gang girl held a gun to my head
… wrote 5 articles, 8 conference papers, about 36 lectures, 2 versions of a book proposal, and 1 book chapter
… drank far too much wine on far too many occasions, some of them happy
… slipped in the shower, hit my head and blacked out
… came home the morning after a long night in the ER and decided to keep living anyway
… found a dying rat who broke my heart
… grew tomatoes, cucumbers, and green peppers for the first time
… lived through my first hurricane
… took a lot of overly hot baths with a lot of lavender sea-salt bath stuff
… sang in front of a camera and realized that even though I'll never be a rockstar, that was OK
… met new friends and greeted some old ones
… stopped writing (fiction, poetry) and then started again
… fell in love again, and remembered to live the questions themselves

… and now I am saying goodbye, not to any of that, but to the place where it has all happened.  It has been a thrilling, heart-rending, wondrous, inspiring, scary and necessary two years here.  Thank you for being part of it.  Here's to the next two (three, five, ten …).

IMG_0457

I told them it was Yeast.

[Warning : This post could VERY EASILY slip into the "FAR TOO MUCH INFORMATION" category. I originally posted it, then hid it again because it felt too, well, intimate.  Then I realized, you know, this Vox thing is my secret place precisely for things like this that would be far too much information in any other sphere.  So I'm posting it back again.  Caveat lector !]

*

There was this time in France, when I had an uncomfortable itch.  To be specific, because honestly the story doesn't make any sense if I remain vague - and please forgive the inexcusably and unavoidably intimate nature of this writing - well, to put it bluntly, the itch was of an anal nature.  On, you know, the inside.  This time lasted roughly 7 years.  No, I am not kidding.

I saw doctor after doctor.  And all I could think of to say, to one doctor after another, was that it felt like I had a yeast infection, only anal.  Inevitably, each doctor gave me The Look (TM) and said something to the effect of "well, it's not that."  And prescribed some medication or other that did nothing to treat the problem but got me out of their offices.

Over the years, I have applied steroid creams, Desitin (or its catchier new cousin, you know, "butt paste"), hydrocortisone creams, hemorrhoid creams.  Nothing touched the problem.  Or, everything touched the problem but nothing fixed it.  And to this day I live in fear of having some innocent houseguest open my medicine cabinet and wonder where I've been concealing the infant with the mean case of diaper rash, all these years.

"It feels like a yeast infection," I told the next doctor.  And got the usual scoffing rejoinder.  "Yeast? That doesn't make sense."

[It was, for the record, worse in France, because in order to describe the feeling of a yeast infection I had to say I had "des champignons."  And in case your gynecological French vocabulary is a teensy bit shaky, yes, that means mushrooms.  I had to tell the doctors I had butt-mushrooms.]

OK.

I am not a medical professional.  All I know is what my own body has lived.  And my body has lived through some goddamn yeast infections.  Since the age of, I don't know, 3?  I know what a yeast infection feels like.  But I kept listening to people who were not listening to me, because (a) I did not know what a hemorrhoid felt like and (b) they made me feel stupid and unknowledgeable about my own body.

Flash forward to 2009.

This past winter, I had to go to the gynecologist.  I was ill at ease from the start, bothered by this unmentionable problem that had arisen without my consent and been ignored by all my professionals for nearly a decade.  The irritation had become so intrusive that it involved blood.  I could not sleep through the night, and the hours I spent in front of my classes were excruciating.  I lived in fear, at the edge of an ever-present potential gaffe (of the "OMG my prof picked her BUTT in class today !!!" variety).  I had reached my limit.  My doctor ran some tests while I cringed, and I finally, tearfully, told her "I am so sorry about this, but I think I have a yeast infection."

"I didn't see any yeast," she said.

"No, I mean - anally."

"Oh !" And she got her little eye-piece back out and examined the area and, sure enough, there was yeast.

"How long has this been bothering you?" she asked, eyebrows furrowed.

I was so embarrassed, I mumbled.  "Ummmm, Mnnfghshfg shugaghsgneta."

"How long?"

"Seven or eight years," I answered, head turned to the wall.

"Hasn't it been driving you crazy??" she asked, and there was no judgment in her face, nothing but concern.  After so long of having to shout just to be heard, and then backing down anyway because one medical "expert" after another made me feel like an ignorant, misinformed hypochondriac with a poor grasp of anatomy, I felt almost like the cartoon guy who scrabbles at the edge of the cliff, arms circling wildly, only to realize the cliff is about a foot off the canyon floor.  My doctor - long may she prosper - prescibed a pill to take orally and sent me home.  A pill for yeast infections, I want to be sure to specify.  I went home and cried.  Half in relief.

*

The last seven weeks of my life have been caught up in the attempt to buy a home.  And over the past two weeks, I have come to some harsh words with my realtor.  We were supposed to close 3 weeks ago.  Tonight, I still have no confidence that we will close.  The contract could fall through at any moment.  See, the house I have chosen needed to be rewired electrically because the old wiring (installed at some point in the 1930s) was a fire hazard.  In the course of events, the electrician doing the rewiring had to cut the power completely, contact the city, and file for a permit to get the power turned back on.  This has been a subject of some major stress.  To say the least.

Granted, nobody ever promised that I would be a homeowner in southern Louisiana, or that I would have the privilege of making monthly payments on a historical house with a porch swing and an arbor, a fig tree and a natural privacy-hedge made entirely of morning glories.  The Good Lord never promised me anything like that at all, and I certainly never imagined my crazy life would lead me here.  But I work hard, and I try really hard to be a decent human being - albeit with varying degrees of success -; and I like to think the Good Lord would smile on my morning coffee on the porch swing, and that any other relevant Powers That Be would not object too obstreperously to my haphazard and amateurish attempts at gardening and grilling.  And call me hard-headed (my realtor has), but I want this the way I want it, and not otherwise.  I have already had a fabulous old house that burned down.  I don't want that again.

Every day for ten days I have called my realtor and said "I think you need to call the power company.  They won't turn the power on without a name to turn it on into, and I don't want my name on this account until we close."

And every day for ten days my realtor has told me, "No, that's not how it works.  They will just turn it on in the seller's name - that's procedure."

The following morning I call the power company - "any news on the connection at [address]?" "No Ma'am, we need a name to turn it on into.  The seller has to call us to request this." - and then call my realtor back.  "They say they need the seller to call and turn the power back on in her name."  And my realtor responds, "You must have misunderstood.  That's not how it's done."

Today, finally, I called the realtor and told her to call the power company herself and find out this information.  Lo and behold, the seller needs to call the power company to turn the account back on ! Amazing ! Who would have thought !

I would have thought.  Did think, but second-guessed myself.  Now closing has been pushed back another damn week and I don't know who I'm more angry with - the realtor, for dismissing me and making me feel stupid ; or myself, for falling for it?

Maybe I should have told her I had mushrooms in my butt.  I have the feeling it might at the very least make her pay more attention.

All I wanted was a Pepsi.

I just got off the phone with my sister.  We talked about our father.  Who had surgery 2 months ago and has lost 10 pounds he didn't have to lose in the meantime.  And I sugested - not perhaps as tactfully as I might have done, if the knowledge that I weigh only 4 pounds less than my father hadn't just smacked me upside the head - the "hire a home-health-care professional" option again.  And earned myself a diatribe.

Note : I did say "earned."

You see, I am not there.  And though she made it clear she understands why my life is not there with all of them (she doesn't, none of them does, and sometimes neither do I), it also became clear that she blames me for what she sees as a choice rather than a vocation.

If I were still as prayerful a person as I was, say, 18 months ago, I would kneel right down and pray about this.

Instead, right now, I am sitting at the computer feeling broken and bruised.  And oh, so vain (yes, I think this entry is about me).

Because, in the midst of the back-and-forth about why she thinks it's an insult to Dad to hire a home-health-care person, and why I think it's a danger not to, came the line I should by now have learned to expect.  Not the "Well, you're not here so you don't know" line.  That one is theme and variations.  (Tonight, it was followed by "Hey, you don't get to make this about you.")

No, I'm talking about the "your life is so much better since you've been back in the States" line.

Which takes all the air from the room and leaves me gasping at forgotten breaths.

Am I happier, back in the States?

Yes.  I have a full-time job with good colleagues.  I know I will be able to pay my rent at the beginning of each month.  I have a crush on a fantastic colleague who is also looking like a good friend.  I don't have to search for every single syllable when I want to express something more complicated than subject-verb-object allows.

No.  My soul has never felt so far away.  My heart has only half recovered from the past year of trauma (some of which she doesn't even know).  I never have truly reconnected with a parish after leaving Lyon.  Paying rent is frustrating, after having been a homeowner.  That crush - the colleague is married.  I'd say it's a non-starter but it's already more complicated than that.  And I have to watch my tongue a thousand ways every hour.  At the end of each week, I pretty much just want to get in bed and wake up once I have tenure.  Or else somewhere in the past.

Am I happier?  I work harder here.  I work more and more intensely and more productively and more proudly and, yeah, harder.  I feel more confident about what I have to offer, intellectually.  And I wish, with a regularity that shames me, that I were back in France.  That I could go back.

"I mean, you were hospitalized in France," she throws at me.

"But this isn't about me," I return, and she hangs up.

It's been 6 years.

I guess I'm just wondering - when do I get to get out of the hospital?

(And if it's not about me, how long will it take for my sister to let me out of the hospital?)

Sky Blue and Black

I have been silent for a while.  I think of it as "down the hole" time, after Haruki Murakami's protagonist in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.  It's a long story (novel), but every so often this man just has to go down into a hole.  And lately, I have felt like that.

Every so often I sit down, open the blog page, and type three or four words.  Then I hit "shift" and highlight and delete them all, because honestly?  The words I want aren't coming, and the ones that do come don't say what I need them to.  Also, I learned in July that one of my grad students has found the lunanina blog.  It makes me nervous.  Exposure?  Performance anxiety?  I don't know.  In any case, speaking my life just hasn't quite felt … I don't know.  Safe.  Appropriate.  Relevant, most of all.

But there is this story building in me, this post that keeps tugging at the edges of my writing mind like a kid pulling at a mother's skirt.  Hey, it says.  Down here.  Are we there yet?

I am trying to figure out a way to combine the people I want (need) to write about.  One, a lost religious man in provincial France.  One, a lost anti-religious man (a Mason, even) in provincial France.  And one, a lost anti-religious man in provincial USA.  The thing is, the threads of their stories keep getting knotted in my typing fingers, and it doesn't feel right to imply (for example) that the lost religious man has a crooked penis.  (And for the record I have no idea whether the lost religious man's penis is crooked or not - that penis belongs to someone else.)  Or that the lost anti-religious man in provincial USA abuses his power.  But in my mind, in my memory and imagination and the way these faces surface against each sleepless violet night on every continent, the trinity of them tells one story.  Do you understand?  The stories are discrete, but tangled, and their knot holds unity.

So tonight instead of writing - after writing, but this writing feels like an excuse rather than a narrative - I am going back down my hole.  In the meantime, I just keep hitting "repeat" on the song that has lifted each of them to the light, the dark-blue light of after-dark in any city, the dark-green blackness between midnight and dawn wherever and whenever the roads turn into rural hamlets with colorful names.  I would sing it, but my voice aches in its raw nuances.

The Revenge Post

me:  i've been doing - well, not great, up and down still, but so much better you know?

Principessa:  I can tell from your blog

me:  feeling much more in communication with myself

Principessa:  there's much more spring in your step

me: yeah it feels that way

and then …

well here's a hell of a thing

i just, out of curiosity, went and checked the stats for my blog

for 2 weeks or so, a scattering of readers from the bay area

and then suddenly, 5 visits between last night and 5 minutes ago, from carbondale

Principessa:  really??

me:  and here's what i think - and i know, this is like stalking in reverse right?

but - paul's dad (and the fantasy internet girl, the one he "didn't cheat on me because it was all virtual" with) live in SF

Principessa:  OMG

me:  i think he went out there for a visit, and then came back and immediately went back to my blog

and is it stupid of me that this pisses me off?

Principessa:  why do you think he is doing that?

me:  that was my reaction too, the OMG

Principessa:  what could his possible motivation be?

me:  my adult, articulate response : because he's a stupid fucking fucker who can't handle actually letting go of a relationship he fucked up and gave up on

Principessa:  keeping tabs on how much he hurt you?

me:  right?

Principessa:  what an asshat

me:  lol

Principessa:  seriously

me:  totally

that is exactly the word, exACTly

i just can't bloody believe it

i mean - sorry - you know i don't use this word lightly - that FUCKER

Principessa:  you should start blogging about meeting hot guys

me:  lol

Principessa:  and havng sex in steamy locations

me:  bains-douches

hammams

métro stops

Principessa:  that would teach him!

then start blogging about how small his penis is!

[pause]

Principessa:  that will get him off there in a hurry!

me:  you know what, it is pretty small

Principessa:  and the world should know

me:  it was one of the first things i noticed about him - not the penis, mind you, but his very DAINTY little FEET

i think we wear the same size shoes

Principessa: GROSS!!

me: also - not sure i ever mentioned this part? - he has herpes.

Principessa:   so, dainty feet, tiny penis, AND a venereal disease.

what a catch !

Patrick also had smallish feet,  I used to ask him how he balnced on those tiny things

me:  lol

Principessa:  Puuuuurrrfect

me:  he didn't tip over?

Principessa:  all of this should be on the world wide web

this is a public service!!

***

… and so, here it is.

Hallelujah.

Hallelujah2.0

romaryka

Mary

Mary