...and they lived happily ever after. Smith & Lady: poets, artists & urban adventurers.
Our relationship was forged to the soundtrack of Yoko Ono's magic,
frenetic, angst-laden hit, "Walking On Thin Ice." ( play song )
You are currently browsing the archives for the Being category.
“I want to totally transform myself tonight. I want to go to the next level,” I said.
“Well, for *you*, the next level is probably hangover!”
“Oh, that’s not very nice. Oh!”
“You know what’s horrible, don’tcha?”
“What?”
“The only way to get to the next level is by your own work. And that’s not easy. Most folk don’t make it. And those that do, usually don’t tell.”
“That’s not fair.”
“I think they lose interest, once they go to the next level, you know? Do you explain to the ants once you’re bringing the exterminator in, huh? You think butterflies go back and hang around with coccoons? I don’t see no butterflies hangin around caterpillars. Once you get on to the next level, you lose interest in this one. It’s like once everyone got out of jail, they promised to send LSD-spiked fruit in to us. And no one ever did. When *I* got out, *I* promised to send drug fruit. But once you’re out, that don’t matter no more. They’re *gone.* You’re on to other shit.”
The best thing I’ve found this past decade–the best thing that helps *my* human condition–is this kind of sense that I don’t have to hold on to everything mentally–that I can just let things unfold as they will–that I can live in the present moment. I used to think that I had a responsibility to juggle all problems all the time in my mind. But now I realize that by doing that I’m avoiding the biggest responsibility of all, which is to be attentive to the present moment. I tell myself, when coming across a caustic thought, ‘Oh, you know what, Kathy? You don’t have to think about that right now!’
And another thing I’ve learned–something that helps me prime my pump–is to visualize what “perfect” Kathy would do. Perfect Kathy is completely self-actualized, and not fearful, and accomplished. Perfect Kathy goes running every day. Perfect Kathy eats right, but Perfect Kathy allows herself a chocolate every once in a while. So I ask myself in a situation, ‘OK, what would Perfect Kathy be doing right now?’ And then I ask myself, ‘Well, why not pretend you are Perfect Kathy? It could be fun!’ And then I pretend I’m Perfect Kathy.
It helps to have a kind of calm, kind, practical, gentle adult woman voice in my head telling me what I could do to mellow a situation. This voice in my head sounds like my friend, Wendy. I’m cultivating my head to hear her voice rather than my choir of chaos. Although it’s fun to listen to the choir of chaos for poetry purposes.
Cat bit Steve in the kitchen. She’d initiated a petting, and then turned on him and bit him, drawing blood. He was bewildered.
“That’s her nature. She’s a snake,” I told him. “She’s a little cat-snake.”
He sat down, painfully slow, creaking into a thump on the sofa. She watched him descend then wagged her tail and crossed the room to me. I could feel just a little breeze as she passed. That’s all she needs to stimulate herself sometimes, a little breeze.
She touched me lightly with her tail as if to tap, as if to warn or entice. There’s no way I’m gonna try to touch her, I thought.
She spent all night sleeping by me, either on my chest or side or across my shoulder, her face resting on mine. She caressed my face periodically with her paws, her nails out just a little bit.
When I say just about anything, Smith asks me, “Where did you think of this? What made you think of that? What led to this?”
I talk to Smith more than anyone. It is just so good to have someone who is really interested in connecting with me so considerately, so thoroughly. I used to be so lonely.
Smith is so very rich. I feel his experiences more exciting, more valid than mine. I sometimes feel a bit flattened by my enthusiasm for Smith and his world, that I’ve lost the hard diamonds I’d summoned up in isolated loneliness before we’d started our relationship.
I’m emerging from a recent bout of quietness. I was dealing with the aftermath of my first and second breakdowns in what could be bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. I’m trying to learn how to live with a loss of lucidity, dumb numb depressed stretches, and the ravages of mania, the flashing lights of false epiphanies.
I think I’ve hunkered down inside myself to re-emerge on more equal terms as a person who authors experience, a person who makes poignant observations. I want to make sure I am not just a receiver of information, but a source.
Communication is betrayal on some level, to someone. We step on invisible toes. I’m always afraid of perpetrating betrayal.
And communicating can be invasive.
But if I am to be a writer, and I think, actually, that I *am* a writer, then I need to start talking. I find new facets of myself in each friend I talk to.
I need to be honest as much as I can muster. I need to risk misunderstanding. There are disagreements in the latticework. If I try to be in harmony all the time, I lose the beauty of what’s there, what’s mine, the fruit of my own mine.
I think the chords of independent observations, independent assertions, a bit unsettling for Smith. I’ve suddenly started talking again.
I worry that I haven’t written many love poems for Smith. I have the thought that a mere love poem to him is like saying Jehovah, that saying a love poem profanes it, for I have sullied the form and objectified Smith, my holy object, in an imperfect work. Before Smith, I would sometimes write love poems using someone else as a proxy, poisoning my pen.
Smith is holy. Talking about Smith is a way of talking about him as an object, objectifying him, and he is so much more than that. He is a distinct lifeform, my everything, my Steve.
So for a long time I couldn’t get over the holiness of our relationship enough to even talk to other males, except briefly. Worried about the sin that comes out when I open my mouth. I mull over interactions recursively, iteratively, finding casualties in the aftermath of what my subconscious has wrought. It’s a very real thing, the subconscious. What we have on the surface, our conscious thought, is incidental to strange currents within.
Talk is holy and a sin.
Irrational thoughts cause me to close up.
I’m experimenting with being more communicative. I’m feeling more communicative and creative, living with irrationality and disagreement.
Maybe my current gusto for communication has something to do with being home, with experiencing the dissonance of raw winter again. We missed winter for three years. The tug of season here is a wild violin, or a concert warming up before the grand performance. Or like Eeyore. I’ve got Eeyore braying, playing a musical saw in my chest. I’ve got something tight and excited in me. My mental interior’s lit up determinedly like Christmas lights on a beat up Cleveland porch…
I’m trying to stop feeling frantic. The frantic thing comes from trying to fly a kite for a theme, trying to grapple with the All all at once. Instead I’m turning over my moment-by-moment pebbles to find the underlying revelations, artifacts like beautiful centipedes & strange potato bugs. I don’t have to feel frantic. It’s all there. All I have to grapple with is each breaking wave as it comes in.
Smith is a creature of nature, of authenticity, a natural, a genius. He follows convention only if it happens to flow naturally with his movement of the moment.
I am a creature of planned action, a hack, a grind, a thinker. I study rules of etiquette of other cultures. I study conventions. I move under a invisible grid of memorized regulation. Were you to look inside my mind, it would be like looking inside the Terminator’s head, with a green grid of data overlayed across everything, and bulleted options for dealing with the moment.
I constantly perceive myself and Smith in catch-22 damned don’ts damned do’s.
“The artist does not have to explain herself,” Smith says. “Just say what you want to say.”
What I want to say is to explain myself.
I am at times so gauche that I avoid talking or looking at people. When I talk too much, I fear I’m a topper, a scene-stealing queen, too precocious, too precious, or a clumsy maniac. It’s easier to not communicate rather than risk foot-in-mouth syndrome. But when I don’t talk, I fear I come off as brute, coldly cool or willfully obtuse.
My self consciousness is stifling. Lack of communication is causing me to close up to much on all fronts and stagnate. I’m trying to improve my interface with the world, trying to open up and become more sociable and normal, or at least in live less in fear of what words may wring, and to forgive myself rather than suffocate under my constant self-rebuke.
Much of my agony has to do with over-thinking, over-complicating things. An example of my obsessiveness: I’ve been thinking of our guest, Yuyu and our car seating situation. I got in the back seat of our car whenever we’d drive places, because it’s difficult to get in the back seat of the car, so I didn’t want to make him suffer it. Also, the front seat is the coveted position in US culture, so I wanted him to have the coveted position because he was our guest. Initially he offered to sit in the back seat. “Oh no,” I said. “Please, you can sit up front.”
Then I remembered that ten years ago I was hosting some Chinese men, and at that time I learned that the back seat of a car is desirable in many Asian countries.
So I explained to Yuyu why I offered him the front seat rather than have it appear that I was insufferably rude. I told him, “In our culture, the front seat is coveted, so this is why I’m sitting in the back.”
But then I worried that well, maybe since I acknowledged that the back seat is coveted in Asia, that it was rude of me to continue to use it. I’d cycle through this worry every day, but I decided that it was best to leave it where it last stood rather than try to clumsily explain myself and make everyone feel weird.
On and on I can go. Never ends!
Typical of the kind of iterative, acrid analysis that eats up my time and mind. My girlfriend says I try to inhabit the mind behind the eyeballs of everyone in the room.
Lately I theorize that actual talk with hoo-mans is the way to get through problems, and if I can’t talk without rusty toads falling out my mouth, at least I can write.
I’ve decided propriety is context-sensitive. Propriety changes on the instance of particular corners, and I aim for calmness, to walk around these corners as they happen rather than work out a convoluted policy, my “thou shalt nots.”
Sometimes I deliberately leave the poetry scene, I deliberately don’t create art or write because it can just be too overwhelming and come at the expense of the necessities of life.
The aftermath of Yuyu’s leaving is like a perfumy vaccuum of curry evacuated out the space hatch. I feel happy, rich with community and words, but too stimulated. I’m sleeping and not delusional but very poetic and unable to focus on anything other than art and writing, not work, though I’m trying. Grandpa is not on the radio lately but Smith’s worrying because I’m overstimulated.
Poor Smith got his tooth pulled this morning. He just walked in with blood on his hands, bloody packing in his mouth.
“What’s the damage?” I asked.
“Oh, not too bad. $100 to get the tooth pulled and $15 for the pain pills.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I said. “How are you?”
“I’m sick of the taste of blood.”
Yuyu offered to take my grandma to Nepal to live out the rest of her days. I told him we’d miss her but he could ask. I told her his offer and I don’t think it registered with her. I think it would be neat. Imagine, Grandma in Nepal. In Nepal they have a festival when you turn 77. You’re carried around town in a chair by porters.
It’s just such a messy blessing, this existence.
Smith and I found a very good movie (a VGM) yesterday, “Kabluey.” It also led to some very good music (VGM) and I’m falling in love with the music. I thought there was no more music for me on this planet, which was bad, because I love music.
This cultural exchange is different from our experience living in other countries. It is a kind of intensity, living with someone from another culture. When I lived in other countries, it was like a movie, like a chinois wallpaper pattern, a dense incomprehensible strangeness. But having this immediate access to Yuyu is like opening a window into the wallpaper and peering into a galaxy. The myths he describes seem a way of parsing alien archetypes into multiple armed fantasies or bizarre chimeras of improbable combinations. One of his childhood stories: his mother told him that if he didn’t finish even a single grain of rice on his plate, in the next life he would have to pick up the grains of rice with his eyelashes.
The intensity of his drive is like a wakeup call for us, a catalyst for commencing artistic work again in Cleveland.
(Mom is pictured above)
I phoned my Grandmother a couple days ago. She asked a bunch of concerned questions, an edge of caution evident in her voice, asking if he was there now as though he might be listening to our conversation. And if he’s coming to Thanksgiving dinner. And when he was leaving. I told her he tours six months out of the year, that he’s based out of New York.
“I think she worries he’s a scoundrel,” I told Smith afterwards.
“I had no idea what to expect,” I told Mom. “I had some kind of vague idea of an Indian man. Anyways, he’s turned out to be quite the gentleman.”
“You need a rough surface for something to appear,” Mom replied.
mint farm outside Lansing, Michigan - foto by Smith
When spiders reach an empty space between where they are and where they want to be, they spin a single strand of web and then leap off into the space hoping the wind will blow them to the other side. If not, they climb back up the strand and leap again and again and again until they reach the other side.
