July 16, 2006

You wouldn’t worry so much what people think of you

if you knew how seldom they do.

Refrigerator magnet motto of the month. How true, how true, like that other wake-up call, he’s just not that into you. For instance, remember that unreachable loved one whose every word and move you once scrutinized for its bearing on you? And do you remember the blinding instant of clarity in which you were able to admit, though you knew it all along, that he seldom thinks of you?

’TIS BETTER TO HAVE LOVED

No. Uh-uh. Beg to differ. It’s not better to have loved and lost. No. I loved. I lost. I would rather I had never loved at all. Ever fall in love with someone and lose him on the same day? Neat trick. That happened to me. It was a spontaneous abortion. No sooner had love been born than it was murdered. Not good. Not better than. Just plain bad.

I LOVE LOVE.

I’m all for love. Go for it every chance you get, for as I ask in the novel I just pulled out of the trunk under my bed, “What is the point of love not given, that rolls echoing through the heart like a ball bearing in a maze? O give love! Give all you can; it’s a mistake not to. Give all you have to give, or what is the point, the point of anything?”

I do go for it, every chance I get—but really, God, enough of the painful stuff, please. Give it a rest. My heart muscle has been exercised quite sufficiently by loss and grief for one lifetime, thank you. I have no more lessons to learn from it. Let’s see, about that one time, what was there to learn from a year or more of often unbearable, always unshareable passion that lingered on like heartburn after that chili dog you knew was a bad idea?

WHAT WAS IT FOR, GOD?

I’m asking you because there’s no one else to ask. I fell in love with the wrong man. No, reshuffle. I fell in love with the right man; I was the wrong woman. Yes, it’s happened before. Is it a pattern? Do I pick the wrong men?

No, it just happened. The usual way. Like you trip over an electrical cord you didn’t see was there. You fell. Really fell in love, like face first into a goddamned bottomless pit. It would have been a miracle if you hadn’t broken your neck. You stuck it out too far. No one’s to blame, most especially not you. No, you didn’t ask for it. You had no way of knowing you would love and lose, not even looking back on it with the eyes of reason. It was life. Life unfolding itself. Life happened. You loved. You lost. Get over it.

You know that turn of the screw whereby the man you loved is suddenly the man you hate? The man you love to hate, hate to love, but hate only because you love? You don’t even get the satisfaction of that. There is nothing to reproach him with. He’s entirely worthy of you, and you of him. But still you lost. He was the right man, you were the wrong woman. The wound is pretty much healed, but every now and then it will twitch, you will scratch it, and it opens right up again like a faulty zipper that breaks apart.

Some torturous flashback lights up your brain, like the day you stood in your entryway holding your keys, opening the letter he mailed you, and as your eyes travel down it, hot tears sprout, a sensation like crumbling overcomes you, like you’ve been kicked in the stomach, and you let it drop to the floor like in the movies when someone gets a disturbing telegram and has to sit down. Somebody get her some water!

STUFF THIS!

You had done some canvassing and envelope stuffing for an antinuclear nonprofit, and fell under the spell of its dynamic director. There’s a vibe between the two of you. You of course can’t be impressed with someone without writing about it, writing all about it, writing to him about it, even confessing, for what it was worth: “You are the best man I’ve ever met.” Not starry-eyed, with your feet on the ground. A number of years later, after the scales of love have fallen from your eyes, or even before that, you didn’t know if you still felt that way—he was only human, and there were other contenders for the crown—but his weaknesses only endeared him to you, because hey, that’s what love does to ya. Still, men of his caliber are surely and sorely hard to come by.

Several weeks after this heartfelt tribute, which included the gift of a personal item in a handmade box, he sends you a form letter, on the stationery of the foundation, thanking you for your work on the project, same as everyone got. He does bother to scribble a handwritten personal note; he could hardly not, but even so, completely unbeknownst to him, it was the cruelest thing he could have done. But so what? He doesn’t owe you anything. After all, you’re the wrong woman. He seldom thinks of you.

I STILL FEEL SORRY

for the me of that day. It can still fetch a tear if I’m feeling pitiful. I wish I could go back in time, and spare the poor soul from crying her heart out like she was coughing up a lung, just snatch the thing out of her hand and toss it in the recycling. This man, for whom she had developed such intimate feelings, was as distant, and as cold, as the moon. As was his right. C’est la vie.

IT’S OUR LITTLE SECRET

You see him now and then around town, and he’s friendly, he greets you, but treats you like you never said the things you did, like there’s no need to acknowledge them, in short, like he doesn’t take you seriously and never did. No doubt he loves the attention and the ego rush he need do nothing to earn, even keeps telling you you should get together for coffee to catch up and you keep saying you will, without ever intending to because you think the guy is cracked. Does he expect to sit there and look you in the face like he doesn’t know the score and you’re supposed to let him get away with it? What are you going to talk about—Helen Caldicott’s bizarre new hairstyle?

SAD LITTLE SERENADE, SONG OF MY HEART’S COMPOSING
I HEAR IT STILL, I ALWAYS WILL

But then you get to the point where you really can’t take another minute of this charade and decide you’re going to confront him, just get all up in his face. You call his office to set the date for the famous coffee klatsch and you’re going to come out firing. Let’s have an affair. That’s your opening salvo.

I’m not trying to take anything from you. I’m trying to give you something. I’m not trying to infiltrate and commandeer your life. I can’t keep up with you and you don’t have time for me. I don’t want to marry you, live with you, have your children, take you to the opera, or build a life together. The one and only thing I want from you is your feelings for me. I want you to give them to me. For an hour or two a month, whenever you feel like going in a room and forgetting every other thing. Then you go home.

MR. TELEPHONE, THRILL ME WITH YOUR RING

But…his assistant never returned my call. And…oddly, the cloud started to lift. I began to lose interest. He became just another guy. I found that whatever the connection had been that I’d had such a hard time letting go of, was broken. And anyway, I had decided to move to the Bay Area.

I like to flee towns
Where love has gone bad
Where life has turned sad
Where I feel I’ve been had…..

Perhaps the scar is itching today because I’m susceptible to suffering right now. I’m in a bit of a crisis. Not the usual mid-life one (I’d have to live to 102), more in the line of that rogue wave we never know will come till you’re in it, and I am not prepared for the undoing of all I have done. Actually, it’s not a bit of a crisis, it’s a full-on siren-wailing, lights-flashing, tires-screeching crisis, bringing sharply into focus every decision I have to make about the rest of my life, right now. No need to get into it here, but one of several options, or outcomes, of this ordeal, is to leave San Francisco.

TELL ME WHAT TO DO. ANYBODY.

I heard a curious phrase the other day: “Though I’m not with anyone right now, I’ve never felt better about myself.” That statement is just wrong all over the place, in ways too tedious to delineate. But though I never define myself in terms of someone else (why I eschew the concept of “single”), I’m in a crisis right now it is hard to shoulder alone and I’m thinking, God how I wish I had someone to ask, “What should we do about this?” “Don’t worry,” the “he” of “we” would answer, “I’ll take care of you.” But just like “The Member of the Wedding,” it’s not my wedding. I don’t get to go on the honeymoon. We is I. It’s all on me and that’s how I have lived my life.

WHEN LOVE COMES KNOCKING

It’s easy enough to be attracted to a man, and there are enough to be attracted to, but I don’t go looking for love. It finds me. But even if I feel close to making that heart connection, no matter what the value of what I have to offer, it’s either too much, or not enough. It’s never just right. Sometimes I think, sadly, it seems to be something God just doesn’t want me to have. (Bullshit. Cry me a river.) Or is it something I don’t want me to have? Why on earth? Because it will interfere with my writing? Like sex would distract a priest from his God?

Among the pickings of my novel I also found a torn strip of paper, at least 30 years old, reading,

You are thrown back into focus—not as being less lovable, less worthy, less desirable—but in facing again the great fact of adult life—that one must depend first upon oneself.

On the other side is crossed out, I wondered what was the crime of love that you kept punishing me for it.

“TWO WORDS,”

I say to Todd Brown. “Love sucks. And it’s sucking today, right this very minute.”

“For you, you mean?” he inquires, as I sip some red out of a tumbler like they serve it in South Philly. It has dried paint on it. Sometimes, I tell him, is today’s theme, it is better to have never loved at all. Or, he suggests, it is better to have loved and lost the memory of it. Jack Hirschman will be reading some Neruda here at the Red Poppy Art House in a bit. I’m conflicted because I’m in writing mode, and it doesn’t do to be scribbling your own poetry while another poet is reading his. I walk over to congratulate him on his Poet Laureate coup. He had also read at the 2004 Festival and had signed my copy of Front Lines with a Russian word I’d been unsuccessful in getting translated ever since. I had even scanned it and sent it to my mother and she didn’t recognize it. He reveals it means nothing more than “always.”

PLENA MUJER

It was Neruda who brought us together, two years ago, I remind Todd. Quite so. We met at Project Artaud, at the Neruda Centennary Festival the Red Poppy threw in 2004. It was there that I fell in love with a full woman—Plena Mujer, that is, Todd’s painting that now dominates my dining room wall. I used some of my proceeds from a house refinance to acquire it.

Plena mujer, manzana carnal, luna caliente
Full woman, fleshy apple, hot moon

WHO?

Todd, to my surprise, later announces that Alexandra Jones is in the audience (one guy offers some mock applause, which I acknowledge with a royal wave) because my purchase at that time had kept the Art House alive for several more months. I let pass the sudden silent attention I should have used to plug my column. Alexandra’s friendly, Todd says, so talk to her and she’ll invite you over to her house to see it. Not all at once, please, I say to the 60 or so folks seated around me. Best investment I ever made.

BUY ART! IT LASTS LONGER THAN LOVE!

Lovely it is to be sitting here comfortably on a cushioned rocking chair and yet uncomfortably so, impaled as I am on the horns of love. The room is packed and it’s feeling mighty cozy as I balance my trusty G4 on my thighs, casting a blue aura around me in the softly lit room. It occurs to me I have never named my Mac, and I hereby christen it QWERTY, after the keyboard of the same name upon which I tap tap tap these thoughts.

I have begged off from a meeting of the Lower Haight Community Organization Challenge Grant planning committee, telling them, truthfully, that my friends are staging an event I simply cannot miss as I am writing an article about it. This here is that event and you’re reading that there article. After all, I wrote the first draft of the grant proposal and that will have to do for today. My secret character flaw is that though I try to be a good citizen… really, I am not a community-minded person… because there has never been a community of which I’ve felt a part, except maybe Bach freaks. I am a lone, sole, solitary writer. I spend a lot of time in a quiet room. Is loneliness a writerly thing, this feeling of being set apart? Of observing the world in which I myself don’t live?

And the lights go down………

I HEAR IT’S YOUR BIRTHDAY

Tonight, July 12, is the 102nd birthday of Neruda, and poet Kristen Alina Sbrogna of Red Poppy, also Booking Manager at Ashkenaz, opens the reading with Neruda and some of her own poems. I love one about St. Stephen (the first Christian martyr), who was stoned to death and became the patron saint of stonemasons.

Adrian Arias, dark, handsome, passionate Peruvian poet, dancer of tango and handler of raw fish, Adrian Arias follows, reads Pablo en español, and his voice is another love poem.

Hirschman takes the stage, which consists of a rug with a stool on it. He stands. He has a bit of some sort of New Yawkish accent, like Red Skelton saying “Gawd bless.” He chants and he booms and he spits. He applauds his own reading, clapping his hands in prayer position.

BULLDOG EXCLUSIVE!

I will end this column, as did Hirschman his reading, with a signature poem of his, “One Day,” which is currently not available in print, though he thinks it appeared in I Was Born Murdered (which title suggested that abortion metaphor I used above–thanks!). Jack has graciously given his kind permission to me to republish it here, for which I am indebted and grateful and you soon will be too. I tell him I’ll send him the column if he gives me his email address, and he writes it on the citimortgage envelope already plastered with the scribbled hasty notes I make in the course of a day.

As he recites the poem, I am thinking, God sent me here. God sent me here to hear this. I am thinking, today’s pain is tomorrow’s poetry. All my life I have struggled with the conflict of needing to love a man and needing to be a writer—not needing to be—being one. Plenty of people, I know, make it work, plenty of writers have husbands and wives and children—and you don’t know it from their writing, until you read the book jacket. But for me the two have seemed mutually exclusive. I’ve never found the right balance. There doesn’t seem to be enough of me to go around. But I do know, as I’m sure I’ve said here, elsewhere and often, I have no greater love than the English language. OK, Bach is a close second.

I YAM WHAT I YAM

When I experience great poetry, by great poets, like Neruda and Hirschman, a hungry, starving hysteria comes over me—the tingling sensation of having to write. I have never, not once, been jealous of another writer’s work. There’s infinite room for every writer to be as great as they are. No one’s greatness diminishes mine. They enhance each other. Some are intimidated, some fear falling short, but I can only be the writer I am, and I am inspired.

THIS IS IT!

My skin is crawling as I leave the Art House. I can’t get home fast enough. I am rushing Orlando Furiously down the street adding more chicken scratchings to the envelope. I’m glad I had a latte at Café la Bohème at 7:00 ‘cause I’m in for another all-nighter. My heart is racing, I am sure to be gasping more than 30 breaths per minute, which in triage would get me tagged Red for Immediate Danger. I am clammy with sweat and hot from wine. Not even looking, instead of heading down 23rd to Mission, I charge up Folsom to—wait a minute, I stop short. I look up and see none of the landmarks I am obliged to memorize as I was born genetically lacking a sense of direction. I am at Kamille Court, past 26th St. Curses, foiled again. Conveniently for me, when I’m walking to the Art House, there’s a store on the corner I need boasting a sign exclaiming THIS IS IT!

WOOF!

I retrace my steps, stop at a corner to impatiently mewl, Where Am I? and find 24th Street. I stop briefly at South Van Ness to lean the envelope against one of those olive green not-a-mailboxes you see next to mailboxes, and finally make my way to BART, nearly missing my stop. A lone saxophone is yearning into the sonorous cavern of Civic Center station, “What’s it all about, Alfie?” I warble along into the echo chamber, “Without true love we just exist!” and nearly shout, “Ralphie!” because every once in a while at broad intervals I like to amuse myself by sending a ridiculous anonymous note to Ross Mirkarimi that’s supposed to be from his dog, named after Nader, the last one being a card reading, “What’s it all about?” and signed, Ralphie. Yes, tell me, Ralphie, what’s the point? The point of anything? Woof!

Now the 6 Parnassus is doing that maddening start-stop-start again-stop again hurky lurky jerky thing it does instead of just taking power and moving forward, as it lurches up Haight St. like it’s missing one tire. GET ME HOME! I want to scream, still maniacally jabbing at the envelope. Finally, a lovely layer of fog spritzes my face as I turn onto that wind tunnel they call Steiner Street. I stop in the middle of the tunnel to write that sentence. Later I will have to scratch the notes out one by one to make sure I covered them all here. Back home I strip off my damp clothes and hurl them at the bathroom floor like they betrayed me. I don’t bother to get dressed, so this one’s coming to you au natural.

WHAT’S THIS COLUMN ALL ABOUT, RALPHIE?

I never write anything in order. I have never started with line one and progressed through the middle and on to the end, because I have no idea what’s going to come gurgling to the surface. I write whatever comes to mind at the time, rearrange thoughts into a flow, smooth things out between here and there—but it is usually only as I feel the end creeping up on me that I can tie the ribbons on the package and find out what I’ve been writing about. Voyage of discovery and all that. I started out here abysmally miserable, scraping the bottom. But as Woody Allen noted, “The heart is a resilient little muscle,” and many hours and words later I feel clean and clear-headed.

DO. BE. DO-BE DO-BE DO.

Well, have I learned something after all? If so, it was along the lines of: Life is not about what you don’t have, or a someone who doesn’t love you. Life is in front of you. Bite into it. You can’t just follow the rules and not get hurt, rules like Don’t fall in love with the wrong person. If you’re going to live, you’re going to love, and if you’re going to love, sometimes you’re going to get your ass handed to you on a plate. Finally I feel freed from wondering why, oh God, why did this happen—I need only be and do what God has given me to do. Was it better that I had loved—well, not better, but it was OK. Now what if I had arrived home, and The Man himself was incomprehensibly waiting in bed for me? Well all I can tell you is, had he been, I would not have written this piece. Luckily, I didn’t have to choose. And that’s the way, uh-huh, uh-huh, I like it.

HIRSCHMAN REDUX

And now, ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

“One Day”
by Jack Hirschman

One day I’m going to give up writing
and just paint

I’m going to give up painting
and just sing

I’m going to give up singing
and just sit

I’m going to give up sitting
and just breathe

I’m going to give up breathing
and just die

I’m going to give up dying
and just love

I’m going to give up loving
and just write.

Jack Hirschman writes his email address
on the author’s citimortgage envelope

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Short Attention Span Poetry Corner

I'm a poet.
Yes, I know it.

Sometimes I forget
and yet

My heart does yearn
so I always return

To the choking beauty
of words.
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5:35 AM Give it up, sister
7/16/06

axfiles@sbcglobal.net

copyright Alexandra Jones 2006