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March 8, 2009I love the smell of cat shit in the morningand of Burning Man Porta-Potties at nightACTUALLY, THAT WAS MY FRIEND ROSS,who thought the Porta-Potties at the Grateful Dead show at Autzen Stadium, Eugene, smelled like smoked salmon. He was in there taking belly-deep whiffs, motioning at the blue plastic door for us to come check it out. Uh, no thanks–but if it’s all the same to you, I’ll take another tab of that acid! YES, WHEN ONE IS IN LOVEone loves for better and worse. Weaknesses are foibles designed for affectionate forgiveness. Oh the humanity! Until you figure out the man you love is just another guy. Then he can start disappointing and hurting you. But my love for my kitty Zahra, whose cat shit smells like home to me, persists through both the warm, fuzzy purring and the litter box patrol. Which is not to say, my home always smells like cat shit; she has gotten pretty good at covering her tracks, an early challenge for the little tyke. Every time I go into the bathroom, Zahra has to follow me and sit in her box, whether she needs to or not, her great big innocent eyes studying my every move. Perhaps we need that most intimate of domestic appliances. OK, that’s as frank a snapshot of my morning as anyone needs. I’m at Church St. Café now, paying my morning Internet homage at the crack of noon, checking out the crowd. Today the laptoppers are out-numbered. Of the twelve people in my field of vision plus me, two are writing by hand, which almost rates an exclamation point, and one is both writing and highlighting (studying). A couple at one table and a loner at another are all turning pages of an old-fashioned newspaper (good news for the Chron). One guy is leaning his head on his hand, contemplating who-knows-what, with an open paperback face down in front of him, three others are reading, and three of us are wireless and tuned in. The other day I got an email from a Swedish artist, the next day I get a hand-written letter (and poem) from an American-Swedish pianist, the next day I receive three handmade masks from the Swedish artist. My handsome friend Beau (Mark Harmon/Brandon Flowers look-alike) is in my apartment at the time and is wowed by them as I unwrap the package. Two wonderful pieces decoupaged with Swedish and Finnish recycled books, and one chocolate-colored furry cat mask, dripping amber beads and bearing a luxurious white satin ribbon. “That is so erotic,” says Beau, as I hold it up to cover most of my face. THAT’S WHYI keep a gilded bejeweled crackalure Venetian mask on my bed post, I tell him. Of course, I also keep comedy/tragedy masks above my bed, the most appropriate post for them. My love life has been a Greek tragedy, and I’m always the one who dies in the end. But I can only laugh! Beau photographs me in the furry mask, but, flash or no flash, my Canon PowerShot Elph can’t capture the mystery of the bestial mask in the moody orange ambience of my living room lighting. After all, what is the appeal of a mask? Mystery. What/who is behind it? You can’t capture it, only pursue it. I can’t read you! Damned if I’m not going to try. ISN’T THAT WHAT MAKES PURSUITso intriguing? Catch me if you can! Believe me, that “can’t catch me” has kept me in pursuit for years, at times. But is the intrigue all in the chase? My cats will chase a toy for several minutes, but when they finally pin it down, they lose interest and walk off in boredom, looking for the next diversion. Apart from my kitty Zahra, I don’t think about falling in love again. I seem to have lost interest in things romantic. Just leave me alone, I have things to do. For instance, I just left a friend on the hoppin’ 16th St. strip, after dinner and a movie, who wants to jump-start her life and was raring to go at 10 pm Saturday night, but really, I just wanted to go home, kick my shoes off, have a glass of wine and do some writing. That’s my idea of a pleasurable Saturday night. A few hours with a friend, a few hours with myself. Beau, a visual artist, was talking about the high of being in “the zone,” as I have called it, when you feel you are channeling universal energies and forces and are speaking for both yourself and humanity. Is there any higher high? For the creative artist, I think not. That high is pretty much all the mystery I pursue these days. I’M REREADINGThomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain for the first time since the mid-70’s, when I wrote a college English class paper called “Hans Castorp as Mythic Hero.” Mann, a behemoth of 20th century literature (I was four months old when he died in 1955), could have used some editing, I have the nerve to say. Much wordier than I recall in his folksy all-seeing narrative; e.g., Hans says, “When I had croup, in my youth,” and Mann throws in “(he actually said ‘in my youth!’)”. I AM SO ASTOUNDEDthat within minutes I am able to find this Castorp paper, and a binder of many others, in the storage under my bed, that I am led to peruse its contents for an hour, and heave a heavy sigh of relief that I have already graduated with a cum laude degree in English and departmental honors, and that I never again have to write papers like: The Muckrakers—Upton Sinclair “A Demon in His View”: Edgar Allen Poe Hamlet as a Tragic Hero Man’s Need to Believe (Religion)—summed up in 10 pages! Limitations of the Theater of the Absurd On Keats’ “To Autumn” On Robbe-Grillet’s Jalousie Mythic Patterns in Tom Sawyer Jesus and the Monomyth Satiric Devices in “The Rape of the Lock” Type and Symbol in Hawthorne’s Fiction Moll Flanders vs. Pamela Andrews On Rhyme and a Few Other Things The Character of Iago Television and the American Dream (Religion) Form in Fiction—Flaubert’s “A Simple Heart” On “When in Disgrace with Fortune and Men’s Eyes” Death and the Orgone (Religion) On Dreiser’s Sister Carrie Whitman’s Concept of the Self—The Problem of Idealism Ahab’s Quest for the Ungraspable Phantom of Life Hans Castorp as Mythic Hero On Shakespeare’s Sonnets 29 and 30 Theology and Falsification (Religion) The Quest for Assertion and Immortality in Absolom, Absolom! The Character of Quentin Compson Time and Reality (in Proust) One Hundred Years of Solitude and Jose Arcadio Buendía’s Dream of the Infinite Rooms Dialogue on the Problem of Evil: Sartre on Self-Deception (Philosophy) A Dialogue on the Problem of Evil with Dr. Theo Phile, theologian, and Dr. Phil Sophos, Professor of Philosophy (Philosophy) Dear Diary: Semester-End Reflections, a last-minute excuse for a paper (Religion) - Professor’s only comment: “You got it! (A)” Psychological Determinants in Billy Budd The Succession of Generations Myth in Grass’s The Tin Drum If you think being an English major is bogus, that you sail through college reading books, try writing 10-page theses about them, while reading and writing about three other books. An undergraduate program in English immerses you in critical reading and thinking, and prepares you for any career that requires thought and analytical skills. But these days most of my critical thinking is limited to myself, mostly when I look in the mirror. I started out wanting to include some little tidbit from each paper, but the list is long and I will spare us both. But for instance, UPTON SINCLAIRconsidered Christ to be the first Socialist, and had a Socialist crusader in The Jungle declare: “Here is a man whose whole being was one flame of hatred for wealth, and all that wealth stands for–the pride of wealth, and the luxury of wealth, and the tyranny of wealth; who was himself a beggar and a tramp, a man of the people, an associate of saloon-keepers and the women of the town…this agitator, law-breaker, fire-brand anarchist!” Yeah, right, Upton. Jesus: his whole being a flame of hatred. EDGAR ALLEN POE,during an 1849 election in Baltimore, fell in with a gang of wonks who got him drunk so he would vote for their man. He was found in a gutter on October 3rd and taken to Washington Hospital. Would a man on his deathbed really peacefully murmur, as his physician reported, “He who arched the heavens and upholds the universe has his decree legibly written upon the frontlet of every human being and upon demons incarnate.” Who could even remember that to write it down? “Wait a minute, Ed…’He who arched…’ what was that again?…something, something, ‘universe,’ something, something, ‘frontlet’ (frontlet?), something ‘humans and demons’. Again, please? He who arched…” Poe’s last words, on October 7th, ten days before he was to be married, were, “Lord, help my poor soul.” THE GREAT DANEAt least in my own tragic love life, I am the only one who lies prone on the stage, but Hamlet takes down with him Laertes, Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, Gildenstern, Gertrude and Claudius. Nice work, prince. Efficient. OUR NEED TO BELIEVEWe hold ourselves up as God’s most noble work and his greatest love, so we give our own image to our idea of God. What, would we envision him as an ass, braying out the commandments? No, we consider ourselves the most evolved of all animals, so it is only fitting that He would give us his own image, or, rather, that we would give Him ours. REVISITING MY INTELLECTUAL PASTA friend drops by while I have the binder open, with handwritten notes on the pages; when he expresses curiosity, I tell him they’re my college term papers. “Ah! Revisiting the past?” Yes, I realize. Within the yellowed pages of The Magic Mountain, I find an Al Hirschfield caricature of Vladmir Horowitz, torn from a Philadelphia edition TV Guide, along with a 1986 photo of him and Charles Kuralt, from when Horowitz broadcasted live from Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater on the CBS News Sunday Morning at 9:00 a.m. I saw that show, live. He hadn’t been to Russia in 61 years. “When I left Russia, my niece was was 9. Now she’s 70.” That was the year he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, our highest honor, from President Reagan. When I was a teenager, Horowitz, who died in 1989, was out there, on the scene, a force to be reckoned with. I love these kinds of connections. Pick up a yellowed old book, “significant” passages underlined to use in my paper, unearth the 30-year-old writings of my college career, run across of piece of memorabilia that reminds me of a great old concert, and I also find a drawing I did of a hatrack on the last page of The Magic Mountain. It is metal, not the wooden one I have in my hallway. I must have been bored in class one day. And now, I have ordered the DVD, “Horowitz in Moscow,” from Amazon for $13.49. He received 24 Grammy awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award, one year after he died. WHAT ELSE I AM LOVINGis the silence in the wake of turning my TV off. It has shape and depth and texture, yet ethereal, like clouds. I’m surprised how easy it was to give up (most) TV. It’s really nothing more than a choice you make. The issue is, you have to have something to do instead. And if you don’t know what that is, a feeling of desperation may arise. Can you be alone with your own silence? When was the last time you spent time with yourself, as if you were in the company of your best friend, and there was nothing else you needed? Self, I am so happy to be with you! Thank you for being my best friend. That’s part of the bravery of individual artistic creation–having the nerve to be alone with yourself, and confront the God-like within yourself. To create something where there was nothing. In my book, there is no higher high.
The author’s drawing of a hatrack. ------------------------------------------------------------ In the ocean
I wrote that poem in the time it took to type it. copyright Alexandra Jones 2009 |
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