a new blog: MY HUSBAND'S AFFAIR





xo
R

To be continued (elsewhere)

So I'm embarrassed with the way that last post ended. To be continued. Which was my way of convincing myself that it would be continued but then we had to move house and you can imagine how that went. So here I am now alone for a few days hoping to write again at last but mostly just reading and thinking about writing.

I think I am going to move this blog over to a Tumblr instead which is what all the hip kids are doing and though I am far from hip, I find it compelling. So I have begun my Tumblr by plagiarizing myself. My Real Name appears on my Tumblr, and for that reason I will not be able to write with the same freedom as I wrote here on this blog, but that may be a good thing for me. I need to save that freedom, alas, for my book. Which I am not writing but thinking of writing.

xo
R

Enforced Debility

I'm having the feeling lately that no matter what I write it will not be enough. This is not a helpful way to think, but it occurs to me as I try to begin a new project--to write something that matters--that everything I've written so far is insufficient. I have a book coming out and I am proud to say that and yet I don't think I quite say in that book what I meant to say. That's okay. I suppose that is the way it goes.

I was reading Blue Nights rather casually, with some distance, hoping to be pulled in when I came to the page where the narrator considers Quintana (her daughter's) diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder. Even Joan Didion, our most skeptical of narrators toward the psycho-pharmo-medical-industrial complex notes that this odd diagnosis fit her perception of her daughter, if such things can be thought to fit. She writes that "diagnosis never seems to lead to a cure, only an enforced debility."

I loved Year of Magical Thinking, though I was left with questions about her daughter. That only strengthened the book; I don't want a writer who tells me too much. And yet in this book, now about her daughter, she confronts the severely troubled life of Quintana, no longer here to tell her story. The tension lies in the acknowledgement that this book, these words, these pages would not exist if her daughter hadn't died. Suicide as a sort of present. It is difficult for me to read the book, to read any Didion, and not to understand that for her, writing is the most important thing in the world. Channeling life into words on a page is one of the most satisfying points of living. And yet. To be her adopted daughter, loved deeply by her parents--it is impossible to read this and not wonder how that must have been. Beyond the obvious privilege, what was it to be raised by these superstars? A number of reviews call Didion a bad mother, which is unsurprising. I think any mother who questions her ability as a mother is--well, I won't defend her, that's beside the point.

The book shifts for me as Didion considers the diagnosis of her daughter--a diagnosis which many question, which is theoretical and flawed.

One day I hope to write about being told repeatedly, after having been hospitalized for years, that I was misdiagnosed. You see--this is something I don't know how to write about--I often think that the words don't exist to adequately explain the small but precise horror of this knowledge, this revelation. The waste.  Like Didion, I (over)value my blue nights--and yet, how can one not think of what might have been? I am not sad. I'm a little bit dreamy.

I am being obscure. I want to focus on what is true, what I can say, what I have done. I want to assert something of a resistance to the part of me that died long ago.

More interesting to me is the way she writes around alcohol, alcoholism. Alcohol-personality-disorder, a friend called it. It seems that may be what killed her daughter. Which would explain things. We had a family friend die at 28, no one said why or how. He drank. I can't imagine drinking that much. But apparently, Didion slowly reveals, Quintana did. It was a way to self-medicate, to cure anxiety. And Didion's surprise, looking back at her fiction, at how regularly she has a character fixing a drink.

There was this woman in the hospital. I am going to call her Angela Desanto. She wasn't an alcoholic, that's not what I"m going to write about though there were women-alcoholics, like Quintana, women who eased anxiety/depression with excessive drink. I was too composed, needed control, too afraid to lose myself to drink--I both envied and felt repulsed by the mess of these maddrunkwomen. J- for example, her multiple personalities, a performance (we all believed) fueled by drink. Elopements--which is what they called it when you ran away, where she'd barhop, always found, always rescued by some mental health professional, returned to her home, the castle, the institution.

I write about J. and Angela because these were my friends and they are no longer my friends--you see, there was no way to maintain these friendships while relinquishing my inpatient identity--and yet they were once in my life so important, so intense, these days we spent together, this life we wasted, together. These stories we believed about ourselves.

(To be continued.)

Love After Love

I was in rehearsal last night. I'm the understudy, a two person show, a brother and a sister who mostly yell at each other the entire 90 minute play. After last week's rehearsal I decided that this is cruel & unusual punishment, to be yelled at repeatedly--called a bitch and a slut and a cunt and worse--for 90 minutes. I have come to hate my co-actor, my brother, though I am meant to have some love for him. I have not yet had to go on for the lead--she is the reason I am doing this, as I adored her as DuBois last summer--and yet nearly every week she has a certain medical crisis so that I am on hold, on call up until showtime. It is rather stressful. I will be happy when the play closes. Secretly, I am happy that it did not get very good reviews, and thus unlikely to be extended. Do you know that they only begin understudy rehearsals after previews, which means that we were not really ready to go on until a few weeks into the run? Well, I didn't know. I thought, oh this is an easy gig. I will get paid to learn a part I will never have to perform. But I forgot about rehearsal, which is performance. I forgot about what it would be to participate in such violence. To listen to and repeat language in this way that is meant as an assault. How do actors do Sarah Kane plays? I understand the medical crises now as somatic. After these rehearsals, I spend an entire day recuperating--today, I walked by the lake for hours, looked at flowers, water, felt the wind. In these moments, I do not regret leaving acting. I do not regret not going to that MFA program that accepted me but which I could not attend because I could not leave New York. Which occasionally I have wondered was that a good choice? Make good choices! I tell Goo. But how in the world does one know? I never did. I still don't. I hope he does. What seems clear now is my lethal sensitivity. In certain cognitive therapies, one is told to smile or to repeat various positive phrases--that the outward expression might transform the inner experience. It works, I've found. The half-smile trick. The smile on your face communicates something to the brain. Or acting As If. Of course, it would then follow that it might work in the other direction--that violent fighting, arguing, screaming and crying, even in an artificial mode, would seep inward. What is artificial anyway? As he yells at me, I come to hate him, I feel assaulted. When I tell him the story of my lover's death, when I am in tears, I am devastated. I don't quite understand the difference between acting and living. I suppose that is a problem. And, well, I suppose that much of this is obvious--all of the legendary stories of actors lost to a "mad" role, Hamlet in particular--and yet I haven't quite experienced it to such disorientation. Or perhaps I used to enjoy that journey--to darkness, madness, oblivion--but no longer. It's terrifying. 

A friend sent this the other day:  

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,  

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you  

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, 

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

          (Love After Love, Derek Walcott)

THE END

"WE HAVE AN OPEN RELATIONSHIP" HE SAID. HE SLEEPS WITH ANYONE

BUT SHE WAS THE ONE I WANTED TO KISS. SHE LEANED TOWARD ME AND SHE SAID HI. AND I COULD ONLY THINK OF KISSING HER LIPS AND THEN WE IMAGINED IT. AND I WAS THE OLDER WOMAN IN THIS SCENARIO. HOW OLD ARE YOU SHE ASKED. 39 I SAID. I'M 29 SHE SAID. IT FELT SIGNIFICANT. WE'RE SISTERS SHE SAID. I TRIED TO REMEMBER BEING 29 BUT ONLY VAGUELY SOMETHING OF THE WAY YOU FEEL YOUR LIFE MUST BEGIN OR YOU WILL DIE OF IT

OR THAT IT'S NOT WHAT YOU SUPPOSED IT WOULD BE. WHICH IS STILL SURPRISING AT 29

BROOKLYN IS DEATH FOR WRITERS SHE SAID

I UNDERSTAND

YES I LEFT. I CHOSE NORMAL OVER BROOKLYN.


HA HA

“I BELIEVE THAT ANY MALE OVER 35 SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO SPEAK IN WORKSHOPS” 

"OR ANY MALE OVER 25 MUST WRITE HIS COMMENTS IN ONE SENTENCE ON A PIECE OF PAPER AND THAT'S IT"

HOW TO SOLVE MY WORKSHOP PROBLEM

ALWAYS THE MALES

AND THEN SHE TOLD ME THAT HER MOTHER WANTED TO KILL HER. AS A BABY. TO PUT HER IN THE DRYER.

ON THE DRYER?

NO. IN THE DRYER.

I HAVEN'T HEARD THAT ONE.

I LIKE YOUR MOTHER, I SAID.

BECAUSE SHE ALMOST KILLED ME?

THAT'S NOT WHAT I MEANT.

ALMOST FOUR ON A FRIDAY WALKING THROUGH COLUMBIA UNIV CAMPUS THE LIGHT SHIFTING AND MY AWARENESS OF MY EMPTINESS AROUND ME HOW I LINK IT TO THE GRANDEUR OF THAT CAMPUS WHERE I WALKED SO OFTEN IN A DEC AFTERNOON SUN. THE THOUGHT OF NOTHINGNESS AROUND ME NOT A SOUL TO HOLD ME IN THAT DARKNESS. THAT LACK

& THE MEMORY OF HOW IT WOULD DEVOUR ME HOW IT COULD THE AWARENESS OF A HOSPITAL NEARBY UPTOWN HOW THEY WOULD SEND ME THERE HOW I WOULD NEVER GET OUT BECAUSE IT WOULD NEVER BE SAFE TO WALK IN THE WANING LIGHT OF THE AFTERNOON

BEHIND RIVERSIDE PARK, MORNINGSIDE DRIVE. THE FEELING HOW IT SMELLS LIKE A HOSPITAL GOWN A SHARPS CONTAINER MY CLOTHES IN A PLASTIC BAG THEY GIVE IT BACK WHEN YOU LEAVE

WHY LET ME LEAVE DON'T LET ME BE LONELY

THIS IS WHERE I CAME TO DIE

WHAT A LOVELY WAY TO DIE WITH LEONARD LOPATE ON THE RADIO MY ONLY FRIEND I AM TRAVIS BICKLE WHO ARE YOU

ALLAN GINSBERG GIVES ME A HEADACHE MY STUDENT TELLS ME. I FEEL FOR YOU I SAY. I WANT YOUR HEADACHE I SAY

HERE IS SOMETHING

& THE THOUGHT LATER THAT I DON'T BELIEVE IN TIME. THAT TIME MUST NOT EXIST. 

I WANTED TO CALL MY SHRINK WHEN I RODE THE TRAIN WITH THE YOUNG BARNARD GIRLS I WANTED TO SAY TIME DOES NOT EXIST JUST YESTERDAY I HAD YOUR MILKY SKIN JUST YESTERDAY I STOOD ON THIS TRAIN WITH THE OTHERS FEELING SO DISCONNECTED & CONVINCED THEY WERE ALL SO MUCH MUCH MORE WELL-ADJUSTED THAN I OR ME OR I

WHICH THEY WERE

WELL-ADJUSTED. NOT AN ACCIDENTAL TERM

I WAS NOT WELL-ADJUSTED.

I WAS UN-ADJUSTED

I'VE ADJUSTED

LEARNED

BUT HOW WILL I FIT INTO MY BOURGEOIS LIFE HOW WILL ANY OF US FIT SOME OF US ARE NOT MADE FOR THIS LIFE

DEAR DR DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN I WAS 20 AND YOU WERE 30 AND NOW I AM OLD AND YOU ARE OLDER AND YET WE WERE THERE YESTERDAY FACING A NEW YORK LIFE BESIDE EACH OTHER

I THINK OF YOU WHEN I COME TO NEW YORK AND I THINK OF B. WHO KNEW HOW TO LOVE ME 

WILL I MAKE IT TO THE END OF THIS POST

I HAVE TO TELL YOU SOMETHING

HAVE YOU KNOWN?

THIS BLOG IS GOING TO DIE. I AM GOING TO KILL IT. BUT IT WILL EXIST AND BE REBORN IN A NEW WAY A NEW FORM IT CAN NOT EXIST HERE

IF YOU WISH TO READ STILL PLEASE SEND ME AN EMAIL. I MIGHT MAKE IT INVITE ONLY

WHICH MEANS THAT YOU CAN READ IT IF I KEEP WRITING

BUT I MAY STOP WRITING HERE

I'M SORRY

IT'S NOT WORKING ANYMORE

OR IT IS BUT I HAVE TO MAKE A TRANSITION

IT'S A GOOD THING

GOOD THINGS ARE HAPPENING

MY BOOK IS COMING OUT IN ONE YEAR

AND THEN OTHER BOOKS I PROMISE

I LOVE YOU

XOXO

Oh yes we read sappho and ginsberg and adrienne rich and and and and

they had this energy this self-selecting energy

I should write about yoram yovell. How many times I have written about yoram yovell.

That's what I mean. I had this shrink. I remember showing up at his office in a purple felt mini-skirt. It zipped up the back. Black tights. Doc martens. I don't know what else but I loved that purple skirt and my memory is lit up with the feel of it, the look of it. There is this thing with a young woman who wants to be the object of the gaze and then is disgusted by the gaze. You know. This is Kate's Green Girl. I remember one day in Yoram's office, he greeted me and he had the warmest smile. I felt something inside of me, that bone below my stomach. He looked at me and said how much he liked it—and I said my skirt?--and he said your whole gestalt.

And I remember the use of the word gestalt which is as significant to the memory as the purple skirt.

I also remember the feeling when I left his office, this aching. And I remember there was nothing that could fill it. Nothing. It was enormous I knew I must die.

But then occasionally, with Yoram, I felt so alive.

One day he told me that his office neighbor, Dr. Prince, saw me there in the waiting room. He saw many of the pretty young women who saw Yoram. And Yoram told me that Dr. Prince said, of me: “I feel sorry for you.”

We were known to be difficult, you see. 

I don't know why Yoram told me that--perhaps later he regretted it or should have regretted it but it stayed with me for a very long time. Fifteen years now. My father was paying him so much money to talk to me for 45 minutes twice a week, to prescribe drugs, to occasionally call me at home, after rehearsals.

Were we really so bad?

(Were you angry? She asked me. Did you think “You son of a bitch”?)

One day, I was taking the train with a woman named Marigold. We volunteered together at Gilda's Club. We began talking about our shrinks in a general way and I told her that I had a small crush on mine, he was on the upper west side.

Don't tell me it's Dr. Yovell she said.

It is.

We were in the train, in the 1 train headed south. We both held the bar, gripping, standing close. She was tall, beautiful in that old money East Coast way. There was something about her, some confidence, that attracted me. It was something I decided belonged to east coast women but would never belong to me. A savvy. Despite her suffering, she knew how to be in the world in a way I did not. I was fragmented. I still am. 

Anyway Marigold was stunned and stared for a long time. I'm very jealous of you, she whispered. He used to be my doctor. I broke our contract and now he won't see me.

What was your contract?

I was not allowed to have a drink. I had to stay sober to stay in therapy.

Oh.

One day, I was waiting for him, and I went to the bar down the block. On Amsterdam. I had a drink. Or more. I showed up at his office. I was really drunk.

He kicked you out?

Not right away. But later. He said we were through. I couldn't come back.

Wow.

I love him, she said.

Yoram was a short, balding Israeli doctor. He was not exactly sexy but I knew what she meant. He was seductive. He spoke in low tones, and looked into your eyes with an intensity. He would moan occasionally. It was like sex. Sitting across from him. His body and my body. It was better than sex. Sometimes he would talk about his days in the army. He would speak of the "dirty" Arabs.

Another woman, from a very religious family, told me how her therapist tried to get her to masturbate. She never had. And he said, I will show you how. He started to show her-- "like this" he said--but she left the office and never returned. I liked her. Devorah. I should have left. I was always too curious, too eager to see what would happen next.  

I'm with you in Rockland

I watched the film of Howl the other day and realized what I'd forgotten: that Allen Ginsberg and I attended the same mental institution. The hospital of the Presbyterians of Columbia University. In the poem he changes this name to Rockland, which is more mellifluous. The poem is dedicated to Carl Solomon--a friend he met in the ward. A friend who got shocks and a straight jacket. I think he talked about how they spent much of their time inside trying to decide if they were crazy or the doctors were crazy. This had me thinking about Chuck, my friend from the Ward who de-friended me some years after we were discharged. Chuck was there before me. He had a wicked, powerful intelligence and sense of humor and exquisite artistic ability. Plus he was so sweet. He used to draw pictures of me. I still have one, with my long hair shading my face, my Doc Martens, my grungy ripped jeans. I was with him on the ward when we heard that Kurt Cobain had killed himself. I was with him when we heard that River Phoenix died. Chuck was the one who would see me reading Sade's Justine (for example) and make a joke. He was the only man on the ward, and often the only black person. Very often. It was a very white, female patient population. Chuck was from the Bronx. He'd been an art director at Rolling Stone. One day he threw all his art away, threw it out the window. And then tried to kill himself. And then ended up on the S.S. Mostly because he was so talented. Lyle sort of sought us out, recruited us. If you are a suicide with a high IQ I Want You! 

When he de-friended me it was because I was sort of blowing him off a lot. I was blowing him off a lot because we were out of the ward and it was difficult for me to hang out with my fellow inmates, who reminded me of that place. And my status. 

In one interview, Ginsberg talks about a kind of self-rejection, the way you internalize all that you've been told is wrong with you; how you bring that out into the world with you. That's what I did.

What I mean is that I needed to move on and moving on meant acquiring a real-world, non-mental-patient boyfriend. His name was Dan. This Dan, my first Dan, turned out to totally break my heart. For all of the reasons that he loved me, he couldn't love me. If that makes sense. I internalized this and extrapolated it as a rejection of me, as a referendum on my ability to be successful as an integrated human being.

Ginsberg says something about what it was like after he left. How he walked around seeking validation. How he had to get out of New York. 


I did, too. Had to get out. But it took me a long time to accept that. 

You see what Ginsberg knew was that the ward was a place for those of us seeking spiritual transcendence and yet the ward reduced or pathologized this search. Still it was a place, an alternative.

& we might find fellow seekers

Like Carl Solomon

Like Chuck

Sometimes I google Chuck and I don't find him and that makes me sad

The last time I saw him he was on the Bowery in a half-way apartment with two disabled men. A caseworker visited regularly. He went to a occupational rehab center.

Do you know what the severely mentally ill are like? Well they smell for one thing. 

Plus they don't care what you think.

My first Dan was this guy who is now in SF with a baby and a wife who reads People magazine and is rather shallow. Or so he told me when I saw him two years ago. I was happy that I did not feel attracted to him. 

Anyway I hurt Chuck and I've written about this many times and what I mean is that I suppose I took pleasure in it I suppose Chuck became symbolic of this place and system which had pronounced me defective and made me defective as part of what it called curing me. What I mean is that if you (and I mean YOU) were locked up for 3 years, what do you think you would be like? How would you feel walking the streets of Manhattan after that? How would you feel going to bed at night in your little illegally sublet apartment? 

Well I don't know but maybe you would not feel safe in your own body. Maybe you would feel that your body was meant to be kept to be DISCIPLINED

Not a free thing

Or you wouldn't even want freedom anymore, not even the Jonathan Franzen kind

Especially not that kind

That's what I mean

Anyway this is on my mind. I'm teaching HOWL. I never cared for the Beats or any of this even though once I saw Ginsberg read in LA on USC campus in the early 90s--still I didn't care. But now I am old and I realize that his story is my story. That I too saw the best minds of my generation--

I will write about QUINN next--I wrote about him here once--

Ron Terada

I forgot what I said the other day about loneliness but so yesterday I found myself at Ron Terada's show at the MCA, which is prefaced by this idea from his compatriot Douglas Coupland:

Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.

It seems the central crisis of my life right now. 

Which you know isn't so bad. I'm not complaining. 

I was just thinking about how there is this thing when you are married. For example your spouse wants you to get a flu shot. This is not your primary concern. It becomes one of his & so each day building up to the day that he actually gets his flu shot is full up with this anxiety and anticipation and insistence: "I'm getting my flu shot." "Okay." "Do you want to come with me?" "No." "When will you get yours?" & so on. Though there are at least 18 things you'd prioritize before getting your flu shot, which is something in fact you'll never make a priority, you feel this pressure. Which you don't want to feel. Given that you have all variety of internal personal pressures of your own to regard. But then if you ignore this external pressure you are risking further conflict in your marriage--that large thing, that thing that has become larger than the two of you--which is one of your prioritized things to avoid. Conflict, that is.

Yeah so.

I'm difficult.

A student wanted to write a polemic and so she was reading Against Love by Laura Kipnis, at my suggestion. I'd resisted this book when it came out but now I think it's sort of awesome. 

The other day I saw a play at a black theater on the south side in Stony Island, which neighborhood I'm somewhat embarrassed to say I've never before visited; I've only ever really visited Chinatown and Hyde Park on the South Side. Hundreds in the audience. Two white people. I sat with the other white man, also a critic, and we got to know each other a bit. I liked him. 

We didn't mean to sit together; we were seated this way. It wasn't segregation.

I want to write about teaching. I'm going to write about having DW for a teacher and how that informs my teaching of Creative Writing even if I am a total hypocrite. As was he. I promise I'll write this soon. I also want to write more about my resistance to rape-scenes in student fiction. Which is not a resistance to rape in literature. Besides The Liar's Club, I am thinking of that sexual-abuse rape scene in Infinite Jest or Toni Morrison's* rape scenes. Which leave me feeling raped, in a totally devastating-bodily-political way. Her aesthetic. My students don't have an aesthetic. "I wasn't trying to be political." one told me. But it is political, I said. 

We were having this conversation. About a book. A writer. We were speaking of the way the book the writer felt so honest and raw. We were talking and he looked to me for something. approval. What do I want from him? To be approving. I was understanding the way power shifts, that there is power from each side. I don't trust this feeling which falls away which is transient which is a moment. Which creates me. This is where I become a self. I feel less than trapped. What I mean is that there is nothing so attractive to me as someone who is searching, has sought. Someone lost, a certain registered suffering. I knew immediately that this person like me had lost a parent when he was a child. We are in this club. 

*Also Toni Morrison writes of FREEDOM. She often writes of freedom, which is a kind of MADNESS, and she writes of it in a way that is far more subtle and complicated and life-affirming than the way that J Franzen writes of FREEDOM. She evokes the freedom of aging, for women. She writes of the body. She is one of my foundational writers—Beloved in particular—a writer who made me want to be a writer. One of those where I shiver, still. Even after she became beyond-famous, I feel this way reading her prose. But I'm afraid I can't teach her. I keep trying and I keep failing. It's okay.

DO NOT ALLOW YOURSELF TO BE IMPRISONED BY ANY AFFECTION. KEEP YOUR SOLITUDE. THE DAY, IF IT EVER COMES, WHEN YOU ARE GIVEN TRUE AFFECTION THERE WILL BE NO OPPOSITION BETWEEN INTERIOR SOLITUDE AND FRIENDSHIP, QUITE THE REVERSE. IT IS EVEN BY THIS INFALLIBLE SIGN THAT YOU WILL RECOGNIZE IT. OTHER AFFECTIONS HAVE TO BE SEVERELY DISCIPLINED.

-SIMONE WEIL