Do Not Disturb

I've finally settled on what should be engraved on my headstone.

More than anything it's solitude I want.  I've learned in the past few weeks that it is the destination at the end of a causeway -- the road to Galveston -- and music will get me there.  I told someone after the election that now was the time to fall in line with art again.  Advice I've been taking my own damn self.  I own a wonderful record collection.  It's a combination of what I bought in my 20's when not only was I part of an innovative music programming organization at the University of Iowa, but as 20-ish people do letting musicians tell me (and others) who I was.  Then I inherited a friend's classical collection when she retired and then I got older, had a baby and fell into the abyss of dire poverty with seat-of-the-pants moves, and could no longer buy records.  Lastly, my boyfriend-not-yet-husband's hometown room-mate who DJ'd when he wasn't being a neurotic asshole moved out and left his collection behind.  (Which is why I own the music of Joan Jett, Béla Bartók, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Donna Summer.)

In my 30's I couldn't write fiction and listen to music, so I didn't play my records except occasionally, like when I struggled to keep depression at bay.  (I have some vague memory of 2 year old D. exclaiming, "Al Jahbay, Mommy, Al Jahbay!!!"  as she danced to Al Jarreau, who as I write this is sittin' on the dock of the bay.  Now in my 60's always aware that I will not much longer have ears to hear and eyes to see am slowly playing this deliberate and inherited collection before I will it to a friend.  It is the way to peace these days.

It is a paradox that life has gotten simultaneously better and harder.  I've always been a bit of a dreadnik but really, it seems like most personal news are tales of loss, damage, diminution and struggle.  I'm having to call on more skills to cope with it because if I don't I will not have a stomach left by year's end.  Music -- live and recorded -- helps a lot because it takes me back and away and opens me up to commune with a place beyond words and rational thought.  Now playing, Norman Connors' Love From the Sun.

Trigger warning :-}
In January I will be taking 2 classes because I'd been subtly warned that there's a sell-by date to getting my degree and you ain't getting any younger .....  I may be crazy by May.  (Editor's note:  make that crazier) and I doubt I will be posting much although godknows there will be plenty plenty to write about.

I wish us all luck.  And solitude.

Regrets? I'd had a few.

Of all the times to resume writing this blog (encouraged by far away friends who use it the way others use Facebook) I did not want to resume in the middle of a national crisis, one that is played out in my own 1200 sf home.  But, this blog was born of national crisis -- the controversy over building a mosque in downtown Manhattan -- and as long as I'm alive, and as long as I can feel outrage, this blog will exist.

Where to begin.

In my day job I sometimes read papers published in peer-reviewed journals that go to great lengths to describe the physics of a bullet as it travels through human tissue.  The speed, the projectile's rotation, calculation of the frictional force, trajectory, and the thermodynamics of heat loss as a device made of brass and gunpowder tears, maims and often kill you.  Usually there are pictures, e.g., Figure 1, let's call it Mortal Wound to Torso, and if I look closely enough (which I never do) what seems at a distance to be the mouth of an angry volcano is more likely what a tunnel gored by a bullet does to someone's body.  (Imagine the violence required to blast through the mountains of western Pennsylvania so that Interstate 76 can take you from Philly to Pittsburgh; that's what a bullet can do.)  If a picture is worth a 1,000 words, one's imagination is worth a 1,000 pictures.  I don't have to see it; I live with it.

In a city that has been dying for half a century.  Where persistent unemployment of young men of color is the enduring norm, not an anomaly.  Where I, who has been through the sluice gates of corrosive institutional racism and should know better am daily conditioned to fear and distrust men who could be my own children.  I repeat:  fear and distrust men who could be my own children.  That's where I live.

And I live with someone who, the mornings after Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were killed, and 5 Dallas police officers were killed, rushed to tell me that Black Lives Matter is responsible for what happened in Dallas.  (Like most libertarians, he thinks he lives on Dispassionate Reason Street when he lives on Id Lane.)  All of it, all of it -- outside and inside my home -- reminds me of the bitter and very American joke:

Q:  What's scarier than a white man with a gun?
A:  A black man with a gun.

I am in a rage which makes it difficult to write.  As I write it congeals into a pounding headache.  But, the paradox is that if I don't write I will never ever get to the other side.  I used to make fun of crazy people who would offer me their tiny-margined, single-spaced, double-sided screeds, their manifesto detailing the malevolence of the universe and all its actors.  I won't any more.

to be continued ...

Paris

You know we were there this summer.  To visit family, friends and the city itself.  You may also know, if you've known me for a long, long time that I am so not a Francophile.  But this attack caused a pain in my heart.  Probably one that would not have existed had I not walked Parisian streets and eaten at Parisian cafés.  As I wrote to some American friends who live there for half of each year:  This hurts in a way the Hebdo and supermarket ones did not.  There was a twisted, evil [but] understandable logic -- which in all wild murders holds only for an atomic moment.  But now that I've seen Paris, and now that it is not an abstraction, and that there were dozens of indiscriminate many ... The French republic will be brutal, dark and swift in its reprisals. I fear that the geopolitical axis has shifted towards another major war.

A blow to one of the world's great cities (and not all large cities are great cities -- Los Angeles or Dublin being cases in point) is a mortal blow to our common humanity.  I've lived in one and been to a few others and the time spent in each and every one -- whether it has been years or days -- has been a gift that has changed me.

Women of a Certain Art: Blondell Cummings, 1944 - 2015

It's Fall.  I'm back at school.  The generational dislocation resumes as I sit in a class where my post-collegiate employment history precedes my classmates' birthdays.

Another friend and collaborator has died.  Blondell and I met in 1980.  I was hugely pregnant and uncertain about all things future.  She was in Waterloo, IA dancing with Bill and on her way to creating her masterpiece, Chicken Soup.  We became friends as women do with talk of lovers, past and present, work and life.  I eventually moved to New York and worked for her for a while when fax machines were a novelty.

We created 2 pieces together:  she commissioned my first dance libretto, Orpheus and Eurydice, and I wrote Act I of For JB (Blondell's meditation on La Josephine).  We stayed in touch although not seeing each other much.  She kept making work through thick and thin, somehow making a living and keeping herself housed and travelling around the world.  She eventually received a Guggenheim Fellowship in recognition of her stature.

When we did chat it was sometimes about work, mostly about the this-n-that of life -- nephews, family, daughters, hair.  I sent her to Daughter No. 1 a few years back to have her hair done.  (I used to tell my friends, ask for the Dailey's Mother discount.  At least I thought it was funny.)  Dailey wasn't pleased, she finds most of my friends are too old, too indecisive, too tentative -- to make good customers.  Nevertheless, I enjoy sending her people who remember her before she could walk, talk, or make googobs of money.

So, good-bye Blondell, good-bye.

Pussycat, Pussycat Where Have You Been?

A.  to London to visit the queen
B.  burying the dead.

The answer, Dear Reader, is B.  But, not in the way you think.  In the way that I now realize is what is the long long arc of transmuting a living being to a what?  I don't even know what to call a friend now dead -- history?

As I am tired and the hour is late I'll cut and paste from an email that I sent to one who helped me pack:

We got everything out yesterday.  I always like to do a last walkthrough, even if it means opening cabinets that I’m certain were cleared.  Sure enough:  I opened the louvered shutters above Fred’s bedroom closet and there was a comforter and a bag of costumes.  So, now it’s done done.  (Mark and I just got back from the storage facility in Wallingford where we put the last things.)  Even though Fred has been gone for me for some time, I stood in each room and said “Good-bye Fred”.  The rooms were naked, shabby where the in-need-of-fresh-paint walls were exposed, and the usual damage that comes from living in a space – the dents, the stains, the marks – were apparent what with the eye not being distracted by beauty and a person’s idiosyncratic style.  He is gone, the place is someone else’s construction site now. Stripped of almost everything that made it unique to Fred.

While I understand some of the Inner Circle’s aversion to being in the space to defenestrate it, I don’t forgive them.  The work of breaking down a person’s physical space isn’t sexy, and it doesn’t bring positive attention, and it’s not about one’s soulful feelings.  It is the quotidian scutwork of life, something I’m far too proficient at doing, and I am hardwired to be thorough in my honor.  At least to this complex and eminently lovable man.

So, the page turns; a new phase begins.

The membrane between the world of the living and the world of the dead has always been a fascination of mine; even as a young girl reading Orpheus and Eurydice I realized that the story was a seminal primer in the mysteries of life and death.  I wrote The Negros Burial Ground as the story of a particularly painful passage to what we Westerners who still profess some allegiance to Christian dogma call the afterlife; the journeys of Eleanor Bumpurs, Eddie Perry and Michael Griffin, African-American New Yorkers murdered by agents of the state. The afterlife is complex in African cosmology and hard to describe in a few words, but suffice it to say that there is always a price to pay for trying to live in both worlds simultaneously, and that price is always paid in grief.

When you pack up a lifetime you exist uncomfortably in two worlds.  Yet each artifact removed, discarded and boxed is an admonition:  he is not here.  Some of those artifacts have new homes, new owners, new uses, and he is not here.  And so the furniture is put on the truck.  He is not here.  The boxes leave.  He is not here.  The clothes, the shoes, the music, the art and the tchotchkes.  Not here or here or there.

But where? I ask, postmodern Christian that I am.  (One who aspired to live by the New Testament, but ignores the Old and can't square the circle of Christ's resurrection.)  I don't know.  That is a country I have yet to visit, although love has already bought me a ticket.

A Cure for Everything But Death

Although I will never write a memoir -- buried bodies will remain buried bodies -- I do tend to think of my life in narrative.  What is the story?  I've been home since mid-April and were you to draw a picture of my life it would be typified by sitting at this desk in this office working with various mounds of papers -- the taxes, the medical bills, the scripts, the insurance, and so on and so forth.  For more than a year I've meant to re-write my will.  Since the last one was signed we've moved states, I haven't stabbed my spouse, my proxy grandchild has been born, and I've inherited money and intellectual property rights from a friend.  In other words, things have changed.  A lot.

I've been giving a lot of thought to who gets what and why. I have my own literary estate that matters enough to me that I'd like someone to take care of it.  And I want to provide for the generations after me.  So now I realize that this chapter, this spring and summer, is about organizing my life in the inevitable event of my death.  For someone like me doing this (although much of this work is tedious, if not downright boring) it is a "prophylactic", a cure for everything but Death.  I like order, a sense of control, a certainty that things are in place.  I don't consider what I'm doing death-defying behavior; this is death-acknowledging behavior.  I die and my physical and intellectual property is left behind.

Part of reconstructing the life of the dead is a treasure hunt.  My husband, and the rest of my family will finally have answers to questions they dare not ask me.  They will be capable of seeing who I was before they knew me, before I belonged to them.  That is, if they wish.  My intention (if I'm able) is to leave much of it behind -- the flash drives of files, the hard copies of correspondence, the souvenirs and letters from friends and family, the mementos.  Even my unfinished fiction and poetry.  (Although I suspect that I'll burn all that if time and circumstance permits.)

B'lievemewhenItellyou that I'm not at all morose, just realistic.  

A Gaggle of Geese, A Year of Elegies

Whatever I was determined to write about last night when I decided to write at all has passed through my mind faster than the V of geese on their way north.  (Perhaps to escape an unusually cold Atlanta?)  What remains is evidence of getting older, not the least of which is these bouts of forgetting.  In answer to someone who asked if I used to dance I started talking about salsa -- which I love and haven't danced since my first years here -- and it's cousin, mambo, and for the life of me I couldn't remember what to call it except that it started with an m.  This was mambo I was struggling to recall.  The passion for which caused me to get up at the crack 'o dawn each and every Saturday for years and take the 2 or 3 to Harlem, exiting at the 135th Street station and then around the corner to the legendary Y, exchange street shoes for dance shoes and dancing my ass off.  In studios, on gym floors.  In clubs.  And every once in a while on the street.  I needed mambo like peanut butter needs jelly.  And yet I couldn't recall the word.

Moving on.  It will be that way, for the immediate future and perhaps even for the future future.  (Other than in grammar there is no such thing as the future perfect.)  I have never been a fantasist (or at least don't consider myself one) but since I'm not going to remember things, might as well make them up, eh?  Or, at least try to remember the broad strokes of a life lived so long that I can point to a 40 year old crown in my mouth that now makes contact with a 24 hour crown, both of which better last me forever.

A year of elegies, I call this.  My friend, Fred, is dying.  He, who I had designated as the executor of my will 20 years ago, will not live long enough to do me the honor.  He's leaving before me, a result of Stage 3B colon cancer diagnosed 7 long years ago.  He, and any honest medical provider would tell you the same, should not be alive in 2014.  But he is and it has been grueling, magnificent, humbling, lonely, relentless, stupid, exhausting, infuriating, and tiring all at once.  Throughout most of the odyssey he kept a journal, the Cancer Diaries, which was published as a book by Skyhorse Publishing.  Not everyone, with or without cancer, can read it.  Much of it is too raw, too painful, too indicative of a fate from a disease that seems to say tag! you're it!  And we are superstitious creatures wondering if I read this will I get cancer, too?  But if you want to know some of what it's like to fight to live through searing pain and depression and hopelessness -- well, this may be the ticket.  Anyone who knows Fred knows he is one tough motherfucker and if you've been his friend or colleague for more than a minute, chances are you've been on the receiving end of his toughness.  But, he is also one of the most honorable and loving people I know.

As anyone who's gone through this with a friend or family member, there is dying and there is dying.    Fred's in the former stage, not the latter.  Which means that the, if not quite zest, but will to live is very strong.  Very strong.  He and many others will swim up from, literally, the depths of despair towards any and every kind of ameliorative treatment so that one more day -- even if it's flat on your back poised for the visitation of the roiling pain that tumors poaching your life force is -- of precious life.  So, we go on.  A drug here.  An definitive answer there.  A nap.  

There are two processes, excepting c-sections and suicide, that take their own damn time:  birth and death.  Make plans if you want to, but don't expect them to be followed according to your wishes.  The body will do what it wants to do.  We must make the most of time.

We Can Dance Until We Die

How lucky I am to live in this modern age:  We here have progressed from seeing cancer as a moral failing to seeing dying from cancer as a moral failing.  The body dies in many ways, aided and abetted by the toxic shitstream we've made of Mother Earth, but it dies nevertheless.  It is never about how you die, it's about how you live.  If there is one gift of knowing in advance when one's contract with life is over is that we can choose what we do with our selves.  And, Elizabeth Edwards did so superbly.  With outspoken courage.  So, thank you Elizabeth Edwards.  I hope you see your son.