Cincinnatus

Bored, half frozen in a manically conditioned classroom, learning about child development in ways that intrigue my academic half of the brain, and bore the teacher half. Out of sheer desperation, I begin to stylize my notes; by Friday, it's a bad habit. Here are some lecture notes...

Lessons in Adolescent Psychology

 

Development (underline, highlight): change over time

optimal maturity implosion at 22

when where is out peak (the fear

of descent greater or equal to the fear of ascent

you do the math)

 

what happens to pitchers once their fastball slackens

(to pictures once their fixatives unmoor

to pitchers once their handle breaks)

senescence

which side are you on?

 

Identity (underline, question mark, exclamation point):

adjustments to life responsibilities

environmental adaptation – not who but how

not I but me

the speed that’s in my head personal velocity

I am how I move through time

 

2. Three Moments to Hang Our Hat

 

Piaget’s cognitive development

5 years of childhood, 6 to 11, don’t blink

children moving through worldviews

relative to shifts in brain function

Himalayas at 11, the arduous decline

stocked to the teeth with cognitive machinery

neural pirates Spanish bad boys in Antigua

disjunction between capacity and experience

anxiety captivity waiting to become

if I am armed when do I go to sea?

 

Erik Erikson’s life span development

8 stages of man

did you solve all your crises?

applied development how do we train

our soldiers and our housewives

not what I am but what I want to do

vocation trumps identity

forget how the sun feels

mark its position

 

today we have a luxury the delusion

to believe I am not applied

that I am I and my house is my house

the real world that we reject, the inner world that won’t be borne

had the meaning missed the experience

I can’t remember the color of my house –

ask habit, she will know

 

Siegler’s microgenetic approach

small changes in brief duration

clawing up the slimy banks of stimulus response

rat in the hand bird in the bush

Nabokov’s ape dreaming bars

in the Jardin des Plantes

smoking chimps in Herzog’s somber empire

armor coffin what serves us on the precipice

(of age, experience, Sunday night)

 

3. Epiphany at last 

 

each day a beeline out to sea

and the fracture when the horizon is finally naked

 

systematic inspiration incubation miscarried

on this shelled out shore

 

learning not transmission but a coin in a well

dropped lost gone to seed rot ash phoenix

 

epiphanies on Tuesday morning

failure mans the oars

 

shift flash rupture miracle

perception invites stimulation

bodies awaiting strangers touch

learning from class to bed

 

everything I learned between two shores

between the sheets

Still trying to recollect 3 delirious weeks of vacation, what can I do, this is the gorging of a vacation-starved mind. The most remarkable thing I did with my parents was to see Georgia O'Keefe, actually an exhibit currently at the San Diego Museum of Art on the Steiglitz circle, Steiglitz and his mistress-muses, oh and artists in their own right (Steiglitz women). My parents glide through the exhibit a little sunburned in Georgia's scarlets, dazed with the unmistakable erotics couched in mundane domestic still lifes. They perch a little uneasily on benches in the middle of the hall, happily, sleepily absorbing the throbbing flowers. It's like they get it at a level too deep and personal for conversation, yet something about this level of getting it binds us all together, each in our silent fuzzy contemplation.

Under the bay windows of the living room, my parents have an enormous terracotta pot of scarlet canna lilies, and next to it, an identical pot of birds of paradise. In a nearby pot, home to a gnarled dwarf lemon tree, there is a skull of a deer a high school buddy brought for my step dad on their 5Oth reunion. I wonder if it's this unlikely overlap in taste, in the choice of domestic objects, that endears them to O'Keefe's canvases. Or maybe it's the sense of erotics with decorum, not repressed or sublimated, just lived out in the habits and rituals of everyday objects, something my suburban parents know, or rather feel.

Under this unexpected influence of my parents' reaction, I am for the first time actually moved by O'Keefe (I can't help it, her style has been so bastardized by hotel art it's hard to discard all that).

Homegrown Eros

Canna lilies

Bloody days of conquest

in the folds of petals

yearning at the base of a piston

Biblical terror and domestic lust

Canaan Babylon Lake George

Georgia’s lilies know how to shatter still life

 

Here it’s days of gutted canvases

forget-me-nots in pots

Spanish adobe roofs above the potted lilies

Within the eddies gathered here

trash cans smolder for pick up

rabbits sniff at kale

and mail trucks purr

dropping phone bills like sacraments

Would Steiglitz’s women find erotics here?

 

**

Georgia’s oils are folds of molten lava

stage sets for a passion play

fragrant votives for a prayed for life

bestiaries of miracles.

 

Passionate control, wrested simplicity

Lake George a burnished coal smoldering in the desert

A hot sentient heart

A map for the blood to course by

Speaking of Homeland Security, I finally bought a bag with the now famous logo that's been turning over in my mind these last 2 days: a picture of Native Americans with rifles, and a caption reading, "Homeland Security: Fighting terrorism since 1492." Still I must say I'm glad they're fucking with Americans at the border - it's time we got a dose of our own medicine.

Onward with the travel journal. I've been thinking about how many people I have met in my travels, all of whom have become something of intimate strangers, people whose paths will likely never cross mine again but whom I got to know with such vertiginous speed and intensity. Flash floods, tropical storms. All rapid, profound and leaving an indelible mark on the landscape. Not knowing what to do with all the residual energy of these encounters, I began documenting them in poems I started calling my letters to strangers - here are two.

Letter to a stranger
 

Diego, you are neither Baudelaire’s flaneur

nor Whitman’s passing stranger:

imagined intimacy never lived.

 

You stop me by the fountain asking for directions

(if you had read your bible you would know

that women at a well lead men to trouble)

Directions lead to culture,

Chomsky, globalization and la izquierda

as the buses almost clip our lefty wings,

rounding the corner of Jardin de Unión.

 

Traveler, your camera will never capture

what your mind perceives;

your mind will never wander far

from what it knows: Chomsky, Trotsky, Gramsci.

Your eyes will see as far as you have thought,

so far and deep, yet depth, you know,

is but a narrow ditch

with banks that shut out sight.

 

And still you are a gift,

for you have apprehended me,

two strangers on a corner,

both strangers in this county,

intimacy lived through thought and word.

 

Returning to Antigua, may your path be light,

your mind less sure.

City of one

 

This city is a map of absence –

The bridge with other people

The tables bearing weight of other arms

The city’s promenade whose multitude is few

 

The story of Jean-Paul et son Pierre

The way a place can nurse its absence

like an abscess

The way the sun’s fall brings the day

aslant from its fulfillment

And the pigeons pecking crumbs

between the throbbing cobblestones

like ushers sweeping popcorn from the aisles

after the lights come on.

Back from 2 weeks in Mexico and pathetically the most vivid memory I have is of re-entry into this paranoid, fortressed country. So let me begin to catch up backwards and start at the border. Also let me begin by way of a poem because it's the only way I know how to reenter English after 2 weeks of rock climbing Spanish - slow, arduous, and always uphill.

In Transit

(Bush International Airport)

 

Between countries, cities to love,

lovers to call home,

beneath the gathering Texas clouds,

in endless neon corridors

of homeland security,

when will I feel myself securely home?

 

**

 

Reentering this country without baggage

I am a too light traveler for comfort.

 

State the purpose of your trip, its length,

intention, secret motives, true confessions.

What did you take? What did you leave behind?

 

The purpose of my trip was pleasure. I took:

my clothes and left 5 pounds;

my email scrawled on napkins;

a fading self that’s climbing still the winding street

rising from Christ’s Blood up Temezcuitate

like the phantom at our school,

thin lanky girl in a white shift, asking others

what they’re doing there.

 

I’m smuggling pictures of my other half,

the undeclared alien, my stranger self

who lives abroad and meets with me at last.

And look, a bundle of explosives –

love letters to foreign nationals and nations

who live still in my address

and cross your borders.

 

Our foreign selves slip through your monitors

without a trace.

I spent yesterday's dinner watching the Ellen show with my mom and grandma, who both adore it. Why? Because Ellen is witty and down to earth, and because her humor is in good taste. And because it’s not too high brow (my mom doesn’t put it that way) – that is, it does not require the knowledge of pop-cultural allusions my family would resent not getting. Still, it’s downright weird to hear your mom and grandma laud the lesbian icon of the nation – and provide celebrity gossip on her surely impending marriage with Portia someone or other, the girlfriend of the day. Now why didn’t I know that?

Nothing a bit of googling can’t fix. I’m informed by www.lesbianlife.com that Portia de Rossi, most recently seen as the shallow, crying-challenged sister on Arrested Development, was born Amanda in Melbourne and changed her name at 15 after Shakespeare’s Portia, that’s right, the one from The Merchant of Venice.  I’m intrigued by what compelled a 15 year old to adopt the name of a haughty, independent, wise and imaginative heroine – foresight? rebellion? wishful thinking? a dramatic flair? At any rate, the 2 blonde American sweethearts will soon be wed and I am left to gather this latest piece of gossip from my suburban, hetero/a-sexual, pop culturephobic family. I need to get with it!

Home is not what you think. This is home too. Why singular, exclusive, monogamous? I’ve never had one home, which is not the same as I’ve never had a home. Home means something different every time you come back to it. At least Pannikin cafe is the same, with the same dyke from high school working the counter –  let's call her Meg, whose hair is now wispy and bleached like a surfer’s (it was always buzzed as long as I can remember), the same two waiters, both Mexicans, one fat, the other a wick, nestling the bandeira bagel plates and the Greek eggs in the crooks of their elbows. I wish this was the kind of place where you could tip. They are like the local cats, loyal and bound. I wonder what keeps them.

Across from Pannikin is my elementary school, named after one Paul Ecke. Much in this area (including the local Y) is named after the Eckes, who came from Germany in 19O6 and began farming poinsettias on the land that is now Leucadia and Encinitas. The flower was native to Mexico and was introduced to the US by one Joel Roberts Poinsett, but never really took off until Ecke, noting that the flower bloomed around December, decided it should become the official holiday season flower. I am proud to say that my hometown is responsible for the atrocious pots of poisonous, odorless, tasteless, red-leafed flowers sold in every Safeway, Ralphs, Vons and Albertsons from Thanksgiving day unto eternity. In Spanish, the poinsettia is called “el flor de noche buena" because a poor Mexican girl by the name of Pepita offered a weed to God and he, seeing her love and humility and shame at this poor offer, turned it into a tacky red thing. And that is the story that underpins my town, my elementary school and the Paul Ecke YMCA, the shrine my family still worships at every 6 am, and where I spend my mornings when visiting. Even Pannikin is not innocent – the sprawling yellow Victorian it occupies used to be the Encinitas train station, where the poinsettia mother plants were unloaded from the freight cars that would bring them from Mexican fields, in the transport losing their one redeeming trait, their fragrant Spanish name.

A message arrives in my Outlook work box: "W97M_IIS.GEN has been detected,and Clean has been taken on 5/15/2008 3:01:48 PM." Now who is this deviant Gen/gender Kathy Acker pirate with a mullet brandishing her sledgehammer, charging at the Ford Foundation fortress (my current employer), and who is this Agent Clean who's been taken on to combat, dissuade, seduce and otherwise disarm her? What computer nerd or word gymnast can explain this oddball programming conceit to me? Amidst the avalanche of proposals submitted to the foundation, c/o Asya Graf, this is the most intimate message, and the one promising a more revolutionary battle than anything waged in the name of social justice!

This time of year, I think increasingly of my grandparents. It might have something to do with the family visit just around the corner, or the fact that as the weather improves, my walks get longer and leave more time to call home, check up on my grandmother who never needed checking up on. It also has much to do with the fact that, inspired by my incessant questions about Soviet culture, my grandmother has taken up her memoirs. Last I heard, she was up through the 6Os, when her life lost its contours to the general blur of married, maternal domesticity. I cannot picture my grandmother as either of these things. At any rate, these are 2 poems from a while back, recently resuscitated, for my grandparents.

Evacuation

                                                for SK

 

I decided you don’t need anything to live

I grabbed documents we later lost

Life – you don’t need these things.

Santa Ana blowing through my mind today,

Fires in the foothills, invokes that other fleeing.

People left with nothing.

Dark forces, armies, nature, or our own lives closing in.

There is a truth to the world ending.

 

**

 

(New York Marathon, Sunday, November 4^th)

                                                                   for YK

Pindar’s athletes bathed in fragrant glory,

luminous and binding,

mixing sweat with a more divine excrescence.

 

The dictatorship of sports: the space of freedom

traversed by sinewed legs in golden Reeboks,

Broadway epic as the Via Appia,

Central Park lindens shedding laurel wreaths.

The runners take the line of flight, the beeline out,

past ideologies and praise, into a space of pure

pulse and sinew, shock and breath.

 

One runner wheels along the Moscow River

under shedding poplars, scattering sparrows,

dust bathing on the quay.

He is a vector and a vertigo

(dust, distance, death)

a line of flight beyond the race.

Columbus Park on Mulberry Street Saturday mornings is a carnival of peace, fairbooths set up to enact zen, culture, identity, community. The cherry blossoms, for instance, or the Chinese opera performed by an alarmingly skinny old man at the entrance under a red beach umbrella. The tai chi in the pavilion, the game of mahjong on the picnic tables. We (or maybe just I) are struck with a bad case of "had the experience, missed the meaning."

There is nothing like a Saturday morning park to inspire fantasies of alternative lives, lives lived parallel to our own and available as options. But here is the glitch - I am increasingly unable to switch into these other lives that used to seem so available, intimate as my own breath. This is my Saturday morning epiphany, something about growing up and something about possible alterity. Growing up is a moment of conscious shift from possibility to escape. Possibility: the present opening into futures. Escape: the present giving way to yet another present, to which the escape track runs parallel.

New immigrants have a slightly stunned look, a slow loping walk, their aim of migrating fulfilled, their next step less sure. The old men walk necks craned, chins jutting out, hands clasped behind their backs, emerging turtles. Their children, wide-hipped and acned on American food, gingerly hold their bony hands, reluctant guides.

Immigration is about possible lives. Arriving is the aching loss of dreams' proximity, losing the intimacy of your other selves.

There is a coworker of mine with whom I carry on an infinite conversation. We cross paths at the corner we round a dozen times a day for coffee, bathroom, briefings with our bosses. We begin tentatively, with office small talk, comments on the color of a blouse or the latest traffic jam across the street at the UN. We pass imperceptibly and inevitably into topics of health, which lead to a reconsideration of the interconnection between breathing, stress, trauma, asthma and allergies. From there we slip into a nostalgic description of our working spaces, our home offices which have been the site, for us both, of identity crises, battle grounds of self-validation and self-loathing. I can clearly see, though I've never been, her corner office with the bay windows full of light and dust, the brown leather easy chair covered also with dust, the orchids on the windowsill, the couch for thinking (my co-worker is an installation artist). She can just as easily occupy my narrow schoolgirl desk with its piles of papers and books, facing the brick wall hung with Turkish saddle blankets, next to an of course dusty window, streaked with a year of rain. And from our scenes of personal comfort and trauma, we very naturally move onto the work that happens or doesn't happen there, her experiments with smell, my steer-roping the English language. At this point the program assistant begins to look at us with amusement and the motion-sensor light has gone out in my office and I've lost my motivation to work, but we've achieved already the most important task of the day, levitating for a moment above the business that our lives have become.