7 posts tagged “marguerite”

It is another perfect day. I am sitting outside as I write, listening to the wind in the trees whispering like a man close to my ear: Tell me now baby is he good to you/ Can he do to you the things that I do/ I can take you higher… The words of the song tempt me to imagine things that have never happened.

You are sitting next to me, for example, and we are talking. My friend the wind gently rustles the hair out of your eyes and slips in between us and tickles the hair on my arms. You are in your favorite well-worn jeans and a black t-shirt with white lettering that reads: Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb… this makes me smile. You have quit smoking and there is a serenity in your face that reminds me of statues I have seen of peaceful Buddhas. Your hands, usually so restless, so frenetic, are folded comfortably in your lap.

From where we are we can see the line of the Blue Ridge Mountains sloping through an otherwise lush green landscape. The sky is Venus’ flawless blue; not a cloud for miles and miles. How long do we sit like this together—not talking, not writing, simply breathing and listening to the happy chirps of birds in the welcoming trees. This is a form of meditation, though we are not sitting on zabutons, though our eyes are fully open. Return to whatever is there and rest, I hear my old meditation instructor advising. The breath is the one constant in life; it is what carries us through.

We feel how good it is to breathe freely without anything pulling at us, having dropped our concerns when we began. It is such a miraculous feeling. It is so comfortable and reassuring. We watch our thoughts float away like the cottony wisps distributed freely into the air by the trees. We are exactly here, we are fully present in the moment. How good it is to be alive today. How easily we flow with the flowing energies around us. Our biorhythms are syncopated to the biorhythms of nature. It is as if it has always been this way, but we never noticed it before.

You reach out for my hand and I immediately feel the quality of your skin. It is warm and familiar and I am truly feeling it for the first time. Just the touch of your hand sends ripples through me, they branch out to my farthest corners and reverberate back to you. I am noting your strong ripply vibration aura and making you a new flower from my inner world. These remembered words float (also) into the air like the cotton from the trees and disappear.

It is a moment of nothingness and everything at once. It escapes from my telling of it and exists in a place we are just now creating. It escapes my words and my reflections. And time… what time? We have made it stand still long enough for us to breathe inside of it. It is our particular form of magic. It is a trick we learned from the trees and the mountains and the vast sky. How long did we sit like this together, breathing in the music of heaven? How long did we stop our precious little dealings and the fluctuations of our intellect? How long did time stand still?

Robert Creeley once wrote a poem about the caves of Lascaux in the South of France.  He wrote that once upon a time, a prehistoric man got his mojo working then painted all of those images of deer and bison and vulvas ("the first instances of the sacred feminine").  He painted them in longing or in memory and they are unmistakably what they are.

So I've been thinking about that.  The very first artists got their mojos working and created art on the walls of caves...  Remember The English Patient--the drawings in caves in the middle of the desert of people happily swimming...?  And Katherine's last words:  we die...  and fruits we have swallowed...  bodies we have tasted...  die with us.  Except in art.  In art, things, tastes, bodies, loves remain.  Maybe this is why I am a writer.  I am trying to preserve the things I love.  I am trying to re-experience them.  I am trying like Rilke to say what it is I call 'orange.'

I wish you were here with me.  It is the most beautiful time of year in the country.  The essences of the earth float into the air and trail through the open windows.  The wind in the trees is heavenly music.  Swaying, swishing, rolling in and out like the tides of the ocean...the sea...of love, which has taken up residency in my heart and head.  I recently told Iris that I am stupid with love.  This young woman is conducted by love, ruled by love, powerless in her own enchanting.  In her enchanting she has enchanted herself, the spell bound by golden threads...  I am as caught in the web as you are.  Maybe some god is in love with us, as M. suggested.  Maybe we amuse him or her.  Ondaatje would say Venus rules our heads.

As opposed to some other god, like Mars for example, the god of war.  Between the two I will always choose Venus, I will never write a war epic.  I leave that to the Homers and Tolstoys of the world.  I leave that to the men whose thinking faculties are so severed from their feelings, as Jung says, that they can make war on other human beings...  I think part of my desire in writing this book, in creating a relationship with you, is to re-assert the feeling capacity into our natures, so to counter the overdeveloped thinking capacity.  Ironically, I must do this by thinking, but my emotions and my intuition play a large part in my thinking.  I have a gift for intuition not only because I'm a woman, but because I'm an artist.  Sometimes I see so deeply into people that it makes them uncomfortable...  What do you see?  I wonder.  I think you have this gift too.

It was very enjoyable writing the love scene.  It was also difficult because I am normally so modest when it comes to talking about love.  It was enjoyable because I was able to imagine it so completely.  It was well-written, you conceded to me as your heart was breaking.  Ah...  I feel now what you felt then.  I don't want to feel that sinking feeling; given the choice I would rather be in love.  I choose to be in love.

There.  I put the power back in my hands and not in the hands of some whimsical god.  Conrad, do I hear you clapping?  Do I see you fervently nodding your head?  You always believed that the people have the power.  They have power over their own lives through the choices they make and the reality they live.  You never believed in fate or coincidence.  I once argued with you about the existence of coincidence and you firmly stood your ground.  Nothing is a coincidence.  Nothing is random.  Everything happens for a reason...  you said.  

What is the reason for what is happening to us now, Henry?  Is it only because I want it?  Or Is it only because of the beautiful weather?  Is it only the earth's mojo working overtime to create?  Or the earth transferring her creative energy into us?  Or is it the fear of death causing us to try to preserve what we love, to annotate and archive it, label and describe it? 

In your wildest dreams what is happening? 

Lascaux Cave (Eshleman's Juniper Fuse)

Joe Brainard

Let's make something abstract like Anselm's poem. But I can't do it, you will have to do it for me. For I am stuck in literality. Yes, let's make something so abstract everyone will think they're reading John Ashbery... Everyone will hate us because they don't understand it. What the fuck? And the trees continue shimmying in the shimmying wind.

The wind, my friend, plays the tops of those limbs and all around the smell of lilacs. It is a purple smell, or pure white like a fresh screen waiting for me to write on it. I must have read something I liked, for I am writing. This is how I write.

Now a story. Shall I tell you a story about yourself? You used to work in a bakery, the confectioner's boy, which you hated, and you hated the early morning hours and the tedium and plebium, no not the plebium. You love/d the plebium, it's the government you can't stand. I once read that a government like ours would never happen in France because they would overthrow the fuckers. They would rise up and take it back.

Back to the story. Your eyes they are the same as mine. Full of blue oceans. You have the whole of the Atlantic in you and are you you? Well, no, now you're one of my friends grueling away in a bakery. And I want to save you from that hell, but I can't because they give you cigarette breaks and minimum wage and play Bob Dylan all the live long day. In short, you've grown accustomed to it and wouldn't have it any other way.

But in the magazine (you were on the cover) you were talking about what it's like to be an action star, do breakdance moves with a gun, and this isn't very abstract is it? Honey, petals fly from the tip of your stem. You said, and I thought this was funny, are you fucking serious? Is that a serious question? Because the interviewer asked you if you ever wanted to join the circus. But no, you are afraid of the circus and run from the taxman in your dreams. (This lady doesn't miss a trick).

Is the story over? No, I haven't told you the meat of it, which is that you love to cook. You make Indian curried onions over rice and sometimes Mexican, though you're not very good at it. If you didn't cook you wouldn't be human... Who are you now? You are full of blue seas, that's all you need to know. Otherwise you'd get jealous because you always wondered what it would be like to be an actor. Actually, not really. I made that up for fuck's sake. And composed myself of sailor's speech.

Ah Henry, the places you'll go! If I can just put you there as if you were. A state park in Hawaii? The middle of the Texas desert with the spirit of the dead Robert Creeley and art of Donald Judd? A fresh lemon-scented bathtub? Yes, a tub, and I will read erotica to you as you did for me lakeside Pennsylvania. Or would you rather hear about the contexualization of the ramifications of the mass exodus of bees? Do I hear you laughing? Toss a wink to the ladle lady of the East.

Love,

M.

Absence can only exist as a consequence.  He is absent, yet he exists.  He exists in another state and he exists in my mind and heart.  What will happen in his death?  In his death he will still exist somewhere. He will exist in these pages.  He will exist in his archive.  He will exist for me in memories and letters and postcards I have inserted as bookmarks into my books.  He will exist in dreams.  I fear his death because I have become so reliant.  I rely on him for life stuff, life guidance.  I rely on him to bolster my courage.  There will come a day when I will have to turn inside, supply myself with what he gives me.

Uploaded on January 21, 2008
by fotosilenziose

Uploaded on May 16, 2006
by mariekje_

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My writer, I call him.  I know he isn’t mine.  I know he belongs to someone else.  Or does he?  In one of his novels he talks about ownership.  How there should be no ownership, no nations, no wedding rings.  I talked to Henry about some of this last night.

‘Why aren’t you reading Oedipus Rex instead of talking to me,’ he demanded in his I’m-a-professor-listen-to-me voice.

‘Because I needed to hear your voice, wanted reassurance, wanted you to confirm that you would really come home to me, if you could.’

‘Why did you need reassurance?’

‘I’ve been feeling isolated and wonder why I’m all alone in the middle of nowhere, why did I choose this place?’

‘You’ve been living in the Poconos a long time, for most of your life, right?’

‘No.  I’ve lived in Ann Arbor most of my life.’

‘So why did you choose the Poconos?’

‘Ann Arbor has gotten too expensive, uber-corporate as one of my friends put it.  And I needed more space.  Now I have more space than I know what to do with…  I had a dream a few nights ago that I tried to kill myself by being consumed by a body of water.  Ever since that dream I’ve felt uneasy.’

‘Did you tell anyone about this?’

‘I told Valerie and she said she thinks I give too much credence to dreams.’

‘Marguerite, I need you.  And I love you.  Do you understand?  Can you feel the love I have for you?’

‘No.  I need you to say it again.’

‘Marguerite, I love you.  I love you.’

‘I love you too.  Don’t worry, everything’s going to be OK.  Now close those big beautiful blue eyes.’

‘That’s my line!  You close your big beautiful blue eyes and get some rest.’

‘OK, Sweetheart.  Goodnight.’

            ‘Goodnight.’