pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PINOT POETRY Sunday evening. Checked my email a little while ago and my SPAM informed me that Women Will Love Me and that Julie [7] says hi. I am eating locally made brie on crackers and drinking a nice glass of pinot noir because the lovely woman in the Whole Foods wine department snared me as I walked past with my creamer and cilantro. "Hi there," she said. "Would you like to hear about our pinot noirs?" Well, I thought, I would certainly like to look at your dimples a while longer and my purchases are disgustingly alliterative, so sure, show me your wares. She described several pinots as I studied her gorgeous jawline, then I said, So tell me, which pinot—that doesn't cost a small fortune—has made you smile most recently? She grinned in response to my question, then handed me a bottle from Oregon that I have just now opened and which is quite good. Plus I get to imagine her dimples deepening when she discovered the taste • I passed the Joy Delight Commandment King Church van on my way down the mountain yesterday and really wanted to look through those tinted windows to see if the bus was filled with shiny happy people (who probably wouldn't get that reference Their name reminded me of the (shiver) Baptist camp where I spent too many summers: Look Up Lodge in Traveler's Rest, South Carolina. What a place. The mountains were beautiful, but they confiscated my Neil Young cassettes (the devil's music) and I still want them back. They also made us to memorize Bible verses and recite them before getting in line for meals and, in my book, if you fuck with someone's food, then it's brainwashing—although, in all truthfulness, I did seem to be the only surly camper there who resented reading gawd's holy word as the beautiful lake beckoned. I enjoyed canoeing there, too—when the counselors left me alone. Usually, though, they decided that I spent too much time by myself and so would call me in off the lake and make me join this dumb game that involved teams pushing a giant ball up and down a field. Idleness is the devil's workshop, I reckon, so canoeing instead of playing with big balls must have put my soul at risk of eternal damnation. Or something. (And just an aside, but wouldn't you think that someone who affixes the bumpersticker These Colors Don't Run to his car would replace the thing when the flag fades nearly to white?) • Pottergrrl gave me a copy of her spiritual autobiography yesterday and I am really looking forward to reading it. She mentioned last week that Women Who Run with Wolves changed her life and I meant to talk with her about Clarissa Pinkola Estés this weekend, but we never got around to that. My shrink gave me this author's Warming the Stone Child cassette long ago. It's a collection of myths for women who grew up without being mothered. I pick the thing up sometimes and consider it, but have never been able to bear the thought of listening to it (just as I have never been able to listen to the cassette that my sister made of my father singing lullabies to her twins, which she gave me after he died). I suspect both would make me sob. Anyway, Pottergrrl grew up attending a Seventh Day Adventist church—The Cult is what she calls it—and first encountered television and films as an adult. She can't watch either though because the violence is too real and it makes her lose her faith in the goodness of people. She wrote this last week:
You aren't afraid to go anywhere, are you? I just managed to make it through [my blog entry] "Situational Ethics." You grapple with things I can't even get close to without nearly dropping off some inner edge. The first time I heard about snuff stuff, I threw up, and couldn't sleep for days without waking up screaming. How can you ponder these things, and then go about your daily routine? ... I wish I had not read that entry! Please remind me again that the vast majority people are not out to damage other people. Okay. The vast majority of people are not out to damage other people, Pottergrrl, and, when you think about it, we mostly find a way to love extravagantly despite it all. (Also, there's not a shred of evidence to suggest that an actual snuff film was ever made.) I wrote my disturbing story The Color of Bruises and created my multilayered torture painting/collage that the Ginger dubbed The Angry Painting in an effort to get images of that murder out of my head. But I wouldn't say that I ponder atrocities and then just go on about my normal routine We carry all that shit around with us I reckon, just as my body carries around every punch my father delivered and all the terror I felt as a child and I stay tense and ready to bolt even now when I'm not paying attention But my body also carries around healing caresses, the comfort I feel falling asleep after a lover kisses my eyelashes, an inner snapshot of my little brother holding out his tiny grubby hand with a balled up piece of bread in it and saying I Made You a Cinnamon Toast Ball, Bird, and so many other kindnesses and love and passion and unsolicited generosity, so there is some balance, if we're fortunate. I don't think Pottergrrl could read Coetzee's Waiting For The Barbarians, but his main character asks similar questions. One of Pottergrrl's patients told her horrible stories of abuse last week—the father tried to drown his daughter whenever she peed in her bed—and these stories made her lose faith in our goodness too. Would send Vassar Miller's sonnet Without Ceremony to myself, but am not sure it would comfort her. The final stanza of Frank O'Hara's Steps comforts me too: oh god it's wonderful but I believe I will send her In The Absence by Kathleen Lake, Morning Poem and Poppies by Mary Oliver, and Work Song. Part 2, A Vision: The Wisdom to Survive by Wendell Berry, which seems like a very Pottergrrl kind of poem. Tree and I talked about our long-ago breakup yesterday morning. She told me she knows that she was a bad partner to me back then, but that it really hurt her that I barely corresponded with her after the Ginger and I got together. And I told her that I understood that medical school—especially a top-five medical school—did not exactly leave much room for a healthy relationship and understand now, as I did then, that it required all of her attention and focus. I also told her that the Ginger was uncomfortable around her—in part because she felt guilty about her role in breaking us up—and that I felt tremendous guilt about that, too, and that both of these things made me keep my distance. Also that I'm glad we have reconnected. • Picked up a parenting magazine in the mountains too. Everything is still up in the air around my possible guardianship of CeeCee and I know my sister and her vacillations too well to assume anything. Still, I pare down my studio in the next few weeks and move some items in there into my study. The latest word is that CeeCee will arrive after around June 1, so I will register her at the year-round school just in case. I still don't know what to wish for. 2:11 p.m. - 2005-05-02 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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