pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SHORT, BRUTISH, AND DIRTY (No. 331 � 27 April 2006) Short, brutish, and dirty. Is that all life is? Here I sit in my studio at 11:48 p.m. on a Thursday night. It rained all day (again) and my grass is very wet and suddenly very very high. My drive home was a mass of foggy undifferentiated shapes that no more than suggest a sustainable world and the pomo interpretation of Chekhov that I just witnessed squashed flat any possibility of a sustainable world in which anything besides our employment of desperate sex to fill the void fails to remove us from the reality of our pathetic immobilized existence. My favorite experimental theater staged this adaptation of Chekov�s Two Sisters (On Ice), which they describe as �a passionate look at desire and disenchantment set in an Edward Gorey-like landscape with a Hawaiian soundtrack.� The male cast alternated between stiff brown uniforms and revealing tighty-whities and one of the sisters masturbated whenever the subject of work came up� I looooong to work. Oh I really looooong for work she moaned. How could one possibly rise in standing ovation to a Chekhov play? And yet sex, in all its emptiness, does still offer momentary transcendence. Because I have abandoned the Atkins diet until my (triumphant?) return from New York City (although I do still plan to stuff soft tuna packages into my luggage so I won�t stray too far), I am drinking my favorite beer (red seal ale, which is strictly off limits on Atkins) and smoking the Dunhills that I picked up on my way home from the play. In other words, I am exhibiting one of the many reasons why Pottergrrrl cannot abide me as I wax cynical into my keyboard and stare at my cello, four guitars, and an ambitious twenty-four-volume set of the New International Illustrated Encyclopedia of Art, at all of this stuff that occasionally makes my struggle with existence seem momentarily meaningful. The Life of James McNeill Whistler sits beside me on a shelf. As do Vita Sackville-West�s letters to Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir�s biography, Camille Paglia�s Sexual Personae, Mark Mathabane�s Kaffir Boy, Kafka�s Trial and, because I live in the violent southland, Larry Brown�s Fay and Dorothy Allison�s Bastard out of Carolina. Plato�s Parable of the Cave asks me to consider whether or not I am turning to look at the light at the opening of my cave and Warren�s Symbolism of Subordination reminds me that I have not chafed against black leather as a woman scratches my back and moans with pleasure in entirely too long. My paperback copy of Kierkegaard�s Works of Love, his nonpseudonymous picture of his Christian faith, has been overtaken by the solid blue canvas of Sartre�s paperback Existentialism and Human Emotions. Sartre tied Kierkegaard to my easel some years ago and continues to lash him as I cogitate, demand that S�ren face the implications of personal action in a universe with no purpose, but never the twain shall meet. Meanwhile, Daniel Chirot is bursting at the seams to explain in professorial terms How Societies Change as Jane Wagner shouts that reality is �nothing more than a collective hunch,� people. My worn copy of the Cherokee sacred calendar competes for space with Ken Wilbur�s Brief History of Everything as Carolyn Forch�s Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness and Ernest Hemingway�s promised sneer that The Sun Also Rises (a title, that, although the writer ultimately chose to end his life, nevertheless suggests hope) and shock and awe: america�s war on words offer cross-continental evidence that bloody clashes leave us with bloated defense budgets and the testosterone itch to use our weapons to dominate and destroy even as we suffer from near-global and decidedly immobilizing post-traumatic stress disorders. The dada exhibit in Washington DC ends in two weeks and I have very little chance of considering the artists� interpretations of a culture-destroying world ravaged by war given my looming trip, but my favorite fur-lined cup must be there. I remind myself that this is an exhausted image now though�one I used once in a poem as a symbol of a time and a place in which artists still had enough faith to be outraged by the fact that humanity will, when left to our own devices, inevitably sprout short brutish hairs on our fine bone china, these articles of our superficial culture, and howl like the women and men who run with the wolves that we really are�people who will, given the chance, pick each other�s bones and feeble attempts at meaning clean (or at least satirize them wickedly well). And there�s Foucault, iconoclastically exploring why we as a species feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, why this lonely jaded demiurgic poet who felt such deep connection with pottergrrrl will devote entry after entry to this exploration after tossing in my sheets alone all night. My conversation with Tree confirmed a reality. Pottergrrrl was raised Seventh Day Adventist by a mother who controls every morsel of food that enters her house with dogged intent. Nothing that is deemed unhealthy ever passes through those lips and she, like Pottergrrrl, is the very poster child of behavioral modification as a ticket to health. Meanwhile, I can go weeks and weeks living healthily while tracking every morsel of food that passes through my mouth and every muscle group that I exercise on a daily basis, but can�t figure out how to sustain this disciplined approach forever�maybe because I can�t see down the road to some golden era of health and believe in my golden-girl powers to reach that mythical shore, can�t believe in myself and my world long enough to stop killing myself. (And maybe I recognize that I can deny myself for my whole life, and still end up like the triathlete Tree, condemned to cancer in her early forties. Or, as my shrink would say, I have not yet emerged from a place of sorrow in which the bad-for-me southern food that my grandmother fed me and the alcohol that numbs me and the cigarettes that momentarily calm me still comfort me when nothing else can. But I can remind myself of how far I�ve emerged from my cave, forgive my failures when they occur, and just keep moving forward with intent. It�s my macaroni dilemma. And there�s Sartre again, insisting, like Pottergrrrl, that I face the fact that I am personally responsible for what I am and what I do. There are no values external to me. I choose my values and make myself. Period. That is my struggle�to figure out how to choose to be a different person and believe that the odds might work in my favor because of my efforts (even though they have not done that with health-conscious Tree), hope that my actions actually do result in my living a longer and healthier chemical-free life. And the truth is, I recognize that living with someone like Pottergrrl would provide the structure I need to sustain myself, even if it drove me crazy and crushed my ego further. But that�s codependent, isn�t it? Meanwhile I am trying to figure out what to do with my produce. In my refrigerator are two plastic tubs of organic broccoli florets, half a plastic tub of organic mixed greens mixed with organic herbs (which I will enjoy for lunch tomorrow with a packet of tuna fish and a mix of balsamic vinegar, good olive oil, and a little champagne vinegar), a bag of Brussels sprouts (which I undoubtedly purchased because Pottergrrrl loves them and which I hope will still be salvageable by the time I return home on Wednesday), an unopened packet of good goat cheese (which I should probably freeze), a smathering of cilantro (which one either loves or hates, and I love it), and some small fading grape tomatoes. A good lunch, but that�s probably more broccoli than I can eat in one day, even if I do cook it in good sesame oil and plenty of garlic and have it with tempeh for dinner tomorrow night. � And now it�s morning and the sun is finally out, so my plans for the day are to head over to campus and sign my performance review (because my boss just called to say it is waiting for me), work out, get a haircut, cut my grass, transplant some happy flowering plants that are in one of my raised beds out back to a new bed I�m making in the front�one that will hide the ugly metal telephone tower that juts out of my yard. Then I�ll wash clothes and pack. Various experts say that the possibility of frost is over for this season. I started fragile plants from seeds and will plant as few of them today and the remainder of them in earnest when I return from the city. I�m glad I�ll get to see my boss again before she leaves on Wednesday. She�s also fragile, two years away from retirement and recently forced out of an associate dean position for stupid, short-sighted reasons. And now she has accepted a desperate administrative assistant position just so she can put in her final two years and retire with benefits. It�s a bitter pill to swallow, but we have liked each other from the start and now can be friends without the careful distance we maintained because she was my supervisor. She invited me to the play last night and introduced me to her group of close friends (which I appreciate more than I can say) and has invited me to join her reading group. I am hyperaware of the fact that she will have moved on by the time I return from my wanderings. Most of the offices in our building are sterile�white-washed walls with little personal effects, little cubes that practice the careful art of nonpartisianship, practicality. My office, on the other hand, is all about personality: my colorful Pacific NW rocks fill an entire shelf above my desk and invite guests to hold them, connect with the earth. Picasso images on fabric hang on the wall and an earth-tone Mondrian-style modernist rug sits atop the ugly burgundy fluff they put on the floor. I park my electric blue beetle bug amongst the undifferentiated gray and white and black bumperstickerless SUVs in our parking deck hyperaware of the fact that my �Darwin Loves You" sticker draws daily ire from the many drivers who sport fish in their rear windows. And I cherish the handmade modernist furniture that my boss filled her office with, the Peruvian fabrics that decorated her walls and reminded us of the colorful world outside. Her departure is imminent so her bare walls shout warnings: Do not take a stand. Do not insist on quality. Go with the flow. Do not make the white men uncomfortable. Make them happy or they�ll force you out, deprive you of benefits and break the bank. Compromise. Bend grrrl ,bend. I piss on the people who shoved her out, but know that I must remain there till at least July 2007, when I am vested and entitled to free health insurance upon retirement and full access to all that retirement money I managed to sock away before the Ginger and I split and I was faced with solo mortgage payments. Right now that�s not my worry though. At the moment, I just need to eat some breakfast so I have enough energy for my workout. I�ll end with a poem: WILD SWANS 1:33 p.m. - 2006-4-28 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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