There was a time when I almost never discussed anything until I'd made up my mind how I felt about it, because I wanted my answers and my decisions to be my own, uninfluenced by others. I didn't ask questions because I felt like if I didn't answer them for myself then the answers didn't count. And now I'll ask anything, I'm shameless, my curiosity wins first. The problem is that I can't boil it down to one question, because for example I have a hundred questions for you, and you're just one person, and now you want me to ask one question. Ask what? Under the circumstances my first thought turns to human nature and then because I'm me I start with Who. Who are we supposed to be kind to: the people who earn it or the people who need it? What is the nature of that kindness; do we give people what they want or what we think they want, what they should want? Where are the scales that weigh our deeds, and are we weighed according to what we did or what we could have done; what could I have done for you that I did not do, what does that do to my scale in the end? When is the end? If I knew when I was dying, surely life would be much easier for a pointy-headed planner like me. Why, then, does the absence of that knowledge as well as the knowledge itself seem to bring so many people unhappiness; why can't we skip the question of when and live for the day as if it were the last even if it's not? Kiss me now before time runs out. How would I like to be kissed? Like it's the first time. Like you mean it. I'm actually a little troubled that I don't have a better question, a more meaningful one. If given wishes I would wish for more, but I don't know the same solution for questions. Why can't I have more? Maybe that is what I would ask. Except sometimes I know that the answer would be because I don't deserve it. What one question could I ask that would give me an answer that would satisfy me? Ah, there it is.
Author: tuckova
Interests: Alfons Mucha, Archibald Leach, big words, Bob Hicok, Brian Eno, Cat Power, Charles Bukowski, Charlotte Masaryk, cheese, clarity, dark chocolate, David Byrne, David Foster Wallace, Dorothy Parker, Douglas Adams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, Frank O'Hara, Fred Rogers, garlic, Gaudi, Gertrude Stein, ginger, Gustav Klimt, Iva Pekarkova, Jane Austen, Jaromir Nohavica, Jeanette Winterson, Josef Skvorecky, Joseph Campbell, Joss Whedon, Just a Minute, Kate Bush, Kurt Vonnegut, laughing until it hurts, Laurie Anderson, Leonard Cohen, little kids singing, Lloyd Alexander, mandarin oranges, making lists, Margaret Atwood, Miss Manners, New Yorker, Paul Simon, performance, P.G. Wodehouse, poetry, Rebecca Solnit, Rob Brezsny, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Creeley, salt, Salvador Dali, secrets, silence, Star Trek, Stephen Dunn, Talking Heads, Terry Gilliam, things that stain, This American Life, Tom Waits, T.S. Eliot, vegetable juice, veiled cultural references, vinegar, water, wine, W.H. Auden
legerdemain
When you were little you sucked your thumb at night, the sweet wrinkled fruit of it. It was your talisman, an everlasting gobstopper, the one thing that made it better. Nothing could entice you to give it up, not reason, bribery, punishment. The bitter liquid painted on at night took hours to get through. Picture yourself with bloodshot eyes in the dark, swallowing acetone and formaldehyde, desperate to get past the nausea to the comfort. This is how you learned to be stubborn. The shape of your mouth deformed, your hillbilly teeth that eventually had to be pulled in with braces that tore blisters into your cheeks and still there was nothing that stopped you crying as well as your thumb fit in your mouth, thumbprint pressed against the roof, tongue to nailbed, and finally sleep.
You sucked it so hard that it melted down into nothing. It wasn't immediate; it was smaller and less comfort and smaller and less comfort and smaller still and one day you woke and you had no thumbs left. Gone. And you tried to talk about it, about how your thumb was gone, but your tongue was searching inside your mouth for what it lost and it stuck to your palate and everyone said you were sulking so you were. How can you complain about what you have lost when everyone was trying to get you to let it go anyway? You can't. Your mourning is ridiculous so you make it a secret, make a curtain of hair and cry behind it and learn swallow your tears, more bitter medicine.
Of course you didn't suffer forever; you're not suffering now. At some point you learned to enjoy your fingers and all the things you can touch when your hand isn't covering your mouth. Velvet, polished wood, the soft fur of some animals. The spines of books and people. You learned words like prestidigitation and dealt cards in a club where, as someone said, what we risk reveals what we value. You have nothing to lose anymore and so mostly you win.
Sometimes you bite your fingers, not the nails but the skin around, until they bleed. Sometimes you eat like you're afraid someone will take your plate away even though you don't understand words like hungry and full. Sometimes you smoke cigarette after cigarette and for a moment it's like the red glow in the dark is going to get you where you want to go, an airplane light across the sky of your need, but this never comes true.
Most of the time you are fine, mostly you don't think about it, you are a grown up now, for goodness sake. What are thumbs for, really, to a person who has so much. Some people have lost fingers, all of them; some people have lost hands, arms. You look at the palm of your hand, the life line's elegance. Your hands are strong; your fingers are electric. Also you can break out of handcuffs without even blinking. What's the opposite of sour grapes? You have eaten the sweet deliciousness of a life made simple by loss.
And then one day someone says that you can grow your thumbs back. That you've always been able to; that it's not too late to try. Aha and what now? Yes, now what.
between
Work and free time, the salt of labor and the honey of a morning in bed. This and that, these and those. Wax and wane, pleasure and pain, responsibility and blame, ball and chain. Too much and not enough, feast or famine, crone or gamine. Good and evil. Your needs and mine. It can be about one or the other, a choice, two lovers. Or it can be about what's fair, about balance, correlation, equality. Oh, and secrets. The other kind of confidence, the kind you share in. Or a rock and a hard place. Scylla and Charybdis. The devil and the deep blue sea. Or those deep blue eyes. You and me (not I). Caught. Squeezed. The place that separates, the place that connects, the distance, the transitory life. The difference or the bridge.
***
Huh, I started that on a bus at some point, found it in my phone, and can't seem to make it go anywhere further, so that's that then.
I get up and I work, I do paid work if I have any or I try to pretend like I'm working at least. I have my days that are just me, wandering from room to room and making sure the heat is turned down in the empty rooms so that the focus can be on my room, my cozy little den, and I feel that I am writing my own quiet story on my heart. Other days I have coffee, lunch, tea, dinner, each with a different person, and when I go to bed at night my skin is thinner than parchment and I wonder what I am doing but then like any palimpsest I start again. What stories shall we tell ourselves today? I've been thinking about Scherezade lately.
I got locked out of two online accounts recently because I couldn't remember the answers to the security questions. Questions I am prepared to answer promptly: Which eye I would rather have a patch on. Whether I would rather live in a tree trunk or in the branches. My least favorite vegetable. How I will die. Apparently the name of my pet is a stumper for me though, so whoops.
Sometimes I feel absolutely overflowing with news, with things I want to say, stories I want to tell you, so many more than a thousand. And sometimes I don't. Most of the times I hover where I am today, in the middle.
Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out, by Richard Siken
Every morning the maple leaves.
Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts
from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big
and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out
You will be alone always and then you will die.
So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog
of non-definitive acts,
something other than the desperation.
Dear So-and-So, I'm sorry I couldn't come to your party.
Dear So-and-So, I'm sorry I came to your party
and seduced you
and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.
Your want a better story. Who wouldn't?
A forest, then. Beautiful trees. And a lady singing.
Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on.
What a sweet lady. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon.
Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly
flames everywhere.
I can tell already you think I'm the dragon,
that would be so like me, but I'm not. I'm not the dragon.
I'm not the princess either.
Who am I? I'm just a writer. I write things down.
I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure,
I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow
glass, but that comes later.
And the part where I push you
flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks,
shut up
I'm getting to it.
For a while I thought I was the dragon.
I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was
the princess,
cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle,
young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with
confidence
but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess,
while I'm out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire,
and getting stabbed to death.
Okay, so I'm the dragon. Big deal.
You still get to be the hero.
You get the magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights!
What more do you want?
I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you're
really there.
Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live?
Let me do it right for once,
for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes,
you know the story, simply heaven.
Inside your head you hear a phone ringing
and when you open your eyes
only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer.
Inside your head the sound of glass,
a car crash sound as the trucks roll over and explode in slow motion.
Hello darling, sorry about that.
Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we
lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell
and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.
Especially that, but I should have known.
You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together
to make a creature that will do what I say
or love me back.
I'm not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are not
feeding yourself to a bad man
against a black sky prickled with small lights.
I take it back.
The wooden halls likes caskets. These terms from the lower depths.
I take them back.
Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.
Crossed out.
Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something
underneath the floorboards.
Crossed out. And here is the tabernacle
reconstructed.
Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all
forgiven,
even though we didn't deserve it.
Inside your head you hear
a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you're washing up
in a stranger's bathroom,
standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away
from the dirtiest thing you know.
All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly
darkness,
suddenly only darkness.
In the living room, in the broken yard,
in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport
bathroom's gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of
unnatural light,
my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away.
And the airplane, the window seat over the wing with a view
of the wing and a little foil bag of peanuts.
I arrived in the city and you met me at the station,
smiling in a way
that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade,
up the stairs of the building
to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things,
I looked out the window and said
This doesn't look that much different from home,
because it didn't,
but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights.
We walked through the house to the elevated train.
All these buildings, all that glass and the shiny beautiful
mechanical wind.
We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too,
smiling and crying in a way that made me
even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I
just couldn't say it out loud.
Actually, you said Love, for you,
is larger than the usual romantic love. It's like a religion. It's
terrifying. No one
will ever want to sleep with you.
Okay, if you're so great, you do it—
here's the pencil, make it work . . .
If the window is on your right, you are in your own bed. If the window
is over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathing
river water.
Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it
Jerusalem.
We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not
what we sought, so do it over, give me another version,
a different room, another hallway, the kitchen painted over
and over,
another bowl of soup.
The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell.
Unfortunately, we don't have that kind of time.
Forget the dragon,
leave the gun on the table, this has nothing to do with happiness.
Let's jump ahead to the moment of epiphany,
in gold light, as the camera pans to where
the action is,
lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame, close enough to see
the blue rings of my eyes as I say
something ugly.
I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way,
and I don't want to be the kind that says the wrong way.
But it doesn't work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats.
There were some nice parts, sure,
all lemondrop and mellonball, laughing in silk pajamas
and the grains of sugar
on the toast, love love or whatever, take a number. I'm sorry
it's such a lousy story.
Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently
we have had our difficulties and there are many things
I want to ask you.
I tried that one time, high school, second lunch, and then again,
years later, in the chlorinated pool.
I am still talking to you about help. I still do not have
these luxuries.
I have told you where I'm coming from, so put it together.
We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor . . .
When I say this, it should mean laughter,
not poison
.
I want more applesauce. I want more seats reserved for heroes.
Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you.
Quit milling around the yard and come inside.
how do you like what you have
One reason I was unwilling to believe that change is possible is that if I DO believe that change is possible, then I have to accept that the reason it doesn't happen is because people don't want to change. In some ways it was easier to believe in a lack of possibility than a lack of desire. And yet my view has changed (because change is possible, because I wanted to change).
There's a child crying in a room somewhere
her weeping eyes are pressed against her knees
and the tears are filling up her socks
In a dream I am dating a crocodile and I am naturally very afraid of getting eaten but also I like that big smile so much. I hold the crocodile's mouth between my finger and thumb because I heard that was sufficient defense, and one night at my request it lays its full weight on top of me and I cannot tell you how safe that felt, not like being crushed at all but like being finally fully held.
I love 21st century television the same way that I love poetry. Yes some of it is bad, some of it is epic only in terms of how terrible it is, but sometimes there's a phrase, a moment, a line break or a gesture that reaches out and grabs my heart with how perfect it is.
When you look at someone
through rose-colored glasses
all the red flags just look like
flags
Standing in Palazzo something or another and telling my son and his girlfriend the story of Psyche. Don't think that didn't have layers. That went all the way through, every one of them, the girl and the god and the goddess, all three of them, me. Pierced me like an arrow, the burn scars on the arm, the disappointment, the irritation, the need for sleep, and not just because I need to maintain my mythic allure.
Sometimes I think that it is awesome that I care so much less about appearances in general and my appearance in particular than I used to. "How hideous am I?" has not left my lexicon but it is exists for me now more as a beautiful quote than an actual deep pain. And other times, patting various creams into my various deepening wrinkles, I think: I am so so so so vain.
“Dear Professor James, I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today.”
The Layers, by Stanley Kunitz
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
Florence
It's cobblestones and crowds, narrow alleyways and giant plates, it's cat herding and the root of familiar. It's an art, like everything else; it's the art; it's art.
It's complex mythology, explanations and origin stories. Passions, betrayals, abandonments. The synesthesia of allegory. The conviction that a story that has been told endlessly can be told again, one more time with feeling.
It's one announcement after another, the messenger you don't shoot to the left, glittering at times with news, the receiver to the right in various states of shock and dress, once holding her finger at the page in the book she was reading, as if she might presently return to it, as if her life hadn't completely changed.
It's babies of varying largeness and golden-pinkness and hideousness, thighs rippled with fat, their fingers making rabbit ears against a world that has not yet mastered light and shadow or much of a sense of humor.
It's zombies washed with tears, bleeding into cups, tortured and medically impossible, pulled down repeatedly to fall into the arms of friends who could not save but believe themselves saved, the legal collection of evidence, the takedown.
It's the one in almost every scene, the one who looks back at you instead of at the action, locks eyes across time. Says "I did this." Says "I paid for this." Says "Please get me out of here."
double you eye double el oh double you
We start with the first image, which is of shimmering green coins reflected on the water's rippling surface. I suppose it needn't be near water but when I close my eyes this is the first thing I picture, the fluttering reflection of greens and yellows, the body leaning over the water, weeping I presume since that's often part of the job description. Weep for me, or for Nina Simone. All of us. What else do I know? In Japan there are always ghosts nearby, and once there was a soldier who fell in love and abandoned everything. Tender green love. In modern mythology it hides monstrous monthly secrets and beats people who get too close, though this is not really canon for the species. Elongated leaves which I guess could mean either it takes a long time to leave or to be left, if it meant something other than what it does. Oh yeah I'm looking stuff up, you think I carry this around with me? It is described as slender although I'm looking at a picture here and that's not the word I'd use, I mean it's no oak but it's not a birch either, more like the gnarled hands of an old woman than a bunch of teenage eyes, is one thing. Pliant, it says here, which is certainly true sometimes. When it's healthy it's agreeable up to a point, which is the point of the roots tearing and then it's a hard no, a refusal to yield. I like that it is both flexible and tough, tender and tenacious. Like, it's crying all the time sure but also you can't easily bring it down. The flowers are surprisingly uninteresting, it is simply what it is, no seasonal surprise of ginkgo stench or linden delight. I'd like to say something here about shoots that hasn't been said before but I can't think of what. In the olden days you could keep your hands busy on mindless tasks, weaving over and under until something useful emerged, a basket to carry things in, a fence to keep things out, a beautiful functional object. The bark cures a bite, or most basic pain I guess, including possibly the one you're in right now, though sadly not mine. Google wants to remind me that there's also an 80s movie of course there is where would I be without the 80s. Okay we're done.
elpis
Pandora's box came up three times yesterday in completely different contexts and originally it was my thought to write about that, but it's actually a shitty myth so I don't know. The story I was planning to tell you is a story about a box, and for starters Pandora's box is not a box, it's a jar. Well the box in my story isn't such a fancy thing, I mean it's not a be-jeweled Waterhouse wonder, it's probably closer to a really nice box that you got a Christmas present in one year and then you re-use the box every year because waste not want not. Small tears of the original bright holiday paper are missing where the lid was taped closed and then the tape removed, but it's still perfectly serviceable. Yeah, that box. But I could switch that box out for a jar, sure, I'm not picky, box, jar, bottle, whatever, and I like staying true to the story even when the story isn't true. And the point of this story is not the box itself, but the lid. And whether it's a lid on a box or a jar doesn't matter: the point is, the lid is SUPPOSED to stay on. Lift the lid and all manner of bad things come out.
This too, a recurring and weird element. If you don't want her to open the box, why put on a removable cover. If you don't want her to open the door, why give her the key. If you don't want me to talk about this, why ask.
So the lid. On the box or the jar. In both containers, what is inside is a vortex of pain, I would prefer the word maelstrom except it turns out it's not from Latin but Dutch and therefore no more awesomely meaningful than whirlwind. In any case, swirling and danger and destruction. I'm thinking a jar is better, more conducive to swirling type action, so that's fine, good, we're going to talk about Pandora.
Except Pandora is sort of a combination dingbat and jerk. Created for the purpose of being so, the gift of cruelty and deceit. And this is not the story I want to tell you. So I will tell you a different one.
I will tell you this story of a woman who has a pithos full of pathos, a turmoil of tears, a welter of memory she carries with her everywhere. She has to carry it because she has to, it's part of the story, it's not that she'll die without it but she will cease to be herself, so here it is, tucked under her arm, and there's a lid and what she really wants to do is let the curse of carrying it be the only curse on her. Like most people cursed to carry a burden she wants to give it a good hard look sometimes, take the lid off and really peer inside and find out what's so darned heavy after all, but most of the time she knows better. "What's in the jar?" they ask and she says "Oh, it's nothing really, long boring story" and they go back to talking about themselves or politics or television which is fine. "What's in the jar, though?" asks another. They are standing at the seashore in the middle of a different myth, and for a stupid moment it seems like a good idea. She sits at the water's edge, coaxes the lid off, shows the contents, the damage, the story more true than works and days, watches their feet kick up plumes of sand as they retreat forever. Too much. She catches a cupful of tears and tops off the jar, fixes the lid back in place, the ocean lapping at her feet as warm and salty as blood.
Some days it's all she can think about. Some days she doesn't think about it at all. Some days or even weeks are taken up with thinking about how unfair it is that she has to carry this stupid jar and be weighted by it if she is silent and defined by it if she opens it. Some days she thinks about how strong she is from carrying it, how a curse that must be carried is borne; she likes wordplay and that makes her smile. Some days she passes other people carrying their own boxes or jars, some bulkier than hers, some heavier, some unbelievably fragile.
Pandora's box is really just a dumb origin story: Men suffer because women can't keep a lid on it. The truth is that everybody's got a jar of some size or another, and that inside of this one, if you're paying attention, you can find hope. That was what I wanted to tell you.
costumer service skills
On Halloween we were all getting ready for the party, planning our costumes, hair, makeup, the works. I was getting a little nervous about mine, because even though I had an amazing dress, I was going to do a fancy makeup trick I had only tried once, and part of me felt like I should practice it and part of me knew there really wasn't that much time. I spent a bit of mental space on this, on what I would do if it didn't work, how bad it would be, how I would process it. And then I remembered that I didn't care how I looked, since I don't have to look at myself, and that in fact nobody else was going to particularly care how I looked. It's nice on Halloween to dress up, especially if you are hosting a Halloween party, but one of the best revelations of my adult life has been: nobody is actually looking at me all that hard. This feeling of my childhood and young adulthood, that people are looking at me and judging, that almost anything has anything to do with me, this epic solipsism, has largely faded, and ohhhh, what a relief.
And now, closing in on fifty, the evidence is that not only is nobody looking at me, but I am in fact invisible. Taxi drivers, restaurant workers, people in the doors of trams, whatever. In a few years I will rob a bank and nobody will have any idea what happened. Ha oh, I am telling this joke for the first time right now.
No but anyway. I mean: the realization that it is easier for me to live in the world when I can remember to focus on seeing rather than being seen is one of the best ones in my life. Not least because from time to time I forget it, and I get to stress out over the fact that my eye makeup went on crooked and then a little kid shows up at the door as a gecko with muscles and I get to learn my lesson all over again. Nobody really noticed, and I could have ruined my whole night feeling bad for not being as perfect as I wanted to be, instead of oohing and aahing over adorable gecko muscles and ferocious pirate hooks. And my dress was awesome.
tuckova 