"The work of preservation demands that the feelings playing in ones guts not be turned into action. Just watch their passing like cherry blossoms. - Maxine Hong Kingston
October 1
I spaced out on writing the page last week. I'm not sure why. Aaron says to center writing in your life and the page has done that for me, to a certain extent. But last week I just didn't get to it very often. And now it's a new month.
The other day I was getting on a bus. On this particular line the buses are new and there are only two single seats. I prefer the single seats but on these buses they are close together and I do jam my knee when I sit in them. The bus driver pulled up past me, and the three other people at the stop got on before me, and I could not get my seat. I was so angry. Sitting in the individual seats protects me from dealing with other folks not wanting to sit with me, so there is an emotional as well as a physical comfort issue. But, I was just so angry! I thought, so much for being an instrument of peace. None of these people had done anything wrong. The driver didn't pull up to a wrong spot. Everyone likes those seats. So, I sat there, trying to be mindful of my anger, trying to let it go. The bus remained fairly empty and I was more comfortable sitting in the seat that I ended up in than I would have been in the other seats. Sigh.
Even before 9/11 things were fraught. 9/11 just dialed it up a few hundred decibels. That was certainly true in terms of world politics and economy. And it is true in terms of my own personal process. My tendency is to feel as if my individual issues pale in the face of the larger world issues. If anyone else said that to me I would tell them that their issues are part of the fabric of it all. But somehow I don't remember that when I'm frustrated and tired. I have always put my feelings through a gauntlet of analysis. If I'm angry I weigh it relative to family history, hormones, social embeddedness. Sometimes I decide I am just simply angry. It makes my head spin though.
My dreams have been crazy. A few days ago I had a restaurant dream. One of the classics, in which I was being called upon to wait on a crowd of people but I was not familiar with the menu and it was all happening very quickly. Last night I kept waking up thinking the phrase--they bombed at the eighty ninth parallel. And I knew it was a bad thing. What was interesting is that I've heard that kind of phrase on the news and never really thought about it in any exacting way. But I woke up so many times with the phrase in my head that I began to think about it. Of course it refers to a line on a map and it may sound odd but I've just never had that so visually clear to me. And when I woke up I thought it was Saturday. I'm still feeling disoriented.
There is a mouse in my house. Last night I him running across the living room. This morning, when I went into the kitchen, there was some crazy noise in the stove. It might have been the mouse running around inside but I wasn't going to open the door to find out. The last time I saw a mouse and called the management company they put sticky traps all over. I dreaded finding a mouse on them. I never did. I just keep hoping that another apartment will become more interesting.
I don't know why, but I had actually come to believe that we might not bomb in Afghanistan. There seemed to be may voices saying go slow, and there seemed to be an awareness that Afghanistan was such a poor country that bombing would be ... unseemly. I spent yesterday afternoon at a teach in. There was an Afghan woman who talked about her country before the war with Russia. Her family had been part of a small but growing middle class. It was very moving. It was comforting to among thinking people, to the extent that I was. Of course, looking around me I wasn't sure. Sometimes a crowd is just a crowd. Still, it was better than CNN.
Mary Patrick wrote a lovely piece about a series of deaths in her life, her daughters question, "where do we go when we die? ", and Mary's own experience of those deaths. She also references the deaths of the people on 9/11. After reading it I thought about a time in my life, as I was becoming a teenager, when once a year, for four years, someone died. I know it shaped me in ways I may not understand. I clearly remember the disorientation of feeling my own grief and watching all the folks around me, none of whom knew any of my family members, going on with life. Even at the funerals, conversations about life ensued. It is a remarkable thing to contemplate. As I sit in my lovely apartment, at my computer,belly full of breakfast, somewhere someone starves, dies. As life ends, life begins and life ends. So how do we feel? How do we understand that process and still strive to contribute? An awareness of impermanence requires such trust. And then there is the anger. The anger that we can not have what we love forever in the form we have grown to love. It requires that we remember something that can not be articulated in words
Getting to school is kind of a pain. It's a two bus trip and shouldn't be that bad. I walk one block to the first bus, one more block from the first to the second bus,and I get of at the base of Lone Mountain. I thought the steps up that hill might be the worst part, but no. The trip can take up to an hour. By car it might be twenty minutes. Yesterday, I was almost there. I was on the second bus, making relatively good time. An older man got on the bus and yelled at the woman bus driver for not pulling up close enough to the curb. She took umbrage at his tone and said she wouldn't drive the bus until he got off. A stalemate ensued. I finally got off the bus and jumped in a cab. I think the bus driver had a responsibility to get a totally full bus of people to their destinations but part of me admired her for not taking any shit. Of course this old man couldn't have been more harmless and maybe she should could have just let it all go. And maybe she should have pulled up closer to the curb. All I could think about was how tender and emotional we all are.
Night before last I went to hear Ralph Nader and a group of local activists, including Tom Ammiano, Medea Benjamin and Michael Franti talk about the MUD. Of course they also talked about the war. It is very comforting to me to listen to intelligent people. A friend pointed out that it sounded like a one sided veiw. Well, yeah. Of course the other one sided view is available every where else.
October 15
A few years ago, in an attempt to understand things in the Middle East. I read From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas L. Friedman and The History of God by Karen Armstrong. From these specific books I got a sense of how the Middle East and Northern Africa were shaped by their resources and their lack of them. Both portray a world where survival is determined by a sense of entitlement. In other words, in the desert, there aren't than many resources. So, if someone takes your chicken, you better go get it back, and take his goat, and hurt him badly enough so that he doesn't EVER try to take anything of YOURS again. But that was all a very long time ago. And we have a lot more technology now. We can do things to expand resources. Why aren't we? It's such a complex situation. Most troubling is the way notions of God are used to establish entitlement. Of course our own president uses his notion of God to establish our entitlement. Ironic. Tragic. Too limited a view.
Yesterday's entry seemed a little oblique to me. It was one of those times when I got in the middle of writing something and didn't know what I was saying. I talked to Kara about it later. I was worried that I was saying that the Arab world had this war like history, as if the whole world doesn't. I was trying to describe a particular characteristic of way wars were begun and the extreme quality of them. Somehow as I was writing it didn't seem useful. But, It is something that I'm thinking about a lot these days.
I got to spend a truly luxurious amount of time with Kara yesterday. That was a comfort.
I'm often struck by how many of my choices in life have been to choose away from and not toward. I guess a more positive way to say that is that in ways I've have chosen toward the unknown at moments when the known was too miserable. So, people who make choices with sense of ability to accomplish, or attain, are mysterious to me. The simple question --what do you want can put me into a kind of paralysis. At the same time I'm enormously petulant and know when I'm not getting what I want. But, too often my choices are based on what I must do, or need to do, and not what I want to do. I'm not alone in this.
The fact that this is a public space is a bit disorienting. It's kind of like a flier on a kiosk, in a room with ten thousand kiosks. There are only a few people who are ever gonna walk past and read this. But it has effected the way that I think about the writing. At the same time, it is the little square that I ask myself to fill every day. It's my way of keeping myself thinking like a writer. It's just been so difficult to negotiate my sadness lately. So, my writing seems either highly rhetorical or totally mundane.
The mouse dominates my living room. I haven't seen it for a few days but I keep thinking I hear it. For some reason I don't worry about it the day, but in the evening I'm always jerking my head around thinking I see it.
October 19
Yesterday, I had a great conversation with Kristina in the morning. The kind of conversation that makes you feel less alone, mentally nourished, psychologically advanced, just feelin a bit better about it all, despite the fact that " it all "still exists. Later I went out to dinner with Deb, and then we went to hear Paul Auster talk about Charles Reznikoff, which was lovely. Auster made Reznikoff seem like a dear and charming fellow, and in doing that Auster seemed dear and charming. Then I got home, returned a call to Tom and had another one of those conversations. By the end of it all I was feeling so much better than I've been feeling and I marveled at the feeling. I mean conversation can be better than any anti depressant. And the reverse is also, obviously, true. Conversation can be the reason for needing antidepressants. But yesterday I got lucky.
Generally, I have trouble sleeping. I have trouble getting to sleep. I wake up at least once, occasionally as many five or six times during the night. If I've had a bad night I am tired in the morning, but I just don't feel like staying in bed. All day yesterday I felt like I wanted to go back to sleep. Of course, I was doing things like laundry, and cleaning the kitchen. Today I just decided to stay in bed as long as I wanted, even if I was in bed all day. I was up by 9:00.
There was a fellow on NPR this morning talking about grief. He talked about the early days of AIDS when people were dying one after another and no one could fully grieve any one death. he talked about people allowing themselves time, to do what ever they need to feel through all this.
The way I'm feeling lately is the way I felt during a four period of time when members of my family died, one a year. It just seemed like death would never stop.
"To make these uneasy arrivals alluring enough to encounter -- the way Dante makes you want to harrow hell -- is a compelling challenge I'm being given, dangerously." - Aaron Shurin
Heard Aimee Bender last night. Very cool. One thing I hear writers say again and again is that they committed to a time every day in which they were going to write. I remember a friend told me once that she begins each day by writing in a wild chaotic manner, she called it writing off the dross. That's what the page is suppose to do for me. I get my cereal and my toast and coffee and juice and vitamins and I head for the computer. I check e-mail. I turn on KPFA. And then I write the page. But the last two days I got to the write page part and I was blank. I had been trying to pull myself up out of the misery and all I succeeded in doing was going blank for a few days.
The mouse is back. I hadn't seen it for almost a week. The last time I had a mouse it just went away, so I was hoping it would happen again. I got this thing that is suppose to make the wires in the wall pulse in a way that bothers mice, and then they stay away, and I thought it was working. But, no. So, I guess I have to deal with having a trap,or something. I don't wanna!!
The district elected board of supes in SF seemed progressive and for me they were a life raft of political hope. All through the city tax refund and the budget hearings I remained hopeful. I wanted to believe that they were getting their sea legs and would get stronger. And then there was 9/11. Currently in SF, if a bunch of shopping carts full of possessions are found they are hauled off to a city site and held until someone one picks them up. This assumes that a homeless person, who returns to find their stuff, knows where to go to get it and can get there. A piece of legislation to put a sign on the carts, a warning, and give them a day to move the stuff. Doesn't seem like a big deal. The hearings on this have been fractious and this week it seems to have sunk completely. I am still hoping they are rewording it to get it and that it will still go through, but hope is getting harder to sustain. There are very progressive members of the board and there are very conservative members but it's the members that are likely to be a bit of both that seem to be becoming more conservative.
On Friday, I went to an interview for a workshop. It turns out that the time of the workshop doesn't work for me. But, at one point I was being led to a interview room and the person took me and another fellow up a flight of stairs. I lagged behind. No one noticed. People moved very fast.
Yesterday in church the usher sat two people in the pew with me that made it impossible for my friend to sit. One of the fellows was a bit large and when I'm in the pew there really isn't even room for two average size people. It hit me in a weird place, a hurt place and I left church. I came home and cried for a while. I talked to Marilyn and felt better. My friends at church are upset that I left. I need to hear that they're upset that the usher was so totally insensitive.
It's about awareness. It's about the lack of awareness.
I got to talk to Jo Ann last night. One of my top ten favorite activities. While I was talking to her Mayor Juliani was on CNN talking about Anthrax. I just haven't wanted to take the anthrax thing seriously. I thought it would stop. It doesn't seem to be stopping. And, here in SF, I feel so far away from it all. Jo Ann is right there in NYC.
I've been working on a piece of writing for a class and I'm just not ... on the page. David use to say that to me. " Your on the page!" I feel like a cartoon character, hurling myself against the page and it bounces my back. It a good enough effort to hand in but I'm just not satisfied.
I've decided that since I can not seem to shake this depression, I'm going to try to inhabit it with some dignity. I feel like a balloon, pulling at the string, raising higher and higher, farther and farther away. The string that keeps me connected is all the people who love me but I'm stretching it thin. One more pull and it'll snap. and I'll just drift away.
So, I'm a cartoon balloon for Halloween.