Swimming through the palms...
The thing about trying to stay off Facebook for a week is...
You're never really off Facebook.
I mean, I am not POSTING ANYTHING. But I'm still there, creepily liking things and then, since I'm not posting, sharing interesting articles with friends in private messages, or just chatting with them there, because I'm still there, only ghosting.
I will probably post this entry to Facebook. Because it's not like it's a STATUS UPDATE, right? I mean, at least I can live without status updates for a WEEK, right?
Right.
Here were some interesting things I really wanted to post, but restrained myself from posting. You get them here. Because, obviously, I have come to an age where if I do not process EVERYTHING right away in WORDS I get panicky.
I wonder (at least, I wondered, today, while swimming - amongst many other things, but those later) if so many writers mine their childhood because it is the pure unprocessed stuff. Memory in images, the thickness of the senses, not the memory of words set down, of patterns and expectations and logical progressions.
I wonder about that. I wonder what would happen if, you know, I just took a total break from everything everything everything for a week. A month. A year. Just me and my notebook. All electronics in storage. What that will do to experience. To memory.
I'd have to be rich to do that. When one works, one has to be in communication with one's bosses. And nowadays, where there's a phone, there's at least a porthole to the internet, for the most part.
And where there's a porthole, there's Wonderland.
"Now everything’s a little upside down, as a matter of fact the wheels have stopped / What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good, you’ll find out when you reach the top, you're on the bottom..." As Bob Dylan writes.
1.) All in the timing. (The article or meme mentioned is of course TOTALLY illegitimate.)
Me: Sita, I was reading an article - or a headline anyway - the other day about how people who cuss a lot are more honest.
Sita: Well, I'll be damned.
2.) Travel. (Excerpted from email to pattytempleton)
"...Dear Havoc,
Travel only sucked on Wednesday, when our flight was cancelled. But that meant I spent the whole day happily ripping up my bedroom and study, rearranging ALL THE FURNITURE (except your desk: sacred till the novel's finished) and moving ENTIRE BOOKSHELVES. Not a book remains on a single same shelf across the three rooms comprising my library. Now all my reference books are in my study, where they belong. All my favorite fiction and things I mean to read are on the shelf (not the same shelf that used to be) right beside my bed on the floor. And all the stuff I probably won't read SOON is in the purple parlor, along with the plays, poetry, classics, and graphic novels.
BLISS.
Then, that night, I got to have dinner with Christie Max Williams at the Dogwatch Cafe, and we spent a good two hours talking about writing and theatre and poetry.
"Editing," quoth he, "requires the kind of long-term love that makes and sustains families. There are not a lot of orgasms in editing."
We got out in the thunder and lightning and rain at 6 AM the next morning, but the flight was on time, and so was our connection in Charlotte, and suddenly, I am here.
Last night was spent making napkin rings from ribbons and little green paper cut-outs with my auntie and Mima. Sita started working with us, but then looked so restless and unhappy.
"What is it?" I asked.
"I just want to go see Lenora's play right now."
"GO, SILLY!"
So she went, very cheerfully, to go see her granddaughter in her play, then went with Nicole, Lenora and Miss Amelia to eat ice cream (ETA: it was really frozen custard), and returned late.
This morning I washed a dozen lawn chairs and went swimming. It was like swimming through my childhood. Am still reeling from the memories. Very strange..."
***
Overheard in airport:
MAN: Don't want to keep the little lady and the kids waiting.
WOMAN: What's her name again?
MAN: I don't know. It keeps changing. It's shorter every time I hear it.
STORY IDEA FROM EAVESDROPPING:
Travelers who keep spouses like time-shares. They always have someone to go home to. Subscribed rituals of greeting, like, "Honey, I'm home!" followed by a complete stranger, who is current spouse, making a prescribed gesture (wiping hands on apron), and saying, "I've missed you. How was your work day." Food is served. Children played with. Ritualized sex.
Falling in love prohibited. Attaching to children beyond the boundaries of random visits prohibited. When a Traveler retires, they may become "Grandparents." Children of unions, whether from male Traveler or female Traveler stay in whatever unit where they were either conceived or born and belongs to the spouse and to the company, not to the Traveler.
And then, of course, what happens when those rules are broken.
3. Swimming
- The first time I saved my brother's life was in a pool like this one. The house on Catalina street. Jeremy must have been two. I must have been eight and a half. Sita turned her back for a half second, then turned around again and said, "Where's Jeremy?"
I was in the pool at the time, and my foot brushed something fuzzy.
I dove down and brought him up again.
- That year in the Bloomfield house, with the pool in the back and the slide. I swam so much. I turned from mermaid to human in the deep end of that pool a hundred times, kicking the rubber diving ring off my ankles as I ascended, and burst to surface, flinging my hair out of my face, while echoes of Ursula sounded in my ears. Imitation. That's how we learn, right? Learning to be a mermaid. Or learning to be human. Around that same pool we enacted our Persephone plays. Is the pool our underworld?
- And now, swimming, the sere turquoise of the May sky, the Arizona sky, the Sonoran sky above me, and the palm trees glittering, and I think, what chemicals are crawling into me, what is this chlorine doing to me, how many dead gnats are clinging to me, I daren't open my eyes under the water for fear they'll burn all day, how sweet the sun is, how dangerous, how unsustainable, this water in this desert, what are we doing, where is this world going, how could I have grown up here, I could never return, I could never return.
- My father's Facebook update:
About to make the painful and awkward transition from "legend in my own mind" to son, brother, father, and grandfather. Sigh. Life is so cruel. KIDDING! #icandothis #only5days #help arrived in Phoenix. Let the nuptial revelries commence.
- Thinking, that's what we get when we return. We come back to all the things that made us. That allowed us to leave in the first place, and introduce ourselves to strangers. These names, these skins, this history we carry with us. Now we are going back to our history, and we can no longer be strangers in a strange land. We are no longer legends. These are the people who burped us and changed our diapers and watched us stumble and betray and grow and glow. These are the people who threw us our first parties, who attended our graduations, who made us cake. These are the people who remember us then.
- That bird I cannot name. Those ornamental orange trees. Those olive branches. That poolside cement, the creamy color of my wintercoast skin. The glittering palm branches. I swim through you all.
4. Handfasting
My brother is getting married tomorrow, and I am officiating. Here are some beautiful things I found to that purpose.
INTRODUCTION OF TWO SUSTAINABLE EARTH ACTIVISTS, A ROSARIO MURILLO POEM:
"I'm going to a plant a heart in the earth
water it with love from a vein
I'm going to praise it with the push of muscle
and care for it in the sound of all dimensions.
I'm going to leave a heart in the earth
so it may grow and flower
a heart that throbs with longing
that adores everything green
that will be strength and nourishment for birds
that will be the sap of plants and mountains."
PRECEDING THE STORY OF HOW THEY MET, A NERUDA QUOTE:
“But I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.”
DECLARATION OF HANDFASTING:
Remember then as your hands are fasted, these are NOT the ties that constrain or thwart, but those that support and sustain…
DECLARATION OF UNION (again with the Neruda):
“Love! Love until the night collapses!”
For now... That is all.
***