Candor, or cited

"The End," Oct. 9, 1991, p. 294

Prayer: May we be relieved of knowing (too much or too little) about the sins of others?

If I don't get back to life immediately I'll die. My throat is aching, just like the woman in the dream. They're killing me. Maybe a man's throat somewhere is aching. Our thwarted destinies. Romance is a romance. We repel one another. Union is brief, inconsistent. Peace is highly desirable. Bear your knowledge. If you can bear your knowledge, you are a plant. Men's greater physicality protects him from other men and from women. He remembers being overpowered and abandoned by a woman. His woman, his mother, left him. He's hurt. He must get over it. He mistreats women, who are peaceful by nature; he tempts her, too. What is sinister in us must be handled, melted, dwelt in, balanced. As I have always done, faithfully. How else could I tell the story I have told? I was supposed to be not only a suicide but a lesbian, to bear my knowledge by not knowing that women, terrible, destroy. Women do destroy. Freud was (right about everything except one thing) wrong. Are we locked in this coupling? Are we amenable? I need a vegetarian man, a thinker, a logician. Not what I'd had in mind the first time. I'd wanted the other kind, (a real) one to subdue me. I still do. He can know I won't use my power to blast him. He will be respectful, not fearful, because he has gone to the core of his knowledge and seen what men are and has re-formed. This re-breaking of myself, this giving myself (social) cancer (candor) in search of the truth, like Marie Curie, in sacred territory. Handle with care.

(repeated): from the Christopher Isherwood Diaries (July, 1940):

Prayer for writers: 'Oh source of my inspiration, teach me to extend toward all living that fascinated, unsentimental, loving and all-pardoning interest which I feel for the characters I create. May I become identified with all humanity, as I identify myself with these imaginary persons. May my life become my art and my art my life.'

Catechism

It could be a blessing but also a curse that in God's light a girl seeing her self-witness asserts herself. The mother built a haymow in the yard. The cat sleeps in it. The Catholic catechism is a gift to Catholic children. What people believe is in the human part of nature to realize -- that the genitals are reserved for Christian marital contact only -- was not in evident practice by Catholic recipients of the catechism and therefore not revealed and not in human nature self-revealing. Heathens, as the dust-men call us, never received the gift of the catechism. We were called to enter the Covenant with God. Our religious practices of childhood forsaken, but not our friendships, with Jewish gay men and women. The Torah tastes like Hawaiian honey-bread, but the Catholic catechism is grave and admits (repentant sinners) to joy and happiness, grace and heart. The condemned read in its pages their condemnation. The catechism calls us to live divinely in poverty, humility, and chastity. The Catholic women provide the orders of their religious upbringings to us who were given little guidance, only love of Christ on Easter and at Christmas, in our states of grace, perceived to be the province of our hearts and the hearts of our parents.

Linda (poem)

to Patty D.

"Do all women carry purses?"
she asked.
"Am I a woman?"
I asked.
"Yes,"
she said.
"Do I carry a purse?"
"No,"
she replied.
"Can I have your purse?"
she asked.

(1983)

Men's movement

What is it, really? These posts I detained: perhaps *Sonia* is peeved to see them "removed," but I can replace them at will, reveal them again at any time. These are not books. These are a blood list, not of names. A list of bleedings that I partially wrote, that I wrote as long as I dared to write them, a packet of essays, a list not of names.

The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman. I watched it Sunday evening at Oak Street Cinema while Asian sheisters locked up my car with a tire boot. Later, they charged me $119 to remove it. That was to be my dinner budget for Friday, when six women were to enjoy our final night smoking and drinking in a restaurant in Chanhassen, a night before the smoking ban takes full effect on Oct. 1. I was to take a cab, in case I wanted to drink too much: red wine, Bloody Mary's, perhaps a tangy beer -- until tipsy, something I do on rare occasions, and sex, something we are not to do in this Age of the New Men. Funny, during the age of the new women, men continued in their drinking & violence, did they not? And didn't they befriend one another? And didn't they meet & mingle? And didn't they graduate college & assume positions? In this, the age of new men, the women are to be tested and subjugated, neglected and ignored. Some women are happy in it, if they have found a little money, if there is still a trail of it, a hot one. Breasts: round & sculpted under skinny long shirts, reverse cut-offs under lingerie nighties on bicycles, inviolate teenagers riding alongside victimized ones.

Swedes in the film. The knight of the Crusades was angelic, true, but I liked the squire more. The women were beautiful, young, & ridiculously unchastened by Death, the Black Death, the subject of the film, that and religion, the film a tome.

Therapy disgusts me. I barely hid my contempt for it at a new therapist's office Monday. What a wimp! What a pathetic passive softhead. Still, in my dutiful condition I shall accept a top-flight therapist, an enlightened woman or man, a guide.

Getting it

Never have I felt so embarrassed. I have shouted about how much I hate rich people. This goes into the phone, along with many other words in the language, words about relationships & friends & men & hospitals & housing & outings -- to my sister, to T. My favorite lack is of outings. We go nowhere together. Anton Chekhov & Arthur Miller love me in the eyes. Sex is a thing of the good past, of the newspaper. New sex is a nuisance: the men had horrible marriages and their wives are horrible and their children are horrible and their careers in shreds and tatters and their ruins in suits as if their ruins were attractive and the men after marriage, in its aftermath & in chasing it; anyway, getting married is for sweethearts, as I may apply myself to be, and its excessive wealth, to relearn shopping, after giving it up, to learn a Sunday common prayer, a practice of religious worship, to be a salon-goer again, someone who gets up in the morning, who has a life, to be a wife, and just be embarrassed by it, by money: for decades. To sneakily give it away to men, to friends, to you. I shall write story plays with long passages of dialogue, and you will not; I shall write poems & short stories, and your poems & short stories will outshine mine, and I shall be glad for our bittersweet episodes of longshots. You brute! You singer! You zimcareeter, frog tester. Lipper. Yes, married, then people at the party? Invite yourself. I've been to three weddings, two of family, and a few funerals. We're having a great festival & wearing a great dress & a suit. We begin to live in honor.

Webgoing Notes

Oh, surfers -- is that still a word? -- sufferers -- who visit Ana Verse searching for Swedish folksongs: "Rida, Rida Ranka" & "Ode to Coffee" & "Varan Prost" have brought it to the top of the google list, yet the punctuation -- so lazy on my part -- is unofficial. Umlauts & the little circle dot over the "a," I guess you'd say, are missing. I was once very careful about such things but have grown lax; there is no translation in Spanish for the found poem in "Lesson 38." Again, lazy.

Million-dollar ideas: Here's one for Oisseau, my name for an occupational visitors' program to schools, similar to writers-in-the-schools, based on Studs Terkel's Working. Parents & community members visit schools & give presentations on their occupations throughout the school year.

Another one: WPA -- federal Writers' Project (from the 1930s) -- revisited, this time to systemetize the self-help book industry. I picture thousands of editors & writers reading self-help books & articles, in print & on the internet, selecting, critiquing, and reviewing those books and shortlisting them for the masses. Included would be books in use, even if out-of-print, with the best of those going into reprintings. Writers recommend novels, short stories, poetry, & plays that help lives & why.

Do you like Hillary Clinton? I hear from my correspondents & colleagues that she is too like the Republicans for their liking, yet I think she's the best candidate for fighting the terrorism that is the Reagan-Bush era. We cannot afford to have a Doe for president, next. I hear that she "is scary" and that John Edwards might be a new FDR. I revered John Kerry and believe he would have made an excellent administrative president. Hillary makes me feel proud to be a woman. That is not "neither here nor there." Is porn a genocide? No news on that subject. Who stakes bare her clam?

Jimmy Carter, they said, had too little sex; Jesse Jackson too weird diction. I don't even have a heart, except in quiet breathing moments with odd women; I've certainly never lusted in it -- a fete in sin. We miss their diplomacy, the once-tame economy, the affordability of life, and reduced crime.

Louise DeSalvo's book, Writing As A Way of Healing (Beacon Press Books, 1999), is excellent and a help to teachers whose students have endured traumas. She outlines safe procedures for writing through difficult passes & lists similar difficulties of many favored authors.

Heard on my walks: Tighty whitey!

Inchworm ...

Out.