An Imperfect Phrase

I didn’t know what to say until I walked out of Barnard Hall, north side, and saw the Annex all lit up: I stared into the empty dance studio, as if seeing it for the first time, lights still on at 9:00 at night and beckoning, where I had my first class at 9:00 in the morning when I was a first-year and I had my new short haircut and my already-faded black shorts and skinny little legs to match and my nervousness and my excitement and my unawareness of what it was that I had gotten myself into.

I didn’t know what to say until I looked up from the piece of paper that kept telling me about “this author” (and wondering—wonder-ing—how I had become such a thing) and remembered something MV once said about Emily Dickinson about the self opening up and the poet on the verge of madness and how it’s terrifying because you can plummet (where?) but that’s how Dickinson and Virginia Woolf wrote, an earthquake style, and did we ever feel like that? It wasn’t a rhetorical question. I thought to myself, well, no, not really. Virginia Woolf? Please. But I did feel like that tonight, like “I and the abyss” but not the abyss, not a thing into which we can fall but a thing into which we can soar, like kids on the swings at recess who believe that if they pump their arms hard enough they will swing all the way around 360 degrees. I looked up to the ceiling because there it was above my head, but I could feel the open space of anything-ness that is the future and I could see the blankness spreading into everythingness. I couldn’t see it all (because who knows what all will be), but I could feel the wild dizzy possibility of all-ness, though the closest I’ll come is an apartment in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, New York, USA, on Monday, May 20, move-in day thank you very much. And so I calmed the fuck down and put on some Cat Power and I knew that I wouldn’t be weeping tonight, four years later, having parked my car on 110th street as if it were a pitch-dark street-lamp street smack in the middle of a sprawling Pennsylvania suburb.

I’m not saying it just now, but I will.

The lead in my pencil is thinner now. I am reading a book (Ordinary Affects, Kathleen Stewart) while my partners-in-living talk on the other side of my door, which is also painted blue and covered with taped-up ephemera. A poster for a conference that got cancelled. A girl with lobster claws for hands. One of those stickers, you know, that says ”Hello my name is: Gertrude Stein.” And another that says “Hello my name is: Kix.” Like the cereal. A receipt or a record or something for two parking tickets and a towing fee; the word REDEEMED stamped across the onion skin, red ink. My mouth tastes like sugar. Cavities.

I take notes. I tell stories in the margins. I feel in my fingers a sense of saturation. Other places too. Stories about the past four years of my life. Stories about the words she wrote on the chalkboard. Traces. (Once you press the pencil into the paper, it’s forever; you can’t erase an act of pressure.)

I do not impress. You made me question my success. My pages, pencil, I impress.

Bad vibes. Green grass (luscious, I called it, as I looked disdainfully upon the frazzled gray-brown turf beneath the bodies in the sun). Why do we love to rip blades of grass?

I refuse to give up my parentheses.

I wish he’d said what he didn’t say. Though this wish makes plain the fact that what he didn’t say he didn’t have to say. I already know what it was he could have said. I have known it all along.

(So,

so what if I put a few words on the page without my knowing what they mean, deciding what they mean, or saying what they mean? I am a performer. I am impressing. Do you know what I mean? Are you supposed to know—more importantly, do you want to know—what it is that’s going on, unfolding, event-ing, intensifying, connecting, affect-ing, with clarity and precision, here? Where is here? I am beholden to that thing called language, which is not really a thing but an everything. Everything is unclear. From here. And now.) 

Say literature. Say it. I love the way you say it. 

It’s quiet now. I’ve stopped reading. I must have read the scene about agency seven times (see page 86), which is what my soccer jersey said when I was a kid. Daydreaming. My father screaming from the sidelines, convinced that I was daydreaming, not trying. “…all agency is frustrated.” And so I read it again. And again. A cycling that is not progressing. I have been progressing, looping, progressively looping, and now I am resting, paddling (I can’t float). Trying to figure things out. But not too much. I was trying. Just living is meaning. I have no need to explain, only to feel, to see, to live, to open, to feel the weight of four years soaked up sponge-like in my fingers. Other places too. 

There were many places where you could have expanded it. Words. Theories. Ideas. Hurdles. Opportunities. It was exciting. Unpack, that’s the word. Why did you sound so lovably sarcastic? If that’s the phrase I’m feeling for.  

Critique is not a verb. Not really. Just saying. (In general.)

Unraveling.

Imagine that you have your head against the wall (a fixed point, pivot point; one of those brass buttons you used in elementary school to hold the center of your spinner, the arrow, and the posable arms of your paper clock) and you keep it there as you rotate, permitting the body to hang limp from the head as you wind and unwind (it scarcely matters which). 

Metaphor.

You decide that postmodern theory is really the best way to encapsulate the tragi-hilarity of your life. I’ll see you in hell, someone says, but you know that you’re already stuck in that hotel room (even if you are a so-called loner; you used to think that anti-social tendencies were the mark of the poet at his bedroom window, the cool kid, the thrift-store shopper, the artist’s daughter with the homemade dress). The door is open, wide open, a big, fat, empty panorama (it’s not pretty). So why don’t you just walk out? You can’t. You can’t. The compulsion to repeat / You can’t. You decide that your life is like (metaphors don’t use like or as; you learned this in middle school, when you had braces on your teeth and glitter on your eyelids and ambitions to become a middle-aged woman) your life is like a scene from The Crying of Lot 49, the deaf mute dance. Nothing will stop you from crashing into nothing. And this is the kind that’s hardest to theorize away, the kind that laughs at your un-high-minded refusal to un-un-split your head in two and spins you round and around til you learn to really like straight lines. This is the real world, sweetheart. (Don’t call me that don’t you know I’m queer as all the world?) 

.

You can’t find the right song, a song to “capture” slash “convey” slash “express” what it is you’re “feeling.” You used to think that life would have a soundtrack in New York City. Jazz. The soundtrack to a Woody Allen movie. You in a long shot, the clarinet. All the time, space, sky, sun, smiles, sidewalks, button-downs, notebooks, dollars, hummings, dogs, donuts, girls, boys, wrong turns, in-betweens, blushing cheeks, shallow puddles, library books, postcards, matchbooks, backpacks, pumpkins, meat smells, chopsticks, walk signs, benches, flower petals, ticket stubs, bookmarks, ice cream cones, birdsongs, gardens, bow ties, belly laughs, goose bumps, records, t-shirts, schoolgirl crushes, river walks, daydreams, nightdreams, phrases, futures, pasts, and presents (it’s getting serious now) … 

.

How do you presume to fill THAT SPACE? (Everyone is always talking about space; apparently, it’s something you’re supposed to like.)

.

But all you can feel is your headache and the emptiness.

.

It was fitting, I guess, that I read from Ginsberg tonight, seeing as it was Ginsberg who brought me to this city in the first place. It was Ginsberg who made me say “lonely trembling individual” over and over and over again—in silence, a saying. Whitman’s word unsaid. That was eleventh grade, an embarrassing admission. 

I’ve always disliked summer. I like it, but I also dislike it. Not even summer camp could cure my insomnia. Trips to the pool, snack time, fun-dips for a quarter, chewing gum stuck to the trees, cold grass, unselfconsciousness. I used to stare at my ceiling in the dim-nightlight-lit-dark, two legs upraised perpendicular to the pink printed sheets. I liked to snake my blanket in between my toes; it made a nice sensation. And then when I got bored I would close my eyes and stare instead at the insides of my eyelids (you’d be surprised what you can see in there if you keep on looking). The insides of the eyelids were to me (seven years old) the whiteness of the whale: “A dumb blankness, full of meaning.” I tried to imagine what there was before there was. Before anything. Before nothing. I failed. And saw myself soaring. And slept.

While I’m on the subject: I’m no Ishmael at the mast-head. I’m the Sub-Sub at her desk, sub-sub-ishly sorting, extracting, compiling. My books surround me, fortress-like. I haven’t the heart to return them. They remain where I’ve placed them, behind the spiral-shaped seashell weather-beaten by the waves and the postcards (Derrida, Patti Smith) and an old copy of Stein’s Three Lives (New Directions). Which way does your beard point tonight? Toward what tendencies? Obsessions? Loves? Thoughts without words. A lonely trembling individual. I have so many words now, four years later; the phrases drip dropping from my fingertips. My nails never used to get this long (I chewed them off before they had the chance).  

And the mast-head? A bench on Morningside Drive; look to the east. This morning I stood with one foot up on the cement slab, knee cocked to the sky, Bob Dylan circa 1964, examining my newfound need to examine, to “clear my head,” to sit in a place and stare at a thing until it loses its thingness and starts to look strange (have I really been hanging around this place for four years?). Unfamiliar. At the height of my undergraduate powers, she said. What’s the use of bursting into tears? 

Sidewalks are now synonymous with doom. Impending doom; not quite. A fluttering in the stomach, a bursting-forth-feeling as my feet move forward (the rest of me follows, against my will); and then, a wave of nervous energy (the kind you revel in), a twinge of excitement (the kind you counteract with but, but…). It’s the forward motion that unnerves me. Each step an articulation: now what? Tracing a line straight through to the future, to the not-yet-here. But then you get there (and there becomes here). How far is here? It’s better to bike, these days. The circles, the cycle, I find it comforting. I can make believe it doesn’t have to end when I’m dodging cars. I know where I’m going.

(It always felt like this.)  

The first-year says, yeah but… And I feel the pangs of lost time. I’m never going to read the Proust that’s sitting on my desk, but I will write and speak and shout and smash in search of lost time.

I’ll go ahead and say it: Margaret Vandenburg, I’m going to miss you. You were right, by the way. I don’t have any architecture.

Did I look nervous behind that podium? Wander down a ways, you’ll see; my kneecaps betray the nervousness in me. They twitch. I didn’t know what to do with my body. (I know how to dance. But the movement of the mouth just messes everything up.) I tried not to think about the bored-sounding tone of voice I take when I read, and just read. Was it a surprise when I said the word fuck? Did you believe that I believed?

I told S that my depression was imminent. Like a deadline. I can feel it descending. I can feel it in the air. I can feel it in the dust that lingers near the trash barrels in Morningside Park. I can feel it when I walk alone in the dark up Amsterdam. I can feel it when I finger the pages of my composition book. I said that I really didn’t want to be the maudlin weeping one. But I will be. I said this.

In green, in warmth, in smiles, in close-knit-ness come too late, in belonging found and gone. Looking back, it was Ginsberg that first made me say, “that’s me.” (Theorize that.) Someday, I will.