I'm still on hiatus. It's August 1, and I'm happy to report that I've written 209 pages this summer. Two hundred nine. That's a fuck-load of writing for me, but I'm happy that I'm getting it done.
Anyway. Just wanted to say hello to y'all. I am still planning to be back around September 1. And I'm sure I'll have plenty to say. ;-)
Love,
Lorraine
Some photos of the place I keep going to in the Adirondacks to write. Friends own an island in one of the lakes: the screen shot is my view from where i sit with my computer.
And a bit of whimsy from one of the local cemeteries. (Yes. I'm still obsessed with graveyards.)
Trying to climb back into my body since Yves' death has been difficult. The last act that Yves engaged in before dying was performing cunnilingus on me, and he went to sleep with my juices in his mouth, on his tongue. His head hurt, and he was so tired -- too tired to have an orgasm, he said, but he asked if I would allow him to sleep for a couple of hours and then he would "make it up to me."
There was nothing to make up. He had already brought the promise of such bliss into my life. It wasn't just the sex. It was the connection. It was the way our bodies spooned together. It was the way our hands curled together across the dinner table, how we already instinctively knew how to make each other laugh, how funny he thought my French accent was. I didn't speak French like a Quebecoise, he told me. I spoke it like a Parisian. And we talked at dinner about the different words. He was wearing a black v-necked sweater over his tee-shirt, and he explained to me that there was a different word for that in Quebecois. It wasn't a pull; it was something else. But I can't remember the word he said.
At one point, he went outside the restaurant to have a smoke. I watched him, smoking, from my seat at the window table. It was chilly outside. Not frigid, probably somewhere close to freezing, but it was early November and there was no wind. He stood outside, I remember, one hand in the pocket of his jeans, the other holding his cigarette. He was watching the people going by him, and every now and then, he would turn and look at me watching him. We would both smile.
Anyway. Sex after Yves has not been the same for me. How could it be? It's funny that the black humour started up almost immediately. Within a day, my friends and I were making jokes about my ability to kill men by going out with them, how I'd have to warn all future dates about my abilities. And, one friend made the inevitable, obvious remark that had actually been so obvious I hadn't thought of it myself. "Wow," she said. "You really fucked his brains out."
Ouch.
It wasn't as if I thought that any man who touched me after Yves died was going to suffer his fate. I knew well enough that while lightning could strike the same place twice, I could be reasonably sure that it wasn't going to. It was more the sense of how can I imbue this act, this sexual act that means so much to me, with any kind of meaning now? When it has become the last thing that someone did, this sex, this mingling of bodies, of fluids? Jesus. There's always been a part of me that has tried to make sex something sacred. Not with everybody, of course. Sometimes, a fuck is just a fuck. But there have been times in my life when I have tried to bring myself closer to awe, to the whole, through sex. I don't mean finding my whole self. I am a whole self. I don't need to be completed by another person. I mean the whole as in that sense that there is something larger than oneself. That my body is this tiny, insignificant speck on a tiny planet in a vast universe. Hiking in the woods gets me to that place. So does sex. Some sex.
So, I had fucked other men after Yves died. But each time, it didn't really feel as if I was all there. Each time, I thought about him, and silently compared what was going on in that bed with what had gone on in his.
I don't feel as if I'm supposed to remain chaste. I did want to be Miss Havisham … for about five minutes. But I'm too much of the earth to let myself get stuck in a world without physical contact.
Instinctively, I knew what I was going to need to put me back into the center of my body. I needed to be with someone with whom I had a history, even if the story was more Grimm than Mother Goose. I chose a man about whom I had once written in my journal: "His loyalty lasts only as long as his refractory periods." But I had also written in the month after Yves died that "the urge to fuck is urgent. I am hungry, restless. I need to be pinned down, fucked while I scream and cry. I need the catharsis. I want rough sex. I want to be spanked. I need to be put back into my body, to be reconnected to the carnal, the breathing, the living. I am living with a ghost. I love that ghost and I don't want to give him up, but he cannot touch me. I miss him so much." Short, choppy, childlike sentences that demanded something of the world that seemed unattainable. As it turned out, the one person who I knew was capable of giving me what I sought played Hamlet, until, sick to death of the hesitation on his part, I told him to go fuck himself.
Winter of 2006 got off to a slow start. Many times, snow has fallen in November-sometimes even before Halloween-but November and December were mild. Grey. Bare trees, yellow grass, dull skies; I moved through a monochromatic world with a face contorted with grief palsy. I rarely cried. Instead, my face just felt set in a default position of "not:" Not happy. Not interested. Not here.
I scribbled notes. Months later, I keep finding them. Some are in my journal. Some are on my desktop computer at work. Some are on my laptop. Some are on pads of paper. It's bizarre, because there are some notes that I don't remember writing down. Clearly, I was functioning. I continued to teach, and care for my children, and perform the quotidian tasks that define us as social beings. But part of my brain had obviously checked out. Reading the little notes I find is like finding postcards from the dead. Here's something I wrote sometime in late November:
I feel as if I've dropped a box of marbles on a hardwood floor. They're rolling everywhere. They are my memories of Yves. I'm afraid I won't be able to gather them all up, that some will never be found again. Maybe years later, when someone is renovating the house, they'll find a single cat's eye underneath a floorboard and someone will wonder at its significance.
I remembered something today. There's a bag in my closet that I haven't opened in over five months. It's a silver-colored, heavy plastic bag, the kind of bag that you get from a clothing store. It was apparently a bag that Yves' mother had in her laundry room, or had been picked up off Yves' floor. Inside the bag are three items of clothing. When we went out to dinner that night, I was wearing black boots, black slacks, a red lycra camisole, a black cardigan, and pink silky panties.
At his apartment, he quickly stripped me down to my camisole and panties, and he laid me down on the bed. I was not passive; we were kissing, I remember, kissing and crab-walking together back through the hallway and around the corner and into his bedroom and then he lifted me up onto his bed. His bed was not up on a platform supported by legs, rather, the platform was suspended among four chains that were attached to intricately carved plates in the ceiling. He had told me that he had designed the bed, and it kind of felt like sleeping like that rock-a-bye baby in her treetop cradle.
Once I was on the bed, however, Yves managed to pull my clothes off, save my camisole and panties, and there I lay, reclining on my elbows as I observed him stripping off his pants and socks and sweater. He was in a teeshirt and jockey briefs, and he lay down beside me, kissed my face, my neck, my collar bone, his fingers tracing my skin. He shimmied his fingers underneath the legband of my panties, and I remember that I laughed because there was no mistaking how much I wanted him.
I have pulled the panties, the camisole, and the tee-shirt out of the bag. I bury my nose in them, and I can smell him in the clothes. I can smell just the tiniest hint of the perfume I wore that night, and I can smell the tobacco, and then, there's something else. It's not laundry soap, because that's there, too. And it's not death, because he was naked when he died. I bring the tee-shirt up to my face and I breathe in hard. A blow lands on my solar plexus, and for just an instant, I think that I can't breathe.
Migraine pain carves through my right cheekbone, my right eye. I see a picture of the Soviet flag, and I wonder what the association is. And then I remember: migraine is like "hammer and sickle" pain.
I fold up the tee-shirt, and shove the panties and camisole down into the bag, roll it up tightly, put it back in the closet.
A note. This is probably (I never say never) the last essay you'll see from me for a while. I have decided that this book, which is burning a hole through me and is forcing me to write and write and write, will be born this summer. I am in transitional labor, and all I can do is hold on and wait for the moment that I get to push.
I don't know if I should post this. It is SO private, and yet, this is the story that I have to tell.
Tomorrow, I’m discussing this article from Harper’s. The students in my class have done a variety of writing assignments. Now, they are blogging, and I want them to think about the things we do as creators. About copyright. And borrowing. And stealing. Plagiarizing. But how anything: an image, a poem, a news article, a quotation—you name it—can be used as the spring-loaded diving board that will plunge us into the wetness of creativity. (And yes. Creativity is never dry for me. It’s always moist. Clearly, I’m not a Lacanian.)
I have been writing non-stop for days. Okay. I have stopped. To sleep. Or read. In the past month, I’ve read close to a dozen books, and this new influx of material is primordial broth from which I expect to make some piquant soup. I feel as if I’m replenishing myself after a long, draining winter that buried me.
I meant to write about this article when it first came out. I know I mentioned it to friends, especially Liza, whose logo should be recognizable. It’s Molotov Man. But when I looked at Molotov man today in preparation for teaching tomorrow, a different image popped into my head. The image of the Loyalist’s death from the Spanish Civil War.
I am humble when I remember that the sea is so large and my boat is so small. I've carried this quotation around in my head for years; I understand that it is a prayer, but I cannot find a source for it. No matter. In my relationship to the earth, it is apt.
I have wandered often in the woods, seeking truth and solace. And, each year, I take risks, stupid risks, because my own hubris tells me that I will always be able to think my way out of whatever nature throws my way. Frequently, my biggest problem is that for a wanderer, I have a lousy sense of direction, and like Hansel and Gretel, I try to leave behind small traces of myself, markers, so that when I leave, I can find my way back to safety.
Sometimes, I think that those who would deny that global warming is taking place, that the earth is in trouble, should be required to spend a week in the wilderness. Not in some tourist hotel at the edge of the glacier, but sleeping in tents, cooking over open fires, dealing with the elements as they present themselves. And Lord, they do present themselves.
Dum dee dum dee dum dee dum
Dum dee dum dee dum dee dum
We are lying on a futon that we have dragged out of the rec room and placed on the hardwood floor in front of the woodstove. The door to the woodstove is open-it is a massive piece of black iron, and in my life prior to the one that now includes the man I'm with, my ex-husband used to say both in terms of complaint and compliment that the heat it produced was too much stove for the tiny two-bedroom ancient saltbox we lived in. The house, built in 1810, didn't have a particularly efficient furnace, so most days, we had stoked the stove with some of the five cords of wood we bought every summer-wood that was dumped in the driveway and then required an entire day devoted to stacking it carefully under the cover of the rickety shed adjacent to the house, and we would open the bedroom doors and allow the woodstove to heat us in the ways that the original tenants had used the long-since bricked-over fireplace.
My lover and I are lying on the futon, watching the mixture of hardwoods-oak, birch, sycamore, but mostly maple-burn red hot. The temperature gauge on the stove pipe is near 400 degrees, and I get up every now and then to check and make sure it's not going much above that. I don't feel a need to poke at the fire, rearrange the wood. I'm not terribly interested in efficiency. I simply want heat, light, and to not allow the fire to become so hot that I risk starting a fire somewhere in the pipe or chimney.
Last night, flipping through the channels, I saw "BREAKING NEWS". Immediately, I realized I had made a mistake--the breaking news was on FOX, and what was it? Bush was speaking at the National Correspondents' Dinner. So I shut it the fuck off and watched something else.
Now, it turns out that the puppet master decided to participate in a little shuck and jive, to demonstrate that he could get down with his bad self. Except he dances like someone pulling marionette strings. No, he dances like the animated, soulless corpse that he is. The master who sends troops to die while he prances around the stage.
This is not funny. It it pathetic. Offensive. Almost as good as the moment when Bush did the "skit" where he pretended to look for those pesky WMDs that he had lied about.
I fucking hate this administration.
It's a gorgeous house, inside and out. I'm going to miss it, and I hope that it winds up in the hands of someone who will take good care of its historical charm. The house was built in 1848, has four bedrooms, a carriage house (for those who have always dreamed of having an artist's studio), a study, living room, dining room and eat-in kitchen. (The kitchen is bigger than the studio apartment I used to live in.)
"…the Tableau is one of only two witch treatises that addressed the issue of witches as women. There were two aspects of their feminity which de Lancre emphasized in his discussion of witches: their sexuality…and women's 'natural inclination' for sorcery (de Lancre Tableau p. 89). This natural inclination was not rooted in women's physically weaker state. In fact, jurists such as Bodin had previously commented on having witnessed 'that women suffer torture more continuously than men' (de Lancre Tableau p. 89). Women's affinity for sorcery was based on women's extreme nature—her pursuit of her appetites, her desire for revenge, and her need for novelty, all distinguished her from the more balanced male."
Lorraine Berry, "Destabilizing Categories: Jews, Witches, and the Christian Male," Aestel 4 (1996)
Are we aware what lies at the end of the road opened up by the normalization of torture? A significant detail of Mr. Mohammed’s confession gives a hint. It was reported that the interrogators submitted to waterboarding and were able to endure it for less than 15 seconds on average before being ready to confess anything and everything. Mr. Mohammed, however, gained their grudging admiration by enduring it for two and a half minutes. "Knight of the Living Dead" By SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Gayle Brandeis is the Bellwether Prize winning writer, the author, most recently, of Self Storage (Ballantine, 2007). This is her stunning meditation on soldiers and loss and the things we throw away.
Please welcome her to CultureKitchen.
Cold Storage
A few months ago, Patrick Rogalin, a 20 year old Army Reserve specialist, came home from Iraq to find that all of the belongings he had put into a self storage locker had been auctioned off. All his clothing, all his furniture, all mementos of his life before Iraq, gone to the highest bidder.
My novel Self Storage just came out, so I've been thinking so much about what "self storage" means. How our selves can be so wrapped up in our things. How we often store ourselves away from the world, lock parts of ourselves up. I can't help but see a different metaphor here, though. Our soldiers are coming home to very little to begin with--reduced benefits, meager military pay that often has to be supplemented with food stamps. These young men and women put their lives on the line, and we thank them by denying them treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, by increasing their co-pays for prescriptions. Aside from reuniting with family and friends, they might as well be coming back to empty storage lockers.
When I first began writing this, I was tucked into bed at seven p.m., hoping to be asleep soon. As I take my notes from last night and begin to type them into the computer, it is 4:34 a.m., and I've been awake for an hour. The headaches that have been dogging me for months have intensified their barking in the past couple of weeks. Pain and nausea are paired, and the pain in my face simply changes shape when I swallow the Vidodin I was prescribed on Friday. I have been trying other pain medications—and they haven't been working—so strung out from pain, I broke down and accepted the doctor's offer to write a small script for opiates until I can get in for my CT scan, which is scheduled for later this morning. (My history with opiates is not a good one.) The Vicodin has made me feel sleepy and sick—and relieves the grinding ache in my head for only 45 minutes or so.
I could pop these pills every hour, chasing the dragon of relief, but ironically, the Vicodin gives me a headache—it's in a different part of my head—a pressure that feels as if the inside of my skull is a pneumatic piece of rubber dangerously overinflated. I'm not really having a lot of fun with this, but distraction seems my only real coping mechanism. And so, I've been reading and reading. By my count, five books in a month, plus who knows how many magazine articles, online articles, and blog entries.
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"I am tolerant of all creeds. Yet if any sect suffered itself to be used for political objects I would meet it by political opposition. In my view church and state should be separate, not only in form, but fact. Religion and politics should not be mingled."
— -- Millard Fillmore, address during 1856 Presidential election, from Albert J. Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom
