Paula's House of Toast

In my dream, M. had bought a $4000 beautiful black refrigerator -- chic, a burnished graphite icon. I was disturbed by the expense and needless extravagance, and was relieved to wake up and find it, as the saying goes "was just a dream."

No dreams are "just" dreams. I am, yes, post Freudian, very much so. But, if only for their lightness and interestingness, dreams are important. What do they "mean" ? What does anything "mean" ? Maybe "how" do they mean is a better question. Or, how does one read them. Like a poem, I think.

Major appliances have always reminded me of death. They seem so ponderous and inevitable. They are curated by the funereal and unctuous. And refrigerators -- need one mention how they close like coffins, how they chill like morgues, and how bacilli continue to rot the contents, albeit more slowly, despite the cheerful and hygeinic promises ?

Associate, then, to the beautiful black refirgerator. The black box of death, like the kitties' carrier we jokingly call "the red box'o'death." Then, poor dead Meana, deflated to rag doll on the bloody pink quilt in the vet's room'o'death. Then there's the opening scene of 2001 space odyssey, of course, and its black monolith.

And the ceilings -- all those ceilings I stared at that first day at Beth Israel. The elevator I rode down to MRI the ceiling had a huge, rectangular, dark steel plate. Burnished, but not terribly reflective. In the middle of it was a smaller square, maybe a door, of metal just subtly different. After hours of styrofoam suspended ceiling I found it oddly beautiful in a post modern way, and told the perky MRI techs that I found it so. (Yes, perky: near midnight the dears burst into my ER cubicle and announced Hi ! We're Pat and Liz from MRI ! I could not help hearing echos of the Simpsons' "Hi ! I'm Dr. Nick," and also dourer echos of "Pat and Dick," as in the Nixons. Clang clang clang goes the trolley of associations.)

But the beautiful refrigerator was like that beautiful ceiling, and an MRI tube is probably smaller than a coffin, as the ceiling seemed inches from my nose. And ugly. It looked like someone had stuck a "smiley face" sticker there, once, that had only been incompletely removed.

Ah, the ubiquity of kitsch.

Mid-April Lauds: Yolanda


... two birds are on the branch of a tree. One eats the fruit, the other looks at it.
-- Simone Weil


Each morning’s light unveils
the window dresser’s work.
I slow my car to view
the new day’s latest oeuvre

of other women’s clothes --
long, silky, flowing, flecked
with slivers of brightness --
if not the work of God,

at least the work of one
well-schooled in beauty, praise.
Each day I praise his praise
remembering the time

monks welcomed me as Christ,
as Benedict prescribed,
scandal and all, unfit
for sacramental bread.

It rained the whole time, hard.
Rain is a fesitval,
wrote Father Louis, free
and meaningless. It talks

without aspersion. Pools
dotted the Abbey woods.
I was prepared to praise,
but miserere mei

came first, asparges me.
Forgive my trespassing.
I did my best to keep
up with the seasoned flock

who knew it all by heart
my mouth proclaim your praise
O Lord make haste to help.
I bowed when they bowed, sure

all my iniquities
were manifest. And when
Lauds segued into Mass
my stomach growled, unused

to so much liturgy
before coffee and toast.
So I, the welcomed guest,
sat, famished, in the choir

and watched the others eat
the beautiful, bright bread
that joined them into One
praiseworthy body, Christ’s.

And so I praised it all --
the monks, the rain-flecked trees,
the long, dark silken flow
of water eastward, spring’s

new fashions and first fruits,
the rind, the chaff, the board
that spurned my unshriven flesh
as it welcomed my gaze.

I've been ploughing through Weil's notebooks in French for a quote about looking and eating to use as epigraph for my Yolanda poem, hence the bad French pun of the title.

The Valium I'm eating at bedtime has screwed up my REM, but I had a brief vivid dream after falling back to sleep this morning. There was a part about rooms and a house, my usual habitat type dream, but then, clearly, I am a priest, and assigned to help a large roomful of people. They are all milling about; the room is filling faster than I can work. I am sitting at some table in a large hall, like a municipal auditorium, and, one by one, the petitioners tell me their stories. There's no privacy (take that, dream hipaa, pfffttttt!) They're not much different from patients' stories, except that I am a priest and not real sure of what to do. The first one is a guy, I forget his story. Poverty, sadness. I think I ask him whether he's "turned to Jesus" and feel sort of bogus doing so, inauthentic but obligated since I am a priest. The second petitioner is a woman, burnt-out, neither young nor old, masked facies, crazy, admitting to me she has done none of the things she was asked to do upon discharge from the looney bin, and I mumble something about how I am also a doctor and how many times medical treatment actually helps, and I remember to ask her about suicidality -- and then to my horror, remember I haven't asked my first client about the same ---

Then some loud machine from Joe's yard wakes me up.

Today I am full of spleen about the whole notion of writing poetry. I am in that place of nausea, disgust, and, yes, inauthenticity. This is the point at which one muscles on in spite of it, eh ?

Sure, why not.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Vatican: condoms don't stop Aids

Then, of course, lest we forget, there's Catholicism's antediluvian, pre-scientific, genocidal, human-rights violating side.

My WHAT ?

I've pulled it out for my Yolanda poem, needing snippets of Lauds to quote. Like a Yolanda gown, I love this inaccessible little book, with its five pretty ribbons -- green, white, purple, yellow, blue -- all undoubtedly significant, all absolutely necessary for navigating this impossibly byzantine prayer book. The abridged version, yet.

I did a few rounds of psalmody in the way-simpler episcopal BCP, whose psalter alternates morning and evening straight through, one through 150. Some great poetry there, and some real ugly stuff too. Vengeance, dashing babies against rocks. The whole gamut. The BCP's a way lovelier translation, too, than my little breviary. But, then again, translation: I wanted to use the de profundis psalm in my vigils poem -- "my soul waits for the lord/more than a watchman waits for morning" -- to use the vulgate latin because Arvo Part's De Profundis had so inspired the poem. So here's the Latin and the translation:

Speravit anima mea in Domino.
A custodia matutina usque ad noctem speret Israhel in Domino

My soul hath hoped in the Lord
From the morning watch even until night, let Israel hope in the Lord.

So where's the watchman waiting for morning ?

What's this atavistic dress shop got to do with anything ?

There it sits, on rather outre piece of Route 60, cinderblock white, with that outlandish limo poised outside, and that window -- with its daily gown tableau -- displaying garments that are as foreign to my own sartorial habits ("Dr. T. dresses like a farmer") as martian attire.

I confess: I love the place. I deeply approve of it.

Passing it in my car, I slow down to get whatever safe glimpse I can of the latest dress in the window. They are SO beautiful. I love that they exist, and that women exist who wear them, and are beautiful in them.

This may sound odd from the unnatural woman who nearly anaphylaxes at the thought of an off-hours sprint into TJMaxx to replace the last remaining unripped and unstained garment that she's accidentally dyed pink in the wash because aluminum foil and paper towels are all that remain to wear to work.

Not that I'd ever go IN Yolanda's, mind you. My God. A contemptuous Butler with a fumigator's backpack would snuff me in a trice, roach that I am. Begone, woman beyond make-over.

Two weeks in an Aspen collar, an accumulating deficit of showers and hairwashes have done nothing for my already sagging self image. I'm probably growing a beard under this thing.

DK took me on an errand last night. I had to buy thank you note cards for the funerary bank of flowers wilting in our den, and soymilk creamer, the sine qua non of my totally fucked-up vegan lifestyle. The world seemed surreal after my recent hiatus from it. They'd gutted the drugstore, and it seemed stripped, dismantled, and remantled into an alien parallel universe drugstore. I noted a solid wall of women's faces: the hair dye aisle. None of them seemed a day over 20. WTF, I asked my dear spouse, gesticulating wildly at the greasy gray scraggles attractively framing my Aspen collar, none of these women even NEED to dye their hair !!!

I will dwell on it no more. Nor on the clear plastic baseball bats filled with sunflower seeds. Nor on any other aspect of that sad hell of consumable effluvium. Only to say that I asked DK "How many people commit suicide in these aisles on a daily basis from the sheer ugliness of this place ?" He, bless him, did not know.

The moon was wonderful. We agreed it lacked a tiny bit of its left side. I thought about moons not bearing grudges as I always do, thanks a lot brain stuck forever in college lit courses, and we got the soymilk, and that was that.

So why Yolanda ?

I'm trying to fit it into a poem alongside Glastonbury Abbey. Lauds. Praise for beautiful things that exist, but from which I am excluded.

Schwarzenegger's governor of CA.

How can this POSSIBLY be ? The Hitler-admiring, woman-demeaning actor and body-builder, apparantly no stranger to various Republican and ENRON related back rooms, has been, basically, installed by the Republican right wing as GOVERNOR of California. The sound of collective jaw dropping in the progressive -- nay, in the common-sense ! -- community is deafening. The nation's cases of severe TMJ syndrome increase logorithmically, from the dropping and the gnashing...

How CAN it be. HOW ?

One plunges gratefully into a dither of inarticulateness. Oh how I wish I could ululate.

He said he enjoyed getting away with upending a woman robot in a toilet. He said he wished there could have been "something floating" in the toilet. He admired Hitler's "public speaking" skills. He admired Nazi Kurt Waldheim. His movies are exemplars of mindless violence and brutality.

He is GOVERNOR of California this morning.

In the food section of the Globe some foodie twitlet "Julie Michaels" was reviewing a trendoid Berkshire Tanglewood take-out eatery. She praised their "braised duck legs" then commented one could sit out on the joint's riverside deck and watch "a friendly mallard and her brood" paddle by.

How cute ! How delicious !! I can just picture the culture-voracious yuppie family pounding down their trendy pre-Tanglewood picnic on the deck overlooking the (Julie's gushy words) "just-about-perfect Williams River":

"Ashley, sweetie, look at the Mommy Duck and her Baby Duckies ! Aren't they SWEET ????"

"Yeth, Mommy."

"Now eat your braised duck leg or we'll be late for SYMPHONY."

Oh how I would LOVE to vote for fellow vegan, Dennis Kucinich. How I would love him to be a victorious vegan David to Arnold's carnivorous meat-world Goliath !

Yesterday was the Little Meanie's Last Ride.

We bundled her up in the pink quilt where she'd been lying since I extracted her from the litterbox that morning. Still, when we entered the room, she'd gaze up and meow. Always one to say hello. Or "what the fuck is happening to me," or "I love you, master, I think I'll bite you now." She jaked DKs finger, and licked it, a good bye kiss. We bundled her up and I held her swaddled like an infant as we drove to the vet, right down Walnut Street, where just a little more than a week ago Little Meanie and I had intersected with Cell Phone Dude from Hell. In the car, she meowed, squirmed some, tried to slash my throat (no mean task through this damned brace) then pissed blood on my legs. The moment we set her gently down in the vet's room'o'death (the same room where valiant Toscar died) she just sort of blanked out, went limp, and agonal respirations set in. Poor thing. Limp and gone. We wept.

All evening I could not shake the image of the Little Meanie's soul floating, frightened and unmoored, through the aether. In some horrid cat bardo. Of course I don't believe in souls or bardos or aether, but a sense of something horribly lonely struck me. But what can be less lonely than being dead ?

Tearful, I confessed to DK that, once, I picked up an orange comb from the hospital parking lot because it looked lonely and abandoned, and placed it in my car. It's probably still there, off on another inanimate adventure.

It's the mother thing. Hard wired.

She was a fine cat. Came from a litter from a house near a Newton golfcourse in 1988. We joked about her silver spoon and her lack of stripes (she came billed as a "silver tiger.") She was drab, misfelinic, skanky, loud. Sharp, as in claws. She loved me, and I loved her. She made caves under the bedclothes. She slept behind me on the desk chair, at my chest when I would lie on the couch. She had a broken tail that, in her last years, sagged like an upside-down U when she tried to raise it in greeting. We called her "Your Little Meanie," disowning her each to the other. She coined the cat word "mreh," which seemed to be a brief utterance of contentment. She could converse with us for long minutes, meow after meow.

She dwindled over the past year, probably cancer, and I worried she was suffering. But she lapped up baby food like a Hoover, sought us out, and even had a last passionate fling with outdoors in August.

Farewell, The Little Meanie. You were a splendid being.

Well, it's not morning and I'm not in my peignoir, but, in my defense, it IS Sunday; my petit larousse confirms that peignoir has to do with combing, the robe we femmes don sortant de our bains, and portant quoi we comb our tresses. The "ample" robe, says larousse, conjuring mumus and morbidly obese odalisques. I cannot comb with any facility wearing this neck rig, and all my clothes seem wrong: damp, torn, stained, stinky. To go along with this slightly maimed body, no doubt.

I sat in the sun today, reading Louise Gluck. Her praise of common speech. Of nouns. Then more "Wild Iris," which is like a knife to my already raw heart.

Death, then.

("Mother of beauty, mystical," chimes in Wally S.)

Lying alone in Beth Israel, contemplating vertebral arteries, spines and brains, and all that can go wrong, I imagined dying and felt nothing. No terror, no anxiety, no grief. A cool indifference, that's it. "This is how it will be." I felt gratitude. So it can be faced.

And "GOD" seemed the remotest thing. A concept slightly shameful, louche, disreputable. Like thinking "GOD" is akin to being caught sneaking out of a peep-show. The night the nurse checked me in she asked whether I wanted to see a priest, or other cleric of my choice.

Yes, I said, after a moment of painful vacillation.

No one came.

There is no other path for me, then, than walking into the darkness alone, stripped of everything. Nothing ecclesiastical about it.

Suddenly I think of wayside crosses, those Lithuanian Catholic artifacts, and feel moved by what they represent: grief, longing, lostness. Hope.

Bah.

The cat's dying. The Little Meanie. 15, dwindling with some sort of cancer this past year. Literally dying. Across the hall, atop the futon in the guest room. No food or water for 3 days. Pissing blood now and then. Still meowing in greeting, but more feebly. More and more indifferent to being patted and scratched. Won't even lick water or baby food off my finger. We gaze at each other, across the gulf. All the indifference toward death I felt in the hospital vanishes, and I am grief-wracked.

The vet advised euthanasia when interest in food, water and socialization had disappeared. We may have to do this.

I remember putting Toscar to sleep. How he simply and quietly just ceased. A splendid cat. How we wept.

Bah.

Ellen came by with pots of soup today. The den is full of flowers from well-wishers. The house is a mess, and I am making peace with disorder.