Paula's House of Toast

It seems, some days, that GWB passes up NO chance to deliver someone or something over to the grim reaper: from his days as Lord High Executioner in Texas, to his current project for a new century of endless war, he is one hell of a thanatocentric dude.

Even when he eats Thai food there is occasion for sacrifice and suffering -- an intraperitoneal injection of pad thai cannot be a positive experience for a mouse.

I am thinking of the deer mouse, Admiral Byrd, who lived with us for three months last frigid winter, snatched from the jaws of feline death one midnight by my son. Miraculously, he (she?) lived through the night, and I had to decide what to do.

How could such a quivering nubbin of protoplasm survive near zero temps and snow ? Following various snippets of advice, and secretly terrified I'd be dead of hanta virus within hours, I got the little creature a plastic cage, nesting material, water, food, swaddled the cage up in a towel to "simulate the inside of a wall," and left it alone as much as possible. Byrd took over the guest room, door shut, of course to keep out four kitties who just KNEW something delectable was in there.

And there he endured until April, when I upended the cage under the rhododendrons, and he scampered off.

Was I jailer or savior ? These categories do not pertain, probably, in the mouse mind. His months with me may have been worse than having presidential Thai food injected into one's abdomen, for all I know. My coworkers, save one (my compadre semi-veg, animal-rights L.), thought I was nuts.

But I do know that my mouse truly earned his name. In 1934 Admiral Byrd wintered in Antarctica alone in an ice hermitage, Bolling Advance Weather Base, eventually sickened and half crazed by a malfunctioning stove; he survived, and wrote an amazing account of it in "Alone," one of the seminal books of my reading and mental life.

A diary entry of his, April 14, describes the utter beauty of the landscape observed during a walk "at 4 pm in 89 degrees of frost" -- the sun sinking below the horizon, Venus rising, the aurora, the silence -- and he concludes, rapturously: "In that instant I could feel no doubt of man's oneness with the universe...It was a feeling that transcended reason; that went to the heart of man's despair and found it groundless. The universe was a cosmos, not a chaos; man was as rightfully a part of that cosmos as were the day and night."

The Charles WAS a mill stream; a mill river, at least. And the part of the path near here where I've been walking was where a dyeworks was decades ago. I went there again today, on my way home from a trip to the ATM on River Street. It felt wonderful to be walking in the bright, cool day. I decided to return by way of the bike path. It's odd, well maybe not, how jumpy I am around cars since my smash-up. They seem malevolent, hell-bent on me. I can envision even more catastrophes than I could before the wreck. That's a lotta catastophizing.

On the dirty white bridge that goes over the Chrles just past the old Jimenez Auto Body shop, I was in full daydream mode. I was gazing across the street at a neatly dressed, very dignified older woman. "A nun," I thought, remembering the nuns who drove me around in the rain at the Merton retreat, and then promptly tangled my feet in some autumnal detritus and crashed to the sidewalk. (Try keeping track of YOUR feet wearing bifocals and an aspen collar.)

"This is probably EXACTLY what someone with osteoporosis and a broken neck shouldn't be doing," I thought on my way down, deeply embarrassed, scrambling to my feet lest some samaritan rush to my aid and deepen my embarrassment. Ten yards of limping brought me to the entrance of the path. With great relief, I ducked into the woods to lick my wounds. Which are, thank God, minimal: lumpy bruise under left patella, twinges here and there.

So it was a beautiful walk. I stopped to gaze at a welter of branches and weed stalks, clumps of asters, clusters of berries. One twig looked so pale and translucent that I thought of my own bones, my poor old vitamin-D starved skeleton, and felt a sudden stark kinship that nearly brought me to tears. And to my knees. As if my whole body wanted to express what I was feeling. Prostration. The bow of bows. One-ness, humility, gratitude.

This is incarnation, I thought, all of this. A cruciform telephone pole rose behind some low white pines. Behind it, blinding sunshine.

I ducked into a small footpath that leads right to the river bank, the one criss crossed by python-sized roots, picking my way carefully over them. The pathside was strewn with several pieces of clothing -- a sweatshirt, a jacket, something that looked like a demolished back pack. And there, on a little bushy outcropping, almost hidden from view, I saw a tent. Old, blue, dirty, domed.

Someone's living here. Suddenly I felt like an intruder, and quietly left. Speculating seems a violation.

It was noon. Sext. Speculate comes from seeing. Nothing is more visible than a crucifixion at high noon. Noon: the hour of incarnation. No wonder darkness fell.

Finally, after weeks of UN level shuttle diplomacy with Margaret the Beth Israel Film Librarian, my neck MRI arrives via Fedex.

I tear the envelope open, greedy for a look at my innards.

The pictures are beautiful, and creepy at the same time. Me, as bisected cadaver. Me voila, indeed.

I was reflecting, the other day, about the inner landscape. How the heart feels impossibly remote, like some God dwelling at the core of a mountain. In fact, I can feel my heart tapping on my ribcage when I lie on my left side and exhale, doing its lub dub thing centimeters from my probing hand.

The brain seems elsewhere. Aloft, I think. Upstairs. Certainly not a trepanation away. Uterus ? Occulted, for sure. Something curled in a den, hibernating, underground. In the next county. I remember my astonishment when, pregnant, I could first feel it rising above the pubic symphysis. The spleen ? Off somewhere slouching in a disreputable bar, cell phone off, hours late for dinner. Intestines ? Tunneling to China.

There is dissection, then there is putting the body back together and living in it. Same with mind, all those busy, fusty skandhas noted and released, noted and released.

There is etymology, then there is putting the word back together.

And in poetry, seeing, and saying. The force and rightness of things. Pulling out GMHopkins to refresh myself on "inscape," I find excerpts from his journals -- rude sketches of a bluebell and an ash twig, and ruminations on their "inscape." Their isness, their suchness.

I think the project of the rest of my life has become the reconstructive one, the reconstitutive one. Seems somehow fitting to my current state of mild fallen apartness.

Operating on the theory that walking and outdoors are an indisputably holistic and life-affirming combination, I struck out into the beautiful, clear, windy afternoon.

First off, I met Joe, who, noticing my Frankenstein Collar, and hearing about my smash-up, counseled me to sue Cell Phone Dude From Hell immediately. He would. If he were me. Even for the few gallons of unused gas that might have been in my poor old lavender Corolla when it met its maker ! For my pain and suffering. For my, goddamn it, lack of FUN ! Wink wink. I squatted to pat the cutesy little pup, Winston. It seemed pleased. Joe and I came to a quick agreement about how cell phones and driving do not mix.

I was going to head to Gore Place and scope out the sheep, but my Judge Judyesque chat w/ Joe so addled me that before I knew it, I was halfway to the river. Fair enough. Haven't been to the Chuck for weeks, since my days of weed and wildflower spotting.

Much to my surprise, someone (who?) has given the Charles River bike path a haircut !

All those luxuriant ranks of hosannah-waving horseweed are GONE ! Mowed to a flat lawn. Along with many of the other overgrown stands of weed and vine. Not, I suppose, in a bad or ugly way, but in a way that clears out for next year's growth -- and there's plenty left to observe, naturally -- but, gosh, it looks different !

The beautiful phragmites have been decapitated, but that outlandish, tall and delicate grass I couldn't identify, with the spare calligraphic seedhead w/ orange and purple fuzzy tongues, that's still there -- the seeds involuted to a spare dull brown. I was glad to see them. The loosestrife has all gone out. Snuffed brown wicks. The tendrilled grape-vine like thing near the footbridge, with the small white flowers has sprouted huge, wild, spiky green pods. The only color, now, is from the late blooming asters -- purple, and white. The bees were going at it. Waxy fruits were everywhere: light dusty blue (?holly), red,
dark blue. Plus choke cherries, and nightshade berries. A few evening primrose still had a yellow petal or two, but, by and large, the world was busily going to seed in a million shades of brown.

I felt very happy. There was wind, and movement, and the sound of the wind. There was the smell of the water, and the cascade of memories that invokes. Ducks on the water -- some mallards with their shiny green heads. Birds fluttering in the underbrush. Seeing and hearing and thinking and the world seemed one seamless flow.

May all beings be as happy as I was in that moment, and as at peace.

anita rust

I like the word. I like the way it sounds, the bald anglosaxophonicity of it. Plus, I have decided that I am a freak. In the old sense of the word. "A product of irregular or sportive fancy," or "a sudden causeless change or turn of the mind; a capricious humour, whim or vagary." From "dancing," explains the compact OED, which I can just barely still read without the magnifier.

I put forth this theory to my internist during my physical. The topic was my cleverly having contracted a riproaring case of the adult version of rickets. She reassured me that I was not the only person to have done so. Paused. Added, "maybe the only doctor, though."

QED.

Freak freak freak freak freak ! Lusus naturae, to be more Latinate about it.

Am I, though, a freak of nature or nurture ? I had the blandest of childhoods. (I am reading "Running w/ Scissors" -- compared to that, anyone's childhood seems Leave-it-to-Beaverish.) We're talking WAY beyond Winnicott's "good enough mothering." I had more than enough of everything a kiddo needs.

Thus I must posit nature as the culprit.

And Erik Erikson.

Of course that's like crediting evolution itself to Darwin, and not the nature of things. But what the hell.

A few years ago I wrote a series of poems based on Erikson's "Eight Ages of Man" (yes, MAN) in "Childhood and Society." It's a staircase-like schema along which one moves, optimally, from Basic Trust to Ego Integrity; in my case I seem to have chosen the stairs that ascend from Basic Mistrust to Despair, tripping along the way on shame, guilt, inferiority, role confusion, isolation and stagnation. Or at least that's how it seems some days.

Of course I'm giving a less than nuanced reading of his text.

But I'm convinced that the basic existential and neurochemical factor in my life has been shyness. All my freakiness flows from that, or from my ill-considered rebellions against it. Club feet ? Well then ! Be a ballerina ! Terribly shy ! Why not practice medicine ? Same freakin' thing, no ? Well, no, I suppose not.

I suppose Big Pharma would have me popping Paxil for my "social anxiety disorder." Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will run with effortless small talk.

I am always reminded of a bit from a Woody Allen movie where he takes an employment aptitude test, and finds out he's most suited to being a "shepherd."

Mine would advise Trappist monk, I'm sure.

I used to love to thunder dorky Hanon piano exercises up and down the keyboard. The warm up. Truth is, I am mostly unmusical and terribly lazy.

I remember, in the sixth grade, being set back from the first to the second row in the chorus "because you don't open your mouth wide enough." Oh sure, joshed my parents, implying it was what was emanating from my mouth that was the problem, not the size of it. I caught their subtext. And they were correct. Can't sing. Never could.

But, still, I want to wake up a prodigy and never break a sweat. That's not to say I haven't loved messing with instruments my whole life, and even hacked up some skill on the clarinet and recorder. But I overall I am sub-dilletante, happiest when thundering Hanon. As musical as waterskiing, as hanging-on-for-the-ride.

My father told me, a few years back, over bad Chinese food: you are addicted to writing. Oh pshaw, I muttered inwardly, dismissing his comment as a pop-cult way-off-the-mark analysis.

Turns out he was right. Like gambling. The more praise and/or publication I got, the more I wrote. Pavlovian. I was a poetry machine. An ugly stinky factory. Submitting like a banshee, then resubmitting when they came back, rejected. Like bad meat re-sold to the poor. Cranking 'em out with little revision. Capitalismo. Kathunk kathunk kathunk goes the iamb machine. No wonder I have abolished my shelf of little mags to the spare room, and replaced them with texts concerned with wordlessness and absolution. Evidence of my shame.

But I've written all my life.

It was better when it was completely private, even secret. I learned some things from "workshopping," but not much. The group grope feel of it always troubled me. Doing readings was wierd. Totally not-me. Performing with the JCA: how did I ever do it ? And now look. A blog. The irony is paralyzing. I am shameless.

Shame. Being seen.

It has always struck me that one of the projects of the anorexic is to disappear from view. And the paradox is that, by shrinking, she becomes a spectacle. And that there is a secret pride in the spectacle. Look. Don't look. A terrible bind.

At the Megalomart the other day w/ DK getting fixings for tea with Greer I saw one of those incredibly thin adolescent girls, low-ride jeans virtually painted onto stick legs, fleshless arms twigging out of a sleeveless shirt: I've got your number honey, I wanted to say, brutally, without compassion. Still pissed at my own inner annie.

It's a bright, windy afternoon. I'm trying to ignite something here, write my way at least into the general vicinity of the Prime poem. Prime is 6 am, it turns out. When I wake. The Trappists have been up for hours.

I watched the Cistercian video yesterday, the Abbey at Spencer. It was beautiful and moving. The monks built it, stone by stone, in 1950. There was grainy film of them hauling rocks.

I would love to live my life over as a trappist monk. No, not a nun, not a "Bride of Christ" -- a Monk. A brother.

Talk about an odd variation on penis envy. Celibate penis envy. What would the Alienist say ?

Child, you have become clinically insane. Go forth from the chamber of psychoanalysis and take thee to the ugly dens and warrens of Big Pharma. There Zoloft and Abilify await to resurrect you and restore your powers.

I offered to "sex-up" DKs promotion "dossier" (their word) and he was briefly taken aback, not being the BBC listener I am, and not having followed the "sexing up the dossier" scandal that led to Dr Kelly's suicide and the judicial hearings and actual accountability being sought.

I told him GOVERNMENTS produce dossiers. Part-time harmony teachers should not have to.

I think the requirements of his dossier have resulted in a document probably more complicated and byzantine that Tony Blair's. He showed me two three ring binders worth of stuff. John Heiss was faxing supporting documents here at 8 this morning. But at least DKs "dossier" has integrity, in grand contradistinction to Tony Blair's and to all the material Dubya et alia foisted forth as reasons for war.

DK worked on his dossier (God I love that word) for days. I told him I'd insert some text about New England Conservatory possessing harmonies of mass destruction with a 45 minute launch capability toward Berklee "Nothing Conservatory About It" College of Music. He declined.

I think the work "dossier" is ALMOST as cool as the French name Didier.

This "medical leave" gives me the small, domestic sense of a world going on quite nicely without me, thank you. I am in my BATHROBE at 10:30 AM on Tuesday morning.

Needless to say, this little snippet of obviousness balloons into the fact that "the world" has and always will "go on without me," in TSEliot's sense of time before and time after; the moon, after all, does NOT bear a grudge, neither against "me" nor against my original face before I was born. "We were all together at the big bang" is not a particularly comforting thought, other than on a coldly cerebral level. Of course that's my turf.

I hate the word "spiritual." I hate it when it's spoken aloud with a rolling-around-upon the tongue evangelical voluptuousness, lots of emphasis on the R's and a porky "ch" right chunk in the middle. Spurrrrrch'l. Spurs, retching, church. I've replaced it in my discourse with a hedging "metaphysical," though that's not much better.

I hate the word "healing." Fine thing for a doc, eh ? I use it begrudgingly in it the narrow sense of a bodily illness or injury resolving. But it's been one of those words co-opted for marketing purposes. Invoke "healing" and the field of moral authority has been claimed. Next thing you know, "closure" will have been achieved.

It gives me the willies.

And while we're on the topic of oogy words, why does the word "tits" sound so satisfyingly tough-minded, and "titties" so, well, creepily salacious ?

I must remove this bathrobe instantly. It is "creepy" to be in a bathrobe" at 10:30 AM on a Tuesday. There is nothing salacious about this robe, however.

GG was here yesterday. We had tea, and ice cream/soy icecream. It was splendid. We yucked it up, shared poems and cosmologies (she has renamed the whole sky for her created world. It's breathtaking. I was moved to see the star charts.) She brought tales of her most interesting cirlcles of friends, and we shared wicked glee about many things. DK drove her home via a surreal visit to "staples," a hell of red marketing banners and office supplies. He kept ranting about my "saintly" and uncharacteristic refusal to get incensed at the auto dealership.

I must read George Whitesides' scholarly paper on the scientific assumptions that will crumble. One of which seems to be "That there will be a world." He's won some kind of major Japanese prize; GG's friend Barbara, his wife, old Wellesley prof, will meet the emperor. His father "discovered Egypt" or some such thing. It's exciting to be within six degrees of sep. from such marvelous and accomplished -- and reportedly genuinely nice -- folks.

PF and MK from work will visit tonight. I have sent emails warning them about the squalor. I did not mention the vague odor of cat piss that, unable to crawl about on the floor sniffing, I have yet to find and abolish.

Maybe I'll tackle "Prime" today.

very loud very bad music on outdoor speakers; inside there were bowls of pathetically over-picked ruffled potato chips; sausages were promised. (I am a vegan, I muttered, darkly. Popcorn was invoked. ) The outdoor music was so loud I thought of the FBI's psycho-warfare against the Koresh Branch Davidian compound; men in stiff suits milled on the sidewalk -- Mormons ? Undertakers ? No.

Car salesmen.

But I had an epiphany.

I was entering a world with its own set of rules and procedures. Its own scripts. The men (they were all men today) working in it have their own agendas, processes, rituals, goals. Like in medicine. I expect patients to undress and don johnnies. I expect them to tell me certan things, and to allow me to touch them, to invade their rectums and vaginas for God's sakes ! I feel irritated by (but try to accommodate) patients who can't tolerate the "rules" -- and a lot of it IS empty ritual.

I know the goals of selling a car and of providing healthcare are not comparable.

But I decided that, insofar as it is possible, I would abide by the "buying a car" rules and rituals. And be polite. DK was chafing, pissed, wanted to bolt. More men kept arriving, each some sort of sub-manager, each with clipboards, promises, suggestions, attempts to pin us down to cars, timetables, appointments, anything. Many had that hairstyle, that upgreased spiky one, that seems au courant. They were large and hearty.

People who sell cars have a pretty lousy job, and I'm going to try and keep my inner crank in a Gorian lockbox during this whole ordeal. It will not be easy w/ DK at my side.

Needless to say, we didn't buy one today.

The horror.

Astonishing glimpses of fall from my recent Persephenoid undergroundedness: leaves turrning colors, and some, now, even falling. I like the hectic feel of movement -- leaves in the air, tumbling along the street in the wind with that unique scritching sound. Like everything's on pilgrimage. The backyard crabgrasslawn has browned nicely, and wears a dusting of leaves. Mr Sturgis has arrived under the cover of darkness and quietly removed the remaining two dead hemlocks, those ill-fated trees that that lawn care lothario Mr Caruso foisted of onto us landscape naifs.

There's a certain deciduousness happening here, too. The Goddess entropy has taken up residence and is having her way with my house.
Scraps of unidentifiable effluvium litter the floor. The rugs seem to be sprouting nubbins of small mammals. The litter box room -- well, there must be clauses in the Public health Laws that pertain.

Persephone. Weil keeps mentioning how she ate the pomegranite seed, and her fate was sealed -- Kore a mange le grenade. Hey, Uncle Sig, doesn't a pomegranite seem more feminine than phallic ? Except for all those little seeds. Nothing androgynous, though, about the God of the Underworld. I am reminded of my first glimpse of a living testis. In surgery, in medical school. It resembles, I thought, astonished, a peeled egg.

I am also remembering the day I sat in Dr M's office catharting, deeply immersed in, lost in, the last extra-late limb of my residency, circa 1993, miserable and addled beyond belief. It was a lovely spring day, and the window was slightly open, and I remember cool wind on my elbow. His office was a sanctuary, laden with the whole experience of my psychoanalysis with him 2 decades prior. He saw me gratis a few times a month when I was at my worst there, simply trying to get through the next moment. It struck me, that day, that to me practicing medicine was like a marriage to the God of the Underworld, and that the rest of my life -- writing, family -- was like my springtime reunion with Demeter. The other image that keeps returning is that of Jonah in the whale's belly.

The doctor despite herself.

...and many more frankly Freudian defense mechanisms were in play yesterday when my associations to the Beautiful Big Black Refrigerator did not lead to the obvious, hideous, real-world consumer imperative that is staring me in the face.

Remember: I am a woman who quails -- seriously quails -- at buying socks and shampoo. Who considers shopping lower than several unmentionable bodily functions in the hierarchy of shame and disgust.

I (gasp) must buy (oh oh oh oh) a (ululululululululate) car.

Or, as some might chipperly say "purchase a vehicle."

I am beseiged by TV-fueled marketing images. All those ROTATING cars. Yes, rotating. In ads, they invariably rotate. Or have some luscious babe draped over them. Or rotate, draped w/babe. As they navigate (and despoil) tract upon tract of wilderness. At breakneck speeds that we are cautioned (in small print) not to undertake ourselves, not being "trained drivers" on "closed tracks."

Or that cosy ad of a couple buying a car on the internet. Clicking on all the options. "Building" their new car, I think the ad calls it. As if they were Simone Weil toiling in the Renault plant. The dude wants a cool stereo. The chick deems that a tad (only a tad, mind you) frivolous. They smile, exude acceptable degrees of greed, all will be well, etc etc etc.

Some inarticulate fellow named Pete from Planet Insurance explained to me why he has decided to give me $7000 for my poor dead car. Coulda been $8000, coulda been $6500, so, landing somewhere in the arbitrary midzone between the two Sources he consulted, he came up w/ 7000. Hmmm. That's not very much, I demur. He waxed indignant. I waxed silent.

I really liked the letter I got from Cellphone Dude From Hell's insurance company reminding me several times that it was my responsibility to "mitigate" something so that I could receive the excellent service that I deserved. Mitigate what, asshole, I wanted to scream: mitigate the ugly gash in the side of my dead car ? (The photos we took of it, and scraggly-haired, be-collared me, resplendant in Hawaiian shirt and plaid, posing next to it came yesterday.) Mitigate my broken neck ? Shouldn't Cellphone Dude From Hell done a little pro-active mitigating before he ploughed into us ? Mitigate. Sure.

But, yes, I must buy a car.

The horror.