Les Affaires de Coeur: December 2008 Archives

"And the woman liked the snake very much. Because when he talked, he made little noises with his tongue. And his long tongue was lightly licking about his lips. Like there was a little fire inside his mouth, and the flame would come dancing out of his mouth. And the woman liked this. Very much." - Laurie Anderson, Langue d'amour.

Yes, I am stressed out, but it is not exactly because I have more things to knit than time to knit them. Nor exactly because I am rapidly running out of funds and have no work lined up. Nor exactly because I have school deadlines to meet.

It is because of you, you see. You to whom I can say nothing of any of this.

"And the woman did not want to go. Because she was a hothead. Because she was a woman in love."

I look and I look and I look, and I find out something about him that makes it worse, as if he were thumbscrew-designed to seem perfect for me. As if someone had taken all the things I like and never find in men and put them into a package that happens to also appeal to me, and then there I sit, across the table, knitting, and dropping things like a 12-year-old girl.

I have those dreams that I can't wake out of, the ones where I'm all disoriented, where I wake up not remembering how old I am. I might be a child again, in a blue room somewhere in Southern California. At my grandmother's house, perhaps. I think it was blue in there - a dusky blue; the curtains had a trace of metallic foil in them. Blue flowers with metallic foil.

There was a sleeping-bag train. I was the horse - always the horse, in fact, pulling my sister behind me. That is how it was.

Now I am the horse again. Straining against the traces. One of those mustangs that goes bad and refuses the lure of oats and runs off into the wilderness despite years and years of training and formerly good behavior.

Every time I see one of those PBS programs about how you can buy a mustang, a tamed one, or a green-broke one, I think about it. Even now, in the city, I think about it.

And then I think about what I know, firsthand, about wild horses - how they think. How they feel in a herd. It's not the stallion who's in charge, did you know that? It's a mare.

I kissed him. Not the first time it's happened, but this time it was me making the move.

Now I want to fly, far away, to the top of a raw cliff, and sit there, looking out over my terrain. Far enough field of vision to see intruders coming from a long way off. Far enough to get a good big headstart, even in a headwind.

When Kitwich was little, we lived in a snowy part of the country, and on snow days she used to watch the flakes come down with an expression on her face like, "Mommy, it's raining cat toys!"

Now that she and I are city dwellers, the cat toys don't come down very often, but just a few minutes ago we started to get a few flakes, and now they're fairly pelting down. They're nice big fat ones, too - the kind that always promised a good thick carpet for me to tromp around in later.

Today, though, I'll be riding around in it, as I have places to go and people to see. I always have to get outside and experience the snow - it's one of those things that I love in some primal way that is hard to explain. Or pointless to explain - you either feel the same way about it, or you think of it as purely an inconvenience.

"We are the light that travels into space." - Zero Seven.

I love that line. I've often wondered about the connection between astronomy and metaphysics - or rather, how far off our science is from the deeper truth. No, that's not exactly it. I feel like maybe there's a connection between the kinds of esoteric ideas that advanced astro- and particle physics get into and the kinds of revelations that we usually think of as spiritual in nature.

I really don't want to die, ever, but I am curious about whether I'll find a connection at that point.

Yeah, yeah, Master of the Nonsequitur. Or however the frack you spell that.

No news is boy news, which may be a good thing, considering that I've been bashing my head into that particular brick wall the last few days, but I did have an interesting conversation with a girl who may or may not also have a crush on him. Maybe she and I will end up being friends, and that will be a nice perverse way for things to work out. It's happened before, if I'm not mistaken.

I was gonna wake up "early" today (you know why that's in quotes, don't you?) and dash off in hopes of seeing him. And then there was snow, and fond memories of Miss Kitwich keeping me company on my lap whilst I worked away next to the snowy window with the pine tree.

And now, well, there's a different snowy window, and a different pine tree, and she's on my lap again, head resting on my left arm, front paws folded under her in that beautifully Egyptian way they do, and purring, and cat-smiling at me. Who could rush off, under those circumstances?

I was thinking today that it's ironic that our popular culture's image of passionate love always revolves around a very young couple.

As even the very beautiful actors age, they're replaced by fresher models, as if desire itself fades with the onset of first wrinkles.

But the truth, I find, is quite different.

I had felt, all summer, a bit like a teenager. It was mostly to do with lifestyle. For a variety of reasons, I had a freewheeling few months, cycling about like a gadfly in the balmy air.

But it was also a state of mind. I didn't want to be pinned down by anything. I wanted, and got, lots of freedom.

And that was great. And I felt sexy. But I'd thought, at the time, that the added fillip of sexiness coursing through me was due to feeling young.

It's not.

I've come to realize that now, in my 40s, I am capable of feeling desire on a scale that is completely unlike anything I experienced as a young woman. I'm not just referring to my present state (though that is certainly an excellent example); it's happened a few times in the last few years, and it seems to be a permanent change in me.

I have two theories about it. (I've always got a theory or two, no?)

A) It's an internal change, to do with having grown more fully myself in the last few years. That may be something specific to me, because I've been on a bit of a mission about it. I've gained access to parts of myself that had lain dormant for many years (okay, all my life), and as such, I'm a much more fully throttled engine than I used to be. Picture the difference in horsepower you get when your car gets a desperately needed tuneup - then multiply that by some large exponential factor.

B) It's also got to do with recognizing what I want in other people. I think two people in their 40s are more likely than two people in their 20s (or even 30s) to know what they want when they see it. It probably doesn't come up as often; there are fewer people out there who will float their respective boats - both because lots of the ones who might are already married off, and because - I think - there never were that many to begin with; we just imagined the leakier boats into a more attractive state because we wanted there to be a bigger selection.

By the time you get to the point of knowing yourself pretty well, and believing that you deserve somebody worthy of you, you begin to recognize that those people are not thick on the ground.

So when you do magically run into them, well, it feels a lot like running right into a brick wall. It's a shock, and you're very likely to hurt your head.

"She's the place I'm heading. And I hardly know her." - Inman, describing Ada, in Cold Mountain.

"I lie awake; I've gone to ground. I'm watching porn in my hotel dressing gown." - Zero Seven

"Dip him in the river who loves water." - William Blake

It's so hard to tell, sometimes, just how I'm doing. On one level, I feel happy. On another, I am anxious. I am trying not to care how things go, because I have sort of come to terms with the fact that I am exceedingly unlikely to be able to get what I want in this situation, and that it's got nothing to do with not being pretty enough or charming enough or XYZ enough. It's got very little to do with me, at all, I think. It just is the way it is.

Like life, in that way. One of the hardest things to learn, it seems to me, is that no matter how much we want life to be a certain way, it persists in being the way it is. Unpredictable. Unwrangleable. Unknowable.

We may know, in theory, that that is actually part of the point. We may even feel that one of our chief goals is to learn to surf the unknown, to allow the wave to go where it wills us, to ride the crest and balance on that uncertainty, poised and at peace.

But, if I may quote Papa Matrix for a moment, there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.

Oh, such a difference. I am halfway there, I think. I am half at ease and half anxious. Half accepting what comes, and half wanting to wrench it all into place with my own two hands. Knit knit knit knit knit. If I just keep thrashing these pointed sticks back and forth in my hands, maybe, like the Fates, I can shape the design of events to my liking. Yeah, right.

Note: The title of this post is a verbatim line from a documentary that's on TV right now. Who writes these things?

I'd like to say that there's nothing so bad that brunch with my girls can't cure, but it's not quite true.

It's almost true, though.

I had a great day today, even though I had bouts of grumpyness and frustration, even though the wind nearly blew us into another county, even though I haven't ridden either bicycle in two days and am uncertain about the future of these knees for tomorrow. Okay, wait I'd better not start talking about that - it will send me into a downspin.

So, leaving that aside for the moment. Brunch. Happy happy brunch. My favorite omelette: egg whites, spinach, scallions, made perfectly at a certain place where once there was a very cute French boy who hit upon me by remarking, after I'd given him a Ginger Altoid, that it was very sexual. He meant sensual, of course. By which he meant to imply sexual. It was a whole delicious curly-headed incident, witnessed by Miz Fury, my mom, and my sister. I turned absolutely bright red and wanted to take him there, on the table.

Oh dear.

Where was I?

Oh yes, brunch. No French boys today; they are a rare and timid species, the pretty curly-headed French boys. They only make their appearance on the first springlike day. They pop their sweet flirtatious little heads out, suck your Ginger Altoid, pick up their handsome tips, and then sashay their lithe little behinds away for the rest of the year. No doubt to Paris, or Provence, where it might be warmer than it is here.

But the omelettes are still damn good. And then we did some errands and wandering, and making of silly dirty jokes (which are our forte), and we went and drank grog (arrr, why is all the rum gone?), and knitted, and talked about the difficulty of getting a straight answer from a straight man. And I rolled my eyes a lot, and fixed a couple of stitch mistakes for Special J, which made me feel useful and magical.

And we went yarn shopping. And I picked up two different kinds of crack - I mean Malabrigo - for gift knitting. Glorious purple Silky Merino for mom, and burgundy Chunky Merino for one of the bike boys (not that one, a different, though equally handsome one). The burgundy is much less orange than it looks in the photo - it's a nice dark brick red.

Lord, is there anything that yummy yarn and dear friends can't fix? No, there really, really isn't.

I wrote here, perhaps a few months ago, that if I were to ask myself what I wanted, I wouldn't have a definitive answer.

I don't know the degree to which that's changed, but I have been thinking lately about the nature of wanting. Or to put it more properly, of desire.

Ours is a weird society in some ways. When the Sept. 11 attacks hit, I remember being shocked (and appalled) that our president was asking us to pull together and...shop. Fight terrorists by spending money.

That just never made any sense to me. And it didn't to a lot of other people, either, judging by the social indicators (on which it was, at the time, my job to report). People were wanting to hunker down with loved ones and think about the deeper meanings of their lives. The acquisition of more stuff held, for once, not much magic or comfort.

I suppose it makes a little more sense to be exhorting us to spend money during a serious-seeming economic downturn, but still I get unnerved when I see things like this. And no, I couldn't bear to watch the video.

I have to say, I think that in our society a lot of the true function and meaning of desire (and by that I mean Desire, writ large) has been distorted, transmuted wrongly into a lust for material goods.

I'm not the only, first, or even 2,000th person to notice this, and yet it really does persist. It's as if that's what's at the center of our cultural identity: a yearning for stuff.

That can't be right. I mean, even as I wrote the words on the page, it just looked ridiculous - more like a child's arrangement of alphabet blocks than a real sentence. It's so wrong I can hardly even begin to explain why it's wrong.

It occurs to me, from the depths of my own, rather different, swirling storm of desires, that Desire as a basic human quality (it feels like it's not quite an emotion, more of a verb than that) has a proper function in a human life. I don't know what it is, exactly, but there is a sense in which a strong yearning for something - maybe anything - feels like a yearning for everything. For truth, to look into the night sky and see there the world - many worlds, an impossible measure of unknown creatures, looking back at me.

I won't ever know what they are saying - maybe when I am dead and melt once more into that dark soup - but somehow to look up and feel the cold burning of the question feels like a good thing. And when it comes to desiring other people, well, it's maybe a hotter question, but there hangs some truth there, too, in the heaviness of it. The feeling of it weighing down my steps and reading meaning that may or may not be there in gestures, in smiles, in smells.

Am I wrong, or is there some kind of poetry in that? There is, at least, no question that I am alive.