I have no luggage to bring but my own heart

The line I borrow is “We have no luggage to bring but our own hearts”, written by a 17th c. Portuguese Jesuit missionary as he prepares to sail out of Macao for Japan, in Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence, one of the few things capable of sustaining my attention right now. It’s a dark story, but strangely peaceful to experience as the scenes and trials of rural, impoverished, brutalized 17c Japan are so distant from my own worries, which are all of our own worries. The depiction of the priest imprisoned but hearing confession through the grate where the Christians are locked up together before the surprising silence of an afternoon execution doesn’t give the same sense of alarm that seeing people shaking hands or sharing a table or hugging each other—on a television show or in a movie, or god forbid on the street in real life!— does. The novel makes me feel the great silence of all gods which is simultaneously the great sound and hum of all gods, all creation, all energy, all emptiness. It’s really terrible, it’s really….it’s the pink noise I’m listening to and the pink noise for and with the pink moon that’s rising tonight, outside the window which is outside the door and outside another door, my back is facing the door, and my face is facing the other window, which looks in a direction opposite the direction that the pink moon is rising. Therefore my back is facing the pink moon rising.

I have been working at home for the last three years, so this video meeting thing isn’t new to me, nor is the non-need to regularly dress for the conventions of social intercourse, not the top-half-dressed, bottom-half-fuck-it thing, not the silence of being often alone, but now, every single day, with nowhere to go ever, I find myself making meticulous effort of appearance. I spent half an hour selecting a necklace the other day, for a call with a girlfriend, but I am doing that sort of thing every day, on days when there are no calls. Mark would see it—though really he doesn’t take notice of a necklace all that much—but no one else. Wearing lipstick, something I do only rarely in “the normal case”, ordering new lipstick shades online, panic-wiping the packages when they arrive, guiltily opening the packages when they arrive, greedily trying the colors on when they arrive, trading black eyeliner for white one day and white eyeliner for black the next day, painting my toenails, shaving my legs, waxing my bikini line, meticulous flossing, regular whitening, exfoliating, moisturizing, choosing a skirt, discarding it and choosing a different skirt, taking it off and choosing a third skirt, trying a sweater with the skirt, putting a blouse on under the sweater, taking off the sweater, taking off the blouse, taking off the skirt, changing the bra, changing the panties putting it all back on, smoothing it all down, combing my hair, a sweet-smelling pomade in my hair, rose-scented underarm cream, a little scented oil on the face, a little spray of perfume on my wrist, on the back of my neck, on the back of my knee. You’ll do it your way, I’ll do it mine.

I tried to see the pink moon but I can’t, it’s clouded over here tonight and raining. I was really giving up writing, giving up poetry, for some other forms, but the other forms are closed to me at the moment. I wasn’t really giving up writing, giving up poetry, but I was giving up writing, I was giving up poetry. For silence! But not really. Although I did have the needle and thread out yesterday, and that’s an old form that gave me a lot of silent pleasure for a long time. So maybe that form, in place of the dirt forms I don’t have access to today.

Meanwhile, sentences. Here’s pink noise, pink moon, for your pink pink pink pink pink pink mood.

The perversity of the ego that declares it will write

The perversity of the ego that declares it will write “for the ages”. Great works have come out of that distortion and a greater many mediocrities also. We know that great works are relative and that without connection to a system great works languish and then vanish. Keep in mind that the ages are brief, relatively speaking. I overheard someone expressing a wish that their book would “outlast us all”. Will it outlast even an hour!

Portrait of a universe on fire, and in witness to that an ego demands infinity. Does my terror of death mean that I too demand infinity?

For some time, months into years, I’ve wanted a functional form. I’ve longed for a functional form. The simplicity of a functional form. I don’t want to give you a fucking poem, I want to give you something silent, and beautiful, that will be of service to you. I started making pots, a form I’d been wanting to learn for many years. Clay will outlast the poem, but that’s not what attracts me or keeps me interested. Its mute chemistry appeals to me, its appeal from the very dirt appeals to me, that it can be ground into dust appeals, its solidity and its mutability appeal to me, I love its low, mute, fuck-you to fame, its deafness to celebrity.

All my studios are closed now, of course. The classroom, the kiln yard. There’s nowhere for me to throw, touch, fire, sand. I live in a condo. So, fuck you: Sentences instead. Poetry instead. For now.

Fragment of a large deep vessel:

fragment of a large deep vessel. red pottery with red and black slip painted decoration.

Harappan (Indus Valley Civilization). Circa 2500 BC. Black slip, blood-colored slip, on red pottery.

no. 2 / forms

yayoi kusama, pumpkin, naoshima japan
yayoi kusama, pumpkin, naoshima island, japan

• Saturday •

Bored by the usual things so need to do the not-usual things? I walked, sans chaperone, from Mark’s house to the little market near the park — high adventure, for coffee, as I’m not three weeks out from a total hip replacement. My sense of vulnerability, uncertainty, a bit of boredom and hopelessness — all those post-surgical feelings continue. But I’ve found some things to occasionally tap my attention.  It is difficult still to imagine yoga. But by next week, maybe? A week ago walking this far still seemed not possible and it was not possible, but now I’ve come this far. But what about patience?

I don’t know who I am anymore, is that true? is that a post-surgical feeling? I want to change.  What is change? So much anxiety. But I know what anxiety is, have learned to wait for it to subside. Do I need drugs? No. Am I sleepy? No. I still find myself sleeping deeply each night and am surprised by that. Yesterday evening — unbearable anxiety attack (but one bears it) — heart racing — I lay on the bed to listen to the relaxation tape. Gradually a weird crunched-up sorrow arrived, my face contorted into an unfamiliar shape, and tears. Not sobs; a crunched-up set of tears. I feel that I am afraid to feel. This is not like me. Feelings — feel — distant.  Except for anxiety, which swallows me whole. Social anxiety too. Shall I write this in public? Oh, and the not knowing what to write, for whom or why. That’s not bad.  But — but what? I need to send a note of thanks to Claudia. I keep forgetting.

I am jealous of everything. (Is that true?) I bought myself presents. For three days I’ve felt myself wanting to BUY something, to have a package come to me in the mail, to have something new arrive. I observed my desire to acquire curiously — why, exactly? Shopping — online shopping — to relieve boredom? I didn’t buy a book, not clothes either — no clothes until all my parts are functioning fully and I’m “myself” again in body. I bought a keychain and a backpack. That sounds childish, now that I say it here. September, back-to-school type things. For children, in adult versions. Was it seasonal impulse to buy? It wasn’t. Surgical intervention is traumatic. In all of my preparatory research and planning, I neglected — I didn’t fully absorb the reckoning with the emotional impact of the transformation — of the “controlled trauma”, as my surgeon put it. The first thing I asked the nurse, coming up from the anaesthesia (“deep sedation”, actually, plus a spinal) was “What do they do with the bones?” She didn’t tell me, but I know they incinerate.

Last night, finally, I could bring myself to watch short animations of the surgery — no muscle, fat, blood, scalpels, saws, or sutures, just sanitized disembodied animations focused on excision of the diseased bone and the settling of the implant. I’m shocked that there is a foreign material in me that’s now mine to own and care for, invisible to me as my own bones were, but now working in me. It’s as though it isn’t true. I said a guilty and loving farewell to the old parts a day or two before the surgery. I can walk now without pain in my hip, any pain comes from the muscles and tendons relearning old shapes — shapes compromised a long time by the rigidity of the hip. Lots of people do this: in the U.S. alone 400,000 people each year.

If I didn’t do it now, by next year walking any distance at all would have been impossible. Mark spent a lot of last year planning a course on the Civil War, and I followed along as he gathered knowledge. What’s come to me most often during this period of convalescence is a kind of horror and sorrow for those soldiers having lost limbs or parts of limbs or undergoing any kind of field hospital surgery or recovery, sans anesthesia, without — my god, how could anyone do it? Uncontrolled trauma. Strange collapse of distance, to find myself weeping for the wounded soldiers of the Civil War. Except how fresh those cuts and their causes still are. Other frailties have made themselves more clear to me now also. That’s another subject.

Far-away friends were visiting last night to give a reading, I couldn’t go to the event (too soon), but was able to spend an hour or two with them talking. That was something.

yayoi kusama pumpkin keychain