Author: Inthegazeoftheother

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The Last Time I Will See Joni

 

 

Last night I dined with a Joni fan, someone with whom I found common ground initially on that fact alone, tossing her words at the appropriate emotion or situation, as if to say, “You know what I mean?” Oddly enough, we did not talk about Joni, though she was there, framing our discussion, our gestures and postures on love, men and the world. We are both children weaned on her music and so look through her lenses, her lyrics and voice, in daily life.

Joni has been on my mind lately for the same reason as Linda Grant has written about her in It’s not always easy to be a Joni Mitchell fan, but her illness devastates me in the Guardian. Joni is ill, has been for a while, and it looks as if life’s accumulations have conspired to bury her soon, if not from this latest episode of falling unconscious, then perhaps not long after. She is 72, a dedicated smoker, and embittered by all accounts. 
 
But it is not the person but the persona of Joni Mitchell that I have adored all my life. She captured the spirit of my youth and has been my creative mother, in some ways, a decade older and wiser, tethering me along on her words and experiences that resonate with and color my own. She is always first, and my footsteps follow in the safety and security of her words and melodies to accompany my heart breaks, my pride and creative yearning.
 
I agree with Grant. When she goes, her music will survive, but something, the undergirding of a culture, a huge part of its iconography, will be lost and will be suffered by some of her daughters, ones like me whose history of love has always been bathed in her coursing stream of heart songs, like the loss of a limb.
 
She has called herself “a scientist of love”; how to love is what she’s trying to get to the bottom of. Like Jean Rhys, she has drawn the anatomy of a woman’s heart, the men we fall for, the loneliness, the fatal choices. The accretion of age, the disappointments of living, are part of the journey we’ve all been on with her, so this life-long fandom can’t have a happy ending. Or even a happy middle. Pity the poor children with an indelible online record of the day they wept when they heard Zayn Malik was leaving One Direction. Perhaps the lifelong experience of being a fan, an admirer, an acolyte or a student of an artist will turn out to have been a fluke, a small window of privilege, and from now on careers will burn up in a year or two, the experience fleeting for the adorer and the adored alike. I don’t think she knows how much she’s venerated. Or maybe she knows and it doesn’t matter. It fulfils nothing. It makes no difference. She’s as alone with her music as we are.
 
 Critical acclaim and personality contest winners have never been criteria for my musical tastes, so I will die a Joni fan no matter the latest news of her quirks and habit–or her death. Here’s to you, Joni, and wishing you good health in as long a life as you permit.
 
Last Time I Saw Richard

by Joni Mitchell

The last time I saw Richard was Detroit in ’68
And he told me all romantics meet the same fate someday
Cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark café
You laugh he said you think you’re immune
Go look at your eyes they’re full of moon
You like roses and kisses and pretty men to tell you
All those pretty lies pretty lies
When you gonna realize they’re only pretty lies
Only pretty lies just pretty lies

He put a quarter in the Wurlitzer and he pushed
Three buttons and the thing began to whirr
And a bar maid came by in fishnet stockings and a bow tie
And she said “Drink up now it’s getting’ on time to close”
“Richard, you haven’t really changed” I said
It’s just that now you’re romanticizing some pain that’s in your head
You got tombs in your eyes but the songs you punched are dreaming
Listen, they sing of love so sweet, love so sweet
When you gonna get yourself back on your feet?
Oh and love can be so sweet Love so sweet

Richard got married to a figure skater
And he bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator
And he drinks at home now most nights with the TV on
And all the house lights left up bright
I’m gonna blow this damn candle out
I don’t want nobody comin’ over to my table
I got nothing to talk to anybody about
All good dreamers pass this way some day
Hidin’ behind bottles in dark cafes dark cafes
Only a dark cocoon before I get my gorgeous wings and fly away
Only a phase these dark café days

© 1970; Joni Mitchell

 

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Bar Flight

  

credit: http://images.fineartamerica.com/saulnier


Sitting at the corner bar, satisfying the urge for a beer and relieving the boredom jitters, I’m tormented by indiscriminate shouting of barflies and distant diners lining the walls of the dark, decor of seafaring ships, anchors and fish. Sea legs. Clearly this place lacks intelligent acoustic design, much to the chagrin of the owners who honestly tried to reduce the clamor crawling the high ceilings, especially with a yoga studio above it. I once heard the story, sitting at this bar with M many months before.

My girlfriend’s already signed off for the night, so I am unconcerned about my phone’s rings, dings and buzzes. I am wherever for whatever. Thinking about the last time we met at the hotel for a quick grope and a tickle, sneaking a hurried sigh and a fierce kiss, my mind smiles, my face impassive.

The pretend-lover is off somewhere in the night, leaving town for the week tomorrow, as the story goes still smoldering in the musk stains left in my hair, emitted in the toss of my head as I spy the inhabitants of this sultry Thursday crowd. At least we got to do the fuck-and-lie before the morning’s 8 a.m. departure. What’s the weather like in the Southeast?

Often it’s the simplest moment that lingers on the tongue of my thoughts, savored in sensorial bites: a shy side glance of the twenty-something deeply brown-eyed half of the pair sitting on the stools next to me sends static up my spine, an imperceptible eye-twitch, my senses on electricity. What does it mean?

I crave quiet corners most of the time, am in love with intimate spaces with or without another. In an unsuspecting moment, memory flashes the scent of heat rushing from a wall heater mixed with bleach and sweat in a dark room in mid-afternoon while we nap, your arm dead over my hips and belly. 

Though the time is so little, so simple, it stays. Maybe that’s the draw, the beauty of it, it’s simplicity and freedom to be whatever we need it to be, something of our own creation without the stress of trying to make it be too much, like living and planning and being together, which is complicated and full of friction. Our island is tiny and sporadic, though well-timed. Maybe it’s the island that is the draw more so than I. 

His wife hates him as much as she loves him, that’s what the bar fly kitty corner to me yells over the blaring music to his companions. I wonder why. Perhaps she cannot stand the way he mispronounces the names of her favorite artist, or his snoring, explosive anger, criticism, taken-for-granted use of her body for his release coupled with the inability to fulfill her because she never figured out how that could be, relied on him to figure it out, but could not relax enough to let him, guide him or even try.

Nat King Cole croons “Unforgettable.”

Filling out a daily diary of calories in my phone app is tedious, a task I assigned myself as consciousness raising more than dieting but it has, like so many other healthy exercises enthusiastically commenced, deteriorated to an obsession. 

The same guy three stools down shouting over the next song, a 70s favorite I recognize but will have to focus on more if I want to remember the artist and title, whinnying really in a high tinny voice, about his divorce and how his wife regrets the divorce being the way it was. Also, his daughter and plans for spring break to be with her and her friends, Abbey her name, is really shaping up. Oh, so a divorce has permanently taken up residence in his conversation. The ex hates and loves him.

The divorce story’s addressees are a big bald dude and his Asian-looking companion, petite and smartly dressed with discreet cleavage, smooth-skinned soft peaks demurely and tastefully displayed below a string of pearl-like gems. She speaks with an unidentifiable accent. Like her, I am only half listening. The divorce story seems to be aimed at her, a polite, captive audience, while her boyfriend baldy winks at her looking away from the divorce tale-teller. Divorce guy wants to be heard. Baldy stays quiet, polite agreement here and there. He wants to be home fucking pearl girl. “That’s the way God meant it to be in some ways,” Divorce says. I missed the context of that statement.

Brings me back to a lover and his week of agony, strife with the wife, severe enough for him to act deflated, distracted passion, wildly unusual, so that I had to ask, as he collapsed away from me and sunk into the mattress, fists fretted together, face pinched in deep furrows, what was the matter. Did he expect me to sense his grief and ask? He is not as mysterious as I once thought. 

In our fifth year he took up confession; home life was bad, stressful, not good for the kids, he told me, the emailed story unfolding in exclamatory bursts, philosophical resignation, religious retreat and cautionary reminders. I did nothing to provoke the last so have to conjecture: it crossed his mind, the thought of leaving, running to me, but he got scared or sober or logical. He tasted the bitterness and stinging hate of hurt and revenge, the loss of power, prestige and pleasure, time spent with his children, too soon gone. 

Imagined scenarios of our making are the engine of creation, the mechanics of our story trotted out for each other to admire and merge into on cue.

Hate, vengeance and righteousness of god, fashioned to her fundamental beliefs in a church that spreads the selective word of a deity who manifested love, she believes he must be the man she wants him to be. The wont of their ilk is to toss sacred words to trump one over the other.

An ancient story repeated, their love grown in children and the grace of goods bought and sold, possession of a union, a house, a garden, two cars and a dog, they loved and rubbed each other right until it was wrong. Humans are pattern makers. God chuckles.

But he was clearly jarred, sorrowed, repentant, and seeking comfort in a resolve to improve, surrender, endure and abide, a solution time tested. Biding time is what we do. Some call it the journey. With attention, it is often referred to as presence, the fullness of time and the conjoint spirit of one. I am content. 

I prefer small pockets of pleasure disturbed by the occasional deep, destructive pothole in the roads I travel. So many lovely beings reach me, their intentions like silk tendrils of touch-full caressing care and wonder like Debussy’s Bergamasque piano silently accompanying the undulating drift of bar meanderings.  

“I will be unavailable to you that week of your return.” I told him that, and he let me go.
 
Divorce boy just informed baldy’s girl that he is going to finish his bottle of wine, though he apparently has had enough, and try his luck picking up on some girls situated elsewhere in the bar. The incongruence of girls in a bar strikes me. 

I have seen divorce boy passively sitting at the bar before–beak-nosed and paunchy with a deceptively young face, not unpleasing. He tries. I am not here often–eight or nine times a year–and the last time I was here he was too. Look at us, the lonely people. 

The two women to my left are pouring the remainder of their wine from their glasses back into the bottle. All neighboring eyes are turned to the task, like a netted tightrope walk to safety, the risk not too terrible but for the stains. The two young women have been sharing a small space, huddled in the corner of the bar, phones in hand illuminating the luster of their eyes and lipstick, checking social media, I presume, and speaking in tones reserved only for them.

Big baldy says, “I’d have to kill the guy.” Clearly man talk. I cannot imagine the stool mates to my left saying that kind of shit, defending their territory. Like R. He would do that, kick someone’s ass who looked at me had we been daylight lovers, out of the bedroom partners in a real life relationship. But I speculate.

How far can a fantasy stretch? What does anyone need beyond a little relief, some tenderness to ease the strain of survival? Maybe nothing. A will to bend, a neck crook for a weary head, an arm flung over a curled-up thigh and those who know your name may be the sum substantial of existence.  
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The Naked Truth: Women’s Bodies

  

credit: http://www.newstimes.co.uk/

You get what you ask for sometimes (though be careful of what you ask for; you may get it), like answers to unsettling questions or promptings for stalled action, for instance. If you stew long enough and put the fretting out there, wherever there is–occasionally you get what you seek despite your ignorance of the search. For the last two days, I inadvertently found my comfort and resolve in random readings around the net, specifically in elephantjournal.com and theguardian.com, two favorites.


The circle of my recent dilemma was typical for my pattern. A few months ago, I leapt into a project to challenge my fears, something I do occasionally for self-induced growth, only thinking about the consequences afterwards. Time draws the demons to me in hindsight: anxieties fill my head with body-shrinking scenarios, like outsiders’ criticism and mis-construction, and kill the fun I set upon in these let’s-jump-and-see-what-happens adventures when they arise. Often I deal with the discomfort and eventual exasperation of over-thinking, over-worrying by lurching from overly cautious to free-fall diving back to head-in-hands, anguished ruminating over decisions big and small.

In the morning’s perusal of the spiritual injection reflections–journals I frequent such as elephant journal–this passage drew me in with its seductive title:  A Man Can Change a Woman’s Body Image for the Better:

We all want to be seen exactly as we are. Fully exposed, naked—physically, emotionally, energetically and everything in between. And in that place of exposure, to be met with pure approval, gentleness and love can move mountains of shame, fear and insecurity. It’s an act of love.

While the title induced a frown of raised feminist hackles, the simple statement bleeds truth, though cliché–we all want to be accepted. But before we can be accepted, we have to be seen. And to be seen, we have to encounter people who are open, interested, observant and insightful. We can only be seen by those willing to look at who’s there. The rest just want to make something of us that aids them in some fashion–stroke their egos or deny we exist at all in their willed blindness of safe, unencumbered worlds.

That basic truth about acceptance, coupled with yesterday’s McCartney project write-up, began the synthesis. Britain’s Jamie McCartney, artist, created a huge plaster mural of 400 vulvas of various ages, sizes and shapes, inspired to backlash the labiaplasty trend, according to the Guardian’s Mary Katherine Tramontana. McCartney’s response to the trend: “Don’t change your parts, change your partner.” He considers industry practices that pressure women through perpetually idealized imagery of their bodies, as a form of “fascism” that operates by “making women feel shit about themselves,” according to Tramontana. She further states that the “Great Wall of Vagina” (the title of the mural) acts “as catharsis or empowerment for the women who helped create it” by exposing and exploding the belief that there is a singular ideal image of anatomy.

Finally, the big to-do (or little to-do depending on your interest in Rupi Kaur, Tumblr or Instagram) surrounding Instagram’s censorship of menstrual blood, and other avoided male-catered-to cringes, reported in the Guardian rounds out the list of happenstance reading that helped me resolve my doubts about going forward with my project, one that ironically places me in the double bind: putting my own image out in a public space–exposed and untouched–risks wresting from me the very control over my image I seek in publicizing photographs of my body in the first place. 

After this last reading, the story of Rupi Kaur’s censored selfie showing leaked menstrual blood in Is Social Media Protecting Men from Periods, Breast Milk and Body Hair?, I was convicted.  In it, Jessica Valenti surmises that social media reinforces misogyny, shunning women’s normal, functioning bodies while concurrently promoting “sexualized images of female bodies” for men: “thin, hairless and ready for sex.” This imagery, she concludes, must change and women can make that happen.

The upside, of course, is that the very nature of social media has made it easier for women to present a more diverse set of images on what the female form can look like and mean. Selfies, for example – thought by some to be the epitome of frivolity and self-conceit – are now being touted by feminist academics and artists as a way for women to “seize the gaze” and offer a new sense of control to women as subjects rather than objects.

The message appeared aimed at me.

When we have the power to create our own images en masse, we have the power to create a new narrative – one that flies in the face of what the mainstream would like us to look and act like.


That was my intent in agreeing to be photographed and interviewed for a female body consciousness-raising website: to disseminate imagery that does not conform to advertisers’ aka men’s ideals of women’s bodies but defies that coded model. I wanted to put myself out on the internet–in all that I am, unfiltered–to help disrupt that narrative sold to men and women alike, that their bodies should be anything other than what they are, worthy, accepted and loved. 

My body represents 54 years on earth and the genetic combinatory potential of random chromosomal breakage and interchange of two specific individuals as well as the exchanges in a line of people that led to them. The story in its unfolding is all there in every line, mark, tone and texture of my skin and its outgrowths: evidence of a living being, one specimen of billions, all different from me.

My dilemma only grew from preconceived labels and anticipated perceptions that I recognized as the “voices” of others eager to judge, criticize and injure. Even though I recognized those anticipated opinions for what they were, fabricated, inherited and illusory, I still felt the fear of judgment, drowning out my own desires to be the message unfazed about the interpretation in order to “seize the gaze,” be the subject and not the object. The act is for itself–and for my daughters to one day consider their mother’s statement: your body is your own and it is acceptable, even beautiful if you adjust your eyes to the light–just as it is.
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The Archeology of an Affair

  
It is a weird feeling day. I awoke with my senses tingling and an inarticulable awareness that something, some idea or fact, was around the corner of my mind waiting to wrestle me to the ground. The first missive to manifest the strange of this April Fool’s Day came thanks to a contributor to my blog whose morning internet crawls often yield blog treasures. The piece forwarded today featured a German married man’s meticulous documenting of his 1969 to 1970 affair, almost in a rudimentary documentary of affairs. 


The story on dangerminds.net includes photos that appear as if witnessed circumstantially evident sex acts: indicia of before and after sex. His mistress-secretary peers into the camera, traces of sultry satisfaction hinted in the cigarette and state of partial undress. The spread includes pictures of a dress he bought her and an empty birth control container, artifacts by which we archeologists of his future could infer a story not of a man passionately in love but the age-old story of control and possession, on display–the spoils of the hunt and capture. 


The implicitly contented face of the smoking mistress with the wonderful beehive do, teased to maximum density, in bed, extended in post coital satisfaction, or so the picture hopes to portray from a purely exterior view, showcases the object of the photographer’s gaze, the same man who presumably put that look on her face–the picture of achievement and narcissistic witness to a man’s conquest and testimony to his virility and prowess. The random bits of details surrounding this short affair appear to be important recordings to a man who does not want to forget any detail that he had indeed had this affair.


The power of possession is indeed the story, one of sex as consumerism. The woman is created only as a result of and in control of his gaze, his angle, his lens and his poses. He creates the experience for possession and posterity, and so it will always be captured in the light he chose to produce. No matter that the face of the mistress hides a pretend satisfaction to please the gazer for gain or purposes of her own, if indeed that is the case (the after-sex cigarette as the symbol of the soothing needed after the near-miss or total lack of sexual satisfaction). 


Her story is subsumed in his, overtaken and dissipated into a past disappeared perhaps irretrievably, with respect to this brief affair. Where and how would such a story be told at a time when a mistress meant whore according to the mores of a time less exposed to the real lives of real people, who marry, get bored and fuck others? A portrait of a man falling prey to culturally crafted needs supplants her story: the will to possess women, and emoting through sex, i.e., he cannot please his wife any longer so he will please someone else to make him feel like the socially constructed ideal of a man as provider, conqueror, lover, success, power–all evidenced by his stuff.


Or maybe it is just a curiosity of time and place.


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The Good, the Ugly and the Human: a Tuesday Musing

 

Credit: http://m1.i.pbase.com

 


To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the human condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from its fragility.
—Martha Nussbaum, philosopher

Ruminating about abandoned love lately, I wonder how humans, a number of them anyhow, can open and shut their hearts with such certainty in such an uncertain world. How does one end a relationship, long and loving hard, and thereafter eviscerate the heart-memory of the once cherished object of his or her love, the light in his heart, the heat in her loins, never to speak or think of the other? Where, precisely, sleeps the graveyard of deep emotional attachment?

No one can control another to the degree necessary to keep and savor that other, to anticipate fear and resentment, illness and death–no way to squeeze answers to the riddles of human behavior.

To be exposed is to be vulnerable, open to danger, criticism, injury or death, whether physical or emotional. Who does not fear the ending of a relationship that houses everything, one that contains all of the self thrown into it?

Dedication to the notion that love means giving all to another bears some responsibility for the resulting grief and betrayal after the end. A piece, some important part must be held back, some core or foundation must be withheld in order to keep the self and the other intact. To invest all is to have everything to lose in life’s uncertainty: love’s cessation, life’s leaking despair, disability and death. 

The burden of possessing every morsel of another being trumps pleasure, smothers desire. 

Many believe the heart cannot survive loss, a conviction that obstructs the happiness that inclines a good human. To withdraw from others, from a lover or society that disappoints, having been badly burned, merely reduces risk of exposure; it does not prevent calamity or inevitability and so a doomed attempt to control a world in hopes of preventing further hurt and loss. 

Humans cannot surrender their frailty without losing their humanity–or their beauty, according to Nussbaum. The good and happy human is unafraid. The tremulous unhappy merely encircle the tenderness and delicate skin of being with armored excuses and persistent tasks that disengage and anesthetize the will to enter the fray of the raw and unknowable–the human circus of flight, fancy and faith–forever locking doors behind them.
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The Second Time 

  

Credit: http://www.autostraddle.com

The second time she came was with a boy-man she had attracted while perusing selections in a shoe store. He was a salesman and she was in the market for some comfortable shoes that evoked her style: earth shoes. 

“Do you have these in a size 9?” she asked huskily, then choking slightly, clearing her throat as she held up the shelf model to his smiling eyes. 

It was late 1978. She had already met Sean but he was spending the summer with his girlfriend while she was working and making her way through college as a young, vibrant, jeans-and-flannel 18 year old seeking love and fun in between classes. 

She was thrilled that she caught his attention, he with the thick, sandy brown, wavy, shoulder length hair, the same texture as his full wide bandito mustache of old Spaghetti westerns, that covered his full mouth and detracted from his cobalt blue eyes, the same color as Sean’s. He was clearly flirting, touching her foot in lingering courtesy, as he helped her try on the ugly dirt brown leather earth shoe with its flat rubber sole the color of bottled rubber cement, and hobbit-foot curved toe box. 

“How do these fit?” he asked, grinning too widely for the contextual inquiry.

It was the first of many encounters with Jim, whom she loved to kiss for hours. He may still go down as one of the best kissers ever, someone who could savor a mouth, a tongue, the fullness of a brushing lower lip along another’s thinner, grasping top lip in utter tender breathlessness of passionate study. He clearly understood that a kiss was a conversation. 

He was a natural fit and they had sex often but after a time, made love, high on cheap wine and pot, in synced undulation that moved her body–shoulders to thighs–slithery-slowly in sweaty sensual waves inside the steamy, airless room of a slightly seedy, shared apartment behind the liquor store of the town’s busy main drag. A shoe salesman’s commissions afforded little luxury.

On one occasion, she found herself lying underneath him, hands softly cupping his bare shoulders, fingers rounded relaxed so that her nails lightly tingled the skin of his back as he slowly moved in and out of her, rhythmic but slow-savor of flesh on flesh, every stroke of it on the way in and out, even-calm gliding sweetness that all of the sudden burst tears from her eyes in a full-blown opening that was yet a closeness to his being; it moved her body and heart–an unknown sensation to her prior to that moment and a mystery still as she bathed in the warm tears on her face and the outpour from her brain down to the depths of her, some place she only abstractly identified as the darkness of her womb. 

She was surprised at the tears and the tender feeling of surrender and body deep warmth leaking from her pores and especially her legs, between her thighs. She would many years later identify that sensation in the throes of an intentionally induced orgasm in the bed of the technician, whose fingers worked effortlessly to make her body arch in that final tautness before the release–as an orgasm. 

It was an aha! moment 12 years later while reflecting in the night spent with that technician, “Hotel Jones,” lying awake in glorious incongruous aftermath of body-spent stillness and sleeplessness for the sheer bubbling liquid excitement that stirred inside her: the newness of an unknown man, experience, and sex never before recognized, come to light of her mind, where she knew everything, filtered by ponderous thought and book-learned emotion, how she understood the world and herself.

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If I Could Savor…

  

If I could savor all the bits and pieces of love I have shared

–with or without someone else–
and store them in a capacious safe place 
such as a warehouse, 
a bank vault 
and my heart, 
all in one, 
to draw upon on days like these after a night of angst and tremor, 
there would never be a moment of worry, 
of terror or dread, 
no steam of regret or anger, 
for all would be washed away in the oceanic amour reservoir. 
I have loved so much so often, 
it is a wonder there is any room for other invaders to besiege my mood, 
disrupt my sleep or daytime dreaming, 
none to spare for jealousy and greed, 
envy and hate. 
Love has filled all the cracks, 
poured off in excess to inundate the floor of my soul, 
completely submerged in pooled good will and heart offerings that bind. 
Or so it would seem on sheer mathematical principles alone. 
So many loves, so many times.

Is there any fiercer love in so fragile a bundle than the adoring eyes of an infant 
following and studying her mother’s face? 
No matter the need, 
there is brimming love un poisoned by desire 
and machinations of how to get that in my pocket, 
in my bedroom, 
or in my bank account.
No matter the illusion, 
the source is there in wide open hazy eyes 
studying the mystery of the powerful impulse 
to forego sustenance in order to drive nearer the object of an overwrought mind 
and wretched will to be in the presence of the beloved. 
The road is endless until a fluid destiny culminates. 

I asked a friend, 
and me, 
on occasion: 
How could there ever be a lonely-cold day of wondering where she’s gone, 
who she loves now, 
when she gave up so much of her herself, 
her ambition and freedom, 
the dream job and impassioned call to the city’s illuminating sights, 
to be with you those many years? 
Did you not collect those trillions of minutes and safe-keep them in your house, 
hidden in the darkest corner of your room, 
the moments of her bottom lip brushing yours in tender, 
have-spilled surrender to the night, 
your heat enveloping her breath, 
deepening her sleep to the pallor of death’s neighborhood? 
Where did you send those beats’ resounding 
if not through that mighty pump thrusting it off 
to venture through the veins of your mind’s nettings? 
Draw them now; 
paint the joy of that brush of your mother’s thin fingers through your hair, 
your grandfather’s whistling from the smokey yard, 
giant barbecue tongs in hand, 
your toddler’s honey sticky fat thumbs on your cheeks, 
your lover’s call in the late night longing, 
your sister’s tearful embrace, 
the memories of moving childhood laughter pinched in her arm’s muscular grip, 
and the first step in the door of the home and hearth 
you have craved for trillions of minutes endured away.  

Love is strong. 
I have heard of her lifting a car to save her baby 
and her loss heavier than the bloated body at the bottom of the lake. 
It does not dissipate for the air cannot carry such weight. 
The heart cannot contain it all, 
and the mind cannot grasp it. 
Love must reside in the thick rubbery green of the rubber plant 
hanging above my porch, 
or in the orange of the sky at dusk, 
or in the olive and pink sheen of my daughter’s freshly showered skin, 
or the ancient brown of the spots on my mother’s cheeks 
or the muffled sound of my father’s cough from the other room, 
or the musk of the classroom still lingering even after long summer months  
or the squeeze of my hand just before I approach the podium for my closing argument, 
or the earth of an emerging bordeaux on my tongue, 
and the thought of growing old with the world.
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An Old Favorite Mistress Song

When once we lived the juicy life
the summer baked
the autumn fades
you pirate you
to steal away with me
I remember well
you’re drunk again
sweet heart you’ll say
careful there, wipe off your sleeve
don’t go searching very hard
for your other half in me
I recall your first kisses

hiding in the closet from your mrs.
the stern old sage and sensible
is what you see by day
the darkness made you cautious too
but I stopped by anyway
now you’re getting hazy
falling far into a film
I guess I’d better move along

leave you to your private realm

I recall your first kisses
predawn imagination

is all that this is

 

http://youtu.be/WEAfH85LgBw

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Mistress, a Powerful Word to Waste

  

Credit: http://art247.com.au/


Margaret Sullivan of the New York Times would like to see the word “mistress” retired as a term past its prime, outdated and sexist (Is ‘Mistress” a Word That Has Seen Its Best Days?). Cued by her readers’ comments, she specifically takes issue with using the term in news stories about women having extra marital affairs, i.e., the Patreus affair. 


She complains the term denotes a woman’s long-term sexual affair with a married man, and, as some readers pointed out, which also suggests financial keeping or maintenance. Sullivan believes the term should be replaced with something less gender exclusive particularly since there is no male equivalent to the term. She also notes her male editor’s response is something akin to “Yeah, it’s outdated and sexist but oh well, what else can we come up with?”

I, however, hesitate to retire a word with such a rich history and multi-faceted application.  

The Oxford English Dictionary has this to settle for the word:

HOMEUS ENGLISH MISTRESS

mistress
Syllabification: mis·tress
Pronunciation: /ˈmistris/ 
Definition of mistress in English:
noun

1A woman in a position of authority or control:
she is always mistress of the situation, coolly self-possessed
figurative work is an unforgiving, implacable mistress
MORE EXAMPLE SENTENCES
1.1A woman who is skilled in a particular subject or activity:
a mistress of the sound bite, she is famed for the acidity of her tongue
MORE EXAMPLE SENTENCES
1.2The female owner of a dog, cat, or other domesticated animal.
EXAMPLE SENTENCES
1.3 [WITH MODIFIER] chiefly British A female schoolteacher who teaches a particular subject:
a Geography mistress
MORE EXAMPLE SENTENCES
1.4 archaic A female head of a household:
he asked for the mistress of the house
MORE EXAMPLE SENTENCES
1.5(Especially formerly) a female employer of domestic staff.
EXAMPLE SENTENCES
2A woman having an extramarital sexual relationship, especially with a married man:
Elsie knew her husband had a mistress tucked away somewhere
MORE EXAMPLE SENTENCES
SYNONYMS
2.1 archaic or literary A woman loved and courted by a man.
3 (Mistress) archaic or dialect Used as a title prefixed to the name of a married woman; Mrs.
EXAMPLE SENTENCES
Origin

Middle English: from Old French maistresse, from maistre ‘master’.

So what could be wrong with a term whose first definition from a much-cited, respectable source is “a woman in authority or control”? Sullivan rebukes the term as old fashioned; a term with implied mercenary kept status should not be attributed to a modern day woman who chooses her own lifestyle and sexuality. However, the word’s true essence conflicts with what she derides, and it is her error in the term’s misconstruction. 


A mistress is self-possessed–going against the grain with her choice of sexual partner. She defies social norms, and in doing so, she carries that culturally instilled burden of shame and conscience subverted for love, power and/or sex. She is all about tough choices that expose her to herself and others, an exposure that continually challenges her control.

In addition, the wellspring of control and ownership from which the term emerges, its earliest significance being head of household, empowers the word. As queen of her castle, the mistress does have a counterpart, the master. In this equivalence, the terms both suggest not only ownership but mastery, the knowledge and competence to operate and own all of the details of a home, including the administration of her staff in running it. 

The predecessor of the modern corporate CEO, the mistress was the operations manager of the home, which may have included serving and cleaning staff in addition to family members. And for anyone running a household, even without staff, that is no menial task. 

As one who has historically taken on the role of mistress of the house, I can assuage any fears of sexism or demeaning intent in that term. Running a household of teenagers, ailing parents with caretakers, dogs and cats, is no mean feat. To keep everything running without a hitch–flawlessly–from paying bills; coordinating transportation to sports, school and other activities; financing the upkeep of the house and the people and pets in it, all while juggling work–paid or volunteer–outside and inside the home, takes the talents of an organized multi-tasker extraordinaire. It takes control.

I used to be better at it, the juggling, when my mind was sharper and my energy level higher, but even then I had to rely on spreadsheets to track everyone’s movements and whereabouts. Running a household draws on a variety of skills inborn or acquired. Though not a long-term planner, my mind is wired to work from three steps ahead backward–necessary to captain the ship. 

When the kids were pre-schoolers, I knew at the outset of any day trip that one of my daughters was going to need a series of five, three and one minute warnings of departure as she was not good with transitions. And just the mathematics involved in planning for the outing, the gear required to anticipate any probable need ordinary or extraordinary (accidents), plus the time factor to shove kids in and out of carseats in time to meet the next appointed destination on the agenda, kept my mind in continual twists and turns of addition and subtraction:  add a few minutes for Jordyn’s resistance or chase before we leave plus a few more minutes for changing Remie’s diaper, which will inevitably be an emergency by the time I round up Jordyn and get her in the car–an exercise in figuring out the smallest movements needed to achieve the greatest effect, something like understanding quantum mechanics. 

The abilities to run, round up–kids and numbers–calculate, estimate, zoom, balance, gather, recoup, resist, stay alert, maintain composure and sanity, all while wondering where pride and sleep went is spectacularly challenging and a tremendous show of competency when done without tearing hair out, my own or anyone else’s. Not a very sexy proposition but one declaring mastery of intellectual, emotional and physical strength beyond compare–power.

Power. Mastery. Sex. To Sullivan’s point about sex, sexism and subservience, I must agree with her editors that the definition nowhere includes financial maintenance, and so the term is not as sexist as she protests. In fact, the illumination cast upon the term from its etymology, derived from the French word maitresse, master, and its name for a teacher, one of the oldest, most widely recognized longstanding, respectable working roles for women (not to be confused with the oldest profession), is the domain of mastering knowledge and communication. What could be more empowering than forming the minds of a population? 

Women are distinct, singular each, work in different ways from each other and from men. Words that carry history as performances past that umbrella performances present should not be discarded lightly, especially in the case of a word that I believe furthers the cause of empowering women–for the informed and language sensitive, that is. I take issue with divorcing ourselves from our past. It is a mistake. We need the reminder, nuanced influence and acknowledgement of who we are, where we come from and where we are heading. 

Keep the mistress as master-ess of her domain.
Posted on

OMG, nooooooooooo!!!

  


Yes, it’s tragic. I can tell by the frequent wailing and gnashing of teeth around here. Zayn is leaving.  My daughters are heartbroken.

When all the eye rolling is done, I have to ask myself if this phenomenon, the three, four, has it been nearly five (?) year love affair my children have had with this boy band (now man band), is something to deride. Perhaps the resistant nod to the importance of this group on my part comes from the force feeding I have endured over the years, trapped in a car with screaming teens and pre-teens, windows rolled down as they shouted along with the blaring music,”You don’t know you’re beautiful!!”, at passersby, laughing, arm-waving and car-seat dancing. 

While I have maintained the appropriate role of music critic, one of many as a mother, explaining to my daughters with aplomb that cuteness is not one of the criteria for musicianship, I must confess to knowing most of the lyrics to at least two of the albums and have been caught singing a 1-D song while cooking dinner in the kitchen a time or two…or five. The truth is, I like the band, and my daughters have been warning me that this day was coming, the breakup of the band. 

They would know as they follow every word ever uttered by mouth or in print on Twitter, Snapchat, Vine, text or telephone from fellow fans befriended while waiting in line for tickets, movies, and concerts, or at fan sightings and school about these adored entertainers. My 16 year old has told me during more than one car ride to school or a friend’s house with grave admonition and dread that their five-year contract, made when the band members were her age, is almost up and it is doubtful they will re-up given their rigorous touring schedule lo these many years. She suspected burnout all along.

And now it is slowly unfolding, the story of Zayn’s quitting–or was he fired? My 19 year old gave me the lowdown this morning about how it may actually be a firing from the slave master, corporate, money-grubbing, greedy-bastard managers (her characterization, my words), when he dared to walk off a tour after publicity of Zayn’s cheating on his fiancee, or so it was made to appear by the evil media. She explained that Zayn was the more sensitive one and just got sick of the twisting of his life with all the fan-dom gossip and media lies. 

So says she, who somehow coaxed me on more than one occasion several years ago to drive all over Los Angeles chasing these boys for a possible sighting. One time, I flipped out on her and her friends after a six-hour chase that made me question my sanity–truly. There is a limit to a parent’s indulgence of teenage fantasy addiction, and I had exceeded that limit by legions.

The truth is, I will miss these boy-men should this signal the beginning of the end. All those car rides–and there have been many–with four or five girls screaming in my car every word to every song, windows down, wind whipping through us, and even my steering wheel banging car seat dance in full swing, have been fun and meaningful, girls having fun in music fantasy, me witnessing. My younger still insists only half ironically that she will marry Harry, so there is no need for any other boys in her life.

These singer-musician cuties have played an important role in our lives, in theirs particularly, and not only as an obsession or a place holder until something bigger and better and realer comes along. Their devotion, waiting for hours to glimpse them, purchase tickets, see them in concert, find the latest about their lives, has been not only the commitment of love-sick, crazy teens with no reality that can compete with the fantasy of them, but of the true commitment of fans, caring fans who love something bigger than themselves, something to hang their hopes on for a future relationship with someone truly special, someone with greatness, ambition, good looks, talent and caring for an adoring heart.

For me, these guys have given me opportunity a’plenty to not only serve as taxi driver, crazy mom, and sage adviser about everything from music to love to addiction, but also as friend and adoring fan to these girls, all beautiful in their youth, purity and zealous affection and enthusiasm in their devotion to a lovely even if sometimes embattled over the rights to the story world, something that could be a lot worse than wholesome 1-D. If they have to be addicted, I am okay with it being a handful of benign cutie patooties. 

And quite honestly, it has been interesting to watch these boys grow, musically and personally, amazingly in sync with my daughters’ growth in the same fashion. The music is less bubble gum, evolved, adding a layer or two of musical and lyrical depth and diversity. Similarly, both girls have developed diverse musical tastes over the years that I deem mature and sophisticated, even as I question the talent of some of their selections. 

My car rides are now infected with a wild array of cynical, political songwriter-singers, not so fresh and innocent as 1-D, more so overly whiny, sardonic and anti everything socially accepted, like the Front bottoms–their rebellion phase, kind of like their mom’s Dylan, Doors and Led Zeppelin phase decades ago. But despite their clear evolving musical tastes way beyond the pop pablum of groups like 1-D, or their predecessor Justin Bieber oh so many moons ago (comparably “my” David Cassidy in the 70s), they hold Harry and the boys near and dear, laughing at themselves while seriously loving them too.

But we all move on, even 1-D dudes. Zayn is right to quit. Why not end at the top? Why not try to regain the semblance of a sane life at the ripe young age of 22? It will take another five or more years to get over the post-traumatic effects of rising and sinking so far and wide as unknown to super-star to used-to-be. Although, I somehow doubt the residue, the fractured band, as Brad Nelson of the Guardian dubbed them, “four goofy white guys shouting“, will make it and not only due to the dent in the multi-textured sound that Zayn contributed to creating. 

The fans may not be so forgiving of the Simon Legree (or is that Simon Cowell?) managers they may see responsible for the breakup or may not be able to let go of what was–the perfect quintet of dreaminess. A beloved will always be missing.

In any event, there will be the press stories and the fan stories, the truths of which may not coincide. The best part of the band for most fans is not even the music but the constant back story and just the story making itself, constantly winding in and around the social lives of imaginative teens and pre-teens flexing their minds and hearts into the vast landscape of love, music and social media. What else is there, after all?

 
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