Curious about the love-relationship labels beginning with the prefix “poly”? Here is an amusing and informative Youtube video to answer some of the basic definitional distinctions between polyamory, polygamy, polyangyny, and other polys. Enjoy.
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
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
Sentimental Morning
Yesterday I read in the Huffington Post the story of A.J.’s 25 year affair with a married man, her divorce lawyer, on whom she had grown dependent for love, money and herself. Her story is familiar. She filled a space that was her, missing most probably due to the abandonment she felt in childhood, with him, but came to realize after two and a half decades that only she could fill that gaping hole.
The hole in my heart couldn’t be filled by anyone but me. I had to love myself more than I loved anyone else. Even him. Finally, I understood.
We walked out of the hotel onto Park Avenue, and without another word to him, I turned and walked away.
This morning I awoke from a dream the last vision of which was the face of my husband of nearly 35 years, smiling, his head leaning on someone else’s shoulders, completely content.
No one has made me weep more in my dreams than he has.
Though we are no longer intimate, we share a connection deeper and more profound than the silence we keep about what went wrong and what is right.
Love is more than dependency, but its shape and character are dependent upon lovers. There is no doubt that we fall in love with love and all we imagine it to be, including that leaning, literally and figuratively, on another. Our hearts resound solitarily in our chests, but the primal urge to sync our rhythms to the beats of those hearts walking beside us is unimaginably fierce. We don’t want to be–alone.
Graham Nash — A Simple Man
I am a simple man
So I sing a simple song
Never been so much in love
And never hurt so bad at the same time.
I am a simple man
And I play a simple tune
I wish that I could see you once again
Across the room like the first time.
I just want to hold you I don’t want to hold you down
I hear what you’re saying and you’re spinning my head around
And I can’t make it alone.
The ending of the tale
Is the singing of the song
Make me proud to be your man only you can make me strong
Like the last time.
I just want to hold you I don’t want to hold you down
I hear what you’re saying and you’re spinning my head around
And I can’t make it alone.
Killer Thoughts
It’s been around for a while, but I just saw this delightful Ryan Woodward animation “The Thought of You,” which has made its rounds on Facebook, Vimeo and Youtube ad nauseum. And my fresh look adds yet another interpretation among the hundreds of others mostly fawning observations and applauding. The difference in interpretive tone–positive or negative–is probably affected by the accompanying song. In one version, Nick Lovell’s “Cradle in my Arms” is the backdrop, which is slow, severe and mournful, whereas the other version is accompanied by the Weepies’ “The World Spins Madly On,” a much more upbeat though just as disillusioned song.
In the short animation, I see thought, airy nothing, on display. I see the “lost in the world” lyric, with two ideas dancing around each other, illusive in the acting out: he grabs her but she evades him, slips from him but then there she is again, and they dance and she caresses him but he ducks away, also slippery.
And the lyric, “woke up wishing I was dead…the night is here the day is gone,” floats into my consciousness as the scene changes to dream sequence, a longing, where she is an angel, the feathers falling as she flies from him. Is he about to kill her off? When they finally spin together as they and “the world spins madly on,” she suddenly becomes real to him, her clear yearning to touch him, there standing in all of her need–real–and he lets her go. She is real, depicted with shading and fullness, depth, and he is still an idea. He lets the real go. Dreams and fantasies are far more interesting, full of potential.
Nick Lovell’s “Cradle in my Arms”
I don’t mind
Where I wake this morning
I will only be misjudged
You are here
But your mind is elsewhere
You have battled for so long
Just call me when you feel like coming home
Call me when you feel like coming home
Have I changed?
Or do my eyes just see things
So much differently now?
Lay the blame
Only if you have to
But it’s you who brought you here
The animation suggests thought as the figures are mere sketches until the woman acquires shading, a touch of reality, when she is more concretely identifiable as herself and not the projections of the male configuration’s imagination: as angel as the feathers that fall suggest or even a dancer. When she stands there just herself in want of him, not playing chase, at the end, he leaves her. He loses interest or runs in fear or both.
I want to peel off my skin and roll myself in salt when I see this where others–Youtube and Vimeo commenters–look to the beauty of the dance and feel warmth and loveliness. The projection of my own thoughts on someone else, making that person an extension of my own desire and will is a life-long habit and a doom to so many relationships.Too often have I wished another to fill the expectations of my imagination, which is powerfully creative and unrealistic as if totally unleashed from senses.
The result: not actually seeing or finding the person standing before me because I have never been there–present–in the first place to notice. Wrapped up in my mind’s eye, not my physical eye that sees not envisions, causes blindness–and eventual loss.
When she is an idea–a thought–it is easier to hurt her. Experiencing another as flesh and blood makes it more difficult to hurt that human being, compassionately and empathically sensed as one senses him or her own self.
That is how genocides or near genocides have been possible in the past–making whole populations an idea, a problem needing a solution, the Jews of pre-War World II Germany as only one example. No human being but the most unfeeling, the sociopathic, could be convinced that the economic solution for a failed economy and the woes attending such is to kill another singular, seething human fleshly being standing right before one’s eyes. No, that person would have to become an idea–the economic drain, the problem, caused by immigration, greed, religious destiny, or some other idea.
For me, fantasy has always been greater than reality and my heart is a painter. Those who show up to be my canvas often cry out, insist on themselves as I sketch and color them brighter, fuller bloom.
The Weepies’ “World Spins Madly On”
Woke up and wished that I was dead
With an aching in my head
I lay motionless in bed
I thought of you and where you’d gone
and let the world spin madly on
With an aching in my head
I lay motionless in bed
I thought of you and where you’d gone
and let the world spin madly on
Everything that I said I’d do
Like make the world brand new
And take the time for you
I just got lost and slept right through the dawn
And the world spins madly on
I let the day go by
I always say goodbye
I watch the stars from my window sill
The whole world is moving and I’m standing still
Woke up and wished that I was dead
With an aching in my head
I lay motionless in bed
The night is here and the day is gone
And the world spins madly on
I thought of you and where you’d gone
And the world spins madly on.
“And the world spins madly on…” The world of the imagination is a mad spin, crazy making in its delusional world making.
How many of us do this–imagine what we want rather than experience what we have?
A Little Perspective
Teaching Amy Leach’s You Be the Moon (Sail on my little Honey Bee) today in class, I cannot help but think of David Eagleman and his brilliant TEDtalk on posibilianism. Though the made up term is interesting enough, I am completely enrapt with this twenty-three minute talk for its first three minutes when he reveals what the deep field Hubble experiment yielded several years ago. My jaw no longer drops because I have shared this talk with my classes semester in and semester out for the last few years but my mind’s jaw still does.
Posibilianism is also a fun kind of idea too. Enjoy.
“To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before…”
The women who have unfolded life to me, staid songs all,
mother, grandmother, sisters, neighbors, friends, “some girl”
and poets with words that floated my time through trouble.
Some few I obeyed, with others I played, and others still
I listened to, cried with, cried over, watched, watched over,
dreamed with or about in silent admiration but under cover.
All were so much more women or girls than me in all ways
But how to compare? An endless envy I kept hush in place,
and sometimes in pure pleasure of the witness and stare.
My sisters, blood, life and ancestral lines laid open, bare,
for a life time, bonded by parents, their words and deeds,
a clan of ever entry, acceptance, toil, care, planted seeds.
Unlike them at all yet so much part of them, nonetheless,
a neighbor calling my sister’s name at me, all dark brows
sparse thick hair embracing eyes hazel gold, hazel brown
and deep chocolate of our mother and father’s x’s and y’s.
We share a lingo and secret codes, a joke, heirloom ties
but not our dreams or destinations, only occasional days
lunch together for birthdays, breaking bread on holidays
and our parents’ care til they disappear from days above
our visions so carefully cultivated in long despair and love.
Each carries a piece of them in a glance, a coiled up tress,
a corner of a smile, a glint in the eye, a gait, the gawkiness,
an agility or stomp, a chuckle or optimistic smile or a frown
dart of the shooting lookaway or a shuffle in the step down.
We laughed together at each other, appearing like friends.
Boyfriends and husbands have come and gone, bookends,
children were born who had children who we all adore too
as us, part of our tribe, our lineage of so strong women who
love, are loved and are love, the kind through a mother flows
who showed it in her doting cleanliness of spotless clothes
and insistence on politeness, disciplining by guilt imposed
savagery we practiced among us, the untidiness of a home .
We were wild weeds growing among the crab grass alone,
the trees that our mother planted alongside shrubs in rows
and the lawn she lay so many years ago seeded still grows.
Our destinies are tied though we drift ever apart as we age
and memory and the loss of connection as we disengage
remove to the space of living within as we live out carrying
out the business of breathing and working and soon dying
just like our foremothers behind us staring with thick brows
watching us dance, fret, forget lines, and take our final bows.
Sticks and Stones May Break my Bones… but Call Me a Cunt?
It may have been Christmas time three years ago, when, in the daze that was my shopping misery, I finally reached the cash register after a zombifyingly long wait in a Disneyland-like serpentine line. To my shock and then delight, the young ostensibly female Urban Outfitter employee asking me if I found everything “okay” was sporting a medium-sized (not too small and not overly large) white round button pinned to the left of the top of her left breast with the word in bold black capital letters, “CUNT” printed on it.
After a bit of an eye widening, I settled into a smirk and complimented her on her pin. She said her pal, the manager, made it for her. I thought it ballsy to wear it in a store, hip as the location is–the anti-mall, a hipster haven–with commercial intent, especially one run by Conservative homophobes from what I recollected reading.
I immediately wanted one. Up to that year, my 51st, I had not encountered the word very often and it had an aura about it, something electric and taboo. The word had never been hurled at me as a weapon til then, though it has been since–by someone I could not have ever guessed would use it against me, yet neither could I have ever imagined that he and I could have ever entered into hideous combat the way he had.
The initial admixture of discordant discomfort, alarm, and delight was titillating and intriguing. Yes, I understood the neutralizing of such terms through ironic deployment as many other terms have been similarly used: nigger and queer, to name the two powerhouse terms of oppression that have been turned inside out by the intended targets’ co-opting these weapons. No, one cannot harm another with a word she turns on herself happily, so that the term is deflated, neutralized.
My reaction led me on the usual journey of the philologist (a title one graduate school professor knighted his class of comparative literature students with profoundly): What is the nature of language?
Interestingly enough, I had this discussion about language with my class just yesterday. We had read Susan Allison’s, “Taking a Reading,” which is a playful essay examining the language of measurement, supposedly a very precise endeavor of linguists long ago. However, in it, Allison wryly asks how it is that her yard, the same word for a measurement of three feet, and that of her childhood–two different sized and located spaces–are both yards. Even the language of precision has so much slippage.
I asked my students: If we woke up tomorrow and the word for cat was now “dog,” would it matter? Language is merely a referent to something else, so does it make a difference which sounds and letters we assign to the object in mind, and how do we know the object we have in mind is the same referent for everyone using the same term anyhow? And what of the individual raised without a word for “cat” or any language? Does a cat exist in absence of a word for it, to recall it to mind and give it form? Pretty abstract for a class during the need-for-a-tea-or-espresso hour.
My point was to consider the arbitrariness of language even as it forms and informs our very existence–makes our world. I am not alone in pondering this phenomenon way too much. Philosophy teems with such obsessing considerations.
But how is it that such words like “cunt” contain all that energy, all that power? Does calling a man a “dick” have the same effect? No, it does not because of the real life power relations between men and women historically and contemporarily in physical, economical and political disparity of exchange. The magic of the term, however, must be steeped in a rich history of which I am not fully aware because calling a female “womb” or “vagina” or “twat” even does not have the same force or violence in my mind.
Few females wish to be identified as one part of their bodies, I would imagine, and if they did, it probably would not be their vaginas more than their brains. Though, as the wonderful Betty White, comedic tough ass actress long enduring herself, has astutely joked, the vagina is a pretty damned tough body part for its resilience, flexibility and endurance in light of the beatings it suffers.
For your viewing pleasure, an entertaining comic strip content of attitudes toward and reactions to the word “cunt” on the Nib entitled “Just a Word,” is offered for discussion. Is it just a word? A weapon? Is it enough to own the word, wear it on a pin to neutralize it? Breeze through the cartoon and weigh in. This inquiring mind wants to know.
In the Gaze of Sayat Nova
Sayat Nova is an Armenian-Georgian 18th Century poet and musician whose creativity abounded as seen through a short portrayal of his life’s work as poet, musician and troubadour, and according to the scant information I found in lightly researching his name. His life’s work/biography apparently is not readily accessible to American culture judging by the comments to this Youtube slice of the larger 1968 work entitled The Color of Pomegranates, a film depicting the poet’s life, in a stream of consciousness that appears more like a series of still life shots, courtesy of Russian director Sergei Paradjanov.
Admittedly ignorant of the poet’s work other than the short film on Youtube and a shallow delving into Internet write ups on Amazon, Wikipedia and Youtube, I am fascinated by this clip for its sheer intensity of suggestion and superb acting. Only vaguely familiar with folkloric representation through symbol, I can see just the glaringly obvious like the mechanically spinning Cupid, the overt machinations of demonstration of love, purity or wisdom (white flower over the man’s face), the book (probably references to the poet’s writings) and projections of desire.
My uninformed interpretation (and I am loathe to do more research until I have fully delved into and purged my initial uninformed impression) is the immediate interplay of the male and female characters, one as object of adoration–the woman–and the man’s supplications to her with his offerings, but concomitantly, the other–male–as the projected object of desire. The words, “I search for treasure, something a little bigger or greater” (my rough translation from the subtitled Italian) are the only lines overlaid by the flashes of stills of faces and seemingly incoherent actions of winding, circling and supplicating.
The words evoke a lack of fulfillment, a seeking of something valuable, perhaps in another human being or in life generally. Thus, the book, flower and other artifacts, including earth are thrown before the seeker as demonstrations or offerings. I thought of how we seek something more in our relationships, especially long term relationships, due to boredom or the temptation of forbidden fruit or the need to fill a hole inside of us that cannot be filled with another human being or things. Perhaps the search is for spiritual fulfillment.
The final act of this clip (from the larger movie) is the holding up of the ring by each, another circle and symbol of marriage or betrothal of some sort, whether to each other or to some idea. So, it seems that all of the communication between male and female actors, is a kind of courting with the male trying to figure out what floats her boat, what will make her heart turn to him, both being so taciturn and severe in expression. The flatness of character isolates the ideas from the personalities/characters, which effectively underscores love, connection and the projection of desire on to the other.
I particularly like the mechanical production reminding me that sometimes courting and relationships–or searching in general–can be a mechanical application of relating, manipulating, knowing what makes another tick, what moves the other to come to love, another human being. Being in the gaze of the other produces fantasy and desire as the object of the gaze becomes the screen of another’s projections of what she wants to see based on her needs and wants.
Before I spoil my initial impression with reading more qualified opinions on this clip, the movie, the poetry and life of the creators of the words and film, I wanted to share this piece, raw and untainted by more informed parsing of the presentation, which I enjoyed tremendously in its peculiarly stylized overly dramatic presentation reminding me of the Kabuki theater of the Japanese.
This five minute clip is worth a few spins to get over the initial offputting oddity and appreciate the artistry of the production. Happy Sunday. Namaste.
One More Street Fair Beatnik Poetry Reading
Here is another one from the downtown Huntington Beach Street Fair Beatnik Poetry Reading.
Please enjoy!
In the gaze of the other 