Break Every Rule Read online

  I have tried to create a space neither fictive nor autobiographical where I am allowed to exist in an utterly different way. Not as a character or through character, and yet not as author either. “Once again sadness has caught you off guard,” a voice says in “Exquisite Hour.” I have no idea who is speaking, it might be the drugs, or the desire, or the fencing master or a party guest—but I do know who is being spoken to—alas. It is me. Once again sadness.

  In a piece I am working on now which shall appear in the next book, I have let my mind and body exist at such an angle to the subject that I am allowed to inhabit the material in a way that affords me a new place in the text. A question arises, painfully, acutely, through the text, and not in the voice of the character, and not in my own voice, and not in an “authorial” voice. A question I in any other guise would not have the courage or ability to pose: Where does your life go? The piece somehow has allowed me to ask the essential, unbearable question at the center of my fear. Because of the time it takes to make money I may not get to where I need to go. Overwhelmed, panicked, utterly dispirited by my day job. There has been no way to approach such a thing. But the text has allowed me to face it. This is perhaps the most difficult thing of all to describe. Through the urgency and force of my desire and through the open place desire has created in me I may enter my work and be engaged in ways that up until now have been off-limits. There is a different engagement—and the stakes finally start to make a little bit of sense.

  Another interesting thing: For me there is less and less of a distinction between writing and living, and this work has clarified that. But that does not quite say it. Let me ask Woolf for help here. She says, “The test of a book (to a writer) is if it makes a space in which quite naturally, you can say what you want to say…. This proves that a book is alive: because it has not crushed the thing I wanted to say, but allowed me to slip it in, without any compression or alteration.” As I was finishing Aureole I happened to hear on the radio that Marguerite Duras, one of the presiding angels of this text, had died. If there had not been room enough in the body of my work to honor her, I would have considered this work to be a failure, a book that failed to live on the most basic level. What would my writing be worth then? If on that March day completing “In the Last Village,” there had not been made a place for her? The creation of an inclusive place—a viable and flexible internal and external space, much like sexual space, at once immediate and remote, completely mundane and utterly sublime—that is what I am after.

  (I want to go as far as we went that afternoon in that room in the trees, our bodies filtering leaves and sunlight—the shapes on the wall—that odd, tripped-up time, the hum of early summer—to let in that kind of pleasure, that kind of light. A line of girls appears—you were always such a child—then disappears. You are long gone—except here. Right here. And then you are gone again. But I will not close the parenthesis yet…

  The tenacity of the erotic.

  I am on a train, as I always seem to be these days, and walking down the aisle I stop to look at someone lying stretched out on two seats, who must have looked like you because standing over this innocent figure I whisper, wake up now. What has brought you here to me? The motion of the train? The desire in these pages, as I finish up the last revisions to Aureole? What has provoked such emotion, such delusion? Who has brought you here? Could it really be you? The movement of the train, does that have something to do with this delusion, this emotion? And the fact that I know you are afraid to fly and that you must be doing a lot of traveling lately and that you travel by train whenever you can, and because you are tired—sleeping in fact, as I stand over you in motion, scribbling, whispering—I try not to think of myself this way…

  My desire to awaken you, and us, retrieve you again, and us, seeing you now as I do before me. You are in the midst of your fifteen minutes of fame and there is not a place, quite suddenly, I can turn without seeing your face—a face I have not seen in years now; there is not a mouth who is not saying your name—or so it seems. And as I write over someone quite asleep, desiring, longing to have you with me (that Amtrak bathroom), to keep you with me—even this sleeping version of you—though you have gone for what is probably forever—trying even here, in the most inappropriate of places, an essay for God’s sake—the elongation of the sentence, to keep you here—not allowing the pen to lift from the paper—to make the words, run on and on, in the terrible, too small—and yes of course, I notice as I stand there that I try in language, using every resource, every strategy to have you with me again. I dreamt that floating train carried us and the narrative. And those words, once broken off with some violence, resumed. At least for a minute.

  I want to get closer to sexual abandon in language, erotic wonder, spiritual awe. I want to be pressed up close to the speechlessness—as we form our first words after making love, having come back from that amazing and sacred place. I want to live next to the impossible, next to that which forever escapes us, eludes us. Aureole is small progress. But the book I love is the book it suggests—and it sends me back again into my own desire and want. This, all this too, and why not this and more and yes. That is the kind of book I wish for. Always more.

  More. I’d like fountains in the text, gardens, reflecting ponds, zones of peace. Deep space. Fleeting, unlikely moments. A place where a clock sounds. A woman sings in French. Her voice caresses the overcast. A child presses her hand against the glass. I see her breath on the pane. She draws a heart. I’d like more weather. The press of cypress against stone, rain at the lip of the rose, she sings, listen, something about the snow…. Charcoal gray graffiti and erasures on ancient stone. Prayers. Intimacies. What they whisper to each other on the rue Christine. The touch of sunlight, the way the hope comes and goes. The Seine running through me still—clinging still. I’d like there to be more swellings, more flooding in the texts. Abundances. More glances and glimpses, more tremblings. I want more hilarity, more bawdiness, more lust, pieces that are rougher around the edges. I’d like, as Cixous would say, more earth. More bloodstorm and sea ache, more birdsong, small warblings. More shimmer and lull. More electricity, fever. Many hotels and boats. I’d like there to be more silence, more darkness. More magic. Made-up languages perhaps; a place of babble. More memory of the sort that the body stores, and the memory that lives in the language. I’d like to pleasure the language for a long time yet, venerate, adore it. Worship the visionary, mystical, ecstatic alphabet—I’d like to get a little closer to what that might mean. So much desire…. Between the night and the night. Between the god and the light—before we are asked to say good-bye. Must be an angel, I think…or Paris…or maybe Paradise…. I’d like a lot of things. This is early work, I know. And I’m still a long way off. I recite a line by René Char to myself: bring the ship nearer to its longing. This book was written in offering to the book just out of reach—radiant, waiting.

  The Re-introduction of Color

  Stitch into your crimson dress a rose, a howl, a code.

  Stitch into your beautiful dress a sentence of your own—a

  room into which one day you will walk.

  for Joan Einwohner

  ONCE I ROAMED IN BLINDING GREEN. White punctuating the scene. Dandelions in August. Blow on them and they would disperse and scatter their seeds. Brilliant yellow the next spring.

  I was drenched in sunlight. Golden seemed to make a sound. Happy, dreaming, lilting child. Look at her, roaming as she is now toward her next adventure, in a place of wonder, iridescence. A green dock. Poodles on a jumpsuit. Beside a gray lake watching the sunfish—and their young, just hatched. You could almost scoop them up in your hands.

  Once red flared from the corner of her world: a beach ball, a bird in winter, the roses her father grew. She felt orange, loved sage, the word indigo, a blue wave. A dock—that crystalline, floating feeling. Wildness of the child—her thousand enthusiasms. She tasted a red rose, pet the black swan that came to her, freed the fireflies her brother caugh
t in a jar. Felt the terrible vibrations of the field against which that brother played—he’s very ill. The child who loved the downbeat, stepped out of time—hearing the world that way. Don’t die.

  She loved being a horse perhaps most of all. She ran fast as the wind. A dark star blazed on her forehead. Running in clover, in heaths, o’er hill and vale—never mind it was suburban New Jersey, never mind. Limitation, like death, an unimaginable thing. Her heart beating wildly as she raced through every time and every terrain, won’t die, won’t die, her extraordinary, complicated tangle of mane, the nostrils flaring, the mouth and the eyes—devouring, the pounding of hoofs, universe, imagination on fire—the child. Utterly dizzied by the contours of the world—and the word. Its rhythms—its heat and light. Of everything there is to say and everything there is to do and be. The body’s small but genuine heat—plowing through woods, hugging every tree. Dancing interpretive dances in her polka-dotted bathing suit, rattling a pod of seeds. In the idyll that was her childhood. Her mother at her side, a more than willing accomplice. Look, Mother, a bird has fallen from its nest, look mother the rabbit’s lair, look mother, oh look. The child wandered freely. Hers the tendency to joy, to pleasure, irreverence, kindness, empathy, dream. The irresistible universe. A secret, a private place. She flew with arms extended once. She sang with fire. Made perfume from roses. Dashed through water sprinkling brightly colored. Danced the can-can. Sang to summon the snow. Adored the rain. Made a May basket for her mother. Lined it with the moss from her special spot in the forest. Listened hour after hour to music with her father. Prayed for her brother, lighting candles on a secret altar: won’t die. Begged the Virgin to appear. Dressed like a butterfly. Streamers flying. Staged elaborate puppet shows. Collected ladybugs. Tasted the night, felt the cat’s velvet, memorized the sky. The stars seemed to make a sound like song. Twinkling. And in the day the sun rang like a bell sometimes. She raced to the edge of the known world. In freedom she imagined being anything, going anywhere. And if teachers or other forces tried to quell her enthusiasms early on—well, they were easy enough to ignore. In a wave, a star, a prayer, a made-up song, the swirl of her mother’s dress—they were gone. Didn’t they always want to reduce a complicated and terrible and terribly beautiful universe? If in those years there was someone anywhere near trying to rein her in or take any of it, any of it away, she did not notice.

  A dark rose. A bottomless black cistern in which she wept. Prayed her made-up prayer. Made potions. Cast spells. A world of charms. Her life opening.

  Imagine the shock then of late adolescence when the charms seemed to desert her, when everything she loved seemed to be taken away. Having roamed freely and unencumbered, the voices out of nowhere started demanding in a kind of staggered unison and from every direction the same thing—conform, conform. Abandon song, conform. Abandon reverence, conform. Surrender your freedom. Against nature, against intuition, do something useful.

  How did she find herself suddenly estranged and at sea in an adulthood not of her own making? Exiled. For a time she must have tried to struggle against it—but like a butterfly pinned, trapped under glass, she felt her lovely wings as she pulled away from the pins to be disintegrating.

  The hairline cracks already beginning to show during the college years. The stress of wanting to know what to do. The burden of a talent completely unrealized, utterly nebulous, just a pressing feeling, nothing even close to words on a page yet. And that strange counterforce coming from almost everywhere. The message—leave that all behind—before she ever embraced it, or tried—leave it behind. Discouragement from every side. Even before she’d ever really begun. Good-bye.

  Who is that sniveling baby who feels so terribly sorry for herself?

  After the buffer of college where the struggle for the child’s soul began in earnest. She stood smack up against the arrogance and demands of conventionality, its breezy assumptions.

  And the request—to go quietly—don’t make such a fuss about it.

  A struggle of wills.

  Having been raised to be an artist surely of some sort—even her mother now seemed to be defecting—your writing—something to do on the side perhaps? She thought she was protecting her from heartache. Alas.

  As she went from one tedious job in one awful law firm after another, she knew she was not going to come true. She was already mourning. She didn’t even know whether there was any real writing in her—but the denial of the chance—the negation of. Yes, but what have you written? Nothing, of course. Not much.

  Give up your childish notions, your silly daydreams. Hurry up, it’s time. Conform, conform. Date. Marry. Work at a real job—not writing for Chrissakes—grow up.

  In part it was this I suppose, in part something more—impossible to define, even now.

  Look at that woman, once the ecstatic child, who walks slowly but undeniably further and further into her remoteness. Not so lonely—-not so lonely there really.

  A young person’s struggle. She felt the terrible weight of convention on her and the magnitude of its demands. The methods were subtle ones—but the message was loud and clear—give up your life for mine, step into line.

  Who is that woman who asks for one hopeful thing—and tries (it’s a little pitiful) to console herself, or erase herself, or something—with recklessness, with sex, with anything she—what in the world is she wishing? A kind of rage, a fast moving inside, surfeit of electricity in her head. And after awhile, after a few weeks usually—she would sink back one more time into speechlessness, dug deep and snug, it’s dark in there, she is, look, she is unable to lift a finger from the bed, or form a word—unable to form a word—oh yes, you’ll be a writer some day! The world flat and drained of color—only shades of gray and then and then—

  E. M. Ciorin says, “The universe is a solitary space, and all its creatures do nothing but reinforce its solitude. In it, I have never met anyone, I have only stumbled across ghosts.”

  How to describe the place where the woman takes up residence? She waves from the distance to the ones she loves, stranded now. Cut off. Frightened by the gap. How she still sometimes wanted to reach them, touch their faces, say their names, have a glass of wine with them perhaps. But the world was losing its vibrancy, its color, its feeling. She felt herself in a shroud of white. And how the sound seemed muffled. The snow—not possible to move through anymore. And the cold.

  The remote hand holds the vestiges of the might-have-been—but forgetful, indifferent, or finally just too tired—you let go of it—that last recognizable part of you—you let it go. And you forget finally completely.

  And she steps into numbness without much of a fight, without much of a fight after all. Estrangement and distance become her, don’t you think?

  Can’t remember much anymore.

  How to describe that white world where from time to time she might make small trips out into a terrible, animated rage, doing awful things, and then fall back into speechlessness, a sorrow so pervasive—Is anyone there? Is anyone in there? Doctors are saying, lovers are saying, friends are saying. Helen. Increasingly difficult. Is anyone in there? Increasingly difficult to know.

  Once she did, she dreamed in brilliant green…Wildness of the child. Audacity of the child. That passionate, vibrant place.

  Look we already know the artist is despised—and it’s not too harsh a word, despised. Really? You think you are a writer? Even if you were it would be treated with dismissal—(and you’re no writer because, let’s face it, a writer writes, does she not?)

  Of course the real contempt is reserved for the real writer, the real artist. She hears the scoffing of the bourgeoisie, the trivializing, the diminishing, the belittling of all that mattered most to her, whenever she’d come out for a little foray into the 1980s.

  It is well past time to mention her father in all of this. The only one who purely encouraged back then. He was the only one as she moved toward adulthood who never asked of her or expected of her the typical, the conventional.
Exerted no pressure. No will over her. The least patriarchal patriarch in the world. She should become an artist. Whatever that would mean. He had been a trumpet player, an artist—and he had felt, though he never said it of course, every day the gravity of disobeying that thing. He had been a musician—but now deprived of a sustainable art form (for how could a trumpet player with five children survive?). He had withdrawn from the world. The price had been high. He lived in ice. She felt she was going there to join him.

  Daddy.

  Once the original, wild, insistent self is lost—how difficult it is to retrieve.

  They lie in the amorphous dark and listen to music.