A Bernadette Mayer Reader Page 6
Not the pride of devils who are fallen angels but the pride of angels who are faithful who subsume all love of other and the hideousness of possession under the vaulted ceiling which is standing for the life where the mind is like a sky over the earth and men and women are the homeostatic expressions of a universe given for a while to their multitudinous ideals of fateful love, land as homes and the principals of families and food, and the righteousness that activates the strongest of what’s left of the men and women after wars are finished to excite the rest to some belief in gratuitous love and the inevitability of the sublime because life for almost everyone has its moments and but for that the whole thing is somewhat dead already, this was my great confusion.
The history of every historical thing including God but not including all men and women individually, is a violent mess like this ice. But for the spaces even hunchbacked history has allowed in between the famous and loud for something that’s defined as what does please us. Which is perhaps this story of an intimate family, though you won’t believe or will be unable to love it, driven to research love’s limits in its present solitude as if each man or woman in the world was only one person with everything I’ve mentioned separate in him or she didn’t represent any history at all though he or she had stories to tell and was just sitting kind of crazily before an open window in midwinter or thinking of the celebrating supper or sleeping on the independent bed or in the enclosed crib which in history could only be relentlessly plundered, in story a sensational death perhaps.
I am like a woman who says I am another woman, or a man who says I am another man. They sleep to rest, beginning to know another, like a story. Then we rest to recover something already gotten from what might be called its mother and father. Next our genius will amaze us like the rest we’ve had to discover of all we might ever be able to know. But not before, as the story now goes, the ones who discover it will be mythically lost having suffered wanting to unearth more than there is from what history’s supposed to be, less than a baby, or the terrible criminal repeating memory which slows us down like a race a swift attack, a current of water in a river or the ocean’s more famous undertow, this window of mine too badly designed to let air in yet too large to make sense, I only feel cold and I’m still here before it, young enough but still a mother, old enough to end the story that might have ended before me.
I have a sensation of waiting, you should call and tell me how the rest might go. Like an important letter, a whole different matter, if I only knew what I need to know. You call and I say in some way I already know all about it, I expected it. That’s a story that might happen today. I don’t dare to end as death is still bewildering, love might be a trick and you are another. But to be beginning I’ll only say that to have you as love is like the history of this idiosyncrasy. If that is not a story then I who have so far listened so much and now am beginning to be able to say something, which is another story am surprised.
from The Desires of Mothers to
Please Others in Letters
VISIONS OR DESOLATION
Come on, there’s always the chance kids will do this, fight uncontrollably crazy screaming like howling buddhas and tearing each other’s never cut before hair out, the bigger ones hitting the smaller ones on the heads with metal tops like latent homo-and heterosexuals with fierce exclamatory natures. Our plan is to just do everything ourselves without any babysitters for the next two weeks and then the classes are over, then we’ll go to New York for a while again, the midwife said I had a neat uterus and she could feel whole arms and legs of the baby, I was waking and talking to a woman on the phone the other day about a playgroup and she kept using the word “shoot,” kept saying, “Shoot I would do anything” and “Shoot I understand what you mean, yes shoot,” then we’ll come back here and spend January getting ready to have the baby, then the baby will be born at the end of that month, I can’t find Dr. Spock can you? but before that we have to gather together all the things we need for the birth and for the baby, cotton balls and undershirts and roasted towels and a bureau for the baby’s clothes and Marie needs a new coat, and we have to do some laundry sometime, when she plays outside now and squats to dig in the dirt the skin of her back is exposed to the air, and they both need new tights, there isn’t any snow on the ground yet, it’s easy to rely on the beat Poets when you’re teaching, any more abstract stuff often turns the students off, they find Frank O’Hara much too difficult, I also want alot of red velvet material and a big red rug to induce feelings that can go past the moon, it’s full again today, those regressive souls in my classes keep talking about how LSD makes deformed babies, these matches are called Rosebud because they have red tips of fire, so many times when you’re pregnant people can’t help but tell you all the worst stories they ever heard, I miss the part of Main Street in Lenox right in front of the bank where the crosswalk led across to the entrance to the library and the buses and cars came circling around the obelisk, Henniker’s equivalent of an obelisk is a kind of former fountain on a triangular island at the foot of which is always lying an old apple core and a discarded ribbon, when I look up I see a portrait of a man holding a glove, if Russell doesn’t see us at all tomorrow perhaps he’ll think we’re not there, I have only twenty minutes left if I’m going to get any sleep, what can I give you, is writing this offering? Lying in bed is a turmoil, anything can enter in, early tomorrow a woman will come with some children, she will be able to explain things to me about this town, she teaches cross-country skiing, now why don’t I do something like that instead of wondering only about babies, poetry, the city, the country and the wisdom I was trying to talk to you about, yet I must’ve sounded a little corrupt when I said that. I do wonder also about you and your way of slumping in a chair which confounds your other way of looking like a jogger in pajamas, I shouldn’t mention pajamas or everyone will make fun of me, I’m sort of looking forward to this January of heavy snows and waiting, bitter cold and never parting again for a while. I don’t like teaching, it distracts us, it’s like everything else everybody says is healthy, skiing jogging and sitting up straight and being independent, eating seaweed and living in the country, the protean brain, or the other way around: Montherlant is nothing if not protean. A peninsula is a body of land almost completely surrounded by water. Some old people live on one can of soup a day. A little peach in the orchard grew, a little peach of emerald hue. . . . I was reading this novel about a man who burned his girlfriend’s house down and then later was almost completely the cause of her father’s death and they try to make a case for this rogue being rather an expression of the girl’s own destructive instincts so the book winds up without a sense of humor (ENDLESS LOVE) and so am I, it’s better to go back to NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND for that. More subtle like the weather’s blatancy (does that mean wind?). But I’m sure you never asked me for my opinions, you asked me for something of beauty, like the idea of the constructing of a house, something less than esoteric, something formal that also has a use, a wedding song or a description of some semi-precious stones. How am I supposed to fit in to this life where children eat so much expensive fruit and leave their trucks in the sand to be run over by the diaper man, will the fleshy influorescence of a collection of color photographs still look like a pineapple or pine cone or a small bomb that looks like one of those? You and I like having each other to ourselves, I compare the two hands of the two yous but I still can’t tell if the hurt one is swollen, why do we have so many injuries lately, is it wrong to walk into a door or let windows slam on your hands, to be slightly stabbed by the midwife to determine the iron content. . . . Something shifts and as Wittgenstein would say, and anybody else not normal, to take some pleasure in being obsessively careful, to quietly comb out the baby’s hair and take one’s time, to decorate the children with ribbons and whisper to them, to prepare special foods, secret inducements, to linger conversing about the dreams in bed, to encourage the counting of peanuts, these are the methods of the usual, inducemen
ts to the ordinary, to pass the time, to adduce pleasure, to encounter danger, to see silver spots before the eyes without fear, the safest form within which to take risks, the advertisement of the day’s misery if I can still look up and see the man with the glove and a chance image of the accumulation of objects, the storehouse of pictures which will not work out in memory, there’s only one time when you can’t be doing this or that kind of work and have something like a drink make it easier than it is, and that’s when you’re giving birth to a baby but there’s nothing new about that. I wish I could try it as a man for once and be the one watching nervously instead of the inhabitant of this always female body, always momentarily fertile and prone to that if I can use that word, it’s worse than taking LSD, not over till it’s over, hoping the baby will be born before another child wakes up, warning people that your screams are not real screams like in a movie or book, expressions of the forward movement of time or movements of the forward expression of time like words, in that case scream is to lean forward and make the time pass faster, hours by clocks in what they still call labor, different from plain work, working in contractions of the muscles of the . . . and so on, you know all about it I’m sure, lucidly there’s space in between during which you feel like yourself again and that is like the book, then when the baby is finally born you don’t know for a moment if you’re thinking of yourself or the other, there’s no reason why the words other and mother ought like an otter to rhyme, they didn’t in Middle English, but then you wouldn’t want to know the derivations for mother, the lees or dregs, I won’t go into that, which is why it’s difficult to remember to immediately hold the baby, you don’t know the baby is different from you, especially if someone else is there. I had a baby once drawn out by forceps from my unwitting unconscious body and when I woke up I said, what was it. It’s worth the tedious trip of consciousness with all the unnecessary pains to thus conquer nature with memory’s astuteness, it’s like the perception of color in after images. There is an end to the sensation, so of this letter.
from Utopia
I was working at my desk one night—Lewis had gone to Baltimore to give a reading with Lucille Clifton—& I was wishing somebody would come to visit me. The bell rang. The buzzer wasnt working and I couldnt leave the apartment because of the children. I hoped whoever it was, assuming it was a friend, would find a way to get in. One second later Grace was at the door, I dont remember opening it.
Grace looked even more unusual than ever, it was not just the patina of her bright red-bronze-copper hair & her shocking sensuality that blew my mind this time but a weird & intense sense of purpose which for a moment made me frightened she’d come to tell me some kind of awful news. Yet she was grinning at me. I couldnt understand how she’d got up the stairs so fast & I thought for a moment maybe it was somebody else who’d rung the bell and that I’d now have two visitors which often happens when you at last have one.
We kissed, Grace gave me a funny look & said, “I’ve just come from the future oh god Bernadette,” & then she sat down. Luckily I had a bottle of Amontillado & had been drinking it mixed with some peculiar red tea this night. I brought her a glass and poured her a drink; Grace breathed deeply, drank and said nothing.
“What’s going on Grace?” I asked, by this time obsessed with her state of mind, “What happened?”
“Bernadette,” she said, “I’ve been in some other world.”
“Grace calm down,” I said though she didnt seem the least bit nervous, it was me who was having hard heart palpitations, “What world?”
“Well I cant begin this story at the beginning,” she laughed, “and I cant speak generally either.”
“Come on Grace you’re driving me nuts.”
“Dont say anything for a while,” she said, “and I’ll tell you everything.” (She looked like she wasnt really sitting in her chair!) She said, “Last week I met two people in the country & they took me on a trip in their car. As it turned out we went about 25 years away, maybe more, I’m not kidding.”
“Oh,” I said, “are you o.k.?”
“Dont dont say anything,” she said, “till I get started. But first let me breathe I am so relieved to have gotten here & to get to tell all of this.”
“Ok,” I said, “I’m not saying anything look and see.” (It was very noisy.)
“The other night there was a knock at my door, it was just like the time the raccoon was banging at your door in Massachusetts, hanging upside down. I was a little scared at being alone, I answered & these two people were asking directions, or at least they seemed to be, then somehow in the midst of our talking it was obvious they knew me, they began without my telling my name at all to call me Grace & before I knew it & without it seeming spooky at all they were making all these big generous sorts of old jokes about me & my family & you & Peggy. That night I never thought anything about their knowing everything. Oh wait I’ve gotta describe them.”
Grace breathed some more & I could tell she was only thinking of the story. It was hard to say nothing so I tried smiling at her in exactly the way she was smiling at me. It wasnt complicated. I took a further drink of Amontillado straight & felt a great rush of anticipation & love.
“They looked alot like Shelley actually, they were small and androgynous with her kind of big eyes & I couldnt tell, though it never occurred to me then to try, if they were women or men and women or what. They were wearing old-fashioned loden coats & pants & one had on a bright Persian blue shirt & the other had a New York Aquarium shirt with whales on it. After we talked for a while they offered to show me their technique of flying. They hovered about the ceilings then, singing a light-hearted song about sleep:
‘Sleep sleep sleep
I do I do I do
we’re all balls of ears
two by two
it’s me hot sun
blue sky at night
all knit together
darkness is light
half of one
becomes my twin
one hand is thick
the other is thin
transparent sky
lets me go through
in sleep each night
each of you
one of us is
brilliant weather
little sleep
statue mother
little sleep
statue father
someone anyone
and another’
“I know I slept then though I cant remember how I got to sleep & you’ll laugh when I tell you I had a great dream about sex in which it was raining milk because of the snow in a movie & next morning when I saw the sun I knew I remembered something that should fill me with either pleasure or fear but I felt like I do in dreams all the time & I couldnt be scared or notice any other sensations in my body, I just felt even like a body with a mind moving.
* * *
“We left on our trip together without talking about it after we ate a big breakfast of Irish oatmeal with cream & tea. We went in their car which was a kind of Peugeot, modified to have 3 rows of seats & the whole inside was painted red. For a long time it seemed like we were travelling over the hills themselves, you didn’t notice the roads. We talked about politics, sex, money, books, and music and dance, till, around noon, we arrived at a kind of camp. My friends introduced me to some of their friends and together they cooked for all of us a meal of pumpkin soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. Then we took a big pail of some peculiar dark beer down to the pond & sat on the shore to have a conversation. They had something interesting to smoke which made you feel like you’d been in a steam bath. We were watching the sun set & as we watched all these people began describing it to me in such a new and fanciful kind of language with all kinds of new words for everything that seemed more like the truth or accurate that at some point if they told me the sky was purple I could see a purple sky & a yellow mountain, but then it was obvious that was exactly what I saw and besides all that that wasnt what they said, it was som
ething even newer, I cant remember, wasnt it just a simple sunset?”
Grace paused. “I dont know,” I said.
“It was after that they took me into the future on such a long and thorough trip I cant begin yet to tell you all the details of it, but wait and let me tell you all the rest first. We all ate another meal later, again I cant remember, it seemed like mashed potatoes with garlic and maybe cream or something combined like that, then we made love & I found out that these people were female & male indeed in a way, there were all kinds of funny aerial acrobatics where two of them hovering were enough to hold me up & as long as one person was paying enough attention to another person you wouldnt fall down, but when you did they sang a funny song as you hit the ground & got kind of scooped up again with all the more attention & love & the song said something like: ‘Small world (laughing) whole world all set up, I see alot of (laughing) in your ah your mama & your papa, let’s laugh through your (penis) we will get to be laughing inside your (vagina) because you see my sweet mouth has words in it, all the sounds. . . .’ I cant sing the song exactly but that’s what it was. They were teaching me too all kinds of lovely & intricate tricks.”
Grace looked at me long enough so I couldnt help but say, “What kind of tricks?”
“Well wait, wait, I’m wanting to tell you how I got here, and then I’ll be finished in a way with some part of the story & can answer everything about the rest, because by then I’ll be sure not to forget everything. I must’ve slept again and in the morning, which was this morning, we made a plan to meet again next week. They said the revisions of life I’d remember might seem inconsequent because they were just in our world but after more time I would even remember more. I’m supposed to bring you and Peggy with me next week. Then they took me here, to your door, in an instant, though now it’s night, and I dont even remember coming up in the elevator. And now my story’s done.”