Bathing Beauty

Today I walked down by the shore of the bay - that yoke of sand and undulating, tepid water - allowing my feet and eyes to palpate those smooth stones that burrow right along the coastline. Of course, I imagined myself as Martha again, that reticent poet the Lieutenant so loves in The Things They Carried. I picked up coral, kernel-sized rocks and purple pebbles and even a seamless, featureless white stone that reminded me of the one so longingly described in the novel. Somehow, the beach has a way of making me think about everything and absolutely nothing all at once, like scrawling out vast catalogues (with a new number on each list for every grain of salt and sand riveted to my limbs), only to tear off the paper from the notepad and toss it aside in favor of an unmarked page. I thought about James and war and how I can't write anymore, and about my father backpacking out west in lieu of college, and about how I need to stop wishing I were more tragic - some sort of doleful, misplaced doe living in those grassy sectors that are all too close to highway medians. To unbutton my own skin a little, I stationed my towel near the dunes, where I could canoodle with the sun, nuzzled my feet into the sand and let fistfuls of it sift through my hands like funnels, and imagined that I really were living in the forties, which isn't hard to do on a secluded beach in a vintage-inspired bikini. I let myself assemble a Bathing Beauty wish-list: all the thises and thats I want to have to be a more genuine swimsuit clad lady of the past. Thought I'd share all those coveted items:

1) An embellished bathing cap, to keep my pin curls in place. In the forties and even later, women essentially never ventured into the water without neatly tucking their labored-over locks into a floral (or otherwise) decorated swimming cap.

2) A pretty lace or paper parasol to keep my complexion looking nicely browned, rather than horribly roasted.

3) Back issues of magazines published in the forties to peruse while lounging on the beach. Nothing like a little inspiration from the glamour girls of the bygone days.

4) A wide-brimmed, straw hat for mid-day beach strolls.

And of course, some accessories I already own that no bathing beauty should be without:

1) Impractical pumps to keep those legs looking long and lean.

2) Fresh or silk flowers or some alternative hair accessory to keep you looking finished and well polished.

3) A vintage handkerchief to dab our faces with in order to fool men into thinking us dames never sweat.

4) And of course, we mustn't ever forget our red lipstick; if, in the forties, women in the military were expected to demonstrate their femininity in spite of their service with stained lips, then certainly, the bayside was no place to be without makeup!

Now, please, all, get to the beach before the summer, too, is bygone!

Braiding

Precursor:

It's not that I haven't been trying to write lately; I have. Maybe the plodding pace of the summer has left me feeling a little lackadaisical when it comes to, well, just about everything, but I've picked up the ole' journal from time to time nevertheless. Anyhow, it seem that regardless, I haven't yet composed anything of real substance this summer, but I've realized this past weekend that my lull in inspiration does not have to equal a lull in posts. Point is, I've been having some computer problems of late, which has motivated me to go through all of my documents and back files up, and in doing so, I stumbled across many, many pieces that I had forgotten about entirely. It's interesting, sifting through all this work from high school, appreciating them in a whole new way (back then, I found a way to loath everything that was inked onto paper from my imagination.) Here's something I wrote in my senior year, when we were studying forms of non-fiction; it's called a beaded essay, because it takes a cluster of ideas and strings them together in a unifying way (as one would in creating a necklace.) I suppose because of this it may feel a little disjointed, but hopefully some sense can be made of it! Here goes:

Braiding

The heirlooms that linger in my space, in my home, are enigmatic, cryptic: they are sphinxes.

The first time I saw them, I was eight or nine, maybe younger. They were like two spokes on the wheels of my bicycle, only healthier in their thickness. Even then, I could tell they were woven by the hands of a basket maker – the three entities of my grandmother’s hair folded into one, three separate strands unified in braids. Such a curious finding to stumble upon; the memory of a lost desire to join the convent. I wondered for many hours, for many days, I wondered about what changed her mind, noting differences between the hair on my own head and her severed hair: both dead, both dull in their tone. The preparation of mind it must take to part with long locks; I can imagine her in front of a vanity wearing clam diggers and saddle shoes, leg shaking like a jitterbug, eyes watching the scissors as though they were ready to start dancing. And I can picture her carefully parting her hair on the top of her scalp and down the back, and then braiding the two sections in the slow, steady rhythm of a waltz. She would cut them away quickly, without lingering, and be left with blunt ends, with no hair to hide behind. I never found out what stopped her from becoming a nun, never got the real answer, only the fantasies: “She met your grandfather and that was the end of it,” my father told me. “No,” my mother said, rolling her eyes like windmills. “That isn’t it.”

It was the typical tourist’s souvenir, the inexpensive take-me-home. A small wooden box with black varnish and doll sized hinges, mother-of-pearl inlay and a depiction of a Japanese tree on top. But the miniature chest did not come home to America empty – it came carrying war – the civilians, the scenery, the expansive ships of the navy, and hollowness. (My grandfather came back with hollowed out cheekbones and a hollowed out soul – the war had stiffened him.) This is how I imagine his homecoming to have played out: he steps over the threshold, present in hand, luggage slung over a shoulder, to nothing. No wife, no children – all had left, careening him back to the wide swaths of foamy sea again, only the depth of blue and mysteriousness of what was under the surface visible. There was a note, that’s all – a small scrap of goodbye – though its contents, its excuses, its explanations, remain unknown to me.

That house was filled with the past and the future was all that was ahead; he plowed forward, trying to fill the chest, trying to develop new memories, finding a new wife, a faithful one; finding my grandmother. Her parents bought the house, kissing their farewells to Baltimore City and welcoming the suburbs. It was the model house: simple, brick, wood floors, three bedrooms and a cave of a basement. And that house was passed down to my grandparents, then to my brother, and filled with innumerable uncles, aunts, sisters, brothers, filled with Sicilians smoking, baking, laughing, praying the rosary, downing wine, and living.

Visiting my brother is like living in a photo album. Visiting my brother is like being in grade school again. The décor has changed since the holidays and weekdays I spent visiting my grandparents, watching television specials and eating potfuls of macaroni and cheese. The carpet has been ripped up to expose the flooring the house was born with, the colors of the walls more muted, the stairwell no longer lined with framed photographs, the old furniture traded for newer pieces. Without the velveteen couch and the knickknacks strewn throughout the rooms, I can see it better now for what it is. I can appreciate the arcs in the doorways and the old-fashioned marble tile in the upstairs bathroom, both circular patterns, as in never-ending, as in everything ultimately comes back to meet. Circular like the heirlooms I own: never really mine, and yet somehow a part of me. I have always been captivated by these objects: their stories so unexplainable, their past sitting idle, waiting to be invented. Their history lies in my hands, in my heart.

La Moda

Let me lay down the ole cliche: new blog, new beginning.  I've decided to intersperse my usual musings (which generally take the form of personal essays and experimental fictions) with something yet untried: fashion.  So in between my writings, look out for photographs of yours truly and all her style inspirations.  Before you're compelled to condemn my vanity, though, let me enumerate a few of the reasons I've decided to take this leap.  

1) There was a span of time this past year where I was downright content slapping on my "Free Tibet" tee shirt, worn out jeans, a gaudy necklace, and my trusted beat-up cowboy boots.  We all have our moments of lounging, I'll acknowledge, but my ultimate hope is that with the desire to blog, I'll simultaneously find myself developing a desire to avoid haphazard wardrobe choices.  Be warned that you'll most likely be taking a gander at an overload of vintage inspired outfits, because I see this blog as a means of fueling (or perhaps curbing?) my obsession with the days of yore. 

(Note: Yes, God, I realize how utterly frivolous this sounds, but a girl has to avoid unalloyed seriousness, right?  Right.)

2) In my own obsessive fashion blog following, I've come to appreciate the careful attention so many fashionistas out there put into the layout of their photo displays.  As I see it, this gives me an adequate excuse to play with the overpriced Adobe software my father spontaneously decided to buy for me while I was still in high school.  Bear with me through all of this, though, as I'm still learning.  I designed the header for this page tonight, and in its original form, it's all cremes and lilacs and sepia-toned colors, but for some reason, when I uploaded it to Blogger, it turned blue and pink.  I'll try fiddling with that again at a later date. 

3) For the longest time, people have asked me, "Where do you get your clothes?"  Well, ladies and gents, now is your time to find out, I suppose.  You'll see that I shop almost anywhere affordable (my attic, consignment shops, and H&M, to name a few.)  Growing up around a thrifty mother who seemed to be sewing constantly, I learned early on what well-made clothes look and feel like, and that they can be found in places other than high end boutiques and expensive department stores.  To me, it's less about individual pieces and more about assembling a head-to-toe, cohesive mien.  

And there you have it.  Currently working on a new essay, so be sure to check back soon.  In the meantime, I've reposted some of the more recent entries from my old livejournal.  Gotta have a little bit of history!

♥ Vintage Betty

The Minotaur

 We two are sumo wrestlers, wedging between the nooks of one another’s flesh with all the force of Venus’ atmospheric pressure, panting like carnivorous bovine animals as we fight to resist our expulsion from the ring.

This is what it must’ve felt like to exist as the Minotaur, Asterion, before he was slain into non-being by Theseus.  I can imagine myself in the Labyrinth now, the beastly offspring of Mino’s wife and the Cretan bull, a tragic amalgamation of human and brute.  It wouldn’t matter that I was a stranded toddler in the serpentine maze: I’d keep expecting you to turn up around every corner, every hedge, perched on some bush of quilted leaves, waiting for me. I’d convince myself that I could never know the complexities of that warren, and that I’d never pass along the same regions twice, just to retain the hope that reaching you was fathomable. 

Inconceivable, to divorce myself from thoughts of you.  Maybe we’d rediscover one another in the center of the erratic network of passages, and our hearts, reflectively, would turn to kernels – soft and edible.  We could devour each other whole, picking through our innards, getting to know our very essences. 

Or maybe we’d stumble across one another on insomnia driven walks in the night.  The initial collision would frighten us both, but I’d soon recall what skin-to-skin contact felt like, and offer myself over to you like some sort of sacrificial lamb waiting to serve its purpose on the altar before god. 

This is all I really want: to surrender myself, and for you to cave in like an old wooden house with a disintegrating foundation – to let me fall headlong into your chest, and to open your arms to accept me as a parenthetical note in the text of your pneuma.  

The Preta

We are hungry ghosts.

I was reborn into the realm of insatiability as a preta, and found myself collapsed like an empty, pried open freshwater mussel on the parched earth, all convex stomach and chiseled out limbs.  “Please,” I used to plead with the air.  “I just need something to drink,” I’d say, curling myself into a logarithmic spiral like some sort of nautilus shell.  I knew it wouldn’t be long before the other skeletal demons around me would start gnawing away at my skin and bone, feasting on my corpse, fighting to quench their own hunger.  I was ready to fall prey to these hyenas; I was ready to give up trying to sustain myself on human feces and carcasses. 

If there was any real nutriment in that hell, I didn’t know where to find it.  I used to watch one of the other nameless, mummified women in her forage for food.  She would claw at the barren soil in search of worms, shoots of grass, bacteria – anything.  She would climb wilting trees, struggling to catch squirrels, breaking off bits of bark and reaching for handfuls of leaves.  Relentless: whenever she came close to obtaining nourishment, the critters and plant-life would dissolve before the pits of her eyes, and I’d gaze at her in all her helplessness, noticing how her slits turned to hollow caves when the food vanished.  She never died.  She never became someone new.  She just withered up like a shrunken head under the rays of the scalding moon.  There, the sun left us shivering, so that every afternoon, my irises would tear around the flat terrain, searching for another individual to huddle up to.  I wanted to be near someone.  I wanted to gather the rest of the ghouls up like firewood and light a match so that we could garner our own heat.  There may as well have been no one.  We were all Anatman – without soul – and when I tried to lend my touch to another being, my fingers would pass right through his body.  We were loiterers, waiting to pass onto another world, another domain, and yet convergence with one another was impossible; there was no such thing as a lingering caress or brush or graze in the sphere of pretas.  

All I ever received as one of those hungry ghosts was pity.  Humans couldn’t see us, but they must have detected our presence, because there was a monastery nearby that used to leave out bits of bread and sometimes meat for us to binge on. I fell in love with one of the monks there, and I once splayed myself out on the stone steps leading up to the building, trying to keep cool and wishing he would walk out into the night and begin the downtempo strides of mindful meditation on my torso.  I wanted him to pick blossoms from the trees that shrouded the outside walls of the temple and tuck them behind my ears.  I wanted us to realize our escape together.  I wanted to be able to touch him, but knew that even if our separate worlds were to intersect, I couldn’t, because I was a woman, and because it would fracture his lifelong vow to celibacy.  

In the darkness, on the stairs, I remained, imagining my own resurrection.  If I could only train myself to be inanimate, I might turn into a thyrsus – one of those ivy covered, pine cone tipped staffs wielded by characters of mythology.  These wands are a symbol of fertility, with their phallus shaped fennel and seed-like woody fruit.  If I learned the art of shapeshifting, and morphed into the thyrsus of Dionysus, maybe I could signal my own rebirth.  

The Things I Carry

 Sometimes, I imagine myself as a pendulum, strung from the intestines of some antique grandfather clock by the chords of my hair.  I know that I am composed of the polarities of Heaven and Hell and that Purgatory is a place I can’t hang onto for long.  (This image has been recycled in films since the beginning of time: Limbo is the edge of some canyon and my hands are neither calloused nor sinewy enough to perpetually grip onto the lip of the withered earth.)  

            This is the only way I know how to talk about my hypomania.  I am capable of making sense of some rudimentary physics concepts because they are inherent to my very being: oscillations, for me, can occur within the same day, within the span of a few hours, within one week, within each individual month that ultimately accumulates into many months, which will eventually form an entire year. I seesaw between moods, so that every emotion is like a different vacation spot, and I have the time to expend making day trips to each one.   I have toured the kind of loneliness where each heartbeat is a new harrowing surprise, and have made excursions towards undeniable elation, (when it’s as though every interaction with the world is a new drop of water helping to make the cup of the self brim with liquid.)

            And here’s the thing: hypomania is in part what has helped to fertilize the ovum of my creativity.  My respective elevation and deflation gives birth to zygotes: ideas seeded in the confines of my brain, curling their roots around my nervous tissues, fighting to sprout their little heads.  These plants push through the soil of my consciousness until I agree to sit down and nurture them, write about them so that they may fully germinate.  This, too, is where my insomnia stems from: I am so incessantly inundated with my own thoughts that I can’t sleep.  Sometimes, I am enamored with it, and I become overblown with pride for being able to operate without the kindling of dreams.  Other times, I am a fed-up lover, and fantasize about training myself to be one of the Buddhist monks who can exist in meditation and hear a gunshot without reaction: external noise is as “neutral as a bird crossing the sky” for these renunciants. 

Either way, I am prone to grandiose notions, and here is the one that has become a sentient life form in my mind today.  I haven’t been able to bar myself from looking at photographs of women during WWII: civilians, Red Cross nurses, Rosie the Riveters, female soldiers.  If this were the 1940s like I’ve always wanted it to be, and I was on the Home Front while you were off waging wars, I’d wait around for you forever.  I’d write you love letters and send you symbolic tokens of my affection that could survive the mail, like Martha in The Things They Carried:

In the first week of April, before Lavender died, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross received a good-luck charm from Martha. It was a simple pebble. An ounce at most. Smooth to the touch, it was a milky-white color with flecks of orange and violet, oval-shaped, like a miniature egg. In the accompanying letter, Martha wrote that she had found the pebble on the Jersey shoreline, precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated. It was this separate-but-together quality, she wrote, that had inspired her to pick up the pebble and to carry it in her breast pocket for several days, where it seemed weightless, and then to send it through the mail, by air, as a token of her truest feelings for him. Lieutenant Cross found this romantic. But he wondered what her truest feelings were, exactly, and what she meant by separate-but-together. He wondered how the tides and waves had come into play on that afternoon along the Jersey shoreline when Martha saw the pebble and bent down to rescue it from geology. He imagined bare feet. Martha was a poet, with the poet's sensibilities, and her feet would be brown and bare, the toenails unpainted, the eyes chilly and somber like the ocean in March, and though it was painful, he wondered who had been with her that afternoon. He imagined a pair of shadows moving along the strip of sand where things came together but also separated. It was phantom jealousy, he knew, but he couldn't help himself. He loved her so much. On the march, through the hot days of early April, he carried the pebble in his mouth, turning it with his tongue, tasting sea salts and moisture. His mind wandered. He had difficulty keeping his attention on the war. On occasion he would yell at his men to spread out the column, to keep their eyes open, but then he would slip away into daydreams, just pretending, walking barefoot along the Jersey shore, with Martha, carrying nothing. He would feel himself rising. Sun and waves and gentle winds, all love and lightness.

            It would be enough for both of us, subsisting on longing and distance and words alone. But this isn’t the Second World War, nor is it Vietnam all over again, and you’re not countries away from me, and even if you were, I’m not sure you’d ever make it back to the States anyway. And so I have moved on, or am trying to in spite of all my original intentions of remaining an unsullied little girl in the midst of this continual bloodshed. 

"Cadaver Me, Cadaver You"

Friday night, where are you?  I’m lonely again.  I want to drink myself to non-memory.  I want to find an anonymous boy to get under my shirt.  “I don’t make a habit of this, by the way,” I would explain.  “It’s just a phase I’m going through,” I’d reassure him (or rather, myself) as we made our way to the graveyard.  I want to feel spiritual and sordid at once.  (It was only a few months ago that I rolled my eyes at the cliché of necropolis sex.)   I want to slaughter that corpse-like core of mine, to flick away my corrugated seed-shell so that I can be devoid of an essence.  I want to learn about nonduality in the physical sense, to purge the world of its duhkha and thereby assuage my own suffering.  We could be empty and open together.  We could breakdown all preconceived boundaries and become mirror-like, reflecting one another, becoming one another, learning what it means to exist without horizons.  This is what I mean when I say we should live intersubjectively. 

Most of all, I want to be touched without thinking of you.  I want to realize my Buddha-nature and stop clinging to the hope of a future, because those fucking daydreams are precisely what cultivate a disconnect with my present world.  But I can see myself now, becoming intimate with the grass and soil, thinking how close the stars look, (because the sky is really just a dome-shaped building,) and wondering why I haven’t bothered to memorize the names of all the constellations.  I would absorb all of this, and know that the boy unraveling my skin couldn’t begin to understand what I meant by any of these abstractions, and so I’d stop him and make him tell me what he was passionate about.  (“And don’t give me some bullshit like economics, because I don’t believe that anyone can really see the lyricism in any of that.”)  I’d scare him with my questions: he thought that I was a pliant tree branch and this was just facile, Friday night fucking.  He overlooked the part about me wanting to really know someone.  I’d whisper something about being hung-up on another guy, and say, “Isn’t this like a Beatles song?  Or no, maybe it’s Bob Dylan.  God, why can’t I think of the name right now?”  Hopefully he’d respond by asking, “Isn’t everything like a Beatles song?”  And I’d surrender, knowing that he was right, and later realize I was thinking of the lyrics to “You won’t see me.”  (“Time after time, you refuse to even listen.  I wouldn’t mind if I knew what I was missing.”)

This is stupid.  I wish someone would just love me for a few hours in an isolated cemetery and then leave me for dead with the rest of the brittle skeletons and disintegrating cadavers.