Another Lady from Shanghai

Lisa,

I finished watching The Lady from Shanghai. I thought about how I would tell my students to either choose a different title, or make the connection the character has to China, and its significance, clearer.

And this leads me to thinking again about what do women want. My friend Jonah used to repeat, I want, I need, I must have, over and over as we were applying to graduate programs: asking for letters of recommendation, and writing personal statements. We laughed about it, but it never occurred to me that of course his desires, the unspoken ones or the ones that go without saying between men and women even if they aren’t involved, were significantly different than my own. The amount of times we used those parts of sentences: I want (“to be able to explore painting (in my case writing) in an environment that….”) I need (“a community of…”) was becoming meaningless (and comical) in the repetition. “I must have” was what we really wanted to say. It was too hard to demand rather than implore. Yet, Jonah said I must have as the punch line, the joke of the desperation to get in, to belong. Looking at it now it isn’t so funny.

It was never clear to Jonah, or perhaps any of my men friends, what the women they knew wanted. We couldn’t tell them. Not clearly anyway. The chestnuts of equal pay, etc. were not the critical issues and the way I put it last night is way too broad. Having a dignified life of my own design sounds right, but just exactly what does it mean?

The one thing I knew I was supposed to want was love. If I couldn’t get that then I was a deficient woman. But the real thing is that we are supposed to want to be loved, or accept love on the other’s terms.

We talk often about what being loved can do for us. The love you got from your parents seems to have helped you to expect love (and accept it) easily. The lack of love I got from mine makes the idea of lovable compromised by the need to earn it, and not being pretty enough (ever) thin enough (ever) blonde enough (don’t laugh) made that a very tough go for me.

It seems that women need to be loved by the world. Perhaps I mean approved of: due to my early lessons approval and love are the same. I bet this is not so different for other women.

I decided long ago that I would not try to be approved of. It seemed the best and only way to be sure if I was lovable: face that gorgon and live, and you must approve of (love) me. But the joke was on me.

Very similar to the femme fatale, I chose to love death. Not my actual death, but definitely the darker, annihilating edge of life. I dared life (desire?) to continue in me despite the lack of love or approval, and for some time. Then, I met a man that approved. He was nuts and of course it ended as the blasted tower. I rebuilt myself in her image again. She is like Hecate: she wants but refuses to need. Of course, I am not sure about any of this I am just talking out of my head.

The thing is I feel that desire in the form of wanting it all has always been prescribed to women as love/approval. Love is all you need was a good idea, but for men it was not describing their own existence, but a way of living with others in the world. For me, the messages of love that I heard were about acquiescence, placidity, and approval. I don’t want to be Brigid O’Shaunessey, but I am more like her than not. I don’t have the real desire to take men toward their doom, but I have fantasized about it with real pleasure. I have to consciously fight that desire to take my desire to the limit every day. For O’Shaunessey, getting the dingus would have meant having the money and having beaten the men at their own game: she would have real power.

I would have real power but for the need to be loved/approved of. Love makes vassals of us all: shanghaied.

Bodies and Balloons

Lisa,

Tonight I was smirking to myself about all the talking about relationships, relating, understanding…

Tonight, at 8 pm this evening, I am thinking only about how alone I am. Tonight I feel heartbreakingly lonely, especially after to listening to the podcast you sent me from This American Life. The episode where the young Latina is so lonely, that despite her yearning and dream to have a vibrant, creative life, a dream of an office and a career in animation, she releases that dream, a luft balloon helium shiny pearlized pink helium balloon an airbrushed unicorn prancing…

Shit.

I sometimes think that the only romance I can have is with loneliness. How hard is it to strike up a conversation in a café? Somehow for me it seems impossible. Not that I do it much anymore, try to converse with strangers. The only ones that seem to desire my conversation or company are visitors from another planet. Here’s the rub: they recognize me. Oh to be recognized by people who yell into your face and ask if your tattoos hurt and tell you that they are also getting tattoos, but the ones they are going to get are going to be able to move and speak.

Merde.

I fantasize Paris where I too can be a crazy alien and so my lack of balance (both physical and emotional) will be recognized as proper for someone from my planet. Paris because once the art created there suggested my fat was beauty.

What is this recipe I have concocted for my loneliness? One part age, two parts body fears issues? Being fat is no picnic in this culture. Neither is being fifty-eight. But those are only the beginnings of my sense of isolation. We would need to speak about class. I have none. I know that you can hear me laughing, but how often do I make a joke, self deprecating or not, only to be met with that lead balloon response. I seem to be working that balloon metaphor overtime and yet the image is so compelling for me: to float away able to transcend, to inhale some of the helium and crack myself up listening to my voice.

I am really good at entertaining myself, but tonight I am not amused.

I have said here before I am not at home in this collection of water blood and bones. I am always at war with it, and yes, I agree, I am my body. What the hell else am I? This is where all of me lives, happy with it or not. I cannot separate my mind from my body, and yet I suppose I do in conversation, but honestly I don’t even know where my mind is except in my body. Sometimes I love this body, being fat, proud of letting myself go; there is power in it and sometimes I am aware of that power.

Sex. Yes, I suppose we need to break that open. I can only start with this statement: I have not had sex in ten years. That should create a hush yes? I am laughing trust me.

It’s been so long for many reasons. I have told you how I lamented to Karen about it and she said that she didn’t know what could be done short of my wearing a sandwich board that said:

Hi, would you like to fuck a fellow American down on her luck?

How hard did I laugh that night and since in the retelling? For some reason I feel that I am supposed to be ashamed of my lack of sex, that I should apologize, or at least explain. I can’t do either.

Having a body that is not the ideal makes me an alien, being old makes me an alien, having a low income makes me an alien. But I think I must love being an alien because in my mind’s eye I have seen me deliberately stopping by that road less traveled and feeling ownership for it as I laugh. I took that damn track and it did make all the difference: it hurt, it cost me, but I did learn exactly what I am made of.

Am I even saying anything that makes sense? I will continue as I have; I am waiting to see where this all goes and for that to happen I have to stay right here with as much courage as I can pretend to have. To be real.

Bodies of Water

A child’s body is more than eighty percent water (enough for a globe)
A man’s body is two thirds water (enough to bleed)
Half of my body is water (enough to support a new life)

Can water be touched?

I have cupped water to my face
Drank it
Poured it over my neck and hands

I have lain down in water
And on water
Supported by the tension of its body

The tension of one half of my body does not allow touch

Water is contained
Yet water will always join with other water
If it is allowed

Half of my body would join and touch

In stillness
Water always finds its symmetry
Always in harmony with itself

As water meets substance
It polishes and smoothes
Shaping it anew

Half of my body is perfect

Water in the body diminishes with age
Or fat
Or starvation

Half of my body is water

The ways of water must live in me
Enough to be touched

Seeing and Believing

Lisa,

When we begin to talk about recognition it really opens the discussion, as we realized on the phone last night.

If women are not acknowledged in the many ways we have talked about, this most certainly affects women artists. I am thinking particularly of writers, as that is what we do, but also writers due to the fury surrounding Franzen’s new book.

Several women authors are outraged at the fact that the NY Times reviewed his new book twice in the same week. Having never read much of his work (I only flipped through “The Corrections” and didn’t feel it) I am slightly suspicious of the hyperbole surrounding the new book; some women writers are less benign in their responses and I think with good reason.

We have talked about, made the list of, talented women writers who commit suicide. This is a legacy offered many young women writers: we will most likely suffer for our work (mostly unrecognized) and then become martyr angels for the public that ignored us, or some craziness like that. For me self-hatred was seeded as a young girl having to walk past the gathering of men on the corner where the luncheonette was. I went to purchase the family Sunday papers and the catcalls, crude remarks (and often the grabbing) had made me not only self-conscious, but self reprimanding for some thing that I had done (that I could not identify) that caused me to be treated in that way. Later on it became a position of power, but as we know a tainted self-immolating power.

So when these women writers are publicly angry regarding the heralding of yet another man’s “talent” I get it.

When we met we were wary of one another I think. I was at any rate. But I also was the one that pursued the friendship, although you did come up to meet my overtures readily. We began with writing, and for me (I will not speak for you) everything begins with that. Talking about writing, finding confidence in our work when recognition for talent seems to move toward men’s work much more often, was the foundation of what has become a most important relationship for me as a writer and woman. I do hate to slice the pie into the woman/man sections so often, but it is really hard to ignore what I see. And I guess that the women who wrote to the Times and elsewhere are seeing it too.

Sadly, for me, when this kind of controversy comes around, it does make me more aware of how hard it is to have a relationship with men. I don’t see them as the enemy, and yet I see them as the ones to beat. I am competitive with men not because I want to win so much as I want to be recognized. Can’t beat ‘em—join? Well, that doesn’t work, so how do we proceed?

Part of me feels that men need to find their own way and if I sympathize (and actually I do) with the constraints and problems foisted upon them by the culture at large I will lose focus. This has played out truly enough for me to have to steel myself and keep my focus on what women, what I, need. This may be why I have difficulty in relationships with men.

I would love to end this with some clever remark, but I feel this too much to be superficial. I will leave it at this: one definition for recognizing is to have been experienced before. Have you ever been experienced?

The Mind That Burns

What can one possibly say to her
When she is like this
there is nothing you can say

Her voice fires a wild angry arrow
over us past us rushing through us pointing at everything
looking for the target and the surety that
She is right

Of course she knows she isn’t
As do we
Right?

Of course it is an abomination what happens to women
The rapes stonings murders mutilations
Women
Denied objectified erased

But wrathful and negative
Everything and everyone to blame she wants
To take no prisoners

We know and we understand
And she herself said well
What’s to be done
Write a shitty poem and feel it’s done the contribution made

Then she brought up the monks
remembering the shorn heads aflame
Perhaps this is what she is doing
Sitting here igniting herself with condemnation for men
for herself
for all of us

In the heat of the conflagration she says
Unlike the monks
She is not willing to die for this
what would be the point
For those she would burn with her
do not even see her

Of course we don’t know what can make it right
What is to be done
What warmth before the embers of her retreating fury?

Instead we look into our hearts and worry
Wondering what stance to take
Wondering what weapons we have

Beyond Sex and Civility

Dear Laura,

You mention the kind of dignity and respect we discuss as good manners, as basic civility between human beings. I absolutely agree. But I think there’s something more, some ineffable thing that must be addressed as well. At coffee this morning we ran into one of my former partners. He was respectful, polite, as was I. Yet something more profound was missing, no? Truth be told, there was always something missing from that relationship, which was based entirely on sex and civility. What is that something more that comes up between people who are really in conversation? And how do men and women really enter into conversation together?

I think, beyond manners and civil behavior, we’re looking for recognition, of a very particular kind. What brought us together as friends? At first, it was just a glimmer, catching one another’s eyes light up in particular moments of discussion, seeing one another navigate the world in ways we both found intriguing. Then, as we started to really talk with one another, it became something more. We recognized, in each other, a particular relationship to life and to love. We saw one another as fully human. We were vulnerable to one another.

My former partner—let’s call him Kennedy—never recognized me. And honestly, I never recognized him. Kennedy did all the things good, engaged people are supposed to do—he worked hard, he read widely, he took care of himself physically, he volunteered, you name it—but he never seemed fully himself with me. He was this collection of disparate parts. He put up a good front. He was never vulnerable.

When I think of how vulnerable we’ve been together—sometimes in this very space—I connect with something fundamental. There is a core to you, and you allow me to glimpse that core—both in moments of sadness and in moments of great joy. You share these moments with me, and for that I am deeply grateful. Because it is this kind of sharing that keeps me alive.

Kennedy and I met on the bus coming home from downtown Minneapolis. We hit it off physically, but it never progressed beyond that. I can’t even picture him sharing his hopes and fears with me, or I mine with him. In the end, it was good that we let that relationship go. It was too casual for me. I want, particularly when I am in conversation with you, to live fiercely. Anything less has come to seem awfully unsatisfying.

You ask about how we go about satisfying our desires as women. One place we satisfy those desires is in the company of the people we recognize. This is why we’ve begun thinking of creating a space of conversation for women artists—we want to speak with women openly and honestly, to recognize the humanity in one another. But is recognition more difficult between men and women? Perhaps. I know the turmoils and the triumphs of other women far better than I know those of men. Yet there are men whom I recognize, and who I believe recognize me. They are, most often, men who think a great deal about what it is to be a man, just as I spend much time considering what it means to be a woman.

Take, for instance, S—your friend and mine. We may struggle at times to recognize one another, and I know that I sometimes find it difficult to see where S is coming from. Yet he is vulnerable with each of us, and we have each been vulnerable with him. Certainly there is much he doesn’t understand about women’s experience, and much we don’t understand about men’s. But we are, the three of us, having a real conversation. And that’s where it all begins.

As you know, I went to the state fair with D yesterday. I spent much of the day thinking about what I’ve come to love in him. He holds nothing back. And because of that, I feel I can be fully myself with him. There’s not a thing I worry about saying. He gets me. Or at least he’s always willing to try. And for me, trying means a great deal. I expect to fail sometimes. The trying becomes important in the face of that inevitable failure.

D and I rode the SkyLine up above the fair and gazed down on the crowds of people. The state fair is usually not my cup of tea. So many people. I forget the world is so full of us. But yesterday, that realization—that we are far from alone, that there are so many of us, made me thrilled with the possibility of it.

Between the promise of possibility, and the certainty of cheese curds, the fair proved a much better experience than I had anticipated. And so has our back-and-forth over this question we are wrestling with. The question, for me, is one of recognition. So what do we do to recognize and be recognized? Particularly when it comes to relationships between men and women?

Like a Natural Woman

I’m going to get my hair colored.

I want to be gray. I have lots and lots of scattered silver threads among the now fading brown box dye I used weeks ago. Not salt and pepper: more like sand and red-brown dirt. I am tired of hiding; I want to be who I am.

When I told my mother I was going to be gray, deliberately, she was horrified and told me I would look old and terrible. Imagine. What is so bad about being fifty-eight and not trying to look younger? Women are made to fear getting older: not fearing the infirmity that might come with age, the loneliness or solitude, just panic at looking older.

I don’t think this happens to men. There is the occasional ad for men’s hair dye, but it is never touted as a complete cover of the ugly gray. Rather, it enhances the distinguished salt and pepper. The culture tells us that age makes men sophisticated, sage, and charming. My father used to spray his hair with a silver coating, like the stuff for Halloween. He knew that gray looked good on him, better than his original color.

I don’t know if it will be a good look for me, but I am determined; a tide inside of me will not be denied.

As I was being seated in the salon the other stylists came over to say Hi and ask what I was getting done.

“She’s embracing her gray,” my stylist informed them loudly, with a proud tone in his voice.

I could have hugged him.

We talked as he folded the tin foil over section after section of hair. Friendly salon small talk: hair styles, fashion (he likes my handbag: Kathy Van Zeeland golden multi animal print, and gold-tone dice charms) and makeup. Talking about bleaching hair, I ask him if he remembered the overly bleached hairstyle from the 1980s that made the hair stand out like fur.

He was suddenly quiet, and I realized.

“Shit, of course you don’t remember you probably weren’t even born.”

Oh god -- I am becoming one of those sad old women who forget that they are old! For a moment I worried: will this gray be just the beginning? Am I crazy to announce I am old? People tell me not to say I am old. When is old, seventy-- eighty? Then I laugh, and so does the young man slicing through my hair with the point of his comb.

When I got my first period, I “became a woman”. When I lost my virginity I became a woman, when I gave birth I was a woman. All of those experiences helped to shape my thinking about myself, about being a woman. Going gray, wanting the silver and steel, must be one more of those moments because I have never felt more like a woman in my life.

Find a Penny, Pick it Up…

When I was a child, I’d lie awake in bed nights reviewing the lies and half-truths, the misunderstandings of the day, promising myself that unless I could speak honestly, and in a way that could be clearly apprehended, I wouldn’t speak at all. The next morning, I’d try desperately hard not to speak unless it was both necessary and true, but I’d fail almost immediately. Even as a child, I was a talker. Still am. If to speak is to lie, I’m in serious trouble.

And often to speak is to lie. Though it seems to me primarily a question of position. Or, as L says: location, location, location. From what position am I speaking; from what positions do I speak? So much seems to be a question of position—not just how we speak, but how we hear and see. Annie Dillard tells of leaving pennies as surprises for passers-by, of drawing an arrow on the sidewalk accompanied by the words “surprise ahead.” Many people, as you may imagine, were not sufficiently surprised by the pennies. But, from the right position, a penny can be a delightful surprise.

I want to be surprised by pennies, but some days, moving as a woman through this world, I’m too busy looking over my shoulder. Or worse, some days I forget to do so, and am reminded by those who care about me, who value my safety, that I must do so. How can one be conscious, alive in the world, as a woman?

A friend of mine told me that he believes it is possible to live in and from a place of love all the time. I want so badly for that to be true. Annie Dillard, after describing the pennies, informs us that only the lover and the scholar can see certain small things—they’re the only ones looking for them. I guess that I want to believe I can look back over my shoulder, be on-the-lookout, and still have my eyes wide open.

When I think of what it means to be naked, fully available to the gaze of the world, I think of openness. On the best days, my heart is wide-open. I can, and will, take so much in. But I find it difficult to live like this all of the time. Perhaps some positions render such things more difficult to accomplish. I can be in love and be a daughter, a sister, a friend, a lover, a student. However, I cannot be in love and be only an object. It isn’t tenable.

As a child, I loved choose-your-own-ending books. As an adult, I begin to know why. Back then, when I didn’t like the directions things were going, I could change course. It was easy—the book had called for me to just that. But people don’t often call for you to change as you need to change. Not, at least, when they need you to be something specific for them. This is the danger of adult relationships. We can forget that the other person is a full person, with her own needs, desires, dreams. We can forget to see her as a subject of the world.

There is no choose-your-own-ending in adult relationships. But there is, however sad it might sometimes be, surprise. Sometimes, when you’re recognized, you’re even offered a penny for your thoughts.

This Is Me: Or, Location, Location, Location

This morning I was checking posts on my students’ discussion board. One man was exclaiming how self-confidence can be misread as arrogance. He also claimed that self-assurance can tip over into unwarranted and ungrounded confidence on the part of the person confirming her/his abilities. (This is a business writing class, and so all of the posts refer to presenting oneself in business scenarios) In essence he was saying that tooting one’s own horn is the same as claiming excellence in one’s field, and therefore should be omitted in a cover letter, or in an interview.
For some reason this morning I could not make my usual written sounds of, “In business it is often the case that…” Instead, I began to explain how the society we live in creates an atmosphere more conducive to arrogance and greed than humility and moderation, but that representing oneself honestly should not be eschewed because self-confidence is suspect. I began to back up my statement by using popular culture, reality television in particular, to underline why the public feels that most people are not honest about their abilities, strengths, and weaknesses. We expect manipulation of the truth, we know that aggressive self-aggrandizement is the way to win, and winning is as we all know the only important part of any game. Winning in business is a big deal. I was beginning to type fast, the way I do when I am preparing something for this blog: my mind racing, full of thoughts I want to share.

I stopped short. I remembered that I was at work, and that I had to be careful about revealing myself. One would assume, yes recall that moldy old assume joke, that as an instructor I have not only the right, but the obligation to reveal certain aspects of my thoughts about the world we are investigating. Or supposed to be. And there’s the thing, I am not hired to do that. I am hired to instruct on the best methods to write emails, and sundry other office type communications, not to critique the corporate world. But this corporate world is something my students are leery of. With good reason I believe. Yet, I refrain from opening this door with them. My posts are monitored.

Last week I gave away, to LJ, a person whom I find to be a source of fun and comfort and therefore the best candidate for this giving, my last remaining items of favorite clothing that I no longer will ever wear. This, for those of you who are too young to have had this experience, and I am assuming (yes, there’s the old joke again) that you will be, was difficult. It was not difficult to want LJ to have these items; I knew she would appreciate their uniqueness as much as I did; it was difficult to have another ending, to see a part of myself yet again in the past tense. This closing of doors makes me grasp harder at parts of myself that I have held back and begin to shake them loose so that they are visible, no longer held behind.

I remember something I read Rosalyn Russell said in an interview. Her definition of acting was that acting was, “...like being naked onstage and turning around. (long pause) Slowly.”

The reason we decided to be naked on this blog was to find ourselves in life, in time, in history if you will. To position ourselves in the world as if on a Google map of the Earth—there I am, and there, and there.

As I need to wear different hats (and here is my discomfort—do I really need this variety of millinery?) I feel less honest; I become less honest within myself. I suppose that in a society, for the greater good, it is best to comply. How do I maintain my integrity?
I think women are particularly vulnerable in this location. I am a mother, a daughter, a sister, an aunt. I decide (do I decide—that’s the question here) to compartmentalize some of my life for the sake of the relationships. Yet, it creates a deceitful atmosphere for me, in me. I don’t like it, and feel thoroughly hemmed in by it.

I have nominated anonymity, to try to find the true voice. Is this dishonest? The problem with seeing me in the past tense so often as things change, as I age, as my son has a child of his own, is that I struggle to stay current with my life. I do not want to be Miss Haversham, or any other spinster, waiting for her life and only having life pass rather than move forward. I fear that as I edit parts of my life for the sake of getting by and getting along, I am losing vast parts of consciousness that are imperative.

In order for me to locate myself in this world, on that map, I need to be able to express my true self. I am an excellent: writer, teacher, mother, mentor, and friend. I don’t care if it makes anyone uncomfortable, and yet, I must or I would not edit myself. So I try to live (without stating so in the places where I am vulnerable) as an excellent woman.

If assuming that the world agrees I have the right to say these things makes an ass of you and me—so be it.