teeth / the world gets inside / Pessoa / Smith

These days my daughter sometimes likes to press her teeth into my shoulder. She is not biting me. She is finding the bone of my shoulder with her teeth, and enjoying a little the give of the skin covering it, experiencing for maybe one of the first times in her tiny life the confluence of soft and hard, the tactile pleasure that it can bring. I have some marks from this sweet chawing. I saw them as I was getting into the shower and sort of liked the way they looked, or liked the fact that this unlikely part of me, small and bony and seemingly inhospitable, gives her some comfort or relief. Mothers need not only be breasts. In the time that has elapsed since I stopped nursing, I've seen how the breast becomes other things--a shoulder, for example--and feeding becomes other things also--gnawing, touching my face and hair, hugging. And this process, this weaning, will keep happening, until it will shift away from the body altogether and becomes something else entirely--identity-building, self-discovery--which will require a whole new code and system of weaning. Sharp teeth are, I think, a necessity, as we try our whole lives to chew away from our mothers.

*

We have this row of windows up near the ceiling on each of the two long ends of the living room (which is the everything-room). And then there are windows down below, where regular windows usually are. The days are getting hotter, and I have been keeping the shades down on the windows below. But when I sit on the couch, I see from the other windows the tops of trees, green and swaying, and swathes of sky, and at night, the moon. It's the best view from any window I've ever had, and I already miss it, anticipating the day when we're in some other place and I look up and only see ceiling. There are no shades on those up-high windows, and I like the idea that there are these squares of outside world that I can't shut out: that while I can hide from what's eye level--people, cars, houses--I can't hide from sky and stars and birds and treetops. Nor, really, do I want to.

*

Oh, Fernando!

When I write, I pay myself a solemn visit. I have special chambers, remembered by someone else in the interstices of my imagining, where I take delight in analysing what I don't feel, and I examine myself like a picture in a dark corner.

I lost my ancient castle before I was born. The tapestries of my ancestral palace were sold before I existed. My manor house from before I had life fell into ruins, and only in certain moments, when the moon shines in me over the river's reeds, do I shiver with nostalgia for the place where the toothless remains of the walls blackly stand out against the dark-blue sky made less dark by a milky yellow tinge.

I sphinxly discern myself. And from the lap of the queen I'm missing falls the forgotten ball of thread that's my soul--a little mishap of her useless embroidery. It rolls under the inlaid chest of drawers, where part of me follows it like a pair of eyes, until it vanishes in a nameless, mortuary horror.

(From The Book of Disquiet, of course.)

In three little paragraphs, more like stanzas, Pessoa touches on nearly all of my obsessions: chambers, interstices, me-as-someone-else, nostalgia, ruin, moon, balls of thread, horror.

*

And then this, from Just Kids, Patti Smith's beautiful memoir of art and friendship:

Our mutual sense of code manifested in many little games. The most unshakable was called One Day-Two Day. The premise was simply that one of us always had to be vigilant, the designated protector. If Robert took a drug, I needed to be present and conscious. If I was down, he needed to stay up. If one was sick, the other healthy. It was important that we were never self-indulgent on the same day.

Brian and I have long used a version of this game. It really works. The alternative approaches disaster.

We saw Patti Smith sing with Bob Dylan years ago, maybe around 1996 or 7. They did a duet of "Dark Eyes" that just rooted me to the spot. Her voice seemed to come from somewhere beyond her body.