Love, asphyxiatedly / Dear Mom / On Vienna Sausages & Bad Radio
I'm home again, after having been gone again. We were in Portland seeing family and friends who are like family. We were eating and drinking things, kissing babies. We got deep into it and high up out of it.
I think that I am good at loving people. I think that I am better at that than I am at writing, and I am ashamed to feel a true, bitter loss over this.
But I don't know if what I'm doing for/at/near people is loving them, or begging love from them. Or if it is one and the same movement, like throwing a ball up in the air. You know it must come down.
*
The body is in a perpetual state of decay. We know this. We forget, but we always know it, even amidst our forgetting. We are fine, we are good--and then we are sick. It's not one person, one time. It's all of us, everywhere. Acquiring the sickness or the sorrow in the face of someone else's.
*
The sickness within the body of my mother has become a sickness unto me. There is this pain in my back that is specific. I think it is the mother pain. I feel it when I roll around with Beatrice and I feel it when I drive away from my mother. Maybe it is the daughter pain.
*
Dear Mom, I'm trying, but I can't seem to write to you.
*
Can I face the burden of being loved into blindness?
*
I love the wide streak of bad taste that runs through my immigrant family, my dear parents. I am so bored by "good" child-rearing tactics, nutrition, play. When I finished grad school, I felt myself abandon the idea of "expertise." How deadening it is to be an expert--more deadening still to follow one around. I miss our electric can opener that made the cats come running. I miss Billy Ocean at top volume in the brown Buick that baked us while we, unbuckled, waited in the parking lot for the errand to end. I wish sometimes I didn't know what flax seed was. What "time out" was. This is beginning to sound like one of those forwards that I delete before reading but I was struck anew several times over the weekend by the amount of statuary in my parents' house. I used to condemn such things as false elegance and later absolve them as kitsch and now I see that they are evidence of an imagination purer than my own. The leftover relics from the Sharper Image. The Liberty Bell from an inconsequential field trip. The entropy of what has been kept, collected--and what has been lost or hidden. The food in cans. The supremely intelligent, worldly, and accomplished, rubbing against the caricature of the foreigner, the thick socks in summer, the incessant tea.
I want to say something else about love and contempt, the body and the immigrant and suffering.
I think that I am good at loving people. I think that I am better at that than I am at writing, and I am ashamed to feel a true, bitter loss over this.
But I don't know if what I'm doing for/at/near people is loving them, or begging love from them. Or if it is one and the same movement, like throwing a ball up in the air. You know it must come down.
*
The body is in a perpetual state of decay. We know this. We forget, but we always know it, even amidst our forgetting. We are fine, we are good--and then we are sick. It's not one person, one time. It's all of us, everywhere. Acquiring the sickness or the sorrow in the face of someone else's.
*
The sickness within the body of my mother has become a sickness unto me. There is this pain in my back that is specific. I think it is the mother pain. I feel it when I roll around with Beatrice and I feel it when I drive away from my mother. Maybe it is the daughter pain.
*
Dear Mom, I'm trying, but I can't seem to write to you.
*
Can I face the burden of being loved into blindness?
*
I love the wide streak of bad taste that runs through my immigrant family, my dear parents. I am so bored by "good" child-rearing tactics, nutrition, play. When I finished grad school, I felt myself abandon the idea of "expertise." How deadening it is to be an expert--more deadening still to follow one around. I miss our electric can opener that made the cats come running. I miss Billy Ocean at top volume in the brown Buick that baked us while we, unbuckled, waited in the parking lot for the errand to end. I wish sometimes I didn't know what flax seed was. What "time out" was. This is beginning to sound like one of those forwards that I delete before reading but I was struck anew several times over the weekend by the amount of statuary in my parents' house. I used to condemn such things as false elegance and later absolve them as kitsch and now I see that they are evidence of an imagination purer than my own. The leftover relics from the Sharper Image. The Liberty Bell from an inconsequential field trip. The entropy of what has been kept, collected--and what has been lost or hidden. The food in cans. The supremely intelligent, worldly, and accomplished, rubbing against the caricature of the foreigner, the thick socks in summer, the incessant tea.
I want to say something else about love and contempt, the body and the immigrant and suffering.
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