My friend marge calls from Rochester. I miss her so much it still hurts. She says, "Are you okay? I've been reading your blog." Think about the connections in our connection. I had just finished posting--she's at the other end, looking at her monitor, sees my pain. My flat screen, a two-way mirror. The kind where concerned social workers watch family therapy sessions, invisible, observing the grief and anguish from a distance. Then we reconnect--coversation--over the phone, voice to voice. Ah--refreshing. I tell her ya, I'm okay. Margie, I'm okay, well, except for wanting it to be okay.

I miss ya Margie. I miss our camelot, the biosphere, oz.

Damn that wizard.

In hiding
I lie silent at last
I am free from my past
I walk among the tall trees
This is beauty I know
I am in love with it all
I have the freedom to love
In hiding

-Genesis, In Hiding

Split, twist, engage, extend, morph, converge. Sometimes, you're 40 years old before you find out that something you always thought was so isn't. Shall we say I had a revealing therapy session yesterday? Yes, let's just say that. These truths that are emerging about my life--what do they have to do with blogging? I think everything. In writing ourselves into existence (as David Weinberger describes this little exercise of ours), we have a chance to change what was wrong the first time around.

Born again blogging.

It goes like this. You reach inside your soul--where else are you going to get all this material, the stuff that matters--and you pull out all of your collective experiences, understandings, rights and the wrongs, all better known as baggage. You approach this clean slate--the net, your blog--and you begin to define yourself.

Come out from hiding and share your life with the universe.
Man, there's no better way to see how fucked it's been.

And it's not always the things we write about--sometimes the significance is in the omission. The things I don't blog. But still, they inform my writings. There is no hiding in good blogging.

So back to therapy. Things are happening, coming undone. Lies and Truth have intersected and I stare at the axis, blinking. Amazed. confused.

Where have I been?
W-h-e-r-e have I been?

There is comfort in pretending, in hiding, which is why I think a few posts back--in leaving my read of Cixous--I was comfortable to stay in exile. Remember that? That's where Cixous left me. Wrapped in the notion of exile. And I thought that was where I needed to be.

With no camoflage left
Naked I stand shaking
Waiting for rebirth.

All I'm saying is this: The connections we make on the net are helping us rewrite our real world selves even more dramatically than our online selves. Yep, I need to explore further, and I will give personal examples, but not tonight. For tonight I will say that connections alone are not enough. They are not the end, they are a means. Something happens, is happening, to me and to you because we're here. Something not defined by google search results or inside our blogs. It's physical. It's tangible. What is resonating with you? Where will it take you? How are you different because you've been? Who are you becoming?

I am not who I was. And I'm not alone.

What do you do when you're tired to the bone, waiting for that one more thing to push you over the edge? I'm pretty sure my one more thing is coming, and soon. Consider this a pre-blog. I'm not blogging about what was or is, but pushing the blog-forward button, telling you another shoe is about to drop. Look up--see it? I do. What's yours look like? White? Brown? Dirty with some gum stuck to it? Mine's one bigass sole (with cleets I think). Poised.

Nothing left but fruition.

If it doesn't stomp me to death, I'll let you know what it brings forth.

In the mean time, I blog. Why not?

David over at JOHO has some interesting ideas on blogging and what we are accomplishing by bringing forth these net voices:

The importance of the weblog phenomenon isn't so much that it enables people to publish their breakfast menus or even their genuine insights. It's that we now know what our "avatars" on the Net are going to be: not graphical cartoon representations but our body of writing. You are what you write. On the Web we are writing ourselves into existence. This introduces into the self the same issues of control, inspiration, invention, deception and play as have always been present in the relationship of authors to what they write.

I think Dave's right on with this, and I think we can take it one step further, and a hyperlinked thought it is: As our fingers wind around the keyboard sketching our online selves--filling in the furrows, the wrinkles, the gleam, the raised eybrow as we go--that avatar we create *recreates* us in the offline world. It is a circle of creation and recreation. That is the joy in it for me--not so much the voice, the self I have created through blogging, but how that unleashed voice is transforming me, the person, the flesh and the mind.

Food for thought. An ecosystem, a food chain, an infinity symbol... I don't have all the answers, but I do know that the hard-copy me, the one who created these five pages of search results on *me*, has been changed by that very act. For the better. I think.

joy. don't forget the joy. it's gotta be here someplace (now where did I put it?)

-night

Gone to the ocean
where the pelicans fly,
gonna soak in the sun
with my kid and my guy.

Away from the city
the crime and the smog,
what the hell will I do
without my blog?

(see ya in a few days...)

Top ten reasons I wish RageBoy would blog more:

10. I don’t have to blog if I’m busy reading his.
9. My dire straits album is getting dusty.
8. I need an excuse to read The Harvard Business Review.
7. I got my war on with no place to go.
6. One word: Zeitgeist
5. Every once in a while, I kinda, sorta understand him.
4. What good’s a meme if no one’s there to propagate?
3. That "Grumpy Fuck" Winer is starting to make sense.
2. Can’t get enough of that funky stuff.
1. I’m still waiting to find out how the LoveLeash worked out.

Whitsuntide

screaming to the edge
I stop short
and take wing,
sweet ascension.

I knew you yesterday,
the someone else
you were then,
something in your
laughing eyes
made me believe.

Rising with a star
night-dark rage
angry Aries,
was it something I said?

Without the death
no resurrection,
so untie me then.

And in the end,
will it matter to you
if I leap and lose?

Cixous writes: "I want the word depays (uncountry); I am sorry we don't have it, since the uncountry is not supposed to exist. Only pays (country) and depaysement exist. I like beings who belong to the removal (depaysement)."

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I leave Cixous and my journey down the three steps here, in my own uncountry. Although she writes more, on naming, on sex and the presence/absence of gender, on dying and flowers and Kafka's deathbed scraps of paper, I'm not there yet. I have read it, but I am not that far in my own journey. I will stay for now in the School of Roots, somewhere between Exile and Uncountry. You go on without me. Because this is where I need to stay, at least for now.

Unbeing is hard. Transitional, but I don't know to what. "Un" is not forever, because there is the dying to be done. And thank you Helene Cixous. I haven't found any other writer as curious as I am with dying and its inherent tangles with writing, with the writer.

So as I close this portion of my blog to Cixous, you know me. I am the one who lost early and often, and then almost for good. I am the one who dreams of creation and babies who are born, lost, and sometimes never found again. And I am the one struggling with my roots, what they mean to me and my daughter, who is calling me back, just now, as I finish this:

"Mama?"

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Cixous Break

Reader-friends, I have a favor to ask. If you happen to be online on Saturday before Midnight, take a trip over to GarageBand.com and check out the Funk/Soul/R&B track of the day from LeadBelly. My husband produces (and lends his nimble bassist fingers) to the band.

The song is in the 100s within its genre now, so I'm thinking some extra attention might keep it climbing up the charts. I'm not sure how the number of downloads/listens figures into their popularity contest over there, but I suspect that it does--and it sure can't hurt. (After midnight, you can still listen, but the tune's run as track of the day will be over.)

Much appreciated. Meme on.

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the school of roots

Cixous writes: "Exile is an uncomfortable situation, though it is also a magical situation. I am not making light of the experience of exile. But we can endure it differently. Some exiles die of rage, some transform their exile into a country."

----------------------------------------------

I see the place named My Exile. I should embrace that place, but I don't want to go, don't want to be apart. Exile is terrifying until you are apart so long you forget the pain of the rebuff.

More and more with the offline world I am wandering into exile. There seems less reason to reach out, to travel outward physically. And there is, for me, less and less reward in it. It's the online, inward journey I'm interested in right now. Traversing the web of discussions and connections that make the old world seem one-dimensional and flat. How ironic that this flat screen leads into a world thick with dimension and energy, while my own front door leads to a bland, disconnected place--a place of far less joy.

What of this? When the touch of the keyboard feels more familiar than the touch of a hand. When to leave, to exile yourself, becomes more compelling than staying.

When the light out there
is much too bright
and the day too hard
to bear.

the school of dreams

Cixous wonders what men dream about. If not creation, she reasons, which is at the core of every woman's dream self--conception, birth, loss, separation, our babies who are sometimes as small as beans and other times disguised as puppies or plants--then what? What colors the dreams of men, especially men who write? What do you birth in your dreams, through your dreams?

In my dreams, I am the child, the mother, the one who loses and the one who is lost.

Cixous finds more comfort in her dreams than I do, or at least draws more creatively from them. For me, lately, my dreams simply mirror my angst. If I could open the door to my blog and climb inside, I think I would. For a while at least. Escape inside the comforting shapes of text and space, of colors and the absence of color, of people who know me well enough to make me laugh, but not so well that they can hurt me.

Here. Here is where nothing happens until I write it, nothing comes undone without my permission. Lately I need to write more than to dream. Lately writing is that dream.

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the school of dreams

Cixous writes: "A woman who writes is a woman who dreams about children. Our dream children are innumerable. The writing time, which is like reading time--there is latency, there is pre-writing--is accompanied by a child state, what Tsvetaeva calls the "state of creation." The unconscious tells us a book is a scene of childbirth, delivery, abortion, breastfeeding. The whole chronicle of childbearing is in play within the unconscious during the writing period."

--------------------------------------------------------------------

I weep all the way home, and once there, I'm plagued by dreams. My baby is born, no she is still unborn. I hold her and then lose her, or she is not mine at all. I swim through them, dark nights of pain, and wonder too long about what could have been--should have been? Most days I am not sure what's real.

And then my baby comes back to me. To be with me. With us. For me to take care of, for real. I can't pick her up because I'll rip in two. So I return to the bed, for a time. I settle with her there, to stare and wonder: what do I do now? My memory of her is gone, my scent isn't on her. Who's is she?

And then it starts. I feel her again, I feel that place inside so wounded by surgeons, where she once lived, that place of the memory of my child. It happens a little at a time for good reason; to happen all at once would kill me all over again.

And I am finally mother.

I am mother, I am writer, I am dreamer.

And she is with me, she is in me, she is me.

I'm home.

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the school of dreams

Cixous writes: "In order to go to the School of Dreams, something must be displaced, starting with the bed. One has to get going. That is what writing is, starting off. It has to do with activity and passivity. This does not mean one will get there. Writing is not arriving; most of the time it's not arriving. One must go on foot, with the body, One has to go away, leave the self. How far must one not arrive in order to write, how far must one wander and wear out and have pleasure? One must walk as far as the night. One's own night. Walking through the self toward the dark."

--------------------------------------------------------------------

As bad as nearly bleeding to death is, the secondary infection is what almost kills me. Ten days on the edge begin to tear apart mother and child bonds, my bond with my baby, my mother's with me. And just there, I have arrived at a truth I hadn't known until I set out, wandering, as Cixous says. The depth of killing in the parent-child separation.

But in the end, I do get up from the bed, and I cry as I leave it. I cry because to die is easier, to be immortalized a heroine, "died in childbirth," the headstones that stop you as you wind through cemeteries. Easier because the damage done to the family from my near-death can't be undone.

But instead I rise from the bed, at the moment of staying or going, I both stay and go at once. I rise from the bed to write. I stay to dream.