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."

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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."

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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.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
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.

the school of dreams

I wake up before I leave the OR, before any pain medicines hit my veins. I wake up with a hurt so strong I wish they would kill me--take me back in and kill me. The agony is unbearable.

Because the surgery takes nearly seven hours, the anesthesia is light toward the end. You cannot hang that long between life and death, while anesthesia balances the body there as the soul dances in and out of the light.

This is a state of dreams. Of needing to leave behind a pain so intense that to not leave will kill you. So it's not surprising that I wake up too soon, before they wheel me into recovery, with the rawness of every cut and stich so fresh I can only gasp, "help."

the school of the dead

As I waver between life and death in my own hospital bed, 30 years after his death, on his birthday in fact, I am somehow not surprised. Terrified, yes. Facing death is not something I'm prepared for. My new baby is just 9 weeks old. How did I get here?

When you lose a parent early in life, you wonder if you'll make it past the age they were when they left you. Every child of death wonders this. That's why I'm not surprised to be near death myself at 36, the same age he was when the luck of the Irish eluded him.

In my hospital bed, hemorrhaging uncontrollably, I am violently enrolled in what Cixous calls, "The School of Dreams." Because I don't die; I live. But in walking the line between here and there, I dream. Images as vibrant as those five-year-old memories, scenes that will carry me through the next half of my life.

Bleeding to near death. Watching helplessly as my lifeforce leaves my body, playing tricks with my mind and taking small pieces of my soul with it, my sanity too. The emptiness is unfathomable. As a new mother, instincts of self-protection battle with the responsibility of caring for this new life. I don't want to see her; don't want her to see me, not like this. My one gift to her: protect her from images of her dying parent--I know how they haunt.

But she comes to visit just before surgery. My sister carries her down the elevator toward the operating room, this small life that has almost cost me mine.

Anxiety gives way to resolve. Once again, I cannot control. I cannot fix myself, I cannot fix my family. I let go, I go to sleep. And I dream. Dreams of pain. Dreams of loss--where is my baby? My husband is gone--no, there he is. And I hear talking, outside of myself.

I am a dream within a dream. A death within a death.

None of this should matter to you. Because it's mine. It belongs to me. My loss, my gain, my death, my life. And yet, others who descend the ladder of writing with me must absolutely experience this school of loss-gain, death-life, grief-joy. If not, we have no common ground. If not, my voice will not resonate with you. If you have not taken that step down, then you and I live in different worlds. Sometimes I glance your way, and it's envy you feel heating your neck, and sometimes it's sadness for you too.

Don't be sorry for me; be sorry for you. I saw the open door and walked on through.

----------------------------------------
the school of the dead

Cixous writes: "For a long time I lived through my father's death with the feeling of immense loss and childlike regret, as in an inverted fairy tale: Ah, if my father had lived! I naively fabricated other magnificent stories, until the day things changed color and I began to see other scenes--including everything I could imagine that was less consoling--without overinvesting."

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

I tell all my friends growing up that my father died of a gallbladder operation. Because no one tells me otherwise, even though he lived another six months after that operation. My fourth grade teacher tells me it is very unusual for someone to die of a gallbladder operation. She says, "Are you sure?" And I wonder if I'm hiding something.

I'm 21 before I ask.

My mother tells me the truth then, about the day he had his operation and the doctors took her in a room, there by herself, to tell her that her husband's gallbladder is fine, but his pancreas isn't. The diagnosis is pancreatic cancer. The prognosis, much as it is today, omonous. Six months maybe. My mother tells me the news rips her apart, and her first and strongest instinct is to wail for her own father. "Bring my daddy here. He'll know what to do. I need him." But there is no comforting to be done for this family.

There will never be comfort again.

-----------------------------------
the school of the dead

Cixous writes: "Of course, I'm only talking about the death of the loved one, it's only a question of love here. And of everything loss brings as it takes away. We lose and in losing we win. This doesn't happen together, it can happen in a deferred, sustained, or continuous manner... This misfortune or fortune--which will make our lives an unending struggle to be fair--is that in losing we have something to gain. Mixed loss and gain: that's our crime. This is what we are always guilty of, guilt we can't do anything about with these unexpected and terrible gains."

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

The days and months that follow are a mix of images without resolution. Technicolor hyper-reality cinema interspersed with sudden fades to black. Black stays for a while as I knock the side of my head trying to remember. Then the show starts again, a new scene, the exhaustion of not knowing how the last scene ended.

The most vivid memory is Saint Patrick's Day, 1968. Mrs. McCarthy knows my father has been ill. She asks if I think he would like some get well cards from the class. I'm pretty sure he would. And that day, we all make shamrock cards for my father, luck of the Irish for a Sicilian, and I am sure that day I have become a kind of kindergarten celebrity. More than once, I am glad my father is sick. I am glad for the attention. It is a wanting that will haunt me the rest of my life.

At the end of the day, Mrs. McCarthy bundles the cards up in a sack for me to carry home on the bus. I can barely stand the ride home, so excited to be bringing some St. Patrick's day luck for my father.

I fly in the front door and up the carpeted steps toward his bedroom, where I know he'll be resting. My mother meets me at the top of the steps. "Look!" I shout, as happy as I've been in six months, "I have cards my class made for daddy!" She doesn't let me past her to the bedroom door. She takes the sack from my hand and tells me my Aunt Penny is in my room--she wants to talk to me.

That instant I know.

My luck is too late.

Slowly I walk to my room. I pass a TV where I hear the soap opera drama of "The Edge of Night."

I love my Aunt Penny. She is my second mother, and would grow to be more so over the years to come. She sits me down and tells me that sometimes God chooses special people to be in heaven with him. He needs them for reasons we don't understand. She really is trying.

"My dad is dead, isn't he?"

The wind knocked out of her, she whispers a soft "Yes."

My father, her big brother, dead at 36.

I don't cry. She tells me I can if I want to. But I really don't want to. I look back often and wonder why, and I find that my thoughts that day are still sensible some 35 years later: He's gone. There's nothing I can do about it. He didn't even get to see the cards. He's gone. Okay.

When I come out of the room my mother is waiting. "It's just you and me now, and we'll be okay." And at that moment, I quake with fear that my brother and sister have succumbed to death too, because she doesn't mention them. I still don't know why she chose those words, but she was a 33-year-old widow with three children, no life insurance, a farm to sell, a job to get. That she chose the words she did is somehow okay.

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the school of the dead

Cixous writes: "The first book I wrote rose from my father's tomb. I don't know why; perhaps it was the only thing I had to write then. I had to write then, in my poverty, in my inexperience, the only asset: the only thing that made me live, that I had lived, that put me to the test, and that I felt because it completely defeated me. It was my strange and monstrous treasure."

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In school on the day of his operation, it was a kindergarten day like any other. I remember the smells the best... exhaust from the school bus, the mixed aroma of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, balogna sandwiches, cheese and crackers, and 30 little half-pints of milk all pulled open at once. My mat, where I take my nap. My teacher, Mrs. McCarthy, who knows my father is getting rid of that gallbladder and who touches my shoulder a few more times than usual that day.

And then it stops. Fade to black.

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the school of the dead

Cixous writes: "The dead man's death gives us the essential primitive experience, access to the other world, which is not without warning or noise but which is without the loss of our birthplace. So it gives us everything, it gives us the end of the world; to be human we need to experience the end of the world. We need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world, and that the world isn't what we think it is. Without that, we know nothing about the mortality and immortality we carry. We don't know we're alive as long as we haven't encountered death. These are banalities that have been erased. And it is an act of grace."

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A bad gallbladder. The doctors tell my mother, my mother tells the three of us. I'm five now. Not knowing what part of the body hides the gallblader, I know it must be somewhere in the middle--because I see him doubled over from the spasms, I watch from behind the couch as he climbs the stairs after dinner to lie perfectly still, bearing the rhythm of pain. No one seems worried. I take my cue from them. The doctors are ready to take this gallbladder out, and my father will be able to eat sauce on his pasta again, not butter. He'll be able to sit through dinner. He'll feel like playing his bass again. The dark circles, the sullen look, the whites of his eyes growing bigger, his stare more distant--these are things doctors can fix with gallbladders, I believe. But I don't forget the red brick building.

I'm four years old, in the back seat of our oversized station wagon. It's 1967 and all the station wagons are big enough to swallow a child whole. Without a seatbelt, riding is more like rolling, swimming around in cool blue cushioned seats.

This day, I'm more carsick than usual. Windows rolled tight against the upstate New York cold, the smell of hair spray and cigarette smoke, mixed with whisps of black coffee, make every breath uncomfortable, and I teeter on the verge of gagging and vomiting most of the way there.

When we pull up to the red brick building, my sickness turns quickly to fear. I'm overwhelmed with panic and the primal urge to flee. Danger. I know we're in terrible danger. And without the words to express it, I do what four year olds do. I wail. Hysterical, high pitched screams fill the car. "Don't go in there! You won't come out! P-L-E-A-S-E, Daddy, don't go in there! Mommy, he won't come home! He won't! He Won't!"

Husband and wife locked in a glance I remember to this day, they slowly turn to me, there on my back-seat ocean of blue cushions, and give words of comfort that shroud their dismay.

"It's just an appointment honey. Don't get so upset. He'll be back in 15 minutes. Calm down, honey, calm down."

My mother climbs in the back seat with tissues for me, and together we watch my father, 35 years old, pull his collar up against the wind and walk briskly toward the building.

As he walked he was dying.

But we didn't know that.

I did.

It was my first day in "The School of the Dead."

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Ahhh. Blogger's back up. This is good.

Can't blog much right now--I'm having a sort of epiphany, and it's never good to blog in the middle of one of those; you can ruin it--much better afterward. The epiphany is coming to me courtesy of a book I'm engaged in:

.
I won't give away much, but consider that blogging is writing. And consider today that you are dying as you blog.

Love among the blogs

Well, well. Seems that one of my predictions for 2002 is already outdated. No Miss Chloe, I admit, still I thought I was being really forward-looking with my prediction of blogger marriages in 2002. Seems I'm behind the times. Got this email from Medley at Uncorked...

Assuming you're talking about people who write weblogs in general, and not just those who use the 'Blogger' tool, there have been a few weblogger weddings already!
My own, for one.
Rebecca's Pocket to JJG
The authors of BackupBrain (if I'm remembering correctly)
... and I'm sure there have been a couple of others.
I'm just sayin'...

-Medley -- A weblog about IT, policy, current events, and more from an INTJ-feminist-geek perspective. http://uncorked.org/medley/

How cool is that? So now they are on notice--we're waiting for the conception part, guys!