On The Fingers Of One Hand

One of the most memorable conversations I remember having with my mother involved the topic of friendship. I had just completed my first year of undergraduate study and was home on winter break, having dinner with her at her favorite North Shore restaurant and dishing the goss. I was bemoaning the fact that I found it difficult to make friends. “Meeting” people, i.e., acquaintances, was one thing, because I was good at it (and anyway who can’t do that?), but making friends? That was proving to be difficult for me.

She set her cutlery down across her plate in the proper manner, and gazed out of the window that was beside her favorite table, watching the people passing on the sidewalk outside, and thinking. She then emitted one of her hilarious barks of laugh (which I believe I inherited from her), reached for her rare dry martini with three olives, took a sip, and said, “Darling. As you grow older, and if you are truly lucky, you will realize that you can count your real, true, close friends, the ones to whom you can entrust your life, on the fingers of one hand.”

She set her martini glass down on the table with a definitive tap and a triumphant, kind gaze at me.

As usual, I argued with her. Something along the lines of, “Oh, come on! Are you seriously telling me that when I’m 35 I’ll have no more than five friends of the type you describe? No way.”

She laughed again. “You may scoff now, Darling,” she said, smiling her trademarked wry smile and picking up her silverware, “but you’ll see. And it won’t matter that they are so few. Because they will be the friends who truly matter. And when you are asked by someone, unexpectedly, to name them off of the top of your head, without thinking, you’ll find, I’m sure, that they number five or less.”

This was a woman who did many, many things, in the society circles and the art circles and the academic circles. So I asked her, in my cagey way, “Fine, then. Name yours.”

And she did. Without thinking. Ticking them off using only the fingers of one hand.

At the time, I believe she was nearing 60.

[Those five women she named, by the way? They were all at her bedside while she was dying.]

I was reminded of this conversation during a far different one this evening, with my straight male BFF from our Scary Larry College Days. We discussed a host of topics, as usual, with us, from rocket launcher designers to François Ozon films to Sodom and Gomorrah to mothers to memorial services. During one course of our varied conversation I mentioned my best friends in another context that prompted him to ask, “Right, because who are they? Me, duh, and Remington, and Anaiis, and The Painter, and…?”

And…actually? Unexpectedly, off of the top of my head, without thinking? That was it.

Because, when it comes down to it? The people who know me best? With whom I would entrust my life? And who know that I want half of my ashes inurned in my family’s mausoleum on Lake Michigan and the other half scattered into the Pacific at The Place Where All Souls Leave The Earth? While Blondie (I’m thinking “Die Young, Stay Pretty,” just to be sarcastic, and to provoke laughter) is playing in the background? Those are them.

I smoked a cigarette in the oddly still early island morning after our conversation had ended, and thought of how right, yet again, my mother had been.

And of how blessed I feel to have these people in my life.

And of how oddly unsurprised I am that they can all be counted on the fingers of one hand.

In Praise Of The New End Note And Internet Etiquette: Via

What I love best about coming from a rich tradition of amazing comparative literature theory and philosophy instructors at Sarah Lawrence College is my profound appreciation for my sources.

The first lesson I learned came in the form of a course evaluation from Arnold Krupat, in which he advised something along the lines of, “Do not allow the voices of your critics to overtake your own interpretation of the text. Do not be afraid to quibble with the words of those other writers before you.” This, I am learning only recently, has come to vastly inform how I interact with other people (writers, “writers”, or not) online: Form your opinion, and stick to it, and do not allow others to influence what you write about the topic (unless, of course, they provide a very good argument). It is not easy to stick with your own opinions while reading others’ online and not being attempted to run with them, just because of their eloquent articulations, name or stature in the online “community,” or marketing gambits. But it is, I have learned, in the years since that evaluation, supremely wonderful advice: Never be afraid to quibble with your critics. And never parrot their own opinions, or allow their voices to become your own.

The second lesson I learned came much more harshly, in an individual conference discussion I had with Bella Brodzki, on French symbolist poetry. “Where did you read that observation?” she asked me, archly, from across her desk, exhaling smoke from a Gauloises cigarette. “I…” I stammered. She interrupted me. “I want the title of the work and I want the name of the author and I want your take on it,” she said. I looked down at the scribbled notebook in my lap, and began to cry tears that I did not allow her to see. “Atherton. Never, ever cite something ambiguously. Be prepared to give everything along with your own interpretation. Cite and know who wrote it, what it was about, where it came from, and be able to cut it to shreds, if you need to do so.”

I choked back the tears as I lit my own Gauloises (do you think I would ask her for one of her own, after that?!).

Only far later that semester did I adopt a new obsession: the end notes of all of my papers. I paid specific attention to their creation and my writing of them, consulted the MLA to learn how I should cite them, and always, always, even if it was my own interpretation of an idea within my own text, if the idea came from someone else (even if I did, thank you, Arnold, quibble with it), I cited it.

I suppose it is because of this training that I try very hard to cite people on the Internet. It may not be their original content, but if I am posting it, “reblogging” it, or in any way referencing it because I learned about it from someone else, I via it. (Or, at least, I really do try to do so. I am quite sure infractions may be discovered in my online work, as they were back in Brodzki’s corner Bates office, in Bronxville, New York, on a fall day.)

I think that is only compulsory, don’t you?

A screen capture of an old end note of mine from those days follows. Because it took more work for me to research and type all of that then, than it takes for us to make one simple copy, paste, and “via” link, now.

[Also please don't crit my writing in that? It was like 199FIVE.]

Inspired by,

and (hello!) [VIA] Blakeley

To All Of My Circles And Triangles

Sometimes, at the moment you precisely require it the most, words, images, memories, and adorations are sent to you.

Without even a moment of hesitation.

These are, truly, the moments that make life worth living.

+ + +

+ + +

Atherton,

It’s been so long since I’ve told you “I love you”. I read your post today, tears in my eyes. You are such a beautiful boy. Still a boy, yes. To me.

You’re the boy I met soooo long ago now. Warm and sad and soft and gentle and delicate. When I think of you, I think of those things. I know. There’s more, there’s your strength and your assuredness, your pride and your conviction. There’s your ability to vamp with the best of them. -smiling- But. I feel like I’ve always been able to look at you and see the fragileness of you. The tiny breaks in the safe smile. I always wish there was more of myself, my life, I could share with you. There have been times, today for example, when I wish we were no more than a door or two away. So I could barge in and flop onto your sofa, weary hand over my face, press into the flesh of your stomach and just shut my eyes. Your hand, light and warm on my back. Just so I could listen to you tell me stories. Your stories. Like the one you told today.

I want to share it with everyone. I have often wanted everyone I know to know a piece of you. Maybe not all the pieces I know - and I’ve always wished for more - but enough to see how beautiful you are. So I can say, “See him, there? There’s nothing he could ever do in this world that would make me love him any less, and I’m always finding reasons to love him more.”

And that’s from all the way over here.

Remember that for me, beautiful boy.

+ + +

Here is to remembering.

The boys and women we are. The work we’ve done. And the work we’ve yet to do.

And to 35 no longer being scary.

Because of people like you.

The Dreaming Days Where The Mess Was Made

“I should not design any websites with stark white backgrounds,” I said, mouth full of two madeleines.

“Why not?” he inquired, his own mouth full of sticky toffee pudding.

“Because they remind me how drastically I need to clean my laptop’s screen?”

He laughed.

I could hear him spitting a mouthful of the confection out onto a plate or something.

“What’s up, Buttercup?” he recovered, borrowing a phrase once used by both me and my friend Johanna.

“I’m just…depressed,” I admitted. “And blocked. And behind on deadlines. And really angry. I was a snarky bitch all day long on Twitter, did not write anything otherwise productive, and turned to re-designing my Twitter and Tumblr pages because I couldn’t write.”

“Hmmm.”

“What?”

“I like your Twitter background.”

“That’s because your screen isn’t filthy.”

He laughed.

“I need inspiration.”

“Write about how sex feels.”

“Huh. No other parameters?”

“No. Go.”

+ + +

The pain shot through my plexus like lightning.

[Did I tell you I once won an Illinois state spelling bee by correctly spelling "lightning"? The other girl spelled it "lightening."]

I could not focus on anything but the crystal blue of your eyes. Maybe also the tremors you were making inside of me. And your tears that were falling onto my cheeks. And the feeling of your slick, wet vertebrae under my fingers, and your skin.

“I love you,” you gasped, breath heavy with Colgate.

[The words of a woman as blonde as me, from far in the future, sprang into my thoughts at just that moment: "You'll find the shame is like the pain. You only feel it once."]

“I love you…too,” I managed, clamping down on your own muscles with all of mine.

Although I hurt everywhere. Trembled with pain. Could feel my bed quaking with it, so intense was this “love” that you professed for me.

[But G-d, how good it felt, too.]

I raised my legs above both of our heads in an attempt to lessen the pain, intending to hook my feet onto my bed’s headboard, but suddenly the bed was no longer there. Nor were the green velvet curtains surrounding my bed. Nor were the mahogany walls, nor the cherry floorboards. Just sand in my hair and moonlight in my eyes and your musculature wrapped around me, quivering.

Silence.

But for the waves.

[I wanted to rage at you, yell, scream, "Say anything! But not nothing! Say, 'I want you,' say, 'I need you,' say, 'I just want to feel myself inside of you,' but please, please say something!" I wanted to run off along the beach and hurl pointedly-phrased epithets into the wind and up to the moon about your perfect body and your perfect dick and your fucked-up brain and stupidity and just...why...why the silence?]

“I feel that it is important that that bit remains parenthetical,” I said, lowering myself between his legs and allowing my tongue to protract lewdly between my lips, as if begging for feeding time.

“Wasn’t Derrida fond of the parentheses, though?” he sighed, as my mouth enveloped his flesh.

[I had to stop, though, for correction. "Margins."]

“Ah, yes,” he sighed again. “I love that you know your Derrida and your Hegel and your tumescent vocabulary and your Bézier curves and your Gaussian blurs. I love your mouth. I love your heat. I love you.”

[Much like the shame, and the pain, though, apparently, with me, "love" only comes around once.]

“Hello?”

I emptied my mouth.

“I heard you.”

“No reply?”

“Not at this moment, no.”

[He said it, though, eventually, years in the future, following a quick jaunt in the gentleman's room during a de Kooning exhibit at The Tate. The art and the flashes of the photographer's cameras had turned him on. He felt the muscles, the moistness, the heat of the man beneath him in the stall, and said...]

“I love you.”

He looked up at him and queried, “Why do you say that just now?”

“One of de Kooning’s pieces made me think only of your eyes.”

They laughed. Cleaned up. Kissed.

And left the gentleman’s room holding hands.

No Words

Still cannot get over today’s news regarding photographer / filmmaker Sergio Goes. I am always at a loss for words when an artist who brought so much beauty into our world is suddenly taken from us.