The House Next Door: a diary

March 27/

Damages so far: 

The top right corner of the housefront has lost its plaster/cement. It was patched quite a while ago, and had been looking a little weak lately, but when the contractors banged the chain link fence into one day, it clearly gave way. Its pieces fell into the trench they dug. I’m going to have to tell them I expect them to fix it. My in-laws have told me to call my insurance company first, in case they want to go after them. 
The other thing we’ve noticed is that the inside stairs, which were just fixed a few years ago, have pulled out somewhat (between an 1/4 inch to a 1/2 from the wall), making them more dangerous, more likely to break. You can see the dark places where they’ve moved away from their normal slots in the structure. 

Other lesser strains: Nerves, tempers. Michael started to fall asleep last night but then had a dream in which a gigantic crack opened up in the bedroom wall near his head. He was up after that and never quite fell back to sleep. 

Yesterday, we went downstairs to inspect the walks. He’d only been down there a few times, so when he started pointing out cracks in the plaster, I had to say, “no, that was there.” Most of that wall is plaster and stone and worse is covered by a pegboard over the big worktable done there. There was nothing more that I could see. 

My relationship to cracks is that I don’t like them, in houses most deeply, but also in arguments, in friendships, in my own personality. I’m not forgiving of any threat of loss. What I can’t prevent, I’m given to abandoning. I’m not given to optimistic scenarios of mending fences or burying hatchets. Of course one could say that I’ve crafted a teaching and administrative career out of fixing problems, of anticipating difficulties. If there were none, I wouldn’t have my job. 

I am enchanted every time someone on Facebook posts an example of the Japanese art of kintsugi, in which a broken bowl is repaired with a lacquer dusted with gold, that brokenness can result in a more beautiful object. I believe that “there is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” But those are aesthetic ideas I can’t actually live inside, how ever much I might admire them. I want my house to be safe and secure. The only light I want coming in should be from the windows. 

Poetry is a kind of kintsugi, isn’t it? Maybe all art is. A simultaneous recognition of a break with the normal world we auto-pilot through and of our ability to transform discomfort, grief, rage, into something bearable, even interesting. Am I appreciating this old house now, as it exists under pressure, or do I just want to sell it off and run away? Mostly the latter. But where in this rapidly gentrifying city would I now be able to settle? 

The House Next Door: a diary

March 22/

Yesterday, no one came, and I missed them. I’d gotten up early so I could get the dog out of the house because loud noises make him anxious. They’d done so much work on Monday that I was sure more would happen Tuesday. It was the hope that “It’ll all be over soon,” the hope of every victim, I suppose, although my victimhood isn’t a real one, only an irritation. After all this, my house will enjoy a better financial position, I’m told over and over. So how could this be anything but good? More like a dental cleaning. More like a proctological probe. I’ll live and prosper apparently.
What I want now, in any case, is a schedule again, a way to predict the world. Isn’t this like any relationship, in which the terror and/or excitement of the first days dominates everything, until your old habits kick back in. When the honeymoon period is over, the marriage is really between keeping as much of your old world as you can as you try to integrate the new world’s demands. Sometimes you realize you can’t do it and either change yourself and embrace the new world, leaving the old one behind (here, I think of the process many, many of my students are going through as they leave a youth they can’t remain in forever), or you abandon an uncertain or frightening future for the pleasures you knew you had before (Make America Great Again, anyone?). I know it’s not that simple of course; I’ve always smuggled away something from every relationship I’ve been in–a turn of phrase, a love for Thai food, an appreciation for bank clerks–some smugglings so quiet I don’t realize until years later came from someone else. 

This construction is a temporary relationship, but already I’m using it as a way to think about my relationship to change, which in a year of enormous anxiety is of some benefit. Writing has always helped me deal with change. I wrote about my grandmother’s death before she died. I felt guilty then, even ghoulish, but it did help. When my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, I did for the two years she had left. I wanted to be sure to see her while I could. Now who am I reporting on but my own passage through anxiety, I suppose. A kind of travel writing project. Who will I be when the new expensive house (and neighbors eventually) materializes? Will I want to sell and run? 

Hope: some notes

Today seems to be a day of peace for the construction next door, so I’m actually thinking about other things than my house falling over. 

Specifically, I’m supposed to read next Saturday at an event whose theme is Hope. I’m doing it because I admire the organizer, who is a colleague and friend of mine. She is someone I think of as serious, as in: not given to superficial gestures, which in a time of panic only waste everyone’s energies. 

In my journal today I tried writing directly about hope, because it’s not a thing I think about directly. Here’s where I got:

It can be practiced. It can be an obstacle. 

We might think of Trump as an embodiment of half the country’s desperate hope, a kind of Hail Mary pass. Unfortunately, there was no one else on the field, only an imagined blitz that never came. Equally Unfortunate: the ball seems to have been caught by someone in a corporate viewing box. 

I didn’t know if, after my mother died, I’d have hope enough to live. I did. She had so much hope for us that I didn’t think about whether I’d been depositing my own self-generated hope into that same account. When she died, though, she’d made it abundantly clear she hoped my brother and I would live again, that we wouldn’t lose hope.

Is hope really hope if you can only imagine a single ending to any dilemma? I’d say no. To hope to control doesn’t seem real hope, which allows multiple possibilities, some conservative, some exuberantly delicious and unexpected. To hope is different from to expect. Or to win, which has an ending. Hope doesn’t. It extends endlessly into the future.

Who against hope believed in hope (Romans 4:18)

in which “against” seems to have meant “without rational reasons to”. Here it might be seeping into faith, which is a starched kind of hope, an obedient form.

Most of my hope these days is placed in (or do I mean “on”?) my students. Paradoxically perhaps because I’m not sure what they have to hope for in whatever world the Republicans are currently trying to project from their own feverish dreams into (or is it on?) the real world. You can see how little hope the Republicans have in their own ideological desires–the way they hide things, the way they keep trying to act as if words have no meanings but the ones they want them to have, their crooked little closed-mouth smiles. They have no hope in individuals.

There are many who hope it will all just go away and don’t care how–acts of god, rabid politicians devouring each other, military coup, legionnaire’s disease. I’m not sure that any of those are hopeful. Although some fantasies can lead out of despair and toward the first hopeful act of voting.

I hope for the student–which one, I don’t know–who, after my class, somehow manages to sneak into deserted places, heartless places, sterile places, with a few lines of poetry intact, the way a positive virus might enter into an unbalanced body and awaken it, re-orient it toward surprise, humor, depth, humanity. 

Hope is hard to think about without metaphors, which are ways of organizing or mobilizing hope maybe.

When there is no hope you can articulate, hope anyway. The world is wild with possibilities. That’s my hope anyway.

My hope that my house will keep standing when the contractors come and bulldoze and excavate the lot next door is a very small hope in light of the other hopes here. There is plenty of, indeed overwhelming, reason to trust that nothing awful will happen. 

The House Next Door: a diary

Yesterday, the contractors were here until 6:30 pm, and there were commotions of trucks delivering gravel and trucks hauling dirt away. It looks to me as if they were mostly working on the utility lines in the back. They were moving fences around, the little bulldozer rumbled around, and the backhoe busily shoveled dirt into a big truck that eventually drove off at the very end like a happy ending. I heard the men laughing, and the phrase “about two and a half hours” a couple times. My thought was that they’d worked two and half hours over what they were supposed to. 

So far the house hasn’t fallen over. Even the house behind the house they’re building hasn’t fallen over yet, and those folks, who are new buyers, had the backhoe basically on their back porches; they will have almost no back yard in the new configuration of things. But the fact that their house didn’t fall, after all that house has been through, is a sign that the houses are probably stable enough. 

This morning I woke up at 6 am to the sound of a truck in the intersection and I thought: oh, god, they’re here at 6 am. But then that truck went on through the stop sign and elsewhere. Then at 7:30, I heard a loud truck noise and thought, well, at least, there’s light now. But it was just the garbage men, the refuse collectors, the sanitationists, picking up our bags of refuse. 

The sound of trucks, which I grew up hearing, because of my father’s sand gravel company, is a mixed blessing these days. 

But the contractors have seemed to be pretty thoughtful so far about not bringing heavy machinery into the quiet of our mornings. 

Now, if the country could only get the Republican ideologues in Congress and the White House to learn such subtlety, such restraint, such respect for the lives they are supposed to be serving. Goodbye, they said yesterday, to Meals on Wheels in their budget. To the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Because, says the budget director, we can’t in good conscience ask coal miners to pay for National Public Radio. Although they already are asking coal miners to pay for the President’s near-weekly trips to ply golf in Florida, and they’ve already assumed that coal miners are glad to pay instead for police protection of Trump Tower while Melania stays there with Barron because they didn’t want to take him out of his private school. If he’d stay home at the WH or she’d move in with him, the money used to protect her or entertain him could fund an enormous number of things for coal miners. Things that might actually protect or entertain thousands, even millions, instead of three.

Who do we turn to, while the few are carving out a space only for the rich out of the taxes of the many? We send out postcards to illiterates of the heart, hoping to scare them. We sign petitions praying each time that the websites aren’t just phishing schemes to get out emails and information. It doesn’t seem as if anyone is really listening.

I mean, I can’t even find on our local government website the legal start and stop times for residential contracting work. 

The House Next Door: a diary

1/ March 13

Is today the day? The “developer” of the lot next door has parked two backhoes in it. They sit like two scorpions, bucket arms curled up, near the back of the lot, and the no parking signs are up along our half of the already crowded street. Nobody is going to get to park comfortably for a while, and it will be even worse on weekends.

Breathe, I say to my chest and mind. It will be all right eventually. Breathe in anxiety and breathe out peace. If anything happens, I can sue. Although the house is old, the basement is old, and I am afraid, no other equally old house or equally frightened neighbor has fallen apart because of the new construction in one of the empty lots. Some nice houses have been built, and some horrors, it’s true, but about taste, there’s not a whole lot to do. The plans make this one coming seem decent. 

Breathe, I have to keep saying, as if I am my own respirator. I notice tightness of muscles everywhere. It can be hard to tell it from excitement sometimes but this own has much powerlessness in it. I will have to accept most of what comes the way I’ve had to accept changes already: the loss of the pear tree and the spruce that grew in that lot and sheltered birds. I will be penned in on one side now as I never have been. The noise will be obnoxious for at least a year. 

I write to ameliorate my fear of change, which I have never loved. Even though I have lived through enormous changes which have been wonderful I still fear it. Does anyone love the threshold over which one has to pass if one is to act, to speak? Why is it that there is always an apocalypse at the ready in my mind and not the peaceable kingdom? This is test says the spiritual pilgrim I’ve installed in my head. (This is “only” a test, says the internal joker-voice, echoing the old tv “emergency broadcast system” we used to hear periodically.) 

There was also supposed to be a snowstorm today, that same voice reminds. What fell so far? I look out onto our little street. Nothing.
2/ March 14

Shall I mention the cool precision of the man who runs the backhoe when I come home for lunch, the way he guides the bucket expertly in the alleyway between the two houses behind ours? He’s digging out a new waterline, I think. And despite the apparent clunkiness of the backhoe, he’s maneuvering it with such delicacy it surprises me. I think of metal and mechanical things as unsubtle tools of men, but as I watch quietly from the car before getting out with the dog and my bags, I can see the care the man inside the machine is exercising. The neck of the backhoe extends slowly and carefully between the houses where he has to dig like the neck of a goose nibbling grass. 

What I expect, as I said, as I have to remind myself day after day, is always the worst of humans. I expect men who work with their hands or in some physical way to be rough, uncaring, nonverbal, insensitive to the emotional lives of others. Yesterday when I left the house with the dog, the contractors were just getting out of their oversized white truck. The guy from the passenger side was exactly what I expected: large and scowling. He looked at us without a word, though I smiled. When we walked around the front of the truck to get to my car, we encountered the driver of the truck, who was exactly the opposite. He said Good Morning loudly, and I smiled and said it back. I said I wasn’t sure anything was happening today because we’d expected snow and he laughed and said Yeah, we were surprised too. We both laughed. I got the dog inside the car and turned to the driver to ask about the work going on, so I had, I told him, some sense of what to expect. He told me in a voice that was neither irritated by having been asked or nervous about where I might be going with my question. He seemed genuinely human.

The result? I wasn’t panicked the whole day about what was going on. 

Which is not to say that later in the day when I came home and saw one of the men running the backhoe so expertly, I felt happy to lose the lot to these strangers who didn’t know our little cluster of folks or feel the need to care about our emotional lives. But I did think: I can survive this.

That the dog wasn’t nervous about the sound of the work next door helped too. Maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as I’d feared. 

Then my house shuddered.
3/ March 16

But nothing happened. Nothing that I could see anyway. I looked out the front door and though the backhoe was close to the house, there was nothing I could see wrong or dented or marked. 

It does occur to me that since the house is attached to the earth around it, I might be misjudging the sound of the house being hit and the sound of the earth around us moving. One I can sue over. The other I’m not so sure about.

I’ve begun looking over the walls on that side for new cracks. I put my palms on the big wall going upstairs the way I’d put my hand on the flank of a big horse: to steady myself against its presence. 
At the same time, of course, the nation is actually shuddering. The Republican congress, with the new Narcissist-in-Chief is at work rearranging the American government, are today about to strip away the Arts, defund scientific research, and aid to the poor here and abroad. 

Breathe, I say to my chest and mind. Breathe in anxiety and breathe out peace. If anything happens, I can sue. Although the house is old, the basement is old, and I am afraid, no other equally old house or equally frightened neighbor has fallen apart because of the new construction in one of the empty lots.

I say it again and again to my apocalyptic mind, and the nation is not likely to completely collapse either. I honestly don’t know what will happen, though, to the nation I hoped would be better than this by now. Some days I do feel as if a house has fallen on me.  I have never won an NEA fellowship, but many of the literary journals I’ve published in seem to depend on that body for funding in large and small ways. Not that the Republicans care or think about the literary infrastructure. They can’t even seem to think about public infrastructure. Their transparency, their utter devotion to their corporate sponsors is abundantly apparent. They don’t care if the government falls; they have accounts elsewhere, expect windfalls from lobbying jobs. They will never be touched by hardship or emotional crisis. 

They have replaced the weather in their inhumanity. I’m insured against the house falling over or a hurricane.
 

That March

There is always more and it is exhausting. There is always more and it is the American Dream. Remember when the old fascists tried to beat their enemies by strangling their access to resources? Letting them freeze to death in garrets and prisons? Well, that is still going to go on, don’t worry, but for many, many of us won’t even notice our incarcerations. In our in-house arrests, we fatten ourselves up, indulge in every comfort we can afford, until we simply fall asleep early every night, bloated with whole wheat pasta and cheese and a good, cheap wine or an artisanal cider or beer bought right at the grocery store. We have explanations, of course. Everything is spiked with self-care: binge-watching tv shows about serial killers who want to do good, children who uncover secret powers in themselves but who only really want to eat waffles with someone who loves them, small people who manage by luck and timing to accrue vast amounts of wealth and power. Meanwhile, around us, over us, beyond us, Hollywood and the political parties are remaking King Kong again, not because they care about the world of giant gorillas, but because they are addicted to the human deep-dream of controlling everything, even the impossible, every hairy, bellowing, enemy-smashing drop of the id that can be found. Simplifying everything into the big and violent. Until everything is an invasion story. Smaller screens feed us stories of heroes who, although denied normality in one way–by being blind, black, a woman–also cannot be killed, who survive by listening well, by being bulletproof, by being surprisingly strong or by having bodies made of quicksilver and lightning, by being constantly conscious of threat. At the level of books, there are too many voices; at the level of video games, at the level of movies, at the level of blogs and news sites and musicians and points of view. Until there is no direction of quiet, of stillness, which itself has been made into death, into collaboration. We are stuffed with choices, our consciousnesses loud with digestion and excretion, with the efforts to keep up, with the fear of missing out. We go to bed early in pain, out of breath, in relief. We wake early in the morning to journal out/about our anxieties and intentions because otherwise there’s no time, between lying comatose or frozen over with panic on the couch or at the desk, at lunch listening to our friends and lovers detail the torments of their equally overstuffed days. Soon enough, I’ll do something. Until maybe at the barber’s shop, because the funny but visibly tired barber takes a little extra bit of time massaging your sudsy head in the sink as she stares out the window, her strong fingers breaking up the tensed muscles around your swollen brain, you feel actual pleasure suddenly, so acutely you might suddenly weep for the kindness of it if it were kindness. And you desperately want more of even that.

Notes from the Wreck

It doesn’t matter that you didn’t do it yesterday. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t do it the day before that. It doesn’t matter if you don’t feel like it now. Or that you’re only doing it now because you feel guilty. It doesn’t matter that your room is too dirty, that the laundry isn’t done or folded or the car needs to be washed. It doesn’t matter that the Golden Girls are on. It doesn’t matter if it’s loud or too quiet. Take twenty minutes and try to write a sentence each minute. It doesn’t matter if they’re true or ugly.

It doesn’t matter if you think it will be great. It doesn’t matter if the pen is right or you only have a napkin. It doesn’t matter at all, if the choice is between writing something or writing nothing, if you even understand it. It doesn’t matter if you get all the way through it. It doesn’t matter if no one else understands it. Or will like it. Write as many sentences as you can using a word that appeared in a dream, in the morning newsfeed, out of the president’s mouth. It doesn’t matter that you think you’re a wreck. Write a wreck.

Write, if you want, the worst thing first. Don’t put it off; rush into the fear. Write out what it tells you with utter seriousness. It doesn’t matter what it brings up. It doesn’t matter if you feel better or worse. It doesn’t matter if the wreck begins suddenly to float or drift, if suddenly out of it flash a gam, a herd, a frenzy, a school, or a shiver of sharks. It doesn’t matter which of those words is scientifically correct. It doesn’t matter if there’s a body in there or a book of myths or even a treasure that you could really use to give yourself and all the people you love a new start. It doesn’t matter that you’ve been breathing water in those last sentences. 

You can tell yourself anything you want to if you write it down. Twenty minutes and try not to look away from the page, holding onto the last sentence if you want to, or dramatically breaking with it if it’s become meaningless now. Somewhere oranges are growing toward your kisses. It doesn’t matter if your heart has been broken by this or that, if you’ve not had the courage yet to stand up to one of the bullies your world has in it. Or if you disappointed a friend who expected more from you. Or if you feel completely overwhelmed by the number of directions you could do something. It doesn’t matter if you’re already on the couch and even the couch is borrowed. 

Waking Up with your hands on the wheel and the car moving…

How to knock yourself out of autopilot? 
Usually the world does that with illness or accident or death or a surprise whose magnitude is such that nothing after it stops vibrating for decades. The event that scared my grandparents was the Great Depression. They worked hard to secure their lives against its eventual return. But they were both already awakened by difficult childhoods, lost protections early on. My more-protected parents had World War 2, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and the Cold War hovering over them. My father never, I think, quite recovered from the freedoms he found overseas, in 50s England, as an air traffic controller. The world he had to return to didn’t have enough external discipline in it. My mother told me she never got over seeing, as a teenager, the first images of the liberated concentration camps, and after that the Civil Rights and Women’s Movements which she vocally supported despite the laughter of most of her own family. She never, after the late sixties, fit comfortably into her white or middle-class or wife and mother identities. The AIDS crisis changed my and most of the gay men I knew’s consciousness, even if it took time for many men to change their behavior. 

For some of us it was 9/11’s bombing and destruction of the World Trade Center, which displayed Fundamentalist Islamic terrorism. (How blind many still are to Fundamentalist Christian terrorists and their much longer reign of destruction, because it fits into what most of us know about America–that it’s filled with dangerous white straight men–because those guys, that destruction, are “normal”.) Suddenly poets I knew wanted to figure out how to write politically. None of my students, who were too young to really remember 9/11, seem to have noticed the Afghanistan and Iraq wars; at least they don’t report those as important when we talk about historical events that woke them up. Instead, they more often talk about Barack Obama’s election, which might be the first time we all learned that Aeschylus’ famous quotation–“Wisdom comes alone through suffering”–isn’t always right. There are some surprises that don’t perhaps require death and pain and destruction. Still, they were awakened in recent years by the incredible number of public shootings of black men and women at the hands of police officers who were then not held accountable. They are all now awake because of Donald Trump’s election to the Presidency. We are, many of us, unable to move in a way that seems to matter.

Is there a kind of consciousness that is disabling? Some of my friends rose immediately to confront the dangers. Some of them have been able to write in the immediate aftermath of such shock, but I’ve been feeling unable to make anything but a few sarcastic poems on Facebook. Maybe I’ve lost faith in words’ ability to bring about change. 

So I’m hoping to dig into that feeling of despair over the next few weeks, hoping to examine it and how it might be recovered from. 

Waking Up

I lie on the couch. I have been lying on the couch since 5:30 when I woke, when I awakened. I came downstairs to write something for today, to fulfill a promise I made myself (and others). I slid down next to the dog and picked up the iPad and opened up Facebook first, to see what was happening in the world. 

Then it was 7:20. I felt I’d woke up a second time, still lying on the couch, without a single word written of my own. I’d read a short article about Rebecca Solnit. I’d looked at some beautiful images a man I don’t know personally posted on Facebook. I’d looked at some photos of a Scottish castle I hope to visit this summer. 

The number of hours I’ve been in fugue states lately, with virtually no memory of what I’ve done in those hours, has begun to frighten me in much the same way that I was frightened when I was sixteen or seventeen and realized that much of the adult life around me was spent there. My parents lived there often. My neighbors seemed to only live there they were so dull. Lives and pairs of them going through the motions, cycling through pre-set obligations–cleaning the house, going to work, buying groceries on Thursdays, visiting parents on Sundays, mowing lawns on Saturdays. 

Everyone on autopilot, although I didn’t know that term then. I wanted something else: memory, spontaneity, excitement, a feeling of aliveness.

Children were the only disrupters in that town, the only agents of change, and they were both adored and punished for their disruptions to the daily grind of responsibilities. They were the sudden flashes of color in an otherwise beige system. If, that is, they weren’t beaten down early by parents who found cycles more comforting than the occasional chaos children represented. 

The closest adults got to being like children was when they got really drunk.

It is now 7:35 and I have at least written these words. In fifteen minutes, I have at least written these words as a way to remind myself of myself while I begin to be aware of the responsibilities of the day–the last student conferences I need to get ready for, the administrative loose ends I need to tie up at the office, to pick up the dog from camp later, meet my friend Geeta for coffee and our weekly writer’s check-in. 

How much time will be spent in autopilot mode? How much of my time will I spend being aware of the possibilities for change, excitement? Will I act today in those moments, and bring about something new? At least writing these words has been something, a waking up within a waking up. It is 7:45. I get up from the couch and send this out.