where is he?

Dear Kate,

When I saw your photos on FB earlier today I thought how beautiful and nymph-like you looked, and how you also looked a little bit like a child. I love you. Thank you for your words, I want to hear more of how you are doing and what is going on in your world (internally and externally). Emphasis on the internal.

France is wonderful. I am taken out of myself and placed in a different language where things don't carry the same weight as they do in English. But where I also have friends who understand and support me as you and my other friends do.

I have felt calm, but deeply saddened. I don't know if I am numb or healing. I feel as if I should be rent in two, but I am more whole than usual. I feel no fear of death. Which is something I always feared, I had panic attacks, but now that he is dead. This person who meant so much to me, who was my Virgil, my mystic, my laughter in the dark, now that he is gone, how can I fear where he is now? That is ludicrous. It's strange because we didn't even see eachother very often and hadn't spent more thn a few days at a time together, but we were so very close. Like you and me. Which is why I so wanted you to meet him.

I feel like I have to imagine absorbing his confidence and his love and carry my life in my hands and walk forward unafraid. I wish I could be close to you and see you each day, that would make me happy and maybe one day that will be so.

At the same time I have also realized that this life, for me, cannot be about finding that one person to share my life with--again if he can die, this person I connected with so deeply--it is not possible that life's end is love of one other person. Do you know what I mean? I am a bit discombobulated right now. But I felt I had to write these things to you. Did you feel a calm at any point after your dad died? I felt when I saw Babur, and touched his face, that he was dead, but that it wasn't him. I felt no solace because he was not there. Where is he then? He would most likely say "there is no such thing as place I am everywhere and nowhere, and you know that is not the right question."

Should I accept this calm or is this just denial? What should I do?


In other news I don't know if I told you, but I was accepted at Goucher after my interview on Friday. THe day before he died. I found out monday that day after I learned he had died. I wish I could believe or not believe that that had any kind of specific meaning. Instead I am stuck in between unsure, but moving forward. I decided to accept goucher, as there are horses and I wouldn't have to move far away from my mom. For at least one more year.

That's all for now. I have to go eat. I love you.

Hi, I love you. There's that.

Hey babe,
  I just wanted to let you know you're the the itch in my soul, the bantering truth-seeking life-buddy of my mind's best day, and the everyday solace in my skin.

Give me an update whenever you can/feel up to it.
I'm here.

<3

Dear Kate,
I am glad that you are working so hard and finding such productivity. I have no energy for elegance. I only have energy for grief. I found out today that my friend, Babur, whom I so wanted you to meet, died. He fell from a third story balcony. I am devastated. That's all I got for now.

Love
Rory

"You see it Igby? I feel this great, great pressure coming down on me..."

Hi dearest,
  I have little energy for elegance. I'm sorry.
  And apologies for not responding/writing more better earlier youknowwhatImean.
  I'm so damn FOCUSED on trying to blow through this PhD program for the sake of furthering shared knowledge and grandiose social change, and it is (bar none) the most intense self-learning process I've ever experienced or ever could have imagined. Which is good. And bad, as you know.

Your encouragement means the world to me.
Truly.
I can't emphasize this enough.

And I love your lists.
Lists are some of my oh-so-favorite things to create when the brain voices are loud and hostile, muddled and inchoate.
Have you read Anne Lamott's book, Bird by Bird?
If you haven't, you should. In spite of (or perhaps because of) it's rambling simplicity, it's bold defiance of human privateness for fear of revealing imperfection & madness gives me hope.

And yes oh yes, must we have faith in the purpose of passion, of a life well and fully lived.

I'm so glad that you're progressing towards your health and well-being professional focus. Your strength also gives me hope. I hold it close to me every day.

I've been doing TA training (to teach Language & Gender in the winter, I'm very excited), working on my research for my two October conferences and December defense, and I'm starting classes on Monday. I've also been doing a lot of fun stuff in the citay; Ben & I went to see Patton Oswalt (the comedian) last night.

Most importantly, though, I'm developing an entirely different relationship with my writing that you've been hinting at in your description of your med school essay experience.
I've always thought writing was (at least) partly about making the pen move, about pushing the cursor across the screen so you stand blinking from a slightly different perspective.
Now, I'm just awash in a sea of combative currents and it's beautiful. And infuriating. And beautiful.
The messy interconnectedness and contradiction of even the most cogent, pellucid academic articles astounds me.
This is what I write, and I astound myself.
I write and write and write, delete and delete and delete, and rewrite incessantly until something emerges that sounds truthy to me. Tight and truthy.
A neural network of myriad simultaneously firing subnetworks.
A cemetery of many-colored, many-personalitied trees.
A crowd of ideas playing telephone.
As it turns out, writing is just as vastly uncertain as everything else in our lives.

Welcome to adulthood yet again, Kate & Rory.

;)

Love & miss you infinitely and hope to catch up with you again soon!

Goucher interview: Went well. May know as soon as Tuesday if I am in or not. Pros and Cons of Goucher: Nice place, nice people, although some seemed a little young, lots of connections, good food, nice facilities, horses, running trails, wouldn't have to move all of my stuff that far away, weekly required volunteer time, weekly mcat study sessions (which I could really use!) linkage to schools such as Brown, 30 students never mixed with undergraduates, no scaled grades, felt kind of high school-like, 30 all of a sudden feels huge.

Bennington Qualities: GORGEOUS campus, Vermont, isolated, Field-work term to explore volunteer opportunities, discussion-presentation based, gives more plastic thinking skills, loved the class, only 15 students mixed in fall with undergraduates, felt homey, liked the homework given out,no mcat study group, less structured, near a national park, no horses on campus,

That's all I can do right now is make pro con lists

my hands smelt like burnt turmeric
and i began to crisp and fringe
curl up at the edges like chips or vegetables
when you said, this;

If I cook am I tempted
to be a woman?
If I lie down on my back just to stare
am I learning to be a?
If I beg to differentiate
between your hate and mine.
Do I dare look for your opposite?

women, truth and being sensible

Dear Kate,

I don't believe I've ever edited anything I have ever written as much as this. I think this goes to show I have never truly tried to write something? Or is this just the curse of personal essays directed at a specific group of people? It is nearly done and I am feeling anxious yet exultant because I feel like I have actually written an essay that shows something of who I am and actually says why I want to be a doctor. I even have answers ready if they ask why not just be a psychologist? Do you think you can handle the science? etc. I am ready, fists up, smile on.

That being said, I've also been doing a lot of thinking about women and who we are. Mostly inspired by reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I love the way Nietzsche writes, but I find it difficult to grasp who this overman is, because it seems to be mainly that-- and overman, not and over(wo)man. He is full of dance, poetry, laughter, despair, hope and all those things that cause us to rise up and fall down and discover our being, but what does all of this mean for women? I then started reading The Second Sex, which I would like to find in French and read over there. I only got through the intro, but I like her style and I like the way she addresses all the questions. I don't think we can reduce men and women to being just humans. We are, of course, all humans, right? But, even science agrees, there's a difference--a difference in how we think, what a specific balance of hormones does to us, and how we develop. But, with Nietzsche, that's not what's bothering me, I find myself wondering if I can understand fully what he's saying. I've just spent the past four years of my life reading a bunch of dead men, so I hope I can...but his seems particularly attached to him, to his illness, to his lack of physical strength, and who knows what's going on with his ideas about women.

I think I like what Rilke has said about women better: "The girl and the woman, in their new, individual unfolding, will only in passing be imitators of male behavior and misbehavior and repeaters of male professions. After the uncertainty of such transitions, it will become obvious that women were going through the abundance and variation of those (often ridiculous) disguises just so that they could purify their own essential nature and wash out the deforming influences of the other sex. Women, in whom life lingers and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully, and more confidently, must surely have become riper and more human in their depths than light, easygoing man, who is not pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of any bodily fruit and who, arrogant and hasty, undervalues what he thinks he loves. This humanity of woman, carried in her womb through all her suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she has stripped off the conventions of mere femaleness in the transformations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it approaching will be astonished by it. Someday (and even now, especially in the countries of northern Europe, trustworthy signs are already speaking and shining), someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being."

I love him because you can't say those things anywhere else...that men are light and easygoing, they do not have the same heaviness that women have. There is truth in that. It speaks to me and makes me gasp. I see that in everything, in the art men create, and the lives women lead. Perhaps it is a subject best left to conversation and poetry, forget quantification. Gotta take a break more later...going to make chili. Fulfilling my womanly duties in the kitchen. Just kidding. I'm sure you have plenty o thoughts on the subject. mwah.

Because this is what haunts my dreams. Could be worse I suppose.

For many years, making medicine my life's career was decidedly not my aim. As a teenager I was convinced I would never want to be a doctor. I had good cause: my mom's life has been riddled with serious health problems, and her hospitalizations were characterized by difficult, unnecessary surgeries and false cancer diagnoses. To me, hospitals were cold, sterile, and garish places which I associated with fear and worry. The doctors were disappointing and distant figures dressed in white coats. When my mom moved to Annapolis, where I attended St. John's, I began to accompany her to her doctors' appointments. Over a period of four years I met a wide range of doctors and specialists. While some doctors showed devotion, warmth, and acuity, others did not. I remember one in particular who barely looked at her--instead he stared at his clipboard throughout the appointment. This lack of connection made them less attentive to my mom, prolonging her suffering by failing to answer questions and to address her concerns.

I have always been a naturally inquisitive student. In high school, though, my investigations were compartmentalized: my physics and biology teachers would argue over which was the better science, and English and math were different worlds. I needed a school that would allow me to explore my diverse interests, like literature, philosophy, science, and mathematics as part of an integrated world-view. I chose the Great Books program at St. John's College. Not only did we focus on the primary texts of monumental minds, but we wrote papers comparing the structure of an equation to the form of a poem; we recognized that careful observation in the lab can be useful in the study of music. Most importantly, I learned how to ask the best questions--both in and out of the classroom. The classical curriculum was rigid, but ideas were boundless. Our classes were conversations, not lectures or debates. A tutor would open each class with a question which students would then subject to careful analysis and discussion. The class usually resulted in another tantalizing question. I may have learned little about the practice of medicine at St. John's, but I learned to independently cultivate my mind. To master the art of asking good questions is to live well. Anyone can gather information, but acquiring knowledge and applying it correctly are ultimately more useful than hoarding facts. My mother's experiences had taught me that knowing how to ask the right question is crucial in the health care field. I began to wonder if my questions could help others live well, too.

During college I considered various careers: perhaps I would be a linguist, or an archaeologist. However, my work as a labratory assistant deepened my appreciation of science. It was exhilarating to reenact experiments and to trace the thoughts of brilliant innovators such as Willam Harvey, James Maxwell and Werner Heisenberg. Science is a wonder, but my personal experience has been the most influential. I saw a need for more doctors with stronger social skills and a greater ability to communicate. I was present to ask questions and remember explanations for my mom, but other patients were not so lucky. Though her doctors have not been incompetent, they have not made her life better. I realized an academic career was too passive. I saw medicine as a broad field where I could take action, a career in which question-asking could make a difference in people's lives.

After St. John's, I volunteered at the Hospice of the Chesapeake. I was inspired by a personal reading list I had developed, which consisted of works by doctors. I spent my free time exploring their stories, their struggles, and their joys. Many of these books, including Pauline Chen's Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality, demonstrated how novices enter the medical world ready to cure, but are unprepared to face defeat and death. I chose hospice work because I wanted to be exposed to an environment where a cure is rarely an option, and palliative care and acceptance of death are primary. During my first few weeks I was in shock. I could comprehend the impotent rage and overt denial many of the patients expressed--how does anyone accept a death sentence? I found it difficult to understand young patients who seemed to accept their deaths with grace. In my training, Hospice was depicted as a way station for tired travelers: they are weary after a long journey, and they are unsure of where they are headed. Caregivers are there to give food, shelter, and human companionship, even if they, too, are ignorant of the path ahead. This analogy helped me as I wrestled with my questions. Some questions can be answered simply; but for others, the best response is honest conversation and compassion.

Intimate conversations with patients and families have been the best moments of my hospice experience. As I prepared their meals, I discovered their favorite foods and tried to brighten and to lighten their day. Even when patients were actively dying and there was a heavy weight upon the house, I continued to find the burden rewarding. I will never forget one of my first patients. He had proudly served in the Navy: when I shook his large hand, made slender by cancer, his grip was firm and welcoming. Looking at his thin frame, it was hard to believe that his alcoholism had once caused him to weigh over two hundred pounds. Even at the Hospice he was provided with a beer a day, before he was slowly weaned off it. He had no family. His wife had died in a plane crash at the age of 21. The other volunteers complained about him. They were bothered by his peculiar demands and temperamental nature. Yet, what other control was left to this man who could not move from his bed, who could not use a toilet? I was glad to speak with him and share my own stories. It was no trouble to make his sandwiches, even when I later found them stashed in a drawer. He died soon after I left to teach in France. He told me that he had accepted his death, but I still wonder if he really had; he never seemed at peace. To this day, when I visit the patients that occupy room 102, I think of him.

Riding my bike to the hospice, I contemplated the stark contrast between my present life working with horses and the declining health of my mom and those I cared for. I had spent the past four years asking questions in a classroom, and now it was time to explore those questions in the world. Reading books by doctors such as Danielle Ofri, Rita Charon, Abraham Verghese and Jerome Groopman confirmed what I had experienced: being a good doctor requires an ability to ask the right questions that will lead to the right diagnosis and treatment, but it also demands that health professionals remain to help their patients face their illnesses daily. The practice of medicine offers moments of intimacy and connection between doctor and patient. It is this interaction between beings--the communication--that allows our conversations to deepen and our questions to evolve. Through conversations at the Hospice, I have moved closer to understanding those who stoically accept death. In the hospice I had also confronted my own fear of death. I realize now, that we can only help others if we are first capable of honestly examining ourselves. Now, when I ask, "How can I best live?" My answer is to be a healer, a communicator and a good doctor.

=

Thanks Kate! Nice set up! I won't be making too many changes for the moment. Beautiful blog template. I love it. And I'll have to think think think about your intro to the book! Thanks for sharing.

I've been thinking a lot, too much, about the future. ( that nebulous cloud so full of water and promises.) Writing this essay and editing it over and over has led me to believe, again, in an odd way, that perhaps I could be a writer. Although this essay in many ways is the truth the whole truth so help me goodness, it is also a fiction because of how far it is projected into a future that is still so utterly unknown. I feel as if I have a projector that is whirring away, vibrating between my palms and it's telling a story and every minute the screen is getting wider but with each moment I have to take a step further back to see the whole picture, thus furthering me from the work itself--things become slightly blurred. This essay is a projection of my past and present experiences onto the idea of a future for myself--a future that may or may not exist--that's up to me an fate. Fiction is a lot like that, though the screen is controlled a bit more, or at least we'd like to think so. I haven't written anything in so long because I've been cramped in between Heidegger and Tolstoy. It's hard to compete with classic words, you end up living inside Ecclesiastes on repeat over-and-over in your head.

I want to live the fullest life possible. How is that done? Through meditation? Through fulfillment of passion? Through release? Through destruction and reconstruction? Through self-immolation? Through actualization of self? Or some combination of all the above. I like that your book is going to explore want and what happens when desire is taken to the utmost extreme--desire as creation, death, sex, spirit, food etc. And gosh, people get so caught up in what other people are telling them and in what words they are saying that they forget what it is to feel real WANT. Want as in I, not as in they said I want this, or I want this because, just I want. I know I want connection. Connection like talking to an old friend, like talking to you, or my girls at St. John's--to feel something more than lust for a man and something unlike disapointment. I want to wake each day with a new yearning. I want to shed words and skin; I want to grow something new--if only to burn it all later. More later.

We are here

to search for the word, the line, and the way. It's on.

You're an admin now too, Ror, so you can change the aesthetics of the blog anytime you want.

I'm dazed and a little overheated, so at the moment I'll focus on keeping my promise of sharing writing. Below is the current state of the (fictionalize, as you'll see--it's similar to the poem I posted to Rod) epigraph & introduction to the book I was telling you about. Of course, the title will probably change a bunch more times, too. But who cares! This is US we're talking about, I don't need to hedge! Feel free to respond in any way you want, or not at all... and let's crack this blog open. Bust the seams and see all the stuffing come rushing out.



...Who Got Everything They Wanted


Escape Velocity
          a poem by Acedia

what word not undone to noise)(

the sound of steam pushing through a pinhole

what fringe)(not frayed to flare

the canopy of nerves

rain on down)(rain on

temptation take the next

)(blankness to bay

light the chords of flesh

and flesh)(the fire

the pot boiled too long

to belong)(anywhere momma

the sound of steam pushing through a pinhole

I love too much)(to love at all

the sound of steam pushing through a pinhole

momma I'm too old)(to come home

come home

*** *** ***

[YOU’RE INVITED]

             “I always want something I can’t get from you.”

Jesus, I’ll never forget that first phone call. The voice faraway at first, a nastiness  in the tone you’d only spit at a lover, the sound of turkey dinner and china hurtling against drywall, … Luxuria slowly realizing her call had gone through.

Of course, she was talking to me.

Back then, I was shocked—I hadn’t gotten a call about a job in over three months, so I thought they’d dropped me. Bottom-of-the-rung, over-the-hill, I’ll ask you for a 200-word bit when Ozzy decides to start biting the heads offa chickens again or whateverthefuck. At best, I was hoping Ren would call me up and demand I head on down to BorderLands, go on a bender, and write some Hunter S. Thompson bullshit about how the decaying profitability of the music industry has launched shallower and shallower bands to superstardom, a hook on top of a hook slipping closer into the blackbody vortex, what a waste, tell us there’s some chance of escape.

You know, the kind of crap no one—not even 20 year-old off-the-street nubes—will touch these days because it’s been written a thousand times before. You know, since the Beatles became world-wide heathens. I mean, heroes. I’m hysterical.

But if I hadn’t been shocked, if I’d been expecting to cover this… this experiment, someone would have thrown me in the institution for goddam schizophrenia.

You can’t predict yet another moral apocalypse and expect to be taken seriously before you die. This was bigger than tightass flare bottom jeans and black eyeliner, I just didn’t know it yet.

See. I grew up somewhere where the summer sun sweats out of the road tar, a fist of blue hyacinths yellowing on the kitchen table.  More dishes in the sink than there were days to do em. Where you want what’s lacking so you can put your feet up on the goddam table and leave a row of half-empty beer bottles making circle stains in the wood. Then this, “I always want what I can’t get from you.”

“Hello?” I said, still hoping she wasn’t talking to me.

“Alright, finally. Shut up,” she yelled, too close, “I got him on the phone. Close your mouth Ira, don’t make me hurt you. I will punch you right in the temple and lick the blood off your face. Do not doubt me.

Hey, listen, we read some of your work on the LA Burners and we think you’d be perfect for this. We need you on site, now. Now. We’re living in a flat in the Heights. We’ve got a room set up for you, a dartboard of Ren and your whole former staff included, anything to get the monkey off yer back. And we’ve got a private investor, she thinks it’s fucking hilarious to call herself The Hand. We call her Oz, touché, right? But don’t worry about cash. You’ll have one thousand dollars UPS’ed to our door each day you’re here. Bring a good digital recorder and a lot of GB for photographs. I’d really like it if you wore a vest. Gula demands you bring your pizza stone, he knows you have one. Invidia says we could really use a harmonica for our four-piece, but—“

“I—I don’t understand what you’re asking me to do. Is Ren involved in this? Leah? Don’t bullshit me. I need work, but not that badly.”

“We want you to listen, asshole. Forget own overblown brewhaha for a second and just listen. If we get everything we’ve ever wanted, of course we want some press. Daily group chats and weekly one-on-one interviews because as we all know, ach-EM, some of us are fucking liars. Outside of those responsibilities, I expect you to pay. Attention. And when it’s all over, you’ll have the rights to our story. There’s a lot of freedom in keeping secrets, but more in giving them away.”

“What story? What is it you’re doing over there? Am I supposed to feel… Grateful?”

“We’re living, without living without. Until the juice runs down my chin. We’re the new purity, buddy, the new body art, so you better get your ass over here before you miss out. A car will be there to pick you up at eight A.M. tomorrow morning.

Listen, we know you’ve got nothing better to do.

Don’t fuck this up.”

She rambled along so fast I thought I was part of some social research project investigating the reactions of unsuspecting strangers to prank phone calls. Ha.

Me, dumbstruck.

“Listen, my mom once said to me that all she ever wished for her children was to be happy, to work hard and to get what we wanted. She just didn’t know the kind of odds she was investing in.”

Dial tone.

Me, dumbstruck.

Now I wonder if it really was me coming down with a serious case of idiocy, letting Luxuria bait me. The mystery. And if nothing else, a goddam income.

No reason to lie, though. Above all, it was the, Really? The, This is really fucking happening to me right now?