I want to watch you be free
life rx 20 may 24
the star, and a paragraph from Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid: “Every evening he came home with another image in his mind, just as in Paris he had come home with a woman. His memory captured: yellow, bony dogs sneaking around trash heaps, pigeons with human eyes, the sun glinting on the tramlines, gusts of hot wind lifting and scattering leaves, the despair in the eyes of humble clerks he ran into on empty streets. Countless times, walking the streets of distant neighborhoods, he asked himself if he were actually awake, and, above all, what it could mean to be awake in such a city.”
the aleatory
I write because it is my favorite way to be free. But I don’t know what it means to be free.
(To be awake in this city.)
I do not want anyone else’s writing to solve my problems. I don’t want to be consoled. I don’t want to be pacified. I don’t want to be scolded. I don’t want to be told what a nice girl I am. I don’t want a hand holding mine. I don’t want to have my nose held down in shit, and be told to be sorry for my sins. I don’t want to be improved. I don’t want to be identified as a sister or an enemy. I don’t want to be healed. I don’t want any of the tricks of meaning—the final wash of sense that comes from something confirming or denying my sense of reality. And from anyone who wants to help me, I want nothing more than to be left alone.
I don’t want anything from a book except to watch the writer being free.
Once, I got to walk the incredible poet CD Wright to the room on the UT-Austin campus where she would give a guest lecture. We stopped at a coffee shop which is no longer there, and she ordered a Coke and a bag of potato chips (this detail has never left my memory, I thought it was so exquisitely southern of her). I’m sure I was awkward and trying hard not to seem that way, and I don’t remember anything about my half of the conversation, but I do remember her saying: “The reader likes the moment of lift-off in a poem.”
This statement strikes me as wonderfully humble. There is no need to think about what the reader needs, what the reader demands or even loves. Nothing so total as all that. Just a bit of enjoyable movement, a chord change. The reader likes it. And liking it is enough.
I write because it is the place in my life where I am the best at lift-off. I am a guarded person—for the moment, I need a mask or a distraction. I have to throw my voice in order to be free. Or I need to be distracted past the point of self-consciousness (like at J’s baseball game last night, where I yelled IT’S PICKLE TIME! as the opposing team’s runner got stuck between second and third base). Someday, I hope to be as free in my regular life as I am when I write a poem. And I hope that for you.
the assignment
five four three two one
writing prompt
Keep an image diary. Birds of paradise breaking from milk-white pods. Tiny white flowers inside the neighbor’s trimmed hedges. A couple at the grocery store disagreeing about how many pears are in the basket. Etc. And for the love of god let it mean nothing.
a chune
“Maggot Brain” by Funkadelic
I realize it might be kind of abstract, what I’m saying—how do you know when someone is being free? So let me explain. Eddie Hazel’s guitar solo on “Maggot Brain” is what it sounds like for someone to be free. (Did you know there was a radio show in Cleveland that for 30 years signed off every Saturday at midnight by playing “Maggot Brain”? 98.5 Saturday Night House Party with Mr. Classic. I didn’t know that myself until I read the comments on the YouTube video linked above. I’m sad I missed it. But it makes me want to find a place to exercise that kind of devotion.)
credits: small spells tarot deck by Rachel Howe
Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu
“Maggot Brain” by Funkadelic
Dear diary, I want to have a nervous system that you could shoot nails at. X Sarah