Where to Find Me

For the next couple of months, 3 times a week, find me on the Bitch magazine website. I will be a guest blogger exploring representations of the body on my blog, The Body Electric. See you there!

Notes on Building Bridges

What San Francisco needed was a bridge, and the Poet wanted to build it. People said the intense fog, the dangerous currents, the strong winds were impossible to contend with. But the Poet wanted a statue in his honor, and people wanted to stand over the swirling Pacific and feel bigger or, maybe, they wanted to stand over the choppy, endless ocean and feel profound and small but either way the poet wanted to build it and the people needed a bridge and so the Golden Gate was born.

A California story was born with the bridge and it is my story, too: a stranger comes to town and a hero goes on a journey and the Poet builds a bridge and the ocean is all that matters, and that never changes.

I. All forces are interactions between objects.

We travel between points, we move with a baffling, sudden precision. I drive to you across a span of impossibility. I leave my hometown and all its decaying industry and I cross a country that does not understand me and a gulf of doubt expanding inside my chest and I arrive, somehow, in California just in time to see the fog descend. I exit a six lane freeway and then I am in your apartment, stunned by the concreteness of destination, the disrupted sense of home, the crooked tooth in your smile and the extent to which I am charmed.

The thing is, it needed to be the longest bridge in the world and it needed to not snap. There could not be a catastrophe, no blood on the Poet‘s hands. Two cables had to hold the tension of forty million cars a year and the rocking effect of torsion. The bough could bend but never break.

A stranger comes to town on a hero’s journey. The compressed narrative is here and it was true for both of us, just as it true for the builders of the bridge and all the bridges before it. I followed you three thousand miles from any reference point and so we drove to the ocean straight away because it was familiar to us both. We watched it, we saw that it was an animal moving with the moon. I needed you to be like the water, more powerful than my history and flexible as the waves. You wanted me to expose something soft in your depths and so we rocked like cables, the tension of our differences acting upon each other. We found the vantage point of the seagulls, and then we anchored ourselves to land.

II. A bridge is only as good as its cables.

(The Golden Gate has two, mighty as redwoods, and it took months to spin them into something strong enough to carry the weight of so much life.)

What didn’t we fight about? Everything was a collision of perspective. A stranger came to town and knocked the hero off the horse. The hero came to town and led the stranger to water and the stranger was shocked at the span of the ocean. How do you build a bridge across something so intimidating, with the cold wind screaming by and the fog wetting your hair? I had the relentless faith and you had the stable hands and we tested the torsion, over and over but we never snapped.

Tension supports the bridge. The cables pull the tension towards the anchorages. The engineers knew not to fight physics. They knew to transfer all that movement from an area of weakness to one of strength.

Sometimes you have to rewrite the story and sometimes you have to trust the truth that you remember. You were the first to bend and I followed you. It’s like the ocean, you said. The ocean, monstrous and correct. We drew up plans and we became two cables that looked like trees and we were gentle and strong as a wave, as a bridge shifting in the fog.

III. To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Tension lengthens, compression shortens. The contradiction is what make the suspension bridge successful: the tension holds the weight until the compression can transfer it to the Earth.

We are not created or destroyed. We appeared to each other one warm day in October and we studied the space between us and then we built a bridge. We never forget that the wind is powerful or that the ocean is the constant; the ocean is the measure. We know the grief of the snap, the way things can disappear and we say a prayer for all that has existed and ceased to exist so that we can be here, in the sway of it, above it, beyond it.

The Golden Gate was completed by the Poet to great fanfare. He got his statue, and the people got to stand above the water and feel small or powerful or both. All forces are interactions between objects and the ocean knows this and the bridge knows this and the Poet knows this and we know it, too. We are the Poet and the people and of course we are the bridge and the dynamic tension and the anchorage and the Earth but aren’t we the ocean, gigantic and impossible as it seems--in the end, aren’t we that most of all?

1991

First, you are right about more than you suspect. You are right to look at the stars and not see light and death. And your physiology may have twisted to save you; and your neurons may be grooving foreign pathways, angry little gravel ones--but you are a force. You read meaning. You bear stories. You are an alchemist with language because you are not the people who taught you to speak, only of them. You are right that you can create a new universe and you will.

That universe will not be parallel. You will not collapse time, only touch it. You will bend but the facts will not.

A person cannot be a problem or an answer. We are not equations. But your math is sound. You were right to lock your big, heavy door and sit in the middle of your bed and wait for something inside of you to happen.

The world is not so small. You are certain of this, I know. You imagine New York with its gritty gracefulness and its people, faceless as history, but that is not what I mean. New York is small. The world is infinite and will fit together in a way that is precise and completely unexplainable someday and you will be baffled, bowled over by wonder.

You are small but not in the way that you think. You are not the size of his cracked and dusty love. You are not a sapling, waiting for water. You are small in the way that centuries are small. You are small in the way of borders, or the split lightening makes with the sky. You are small as the cells that contain you.

You are also endless. Cells cannot contain you. People cannot contain you. Words cannot contain you. I cannot contain you.

You are right about more than you suspect. You are relentless as fingernails. You wait for the space to open up. What you believe feels as flimsy as magic but there is magic waiting for you; magic is exactly what endures. You are a heartbeat, a century, a universe in a cell. You are the rip screaming through the sky and you are the sky, bared and unbroken.

Adventures in Non-narrative, Part I from "This Fragile Fortress"

Words fail. What is lost in translation:

We are, you and I, propelled to know and yet we are forever dwarfed by the immensity of that which surrounds us. Though sometimes awed by it, aren’t we also uncomfortable with our smallness? Isn’t that why we tend to focus instead, in our fuzzy way, on how well we are able to describe? We illustrate in order to inspect, to clarify, to master. It may be that human knowledge is fueled by our curiosity and wonder, but perhaps it is the terror of being unseen, unknown, or left behind that causes us to paper over everything with descriptors, clichés, tropes, and classifications.

In psychology as well as literature, in the aftermath of devastation and grief, in the stories we tell ourselves and each other--we utilize narrative to make meaning out of experience. Though the benefits of this are clear, the intolerance of non-narrative on a larger scale can lead to an interpretation of some untranslatable moments and their encompassing silence that takes on a troubling texture. What of the experiences that we circle around, flailing in our attempts to contain? What of the mysterious, the resistant, the lost?

Words transcend. Words fail. Our parents do not name us into being, they name us into a shared storyline. Everything is mediated by language. Despite this, there is an exquisiteness to finding your story in the words of another, which is why we are here, isn’t it? I look for you and you look for yourself in these black lines--so broken, so delicately arranged.

Language is more than simple communication. The words we use are, in fact, symbols that become vessels between us. We map the world through the words we choose. We are imprecise, but verbose. We aim widely and hope for the truest truth to emerge.

The writer, in particular, relies on language as connective tissue. If I verbalize myself, I am made more real. Somehow, the gauze is lifted; the problems of physicality and its inevitable borders are solved, the messy ambiguities are sharpened just a little. I make myself familiar. The trouble occurs when narrative becomes blubber--insulating, layered, removed.

Alternatively, the sounds of our bodies are universal, rhythmic, animal. We are located in the rumblings and squeaks. It is the immediacy of the body’s call that takes us beyond the alien echoes of the external world and leads us back to the unmapable reality of our most unmasked selves.

In moments without language, there is faith in something larger. In a determined sort of silence, it seems inevitable that the individual stories we subscribe to be washed away by the boom of blood throbbing in our ears, epic as any part of the grand chorus occurring around us.

Babel is reversed when one sits, quiet as an animal, among other animals. In the Quaker tradition, meetings for worship involve silent meditation. Unsurprisingly, the Quakers are also committed to equity--social structures fall away and it is impossible to justify hate or oppression when navigating the defenseless contours of your own expectant heart.

It seems inevitable that silence can equal tolerance and humanity, so why should it equal a murky, bubbling swamp of ignorance, hatred, and fear? Silence as what we should say but don’t; silence as the stories that never get told; silence as the ways we are made less than human. How can something be so divine and debasing, simultaneously?

How else can I say it, writer or not? Perhaps language is to blame.

It is language that gives us the capacity to tell our stories, which allows us to claim them. However, isn’t it the specificity of our stories that make us separate? This parallel truth exists in all of us. I tell myself who I am and, therefore, I am. I tell you who I am and, therefore, you know me. But you will never sit with me in a gravel parking lot outside of Pittsburgh and watch planes land, as I did with my best friend many times in high school. We smoked cigarettes and barely spoke. Did he know me then better than you do now? It is impossible to tell. Though we passed much of those years staring out windows and sharing space in moving cars, my favorite memories of our friendship are the ones where we spoke to each other about that which mattered most to us. Over the harmony of all that silence, our words carried such gorgeous meaning.

So, this is what I try to tell you, now: the reality of the details, so you can imagine with me. You, too, can understand the way a warm Pittsburgh summer evening could be perfectly pitched to the story of a couple of high school misfits in a beat up old Toyota with a portable CD player playing through the tape deck. I want you to see the way the outline of the chain link fence through the windshield looked menacing after dusk, how we never knew if the people pulling up beside us were there to make out or drink beer or hassle us, how maybe it was all of this not-knowing that prompted us to notice the way the quiet we welcomed so completely could sometimes give you the creeps. I want you to see us out there in our t-shirts, windows down, a light breeze moving the hairs on our heads. I want you to believe me even though I am making this up, even though I don’t remember, really, more than a passing detail of those nights many years ago; I want you to remember what you don’t remember, too, I want you to understand me and I wish I had something more to give you, something tactile and exact but I only have this paperboat and this water to float it on and this fire to set to it so of course

I do.

Believing the Bird from "This Fragile Fortress"

“When the bird and the book disagree, always believe the bird."

-James Audubon

Children are interested in the unfamiliar—it’s what allows them to return excitedly from a hike bearing the bleached skull of a lizard or a mangy raven feather. I once worked at a summer camp where we encouraged kids to treat mystery with reverence. Upon discovery of a spider hole or a wayward raccoon, it is a faithful act to believe that which you don’t understand is only a lesson waiting to be learned.

I find myself on the receiving end of this curiosity frequently. Whether I’m teaching in pristine classrooms, sweltering school portables, or the belly of a museum; whether it‘s a shy whisper, a genuine inquiry, or a vague accusation, the question is inevitable: “Are you a boy or a girl?”

I crouch down so the child and I can face each other. I smile and ask, “What do you think?” They see my collared shirt, my boots, my baseball hat, the sprawling tattoo on my forearm. They propose a clarifying question. My favorite came from Andres, a ten-year-old I taught poetry to in Fruitvale: “Do you skateboard?” I tell him I used to. “Boy,” he says confidently.

They always say “boy.”

“I’m a girl that’s more like a boy,” I tell them on some days, to make it easy. Nods all around. Of course.

I know that parents release kids into a world where they are charged with recognizing incomprehensible dangers. It is true that children can lack literacy around what might hurt them, so it seems that, often, a bit of shorthand develops. The older the child, the more pronounced the sentiment: unknown = dangerous.

Though there are protective qualities in this idea, the result is that an ignorance has been transmuted—often unwittingly—through yet another generation. To be afraid of what one doesn’t understand may simplify things, but it also makes the world a claustrophobic, violent place.

Like most children, I grew up with positive ideas about hybrid creatures. Centaurs were majestic, mermaids were beautiful, unicorns were innocent, a dragon played a starring role in my favorite folk song. During a class at the natural history museum in Pittsburgh, we were to draw objects from the Egyptian exhibit. I picked the friendly-looking Anubis. What could be more magical than the strangely familiar?

It seemed appropriate, years later and a week after surgery, to think of unicorns when I saw my new chest for the first time. Smooth and scarred, hairless and flat, nipples and pecs—I was a myth of my own making.

However, my exposed and tender flesh unnerved me a little, as I remembered the heartbreaking tapestry I once saw at the Cloisters in New York. Intricate and relentless, the rendering from the Middle Ages was of a brutal unicorn hunt. The unicorn, muscled and docile, stepped out of a creek and onto a bank, only to find himself surrounded by waiting spears.

Unlike a unicorn, my scars are not benevolent and clear. They are, instead, reminders of the blades that made them, of loss and ritual and a new kind of myth. That first day, they glowed bright red and bold on the white of my skin. I, too, am a hybrid, a volcano erupting naked, human parts from my core.

I am a product of massive integration. Every moment I absorb and add to the stacks of moments before it—I categorize when possible, I learn to tolerate what cannot be categorized. I study science with a poet’s heart.

My body grows older and my skin and bones are all new and my breasts are gone, which mostly means that my hand can cover my heart without interruption. I regenerate. My anatomy is mine alone. I am four, the day my father discovered me reading a book on the human body. I am fourteen and it is my first kiss with my first girlfriend in the pouring rain under a makeshift canopy of trashbags in the park behind her house. I am twenty-four and eighty-miles-an-hour to San Francisco in a beat-up Nissan. Time moved along and space collapsed into it.

The space between breaths is a tiny, suspended glimpse at death. The focus on the next breath, the next step, the other side, can cocoon so tightly around us we forget that there’s even a mystery that we’re being protected from: for each of us, at some point, the crest will not come. When we forget the space between, we forget the wonder of that.

Despite my affectionate childhood understanding of hybrids, both centaurs and mermaids are vilified, portrayed in their unclassifiable bodies as violent and primal or wild and lonely creatures. They are warnings, used traditionally to promote the importance of man’s separation from the baseless, animal world surrounding him. The truth is that these mythical creatures were also uniquely qualified to see, with clarity and understanding, the spectrum of life around them.

Unicorn hunters believe that force makes you powerful. Real power, however, is as invisible as love, mutable and omnipresent as rushing clouds. I am the unicorn, torn open at the chest, healed and scarred, at once; but I am also more than that. Listen: I am the mermaid calling sailors home, not to a watery grave but, instead, toward a clear and complete reflection of themselves.

Haywire from "This Fragile Fortress"

“Things fall apart/the centre cannot hold.”

-W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

North American loggers in the nineteenth century were branded a “haywire outfit” if they regularly used the wire involved in binding up hay to make hasty repairs. Their methods were makeshift, unstable. 

It is defiant to make permanent what is clearly temporary, but is that not our nature? We often hold stubbornly to old solutions despite mounting evidence of ineffectiveness. 

We 

b 

e

n 

  d 

the bough until it br

eaks 

and then we must make a choice: clumsily tie it back onto the tree, or relocate ourselves. To choose to adapt means to recognize the strangeness of the space we’ve landed in. What is scarier than the structure collapsing? What is more frightening than freefall? Who are we without our bearings, unsteady as they might have been?

Objective reality is impossible, yet we live in the shadow of its illusion. We build cultures and bridges on the basis of its laws. We may conceptualize our world into being through memory and myth, but that doesn’t make it any less real. 

The solidness in question is less about the tossing of the trees and more about the uneasy sound we hear when this fragile fortress finds itself a whistle played by the wind rushing through its mighty, splintered doors. 

Bend/break. 

When imbalance occurs that which protects us can morph into disease. Fever is a symptom, almost always, of infection. Symptoms are generally signs of healing. The body ramps up the temperature in an effort to kill off sensitive pathogens and aid in white blood cell reproduction. 

While the body usually regulates temperature effectively, sometimes it calculates wrong. Sometimes the infection spreads and the hormones produce fever in the brain and the hypothalamus keeps coordinating a rise in internal heat; like a stuck, spinning wheel. Sometimes the solution becomes the problem.  

Shame, as a coping strategy for traumatic childhood abuse, epitomizes the psychological version of this paradox. The haywire ceases to be a quick fix and becomes a habit. What was originally an adaptive solution to an overwhelming situation often grows cancerous for the survivor that employs it. 

Children don’t utilize shame consciously, but they don’t choose to be abused, either. They do choose, almost always, to grow in the most intact way they can imagine. The chaotic implications of an adult—especially a caretaker—seemingly bent towards annihilating the child’s sense of self is too much to bear. Internalizing the aggressor’s perspective—which is basically the aggressor’s whole objective in directing abuse toward the child in the first place—is the child’s only protection in a world without rules or safety. Children will absorb the toxicity of their environment in order to ensure their survival. They will sprout out of cracks and brutality and generations of entropy. Survival isn’t the question; the question is can a plant grown in bitter soil not be poisoned? 

At one point does an adaptive strategy become maladaptive?  Perhaps when the wind breaks the bough or blows down the door and we rely on the haywire rather than allow the faulty solution to come to its natural end. When the poison becomes the orientation, the symptoms carry the disease. The body’s temperature skyrockets. The shame grooves the neural connections in the brain until they are smooth with wear. The adaptation controls the organism. 

Psychological coping mechanisms, unlike the clean and highly refined process of biological homeostasis, are regularly messy. All learning happens through successive approximations, which suggests that our minds work more like blunt instruments than laser beams. 

The importance of the conscious flexibility required to manage our emotional lives—though no more important than in the ever shifting terrain of the body’s needs—clashes directly with the core fear of change, uncertainty, and impermanence inside us. 

It is consciousness that is afraid; consciousness that contains the construction of memory and myth that cry out for haywire solutions in the face of what is broken. It is conscious perception that builds castles in the sand, right next to the shoreline, again and again. Consciousness is what allows us to see ourselves as separate and, thus, alone. 

Consciousness, however, is also the basis of choice and—in yet another of life’s spectacular twists—it may be choice alone that can override maladaptive drives. As in the case of any mythological monster slaying, the hero must first decide to embark on the mission and this requires an intimate relationship with both fear and the mechanics of perception. 

Plants grown in bitter soil can thrive. In fact, Sunflowers are often planted in order to purify toxic soil so that other vegetation can live. With shame, what is leeched can eventually be expelled, but only through an intimate assessment of its purpose. The fortress materials must be inventoried. It is here, on this dark landscape, that something new may be built; perhaps something discrete and powerful as a tree tilting steadily into the wind. 

Needle in the Camel's Eye

Few things are more satisfying to me than closure, especially the variety that involves some sort of ritual or commemoration. I'm clearly not the only person that feels this way, as evidenced by memorial services, graduations, goodbye parties, and so on. Though these ceremonious events are often intended as benchmarks, the weight of expectations piled upon them often crushes their effectiveness. The other sort of closure, the "I've forgiven my ex/parent/estranged best friend" type, often happens gradually and without the participation of the other person. Though this is a beautiful thing and illuminating as to the ways we heal ourselves, I've often felt that it doesn't create quite create the closed-loop current of connectivity that being witnessed in our endings does.

As a teacher, the last day of class provides the opportunity for that closed loop, but the risk of failure in organic closure is high, especially with notoriously guarded teenagers. It was thrilling today, therefore, to end my year as a beginning creative writing writer-in-residence in such meaningful way. 

The school district and I hired my partner, the artist Michael Braithwaite, to spend a week handmaking book covers for my students' individual twenty page projects. The covers looked beautiful and the projects, created by mostly ninth graders, included: a graphic novel about an abusive father, a short story about a man who loses his job during the Cold War and behaves as if the world is about to end only to find that it does not, urban fiction about a woman and her boyfriend on the run in Miami, a short story about two girls trapped overnight in a creepy department store, several poem collections, and a heartbreaking nonfiction story chronicling the life of the uncle of one of my students. Something you should know about these projects: other teachers said it couldn't be done, that my students were not capable of this kind of output. Many of them did not have computers, printers, or the internet; several did not know how to type. To receive beautifully bound copies of their work today was a tangible sign of their achievement, and it showed. They passed the books around excitedly, volunteered to read their work aloud with double the usual level of enthusiasm, and made thoughtful and kind comments about each others work. 

When I handed my students their books, I called their names and had them receive them like diplomas. For some of these kids, this is the closest to a diploma they'll get. Some will receive full ride scholarships to fancy schools but some will drop out next year, others will repeat the ninth grade, and others still will transfer to better funded schools. Two of my students have spent at least part of this year homeless, one has watched her mother dying, one has tried to kill herself, and others have been bounced between parents who seem to take only a passing interest in them. One of my favorite students, a delicate bird of a girl who I composed a reading list for, did not show today and I doubt I'll ever see her again. After class, I gave the kids my email and told them to contact me with their achievements or their questions. Five or six kids came up  to me as I packed up and hugged me, suddenly articulate in their emotions. One, very formally and fittingly, shook my hand. 

Leaving campus, I knew I would not return next year. I will probably not hear from most of these kids, who will go on to lead lives as tragic and full of possibility as my own. They are a scrappy bunch, and my identification with several of them--those bearing the most potent brew of defiance, passion, and honesty--reminded me regularly and painfully that we are not ever that far from the person we used to be. 

I like closure because it means that, just before the new beginning begins, there is a sweet moment of transcendent assessment, a little window into the world you're leaving. I think music exists for these moments, and I have a full repertoire of songs stemming from times when loss and movement twin  (relatedly, "I Shall Be Released," by Bob Dylan, is the song I hope will somehow play for me as I die). 

As I walked down toward the MUNI, the fog clearing and the air rich with the quintessentially San Franciscan scent of Eucalyptus trees, "Needle in the Camel's Eye" by Brian Eno burst through my headphones. I was suddenly transported to my senior year in high school, driving around Pittsburgh with my best friend in his crappy car, aimless and also full of a giddy, chest-bursting sense of the life I was about to leave for the alien world beyond it. We were all teenagers once, all so desperate and wise and wrong, simultaneously. It was a moment of poetic symbiosis at the Forest Hill MUNI stop, and I couldn't have asked for a loop more closed, an ending more electric, than that.