Buddhist 083011

the buddhist
Dodie Bellamy
Allone Co. Editions

CONTENTS
The Buddhist 11
Belladodie
My Person 17
Heart Publication 31
Operatic Suffering 47
Oppositional Weakness 65
Blob Love 85
It’s a Trope 107
Unposted 131
For all my sister
hydra-heads
like a being whose constant mantra is “never enough/never enough/never enough”
—the buddhist
The Buddhist
* THE BUDDHIST *
I
’m curling back on my spine, ass up in the air, cunt pointed towards the
ceiling, and he’s plunging into me. We never set eyes on one another until
yesterday, yet here we are, a middle-aged woman and a middle-aged
Buddhist grunting together in the Kabuki Hotel. How did this happen?
The internet, of course. As soon as he got inside me he shoved my ass up, and
then he stuck his arms under my legs and pushed them back, on either side of my
head. I keep thinking of the human spider I saw in a movie, a possessed woman
in an exorcist movie, her chest skyward, her head bent backwards, hands and feet
on the floor in some arachnidy yoga pose, she scrambles about on all four limbs
at a preternatural speed. Or maybe it was a Dracula movie, a postmodern one,
where Renfield moves from eating bugs to becoming one. There’s no lube, so it
hurts like hell. I’m reminded of the lecherous Buddhist teacher I read about who
fucked his students without lube, and I wonder if this is a Buddhist thing to do, to
fuck without lube, something about not glossing over an experience. He thrusts
deeper—OUCH—last week I was having dinner with a colleague and she said, are
you really going to get naked with him—at your age? She grimaced over her grilled
sea bass and said she’d never do it. She told me how one night she and this other
female poet fantasized a bodysuit for aging women who took on lovers, the suit
would have four strategically-placed holes. Sure, she said, we all tried anal sex when
we were young, but we’re not going to do that any more, so no need for a hole there.
The neck hole of the bodysuit would cover the neck and chin, ending just below
the lips. There would be two holes on the chest, just big enough for the nipples to
poke through but leaving the areolas covered. My colleague scrunched her face.
“When you get old, they spread. Nobody wants to see that.” And then there’d be a
slit for the genitals, but not so wide as to allow any sagging labia to hang through.
This outfit she calls the post-menopausal sex burqa. And I said, do labia really start
to hang? She said, yes, just like men’s balls, gravity makes the labia hang. I told her
I never noticed that, I’d have to take a look. Maybe if I were more aroused there
wouldn’t be any need for lube. It’s not like I haven’t fucked in this position before,
but not the very first time we did it, not right after he entered, there’d be some
getting used to it, on solid bed ground, some wildness and slobber beforehand,
some kind of progression. The Buddhist once wrote to me that it didn’t matter
how we were in the past with others, that had nothing to do with how we were with
each other, so maybe he has a different sense of history, this moment of fucking has
nothing to do with previous moments of fucking—OUCH—OUCH—OUCH—
so why am I going through with this? Because this is what I do—whether I want
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* THE BUDDHIST *
them or not, I push things as far as they’ll go. That’s how I ended up married to
my first husband, he had this otherworldly sweetness, he’d sit on a bench in Golden
Gate Park, so still, so at one with nature that squirrels would climb along his arms
and shoulders. He didn’t talk much and he couldn’t balance a checkbook and he
filled my bed with squirrel fleas, but I pushed and pushed and he married me.
From the hundreds of emails and hour-long phone calls I know the Buddhist’s
vulnerability, his sensitivities, his loneliness at all those meditation retreats, he said
that people who’ve known him for 30 years don’t know him the way I do. I know
his romantic history, his childhood traumas, his cultural likes and dislikes: music,
movies, books, theory, his love of Jack Spicer’s poetry, how at meditation retreats
this summer he’d drive an hour to Whole Foods for shrimp salad and guacamole
he’d eat alone in his room, how our connection is so strong, so auspicious we must
have been very close in a past life, perhaps many lives. How he plans his days
according to astrological alignments. But I didn’t find out he was married until I
read an article, online, in the New York Times. Geeky in photos, he’s handsome in
person. He’s contained, groomed, powerful, exuding a hyper-professionalism that
trumps class origin, race, regionalism—like George Clooney in that movie where
he flies around firing people. A person for whom hotel sex comes naturally. Upside-
down, legs dangling above me, I’m like an orchid hanging from the branch of a
banyan tree in a botanical garden in Florida, an extraterrestrial white flower with a
flushed pink core glowing in the generic hotel room light. Whenever he talks about
visiting the stupa, a tall pointed Buddhist shrine, I think stupa sounds an awful lot
like shtup—he’s shtupping me with his stupa—he said a stupa had something to do
with geomancy, that it is carefully placed to be a divining rod for cosmic power, and
he’s got this necklace on, a double strand of string—Buddhist protection cords—
so maybe my ass in air has some kind of special meaning for him. Like it’s this
tantric thing? The sacred shtupa position? He’s got a nice cock, not gigantic, but
large-normal, thick, oval-shaped, not veiny, straight—a handsome sturdy cock—
but from this position, I don’t know how to greet it, I suppose I could flap my spine
like a fish, I think I could do that—would that make my cunt move in the right
direction? From far, far above me, hovering like an alien spaceship ejecting a probe
into Earth woman, the Buddhist looks down, his gaze all tender and lovey, and he
slams in harder, my eyes bulge with pain and he loses his erection, right there inside
of me. This is what I do, I push things until they break.
* * *
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belladodie
* M Y PERSON *
* MY PERSON *
9/19/10
Fading
Sitting on my bed, doing class work. A peaceful, but oppressively muggy day.
I haven’t kept up the blog because my attentions have been elsewhere, a big
elsewhere. I’m immersed in tenacity at the moment, feeling such longing for a
situation that seems to be slipping away. You know how it is—someone enters
your life and you feel reborn. All your loneliness is suddenly gone, loneliness is
this thing on the distant horizon, loneliness will never approach you again. Then
things shift, a deal breaker arises between you and your person. When you try to
talk about it, your person shuts you down, and there’s no place to go but towards
that terrifying horizon. I find my resolve wavering, but then I read an email from
a couple of days ago where the person ridicules my vulnerability, and I vow to
keep moving towards that looming horizon. My ridiculously extended horizon
metaphor reminds me of one of Bruno Fazzolari’s Lost Paintings currently on
display at Margaret Tedesco’s [2nd floor projects].
In the catalogue essay Kevin wrote for the show, he talks about Bruno’s use of
horizon in this painting:
Like the other pictures it seems to inhabit a landscape rather than a

portrait space, and here you can see a familiar horizon four-fifths down
the page—not the most comforting proportion, but one often used
by Turner and other painters with gigantic and tormented skies—
so the earth shrinks from the sky as if wounded by it. Here the line
of the horizon—I guess that word should appear in quotes always,
because it’s not a horizon, only lazy thinking makes it so—the line is
dramatically broken, ripped in half—or is it an optical illusion caused
by the placement of yellow—a dramatic splash of color that I can only
describe as a conflagration.
Love “the earth shrinks from the sky as if wounded by it.” That’s what I was
feeling like at the beginning of Bruno’s opening last night, the pain in my heart
as vast as the sky. Artist Colter Jacobsen was standing in the hallway outside the
gallery. Colter is a confidante, so I could speak candidly about what was going
on with me. Colter talked about his inability to write a project proposal. As soon
as the deadline passed he was energized to write two inspired proposals, but he
wrote them more like poems than project proposal format. Working in a form that
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* MY PERSON *
feels natural to you. I sometimes think of heterosexuality as a form that never felt
natural to me. Kevin came to me as a gift to create this in-between state; I see our
marriage as a poem rather than an overburdened project proposal.
Bruno’s paintings were lovely, Bruno was lovely in his vintage-y blue plaid rayon
shirt which I so enjoyed rubbing, feeling the muscles in his arm beneath the fabric.
Sorry, Bruno, for being such a lech. I saw Donal Mosher and Mike Palmieri, who
were in town for a screening of their documentary, October Country, as well as to
do some filming in Santa Cruz for their latest project, which centers on drug test
subjects and prescription drug consumers. Their project is sad and frightening,
capitalism invading and destroying the body.
By the end of the evening I moved from stiff, suffering heroine mode to having a
good time. It was a delight to see Bradford Nordeen and Deric Carner, who were
in town for, among other things, the opening of a friend’s baby store on Valencia
Street in the Mission. I talked with artist Matt Gordon and his friend Patrick, who’s
a young curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Matt emits a blend of irony,
sweetness, and humor, with an extremely low-key manner that I find intriguing.
He can say the most outlandish things without showing any affect on his face,
which to me is an invitation to play, so I did play. His studio is in the basement of
his building and he sometimes blasts music when he’s working, disturbing the next
door neighbors, whose living room shares a wall with his studio, but he feels no
remorse for their pain. If he were my neighbor I’d hate him, which is interesting to
19
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* MY PERSON *
consider, to so like someone who, in a slightly different situation, I would hate. He’d
hate me too, because I’d be a bitch to him. I think back to something I read many
years ago that Lacan said, that all relationships are about finding the right distance.
Due to memory and time, I make no claims on the accuracy of this statement. And
now I’m thinking back to that looming horizon I’m facing.
* * *
9/27/10
Memories from the Sickbed

I spent the day in bed with Sylvia and Ted. I’ve been in varying degrees of
sickish and sick since Friday, but have been going out anyway. Today when I
woke up I felt too weak to leave home. Canceled my class, crawled back in bed,
and slept until 2:00. The dramatic symptoms have passed, but I still have this
profound exhaustion and inability to stomach food. After a week of diva-level
emotional upheaval, I’m oddly calm. I look at the cats on the blue hand-blocked
Indian comforter cover I bought in Vancouver a couple of years ago, and I feel
contentment. We were staying at Scott Watson’s, in Scott’s room, and Scott had
a similar cover on his bed, so I went over to Commercial Drive and got one too.
When I got home, as I was stuffing the comforter into the cover, in excitement at
our return and fury at our absence, Sylvia squatted and peed on it. That she’s still
around is a testament to my ability to love.
Tuesday night Eileen Myles read from her new novel, Inferno, at Modern Times
Bookstore. I’ve heard her read from the book many times, and I never get tired of
it. The audience was a good mix of hip young dykes and older poets and artists.
Afterward, Eileen and I went out for tea at Ritual Cafe and then for latenight
tacos. Our conversation was divinely personal—gossip, relationships, writing
projects, and how to hold it all together. When I told her about my emotional
upheaval, she was a focused, compassionate listener. Eileen talked about various
spiritual practices she’s engaged in, and said if she let them slide, she started to
believe what was in her mind. I’ve pondered that this past week, the wisdom of
not believing everything that’s in my mind. I asked her how she handled it when
personal stuff intrudes upon her writing space, meaning the psychological space
necessary to let the writing flow, and she acted like she didn’t understand the
question. It seems that Eileen doesn’t allow anything to intrude upon that space.
She continues to be my hero.
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* MY PERSON *
Friday night Kevin and I went out to dinner with Bradford Nordeen at Mystic
Cafe on Castro Street. The Castro was packed with pre-Folsom Street Fair
revelers. Outside the MUNI Station was a gaggle of totally naked men, most of
them not young, lounging about, like scrawny white pigeons. A couple of them
had remarkably long penises. Later, when Bradford and I were chuckling over
them, Kevin said, “What naked men?” Bradford and I were like, how could you
miss them? We talked leisurely about films, gay artists and magazines, gossip,
art writing, relationships. Bradford told me that whenever I lose focus on my life
goals, I could text him and he’d tell me to get back on track. I tried it on Saturday,
and he did tell me to get it together. My sickness, at this point, was moving from
background to foreground, and when I got home my intestines were churning.
I woke up Saturday feeling worse, headache and kind of queasy, but got dressed
and drove with Kevin to Soquel, which is near Santa Cruz, for Suzi Markham
and Terry Olson’s wedding. The drive there along the coast highway was,
predictably, glorious. I had many fond flashbacks to the quarter I taught at UC
Santa Cruz and made that drive twice a week, tunneling through the ecstatic
landscape, mountains and surf. Each night after class, I watched the sun set over
the ocean. Life felt good. I hadn’t taught much, and that was ultra-exciting as
well. My teaching was more radical back then—or, rather, now I measure out the
radicalness according to the situation, rather than having it be an all-pervasive
mode. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more willing to provide the world with
multiple lenses rather than one “This Is Me, Take It or Leave It” mode. Though
in some instances—and this is quite poignant for me at the moment—“This Is
Me, Take It or Leave It” is what’s called for.
At the wedding, Kevin and I hung out with the poets—Brent Cunningham,
Melissa Benham, and Cynthia Sailers. This is the third wedding that all of us
attended this year, beginning with Brent and Melissa’s wedding, then Stephanie
Young and Clive Worsley’s wedding, and now Suzi and Terry’s. With each
wedding, the percentage of poets diminished, so that here at Suzi’s we were the
only survivors, like the finalists in a reality TV show. We grabbed a table and
ate dinner together and chatted and laughed for hours. Cynthia raved about a
psychic that many local poets consult, and even though I’ve never been impressed
with psychics, I emailed him when I got home and requested a phone chat.
As we drove home, my headache and queasiness got worse and worse. I was up
much of the night throwing up, horrible nausea. The only way I could get to
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* MY PERSON *
sleep was to lie on the couch in the dark with the TV turned on low and try to
find something totally non-challenging to watch. Saw the beginning of Dune, but
even that had this giant monstrous head in a tank. Would wake up every once in
a while and see a flash of a scene. Kyle MacLachlan wearing the desert suit that
recycled his fluids so he could go for weeks without drinking. The next time I woke
up it was a movie about a child serial killer and I turned off the TV.
Sunday I spent much of the day in bed, while my neighborhood was flooded
with people attending the Folsom Street Fair, which is 2 blocks from where I live.
I had an hour phone conversation with the psychic Cynthia recommended, and,
yes I was impressed. Among other things, he gave me advice about the anxiety-
provoking person/situation, and after talking to him, I felt much calmer. Later in
the afternoon I walked over to Rainbow Grocery, which also borders the Folsom
Street Fair, to buy some instant food for today, in case I wasn’t feeling up to fixing
anything. Some fair-goers were at Rainbow, and while I’ve grown used to seeing
naked and near naked bodies on the streets of San Francisco, it was jarring to
see them in a natural foods store, with those little plastic baskets on their arms.
In the evening Kevin and I went to dinner with Stephen Motika at Osha Thai
on 3rd Street. While I tried to figure out what to order, Kevin and Stephen had a
lively exchange about Unlimited Intimacy, Tim Dean’s book on barebacking, versus
Edelman’s No Future, which boiled down to a strange choice between hope and
despair. Kevin and I came home and watched Mad Men, and went to bed. I slept
soundly and now it’s all about peace, weakness, this blog, and the cats. Sylvia’s
twitching her whiskers and paws as if she’s dreaming, but her eyes are half open.
That’s what I feel like, like my fingers are twitching out a dream here. It’s a rich
dream, don’t you think?
* * *
9/30/10
Innocence
I have a photo of my seven-year-old self stuck to my refrigerator with a magnet.
I’m in my grandmother’s backyard, wearing Grandma’s fur jacket, hat, sunglasses,
jewelry, white gloves, heels, and daintily displaying her handbag. I’m ecstatically
happy in my heteronormal gender play. Outside the frame there’s a bird fountain
made of poured concrete that my older cousins decorated with colorful bits of
broken bottles and pottery. Rhubarb is growing along the edge of the yard, where
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* MY PERSON *
it meets the alley. We’d pick it and my grandmother would stew it with cinnamon
and oranges. Before Shell Oil bought up the surrounding fields and we had to
worry that an oil tank might explode and consume Grandma and her house in a
giant orange blaze that reached up toward the heavens, my father would forage
wild asparagus, and Grandma would cook it in cream sauce. My father loved
anything creamed, we’d have creamed chipped beef on toast, which he said in the
army they called shit on a shingle.
I loved spending the weekend with Grandma and Grandpa. Grandpa was a
mean drunk, but he was only mean to Grandma. Sometimes he’d take me to
the neighborhood bar with him, other times we’d watch TV, eating pineapple
sherbet sprinkled with peanuts. The love of grandparents is uncomplicated, the
lightness of having a carefree affair versus the complicated drama of life at home
with Mom and Dad. My parents got along, but childhood with them on Oakdale
Avenue more often than not felt like a bad marriage. If we move from figurative
language to real life, I suppose my situation is reversed at the moment—carefree
marriage, bad affair.
When I look at this photo it embodies for me what I always thought love should
be like, open and unquestioning. A beaming me-ness, a smile of acceptance and
gratitude for the other behind the camera. The grace of the shared loving eye. A
childlikeness that can sometimes bleed into childishness—I know I’m not easy—
but I’ve always loved with an unguardedness. Luckily, Kevin loves that way as
well. I think of the obituary I read online not long after Kathy Acker’s death—by
her former lover in London, the one she demonized in the end, whom all her
friends hated—but I found his memories of her quite moving. He said that when
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* MY PERSON *
Kathy was touched she threw herself into it totally, like a child or an animal.
Which makes so much sense, considering her writing, her astonishing ability to
link into primal spaces and move through them as if they were physical terrain.
It’s confusing to encounter people whose love is complex, a doling out and then
withholding, an obsession with control. People who cause you so much pain that
eventually it doesn’t matter if they love you or not, you just want the pain to
go away. It’s been a rough couple of weeks for me, and my friends have been
wonderful, listening, offering love, and telling me over and over again that I’m
lovable. I’m astonished how many people told me they loved me these past couple
of weeks. I didn’t ask for that, it just seemed to be in the air I needed to hear that.
My mainstays have been Marcus, Bhanu, and Bruce. But there’s also been Donna
and Karen and Chris. And, of course, Kevin.
I’ve spent a lot of time talking with Bruce Boone lately, long phone calls, and then
yesterday a springlike evening in the Castro. Bruce talked about writing his latest
blog entry, and his relationship with Jamie, who passed away a little over a year
ago. I visited Jamie a few weeks before he died, the final weekend he was coherent.
(After that he’d be this shadowy figure in the bed, moaning, as Bruce and I sat in
the kitchen eating mochi and drinking tea.) I brought Jamie a box of truffles from
Joseph Schmidt and sat in the bedroom with him. He said he was calling up all the
people he cared about and telling them that he loved them. He said we don’t tell
people enough how much we love them, and knowing that he was dying gave him
the opportunity to do this, so that knowledge was a blessing in a way.
Last night as we walked down 18th Street, Bruce told me his love for Jamie was
unconditional. And when I didn’t respond right away, he said you’re pausing at
that. And I said I didn’t know if human love could be unconditional. He said he
loved Jamie no matter what, and I said you certainly went through a lot with him.
Bruce said, yes, he was a drug addict. And we discussed Jamie’s drug problem
and its impact on Bruce’s life. He said, isn’t your love for Kevin unconditional?
And I said it seems like it could survive just about anything. But what if Kevin
changed, what if he became a horrible person? Would I still love him then? I
said I’d take care of him through anything. We agreed that it was unlikely Kevin
would change. I said to Bruce, what if Jamie cheated on you, would you still love
him then. Bruce said that was the one thing he couldn’t have tolerated. I asked
him why that was important to him, and he said he didn’t know, it just was. I
like that, not having to rationalize one’s needs. Then our conversation turned to
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* MY PERSON *
Bernini’s Saint Teresa in Ecstasy, the kinkiness of merging of pagan and Catholic,
of sexuality and spirituality. The way Saint Teresa is totally throwing herself into
it. Like an animal or a child.
10/1/10
Received Images
This afternoon I had a Taoist internal organ massage. There was much
tenderness from being sick, tenderness from heartbreak. As usual, the treatment
put me into a trance, and I received images of a powerful cord still connecting
me to the person I’ve been moving away from. Afterwards I asked Erene, the
practitioner, what do you do when you feel such a cord between yourself and
another. How do you unhook it. She said all interactions are energy exchanges—
there was no way out of that—and the way to work with another’s energy and
not have it get stuck in you is to be totally open to it. I know this will sound too
woo-woo for many of my readers. When I start talking this way, Kevin rolls his
eyes—but if I told Marcus, he’d be all yes, yes. Erene mentioned the famous
17th Century samurai, Miyamoto Musashi, how he’s depicted standing with his
legs spread, arms down at his sides, holding two swords—an open stance where
he can easily move and see in all directions—a stance where he can take on ten
opponents at a time. An openness that allows energy to move through you and
around you. I sat there cross-legged on the massage table, listening with the rapt
attention of a child being told a bedtime story. I thought back to the cord, and
what this image of Miyamoto Musashi says to me is to not resist the cord, to let
it go where it will in its own time and direction. This allows me a softening, a
compassion for the other person.
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* MY PERSON *
Earlier in the week someone suggested I look at images of hungry ghosts. A

hungry ghost has a huge bloated stomach and a long skinny neck. The hungry
ghost is ravenously hungry, but its neck is too skinny to swallow any food. It
represents deep-seated longings that can never be satiated. Some situations—
such as a romance—can awaken these ghosts and one falls into a state of terror
before a need so unfathomable, it’s unbearable. I was told that you can’t suppress
the ghosts—rather you have to learn new ways of relating to them. I suppose if
someone really loves you, they’ll be patient, work with you to relate to your hungry
ghosts. Not ridicule you, as was recently done to me. But that person has his own
hungry ghosts that are driving him. He’s more frightened than I am, I’m sure of
that. And I love that about him, his fear. Because it’s vulnerable and it’s real and I
feel honored he trusted me enough to show it to me.
10/4/10
Miraculous Lesbians
Friday night Miss March, the 2009 buddy/road trip movie, was on TV. It’s one of
the most tasteless, vulgar, stupid, offensive comedies I’ve seen. I stayed up until
2:00 in the morning watching the second half of it. The most intriguing vein for
me was the lesbians who pick up down-trodden hitchhiking protagonists Eugene
and Trevor. The guys are desperately trying to get to Los Angeles to the Playboy
mansion. Eugene, who’s been in a coma for four years, needs to reunite with his
high school girlfriend, who’s become a bunny.
A car pulls over, containing two beautiful babes with Slavic accents—Vonka and
Katja. They inform the guys that they’re lesbians who can’t keep their hands off
of one another. They’re headed for Los Angeles and want the guys to drive the
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* MY PERSON *
car so they can crawl in the back and “make love and suck and fuck each other
the whole way.” The guys agree, and the lesbians have wild sex while stunned
Trevor runs the car into a post. Katja complains: “Is there going to be a problem?
You almost made me bite Vonka’s labia.” By the end of the drive this has all
become normalized, and the guys are chatting merrily while the lesbians continue
to frolic. As they enter Los Angeles, Trevor shouts, “Look, Lesbians, palm trees!”
The guys never refer to the women by their names.
Later, in a hallway in the Playboy mansion, Trevor happens upon the lesbians,
who are, of course, frantically making out. Trevor desperately needs to get into a
room, but they’re all locked. He says, “Lesbians, help me break down this door!”
The lesbians aren’t interested in helping him until he tells them there will be a
bedroom and jacuzzi behind the door. Vonka kneels before a door with a super
large keyhole, sticks out her miraculous lesbian tongue, and licks and sucks the
keyhole until the lock clicks.
The lesbians are so much into the all-consuming otherness of their desire for
one another, they’re impervious to the male gaze. No matter how much men
gawk at them, the power of their lesbian desire subverts that gaze, renders it
impotent. Their desire is so natural, it’s like the weather, it can happen anywhere
and everywhere. A desire that throws up a shield of protection, and within it the
women see nothing but one another. Lesbian desire gives Vonka the super-human
power of opening locks with her tongue. It’s like the more these two women
fuck, the more potent they become, like they’ll grow to rule the world with their
vampiric accents and their tough pouty lips. The guys address them as “Lesbians”
because they dare not speak their names.
* * *
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* MY PERSON *
10/4/10
Flinching before the Gaze

After I finished this morning’s post on the miraculous lesbians’ subversion of
the male gaze, I stumbled upon the following passage from Freedom, Johathan
Franzen’s latest novel:
Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see
how her presence—the drama of being her—was registering. In the way
of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation.
Katz had encountered, practically verbatim, the same provocation a
hundred times before, which put him in the ridiculous position now of
feeling bad for being unable to pretend to be provoked: of pitying Lucy’s
doughty little ego, its flotation on a sea of aging-female insecurity.
Due to all the stagy point of view switches the novel apparently employs, I’d
thought of assigning it to students, but after reading the above passage I was
like, not in 100 fucking years. The cruelty and hubris of Franzen’s depiction of
the woman—a reviewer points out that Katz is the character who seems closest
to Franzen himself—is astonishing. Middle aged women are such easy prey, like
they’re supposed to walk around with eyes averted, hanging their heads in shame
at their wreckage.
Here’s a sappy image of a crone to wipe out the evil Franzen-view. She looks
complete, does she not, with her moon and bunny and snake. With such cute
animals to pleasure you, who needs men? When I talk with “aging-female”s—
meaning straight women, not miraculous lesbians—some of them welcome being
29
outside that gaze. Some of them have no interest in attracting men, and from that
they feel powerful, freed up to direct libidinal energies into other pursuits. I’ve
felt that myself, no desire for men equals centered and powerful Dodie—and no
matter what men I interacted with, I felt in control.
I recently, despite all intentions to never do that again, got involved with a straight
guy. At first it was great, but the power dynamics gradually switched, until I ended
up being treated like a petulant child. At one point he told me not to hint for what
I wanted, to just say it—and since that’s something Kevin has also asked me to
do, I figured he had a point—so I did start to ask for what I wanted, very directly.
Much of the time he’d simply say no—no explanation, just no—or he’d make a
flippant retort. When I said these blunt nos weren’t going down well, my behavior
was called “peremptory and monarchical.” The more he’d treat me like a child,
the more childish I became—until one day rage came welling in, and this rage
gave me Crone Vision: this is fucked up! Off I went, back to my animals and
Kevin and the delightful queerness of my writing/art world.
FUCK YOU JONATHAN FRANZEN!!
* * *
30
* H EA RT P UBLICATION *
31
* HEART PUBLICATION *
10/9/10
Public Display
I’ve been thinking a lot about the recent break up of two well known poets in our
experimental writing fishbowl, how the female poet has been expressing her pain
on Facebook and her blog. A few weeks ago for his status update on Facebook
the male poet wrote, “Must it really all be so public?” Some guys chimed in with
how pathetic airing one’s business in public is. Breakups, I guess, are like death,
old age, insanity—best locked away behind closed doors. I’d love to see more
operatic, grand suffering in public. The relationship between these two poets was
very much a public relationship, so why shouldn’t its dissolution also be public?
With the type of writing many of us do, and the community we live in, the
personal and the public are blurred, anyway.
Jackie Wang recently wrote a blog post entitled “If you date a writer, they’re
going to write about you: brutal honesty as performative writing.” At least in my
community, truer words have never been spoken. For a few months I was involved
with a very private person, who was terrified I was going to write about him. This
guy must have some self-destructive streak—he’s read my writing, what was he
thinking? My involvement with him throughout had overtones of performance
art, in that a handful of others knew about him and eagerly awaited updates.
Even those who knew his name referred to him as The Buddhist. Friends would
say to me, “How are things going with The Buddhist?” “Are you going to have
sex with The Buddhist?” They were happy to be hearing about someone outside
our world. If I were getting involved with someone like, say, David Buuck, they
would have rolled their eyes. They’ve heard that story a zillion times before. And
it’s exactly this community involvement that led David to declare at one point,
“No more poets!” Really, who wants to have sex with an entire community? No
one but the community.
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The Buddhist kept my interest by being freakishly secretive—for instance he was

sending me all these seductive boundary crossing emails, but he wouldn’t say if he
was gay or straight or whatever. He said it didn’t make a difference, and I was all,
on the contrary, it makes a great deal of difference. So, finally he admitted he’s
straight, and my small audience of fellow writers eagerly nursed this new detail.
Later I announced to them, The Buddhist has a partner—and they nursed that.
Then I told them that I read online in the New York Times he was married! And
they nursed that. Then he told me they weren’t really married, he’d lied on some
insurance forms. News flash! None of his secrets were all that interesting; they
were banal, in fact. He basically leads the evasive lifestyle of a cheating married
man. Buddhism gave it an otherworldly aura, as much of the online romance
was happening while he was leading meditation retreats. He’s a Buddhist priest,
of sorts. I never would have imagined a meditation retreat leader sitting in his
room, drinking beer, writing to his long-distance girlfriend—especially when his
“partner” is also at the retreat—how bored and lonely he is. Yet here I was, eagerly
awaiting his emails. When he came to visit me in San Francisco, he wouldn’t tell
me when his plane got in because he doesn’t like people to know what he’s doing—
my friends loved that one. And then the morning we were to meet, he wrote me a
series of weird, aggressive emails, very disturbing. That evening at dinner, he said
he’d felt pressure to be happy about seeing me, and he didn’t like to be pressured
into being any way, and that’s why he wrote the emails. He said he had anger
management issues. He said he was notoriously difficult in relationships because
he tended to withdraw. A few days before he came to visit, I was listing all his flaws
to Donna de la Perriere, and after each one, Donna would should out, “Check.”
By the end of the list, we were bent over, snorting with laughter. When I met him
at the restaurant, I slipped into the bathroom and texted her my first impressions.
When I’ve been pissed at The Buddhist, I’ve posted bits of his emails on Facebook.
“This is how a Buddhist mocks you: ‘The selfless compassion here is astonishing,
is it not?’” “Here’s how a Buddhist signs an insulting, attacking email: ‘May all
bodies find comfort and ease.’” People “Like” these or make comments. I emailed
particularly crazy bits of his emails to my writer friends for feedback. They’d root
for me. They’d say he was horrible. They’d tell me to get rid of him.
Ariana Reines:
o dodie, i think this is awful. i don’t know the story or whatever, but it
seems like he is a nonartist who is excited by your artwork and the raw
33
emotions inside it, thinking he is like making art or something by playing

this game with you because he never risks his own feelings i don’t know.
probably someone who also can only handle emotions when they arrive
packaged in some form. i don’t like him. i mean i guess noncommittal
flirtation is also a domination technique and teasing + denial is erotic.
to a point. and not to me! i hate being fucked with like that, usually it’s
just a turnoff or it makes me very sadistic and mean. i don’t have the
fortitude to be played with like that, i think maybe i’m too weak for it.
Of course it ended badly. Recently I tried to smooth things over with The Buddhist.
It was disastrous. Bradford Nordeen on my efforts: “Aren’t these awful experiences
best when they’re funneled into the work so that heartache is turned into a piece,
made productive? That piece is written (and lovely) so why on earth would you
get back into the sandbox?” Bradford’s referring to the 1000-word story/memoir
I recently completed called “The Buddhist,” a piece so obscene it makes my soul
blush. 1000 words sounds right; I have no desire to write any more “real” writing
about him. I enjoyed working with brevity—layering subtlety into such a raunchy,
blatant blip. I even created a character arc for the protagonist, just like they do in
real fiction. The “now” takes place within a few minutes, but the content extends
and swirls way out, the now being like the eye of a tornado, and everything else
racing around that. It never ceases to amaze me that no matter how personal or
vulnerable my subject matter, at a certain point in writing it all boils down to formal
concerns, I become this slightly mad biologist panting to herself as I pin a butterfly,
alive and writhing, to a cardboard background. Of course I’m thinking of Nabokov
here. Is 1000 words and a community who’s been entertained for 5 months worth
the pain? And, yes, there was pleasure as well. It was like being in a cult, a strange
narcissistic Buddhist sex cult. I wouldn’t have passed it up for the world.
* * *
10/11/10
Oppositional Weakness
On Facebook I recently quoted Octavio Paz: “When society does its very best to
homogenize us, what is wrong with a strong, knowledgeable, and responsible ego
crying in the darkening wilderness?” Nada Gordon countered with, “or even a
weak, ignorant, unreliable one?” Nada’s critique is right on—to accept that one
has to be strong, knowledgeable or responsible in order to speak is to assimilate
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Western capitalism’s narrative of progress; it denies otherness and represses vast

arenas of human experience. This is what I was getting at in my post on public
display and operatic suffering—an in-your-face owning of one’s vulnerability and
fucked-upness to the point of embarrassing and offending tight-asses is a powerful
feminist strategy. Writing is tough work, I don’t see how anyone can really write
from a position of weakness. Sometimes I may start out in that position, but the
act of commandeering words flips me into a position of power. To deny behaviors
and experiences gendered as weak or “feminine” is not feminist or queer, it’s
heteronormative to the hilt. Like Kathy Acker, I long to quiver and terrify in the
same gasp.
In a blog post about queer negativity in the work of Judith “Jack” Halberstam,
Jackie Wang uses the phrase “hegemony of happiness”:
The issue, for me, does not come down to hope vs. cynicism, but figuring
out how we can resist the tendency to normalize from the position of
a privileged affective response or attitude. This means challenging the
hegemony of happiness, which invalidates people who are too crazy or
angry or fucked up by the world to function or participate in a polite way.
After I read Wang’s post, “hegemony of happiness” rang through my head like
a mantra. Since I’m writing a book about New Age spirituality and cults—
and I’ve been dealing with The Buddhist’s slinging of Buddhist jargon (such
as “spaciousness”) at me whenever we got in a fight—the notion of peace or
happiness or selflessness or any other “positive” trait being the pot of gold at
the end of our spiritual/therapeutic quest has made me want to puke in my
mouth. I don’t want to be miserable, but I also want to embrace the fucked-up,
to move towards a maturity and strength that can include and express weakness
and embarrassing content of all sorts without shame, to allow myself the full
resonance of being a female subject (and all the other categorical adjectives that
could be applied to me) living in a fucked up nation, in a fucked up world, in the
21st century. May we each become a queer head on what Judith Halberstam calls
“the monstrous entity that opposes global capitalism”:
We need to craft a queer agenda that works cooperatively with

the many other heads of the monstrous entity that opposes global
capitalism, and to define queerness as a mode of crafting alternatives
with others, alternatives which are not naively oriented to a liberal
35
notion of progressive entitlement but a queer politics which is also not

tied to a nihilism which always lines up against women, domesticity
and reproduction. Instead, we turn to a history of alternatives,
contemporary moments of alternative political struggle and high and
low cultural productions of a funky, nasty, over the top and thoroughly
accessible queer negativity. If we want to make the anti-social turn in
queer theory, we must be willing to turn away from the comfort zone of
polite exchange in order to embrace a truly political negativity, one that
promises, this time, to fail, to make a mess, to fuck shit up, to be loud,
unruly, impolite, to breed resentment, to bash back, to speak up and
out, to disrupt, assassinate, shock and annihilate, and, to quote Jamaica
Kincaid, to make everyone a little less happy!
—Judith “Jack” Halberstam, “The Anti-Social Turn in Queer Studies”
Like the miraculous lesbians in Miss March, radical writing should enact a
subversive relationship to the heteronormative gaze.
Here’s a photo of me being what The Buddhist called “peremptory and

monarchical.”
Over and over on my grade school report cards, one snooty teacher after another
wrote “Doris has a bad attitude.” These comments were a source of shame for
me, and threats from my mother to stop my damned pouting and behave myself.
But reading Halberstam makes me proud of young, frowning Dodie for balking
at her powerlessness at such a young age, and for being such a “loud, unruly,
impolite” little girl.
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10/13/10
Moving On
Or maybe it’s moving through. Due to my allowing emotional excesses to bleed
around my words here, people keep asking me if I’m okay. People write all the
way from France to ask Kevin if I’m doing okay. I’m doing fine, more than fine,
I’m feeling good, it was a beautiful warm day today and I was wearing a gauze
plaid Western shirt I got at Old Navy, not something I’d normally wear, a plaid
Western shirt, but this one was light gray plaid with apricot and yellow accents,
and the inside is gray gingham checks, which show when you roll the sleeves
back, with pearly snap buttons, I couldn’t resist it, and the gauze reminded me
of when I was an undergrad and wore gauze hippie shirts, a gold square-necked
pull-over, and also a blue one, and it lured me back to warm days in college in
Indiana, especially around dinnertime when it cooled off, I was in downtown
San Francisco, South of Market, but still downtown, tall buildings and traffic,
I was flooded with sense memories of the brightness and calm of early evening
in Indiana, the ecstasy of being young and roaming around the thickly-treed
streets, it was like the present and the memory were equally there, equally vivid,
superimposed, and I had one of those, wow life is rich moments that are so precious
but kind of embarrassing to admit.
Friday and Saturday, the last interactions I had with The Buddhist, he was so
weird and cold and paranoid, not a flurry of compassion or kindness towards me,
or any softening, I was stunned, I was reminded of how they say when you have
cats that are close and one dies, if you show the dead body to the survivor, they’ll
move away from it, move on, forget their mate, that’s what this was, anything I
had with him was like this dead cat, and that was helpful, it made me recoil, and
it’s good, I’m not feeling angry or resentful, just moving away from this dead
thing. The end result is a sense of clarity, the ability to look at and engage with
what’s right in front of my nose, so many great things and people right in front of
my nose. I don’t feel like I need much right now, just sitting on the couch cuddling
the cats makes me happy, slouching on the couch watching Glee with Kevin makes
me happy, even reading student work makes me happy.
Meditating also makes me happy, even though that’s not supposed to be the goal
of it, but I guess I’m happy that I can do it, as it’s so tied up with The Buddhist, like
how do I look at spirituality, having been on the receiving end of such a damaged
teacher, a professional Buddhist—I’ve realized he’s just one person going through
37
his own crisis, it has nothing to do with spirituality or Buddhism, and I’m sure
there’s plenty of spiritual teachers out there who are way more damaged, and I
wasn’t his student or anything, and let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater
or any other clichés, Bhanu Kapil has been very helpful in talking through this,
so thank you Bhanu, and I know that when I sit down to meditate it’s about my
relation to the process, period—and I would never want to be a spiritual teacher,
being a writing teacher is more than enough responsibility, I know from teaching
writing you have to put your heart into it or it doesn’t work.
So, if you’re the type who worries, don’t worry about me, and let’s talk about
other things here, like how trolling around YouTube I found The White Rose,
Bruce Connor’s 1967 film, about the moving of Jay de Feo’s 11 x 8 feet, one-ton
painting, The Rose, from her apartment on Fillmore Street, after she got evicted in
1965, the thing was so fucking massive movers had to cut away part of the wall
and use a forklift.
I’ve wanted to see this film for years, but I never expected it to be so beautiful,
the melancholy but stately Miles Davis soundtrack, the luscious black and white
footage, the guys in black suits (who would wear a suit to unearth a painting?),
the white jumpsuited movers, I was raised in the 50s but I didn’t know any men
who wore suits, my upbringing was with the white jumpsuits for sure, and Jay
de Feo so nonchalant and young, lounging on the fire escape, sitting in the hole
cut in the wall smoking, lying on her painting, I wonder as she lay there if she
thought the painting was a live or a dead thing, after it was moved she kept
working on it, drinking brandy and smoking Gauloises, so I imagine she felt it
38
was still alive, time itself feels languorous in this film, like if we all cut holes in
our buildings and dangled our white-shoed feet, life would be good and full, and
would last a really long time.
* * *
10/15/10
Private Rites
Had another brief skirmish with the buddhist yesterday and today. (Suzanne Stein
wrote to me, “i think we should demote him to lowercase,” and I am following her
suggestion.) Our involvement remains this dead thing. I remember watching my
mother die, how right afterwards, in her neck there were these little contractions
like animals were scurrying under her skin, that’s what it feels like with the
buddhist, those final musculature contractions of a dead thing. I’m tired of writing
about him. Back in the early days of New Narrative, when we were all wanting to
be in one another’s work, I complained to Kevin, why don’t you write about me,
and Kevin said he didn’t write about me because writing was an exorcism, and
he didn’t want to exorcise me. Writing about the buddhist here has been a sort of
exorcism, but the time for that has passed—no more soap opera narrative for this
blog, time to return to random bleeps of experience and observation.
This whole experience has made me keenly aware of the limits of thinking and
analyzing when trying to recover from matters of emotion/the heart. At a certain
point I realized that rationality wasn’t working. I could go over and over all the
things he did, all the things I did, could rehearse all his bad traits, could try to
repress all the caring and pleasure I’d lost, but none of that was really helping. So
39
I turned to ritual and the nonrational—I had some excellent help with this, and
it’s been profound, but I can’t share it here, because there’s this power in secrecy,
a density of energy. Speaking my rites would dissipate their magic. I’m thinking
of a story Eileen Myles told me of how she was giving a reading one evening—I
can’t remember the details of the story—but she performed the piece she was
planning to read for someone before the reading, and then when it came time
for the reading, her energy for the piece wasn’t there and it fell flat. I’m thinking
of how when I’m in the process of writing something, I don’t like to talk about
it too much, that I need a monogamous relationship with the piece, like I have
to be in love with it in this private bubble. And when I finish a piece I email it
to a handful of friends—and this emailing the work to a core group is its real
publication, a heart publication, allowing these few people to step into the bubble
when the writing is fresh and my relationship to it is still raw and vulnerable.
Other publications follow, but none count as much as this initial sharing. Each
layer of publication after that becomes more denatured—maybe the piece will be
in a journal, then a beat in a larger book I publish, and some pieces will end up
anthologized, totally stripped from their original context.
I get a similar heart thrill from reading a new piece for my local writing
community, and will sometimes use an upcoming reading as a deadline—a
practice I borrowed from Cedar Sigo. Last March I was scheduled to read
with Chris Martin at Jason Morris’ house, and I got this horrible cold, and had
also bought a new bed and couch. Thursday night the old bed and couch were
hauled out to the street, awaiting pickup by Sunset Scavengers, and the new
furniture wasn’t arriving until Saturday, so for a couple of nights, Kevin and I
used a mattress on the living room floor as both bed and couch, it was kind of
fun, like being back in college, when friends would come over and lie on your bed
and listen to music. My cold got worse and worse, I was miserable and feverish
and sneezing, but I propped myself up on that mattress and wrote like a maniac
for my reading. I finished the piece around suppertime on Friday, Kevin read it
over and made a few suggestions, and I quickly edited it. That evening, in Jason’s
living room, I leaned against a counter and read it, all faint and woozy, blowing
my nose, to maybe 20 people, and it was amazing, the writing was so alive for me,
practically glowing on the page. I offered it to these people with such tenderness
and excitement. I felt bonded to them in ways I don’t typically feel during a
reading, like these were my loved ones, my people—even the ones there whom
I’d never met. Nothing in the future I do with that piece will ever approach that
original runny-nosed initiation of it.
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10/15/10
Stream of Gardenias
Sitting here, computer on bedtray, wearing my new black cotton velvet “skinny”
jeans which don’t look very skinny on me, they don’t have any pockets but when
I was standing I kept trying to put my hands in pockets anyway, like the structure
of pockets in my head was stronger than the physical lack of pockets, which is
similar to my humiliating longing for the buddhist today, I still have the structure
of longing for the buddhist even though the buddhist no longer exists for me, I
tell myself this is better than repression or denial, but I’m not convinced, I doubt
if he’s sitting wherever he’s sitting at the moment, longing for me, he seems very
proficient at breaking up, like it comes naturally to him or he’s done a lot of it, I
suppose the longing’s not so bad, it makes me want to be kind to others, makes me
want to be kind to him, which I dare not do, I’m also wearing a sky blue cotton
knit top, my only sky blue item, as that’s not my color, but I can stand it because
it’s saturated enough to not be pastel, it’s a color my mother would wear, a color
I always associate with her, so putting it on this morning was a bit like putting her
on. In two weeks it will be the third anniversary of her death, and when I think
of her I also feel longing, different than I feel for the buddhist, deeper and less
complicated, that dumb wish to squeeze my eyes really really hard and when I
open them she’ll somehow exist again, and I can pick up the phone and she’ll tell
me she loves me, being able to pick up the phone and have someone tell you they
love you is such a blessing, we should never take that for granted, though we do.
I’m wearing smoky plum eyeshadow, which makes me feel like Simone Signoret,
I saw her recently in two films, Room at the Top and Ship of Fools, I only watched
bits of Ship of Fools, it had some of the most exciting overacting I’ve ever seen,
but Signoret was amazing in it, I adored her as a child, and I still adore her, her
41
fleshy sensuality, a woman who loves profoundly and suffers profoundly, she’s so
unguarded and vulnerable yet totally worldly, the world has not made her jaded,
she’ll always be willing to squeeze one last drop of desire from it.
I wish I could see colors streaming from my body the way Bhanu Kapil does, but I
can’t, I wish I could twist my sentences into ecstatic surprises the way she does, but
I can’t. When I had a Taoist internal organ massage today, I had two big releases,
where you come out of the trance with a gasp, gulping for air, and after the first
gasp I distinctly smelled gardenias, even though there were no flowers in the room.
Afterwards, since I was already downtown I went to the flower stand across the
street from Macys and bought a gardenia, I’ve been buying gardenias from that
stand since the late 70s when I moved to San Francisco, and of course gardenias
remind me of Billie Holiday, which reminded me, in turn, of the early 80s, how
the experimental feminist poets were into Billie Holiday and Frida Kahlo. It
wasn’t really acceptable for experimental feminists to be into strong emotion and
suffering, if we addressed such intensities in our poetry they had to be coded and
intellectualized, there was all this pressure to be smart and fragmented, and Holiday
and Kahlo were a place were we could admire directness and raw emotion, I’m
sure that the non-whiteness as well as the non-writerness of Holiday and Kahlo
had much to do with their being acceptable, it would not have been cool to admit
to liking Sylvia Plath, for instance, she was bad emotion, bad suffering, but putting
on a Billie Holiday album made you a hip experimental feminist, Holiday and
Kahlo were victims, but Plath, she did it to herself. But I did love Plath, and I
did address raw emotion in my poetry, I was embarrassingly nonfragmented and
direct, and, yes, my work was considered stupid and my eyeliner was too heavy
and I talked too loud and whenever the opportunity presented itself I was always
eager to fuck. I was a bad experimental feminist.
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10/16/10
Heart like a Rock Cast in the Sea

Thinking more this morning about my band of young, mostly white (though my
best friend in the group was Evangeline Brown, a Chicana attorney) experimental
feminist poets turning to black blues singers to feed their need for emotional porn.
In the early 80s, most of us were not yet published, or barely published, many
of us were students at San Francisco State, where we were being indoctrinated
into a feminism that wasn’t so much about reproductive rights or the history of
female oppression or sexist representations of women, this new feminism was
more about symbolic order and don’t let those male Language Poets dominate
your thinking, in other words it was an academic feminism where producing
disjunct poetry that forefronted its difficulty was somehow going to free us from
the horrors of logocentrism.
Billie Holiday, with her controlled jazzy sophistication, was much more popular
with our group than was Bessie Smith. Bessie Smith was hardcore, with her
sprawling viscerality and aura of endangered abjection. With Bessie Smith you
can’t twirl your martini glass and comment on her vocal technique the way you can
with Billie Holiday, with Smith you’re yanked into a sludge of loss and hard times.
Evangeline and I loved her. We devoured chimichangas at Roosevelt’s Tamale
Parlor, gushing over Smith’s genius and sharing intimate details of one another’s
lives. Evangeline owned two houses in Rockridge, and I was living hand to mouth,
but our commitment to feminism, poetry, and sensuality drew us together.
This morning on YouTube I watched Bessie Smith’s enactment of “St. Louis

Blues.” I was intrigued by the clip’s subversion of film conventions of inside/
outside—or perhaps back in 1929, the conventions I’ve come to expect hadn’t
43
jelled yet. Most of my knowledge of film history comes from watching Turner
Classic Movies with Kevin, who will shout out things like, “In this movie, she’s on loan
from Warner Brothers.” He’s mesmerized by the machinations of the studio system,
the way stars were owned and loaned, like glamorous cattle. The film begins with
Smith lying on the floor in a bedroom, we’re talking way abject. She sits up, drinks
some whiskey and begins singing, “My man’s got a heart like a rock cast in the sea.”
She sings the line again, and then we dissolve to what looks like a hotel bar, where
she sings the line a couple of more times, then the camera pans the audience/
chorus, and then the band, which begins to play. It’s hard to tell what the temporal
relationship is of the lying on the floor to sitting at the bar—Smith is wearing the
same clothes—is it a flashback to earlier in the evening, is it later in the evening, is
it a fantasy? Who knows. Once Smith’s singing is acknowledged by the audience/
chorus, by current musical number conventions, one would expect all the regular
action to cease, and the whole room to focus on and actively engage in Smith’s
singing. But the audience remains disengaged, their bodies and facial expressions
impassive. When the camera backs up, it’s hard to tell they’re singing—even in some
close-ups the only way we know they’re singing is that their mouths are moving.
Waiters continue to rush around with their trays, other customers walk in front of the
camera, temporarily occluding Smith, and the bartender to Smith’s left continues
to talk to someone outside the frame, occasionally glancing at her suspiciously, like
she’s a crazy drunk sitting there on her stool, talking to herself. Smith’s got her back
to everybody—the bartender, the chorus, the viewer. Her aloneness in the video is
painfully unremittent. The communal support we expect from the chorus comes
across as a half-assed fantasy. Smith’s very specific abandonment is a vortex pulling
in the viewer’s own sense of abandonment, Smith’s body jerks forward and back,
like there’s nothing left to hold her up, her gaze remains inward trapped in the
world of the song, at the end she’s so weak and drunk she has to prop her head on
her hand. The video makes me voyeuristic and uncomfortable—the trappings of
cinematic fantasy dissolve, and Smith flaunts the privacy of her suffering, springing
from a depth that doesn’t belong to me, that I have no right to witness. Of course
I see this as a model for writing, a highly-crafted mystique of the unmediated that
seduces the reader into profound discomfort.
* * *
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10/18/10
Heart to Heart
I dreamt about the buddhist this morning, very intense and visceral, it didn’t feel
like my own dream, more like a visitation, I jolted awake at 6:00 a.m., wondering
what had just happened to me. This left me feeling connected to him again, or more
precisely, poignantly dis-connected, an aching sense of missing something, it wasn’t
rational, it wasn’t about remembering anything pleasant with him, it wasn’t even
about desire, it was this blunt emptiness. The feeling continued all morning as I did
school prep work, and as I taught from 4 to 7, the class went well, I got home around
7:30 and the feeling of longing had grown to the point that I wondered if it had
anything to do with the buddhist at all, if he were merely a conduit for the feeling,
or if I was associating it with him by habit, I slipped into an even deeper emptiness,
this primal emptiness that’s buried in all of us, only mine had somehow bubbled to
the surface. Kevin was lying in bed, so I crawled in next to him and asked him to
talk to me, to talk about anything, so he told me about his day and his own feelings
of overwhelm with deadlines, etc., he made me laugh, and he said it helped him
to talk to me, and I took his hand and placed it on my heart chakra and held it
there, tightly, and the warmth of his hand seeped down into the emptiness and
soothed it, and since we were lying there all cozy, one thing led to another . . .
can’t get too graphic on the internet . . . and afterwards as we wilted into that
“wow, what just happened to me!” mode, Kevin said he could feel his heart sutra
opening, and I said, it’s not your heart sutra, it’s your heart chakra—the heart
sutra is—remember when Steve Abbott died and we went to the service at the
Hartford Street Zen Center and Philip Whalen droned that scary “all is nothing
you are nothing”—that’s the heart sutra—Kevin said whatever it was called, he
wanted to rest in that opening, and I asked him if he was feeling oceanic, and he
said, no, it’s more contained than that, more like a lagoon.
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* O P E R AT I C SUFFERING *
* OPERATIC SU FFERING *
10/21/10
In My Defense
This evening when I was reading the blog of the female member of the poetry
couple who has recently broken up, she wrote, “G. said in our last phone
conversation (maybe our last ever?) that he didn’t want me to be like Dodie, to
treat the relationship as Dodie treats hers.” I’m assuming he was referring to my
writing about the buddhist here. To reveal or not to reveal—this is a core question
for many writers. This business of women not suffering in public, of having a
gag order when it comes to personal drama, such as a break up, connects back to
larger histories of suppression, such as the literature of victimization, women not
daring to speak of rape or incest (and I’m in no way suggesting that my current
situation is in any way comparable to those violations), a harkening back to the
whole notion that domestic space is private, what happens behind closed doors
stays behind closed doors, and somewhere buried in there is the history of the
wife being owned by her man and therefore she better keep her trap shut, and
bourgeois notions of suffering with dignity—or dignity itself, how oppressive a
value is that? Betrayal happens in private (usually), thus betrayal itself is less of
a bourgeois sin than talking about it. In my rust belt working class heritage, if
someone betrayed you, you would tell anybody within earshot what that son of
a bitch did to you—you would cuss and gesticulate and wail—and there would
be no shame in that. In fact, you who had this great emotional burden would be
treated with awe—working class people respect anger—and others would join
your rage, light your cigarette, and say, yes, that son of a bitch doesn’t deserve
you. Think of Anna Magnani’s fury when Rossellini left her for Ingrid Bergman.
Neo realismo!
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* OPERATIC SUFFERING *
Throughout I’ve tried to use my babbling about loss and betrayal as an opportunity
to refine and promote a political/aesthetic position. In writing about the buddhist
here, I admit, there’s a passive-aggressive (bordering on straight up aggressive)
impulse behind it. I gave him many opportunities to not have this be hostile, and
he remained cold and patronizing, so at a certain point I was fuck this, my not
writing about him, given my overall writing project, is remaining loyal to him, and
he did not deserve my loyalty. I felt that in order for me to break with him, I had
to perform an act of disloyalty. Okay, I admit that this doesn’t make much sense.
But on some counts I have remained loyal to him—I’ve not revealed anything
personal about him that didn’t impact me directly—I have kept him anonymous,
have not included details that would make it possible for the clever reader to figure
out who he was—I have not mentioned where he lives, what he does for a living,
what sect of Buddhism he’s involved in, his name or even an initial. And I haven’t
gone into every little thing he did that I felt wounded by—for one thing, it would
get tedious quick, and writing is writing, you do anything to make it work, even
leave out details you’re attached to if it bogs things down. In other words, aesthetic
decisions have been made here every step of the way, and I’ve tried to forefront
that. I’ve made it clear that there was much to care about with him, that he gave
me pleasure and affection. I’ve not made myself out to be a rose here, I’m difficult,
and with him I succumbed to primal urges and needs I can barely comprehend.
But I’m fascinated with mourning, all these layers that one goes through, and with
the anniversary of my mom’s death looming, how mourning the (symbolic) death
of a relationship is similar to and totally different from mourning an actual death.
The unhooking from the buddhist now feels complete; I’m ready to open the door
and step out into the rays of my sunlit future.
* * *
10/26/10
The Deep Moans Round with Many Voices

Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
49
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
I came across these lines in an old journal. I copied them down this summer when
Marcus Ewert and I were lunching at the Samovar Tea Lounge at Yerba Buena.
In honor of the poetry anthology he’d found on the street on his way there,
Marcus suggested bibliomancy. Things were still developing with the buddhist at
that point—the innocent days, before he admitted to me he was sort of married—
so I asked about him—not a specific question, more of a general “what’s up
with this.” I plopped my finger in the book and landed upon this passage from
Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” At the time I thought it was saying, go forward with him.
But maybe it was a warning, and here I am sitting, listening to Pandora in my
newer world, and you my readers are the many moaning voices of the deep.
10/27/10
You’re in writing mode

when you’re listening to Neil Young’s Live at Massey Hall (1971) version of “Down
By the River,” and he sings “She could drag me over the rainbow,” and you start
crying. Because you just know.
50
10/27/10
Red Brick Road

This evening I went out for dinner and then tea with writer Lindsey Boldt.
Lindsey’s 27—the age I was when I moved to San Francisco, so as I talked
with her, I experienced this uncanny doubling, my younger self superimposed
over her, even though I wasn’t much like her when I was younger. We had an
intimate conversation about relationships, writing, therapy, insecurities, and other
writers—not so much gossip as the complexities of living within such a tight circle
as an experimental poetry scene—and how it feels to be focusing on prose within
such a scene. Lindsey told me that younger women are afraid of me because I’m
intimidating, and I told her that I’ve been trying to act more friendly.
Earlier in the day I walked downtown and back—now that the virulent
gentrification of San Francisco has reached 6th Street, it’s not too intense to make
the 20 minute walk down Market from my home to Union Square. There’s still
poor people, and drugged people, and crazy people, and confused tourists, but it
all seems to work. I’ve seen blood on the sidewalk, but not on pedestrians. Today
when I was near the corner of Market and 6th, these two guys came together in
front of me, a tall guy and a short guy. The tall guy said, “What.” And the short
guy said, “How about a computer,” and pulled up his black T-shirt to reveal a
large Dell laptop, silver colored. “$110,” he added, definitively. This unexpected
witnessing of a transaction so far outside of my normal life skewed my perceptions,
and suddenly I felt like I was in a movie, a crime film, obviously. It was an overcast
day, around 5:00, growing subtly darker, with a total lack of shadows, which made
colors really pop. The evenness of lighting, the saturated colors, and then as I
neared home, the sidewalk switched from concrete to red brick—it felt like I was
51
moving through a sound stage, like the outdoor scenes in Jacques Tourneur’s
Cat People, the woman beside me wearing the turquoise scarf and pushing an
over-stuffed cart was an extra—and that Dell laptop a few blocks back was a
prop—just a shell, no guts. My therapist said it’s likely that the buddhist no longer
thinks about me, that he’s shut me out of his consciousness, my therapist said that
this is not uncommon for a certain type of man (my therapist thinks he’s a classic
narcissist)—my therapist says this is a highly effective defense mechanism—it’s
over, wall that part of your past off and move on. This is so far outside my nature,
I can’t imagine how anybody would do this, but then I was thinking about movies,
how you love watching a movie, but when the movie’s over, you may ponder it for
a bit, but you move on to other movies, and that’s the only way I can understand
this, that the buddhist saw me as a movie, not as a person who continues with all
these guts and confusion.
* * *
10/29/10
Raccoon Eye
This morning when I looked in the bathroom mirror, I was surprised to find a
black circle around my left eye. Apparently I forgot to take off my makeup last
night—but why was there a circle around my left eye only, what happened to the
makeup on the right eye? Another unsolved mystery. Since I looked like a raccoon,
I googled “raccoon spirit guide,” more in the mode of a parlor game than a quest
for meaning. (These days I’m questioning meaning, its very existence.) Here’s
what I found:
Our ancestors employed mask in ceremony, ritual, healing and in other

desired goals. Raccoon’s message gives us the power of the mask to
create change, healing and transformation. The mask becomes the
doorway to knowledge that is hidden from the conscious mind. Use your
curious nature to explore this area. If you have raccoon for a power
animal use your energy wisely. Take a class in acting, creative writing,
or mask making.
I wonder if teaching creative writing fulfills the raccoon suggestion to take a class in
it. Last night in my Developing the Novel class, a group of students did a presentation
on the narrative structure of Animal Farm, that included our watching the ending of
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* O P E R AT I C SU F F ER I N G *
53
the 1954 cartoon version of Animal Farm. The cartoon’s ending is different than the
book’s ending. The students said this was because the cartoon was funded by the
CIA as an anti-Communist propaganda vehicle. From The New York Times:
Many people remember reading George Orwell’s Animal Farm in high

school or college, with its chilling finale in which the farm animals
looked back and forth at the tyrannical pigs and the exploitative human
farmers but found it “impossible to say which was which.’’
That ending was altered in the 1955 animated version, which removed
the humans, leaving only the nasty pigs. Another example of Hollywood
butchering great literature? Yes, but in this case the film’s secret producer
was the Central Intelligence Agency.
The C.I.A., it seems, was worried that the public might be too influenced
by Orwell’s pox-on-both-their-houses critique of the capitalist humans
and Communist pigs. So after his death in 1950, agents were dispatched
(by none other than E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate fame) to buy
the film rights to Animal Farm from his widow to make its message more
overtly anti-Communist.
In both endings, Benjamin the donkey peeks through a window at the pigs. In the
book he sees the ruler pigs with the humans and he can’t tell the difference, and
that’s it. In the cartoon he hallucinates the pigs turning into humans and then
back to pigs, then all the animals join together and march towards the pigs in a
big rebellion. Much more rousing and dramatic.
Where am I going with this? I awaken and look like an animal, and I think of
Orwell’s animals, and I fixate on the CIA’s desire to rewrite the book to get it
right, and I’m thrown back to mourning, like isn’t that the heart of mourning,
you keep rewriting a situation over and over in your head, trying to make it
turn out right? I had an intense, intimate dream about the buddhist last night—
the second such dream this week. When I woke up this morning, I said to my
subconscious, give me a fucking break. And then I looked in the mirror and I had
become Raccoon Woman.
The raccoon’s association with masks reminds me of personas—always a difficult

subject for me, I remember when I was in my 30s a therapist saying to me, what
54
you need to do is to develop a public persona—as opposed to the whimpering

mass of social phobia that I was at the time. Our stance on personas was one
of the many ways the buddhist and I were polar opposites. He said that almost
every human interaction was a performance for him—and a big part of that
performance was maintaining a mystique. In person, I was struck by how
groomed he was, how every detail and movement was about projecting an easy
entitlement and power. Whereas I was not groomed for anything except to be a
grill cook—until I got involved with the New Narrative crowd, where I was told
that writing was a middle class occupation and if I wanted to be a writer I’d have
to be more middle class. And they won, I have become more middle class, or at
least more adept at passing.
But I’ve always been conflicted about that. My working class family had no
ambitions to better themselves. (I’ve written about this before, but here we go
again.) My mother scorned friends and neighbors who tried to claw upwards
into the middle class. The way we were was fine, we didn’t need to be prissy
and pretentious. I’ve come to respect and love this about her, even though there
was much conflict between her and me over my attempts to better myself. She
was willing to pay for my college—even though she had to scrimp to do so—
but she didn’t want it to change me. I hid most of my shenanigans from her,
but sometimes I’d come home with something decadent like a coffee grinder
and she’d look at it in horror. What’s wrong with Folger’s? Are you too good
for Folgers? The last few years of her life, when we grew close, she came to
appreciate the beauty of having a middle class daughter—I was no longer a
fuming heathen, I was well behaved and quiet and considerate and compliant—
and her friends liked me too, for the same reasons. But I still hold an internalized,
naive scorn of phoniness, that comes from my mother and a more generalized
earnest midwesternness.
The buddhist was interested in details of how I packaged myself. When I gave
him my jacket to hang up, he looked at the label and mentioned the designer. He
said his sort of wife worked for the designer, and got a discount on the clothing.
“Expensive,” he said in an enigmatic tone. Then later that same evening he
asked, out of the blue, “How much did you pay for your glasses?” When I replied,
somewhere between $600 and $700, he said, that’s what he figured. Then he
added, as afterthought, that’s what his glasses cost. I was disconcerted, like why
did he care about such things? He also grabbed my silk scarf and was fingering it
and looking it over closely—and I pointed out that the scarf only cost $12, as if to
55
redeem myself. I have no idea what his opinion was of the price of my trappings.
It was like being under a microscope—does the microbe know what’s in the mind
of the scientist? I think not.
I wish I could erase the buddhist from my consciousness, I’m sick of thinking
about him, but my writing brought him into my life, and it seems he’s going to
stay there in spirit, if not in flesh, until the writing’s through with him. When he
contacted me, I was in the midst of working on my manuscript about New Age
spirituality and cults. Suddenly a person from the world of my book was offering
himself up to me, and I couldn’t resist. This summer, when I was working hot
and heavy on the manuscript, he spent 11 weeks in meditation retreats—most
of which he was teaching at, and from which he was emailing me daily, often
several times a day. The energy of his writing to me got fused with the energy
of the book, and I would share the writing process with him in ways I never
do, and it got all confused. I wasn’t writing about him in the book, but the eros
of our contact influenced the manuscript, and the writing kept getting kinkier
and kinkier—more interesting, more animalistic than I’d planned—a frenetic
New Age fuck-fest. So now that I’m again trying to finish the book, the writing is
clinging to his energy. The connection between writing and life can be so magical,
and once that process takes over, the writing always wins.
* * *
10/30/10
No Flowers or Candlelight?
Thursday night I sat at my computer until 3:00 in the morning, watching Tulku,
a film by Gesar Mukpo, a son of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the founder
of Shambhala (and for the poets out there, Naropa University). It’s a film the
buddhist saw this summer and was moved and rather disturbed by. Like that
Little Buddha movie staring Keanu Reeves, Tulku is about Western children
who are “recognized” as reincarnations of Buddhist masters—except Tulku is
a documentary. Gesar Mukpo himself is a tulku, and he interviews a handful
of other young guys born in the West, who have been hailed reincarnations of
great Buddhist teachers, but who aren’t living out that destiny—one of them, the
coolest one, reminded me of writer Dennis Cooper when I first met him in the
early 80s.
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The movie is interesting but flawed by the wimpiness of Gesar Mukpo’s position.
Throughout, the film is critical of the tulku system, but then at the end Mukpo
backs off from that and says how proud he is to be part of such a great thing.
Mukpo interviews and eats dinner with one of his teachers, Bhutanese lama (and
tulku) Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, whose spunkiness and no-bullshit attitude I
was taken by, so I looked him up. I found out that he’s very popular—a filmmaker
himself and a consultant on Little Buddha. Last night, Friday, I printed out
“Distortion,” an article I found on his website, and took it to bed with me. Sitting
up, sucking on my sublingual melatonin, when I got to the following passage
about women and sex, my eyes practically popped out of their sockets:
The notion of sexual equality is quite new in the West, and because of
this there is a certain rigid and fanatic adherence to the specific way
it should be practiced. In vajrayana Buddhism, on the other hand,
there is a tremendous appreciation of the female, as well as a strong
emphasis on the equality of all beings. This might not, however, be
apparent to someone who cannot see beyond a contemporary Western
framework. As a result, when Western women have sexual relationships
with Tibetan lamas, some might be frustrated when their culturally
conditioned expectations are not met.
If anyone thinks they could have a pleasing and equal lover in a

Rinpoche, they couldn’t be more incorrect. Certain Rinpoches, those
known as great teachers, would by definition be the ultimate bad
partner, from ego’s point of view. If one approaches such great masters
with the intention of being gratified and wishing for a relationship of
sharing, mutual enjoyment etc., then not only from ego’s point of view,
but even from a mundane point of view, such people would be a bad
choice. They probably will not bring you flowers or invite you out for
candlelit dinners.
If a woman is going to fuck away her notions of gender equality, she should at
least enjoy the sex! I spent a lot of time this summer researching sexual, substance
abuse, and financial scandals of spiritual teachers—not just Buddhists, I looked at
Christian cult leaders and some so out there I wouldn’t know what to call them.
I wrote a piece about all the scandals I found, focusing on the language that
followers use to rationalize the “bad” behavior of their teachers. (The buddhist
criticized this piece for not appreciating the “beauty” of belief.) I read many
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excuses for spiritual teachers having sex with students (it makes the student get
enlightened faster, did you know that?)—I read of rapes, druggings, humiliations,
knowingly passing on HIV, etc.—this material depressed and creeped me out, but
nothing I read pissed me off the way Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche’s promotion
here of psychological abuse does.
A consensual SM relationship is one thing, there’s an integrity in that—but the

glorification of a sexual relationship between student and teacher—a power
inequality minefield in the best of circumstances—that dismisses the student’s
desire for something as basic as “mutual enjoyment”—this is really fucked.
Accusing her of being attached to “ego” when a woman owns her desires or stands
up for herself—yes, I’m starting to get plugged into my rage with the buddhist,
his patronizing attitude, his attempts to call all the shots, and when I stood my
ground, his hurling Buddhist terminology at me and withholding affection. But
I’m out of that situation now—let’s reduce this to a cliché—no use crying over
spilt milk (an idiom I don’t quite understand for it is easy to imagine scenarios in
which spilt milk would, indeed, be something to cry over). About so called sexual
equality, Rinpoche writes, “To expect a yogin or yogini, who is aspiring to go
beyond the chauvinism of the confused mind, to worry about sexual rights issues
seems absurd in the context of such a vast view.” A guy in authority declaring
an issue so vast it takes priority over women’s rights—sound familiar? I have a
copy of Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche’s What Makes You Not a Buddhist (which the
buddhist told me about, of course). Would any of you gals out there like to come
over for a book burning?
* * *
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11/1/10
Third Anniversary
This is a picture of my mom and me—she would be 20 in the photo. Today, All
Saints Day, is the third anniversary of her death. In 1931 she was born Winifred
Barbara Hoff, and she married my dad, Byron Bellamy, when she was 18. To
honor the occasion I washed the dishes, cleaned my countertops, and made a
simple altar for her on the kitchen table. I made an altar for the first anniversary of
her death, but not last year. This year it seemed important to revive the tradition.
I’m not thinking about her as much as I used to, and I don’t want to lose her.
Three years ago, on Halloween, I flew to Indiana, arriving at her hospital room
a little after midnight. The nurse could rouse her, but she wasn’t very conscious. I
spent the night with her, and she died in the morning.
It’s devastating to have her gone, but if any two people worked out what they
were brought together in this life to do, it was she and I. We moved from a stormy
relationship of conflict and distance to a profound love the final years of her life.
I truly felt held by her like she’s holding me here as an infant—and I was able to
hold her as well.
* * *
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11/4/10
Class Prep
This morning as I chopped apples for breakfast, I couldn’t shake this fantasy
of the buddhist coming back, and then I remembered his impossible coldness
towards me at the end, something I couldn’t change or reason with, and a wave of
loss swept over me. I just let it rip, and when I sat down to critique student novel
excerpts, I thought, I’m glad I have these 90 pages that demand all my focus. As
I type this, Sylvia keeps rolling around my desk, climbing in my lap. Kind of like
my thoughts of the buddhist, it’s impossible to get rid of her, no matter how many
times I put her down on the floor, she jumps back up. I remember one colleague
in an interview saying his students keep him honest. If anybody keeps me honest,
or at least human, it’s Sylvia.
11/6/10
If I Were a Loving Person

When I first heard about the Open Studio reading of Dorothea Lasky and
Elizabeth Hatmaker, it gave me pause, because earlier in the year there was a
discussion of my reading with Dottie when she visited the Bay Area, and there
also was a discussion of my reading with Elizabeth—at different venues, both
of which fell through—and then here they were together, and I was all what
happened with me, how did I get erased from the picture, even though I knew
their pairing had nothing to do with me. But there it is, my knee-jerk eagerness
to make it all about me, my inner sonar that’s always scanning for rejection and
marginalization. Beep beep NOT ABOUT ME beep beep.
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Dottie has a wonderfully straightforward, and eager to the point of demented,

delivery. Even though at least one poem argues against irony, the gushing sincerity
of the poems put them on a razor sharp edge where they kept tottering between
humor and slicing us with our own vulnerable fucked-up-ness. Dark and brilliant,
the poems did what all good writing should do, they don’t tell us what to think,
they trap us into new ways of thinking.
Elizabeth read from her new BlazeVOX collection, Girl in Two Pieces, a book of
poetry about the 40s Hollywood murder of Elizabeth Short, “The Black Dahlia.”
Her book is a remarkable analysis of the personal and cultural impact of this
marginal woman who was cut in two halves, with a smile carved into her face.
The case has never been solved, and Elizabeth deftly explores the notion of the
unsolved from so many angles, it morphs into an existential condition.
Afterwards, a group of us went out to a bar on Telegraph. We grabbed a corner

table and shouted at one another in the deafening Friday night boozy roar. I
found myself sitting next to Cecil Giscombe, who like many people who live in
the area, I hadn’t had a conversation with in years, so I was doing my best, and
he seemed to be putting in a effort as well. “So how are you liking teaching at
Berkeley?” “It’s fine.” That kind of conversation, but when I mentioned Bhanu
Kapil, his face lit up, not just his face, his whole being lit up. He said he’d flown
to Boulder recently, mostly to talk with Bhanu. You’d be surprised how often I get
this reaction when I mention Bhanu, people get this far away look in their eyes,
like they’re in love. Like Cecil, they use the word “magical.” And every time it
happens, I feel jealous, and then I feel pangs of guilt for feeling so petty because I
61
myself love Bhanu, she’s been such a wonderful caring friend, besides being one
of my favorite writers.
When Kevin and I returned to San Francisco, and were driving around looking
for parking, on the next block from our home we came upon perhaps 10 people
dressed in black pants and tank tops, standing in the middle of the street, twirling
flaming batons, trails of white fire from both ends of their batons convulsing in
the air. There was no audience besides Kevin and me, these people were doing it
for themselves, for the love of twirling fire. Kevin spied a parking place, and just
as we were pulling into it, two police cars arrived, I can’t imagine what dried up
petty asshole would call the cops on such gloriousness.
Guilt over my Bhanu jealousy was growing and I moaned to Kevin that I wasn’t
a loving person, if I had been more loving, the buddhist wouldn’t have turned
against me, and Kevin said I was plenty loving towards the buddhist, that he
was a horrible boyfriend. Kevin said you are a loving person, you’re difficult but
loving, and you’re making the mistake of not distinguishing the two. But if I were
really a loving person, I would have unconditionally agreed to help Kevin set
up tomorrow for Matt Gordon’s opening at Right Window Gallery, rather than
negotiating his driving me to the doctor this morning in exchange for my help
tomorrow. If I were a loving person I would have answered Ramsey Scott’s and
Dana Ward’s last emails. Whenever I get an email from Dana it’s so exquisitely
written I’m delighted but also jealous, like how could he just toss off such amazing
writing, he breathes brilliance like a dragon breathes fire, whereas I have to work
so hard for any sparkles. Kevin says I’m jealous of Ramsey’s correspondence with
Hoa Nguyen. I don’t think that’s true, but maybe my jealousy is buried, some
old crusty monster, waiting for a pin prick to give it the life to roar up and flail
and screech, “Ramsey you have to love me best of all!” If I were a loving person
I wouldn’t have had to go up to Matthew Zapruder last night and apologize for
being such a bitch the first time I met him (and he was such a gentleman, claiming
not to remember). If I were a loving person, I would have called Bruce Boone
back, even though I’ve been insanely busy the past couple of days. If I were a
loving person, people would glow when my name was mentioned. If I were a
loving person, I wouldn’t care if people glowed when my name was mentioned.
So, when Kevin was driving me to the doctor this morning, I got out my cellphone,
dialed my brother and wished him a belated happy birthday—his birthday was
yesterday, the day my mother was buried, which must be so hard for him. He was
sitting beside me at the funeral home when we made the arrangements, he could
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have said, no, we can’t bury her on my birthday, but he didn’t say anything, and
I didn’t think of it, but when I realized, if I were really a loving person, I would
have insisted on changing the date, regardless of the hassle, so he wouldn’t have
to go through the rest of his life remembering his mother’s funeral on his birthday.
After the funeral he went gambling in Michigan City. I wasn’t invited.
* * *
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* O P P O SI T I O NAL WEAKNESS *
* OPPOSITIO NAL WEAKNESS *
11/9/10
Just Like That

This weekend I received a handwritten letter from the buddhist requesting to
talk on the phone. He spoke of our “enormous mutual affection” and said that
he realized neither of us intended to harm one another, though hurtful things
were said and done. I should have known that, despite the exciting embodiment
of his handwritten text, things were hopeless—from his abstract tone, and from
the untruth that neither of us intended to harm one another. When things were
falling apart, he wrote horrible, cruel things to me—and when I told him how
hurtful this was, he never backed off. And I also did some cruel things—if not to
hurt him, I didn’t know if I could hurt him, to at the very least piss him off. I was
angry and I wanted to make an impact. How is making up possible if the request
already contains a lie?
Anyway, I emailed him on Sunday, agreeing to talk on the phone on Wednesday,

but by Monday afternoon our communication had disintegrated to the point that
he again sent me a ranting email attacking my personality. I wrote back don’t
call me. So, after all this longing, he came so close and I again turned him away.
What happened? He continued with his abstract, non-forthcoming mode. I wrote
to him about the soul searching I’d done during our time apart, and he wrote
back about the weather. I asked him what he’d been doing, and he gave a list of
places he’d traveled to. His communication was closed, no warmth. I asked him
why he wanted to talk, and he wrote back that he’d rather be in touch than not in
contact. I asked him why now; he said because it was winter. After that vagueness,
I began to feel we needed to come to some agreements about the conversation.
I told him that I wasn’t yet ready to be friends—but if he wanted to look at
the wreckage together to see if anything was salvageable and move forward, I’d
be willing to do so. He wrote back that he hadn’t considered either possibility,
friendship or moving on—that both positions are a “framing,” and he wanted to
approach our discussion in openness, with nothing on or off the table. By the end
of the day, my suggestion to see if anything was salvageable was called “an iron-
clad agreement.” He accused me of trying to sabotage our communication. He
tossed off a platitude about love requiring bravery and courage, risking a broken
heart—he’s writing a book on spiritual bravery, so I assume that’s something from
his book. And he used the deadly “as always” phrase—what he offered wasn’t
enough for me AS ALWAYS. He declared he wasn’t going to email me any more
and that he’d call me on Wednesday. I told him I felt no joy in his return, no
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tenderness on either side, and if he were really brave he’d be vulnerable and
touch me. I told him I wouldn’t talk with him until I understood why he wanted
to talk. He called anyway—my landline and my cellphone—I didn’t pick up.
Nothing felt right about our exchange.
I was moaning about all this to my friend Donna and she wrote, “He really should
just be able to say he misses you & loves you & wants to see whether he can make
it right. But he apparently can’t.” This got me to thinking about making up in
general. I remembered an encounter I had with poet Dale Smith. In the 90s a
disagreement between us about poetics and representation escalated into name-
calling and vindictiveness. He lives in Texas and I’m in California, so I didn’t
think of him often, but when I did, my thoughts were something like, that Dale
Smith is a pig. Then ten years later, the doorbell rang and a gorgeous bouquet
of flowers was delivered. There was a note that said something like, “I’m sorry
if I did anything to hurt you. Dale.” Kevin and I were scratching our heads, who
the hell is this flower-sending Dale? Then I received an email from Dale Smith
saying he was sorry for what he’d done back in the 90s, and I instantly wrote back
and said he wasn’t the only one to blame, that I’d done various things that were
obnoxious, and that I should have handled the situation differently. He wasn’t
asking me for that, but I was happy to give that to him. Our exchange was joyful.
Though flowers were unnecessary, I loved the extravagance of the gesture, and
my heart opened to Dale Smith. Now whenever I think of him, a smile crosses
my mouth.
I thought of other situations where making up went well. It seems in each there
was an admission of wrong done, an asking for forgiveness, an approach that’s
ruthlessly honest and from the heart. The apology is given as a gift. It’s so easy
to meet that. It makes one eager to share the burden of the wrongful past. And
it ends with an opening to love. I experienced this recently with Cedar Sigo, I’ve
done it with Bruce Boone—and Kevin and I have done it a zillion times over the
past 25 years. Making up is pleasurable—they don’t have the term makeup sex
for nothing.
With the buddhist, I don’t even know if he wants to make up, he’s that vague.
And how can we have openness if he’s hiding from me how he’s feeling? Can you
simultaneously have openness and fortressed secrecy? The sadness is that the “real”
part of the buddhist, that tender core, is quite lovely. Whenever someone is willing
to hold that part of you, it’s a gift. But that part of him continues to be locked away
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from me. It’s like his heart is a closed book, an ancient leather-bound esoteric text
wrapped with a huge gold padlock. The sadness is that it’s obvious what he really
wants—why else would he come back—is for me to again hold that tender part.
Last night throughout the evening I complained about the buddhist to Kevin. He
was mostly sitting at the computer writing, and I’d walk in and rant about what
I wrote to the buddhist. “I told him, wanting to return to our original vagueness
is like longing to return to the womb. You can’t go back.” Kevin would critique
my comments. “Well said.” “That was a good comeback.” “Very clever.” And
I wondered how much of my relationship with the buddhist, how much of my
relationship with life in general, is a literary exercise—whether I write about it or
not. How being a writer and living in a postmodern world, all life is a text. Of
course this has been theorized up the wazoo, but I’m not talking about theory
here, I’m talking about a cognitive shift, a gut-level viewing of life as a text. A
fascination with what’s projected on the veil of illusion. When I was in college and
all spiritual, I named my cat Maya, which means illusion, and I felt very daring to
name my cat such a “negative” thing, a kind of spiritual punk.
Recently I watched the 1932 horror film White Zombie, mostly because it stars
Madge Bellamy, who I thought was a blood relation. I’ve since learned she was
born Margaret Derden Philpott, and while living in Denver she married a cousin
of my grandfather’s. Madge is turned into a zombie by a young handsome
Bela Lugosi—during some of his closeups Kevin and I would giggle because
of Lugosi’s striking resemblance to Berkeley writer Charles Weigl. Throughout
the movie, Kevin kept exclaiming, “Madge Bellamy looks just like you.” And
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I’d counter with, “No she doesn’t.” Her shuffling state of elsewhere reminded me
of how my involvement with the buddhist put me into a state of elsewhere, how
I was so focused inwardly on raging emotions and thoughts of him, the world
felt insubstantial. When the credits rolled, I was astounded to discover that one
of the zombies is played by an actor with the same last name as the buddhist.
White Zombie was our movie, enacting our joint enchantment. Eventually Lugosi
is killed, and Madge returns to the world of the living. Extending my godawful
figurative reading of this film, that’s what these weeks without the buddhist have
felt like to me, a gradual return to the living, a removal of that elsewhere glaze in
my eyes to focusing on what’s in front of my face.
Saturday night Kevin and I went to dinner with Elizabeth Hatmaker and Dottie
Lasky, and it was a delightful evening, with an unguarded intimacy that’s rare for
four people to achieve, lots and lots of laughter. When we got home I told Kevin
that it was the first time since I’d broken up with the buddhist I’d been in a social
situation and felt joy. Something had switched, and my heart had opened. And now
I’m wondering if the buddhist isn’t right about my sabotaging our reconnection,
that now that I’ve glimpsed a state of joy, no matter how evanescent, I’m resistant
to slip back into that state of elsewhere.
* * *
11/11/10
Cyclonic Separation
Last night the buddhist wrote me yet another long email about what a terrible
person I was and how I deserved/caused the treatment I received from him. A
classic pattern. He ended by saying that our combustible hostility created so much
energy that perhaps we should continue the relationship, that there’s something
there. I think he was being sarcastic, but who knows. The two of us are, indeed,
capable of generating an enormous amount of energy between us. Which got me
to thinking—what have I been longing for these past couple of months? Is it him
or is it that energy?
I remember a warning that my friend Marcus gave me more than once—do not
go all oceanic with the buddhist, do not direct energy towards him that belongs
on the altar. And of course I went ahead and did exactly that. I don’t want to start
tripping out all abstract about energy here, though I’m totally capable of it, but
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I’ve realized I do not have a boring isolated life, that excitement is available to me,
energy is available to me—from people I know, from the general environment in
which I live, and from my writing. It never was a matter of no buddhist, no energy.
Since he was engaged in “spiritual” writing projects, the buddhist and I talked
repeatedly about spiritual writing. He’s included very little of his personal life in
his spiritual writing, and he grapples with the issue of how to insert the personal—
should he, could he. My position, of course, is how can you separate the two,
ever. I’ve always been irritated by poetry that was labeled as “spiritual,” which
by default makes other poetry base. Spiritual versus mundane, high versus low
culture, and of course the old mind versus body—they’re bullshit divisions. The
only way we know the world is through the imperfect fucked-up lenses of our
personality and body. Writing about the buddhist here has been public display,
of course, but it’s been a public display of trying to figure something out, I’m
not sure what it is—something about desire, obviously, and the trajectory of
mourning—but also about boundaries, about secret/public, about embodiment
and meaning, and the frailty of the ego, about the embarrassment and shame of
being left or rejected, about pushing myself into ever uncomfortable spaces in
writing. I’m not talking about my life here because it’s particularly interesting, it’s
more the whole “push the personal until it’s universal” cliché, though of course
nothing is ever universal. I’m not an essentialist. A handful of women have been
writing me fan letters, have been egging me on in this. The buddhist has become
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a sort of soap opera character for them. And they share with me their own lives,
their own breakups, their own wrestling with relentless attachment.
But I’ve had enough of my cyber vulnerability and honesty. It’s time to direct
those forces into book projects I want to finish. So, I’m saying goodbye to the
buddhist vein here. I already said that, but I mean it this time. Any more I’d have
to say about this stuff needs the intense focus and discipline of Real Writing
to tease it out. I’d planned a longer, more meandering post—a rant on cheesy
symbolism, a couple more jabs at the buddhist’s character, etc.—but who cares.
He is who he is, and ours was a cyclone created by combined forces.
11/15/10
Cat Meditation
This afternoon I sat cross-legged on the couch and meditated, my mom’s cat
Quincey and my male cat Ted on either side of me, like the two bronze lions
flanking the entrance to the Chicago Art Institute. I was quite tired, still being
sick and having woken an hour early with vivid dreams I just had to write down.
Quincey was on my left, purring loudly; Ted leaned against my right leg, the heat
of his body uncomfortable in the freakish 76 degree mid-November day. I kept
fighting falling asleep, but eventually something shifted, and perception became
so vivid and multi-layered that sound and space felt sculptural. When I finished,
I spent several minutes cuddling Quincey and Ted. They hate each other but
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sometimes I’ll catch them engaged in affectionate behavior, such as ear licking,
that they both quickly deny ever happened.
Yesterday at my book party for my new chapbook, Whistle While You Dixie, I talked
with Neil LeDoux about the hyper-kitschy drawings of bunnies and owls he’d
hung in Lindsey’s hallway for the evening. The drawings of cats and owls are
elaborations on drawings that Neil did 5 years ago, simple practice sketches
which Neil has added to, creating formal arrangements he finds compelling.
Where originally there were two owls, now swirl 5 or 6 owls. For Neil, one bunny
drawing in particular—sentimental and ornate to the point of creepiness, an
orgy of cuteness, one bunny morphing into another—represents the essence of
my chapbook Barf Manifesto, in that his drawing problematizes the everyday. To
comfort ourselves, he said, we create cultural objects, such as the twisted bunny
montage—but rather than giving comfort, the objects cause more problems. This
is not how I would characterize Barf Manifesto, but I love what Neil’s saying here.
I’ve never thought writing or art was about getting anything right. In fact, the
skewedness of getting things wrong can be more stimulating than accuracy.
Neil’s recent infusion of kitsch into a mystic expressionist aesthetic that was
threatening to turn static on him, resonates with my “Cyclonic Separation” post,
where I argue against dividing high and low, spiritual and base. My old friend
Rainer added a comment in which he catches me in a contradiction:
Your post really cracked me up, and intrigued me, partly because of a
multi-decade déjà vu aspect, partly because of how you said this is the
last one, really, (and so I am now eagerly awaiting the next one), and
partly because of the way u refer to Real Writing, only steps away from
talking about divisions being BS.
The déjà vu aspect he’s referring to is a fucked up affair I had with another spiritual
teacher so long ago, it’s like it didn’t exist. And he’s right, I’m practically having
to bite my fist to keep myself from writing about the buddhist—even earlier in
this post, I was just dying to bring up the buddhist when discussing Neil’s point
that objects we create for comfort can cause their own problems—even though
I’m poignantly aware the buddhist is not an object, he’s a complex person. I don’t
think the buddhist is seeing me as a complex person in return. His last email spoke
of me in such over the top terms that it seems I’ve switched into devouring goddess
mode—no mortal woman could be so gruesome and powerful as he made me out
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to be, like I should wear a necklace of human skulls. One would think he would
know better, but no, he doesn’t know better, which is kind of wonderful—it was
such wholeheartedness that drew me to him in the first place. But, the part of
Rainer’s comment I’m really wanting to address is that, after poopooing divisions,
I made a distinction between blog writing and Real Writing. That’s a hard one,
for I don’t know what I’m doing here, why I’m putting all this energy into these
posts. I think of poets who speak of their “writing practice,” meaning it’s all part
of the process; they don’t separate out precious, discrete poems as the real work,
and letters and journals as lesser work. Thus the fetishization of George Oppen’s
daybooks, for example. I’ve always considered the whole Writing Practice idea as
yet another example of some poets’ insufferable egotism, a total guy thing, like
they think they’re such geniuses their shopping lists should be bronzed. Would
these guys consider a woman blogging about her heartbreak as part of a serious
writing practice? I doubt it. Is my refusing to consider this blog Real Writing
an internalized misogyny? My posts are too slight, too femmy, too sloppy (I’m a
compulsive reviser), too easy. So Rainer’s right: I’m conflicted.
* * *
11/17/10
Extradiegetic
Spending the evening home alone drinking organic unfiltered sake, the creamy
white kind, which I just discovered last Wednesday when I went out to dinner with
David Buuck. David was paranoid that I was going to write about him here, so
I’m remaining mum, except to say that we had a really good time together, and
the content of our conversation, which I’m not discussing here, was meaningful
to me. David met the buddhist but doesn’t remember him. I’ve had enough sake
to dull my senses a bit, but not enough to loosen inhibitions—for instance, I’m not
going to write the buddhist an embarrassing dirty email, though maybe I should,
as I’ve never written him a dirty email, he was too much of a prude that way, and
I felt like saying to him, dude, you’re not using me to my full potential. He thought
dirty emails were too generic, and I suppose they are, unless you’ve got two poets
going at it, then it can be an exhilarating ride. The buddhist isn’t a poet, as far as I
know, though he does love Jack Spicer. How perfect for him to have an affair with
the wife of the biographer of his favorite poet. How perfect for me to be writing
a book on New Age spirituality and cults and to have a Buddhist teacher appear.
Sometimes life can be so neat.
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* OPPOSITIONAL WEAKNESS *
I wonder if I could ever write a blog post when really out of it, that would be
another exhilarating ride, like the post Jackie Wang did under the influence of
Ambien. The post begins:
6am. hello. fading fast because i took an ambien and am becoming

incoherent. but the nice thing about ambien is that you can write and
write and write because you don’t give a fuck, it;s good for the loosening
that needs to happen in order to speak.
A little further down the page, grammar and spelling begin to disintegrate:
i was going to wrier sometrgiubf important but i snasccan6y cant read

nmyg own handwriting and i hallucinate when i look at things.
The text becomes a brilliantly pathetic montage of family secrets and typos, and
even though it’s reminiscent in tone, there’s the sense that nothing exists in this
text beyond the present moment. I think of the Huffington Post article that Matias
Viegener recently linked to his Facebook page, “Is Death the End? Experiments
Suggest You Create Time,” which postulates that our mind creates the illusion
of time, but time in and of itself does not exist. Change exists, but not time.
Change is a series of frames at rest. “[T]ime is the inner sense that animates the
still frames of the spatial world.” Memory in Jackie’s Ambien post feels like a
series of still frames that become increasingly jumbled. She’s very brave to take
Ambien and fight against sleep. You hear of people doing horrible things on
Ambien that they don’t remember the next morning—eating huge amounts of
food, wracking up debt on the Home Shopping Network, crashing their car and
getting arrested, having sex with god-knows who. Donal Mosher told me that he
likes to take Ambien and watch TV until he’s about to pass out and then dash to
the bedroom before he falls down. Many times he has fallen flat on his face and
slept on the hallway floor.
What do you know of the extradiegetic? I’m no theory-head myself, so I’m

assuming that some of my readers won’t know what “extradiegetic” means, and
I’m not sure I can explain it clearly or accurately. But here goes. Intradiegetic
refers to the reality that exists within the narrative of a movie or fiction. The plot,
characters, dialogue, etc. Extradiegetic refers to elements that exist outside that
narrative. A first person narrator would be intradiegetic, whereas an omniscient
narrator would be extradiegetic. The musical score to a film, which presumably
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the characters can’t hear, would be extradiegetic. If a work is based on something

from “real life,” the audience’s pre-existing knowledge of the events would be
extradiegetic, as would the audience’s familiarity with the life of the actors—the
way Heath Ledger’s death added a frisson to his portrayal of the Joker in The Dark
Knight. New Narrative—and this blog—are about problematizing and confusing
the division between intra- and extradiegetic.
So where this is leading is Donal’s connection to documentary films. Along with

Mike Palmieri, Donal directed the feature-length documentary, October Country.
An article I wrote about the film is included in the liner notes of the DVD. October
Country centers around Donal’s family in upstate New York. A favorite “character”
in the film is his aunt Denise, who is a witch, and with whom Donal goes to a
cemetery with a camera to try to capture ghosts on film. I happened to be in
Los Angeles when the film premiered at the 2009 LA Film Festival. I went with
my friend Lamar, who, as Lara Parker, used to play the witch Angelique on Dark
Shadows, a gothic soap opera that aired on ABC from 1966 through 1971. When
Donal was a kid, he and Denise were avid fans of Dark Shadows, and watched it
together regularly. Denise was thrilled when she heard Angelique watched her in a
movie. See how intra and extra are getting all mucked up here? Who is fan—who
is character—who is audience? Where does the movie stop and life begin? Lamar
signed a still of Angelique and sent it to Denise.
Donal himself was featured in another documentary, Robert Arnold’s Key of

G (2007), which “follows Gannet, a charismatic 22-year-old with physical and
developmental disabilities, as he leaves his mother’s home to share an apartment
with a close-knit group of artists and musicians who support him, not only as
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paid caregivers, but also as friends.” Donal is the main caregiver in the film. I saw
Key of G at the San Francisco Film Festival not long before Donal was moving to
Portland, and I was already missing him. Watching him on the “big” screen of
the Kabuki Theater I found my eyes tearing. Donal’s been reduced to image, I
thought, all that I’ll have left of him is image. I was making a big deal out of him
leaving, and here he was in enormous closeup, disappearing.
I imagine Donal’s subjecthood in Key of G had an impact on Mike and Donal’s

decision to make their own feature-length documentary. Before October Country,
Donal did still photography and Mike made rock and corporate videos. The same
time Robert Arnold was filming Donal in Key of G, Kevin and I were being filmed
for yet another feature-length documentary, Justine Pimlott’s Fag Hags. Kevin and
I would kvetch with Donal about the process—for instance, having the filmmaker
ask us to “redo” certain moments. “A bus went by, would you say that again?”
At a certain point, Donal said he put his foot down and refused to do retakes
of his own life. Fag Hags aired on Canadian TV. Not long afterward, Kevin saw
Michael Ondaatje at a memorial service, and Michael told Kevin that he and I
were famous because Michael saw us on TV. I’ve always been confounded by
the “real,” but with these documentaries swirling in and around my life, it gets
uncanny, especially when Donal entertains me by making fun of documentary
clichés, the contrived narratives, the silly (extradiegetic) upbeat music played
during road trips, the gratuitous moments of “beauty.” And then there’s my
compulsion to document everything in writing, it’s like writing is a race against
time, if it doesn’t get written down, it gets lost, the way I read my old journals and
think, could this life really have happened?
* * *
11/23/10
Double Trouble
This evening I sat up in bed and read Eva Hesse Spectres 1960, the catalogue to
the Eva Hesse painting show I saw this weekend at the Hammer in Los Angeles.
When Kevin, Tariq Alvi, and I arrived at the Hammer, Whitney curator Elizabeth
Sussman just happened to be giving a lecture on the paintings, which we caught
the last half hour of, and then went to see the exhibit, all primed and contextualized.
The biographical focus of Sussman’s talk—the impact of the holocaust on
Hesse’s childhood, the years she spent in psychoanalysis—made her occasional
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analysis of Hesse’s painting all the more satisfying. These paintings are intense,
spooky, mysterious, nightmarish, simultaneously about aloneness and a fragile
interpersonal—they hit you in the gut. All are portraits, with one to three figures
each per small canvas; like the most potent dreams, they’re not quite narrative—
one gets a flash of a potentially intense situation or relationship, suspended in an
ambiguous context. The details are in the inerasable slap of impact. Lots of dread
and angst here. My understanding of Hesse’s paintings is deepening through
reading about them, but that pales before their incomprehensible confrontation.
One is stopped before them in awe. It’s rather like falling in love, that compelling
and hopeless. The rational seems a bit silly before such psychic intensity.
11/27/10
It Stares Back
In the car I’ve been listening to Pema Chodron’s This Moment is the Perfect Teacher:
Ten Buddhist Teachings on Cultivating Inner Strength and Compassion. The buddhist
likes PC. When he taught a retreat with her, he was impressed with her careful
preparation and her flexibility in speaking. He visited her room, where she fed
him sliced peaches in a bowl. The week before the retreat he ran into PC at the
local Target. “I recognized her immediately,” he laughed. “Who else would be
wearing nun’s robes and sunglasses at a Target!”
On the CDs PC urges compassion for everyone, including smokers and irritating
neighbors, who—based on the Q&A session—drive her Boulder Buddhist
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audience ballistic. Why does the buddhist deny me the very compassion he
teaches, I wailed as I drove through the streets of San Francisco. He enlisted
Buddhist values to criticize me. I wasn’t “open,” I wasn’t “selfless” enough to
deserve his love. Drive all blames into Dodie. The more I listened to the CDs, the
more I embraced the buddhist’s scorn—I’m a total fuck up, if I was more like PC,
things wouldn’t have gone sour, my life wouldn’t be such a mess. Such wallowing, of course,
is exactly what PC warns against. I slipped into profound mourning; I longed
to write to the buddhist, to convince him that I’m not scary, that I don’t want to
destroy him, that I’m not that bad.
So I was in this horrible emotional pain (still am at times, it comes in waves), and I
turned to the one tool that has saved me throughout my life: my writing. I worked
on my TV Sutras book, on a section that has narrative impulses, though not a full-
blown narrative, and I poured into it my desire and heartbreak for the buddhist—
and this relieved the pain. What I was writing isn’t about him or me, it’s not about
anybody, I made the people up—but it’s infused with the energy of the buddhist’s
interactions with me, as well as his weird flirtation with a friend of mine. And, yes,
I got involved with him after I comforted her through her freak out over him—her
situation with him was very different than mine but ultimately the issues were the
same—control, secrecy, intimacy followed by withholding, anger. The characters
in my sketchy narrative don’t have names, I want to keep them shadowy, a bit
generic, with just enough detail to hint at a specificity that’s being occluded.
Journaling—or blogging—doesn’t have the same ability to hold strong emotion

as does “real writing.” A polished piece demands distance, that you sustain a
meditative state for hours in which both you and your material are transformed.
A sort of tempering. The rush of journal writing is more like a wave—there
are plenty of waves behind it. But if you really commit to placing energy into
a container, the container absorbs that emotional energy, takes some of it away
from you. Creates space within you for new energies.
When I went to Tariq Alvi’s Los Angeles opening last weekend, I asked him
how his yoga practice was going, and he said he still did it regularly. I asked
him if he meditated, and he gave a firm “No.” I asked him if he observed any
Muslim practices, and he said, “No. Dodie, I’m not religious.” But I wonder if
Tariq’s meticulous use of collage isn’t a form of meditation, the way he glues
together hundreds of teeny strips of newsprint into long curling tentacles. The
craftsmanship is amazing. I said, “How did you get them so perfect, did you glue
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them to a backing?” Tariq said, “No, I just glued them together,” in a tone that
seemed perplexed by why I was making such a big deal over them. I can’t imagine
how many hours it took to produce his massive “Disco Twig” piece, the careful
ripping up of each club flyer into tiny bits, the precise attaching and arranging.
In manner, Tariq is quite calm—I imagine this calm is a side effect of his artistic
practice, that during the thousands of hours a year he spends focusing on these
exquisite objects, the chaos and turbulence in his psyche flows into them.
I’m not suggesting there aren’t a lot of meticulous yet fucked up artists and writers
out there. I’m not suggesting that this process will make anybody less fucked up.
But I am interested in the way psychic material can be projected into other hosts,
other containers. Reading about Eva Hesse is inspiring these musings. All four
essays in the Eva Hesse Spectres 1960 catalogue discuss dreams and condensation,
and Hesse’s projection of dream content, trauma, and desire into the paintings
(and later her sculptures).
Here’s a long passage I copied into my journal, from Helen Molesworth’s “Me,
You, Us: Eva Hesse’s Early Paintings”:
Absence is rendered in the images of single figures by their being

singularly devoid of any identifying characteristics. Nonetheless, they
read or feel as if they are self-portraits. This is largely due to their
extreme frontality; they fill up the frame of the picture, as if their faces
were pressed upon the glass of a window looking out at the viewer. And
although they lack articulated eyes, their flat frontality implies a gaze,
one both direct and unflinching. There is a kind of closed circuit in these
works: the artist looks at a surface and paints an image that looks back;
both gazes are steady; both gazes seem to desire the reciprocal look they
engender. As a viewer of these works, I have sometimes felt almost like
an intruder, a feeling I attribute both to the emotional intensity of these
small pictures and also to their slightly ‘private’ nature; it’s as if Hesse
would like to be alone and I cannot quite let her be. Or, alternately, that
she would like to be alone and knows that structurally, within this system
of personhood, she cannot be.
Art writing doesn’t get much better than this—Molesworth’s willingness to engage
in such a personal, intimate relationship with Hesse’s work, while never losing her
analytic eye. This idea of the image looking back feels key here. It’s as if the effort
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made to create a work invests the work with its own personhood—an otherly
personhood that stares back at its creator, a stare fed by the psychic bleeding
of the creator, that results both in relief and a slap of the uncanny. If the work
doesn’t stare back at you, you haven’t invested enough energy in it. The buddhist
once asked me if writing was my religion, and I said no, writing is not my religion.
I don’t know what religion is for me. Writing is my calling.
* * *
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* BLOB LOVE *
* BLOB LOVE *
12/3/10
Pity Web
Tuesday evening Colter Jacobsen and I met for dinner to discuss a collaboration
we’ve been invited to work on for SF Camerawork. Colter proposed that we make
a book based on my blog posts about the buddhist. Colter’s the force behind
the Bay Area branch of Publication Studio, “an experiment in sustainable
publication,” founded in Portland by Matthew Stadler and Patricia No. From the
Publication Studio website:
We print and bind books on demand, creating original work with artists
and writers we admire, books that both respond to the conversation of
the moment and can endure. We attend to the social life of the book,
cultivating a public that cares and is engaged. Publication Studio is a
laboratory for publication in its fullest sense—not just the production of
books, but the production of a public. This public, which is more than
a market, is created through deliberate acts: the circulation of texts;
discussions and gatherings in physical space; and the maintenance of
a digital commons. Together these construct a space of conversation, a
public space, which beckons a public into being.
I hadn’t thought of making a book out of this stuff here, my project of dailiness,
endurance, embarrassment, but I jumped at the opportunity. I excitedly began
taking notes on issues pertaining to translating the blog to book—why do it, is it
possible, what will it take for it to make sense. I talked to Kevin about it. I emailed
JW Veldhoen about it.
Here’s what John wrote back:
Accrual is a huge problem for the web! Even the experience of reading
a scroll compared to a book changes everything. Hard to sense the
dissipation of pleasure on the web, like in a book where the intimacy
of knowing is tangible. You occupy another mind, or vision, and in a
book you can sense duration. The finiteness of a book, how much space
there is on the page, for the thumb on the margin, as the pages shrink,
as the relationship begins, and ends. No way! The web is gargantuan,
the reason to pity it.
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John’s point about finiteness/endlessness feels key. No wonder I want to put the
buddhist into a book. I want to contain him, I want to put an end to this madness,
this endless mooning over someone whose meanness bordered on abuse. Fuck,
Dodie—let go move on get over it. More ideas popped into my mind, more notes
bled into my journal. I became convinced that my ideas were too good for the
casual tossed-off-ness of a blog post. These great ideas needed to be developed
and formalized and pushed into the polished glory of an afterword, a printed
piece that would follow the blog material, to make the book worth buying. As my
fantasies of the book and its lapidary afterword grew, my attitude towards the blog
became more dismissive, as if it were my tawdry stepchild, a pitiful Cinderella
who will never find her way to the ball.
Wednesday night my mind was firing with ideas, so in honor of the Ambien
rant Jackie Wang posted on her blog, I took an Ambien and brainstormed in my
journal. As an antidote to my urge to privilege bookish mode over bloggish mode,
here are my journal rants, typed up, as unedited as possible:
A book by its very structure suggests a narrative of closure. No closing the

internet. You turn it on you turn it off—it goes on without you. Historicity of
book. Internet outside of time.
Notion of embarrassment—pushing towards discomfort. Notion of buddhist—

has he read any of this—when we were involved he Googled me extensively—I
chided him about cyberstalking—but now that he no longer wants me—I guess
he no longer wants me—he’s so vague I don’t even know that—vagueness
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is power for him—it keeps a woman off-kilter—but does he bother now? We

never exchanged photos—we didn’t need to—there were plenty of pictures of us
online—anyone can search me—I’m forthcoming to a fault with people I let in—
but I’m not in a general sense—I never used to be, but I’m rather reserved—is this
whole project a love letter to the buddhist—if he could read this and understand
that and embrace it/me I would be his forever.
I wrote a rough draft of this last night while on Ambien [this is me speaking as if
in the future and looking back at the Ambien rant, even though I’m in the midst
of the rant while writing it]—a tribute to Ambien rant genius Jackie Wang—
but as soon as a book gets mentioned—suddenly there are drafts—immediacy is
flushed like so much acidic vomit.
I love the idea of giving the impression of the unmediated in writing—to type
in all caps WHY WON’T YOU FUCKING LOVE ME—it’s in the middle of
the night I click send and the next morning when he logs online at 6:30, after
meditation, the buddhist reads it and rolls his eyes—I made the fucker roll his
eyes, I have agency, I have impact. He’s a very private person. Privacy is power.
Is that true? Only if someone’s out to get you. Privacy has other meanings for
me—embarrassment—sharing—a condensation of energy—Bhanu/keep your
psychically dense stuff private—shaped what I said here.
Ambien rant—not pure—from night before—immediacy/soap opera/this

happened 60 minutes ago—double dipping—framed/framing. Let go of this/
make room for more/asked JW for permission to quote—when did I start doing
that? Spectre of book brings in politeness/punk.
* * *
12/6/10
For Closure
Sunday afternoon, the intuitive consultant I’m working with taught me the rose
visualization. Here’s how you do it. You sit in a chair, feet on the ground (shoes
optional), and you imagine a rose in detail, its petals, stem. If you like, you may
move your hands through the air as if to touch it. Then you place in the center of
the rose all the buddhist’s negativity and all the soul-destroying things he wrote to
you—when the rose has fully absorbed them, you blow it up. Poof ! You give the
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fucker back his energy. Do this over and over until your aura feels clear. Here’s
a powerful female warrior relaxing amidst a bower of buddhist roses. Whenever
those rose get unruly POOF! she will blow them up.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Bett William’s recent blog post about feminist
performance artists Kathe Izzo (The Love Artist) and Carolee Schneemann. Izzo
is best known for her True Love Project, a performance for one during which she
“will freely fall in love with you, unconditionally and with unmitigated passion,
for one day. On this day you will be in energetic contact with Kathe throughout
the day. You will not be rushed and you will share your day with no one, unless
you choose the advanced love option. There is no need for any physical contact.
Satisfaction guaranteed.”
Izzo provides a sample video of her performing true love, a simple piece consisting
of a ultra-tight closeup of her face. No soundtrack. Wearing a red woolen scarf,
Izzo runs in some outdoors environment as a handheld camera tracks her face,
her gaze continuously locked on the lens/viewer/lover, registering desperation
and excitement. Occasionally Izzo pauses and beams with joy that melts into
serious intensity, with flashes of vulnerability that suggest insecurity, then more
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beams of joy, more frantic running, pause, beams of joy. At times she looks like she’s
going to cry, she’s so overwhelmed with her engagement with the viewer. Izzo’s True
Love video beckons the longing and tenderness that we all crave. Her engagement
is so intimate, it’s difficult to maintain your distance, to remember that this gaze
isn’t meant for you. And when you do remember, you’re thrown back into a primal,
Lacanian sense of lack. The more I watch the piece, the more tragic it becomes. It
pushes so many buttons that at times I’m pissed at Izzo for her cruelty. I’m all for the
blurring of art and life, but when it gets this blurred it’s terrifying.
Her deep soulful gazes and quivering defenselessness remind me of the first time I
saw the buddhist in person—we met on a Friday evening in the Castro at a seafood
restaurant called Catch—after intensely emailing and talking on the phone for
five months. As to be expected, there was lots of excitement about his visit. That
morning, out of the blue, he started sending me weird, alienating emails, and in
the afternoon we had a screaming fight on the phone. I almost didn’t go to the
dinner. None of it made sense. This is what I suspect was happening: the buddhist
gets a charge out of seducing, but I was too eager to be seduced. Pissing me off
created the resistance necessary for a conducive seduction atmosphere. He took
my hands in his and peered at me over his glasses with adoring puppy looks that
begged for forgiveness. He raised his eyebrows almost exactly the way Izzo does
at one point in her video. Much of the time he fell silent and sat there, rubbing
my palms with his thumbs, hypnotically locking my gaze. The buddhist said that
every time he left the house he gave a performance—and here I was with him,
outside the house, believing I was the adored exception. What I don’t know—
what I’ll never know—is how much of his feeling was authentic and how much of
it was, like Izzo’s project, a performance.
The last time I was in New York, writer Bruce Benderson told me that in the
future people will fall in love with machines, that there will be machines designed
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to love you. Bruce said, how do you know if somebody feels love for you? Because
they tell you so. A machine could do that—with more reliability. Those hundreds
of doting emails from the buddhist—what was I heart-throbbing, a man or a
word machine?
When I said to Kevin that this buddhist blog was a performance, he said he saw
it as an industry. When I asked him to elaborate, he said an industry is when you
have one thing and you make twenty things out of it. Like the Spicer industry,
all the material by and about poet Jack Spicer that just keeps spinning out and
out. “It’s not the same thing as during the Industrial Revolution. Look it up.”
Industry or not, I feel what I’m doing here resonates with the history of feminist
performance art. When I think of performativity in prose writing, I turn to Kathy
Acker, her aggro assertion of female subjectivity—aggro deconstruction of female
subjectivity—aggro fuck you to received notions of female subjectivity. From the
scroll Carolee Schneemann pulled from her cunt in her Interior Scroll performance:
“if you are a woman (and things are not utterly changed/ they will almost never
believe you really did it/(what you did do)/ they will worship you they will ignore
you/ they will malign you they will pamper you/ they will try to take what you did
as their own . . . .” Time collapses: ten years ago I met Schneemann at a party at
Leslie Scalapino’s house. Saturday night I played “Girl 1” in Small Press Traffic’s
production of Leslie’s and Kevin’s collaborative play, Stone Marmalade. As “Girl
1,” I said:
Eurydice says the structure—as it’s in reverse her being—in death per se
and there not being juridical space in which Orpheus comes to her, there.
The buddhist was someone I could say anything to, be any way with. He had a
wry sense of the comedy inherent in the most outrageous emotions. There was
much I never trusted about him (his not telling me about his sort of wife wasn’t a
good start), but I trusted his acceptance—and then he turned all Jehovah on me.
That is his biggest betrayal, his judgment, his switch from cozy unconditionality
to condemning me, not only for what I did, but for things I never even thought
of doing. My mind goes over it and over it and over it, churning the past from
various angles that never align. I’m unable to come up with an official version
of what happened, of who he was. Did he love me? Did he reject me? Just these
overlapping, mechanistic flashes of memory blurred with interpretation. My
mind stutters like a series of Muybridge stills. When the buddhist ran towards me
with love in his eyes, did both feet ever leave the ground?
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12/7/10
Gazing Back at Kathe

In response to my discussion of her True Love video, Kathe Izzo posted the
following comment:
but the gaze was for you or could have been . . that film was made years
& years ago but i meant it . . i was the only one holding the camera . .
& the gaze was for me & you & all of those emotions were as you called
them, self conscious of course, what can we do . . i once said to a love
patron who called me a liar because i wouldn’t love him the way he
wanted to, prove it, prove it that i am not loving you right now . . thank
you for taking the time to look at my work, much love dodie xo
Kathe, thank you for this! My mind has been buzzing ever since I read your
note. As I’m sure you’re painfully aware, once we create something and put it
out in the world, we have no power over how viewers/readers will receive the
work. The whole viewer as co-creator thing. Regardless of your intentions, which
I’m convinced are honorable, to be exposed to “true love,” and then have it end
in a few minutes, can’t help but bring up a profound sense of loss. Your video
performs an act of adoration that even those of us who are lucky to be in loving
relationships only experience in brief flashes throughout our lives. Such a gaze,
which to me reaches all the way back to the undifferentiated mother bond, turns
claustrophobic quickly, but there’s a part of me who longs to gorge in it, who
would willingly drown in it. Watching your video I flash on all the times I’ve lost
that gaze, as well as my suicidal impulse to lose myself in that gaze.
Your eyes peer out, not towards a person, but at a camera lens. You’re not seeing
me or any individual, you’re seeing this behemoth of collective desire. Could I
ever be satisfied by eyes that don’t see me, no matter how loving they are? Kevin
gave me a copy of Bettye LaVette’s Interpretations CD, in which she sings hits from
the 1960s British Invasion. LaVette’s R&B-inspired covers radically defamiliarize
the music. Lyrics I never paid much attention to become “oh my fucking god”
poignant. Every time Bettye belts out lines about her desire to be seen, to be really
seen—and her agony at not being seen, I get all yes, yes, yes. I’m just a soul whose
intentions are good/ Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood. To watch your video is
to be seen by eyes that are essentially blind—it’s uncanny, like a romantic horror
film where the lovers are in two different dimensions (the living and the dead, the
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here and the beyond), straining to touch through a gap that can never be bridged.
See me once and see the way I feel/ Don’t discard me just because you think I mean you harm.
The love that you’re projecting in your video feels very personal, and that’s
confusing. It’s not the clean, unconditional love of Amma the hugging saint, for
instance. When asked how it was possible for her to “embrace each and every one
in the same loving way, even if they were diseased or unpleasant,” Amma replied,
“When a bee hovers over a garden of varied flowers, what it beholds is not the
difference between the flowers but the honey within them.” When Amma hugs,
she’s not hugging you as a individualized flower; she’s hugging your honey within.
Perhaps all love, in a sense, is about perceiving the honey within.
More than one woman has complained about the buddhist’s messy boundaries.
Very mixed messages—his putting out attention that feels romantic/sexual to a
woman, his acting as if nothing is going on, and the women feeling like she’s
going crazy. He was that way with me at first, but I called him on it, and things
shifted. Once it was acknowledged we were having a romance he wanted us to
read together Christina Nehring’s A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the
Twenty-first Century. He proposed that we use Nehring’s book as a theoretical basis
to discuss our romance. “This thing has a life of its own,” he declared more than
once, and he approached with a sort of scientific fascination all the emotional
upheaval both of us were going through. I tried reading the book but never got
past the beginning, where Nehring gripes about feminist critiques of romantic
love, and prejudices against female writers who indulged in it—during which she
tells stories of one woman writer after another who got royally fucked over by
terrible men. I found myself siding with the feminists, plus the dickhead side of
the buddhist was starting to emerge in flashes and I didn’t want to think about
what a fool I was, so I abandoned the book in Vancouver.
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Bettye LaVette: It’s like the sun going down on me. When the buddhist went down on
me, he said, “Too bad you don’t like this more.”
* * *
12/10/10
Hotel Retreat Day 1

So here I am in the Courtyard Marriott in Culver City, the first of 10 nights.
I’m too exhausted to think, but not to type, apparently. I hooked up a portable
speaker to my laptop and listened to a live Joni Mitchell/James Taylor album
that I discovered on the computer, have no idea where it came from, recorded
apparently when they were involved. When Joni tells stories in between songs,
she calls kindred spirits “freaks.” Supershuttle picked me up in San Francisco at
8:30 this morning and I arrived in my rental car in Culver City at 3:30. (SFO
apparently doesn’t allow planes to take off when there’s fog.) It wasn’t as hellish
as it should have been, I sat at a table at the airport and did work I was behind
on, probably got more done there than if I’d been at home, then read on the
plane, pleasure reading. I was “chill” (since I’m still reeling from Joni Mitchell
speak) until the rental car company, then my bitch side started to emerge. Then
the faculty meeting (I’m teaching in a low residency program) and the jolt of
needing to switch into friendly mode. Then off to Whole Foods for supplies, then
unpacking and talking with Kevin on Skype and then Gmail video chat—we were
doing a comparison, and I think I like the Gmail better.
Thoughts of the buddhist have been creeping up. Before our fallout, he was going
to come visit me here, he would have arrived late this evening, and leave Sunday
morning. Such a bad idea, this being a work situation, and in a work situation
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one doesn’t need extra intensity or any potential combustibility. He really wanted
to come hang out in the LA art scene. The buddhist is beginning to feel like a
fantasy, like the British boyfriend of this girl I knew in junior high school. The
Beatles and everything London were all the rage, and this girl—who was as nerdy
and unpopular as I—claimed to get backstage at every rock concert held in
Chicago. She showed all the 8th grade girls a ring wrapped in angora that she said
was given to her by her English boyfriend. We loved to hear about her English
boyfriend, though I don’t think anybody really believed he existed.
I enjoy the simplicity of hotel living, my few things, I bring one fork, one spoon,
one knife, a Tupperware bowl and the top layer of a stainless steel tiffin. I splurge
packing space with a beautiful wool shawl that I lay on top of the bed and sleep
under. I bring a 3-inch statue of Quan Yin and a citrine crystal. I have some
hummus and carrots and ground flax seed in my teeny refrigerator. I’m drinking
chamomile tea. Brought my yoga mat—have two half hour yoga sets copied to
iTunes. The window opens so I have fresh cool air wafting in. I talk to Kevin for
an hour each night, which always feels a bit like we’re dating, the intensity of our
chat time as opposed to the more diffuse interactions of living together. He’ll be
here a week from tomorrow. And when I pick him up from the airport it will be
a bit of a shock, the materiality of his being, that he really does have physical
embodiment, which is a rather sexy realization. I’m reminded of when he and
I, after an exciting and agonizing year, finally got together—it was something I
wanted badly but didn’t think would ever happen, and for the longest time I’d
have this eerie fear that I was in some Twilight Zone type dream, and I would wake
up and he wouldn’t be there. But, 25 years later, he’s still there.
* * *
12/11/10
Hotel Retreat Day 2

I’m sitting in my hotel room in jammies, listening to shakuhachi music on iTunes. I
have two albums of it on my laptop, this one was a gift from Karen, my chiropractor,
who I have wonderful, soulful conversations with about love, spirituality, trauma,
and glutenfree cooking (she makes a yummy glutenfree peach cobbler) while she’s
holding me and moving my body in strange, vulnerable positions. Mostly she
does osteopathic manipulations, which are so gentle and relaxing, I become a
noodle in her hands. It’s a joy to have such innocent pleasurable physical contact.
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I’m reminded of a fantasy another friend and I play around with—should our
husbands die and we’re left alone, she and I would get married, and spend our
old days as lesbians with dogs—sex is optional in our fantasy, we’ll see how we
feel about that when the time comes. She said we’d sit on the couch and hold one
another. Occasionally one of us would pat the other on the head and say, “It’s
okay.” It sounds like a good life to me.
This morning I had a longish phone chat with Colter about our collaboration
at SF Camerawork. There was some upheaval and drama around that, which
we needed to take care of. The whole exchange went so smoothly—we weren’t
exactly fighting, but there was tension—it was a pleasure to release the tension
and it moved us into a sweet intimacy. The incident that caused our tiff wasn’t
important to either of us, but we got all riled anyway, it was like when you get
upset about not being invited to a party you wouldn’t want to go to in the first
place. Afterwards, I thought back to when the buddhist and I tried to reconcile
a few weeks ago, the near instantaneous crash and burn. Colter approached me
from the heart, and I responded from the heart. The buddhist was so concerned
with protecting himself and throwing around the jargon of openness, that no
heart connection, no true vulnerability or openness was evident.
Online I found a quote from the buddhist about a workshop he co-led. The
author of the article had asked his opinions on how the weekend went, and the
buddhist gave a response that was so doctrinaire, so loaded with Buddhist buzz
words (“golden ground of basic goodness,” “healing waters of compassion”),
that it reads like a press release. When I encountered the passage, I felt such
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sadness, like I could see into the core of his alienation, his insecurity, his terrible
aloneness. I thought, vainly, as if I were speaking to him—you need me more than I
need you. My heart hurt with his hurt. It was the most compassion I’ve felt for him
since we fell apart.
Teaching writing I’m frequently given glimpses into wounds in student psyches.
Sometimes the students are aware of what they’re revealing, sometimes not. If
they’re aware, I try to help them go deeper into their vulnerability, to help them
more clearly express that vulnerability, to set the right tone for the piece. If they’re
not aware of what they’re revealing, I may make some gentle nudges, but for
the most part I act as if I haven’t seen anything. Teaching writing I sometimes
have to hold some intense stuff with and for the student—but always keep the
conversation focused on writing (this is not therapy). One time a woman brought
in an amazing piece about a suicide attempt she made when she was younger—
it was powerful writing, well crafted, beautiful even—and after she read it, the
class fell silent, stunned. So I spoke up and said that it was hard to write about
depression and make the writing interesting, to write about being stuck but to give
the writing momentum—and I was impressed with how well she did that. After
class I kicked myself for my inadequate, dumb ass response—I got all clinical with
her, when I should have first approached her from the heart.
* * *
12/12/10
Hotel Retreat Day 3

This evening I had a perfectly lowkey dinner with Matias Viegener. We each
ordered a bowl of pho and split one of those divinely greasy Vietnamese crepes
you wrap in rice paper with mint and lettuce and sauce, and try to eat without
the whole thing falling apart in your hands. I’m glad I was eating with an old
friend who’s seen it all. I made a total mess, used up tons of napkins. Then we
went back to Matias’ and drank peppermint tea and talked on and on. Matias is
part of the social practice art collective, Fallen Fruit, which “began with creating
maps of public fruit: the fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los
Angeles.” Matias loves fruit, and he always has interesting varieties. He gave me a
Chinese pear to bring back to the hotel. It’s like a Japanese pear, but pear-shaped
instead of round, a very pale yellow. It’s mild, hardly sweet at all. There were a
couple of German art books on Matias’ coffee table, by an artist named Eberhard
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Viegener. I asked if it was a relation, and Matias said it was his grandfather. Matias’
grandfather was the only one of his relatives to stay in Germany during the Third
Reich. He wasn’t Jewish, but his wife, Matias’ grandmother, was—and she stayed
as well. She survived by hiding in the coal cellar. The Nazis knew she was there, but
when they came looking for her, she would tunnel into the middle of the room-sized
heap of coal, and remain buried there for hours. I asked if his grandfather was
punished for helping her, and Matias said he wasn’t allowed to show his art.
Then I drove home. To get from Matias’ house to here, you get on the 101 South
at Silver Lake, then take the 110 South, then the 10 West, then the 405 South,
and exit at Slausen. It used to be when people here would rattle off these lists of
freeways I would panic, but now I’m all oh yeah, that’s easy. And it was. At 7:00
it took an hour to get to his house, and at 11:30 it took 20 minutes to get back to
the hotel. Zoom zoom zoom.
* * *
12/13/10
Hotel Retreat Day 4

Energetic and happy and having a great time. I, who love to hear people’s intimate
stories, have heard so many private things from students and faculty. I may not
be good at dinner table conversation, but if you want to tell someone about your
complicated divorce, I’m your gal. It’s been good for me, the change in scene—to
use a cliché, it’s as if these blinders have been removed. Talked with Kevin on
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the phone about the buddhist. I said, “I’m over the fucker.” I realize that I had
a vision of a beautiful connection with him, and for a while it seemed we were
enacting that vision—and despite all that went down, I was remaining loyal to
that vision, blah blah blah.
Kevin and I were old fashioned the past couple of nights, and used cellphones
rather than video chat. He said my mom’s (and now my) cat Quincey shit on a pair
of my shoes. Fortunately they’re shoes I should have gotten rid of anyway. The
cat’s helping me declutter. A friend is very involved in Clutterers Anonymous and
he’s using it to clean up his messy bedroom. They have call-in phone conferences
where you can put the meeting on speakerphone and clean house while you listen
to others share. So everyday at 5:00 my friend calls in and cleans house for an
hour. He says it’s working miracles. I so want to check this out when I get back. I
would love to live a life with the organized simplicity of hotel living. The problem
is, who can I get to come in each day and make my bed?
12/14/10
Hotel Retreat Day 5

This evening when I went out to dinner with a friend it was brisk and clear out.
By the time we left the restaurant, fog had set in. It was blowing across the road in
wisps—something I associate with San Francisco, not Los Angeles. I drove down
side streets, with holiday-decorated front yards. Christmas lights in fog are very
atmospheric. I’m dreaming of a noir Christmas. On the stretch of Rose Avenue
between Walgrove and Lincoln, I could only see a few feet in front of me, so it
looked like I was driving into nothingness. It was thrilling, with a tinge of anxiety,
like when driving along the coast highway from Santa Cruz at night. Burrowing
into the dark.
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12/15/10
Hotel Retreat Day 6

The nightgown I brought with me is getting funky so I bought another one at
the Nordstrom Rack at the Howard Hughes Center. Being a Princess and the
Pea type person, I cut out the tags so they wouldn’t scratch my delicate nature as
I slept.
You gotta love the middle, WARNING: KEEP AWAY FROM FIRE tag, and
its lame attempt at a comforting afterthought: ALL FABRIC CAN BURN. Like
they’re trying to convince you that this nightgown isn’t particularly flammable—
it’s more of an existential thing, more like every time you go to bed you’re in
danger of combusting into yet another Anima Sola, running through the night,
heartbroken over the buddhist, engulfed in tonguey orange flames. She must have
bought her nightgown at Nordstrom Rack too.
* * *
12/16/10
Hotel Retreat Day 7

Today the longing came back. It first raised its ugly head during meditation, and
I let it rip. Usually when it comes up there, it’s near the beginning and it passes,
but today it was more about waves—throughout the meditation, and then after
my busy busy day, in the evening when I was finally alone it flooded back in.
Perhaps longing is the wrong word, more of a sense of loss, and a frustration
at my inability to talk to this person. Do I even want to contact him, if I dared
hurl myself against his wall of hostility, what could I say, I guess I’d say, “Don’t
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you miss me?” I miss you. My missing him wouldn’t matter that much to the
buddhist, he’d see it at a passive-aggressive accusation, I’ve come to realize that
my caring for him mattered much less than my appreciation of his caring for me,
what excited him was my delight in his performance as paramour, at the end he
complained about my lack of appreciation, said he’d never felt less appreciated,
he tended to use the words “never” and “always” when referring to me, which
I imagine, from my amateur understanding of Buddhism, to be the opposite of
what he teaches to those hundreds and hundreds of little people who go to those
woodsy meditation retreats, he also told me he didn’t like nature, so the woodsy
retreats must wash over him, but he did frequently write to me about the moon,
so maybe his not liking nature was a momentary impulse, we were at the ocean
when he said he didn’t like nature, he had his back to the ocean and was fondling
my body, the moon he wrote to me about because we shared it, it was something
we could both look at and discuss, no matter where we each were at night.
Memory is so intimate, so piecemeal, a fragment of a body, a blur, the most

mundane moment is heightened, but somehow you never feel totally alone with
the beloved, or maybe it’s you never feel alone in your love, all these competing
memories and emotions contradicting every impulse. There’s a tenderness to
mourning that one longs to cling to, why have I switched to this distant one
when I really mean me, how I wish there could be fondness rather than pain in
remembering what a few months ago thrilled me, and why am I unloading this
in public, why not my journal, why not answer Bhanu’s last letter, she’s been very
generous in holding my ramblings, why do I long to speak to no one and everyone,
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why hurl my thoughts out into the obscurity of a mostly unknown audience, not
totally unknown, there’s a handful of you dears who read whatever I put up here.
In the original version of my book The Letters of Mina Harker, all the letters were
written to writers I knew—and sent—so there was this edge of risk in that, I’d say
things—or my avatar Mina would say things—to my friends I never would say
in real life, it was a performance of saying the forbidden, one person at a time.
When I finished the book and was faced with refocusing to non-epistolary writing,
I felt like I was standing on the brink of the void, how could I possibly write to
a vague unknown audience, I visualized such an audience as this misty blobby
thing, and now I seem to be turning my back on specific persons and wanting
acknowledgment and love from this blob. Oh my dearest blob, do you love me,
will you love me the way the buddhist refuses to do? Is blob love something that
will never go away? Interesting how similar blob is to blog.
I know it doesn’t sound like it from my tone here, but it was a good day today. This
morning when I was racing over to Antioch to teach my two hour seminar on
collage, as I pulled my champagne-colored Hyundai into a space in the parking
garage, an instrumental heavy metal version of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”
came on the radio, insanely bombastic, layers and layers of drums and guitars, a
dissonant typhoon of Christmas cheer, and, even though I was nervous and in a
hurry, I sat there and listened to the entire thing and laughed.
* * *
12/17/10
Hotel Retreat Day 8

Walking to campus this morning, the sky was huge—vivid blue and fluffy clouds.
In the lawn of a corporate park that borders the sidewalk I noticed a mushroom
growing, then another mushroom and another, it was a small forest of mushrooms,
ranging in size from an inch to three inches across, flat and darkish brown like
shitakes or portobellos. Some of them were unearthed and lying upside down with
their stalks in the air, which reminded me of cartoon images of dead dogs, lying
on their backs with their legs straight up in the air, and why would cartoons have
images of dead dogs with their legs in the air, this is an ancient memory, so it’s
totally out of context. The mushrooms startled me into regression, I felt like I was
shrinking down to their size, entering a fairy tale realm where they would surely
be called toadstools, and then I passed some pine trees with super-long needles,
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like foot-long needles, which give such a lacy effect, they reminded me of the pine
trees that grew near the ocean in Sarasota, my friend called them Australian pines,
and suddenly I flashed to being in my early 20s, in a grove of Australian pines,
their delicate needles brushing my skin, soft as a breeze, the light tinged green and
the ground fine pale sand, the effect bright and airy, not dense like a forest, and
then I’m back in Culver City climbing stairs to the campus, and long strands of
grass, long as the pine needles, are bent over and wet, and in the sun the beads of
water are sparking like diamonds, thousands of diamonds in this long, long grass,
and my eyes are drinking it in, and then I pass a tree whose twisted trunk looms
into vision, and it’s all so beautiful I’m starting to feel uncomfortable, I think back
to my 30s when I had drug flashbacks, which would begin with things suddenly
looking too beautiful, and I read that Virginia Woolf ’s breakdowns also would
begin with things looking too beautiful, which made me think that all intensity,
no matter how much you long for it, is painful, that opening oneself to beauty is
a sort of altered state, it always involves a releasing, a part of you enters whatever
it is that calls out to you—uncontrollably—you always lose a little of yourself, and
thus the terror. Then I went to my office and met with students.
12/18/10
Hotel Retreat Day 9

Kevin’s supposed to arrive at 10 this evening, but it’s raining here in Los Angeles
as well as in San Francisco, so his flight keeps getting delayed. The latest update
estimates a 3:40 a.m. arrival, which may be a total fantasy. After my workshop
ended this afternoon, I met my friend Lamar at the Real Foods Daily in Santa
Monica. We sat and talked for three hours, and then Lamar’s husband Jim joined
us for another hour. We continued our conversation from last June when I stayed
at their home in Topanga for a few days—Antioch, writing, books, movies, news
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of the Dark Shadows movie Johnny Depp’s supposed to make, Lamar’s family, their
plans to open a solar farm, Kevin, teaching. I was writing to the buddhist while
staying at her house, but I’d never told Lamar about him, so over winter squash
and apple bisque, I spewed. She was all ears, and I went into full lurid detail
rather than the cryptic tidbits I’ve revealed online. It was odd to be talking about
him. Based on this blog, I’m sure it sounds like I talk about him all the time, but I
don’t. I was feeling melancholy about the whole situation today—and there it was
again, the unshakable longing that I keep thinking I’ve shaken—like the eternal
return, it comes back again and again, its quality essentially unchanged. When
the longing strikes, I get this romantic sense that the buddhist is feeling it as well,
that the longing connects us across time and space—as soon as I think this, I
squelch it, think you’re an idiot, Dodie.
After dinner, I took a walk, carrying the Antioch umbrella I bought at the school
bookstore, with alternating wedges of forest green and white. Misty rain made
the air impossibly fresh. Not many people were around as I sauntered along the
3rd Street Promenade, past one chain clothing store after another. None of the
stores appealed to me, but I fell in love with the topiary dinosaur fountains. Cute
and sinister at the same time—a combo that always excites me—these giant
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extinct beasts loom in the midst of a garish capitalist monument, spewing. That
the dinosaurs have plant tendrils creeping up their legs and winding around
their torsos implies that nature itself is uprising—no more oil spills, no more
deforestation, no more raping of the ozone the seas the land—and when all the
shoppers are tucked in their beds and all the chainstore lights in Santa Monica
are shut off, the dinosaurs will lumber off their mounds, crash through plate glass
windows, knock down display racks in Anthropologie and H&M, and spew and
shit and roar, NO MORE!
Further down the street two men with saxophones were jamming—one guy was
dressed in a Santa jacket and hat—they were improvising all over the place, a
sophisticated and elegant jazz, and every now and then the melody of a Christmas
carol would break through.
* * *
12/19/10
Reentry
I’m sitting at my desk in San Francisco, trying to write with Sylvia constantly
jumping in my lap. I’m listening to Wynonna Judd singing “Anyone Who Had a
Heart,” her version puts all versions to shame, even Dusty Springfield’s—and it’s
hard to compete with Dusty. “You couldn’t really have a heart/ And hurt me/
Like you hurt me/ And be so untrue/ What am I to do.” The last time I had
a broken heart, which was 15 years ago, I’d sit and listen to Dusty and cry and
cry. She’s good for that. And I don’t see anything wrong with listening to Dusty
and crying, all this bullshit about detachment. More and more I’m weighing in
on living life to the fullest, and if your fullest expression of life at that moment is
crying over Dusty, then I say go for it. More and more this hierarchy of higher
versus lower feelings or attitudes is bullshit. Strange how the lowest feelings are
those that tend to come easily to women, feelings that women are known for. The
silly second class flutterings of the secretaries on Mad Men, I love the pre-feminist
secretaries on Mad Men, their bitchiness and their breakthroughs of awareness
that they squelch in order to not go insane in a system that’s stacked against
them. Just listened to Dusty’s version of “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” and she
captures an abjection that Wynonna lacks—not because she seems to feel the
song more, it’s more the quality of her voice, a husky yet sharp vibrato that calls
out to you to sit home alone all boozy and weepy. Now I’m listening to the Dionne
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Warwick version, which is too sophisticated, with the arrangement overpowering

the tragedy of the song. And now Shelby Lynne’s version, which is too smooth.
Perhaps the most interesting video is Cilla Black’s version. Cilla is one of the
stiffest white girls I’ve ever seen. In the video she’s posed on the stage in a dress
that looks like a nightgown, occasionally making robotic arm gestures before an
audience that looks bored, her big big voice in a body that doesn’t seem to know
how to contain it, and the weird way she screws up her mouth. Anyone would
love me. Why won’t you.
* * *
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12/20/10
Eclipse
An hour before the lunar eclipse began I sat down to meditate. Since I’m all jet-
laggy, it was hard going for the first half hour or so, as far as staying awake. But
that phase passed and I eased into a comfortable rhythm with my breath—and
then, without warning, my heart twirled open. I had the image of a lump of coal
being hurled away, and I felt such love, a generalized love, and then I thought
of the buddhist and I loved him as well. Behind the hurt and the rage I felt
this core of love that’s never changed. Then my 20-pound cat Ted crawled in
my lap and started kneading my inner thigh—painful, it felt like he was slowly
drawing bruises—I tried to ignore him, figuring he’d settle down and take a seat,
but he kept kneading, adding a flourish of banging my forearm with his nose, as
if to fling it up and onto his head. So I gave in and cuddled Ted. He was quite
passionate in return. About half an hour into the eclipse, I stood on my landing
and took a photo. The shadow doesn’t show up, but it’s there.
12/21/10
Wind Up, part 1

Winter solstice—it’s time to wind up the buddhist vein, to pack up my bags and
move on. It was through Blake I first heard of the path of excess—do something
until you can’t stand it anymore, and transcendence will follow—I’ve had it with
writing about the buddhist, yet I long for some kind of pull-it all-together ending.
What can I conclude other than this whole process has led me over and over to
the conclusion that in the psyche nothing ever concludes. I’ll never figure out how
and why this person came into my life, who he was, how he vanished, what was
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my role in any of it. Am I better or worse off for knowing him? Has he changed
me at all? There is no one way to view the buddhist—when I try to touch him, he
dissolves and reshapes just beyond reach. With him I simultaneously experienced
profound alienation and profound tenderness. Maddeningly, I bounced back and
forth between desire and anxiety. In the end the anxiety won out.
The past couple of weeks I voraciously read Stephen Butterfield’s The Double Mirror:
A Skeptical Journey into Buddhist Tantra. The buddhist practices tantric Buddhism,
but when I asked him what that was, he wouldn’t answer. Butterfield went through
advanced tantric training then dropped out. The Double Mirror is odd in the cult
survivor genre, in that Butterfield is an intelligent, sensitive writer, and he never
turns his back on the teachings—just robotic adherence to cult doctrine. His book is
a precise account of a person going through rigid spiritual training while grappling
with doubt. Doubt is the monster in the closet in all closed systems, a dirty little
secret that the group member needs to hide in order to be allowed access to arcane
teachings, and to guard against group humiliation/shunning. Butterfield ultimately
decides doubt is vital to keep teachings alive and meaningful. I recognized so much
of the buddhist in the pages of Butterfield’s book, down to his body language, his
knowing smiles and laughter at my foibles. Butterfield discusses elitism in his sect,
its rigid system of hierarchy, the usual sexual and substance abuse scandals, the
promiscuity encouraged in the early days (promiscuity serves the same purpose
as enforced celibacy, to break up couple bonding), spiritual one-up-manship, and
the difficulties he had developing intimate connections with other followers. When
Butterfield explicated Buddhist ideals of relationships, I realized I was a really bad
Buddhist girlfriend, but I wouldn’t want to be a good one. Through Butterfield’s
adroit explanations of Buddhist principles and the sociology of (Americanized)
Tibetan Buddhism I could understand the buddhist’s vocabulary and where his
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criticisms of me sprung from. I also understood his compliments, like how when
I’d say something he approved of, he’d call it “sane.”
At first it was a traumatic read for me, but eventually I got into Butterfield and his
book in their own right. The Double Mirror deftly interweaves personal experience,
critique, and reportage. He’s generous with details of his own life, his insecurities
and fuck ups, his lung disease that makes the physical demands of tantra all the
more excruciating. It’s through a highly personal lens that he explains Buddhist
principles and the complex Tibetan panoply of gods and spirits. I hate explaining
things, even describing this book is agonizing, I always long to jump headfirst into
the messy nuances, but part of writing is committing to the scaffolding. The book
shines when Butterfield describes the series of rigorous tasks he undertakes for his
advanced training, beginning with 108,000 prostrations, which takes him three
and a half years to complete:
You fold your hands in anjali, touch them to forehead, lips, and heart
while repeating, “I take refuge in the guru, I take refuge in the Buddha,
I take refuge in the dharma, I take refuge in the sangha,” and prostrate
full length on a mat or board, with your arms and legs stretched out
and your forehead touching the floor surface. All this time you are
supposed to visualize the lineage tree in front, your father on your right,
your mother on your left, and your worst enemy behind you. At the end
of a prostration, you rise and count off one bead on the mala. Only
107,999 to go.
While performing tasks as overwhelming and tedious as when Psyche separated

the roomful of lentils, beans, and grains into piles, Butterfield experiences doubt,
rage, exhaustion, and ecstasy. I followed Butterfield’s psychological and spiritual
extremities with the same fascination with which I read, in an oral history of
Vietnam, accounts of how POWs survived living in bamboo cages. There’s a
heroism in intense commitment. Butterfield compares the tantric tasks to boot
camp, meant to break down the ego and make one a good Buddhist warrior. He
says that the thrill of boot camp should be more widely acknowledged. Now that
I know the vocabulary for such practices, trolling around online I discovered that
the buddhist leads retreats in them. The more I read Butterfield’s book, the more
Other the buddhist seemed, like I had been trying to be lovers with an extremely
focused, elegant praying mantis.
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12/22/10
Wind Up, part 2

Towards the end of The Double Mirror, when Stephen Butterfield drops out of his
Tibetan Buddhist sect, he finds Buddhist truths everywhere—in other religions,
philosophy, and in the “great” writers of the Western poetry canon. Butterfield
argues against the aesthetic of spontaneity in American Buddhist poetry, in favor
of carefully wrought verse:
Letting go of thoughts is an excellent technique for encouraging the

raw material of a poem to emerge; but to turn raw material into a
masterpiece worth memorizing, as Yeats, Milton, Shakespeare, Donne,
Pope, Keats, and Byron well knew, requires months and years of
sustained effort and discriminating judgment.
“Great” art, for Butterfield, is created with a commitment and rigor similar to
the tantric practices. I think back to an earlier blog post when my friend Rainer
chided me for opposing “real” to blog writing. I realize now the difference isn’t
about value—one form isn’t more valuable than the other—the difference is
about labor and intensity. I do a certain amount of fudging and editing for the
blog, but with “real” writing I sit with it for hours—or days if necessary—until
the writing opens to me, until the world itself opens to magic and synchronicity.
The blog is about dailiness, catching bits of whatever’s passing through my life.
All writing for me is a pouring of myself onto the page, both an emptying of
self and a removed observation of self. It’s not necessarily about emotions I’m
currently having—like a method actor, I invoke emotions, some so painful I feel
like I’m being flailed, then I step back like some Nazi scientist and chronicle it all.
Studying and rearranging the words, sitting and waiting in a sort of calm mania,
for the perfect combination of words to appear to me. Many writers have spoken
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of how if you stick with it, you enter a gloriously crazed state where you tap into
bolts of energy and inspiration you can barely imagine in ordinary life.
Even though I took issue with his fetishizing of the Western literary canon and his
belief that the point of art is to evoke beauty, the more I read The Double Mirror,
the more enamored of Butterfield I became. Writing is so much about love—
we fall in love with the authors of our favorite books—even if, as the case with
Butterfield, they’re dead. I fall in love with anybody I write about—even if he’s a
nudist with 24-hour surveillance cameras trained on himself, even if they’re two
Iranian teens publically hanged for being gay. I fell in love writing to the buddhist.
I continue to love the buddhist, writing about him. In honor of the solstice I
emailed him a love letter of sorts. I said I was sorry I hurt him. He didn’t answer.
And then he did.
* * *
12/25/10
Happy Kevin’s Day

“Happy Kevin’s Day!” That’s what I heard people saying to one another last
night, at Kevin’s Christmas Eve birthday party. We do this every year, but this
year I actually had a good time. The roll of hostess can be nerve-racking, but
last night I decided to go with bohemian chill, so when early comers arrived
and I hadn’t finished dressing, I chat-shouted with them through the bedroom
door. Then I sat at my makeup mirror (located on a bookshelf across from my
computer, so I can just swivel around in the same chair I’m sitting on as I type this)
and smeared on eyeshadow and mascara, directing them as they toiled away on
the unfinished vegetable platter. I declared I was having an interactive party, not
one of those boring parties that are ready when the guests arrive, and then people
stand around with nothing to do. Joseph Lease and Donna de la Perriere deserve
gold stars for their generous assistance.
But what made the biggest difference for me this year was our party favors,
necklaces made out of cherry tomato sized Christmas ornaments, hung on black
cotton/tencel yarn. I put a necklace around the neck of each of our 38 guests.
This was surprisingly intimate, each person chose their ornament, I’d thread it
onto a length of yarn, reach around their neck and hang the necklace, check its
length, then my hands would flutter against their back as I tied the yarn into a
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bow. When I finished, I would pat them lightly on the shoulder, a mother-child
tenderness. I could tell people liked the attention, liked being passive, acted upon,
liked being touched. I thought of body workers, the insights into human need
they must have. Towards the end of the party, as I sat on the couch laughing with
a roomful of amazing, creative people, the buddhist came to mind, and I thought
I don’t need him.
12/28/10
In-Between
I’ve been patiently and tediously copying buddhist blog posts, pasting them into
a Word file, and reformatting them. Then the editing of the book begins. There
are so many choices to make, like exactly which posts, which images do I include,
what do I do with reader comments, and the larger general issue of how much
should I rewrite/edit. I guess that strategy will arise as I touch the words, and
they touch me back. Unedited, the manuscript is 33,625 words, 53,674 characters
(without spaces), 187,996 characters (with spaces). Kevin said the other day, that
I may want to cut the manuscript way down, and I wanted to say to him, leave
me alone. But, as always, I’ll ask him to read it, and he’ll say lots of things I won’t
want to hear, and I’ll argue, and in the end will take almost every one of his
suggestions.
The buddhist and I have been emailing since the solstice, which is inhibiting.
It doesn’t feel right to write about him while we’re in touch. He’s given me his
blessing, as far as the book goes, sight unseen—something I don’t understand,
but I’m not going to argue with it. Things between us are tentative. I don’t know
if we’ll ever speak on the phone. I finally agreed, and then he backed off. We’re
being nice to one another, but our interactions feel a bit like a deflated balloon left
over from a glittery party. Is this better than abject longing?
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12/30/10
Deflated
For the first time in months I feel, as the buddhist would say, “sane.” Being in
contact with him has been a shock, it threw me outside of time for a few days, in
the nonspace of trauma relived. We continue to be nice to one another, but that
deflated balloon feeling still predominates. The crisis for me came Tuesday night,
when I was finally washing the serving dishes from Kevin’s birthday party. Kevin
was sitting at the computer, in our back porch office, which adjoins the kitchen, I was
a few feet away from him, enjoying the warm “natural/non-toxic/biodegradable”
soap suds, when all of a sudden I had a full-blown panic attack, something I’ve not
experienced in ages—racing heart, dizziness, feeling faint—and I realized whatever
was going on between me and the buddhist, it wasn’t rational, that rationality was
of little use in my coming to terms with him. The attack only lasted a few minutes.
I said to Kevin, “Mind if I put on some soothing music?” I clicked on one of the
shakuhachi albums I have loaded into iTunes, and continued with the dishes.
After that, my emotional upheavals diminished significantly. I’ve also been doing
visualizations that Tiffany, my intuitive consultant, taught me, to release unwanted
energy. Tiffany is wonderful. See a rather frail, birdlike woman throwing open her
arms and exclaiming in a New Zealand accent, “Who gives a fuck what people
think of you!” I haven’t done visualizations in years, but I’m floored by how
effective they are. This combined with my hyper-rational therapist works well for
me right now.
The buddhist is depressed and tired, so this is what we’ve been emailing about.
I think back to our early days of effervescent newness—guess what our favorite
topic of conversation was—you got it—his depression. He calls it melancholia.
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I’ve been depressed; depression is terrible, but after a while, how sexy is that? My
therapist says he’s seen, over and over, the pattern of a depressed guy pulling
someone in there with him, and once that person is hooked, he withdraws. My
therapist has worked with both the depressed guy half of the equation, as well as
the person drawn in. My therapist says the buddhist is emotionally abusive, and
that, based on the battered women he’s worked with, it’s very difficult to leave
an abuser. My therapist says that having a meditation practice, no matter how
serious, doesn’t guarantee it will have impact on a personality structure. He told
me about a friend who’s practiced Buddhism for 40 years, goes on all sorts of
retreats, and when he returns from a retreat he’s still as fucked up as ever. Though
my therapist has benefited from his own Zen practice—he’s less depressed, can
focus better, and feels more compassion towards others. My urge to meditate is
like a physical craving. Afterwards I feel more centered. That’s all I want from it.
My therapist says its about clearing out the “noise.”
I guess what I’m feeling about the buddhist—and I use the words “I guess” on
purpose, because all opinions these days feel tentative and fluid—is that I’m fine
that the balloon has deflated. To extend the metaphor in ways I would tell writing
students to delete, there are plenty more balloons in the world. I’m going to a New
Years party on Friday night, I’m going on a road trip next week, I want to pleasure
fully in those. The buddhist and his depression are the opposite (EXTENDED
METAPHOR WARNING!) of a shiny bouncy balloon—more like a weight
around my neck. I don’t think I care about him anymore, and, more importantly,
I don’t care if he cares about me. I wrote to him, “Seeing that we’re each not
monsters feels like a great step forward, and perhaps enough for now, as far as
figuring things out?”
* * *
1/2/11
Yellow New Year

Nothing new worth mentioning about the buddhist, don’t know if I’d write
about it if there was, because then I might be tempted to add this post to the
buddhist book, and editing the thing is such a bear, I don’t need any more words
to maneuver. Editing is all the work of writing with little of the pleasure. I’m over
half way though the 80+ space-and-a-half pages, and I still don’t know the rules
of the editing, like how radical I’ll get with the changes. Thus far, other than line
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edits, I’ve combined a couple of posts and added a few jolts of graphic sex—I
figure if you’re going to make it a book, you should give the reader some candy
they can’t get online. But not too much sex, the TV Sutras, my supposedly “real”
writing project, is so kinky, no need to get redundant.
Applying picky editor brain to my originally dashed off posts, it’s hard to reset
my brain and turn back here and dash something off. For New Years, Kevin
and I went to a party artist Marcella Faustini held in Kota Ezawa’s Russian Hill
cottage, where she’s catsitting. It was a hip, shoeless art crowd. Curator Joseph
del Pesco made me a cocktail of champagne with a splash of his homemade
herbal liquor. Someone else gave me a small cup of aquavit. You’ll like it, they
said, it tastes like rye bread. Aquavit sounds like an effervescent health drink that
you’d be served after your hydrotherapy at a 19th century spa, but this stuff was
strong enough to knock my pantyhose off. Marcella served sausages, sautéed
peppers, cheese, warmed herbal infused-olives, and Brazilian-styled black eyed
peas. Kevin and I asked Marcella about New Years traditions in Brazil, where she
was raised. She said that in Brazil people put bay leaves in their wallets and they
wear yellow underwear. She threw her hands in the air and said, “Like who has
yellow underwear!”
New Years day I put a bay leaf in my wallet and when downtown I stopped in a
department store to look for some yellow panties. They only had one kind, yellow
lace roses with pink accents. I bought a pair and wore them to dinner that night,
underneath my jeans. I don’t know what the panties are supposed to bring me.
Maybe it’s simply about the willingness to sit around with your ass wrapped in
yellow roses. An attitude of why the hell not.
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1/4/11
Negative Space
After David Buuck’s reading Thursday, a young woman—a poet—came up to
David and said, “I loved what you were saying about negative space.” She was
referring to David’s collaboration with Juliana Spahr, a delightfully perverse first
person rant by a female protagonist who has recently given birth, whose nipples
squirt milk and whose stretched-out hole cannot be filled, no matter how much
she fucks her lovers. She also becomes an arms dealer. So, by “negative space,”
the young poet meant a messy, ravenous cunt. Anyone with an intellectual bent—
especially women—feels pressure to use abstract language in order to gain respect,
approval. Ever since the early 80s I’ve been talking with women about female-
centric ways of claiming space, can you really do that and be taken seriously? I’m
thinking of 60s feminist art made from crochet and needlework. I’m thinking of
Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975)—she’s making a statement about
the oppression of domesticity, but also a statement that women’s tools, female-
gendered space, could be the subject of art.
I lied when I told the buddhist I wasn’t a monster. I am a monster and that’s
why he fled from me. To be female and claim power—to want to be accepted on
your own terms—to claim your vulnerability and fucked-upness as part of your
power—you are a monster. Lady Gaga glamorizes this, the Gurlesque performs
it in skinny femmy drag—but to put yourself out there like the female narrator
of David and Juliana’s piece, an outlaw female presence with squirting nipples
and an insatiable flabby hole—is to instill a terror that invites flight or dismissal.
This is not the realm of negative space. It’s the realm of the cunt. Is the purpose
of a cunt solely to surround something? I looked up negative space. According
to Wikipedia, it’s “the space around and between the subject(s) of an image.” The
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subject is the positive space, and everything else is negative space. Couldn’t we
see the cock as the negative space, and the hole the main event?
1/17/11
Spring Cleaning
Today I deleted the buddhist from my “contacts” on my iphone. No need to
elaborate on the significance of this.
* * *
1/21/11
Organization
Reading this morning how obsession is a way to organize your life—which makes
me think—surprise!—of the buddhist. These past few months have been devoted
to mourning him, but when we’d be in contact—invariably—it was disappointing.
He can be one cold bastard, even when he’s being “friendly.” After a series of
emails he signed “love,” he sent me one on New Years Day, saying he was thinking
of me, and signed it “with warmest regards.” When I told this to my therapist, he
burst out laughing. The buddhist’s perplexing “warmest regards” highlights how
manipulative he is, never allowing the ground to be firm, for firm ground would risk
a loss of control. He’d give up anything, even something he passionately desired, if
he felt it might cause him to lose control. Which makes him a sad person, don’t you
think? Refusing contact with him and obsessing about my mourning has been my
way of being in control. “With warmest regards” is a small thing, a mere twitch of
communication, but it was the point where I finally, finally gave up.
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Last night, around 12:30 I drove Ted to the emergency vet, as his urine was bright
red. The streets in my neighborhhood were so empty, it was me, cabs, cop cars,
single men standing on corners looking suspicious, and parking attendant carts
zooming about like hyper-enthusiastic insects, ticketing stray cars remaining in
the “NO PARKING on Fridays 12-4 a.m.” zones. The lonesomeness of South
of Market was eerie, and I thought back to 1990 when Laura Brun warned me
against moving to a warehouse district. “That’s where women get raped,” she
said. The first week in my apartment, Laura and I went for drinks at the Paradise
Lounge on Folsom and 11th, and on our way home, some guy exposed himself to
us, as if to prove Laura’s point that I’d made a big mistake. That’s never happened
since, except the one time I wrote about in Mina, where the guy exposed himself
to both Kevin and me. I’m not counting the zillions of guys I’ve seen peeing
on the sidewalk. Last night, on 12th Street, I drove past a man and a woman
on bicycles, riding side by side, taking up most of the lane, with looks of pure
pleasure on their faces. The silent stretches of street and them appearing, almost
magically, felt like a metaphor for how I’d like my mind to be.
* * *
1/22/11
Touched
Yesterday on Youtube I stumbled upon a 3-part interview with Stephen and
Ondrea Levine, who are known for their Buddhist-inflected work on death and
dying. Now they’re very ill, too sick to travel—Ondrea has leukemia and lupus,
Stephen is frail from something unspecified. After devoting their lives to the
terminally ill, it’s as if they have absorbed death and dying into their own bodies.
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They are remarkably casual about their conditions. The tone is: we’ve witnessed
it intimately, this dying thing, over and over, and now it’s our time to go through
it. Even though I’m skeptical of anybody who gives talks on spirituality, who, as
my therapist puts it, is “on the circuit,” I was touched by these two. Sure, they say,
we’ve tried to live the principles we’ve written about in our books, but we weren’t
perfect. They have the awesome groundedness of nurses, the kind of people who
clean up shit with tenderness, but not too much tenderness. The impression they
give is that their lives are in fairly close alignment to their teachings. I want to
believe this. With the buddhist, it was always disconcerting to witness the gaps
between his teachings and his life. When I was walking with him, a guy asked him
for some money. The buddhist took a dollar out of his wallet, bowed as he handed
it to the guy, and made that careful Buddhist eye contact. As we walked away, he
said, that guy’s awfully well dressed to be asking for money, I think he’s going to
use it for drugs. He went on and on about the guy and the drugs, and I—the jaded
non-Buddhist—suggested maybe he should just give the money unconditionally.
As my friend who worked in a homeless shelter once said, “Shit, if I was living
on the street, I’d use drugs too.” To me, that the guy could get it together to be
cleanly dressed does not suggest a heavy drug user. But that’s beside the point.
Part 1 of the video begins with the Levines recounting the most romantic story of
how they got together. Which made me feel all gooey for the 25 years I’ve been
with Kevin. Ours wasn’t love at first sight, but I remember when I realized it was
happening. I’d moved a couple of blocks away from Kevin, and ever since then
we’d been hanging out a few nights a week. Then on my birthday—this would be
February, 1985—I didn’t have anyone to celebrate it with, so Kevin took me out
to dinner. I wore a pale lavender knit cotton dress, and I looked at him across the
table and it hit me. I loved this guy, as improbable as it seemed. We got married
a year and a half later.
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1/23/11
A Song from a Dangerous World

When Kevin read my last post, he said, “You’re never going to get tired of writing
about how awful this guy is, are you.” But that’s not quite true. The buddhist’s sort
of wife is teaching and lecturing at a center 4 blocks from my home, which has
stirred up a lot, so this attention to him is a temporary flurry. Maybe he’s here too,
a shadowy figure in a rental car, creeping around MY streets, rather than staying
any place else, where he belongs.
On my kitchen table, I have a bamboo egg-shaped box, with a Tara figurine

sitting on top. It’s my god box. Marcus told me about god boxes, which I guess
are common among 12-steppers. You write what you’d like on a slip of paper,
date it, put it in the box and turn it over to god. I’ve not put anything in my god
box for weeks, but once I did write that I’d wanted to hear from the buddhist, and
not long after that I got a hand-written letter from him. As dedicated readers will
remember, that interaction turned out disastrously. The old be careful what you wish
for. If I were going to put a new wish about the buddhist in my god box, it would
be to never think of him again.
The title of this post is from the stage directions of “Lycanthropes/Entre Chien
et Loup,” Cecil Giscombe’s contribution to Small Press Traffic’s 10th Annual
Poets Theater Festival, to be held next weekend (January 28 and 29) at CCA.
Yesterday afternoon I was in Timken Hall to rehearse my part as “Continency,
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an angel” in David Brazil and Evan Kennedy’s play, “I Confess!: An Adaptation

of The Confessions of Saint Augustine in Six Scenes.” An ambitious play, to be
sure, but marvelous. In it Taylor Brady will play, not one, but two different trees.
Matt Gordon is designing my angel costume, and it’s still being worked out what my
relationship to Augustine’s genitals will be. David and Evan envisioned me gesturing
to them, while Kevin’s impression is that I should practically fondle them. When I
reported Kevin’s suggestion to David, he said, “We like that, go with it.”
Cecil, whose play was rehearsed before ours, was sitting in the theater, and as I
walked past him, he said, are you still going to be in my play, are you still going
to scream from the audience? I have vague recollections of volunteering to shout
from the audience, months ago, during after-reading drinks in Oakland, but I
have no memory of agreeing to do any screaming. Cecil said Giovanni Singleton
was also going to scream, and I replied, that’s perfect, she’s as repressed as I am.
Cecil said that when he told Giovanni I was going to scream, she said that I was
the best screamer.
The fear of standing on stage, dressed as an angel, interacting with St. Augustine’s
genitals, is nothing compared to my fear of sitting in the audience and screaming.
Being onstage you’re handed authority. I can cavalierly lecture, give readings, be
on panels, but I find it nearly impossible to ask a question from the audience,
where I have to claim my own authority. And the unmediated viscerality of
screaming, how do I generate that for no reason other than Cecil’s asked me
to do it, in public, how can I? I have dreams where something terrible’s about
to happen and I open my mouth to scream and nothing comes out. What if on
Saturday night I throw open my mouth and there’s nothing but silent grunts?
Giovanni’s across the auditorium, screaming her brains out, but my mouth’s a
frozen circle of failure.
* * *
1/28/11
Insubstantial Rant
Colter says he likes how the references to the buddhist go on and on, but I don’t.
This past week I’ve been consumed with anger towards the buddhist. I have no
desire to be in contact with him, so why this clinging to the connection? I’m sick as
I type this, just a cold, but miserable, and hopefully the fever of the cold will burn
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away these final buddhist stickies. When the buddhist came to visit me, there was a
raging fire in his area, and his neighborhood was being threatened with evacuation.
That evening, a mere 5 minutes from SFO, a gas line exploded in San Bruno,
sending up a “geyser of fire” (SF Chronicle). He flew from one cloud of smoke into
another. The first time we “did it” was on September 11th. Discouraging portents
abounded. Wherever it was he spent his first night in the Bay Area, he got bitten
by something and had a couple of huge, scary welts on his chest.
The buddhist is now on Facebook. I scan through his 400-some “friends.”

Among the gaggle of well-kept middle-aged women he tends to favor, is his old
girlfriend, who lives in the East Bay. They’re constantly in touch (he visited her
the same weekend he visited me)—but it’s “nothing sexual,” he offered, without
my asking. He also said she’s not gotten involved with anyone else since they
broke up over a decade ago. I click to her profile and scroll down to Relationship
Status: “In an open relationship.” My brain starts wildly deducing like Sherlock
Holmes on speed; I block the buddhist and the girlfriend. With his secrecy and
vagueness, oldtime words apply to the buddhist: lech, womanizer. He told me
that I was unusual in that I came as a surprise, and if he’d realized he was going
to be interested in me, he’d never have been so open. He joked about this whole
seduction routine he has with women. Our relationship began with my friend
dumping him, and him going into a rage. What about compassion—I wrote—
where does that fit in, being a Buddhist aren’t you supposed to feel compassion?
He thanked me for reminding him of compassion—and contacted her again
to try to patch things up, but she reaffirmed the dumping. I now appreciate her
sharp, self-preserving wisdom, to cut off all ties with such a whirlwind of messy
boundaries.
I feel the rage of someone who’s been duped in a real estate scam. This is what our
final fight was about, why he described me as a “being” whose constant mantra is
“never enough/never enough/never enough”: I suggested that I come visit him.
He lives alone, his sort of wife is two timezones away, so why not. Here’s why not:
his place is too small, too messy, there’s nothing to do in his town. I never found
out the real reason for his not wanting me there, but it soon became crystal clear
that I would never be welcome chez buddhist. It came to me in a flash that this
was not the grand life-changing passion that we’d been discussing. I was merely
one of his affairs, whom he wanted locked away in San Francisco, a girl in one of
his ports, to visit as he travels along the Buddhist teaching/speaking circuit. Even
though the sort of wife was always in the background, my involvement with him
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made me feel singular—to realize I was one of many threw me into a categorical
crisis, like seeing my doppelganger in a bathroom mirror, like Vera Miles does in
the Twilight Zone “Mirror Image” episode.
My friend recently ran into the buddhist, and he glared at her with such
antagonism she feared he’d cursed her. I’ve also feared he’s cursed me. When
he glared at her, it was like he was glaring at me as well. He hates us. She and I
have been comparing notes throughout, and we’ve taken one another’s side. If
he’d been up front with her—not lied by omission about the sort of wife—there
wouldn’t have been any tension between my friend and the buddhist. To have so
intimately let into my life someone dishonest, I feel violated. Other people have
hurt me—they couldn’t love me the way I wanted to be loved, they grew tired of
me, other aspects of their lives pulled them away from me—but my involvements
have always been what you see is what you get.
With ours being a long distance thing, I saw both more and less than if I’d come
to know the buddhist in person. More: I saw a core that was wonderful—perhaps
that basic goodness that Buddhism talks about. Less: his performativity, which in
person would have quickly sent me running, was not so apparent long distance. It
was hard to talk to him. I’d be chatting away, or I’d ask him a question—and he’d
give me a long, complacent Buddhist smile and remain silent, so that, like a puppy
in training, I’d fall in step beside him, muted and waiting for his next command.
I came to love Kevin because we could talk endlessly—about anything—no topic

was boring or taboo. I think of my road trip with Bett—we spent four days talking
pretty much nonstop, a delightful, open exchange. I think of Monday’s dinner
and tarot reading with Marcus, the rush of excitement to catch up. I think of
visiting Matt’s studio Wednesday night, of taking in the panoramic view atop
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Bernal Hill, of sharing a greasy Vietnamese crepe, chattering and guffawing—life

felt so easy and open. Open and open and open—this has been the tone of my
relationships and friendships.
This rant is the final rant about the buddhist, it has to be. As my guide Tiffany
said—so you called this one wrong—let go of it. Poof ! That I could love so deeply
when given so little, does not mean I’m pathetic. It’s a testament to—if not the
largeness of—the creativity of my heart. My friend said that though the buddhist
looms iconic on my blog, in real life he’s like a dust ball or sagebrush. So here he
is, insubstantial and lacy, tumbling out of sight, my anger swirling along with him,
a faint, dusty aura.
2/2/11
Turn Of
I have notes for an(other) over-the-top ending for the buddhist vein/book, but
this late-ish morning isn’t, as he would say, an “auspicious” time to finish it off.
Planning and designing an entry rather than writing it off the top of my head—
the bookishness of the project is steering it towards Real Writing; then it begins
to sound like work and thus something to be put off. I’d rather just lie in bed and
read and write embarrassing thoughts in my journal. Rather than embarrassing
thoughts in public. When people tell me they read my blog, I sometimes wince
in embarrassment. Saturday night, when Cecil Giscombe told me he read what I
wrote about him here, I winced. When I think of students or colleagues reading
it, I wince. But when I remember Bett and Bhanu and Ariana and Donna and
Marcus and Colter, and a big handful of others both known and unknown, who
I feel I’m making a heart connection with, then I don’t wince.
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One thing this project has made me realize is that my need to love is even stronger
than my need to be loved. That’s why I cannot stop loving the buddhist; that’s why
I keep repeating these futile gestures. It doesn’t matter that the buddhist no longer
reciprocates my love, or wants it—or at this point would even believe it—my love
is there, burning orange-red, like an ember in the core of my rage. The futility of
my love. The futility of this blog. I hope the buddhist (the book) will be interesting,
but I have no illusions it will be great literature. Which is fine—so many people I
know are writing against the notion of greatness—I talk against it myself. But still
the concept of Masterpiece is branded into my mind; thus the spectre of failure
arises; thus my excitement when at Naropa’s summer writing program, Anna
Moschovakis taught her seminar/workshop on failure. Seize the tenderness by
the balls. Throughout the course of my boomer education, the canon was firmly
in place. The Great Books of the Western World. I was not even aware of the
canon being questioned until I was an undergrad. (Let’s all bow down and say
a prayer to Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics.) It’s exhausting—and I’m sure I’m not
alone in this—to continue to think and feel so many things I know better than.
Sometimes I feel so struggling Turn of the Century, like Colette’s Léa in the Chéri
books, an aging courtesan who finds herself in a world where she’s becoming an
anachronism. How much change can anyone stand in a lifetime?
2/5/11
The Sound of One Wing Flapping

Last Saturday, I managed to put on Matt Gordon’s dish drainer/shower curtain
angel costume and play Continency in David Brazil and Evan Kennedy’s stage
adaptation of the Confessions of St. Augustine. The costume also included a blue
terrycloth turban and the largest T-shirt I’ve ever seen, longer than mid-thigh; it
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was white with a huge red cross on the chest, LIFE GUARD printed above it in
big red block letters. Rather than messing with clothing changes, I just wore the
huge LIFE GUARD shirt with a long charcoal gray nubby cashmere cardigan, a
brown flared wool maxi-skirt, and rustic brown boots. I got many, like at least five,
compliments on my outfit. And I’m all, no no no, this isn’t an outfit, this is part of
a costume. I was appalled that people would think I’d dress like that on purpose.
Then I was thinking maybe I should dress more outlandishly, I’m privileged with
a lifestyle where I could totally go outlandish, like I could become a super-sized
lowbudget Kathy Acker and nobody would blink an eye.
Yesterday I walked from my home to CCA, 27 minutes from door to door, and
afterwards I walked from CCA to SF Camerawork to meet Colter, 42 minutes.
It was a beautiful day, and even though neither walk is particularly attractive, I
enjoyed the blueness of the sky and the freshness. Given the weird topography
of South of Market, the quickest way to get to CCA is to take a counter-
intuitive route that only someone who lives in the neighborhood could possibly
manage. I was reminded of being a kid, the meandering “shortcuts” I would
take on my way to school, the intimacy I had with the landscape, my delight
yesterday encountering hedges of bamboo in the Design District, their spiky
stalks both fragile and imposing. I walked past the courthouse on Bryant and
7th, with its neighboring bail bondsmen and fastfood places, and I thought of
Cecil Giscombe’s essay on the TV series The Fugitive, which was published in the
1994 anthology A Poetics of Criticism (eds. Juliana Spahr, Mark Wallace, Kristin
Prevallet, Pam Rehm)—how Cecil presents in trouble as a state of being/a state
of mind. Entering Yerba Buena Gardens I was hit with a flush of pink flowering
trees. Colter thinks they’re plum blossoms.
Colter and I were meeting about the buddhist book. Last week he (Colter) emailed
me a passage from Proust:
Even when one is no longer attached to things, it’s still something to have
been attached to them; because it was always for reasons which other
people didn’t grasp. . . Well, now that I’m a little too weary to live with
other people, these old feelings, so personal and individual, that I had in
the past, seem to me—it’s the mania of all collectors—very precious. I
open my heart to myself like a sort of vitrine, and examine one by one
all those love affairs of which the world can know nothing. And of this
collection to which I’m now much more attached than to my others, I
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say to myself, rather as Mazarin said of his books, but in fact without the
least distress, that it will be very tiresome to have to leave it all.
Colter added:
I thought of you when i read this. . . . I hope I wasn’t insensitive when i

said that i like the constant return in the blog of the buddhist. It was also
meant to be an observation that while you are editing the buddhist blog,
it also seems to be growing. A blog can go on forever (scrolling scrolling
scrolling) but a book ENDS. I know you are IN the thick of it. It being
your feelings in negotiating this thing called buddhist. I think it brave
and vulnerable. I feel that you are making the reasons graspable (see
second line of quote above). I think people appreciate this because we
can so relate to it; there’s always someone in our life whose relationship
was left unresolved and complicated and so much time is spent weighing
what happened . . . till it becomes almost an abstraction.
Colter signed his email “much love,” such a contrast to the buddhist’s final insipid
valediction, “with warmest regards.” Let’s pause here for a moment of sadness.
Writing about the buddhist has done much to release my anger towards him.
Words transform him from person to character. Still, as Colter notes, like the
blog he goes on and on, and yes, we all have so many of these incessant flows
of psychic charge. Thus the appeal of the narrative arc, its seductive fantasy of
resolution, termination. The narrative arc fuels our longing for a meaningful
death. The narrative arc doesn’t just slam into a wall and end. It ends in a way
that makes sense. Thus my attempts over and over to write an ending to the
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buddhist—the blog, the book, the person. When he read in my last post, “This
rant is the final rant about the buddhist, it has to be,” Kevin rolled his eyes. “How
many times have you said this is the last one? Four? Five?” “People like that,” I
replied, defensively. “It’s a trope.”
The night I played the angel, I was so sick I was worried I couldn’t leave the
house, or if I even had the energy to stand up in the shower long enough to
wash my hair—but I pulled it together because I had a mission, my role gave me
strength. I think of stories of people who should have been long dead, but they
keep hanging on because they have a compelling purpose. People used to say that
Bob Flanagan, year after year, was the oldest living person with cystic fibrosis
because his art gave him a reason to live.
I can no longer hang on to the buddhist—the book, the person, or the blog. May
I be wiped clean of all griping, abandonment, desire, melancholy, and rage. In
this ending I hear the voice of an Angel commanding, Let not your heart be
overcharged with anger and desire. But remember that we are dust, and that of
dust the buddhist was lost and is found. And I reply, Yes, mine Angel, he whom
I so loved, saying this through the inbreathing of thine inspiration, is of the
same dust as my dust. I can do all things through him that strengtheneth me.
Strengthen me, mine Angelic life guard, that I can give what thou enjoinest,
and enjoin what thou wilt. Thou knowest on this matter the groans of my heart,
and the floods of mine eyes. O Angel of Continency! All my hope is no where
but in thine exceeding great mercy. Verily are we bound up and brought back
into one, whence we were dissipated into many. For too little doth the buddhist
love me, who loves any thing but me, which he loveth not for me. O love, who
ever burnest and never consumest! O charity, mine Angel! kindle me. Thou wilt
increase thy gifts more and more in me, that my soul may follow me to thee,
disentangled from the bird-lime of rage. Thou shalt slay my emptiness with a
wonderful fullness, and clothe this corruptible with an eternal incorruption. By
thy abundant grace to quench the impure motions of my mind, I despiseth the
buddhist no longer, and thus I cry unto him, in all the fullness of my heart, “With
warmest regards!”
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2/20/11
One More
I’m in 40-days-in-the-desert mode, meaning I’m being very alone. I was horribly
depressed until I accepted this is what I need to be doing, and once I gave myself
permission to spend as much time as possible alone, it switched into this really
good space. I feel protected, fortressed. Just about done with the first round of
editing the buddhist. Will then print it out and, for the first time, read any of it off
the screen. A gradual manifestation from cyber abstraction to book. Went to see
William E. Jones at SFMOMA last Thursday, and he bemoaned porn’s switch
from tape and DVD to the internet, said he liked to hold the object in his hand. I
loved Jones’ focus on the marginal and the discarded. I’m thinking of writing one
last blog post, that will only be in the book. The opposite trajectory of my first
book, The Letters of Mina Harker, where the first letter is the only one that wasn’t
mailed. In the buddhist the final post will have never been posted. This may or may
not happen. I spent hours yesterday sitting up in bed, jotting down notes for it
in my journal. Part of the time, Kevin was taking a nap, lying beside me under
a tomato red blanket, sleep breathing, and Ted and Sylvia were lying at my feet,
and I thought to myself I have so much.
2/27/11
Walk a Mile in My Shoes

Driving down Van Ness for a chiropractic appointment, I wait for the light at
Market. A guy crosses the street, walking with a jumpy step to a brisk beat that’s
coming from somewhere inside him, then comes an old woman, bent over with
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a scarved head, hobbling slowly—shuffle, shuffle—and suddenly the gaits of all

the pedestrians seem choreographed, like in West Side Story when the gangs dance-
walk down the street—now there’s a man and a woman, side by side, legs moving
in unison, and the light changes, and I stare at it all. The vividness morphing
outside the bubble of my car is so exciting it’s frightening, and I think, this is what
Real Writing does for you—it throws open the shades and life comes streaming
through in such glory. No high compares to writer’s high.
I’m sitting in the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, on a beautiful,
bright, cold day. I’m bundled up, sipping genmai cha and miso soup, and nibbling
small rectangles of very soft, fresh mochi—lychee, mango, strawberry. I’m facing
a tree and a small brook. I get out my iphone and snap a totally touristy picture.
I hold my fountain pen with a freezing hand and write in my journal, wondering
if I could manage it with gloves on. I compare myself to the Situationists, doing
something random, out of the ordinary—I wasn’t planning to go to the park,
but after Karen worked on me for an hour, I was too queasy to eat lunch or
drive home, so sought the comfort of fresh air. Lying on the table, I had a small
panic attack, and Karen wondered how my externally rotated leg was affecting
my sympathetic nervous system. The cold has left the tea garden blessedly
underpopulated—a scattering of families and couples. I’m the only person who
seems to be alone. As I walked here, I remembered the one other time I strolled
through the park after the chiropractor—it was such an event, I worked it into
the Shamanism article I was writing for thefanzine.com. I also thought of hippies
dropping acid, free concerts, of Zen teacher Reb Anderson jogging through the
park and finding a dead body, and taking the gun lying beside the body, and the
scandal that ensued. At the entrance to the park, I paused, remembering being
here with the buddhist, we were going to a show at the De Young, but he’d gotten
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the date wrong and it hadn’t opened yet—some Impressionist, which didn’t excite
me—growing up a short train ride to the Chicago Art Institute, I’ve had my fill
of Impressionism—haystack, haystack, haystack. This afternoon, standing there
at the park’s entrance, I almost turned around and left, I couldn’t bear to revisit
his ghost, the trails of our movements along this same sidewalk, his arm wrapped
around my shoulder, my waist. And then I thought about all the other people I’d
walked with through the park in the 30 years I’ve lived in San Francisco—a long
line of ghosts—and I said to myself why focus on the buddhist’s ghost in this
realm of ghosts, and I continued along, drinking in the many shades of green.
After I finish my green tea and mochi—not until I’m exiting the park, jazz trumpet
in the distance, will I realize I didn’t pay for my food—I wander through the tea
garden, enjoying how it loops back on itself—almost mazelike the way the trails
split and reunite, you think you’ve experienced it all, and then there appears a
path under the arched stone crossing you traversed a while ago. On a flat wooden
footbridge, some teenage girls are staging a photoshoot of themselves tossing
pennies into the shallow pond below. “Turn this way more before you make your
wish.” I look down and see coins scattered beneath the water, take two pennies out
of my wallet, and as I throw them in I wish for peace with the buddhist. I assume
that peace, if it is to come, is something I’ll do alone. When I contacted him in
December, he’d just returned from Japan, and when I asked him if he enjoyed his
trip, he wrote back that his “wounds” were so fresh, he was leery of emailing me
even something benign as yes, Japan was fantastic. He said he was frightened of my
emails, that the only reason he read this one was it was sent on the lunar eclipse, an
auspicious time. His projections on me were so thick it was like trying to maneuver
through mud, I didn’t have the energy, the patience for it/him.
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A few days ago I received a distressed email from my friend who’s also on the
outs with the buddhist, after running into him outside the shrine room where she
works:
But he has taken to just staring at me now—when he sees me. Then I

didn’t want to depress you in birthday week—but there was a shoes/
Sharon Salzberg incident. I go up the stairs, I’m late and he’s just sitting
there—everyone is inside, and he’s OUTSIDE—sitting—meditating?—
in the SHOES. It was very awkward. He just looked at me and didn’t look
away. I thought that was a bit aggressive. Always unspoken in those stares
is the fact of the blog, your blog . . . . What was he doing in the shoes?
Water ripples over my pennies—I imagine it’s me who stumbles upon the buddhist,
meditating among the shoes. I pay no heed to his glares, take off my Fluevogs and
toss them among the pile. Without saying a word, I sit down, crosslegged, beside
him on the floor and turn my attention to my breath. As I type this, on the radio
Lady Gaga sings, “Caught in a bad romance.”
* * *
3/4/11
Lapdance
Ariana Reines sends me a copy of the poem she wrote for The Air We Breathe, an
upcoming exhibition that explores same-sex marriage. For the show’s catalogue,
SFMOMA commissioned poems from George Albon, Will Alexander, John
Ashbery, kari edwards, Anne Waldman, Ariana, and, collaboratively, Kevin and
me. Ariana’s poem begins:
Why shouldn’t Kevin Killian

Be able to marry the Bolivian
President Evo Morales if he wants to, and still stay married
To Dodie Bellamy too, why not?
Her poem is nine pages long and far-ranging, but what stands out for me is all the
cocks and fucking, her poem makes me long to write about cocks and fucking too.
I’m sitting up in bed typing on a laptop that’s actually on my lap, like in a movie,
or like students on the couches in the entranceway to the Writer’s Center at CCA,
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sitting side by side, staring into laptops balanced on thighs, nobody’s talking, and
as night falls no one bothers to turn on the lights. Lit by the glow of their screens,
student faces look eerie, like the laptops are vacuuming their brains. If I were still
writing The Letters of Mina Harker I’d come up with a few lines about how sexy the
laptop is, how I’m pecking words straight into my cunt and fucking the computer
is so great, this total Barthesian lapdance my language trembles with desire and then
I’d spin out and out, pastiching in movies and a passage from Deleuze with all the
verbs changed to fuck—back in the 90s I was so much more impressive, or at least I
tried to be, but my cunt isn’t going to be fucking anything, I’ve got a dermatological
condition going on down there and no it isn’t any STD that Kaiser has a test for,
but first they thought it was herpes, and I was sure I got it from the buddhist, and
rage like I’ve rarely experienced welled in my body, bouncing up and down from
chakra to chakra like a crazed pinball flip flip flip flip flap flip flap fucking irresponsible
Buddhists I raged, at least I didn’t sleep with the Regent I spat out sarcastically, referring
to Trungpa Rinpoche’s successor, who knowing he was infected with HIV had sex
with all these students, most of them straight guys, and passed it on to one of them,
who passed it on to his girlfriend before he died. It is not the slumber of reason that fucks
monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality. In this one tiny thing the buddhist was
innocent, I don’t have herpes so he couldn’t have given it to me, but I hated him
when I thought I had it and hating him was much easier than not hating him, hate
is like the black of emotions, black swallows all colors so they no longer exist, and
so it is with hate—heartbreak and weepiness twirl away in the murk of hate.
There is no fucking in the gay marriage poem that Kevin and I composed—he
and I have already fucked so much in writing, does anybody want to hear more of
it? Ariana: I am often a voluptuary, a vat of mushy ideas and disgusting feelings, and I have
resented the cleanliness and elegance of tight and perfect writing. I have felt that writing should be
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dirtier and more excessive. I think of the unposted ending I wrote for the buddhist book,
how I was going to pull out all the plugs, but instead I wrote a prim, almost sweet
conclusion. Should I insert the buddhist’s cock into the ending? The buddhist’s
cock is in the beginning, before the blog. Is that enough buddhist cock? Or could
the buddhist’s cock provide a satisfying framing device? It was weird with him in
that up until right before we got together in person, he was all sexually repressive,
would squelch any overt sexual references from me, even after it was declared
that we were going to be lovers—it was always it’s not time yet to do “lovers’ flirtation,”
as he called it. When he was reading Mina, I was worried he’d think I was a slut
and wouldn’t like me any more, me with my dirty mouth—I know, this is really
fucked up that I’d allow myself to feel this way but I think so many fucked up
things—and then a couple of days before he was supposed to fly here he said it
was a particularly auspicious night, so maybe we could try something new on the
phone, and somehow he had his pants unzipped and his sake set down beside his
bed, and I removed my pants and said what do you want, and he said maybe you
could come for me, and I said okay, and I’m working on myself, and he’s being
silent on the other end of the line, and I said do you want to help me with this,
and he said he didn’t know what to say—I haven’t had a lot of phone sex, maybe
four other people, and they all had lots to say, but the buddhist was silent, so I
tried to work that, really delve into the masochism of my discomfort at his silence,
and then I came, a languorous, swampy orgasm, and he seemed touched, beside
himself with tenderness and appreciation. That’s what’s missing in the buddhist
book, our tenderness and joy—the baseline, as I would call it in class, against
which loss can be gauged and felt—there was so much joy, months and months
of it—he was my person, as Eileen Myles put it last September, after her reading
at Modern Times, over tea—there are tons of wonderful intelligent witty sexy
attractive caring people in the world, there are sweet friends who love me, and
there are even fans who make me blush with their praise—but the buddhist was
my person, the eye around which all the others spun. That’s one version.
Ariana writes to me, “i am sending you a lot of love.” As if love were the easiest
thing in the world to send. I’m more like my abandoned cat Ted, hiding under
the bed, green eyes glowing, not sure if I dare allow you to pet me. On my way
to the vet, a gray, boxy van is parked on Harrison, handwritten on its side is EAT
PUSSY NOT COW, and I think this is a gift from the universe to this poem (dare
I call this a poem?). EAT PUSSY NOT COW perfectly resonates with Ariana’s
first book The Cow, an exploration of the violence perpetrated against cow/
woman—before I met her she mailed me a copy whose cover she spray-painted
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gold, concealing the slaughterhouse photo, it was like a valentine, her making
the world pretty for me. Ariana: Fleshy pink hood over those long lips. The weekend I
fucked the buddhist, Ariana was in town giving a reading, but I didn’t see her, I
was with him. During our sex scenes, feel her energy in the background, a sheer
milky blue veil glittering with gold dust. It’s hard to appear normal when you’re
in the thick of writing. One thing I envy about Ariana is her ability to create a
persona where some craziness is taken for granted. I lie to a student I’m meeting
and dart to the bathroom to jot down notes for this piece.
After I finished coming over the phone, the buddhist said this will make things
easier for us when we meet, but it didn’t. There was that huge fight the day of his
arrival, and after dinner that evening, when we went to his hotel room and made
out on the bed with our clothes on, and he was masturbating me through my
tights, I couldn’t relax, like how do I flip from “sexual expression is inappropriate”
Dodie to sex fiend Dodie, with no transition, it was like those dreams where I can’t
wake up, and I get out of bed to turn on the light, but my body isn’t solid and
the light switch passes right through my hand, and I try over and over to turn on
the light but it won’t budge—replace light switch with my arousal and you’ll see
what it was like. That first night I did manage to come, it was a distant orgasm,
but it really was going to happen, him rubbing my clit through my tights, but the
moment I climaxed, instead of rocking my cunt, the orgasm shot up into my head
and I got the worst headache, accompanied by horrible nausea, and I had to run
to the bathroom and take a shit. As he drove me home it took all my willpower
not to puke in his car. It’s because you’re nervous, he said—but it seems like more
than that to me, it’s like my body was throwing a tantrum, my body was saying—
not this controlling cheater, no way. My body and I often don’t agree. The next
night it was pressure pressure pressure for me to come, but I couldn’t come—I’d
tell him to stop coercing me, and he’d agree, but then he’d try something new and
as soon as I’d show any sign of pleasure he’d do whatever it was twice as hard
and twice as fast and say are you going to come, and I’d say no, and he’d say some
women like this. You wouldn’t think a Buddhist would be so goal-oriented. I kept
waiting for his abandon, his arousal, a frenzied wave I could ride home on—his
cock was hard throughout so I assume something was happening for him, and
I said why don’t you come, it would be nice if you came. See him kneeling on
the bed, naked, peering at me suspiciously. “Oh, so you want me to go first,” he
exclaimed, as if he had got my number. The weekend ended with neither of us
finding closure. I thought—for this to work, we need time, a lot of time. But there
was no time. Afterwards I was worried that sex with the buddhist had somehow
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ruined me, and I was both eager and leery to hook up with Kevin, not sure if it
still all worked down there. It did. Ariana’s poem makes me feel prudish—but
after a certain age I stopped seeing the world through my cunt, the buddhist made
me feel the world through my cunt again, I was horny all the time, it was irritating
and exhilarating, he liked it when I told him I was horny, and he admitted to being
horny as well, getting an erection during group meditation, and I asked him, how
do Buddhists feel about erections during meditation, is that a bad thing, or is it
just considered an experience, but he didn’t answer me.
Barthes on striptease: The dance, consisting of ritual gestures which have been seen a
thousand times, acts on movements as a cosmetic, it hides nudity, and smothers the spectacle under
a glaze of superfluous yet essential gestures.
I finish editing the buddhist, drive to Kaiser, remembering to look at the beauty, and
my heart opens—I think of the buddhist, feel loss, start crying. I’m crying so much
I can’t parallel park, “tap” the car behind me so hard its alarm goes off, I speed
away in search of a larger space. I want to trust myself. I want to love myself. I
want to take care of myself. I attend William E. Jones’ artist talk at SFMOMA.
A couple of the “movies,” Killed and Punctured, use found Depression Era archival
government footage of everyday life. Many are by famous photographers early in
their careers. A power-hungry bureaucrat, Roy Emerson Stryker, destroyed the
images he didn’t approve by punching holes in the negatives. Stryker called this
“killing” the negatives. Jones animates prints of these killed negatives, focusing on
the holes. In Killed, the black hole dances across the screen. In Punctured, the hole
remains in the center of the screen, it fills the screen, then shrinks down, revealing
an image, fills the screen, shrinks down, a rhythm that makes me increasingly
anxious. Even in the most exuberant moment, the hole is always waiting—
eventually it will expand—it always expands—to swallow the image/person/me.
I remember the buddhist in Catch, the restaurant where I first arranged to meet
him, this suddenly materialized body I knew I was going to fuck, sitting across
from me, peering with aggressive innocence over the tops of his wire-rims—a
black hole punched in his right shoulder.
The buddhist said he loved me when we were fighting as much as when we

were purring to one another, he said he loved all parts of me, all moods of our
interaction. And I believed him. I could tell him anything, I could be any way with
him and he would still love me. My therapist’s response to this: when things seem
too good to be true, they are too good to be true. Anals of official philosophy are fucked
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by bureaucrats of pure reason. The buddhist’s attention was so dazzling I felt like the
star of a reality TV show, the fat woman who has an extreme makeover—ugly
parts are cut away, new parts are stitched on, then she’s coached into fitness and
retooled by a team of beauty experts—for the grand finale all her friends and
family gather to witness the unveiling of the gussied up version—she is stunning,
a bride to her dream self. Then the cameras and support staff vanish, leaving her
to deal with the profound loneliness of ordinary life. Standing in line at Safeway I
vacantly stare at a magazine cover featuring three former contestants from a series
about pregnant teens, now that the show is over their lives are falling apart—
depression, drug addiction, boob jobs. I look at Kevin beside me, peacefully
sleeping in the navy cashmere cap I bought him for his birthday—I get a hit of his
otherness and his sweetness and it pangs my heart—with this incredible love, right
here, that slaps me in the face on a daily basis, what was the point of the buddhist?
He made me feel sexy special exciting—traits I don’t particularly try to convey,
like I’m over such staginess—but I must still crave it, must still long to be that
dazzling woman beneath the klieg lights—all eyes turning to watch, to delight
in Her/Me. For women, God is always about the gaze. Little ones to him belong, for
they are weak and he is strong. Jesus loves our weaknesses, but God loves our glamour.
Love is not complex and ornate, love is not sophisticated. Love is simple-minded, an
animal drive. Anything with a central nervous system can love. In The Mahasiddha
and His Idiot Servant, Trungpa Rinpoche’s butler, John Riley Perks, writes of how
his encounters with Trungpa Rinpoche enabled him to attain spiritual awareness
from “eating” pussy:
I began to realize that the energy was directed into my mouth—first from
the stomach becoming like a valley and then expanding into a mountain
before rushing in a river of great force into my body. I began to realize
that I was dealing with energy that was beyond self-attachment, that it
was primal and existed in the universe everywhere; that it did not belong
to a self; that it was rather like electricity, which does not have a self; that
in order to experience it, self had to be surrendered.
When I read this I was reminded how impersonal sex with the buddhist felt—I’m
lying beside him, naked, he’s on his back, and I say, “You and I need to approach
things from a heart connection, that’s what it’s always been about between us, a
heart connection.” He acts surprised, says, “Doesn’t that usually come afterward?”
I imagine Buddhists around the world, having their nonattached, two-sentient-
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beings sex—and limp in the aftermath of their exhausting performances, looking

at one another and going, wow, you’re not just anybody, you’re you, I have touched
the miracle of you. It gives me a cramp in the neck to write with the computer on
my lap, the heat and weight of it on my thighs makes me want to watch porn,
on a giant couch are two men who look vaguely like the buddhist, with a very
enthusiastic blonde woman lying between them, she’s facing the camera, one guy
is on his knees fucking her, her right leg is straight up in the air, against the guy’s
chest so we can get a good view of the works—she has her head in the other guy’s
lap—in order to continue facing us, her mouth remains parallel to the cock’s
shaft, but the guy is so enormously hung she is able to curve the cock around
and stick the tip between her lips, then she takes in more and more of it, it looks
impossible to suck a cock at this angle, but here she is—the woman with her right
leg poking in the air like an exclamation mark, the blown guy with his cock bent
backwards into a C—the only one who doesn’t look awkward is the guy on his
knees fucking her—by far the least interesting of the triad of woman and two
buddhists—eventually they all move together as one long grunting wave, I come,
not the hardest orgasm I’ve ever had, but perhaps the most extended, riding the
image’s wave, I feel inside it, laptop trembling.
The buddhist used to live in the Bay Area, and we deduced that in the 80s we’d
both been in the same room twice—to see Jane Gallop at San Francisco State (he
remembers her wearing a pink satin skirt, I remember a pink satin blouse) and
the Spicer conference at New College. Not long after the Spicer conference, while
exiting the number 15 bus, downtown at 3:00 in the afternoon, I got attacked by a
guy—I glanced at him when I boarded the bus: wire-rims and backpack, I thought
probably a college student I thought benign. There was no instigating moment, the guy
ran after me as I stepped off the bus, yelling crazy shit I couldn’t understand and
hitting me on the back. On the crowded, brightly lit corner, nobody helped me.
He eventually quit pounding on me and walked away, still yelling. Fast-forward
to 2011—in my rage at the buddhist for giving me the hypothetical herpes, it
strikes me the wire-rimmed guy resembles a younger version of the buddhist.
I remember with an ah-ha! that buddhist was a college student when he lived
here—and then it comes back to me, the geomancy incident—to help put himself
through school, the buddhist worked part-time as a security guard, so on the job
he was writing a research paper for a “friend,” about geomancy, and the energy
of geomancy reached up through his words and overcame him—he started
shaking and having visions—he was so out of it his “friend” had to come pick
him up. That could have been him, in his geomancy craze, right there, at the
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bus stop at 3rd and Market, pummeling me for being in the wrong place at the
wrong time. That I was wearing the same bright blue dress I wore to the Spicer
conference sealed the case against the buddhist. Even though it was my favorite,
I never wore that dress again. Ariana: Does a resemblance really mean anything./ The
world rhymes too much. Maybe.
It’s a tragedy the buddhist has such a nice cock. Last summer I dreamt it was
huge and shaped like a pelican’s beak, and I could never figure out what that
meant, like I have no associations with pelicans, except that I used to use a Pelikan
fountain pen, so maybe my dream was predicting that the buddhist’s cock would
inspire my writing? A beak is a hard, scary mouth. The cock beak is speaking
to me right now, it’s saying you’re a bitch for writing this nasty, personal shit.
When I applied for a job at UC Santa Cruz, a friend on the search committee
told me he fought for four hours to get me a second interview, but I was denied it
because of the sex in my writing; when a friend who worked at New Directions
submitted Mina for me, the editor liked it, but said a book with that much sex
had “a snowball’s chance in hell” of being published there; and before I was
asked to blog for SFMOMA it was deemed necessary to get preapproval by higher
ups, due to the content of my work. And now, here’s Ariana fucking right in the
middle of an SFMOMA catalogue. How did she approach the impossible task of
writing a poem about gay marriage—by being unapologetically herself, by not
even considering cleaning herself up. Language is not made to be believed but to be fucked.
Kevin’s and my poem is straightlaced by contrast. My portions are rendered in
totally flat prose blocks inspired by arguments I had with the buddhist about his
use of the word “partner,” of straight people coopting the word “partner.” Kevin
sprung open my critique, inserting oblique allusions and images ranging from
cherry blossoms to Walt Whitman, which he broke into lines and floated across
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the page. Our poem uses the page as a field, he declared. I said we were subverting
gender roles, I was enacting logocentrism and Kevin was adding the flutter. Before
he met me the buddhist got it in his head that I was the grande dame of the Bay
Area experimental writing scene—an overestimation of my position, for sure.
“Grande dame” sounds so stodgy—when all I ever wanted was to be feral, feral
for me equals writing—my problem has always been how to enact the feral in a
bourgeois world I wasn’t raised to navigate. The buddhist wasn’t raised in it either,
but he was groomed for it, prep school, ivy league—he speaks with the careful
diction of someone who’s had oration lessons—his feral is so buried it would take
eons to unearth it—but I did see a flash when I was humping his leg, when he
growled in a voice way deeper than his norm, something like oh yeah fuck me
baby—I found that part so intriguing, I was frustrated by my own stiff virginal
behavior, a Lady Chatterley who never gets her act together.
I don’t have gonorrhea hepatitis syphilis herpes or HIV. It took 3 visits to the
doctor to figure out that my raw and blistered crotch is a bacteria infection,
probably MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus), pronounced
Mersa. My doctor says, don’t worry, the news media exaggerates how many
people die from this, we’re not just seeing it in gay men, we’re seeing it in all
sorts of people now, we have it on our skin. Mersa sounds a lot like mercy, don’t
you think? Wednesday is a good day to go to Kaiser, that’s when they hold their
weekly farmer’s market outside the entrance to the hospital. As my doctor labels
the culture sample she swabbed from the crack of my ass, she says, you gotta
try the oranges, the oranges have been excellent lately, she bought two bags,
one for herself, and the other she left in the breakroom for the staff. Afterwards
I walk across the street and buy a navel orange, perfectly sweet and glistening
like an orange jewel in the rainy afternoon. Inflammation is distress rising to
the surface of the body, the skin swells reddens and erupts, pus flows in rivulets.
Inflammation is the body weeping. After Akilah Oliver’s death, Ariana asked
on her blog, Did we love her enough? In Ariana’s comment box I wrote, do
we ever love anybody enough? I was born on a rainy Wednesday afternoon—
my father rushed from the construction site to the hospital—this man whose
treatment of me amounted to consistent, systematic psychological torture—this
man rushed to the hospital, his heart racing with joy to behold his daughter, his
miracle. Writing this makes me cry, and since I’m planning to read this piece
in a couple of weeks in New York and Philadelphia, I worry I’ll start crying
in public. Writing this, I keep imagining CA Conrad in the front row, listening
intently, offering up courage, sometimes no one else is in the room, just Conrad.
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In Ariana’s gay marriage poem Bach says “Ich habe/Genug.” I’ve had enough.
Clearly Bach was not a woman—I’ve never known a woman who’s had enough.
My cunt flesh belches and fissures, torques itself inside out—this is the carnage of
abandoned love—sex is dangerous, the buddhist told me over and over again—
my cunt drools and spews, its juices glistening like a perfect orange on a rainy
afternoon, my cunt shrieks never enough never enough never enough. When
the cultures come back from the lab it turns out I don’t have MRSA but Strep
Pyogenes, the other germ that can morph into flesh-eating bacteria. A woman
goes to the hospital to deliver her baby, she wakes up in a fog, and when she
peers beneath her hospital gown all the skin of her belly is gone and she can see
her internal organs, wrapped in yellow Saran wrap. Ariana: What happens to the
world when a body is a bag of stuff you can empty out of it. It will be two years and 40
or 50 operations before the woman can eat anything. Her first meal is lasagna,
zucchini, salad and cake. “I love this salad,” she says. “It is amazing to actually
be able to chew something and to have different flavors in your mouth.” I’m
doing the dishes, white cashmere infinity scarf wrapped 3 times around my neck,
Pandora is playing Neil Young and I dance and wash, dance and wash. I think of
my piece in Academonia about washing the dishes while drinking sake and listening
to Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man—it was this short essay that made the buddhist
interested in me. The buddhist often drank sake while writing to me, and I took
this as a tribute—but later I read that sake was Trungpa Rinpoche’s drink of
choice, and then I imagined the buddhist had been drinking sake while writing to
women long before he’d ever heard of me. Neil Young whines It’s gonna take a lotta
love and I’m filled with ideas for the ending to the buddhist book, so many ideas, I
can’t contain them, I grab my journal, not bothering to dry off, and scrawl and
scrawl, wet hand looping and trailing across the page—ink smears, threatening
illegibility, and everything pauses for a moment as I stare at my bleeding words—
not their meaning, but the wonder of wet hands on paper—then it starts up
again Gotta lotta love/Gotta lotta love and I plunge back into warm soapy water.
Colter writes that he’s found 8 typos in the buddhist manuscript. He adds:
It’s so much more enjoyable to read it printed out rather than on the
blog. That may be just my feeling. I almost always approach a blog
hurriedly, anxious, wanting to complete it like an email so as to get
to the next online thing. And most often, I don’t approach the laptop
just to read blogs. A blog will be a periphery of checking messages on
Facebook or something, marginal or like a footnote, you know? I think
with the printed page we tend to approach it in preparation.
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This is me, Dodie, approaching you with preparation. All my klieg lights are
turned on you. The miracle of you. My cock beak says: Moistest mouth is cow’s
mouth sorrow face normal. This is me Dodie stuffing the black hole in your shoulder
with printed love.
* * *
145
IMAGES

1 Colter Jacobsen, hollow Buddha texted-phone-image
10 Colter Jacobsen, Dammed, graphite drawing, 2010
19 Bruno Fazzolari, Untitled (2001-2004)
20 Dodie Bellamy’s feet with cats, 2010
24 Dodie Bellamy as child, 1958
26 Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Saint Teresa in Ecstasy (1647-1652)
27 Scroll of the Hungry Ghosts, 12th century
28 still from Miss March, 2009
29 crone (artist unknown)
32 still from unknown opera
36 Dodie Bellamy as corpse bride, 2005, photo: Kevin Killian
38 still from Bruce Connor’s White Rose, 1967
39 detail of frieze from the Villa of Mysteries, Pompeii, ca. 60-50 BCE
41 still from Room at the Top, 1959

42 Billie Holiday
43 still from St. Louis Blues, 1929
45 still from Creature from Black Lagoon, 1954
48 Anna Magnani
50 Marcus Ewert, 2010
50 Neil Young
51 Lindsey Boldt, 2010
53 eye, 2010
58 Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche
59 Winifred and Dodie Bellamy, 1951
60 Sylvia on desk, 2010
61 bar scene: Dorothea Lasky, Clay Banes, Cecil Giscombe, 2010
68 still from White Zombie, 1932
70 diagram of cyclonic separation
71 Neil LeDoux, vexadrone 1 (bunnies)
75 Lamar Hawkins and Donal Mosher, 2009
77 Eva Hesse, No title, 1960
79 Tariq Alvi, detail from sculptural piece
85 belladodie blog on laptop, with journal notes, 2010
87 rose alphabet: the letter G
87 still from Kathe Izzo’s True Love
88 ibid.
91 Bettye LaVette
92 video chat image of Kevin and Sylvia, 2010
94 Anne McGuire, Christmas postcard, 2010
96 Matias Viegener, 2010
97 lily on Antioch campus, 2010
98 parking lot in Venice, CA, 2010
100 tags from nightgown, 2010
100 Anima Sola
101 detail of photo of audience
103 frame for topiary toadstool
104 topiary dinosaurs in 3rd Street Promenade, Santa Monica, 2010
106 Cilla Black
108 lunar eclipse, 2010
109 prostrating Buddhist
111 Sophie Cave, Floating Heads, Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow, Scotland
113 Dodie Bellamy, 2010, photo: Karla Milosevich
114 white umbrella
115 balloons in crowd
117 lace panties on keyboard, 2011
118 Martha Rosler, still from Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975
119 toilet
120 cars parked South of Market at night, 2011
121 Stephen and Ondrea Levine, still from video interview, 2010
122 Tara figurine on egg-shaped bamboo box, 2010
125 still from Twilight Zone episode, “Mirror Image,” 1960
126 Dodie Bellamy, 2005, photo: Kevin Killian
127 Matt Gordon, angel costume, 2011, photo: Kevin Killian
129 Colter Jacobsen in Yerba Buena Gardens, 2011
132 5 of pentacles from Rider-Waite tarot deck
133 creek in Japanese Tea Garden, Golden Gate Park, 2011
134 Bhanu Kapil, Dodie Bellamy, Christine Wertheim, 2008,
photo: Kevin Killian
136 William E. Jones, stills from Killed, 2009, and Punctured, 2010,
courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
142 ibid.
145 ibid.
150 Colter Jacobsen, hollow Buddha texted-phone-image
With the exception of “Walk a Mile in My Shoes” and “Lapdance,”
all the material in the belladodie section was originally published,
in slightly different form, on Dodie Bellamy’s blog, belladodie,
dodie-bellamy.blogspot.com.
This book grew out of the SF Camerawork exhibit, As Yet Untitled: Artists
& Writers in Collaboration (January 6–April 23, 2011). Undying gratitude
to Chuck Mobley, Leigh Illion, and the rest of the SF Camerawork staff
for creating an environment where craziness like this can blossom.
Warmest thanks to Donna de la Perriere, Marcus Ewert, Dino Di Donato,

Karen Montalbano, and Tiffany Challis for their support in this
endeavor. And to the buddhist—I couldn’t have done it without you.
And to Colter Jacobsen for suggesting the project and being a dream
to work with. And to Wayne Smith, the best designer ever. And, always,
to Kevin Killian, my guiding light.
ISBN 9781935662471
© 2011 Dodie Bellamy
Design and layout by Wayne Smith
Printed and bound by Publication Studio.
Allone Co. Editions

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It’s a Trope 107

Like the other pictures it seems to inhabit a landscape rather than a

Memories from the Sickbed

Earlier in the week someone suggested I look at images of hungry ghosts. A

Flinching before the Gaze

FUCK YOU JONATHAN FRANZEN!!

The Buddhist kept my interest by being freakishly secretive—for instance he was

emotions inside it, thinking he is like making art or something by playing

Western capitalism’s narrative of progress; it denies otherness and represses vast

We need to craft a queer agenda that works cooperatively with

notion of progressive entitlement but a queer politics which is also not

—Judith “Jack” Halberstam, “The Anti-Social Turn in Queer Studies”

Here’s a photo of me being what The Buddhist called “peremptory and

Heart like a Rock Cast in the Sea

This morning on YouTube I watched Bessie Smith’s enactment of “St. Louis

The Deep Moans Round with Many Voices

You’re in writing mode

Red Brick Road

Our ancestors employed mask in ceremony, ritual, healing and in other

Many people remember reading George Orwell’s Animal Farm in high

The raccoon’s association with masks reminds me of personas—always a difficult

you need to do is to develop a public persona—as opposed to the whimpering

If anyone thinks they could have a pleasing and equal lover in a

A consensual SM relationship is one thing, there’s an integrity in that—but the

If I Were a Loving Person

Dottie has a wonderfully straightforward, and eager to the point of demented,

Afterwards, a group of us went out to a bar on Telegraph. We grabbed a corner

Just Like That

Anyway, I emailed him on Sunday, agreeing to talk on the phone on Wednesday,

6am. hello. fading fast because i took an ambien and am becoming

i was going to wrier sometrgiubf important but i snasccan6y cant read

What do you know of the extradiegetic? I’m no theory-head myself, so I’m

the characters can’t hear, would be extradiegetic. If a work is based on something

So where this is leading is Donal’s connection to documentary films. Along with

Donal himself was featured in another documentary, Robert Arnold’s Key of

I imagine Donal’s subjecthood in Key of G had an impact on Mike and Donal’s

Journaling—or blogging—doesn’t have the same ability to hold strong emotion

Absence is rendered in the images of single figures by their being

Here’s what John wrote back:

A book by its very structure suggests a narrative of closure. No closing the

Notion of embarrassment—pushing towards discomfort. Notion of buddhist—

is power for him—it keeps a woman off-kilter—but does he bother now? We

Ambien rant—not pure—from night before—immediacy/soap opera/this

Gazing Back at Kathe

Hotel Retreat Day 1

Hotel Retreat Day 2

Hotel Retreat Day 3

Hotel Retreat Day 4

Hotel Retreat Day 5

Hotel Retreat Day 6

Hotel Retreat Day 7

Memory is so intimate, so piecemeal, a fragment of a body, a blur, the most

Hotel Retreat Day 8

Hotel Retreat Day 9

Warwick version, which is too sophisticated, with the arrangement overpowering

Wind Up, part 1

While performing tasks as overwhelming and tedious as when Psyche separated

Wind Up, part 2

Letting go of thoughts is an excellent technique for encouraging the

Happy Kevin’s Day

Yellow New Year