But can I start some massive program of self-improvement before this evening? Hairdo, new clothes, laugh a lot and talk less? (All my life I’ve wanted to be somebody a little different, anyway.) I’m afraid it will take time, though I can reward myself with little snacks of things I like a lot like asparagus with hollandaise sauce or artichokes or frozen lemon crumb-crust pie. (If only I didn’t have to cook them all myself.) I’ll practice the new me in front of guests. I kind of like some of them, the guests. One has a soft, soft voice but I’m afraid he, too, may be practicing his new personality on me and is really not a gentle person at all. I’m afraid the gentleness is because of some violence in him and that maybe he has trained himself with electric shock to his balls or some other place just as tender and soft, so that we are both living a lie. Maybe I’m drawn to him because of that or that his gray mustache reminds me of Einstein. But anyway, I think I will tell him about Good Cheer and about Ananta Marga and her techniques for relaxation, all the while watching the person I care about the most.
I’ll tell him what I think of him later on, like: “When I come across you suddenly in the dark corners of the house, I scream inwardly and head for an unoccupied room.”
TV
I would let my life be televised. I would let them find out all about me. They could follow me into the shower and find out that I have small, (fairly) pendulous breasts, and I’d be walking around in my underwear or my torn nightgown or nothing at all, just as I usually do. I wouldn’t care. I’d shout like I did today. I’d throw sneakers at the cameraman. I wouldn’t care who saw it. My voice would get strident and harsh, my neck would get stringy, but that’s O.K.
SEX
There’s a woman who took a whole movie just of vulvas, one after the other, big ones, small ones, and from pink to red to purple-colored ones. Ten or fifteen minutes’ worth of them. I would let my vulva be televised.
ART
I would let my vulva be televised!,
(If you think that’s not hard to say, try it.)
I tell the world that—I, who am not an exhibitionist, in fact who am the opposite of an exhibitionist (I can’t stand being looked at), I, who am shy, and who feel uncomfortable if called attention to in any way, but who will do (almost) anything for Art’s sake (though not for life’s sake, so don’t ask me).
But Art comes from deep within hidden recesses like vulvas. From secret feelings.
Well, that’s only one kind of Art.
My kind?
No. Not anymore, or only partly. Yours has some confessions hard to make, but of a fairly “cool” kind. Besides, we no longer feel anything much when confessing things these days, whether it’s wanting to love a father or a mother, son or daughter, or just masturbation, and since nothing sexual is sacred or secret any longer, what’s to confess? and we are forgiven (our humanity?) instantly by every aware person.
Aren’t there any confessions you can make anymore? Has everything of that nature become too easy? Is reality so acceptable?
Reality is not only completely acceptable, it’s very abstract once you look around and listen to what’s happening. Reality, actually, doesn’t have much form.
But what kind of realism are you after now that the deep, hidden recesses of the mind are so easily available as to be not worth bothering with?
Does anybody know what Art is or should be?
Do we try to redefine it every day of our lives?
Every other day?
Every now and then?
What will you give me if I succeed in redefining Art once and for all?
Well, then, must we do our Art without knowing any sure things about it?
Yes.
MORE ART
Newspaper reports bleak outlook for the Art scene. Less money for cultural events.
Let me tell you something about myself and Art. Art keeps me busy. Art keeps me happy at home (sort of) and alone… sort of happy at home and alone… alone and sort of happy ( sometimes).
We really must learn to tell the difference between love and Art and love and hate if we can.
Art! We are saving our money for it. With our money we will buy the things to make Art out of. We will try not to do anything that is not conducive to Art.
If we are overcome by Art, as we are sometimes, and left leaning over with our head in our hands, our elbows on our knees, and nothing left to rely on; if we are left sexually aroused by Art for Art’s sake instead of sex for sex’s sake nor love, either; if we consume ourselves with desire for Art every day of our lives, living according to Art and from Art yet hardly knowing what it is, then we are living with Art as we are living with our love, head in hands, back turned….
After the Art experience, take a little rest.
Eat something.
LOVE
I love him. I love him not. I love him. I love him not. I love him. I love him not. I love him. I love him not. I love him. I love him not. I love him. I love him not. I love him.
My face is aging. I’m becoming like fine old leather, smooth and soft and worn. I think I will last a long time. I’m wondering if he will want to live with me to the very end. Shall we grow old and infirm together?
When I married him I had no idea he was going to be the sort of person who gets up so early in the morning.
The person you care about the most comes back.
LATER THAT AFTERNOON
Trying again to work together on a common project, he calls me destructive to his creative instincts.
“Yours are outmoded moralities.”
“My concept of eternity is different from yours.”
“You said we’d be artists together but it hasn’t been like that.”
“There are some things I’ll never forgive and forget. Once I read a book on being passionate and you wouldn’t read it. Once you slammed the door on my hand. I bumped my nose on your forehead. Your toe is on my knee. This is one of your hairs I have stuck in my mouth.”
(I must have married him for his looks more than anything else, though that doesn’t seem logical. )
(I married him because he looked at me. )
“You’ll never be an intellectual.”
“Haven’t you noticed my passionate love of truth?”
“My horoscope said I should avoid arguments.”
“Do you still wish I was tall and had bigger breasts?”
(We are communicating on the deepest possible levels.)
(Are these the realities of a so-called happy marriage?)
(Oh, I forgot to mention our genuine feelings for each other.)
I’m watching him struggle with the problems of form and content. “What kind of realism are you after?”
Watching him and trying to shape him a little bit, wanting to lead him gently into an understanding of women, telling him about some of my own little idiosyncrasies, telling him women like gentler, tickly sex, even at the climax, that they can have two orgasms in succession, and some say even more, first clitoral and then vaginal. But it’s all there in the books. I’m asking him to read one or two if he has some spare time.
“Are you trying for a physical or mental realism?”
If I have a chance this afternoon, I may wonder about the meaning of life or Art, or I may take time out to find myself.
(Is the world intolerable or not?)
We suffer every evening when there’s no TV of the panic of being alive. (By “we” I refer to humanity at large.)
But I want somebody to love besides dogs, cats and children. I put my left leg over your knee. You put your elbow on my shoulder (it hurts, but that’s all right). We have come to no real conclusions as yet, but I take a secret look at your crotch and I see you take a secret look at mine. I try to imagine how you look without any clothes on even though I’ve seen you thousands of times. “Nobody’s always nice,” I say.
Good Cheer is a rock group. It’s a look in your eyes.
The person you care about the most touches you possessively on the back
of the neck.
I suppose I could put my hand out in some sort of caress.
“Say, did I tell you what I really think about Art yet?”
I have a dandy, fresh feeling of forgiveness, but it will take a certain amount of courage to say so.
Joy In Our Cause, Harper & Row, 1974
Biography of an Uncircumcised Man (Including Interview)
JOHN is a poet. There are many kinds of poets. What kind of a poet is John?
John is an eager young poet, self-aware and interested in discovery. He believes that new awarenesses necessitate new forms and even that new forms, of themselves, can generate new awarenesses. He is also the kind of poet who is trying out behaviorist conditioning and Freudian analysis at the same time to see what they feel like.
Except for one little thing, John is a very sane poet.
Poets look like everyone else.
John looks like everyone else.
Once upon a time there was a young prince who was a poet. The prince’s name was John or Tom.
The prince’s name was really Ed and he was not a poet at all, but a film maker who was not afraid of heights and with a certain reputation among his own kind and he lived in a little house with his wife and three children and made just enough money for his needs, even though film making is very expensive.
Coming in singing old songs one afternoon (like “Rock Around the Clock” and “Love and Marriage” and “The Music Goes Round and Round” and so forth) and after military service in Italy in 1945 and the University of Michigan Art School in 1947, getting a little fatter as he grows older, hair thinning, having had a beard since a Canadian summer in 1957, suitcase ready to take the first plane to Greensboro or Ithaca or Ann Arbor or some other college town, he made love to me (it came out about four on a scale of ten) and went to Chicago.
He isn’t one of those husbands who recognize their wives at a glance.
“Ed, first lie close to me, your leg over my leg, and tickle my left breast with your tongue.”
Poets say a lot of things everybody else says, even in their poems, like:
“So as I was saying to you
yesterday”
John Perreault
and: “A dog disappears
across a small lake”
Joseph Ceravolo
and: “I have nothing to write you except I am feeling dizzy again”
Lewis MacAdams
and: “Suppose you had plenty money”
James Schuyler
and: “I don’t know anything about hemorrhoids”
Ron Padgett
(Ron Padgett thinks about Frank O’Hara, but I think about Ron Padgett and Frank O’Hara.)
Here are four beginnings of poems:
“Returning from the movies we find”
Dick Gallup
“Corn is a small hard seed”
Bernadette Mayer
“Today I met my woman in the subway”
Frank Lima
“What we need is a great big vegetable farm!”
Bill Berkson
which illustrate the same point as above.
I like that.
I know a poet who has an eagle tattooed on his chest but I’m not going to say his name. (Tom D.) “Do you want to see my eagle?” he said.
“Of course,” I said, and I was impressed.
(That was a strange thing for Tom to do. It may have been that it was the end of a love affair. I wonder what he thinks about it now.)
John the poet’s mother is thin.
Tom’s mother is dead.
Ed the film maker’s mother is fat.
Ed is six feet tall and weighs 180 lbs.
Ed’s mother is five feet three and weighs 155 lbs.
Ed’s children, at their present stage and in spite of their varying ages (12, 14 and 15) are all about five feet four and weigh around 100 lbs.
Ed got first prize in 1959 for his first film and the year after that he got an honorable mention and that was good, too, and the year after that, something else, but after that they didn’t give any more prizes at that place so he had to win prizes someplace else.
When he dies, I will reorganize Ed’s attic workrooms into a pleasant bedroom/writing room for myself. I will paint the walls white and open the windows, which are now covered over with black plywood in order to be able to show movies there in the daytime. Or, instead, I may move out to some college town, Greensboro, Ithaca, or Ann Arbor. I was wondering if I could support myself writing confessions of sins I never even wanted to commit or adventure stories like the lives and loves of some of the poets I know (Tom D. or John H.).
But I expect it to take a year or two to get back to writing after his death.
John is an eager young poet, as I said, but Ed is not so young, forty-five or forty-Six. Ed is an eager older film maker, perhaps not as self-aware as a poet would be, nor as verbal, perhaps a master of one sort of nonverbal expression, of whom it was written by Sheldon Renan:
Many people in the underground (film) can, in fact, get whatever they wish out of a camera. Stan Brakhage, Marie Menken and Ed…
If some of the underground film makers were arranged according to height, smallest first, they would line up like this:
Storm De Hirsch, by far the shortest
then Maya Deren
Willard Maas
Shirley Clark
Jonas Mekas
Adolphus Mekas
Gregory Markopoulos
Ken Jacobs
Ed
Marie Menken
Stan Vanderbeek
Hilary Harris
Five things Ed likes:
Steaks
Martinis
Having his back rubbed
Making movies
Playing the guru
When I asked him what five things he likes, Ed said:
Making movies
Me
The kids
Travel and having adventures
Learning something new
I know three poets whose names are all Bob.
I know a white poet who has a little Negro son.
I know Jack, who is a fairly small poet with dark hair and a sharp nose. His daughter is five years old and looks like him. His wife is pregnant. He’s twenty-eight years old.
(Sometimes I think you can’t really know who a person is until you see their wife, if any, and children.)
So…
Ed has:
One dark-haired, brown-eyed daughter, well built since she matured last year
One thin, awkward, blondish daughter with green/tan eyes
One blondish, tan-eyed, left-handed son who is large for his age
I am Ed’s wife.
I know of a poet who had a wild surmise and another who wrote, as though he were a cloud, “I bring fresh showers…” and one who had strange fits of passion, but these were a long time ago.
Who is that small-sized poet sitting shyly on the stairs?
Who is the poet playing the piano?
Who is the poet in the blue farmer shirt?
Who is that tall, sweaty, hairy poet with the loud laugh?
That isn’t a poet. That’s Ed, the film maker.
Hail, Prince John, Tom D. (or Ed man of a lot of ideas, everyday morality and nice blue eyes) I
When they dug up Haydn to examine his brain, it was found to be not unlike the brains of all the rest of us.
Ed says: “I was born to the fat lady in the circus. My father was either the clown who jumps out of the burning house from the top floor or the giant with a pituitary problem.” (Some of this is only a little bit true.) “I was conceived at the very hour of an early-morning disaster in which seventy-three senile people were burned to death. Most of my childhood was spent on a tightrope and with dwarfs my own size at any given time and this accounts for some of my personality hangups.”
There’s a season for people like Ed, but it’s not spring.
Ed says: “I have this skin disease be
hind my ears or under my arms that makes me itch. I put some medicine on it but it doesn’t do any good.”
We read Van de Velde’s marriage manual together and tried some of the positions.
Ed has a strange way of hunching his shoulders. I kind of like it.
Well, what is your favorite season of the year?
As we adjust to a poet or get to know him better or two or three poets or sometimes as many as sixteen poets at the same party, as we make adjustments to poets almost as though they were like anyone else, we must remember that they sometimes do amount to something and even may make a little money. (John has only put out one little book of poems so far. It costs two dollars for sixty pages.)
As a prince, how do you find life in a democracy of sorts? As a guru, how do you like making occasional mistakes? As an artist, you could draw me writing at the kitchen table like this or doing dishes or wiping cat throw-up off the rug. As a poet, you could do the lyrics to my tunes. As a film maker, do me walking in the woods.
You did that.
Japanese poets are nice.
Poets with addresses on Park Avenue. Poets from the ghetto. Poets in prison. Shoeshine poets of Chicago or Detroit. Radical poets. Black poets. Women’s lib poets. Trying to tell you something. Telling everybody things. Are they (you) turning little everyday things into art? Have you (they) been thinking about reality lately? Have you been thinking about reality! What is the realest thing you do this time of year? Is this art? Do a real thing. Do not think about it. Now do an unreal thing. Do not think about it. Does it matter?
There are hidden realities.
There are pure and impure realities.
Some realities do not last long.
Can you call together a small group of eager young poets and tell them about this?
“Uh… ah… well… ww… uh…”
Your bloodshot eyes give me the creeps.
Your stomach sticks out.
You have a pimple on your shoulder.
“Remember, friends, nobody’s perfect.”
The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1 Page 34
