10.06.12

Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges all of space.
Let your presence ring out like a bell
into the night. What feeds upon your face

grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.
Move through transformation, out and in.
What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your senses in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious encounter.

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I'm flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.

(rainer maria rilke; alternate translation here.)

09.26.12

09.14.12: tino sehgal's "these associations," turbine hall, tate modern. eddies of loose-limbed men and women in performance artists' conspicuously plain clothing catch at each other across the hall's concrete. some have snagged on the walls in groups of two or three; others spin away in my wake as i pass. i take the center of the room slowly, let its gravity pull me down. i'll take a few deep breaths and leave. i'll sit to demonstrate that i'm not afraid and i'll leave. "it was when i was four years old, and my mother and i were sitting on her bed," the woman suddenly at my shoulder says. she's scooted across the floor to get next to me and has folded her wrists across her knees. her father was frequently absent from their home, and it made her mother cry; she herself was too young to know how to respond, to address her mother as another person in need. this was in greece. i tell her that my father once asked me if i thought he deserved to be happy - this was in the months after he left my mother, when i was out of college and living in san francisco - and i realized that i was not going to be a child. the lights in the hall go out, one by one, and as i rejoin joe on the stairs i haven't yet decided if i'll tell him what we talked about.

09.10.10

our little cat, jude, died a year ago today. his ashes are in a little tin next to my jewelry box in our bedroom closet; i can't imagine where we would scatter them, and sometimes i need to reach in and touch the tin before i go to bed. there are things i called him which will always be only his, but there are others which were only his and now slip out of my mouth when i'm talking to steve (a gregarious, knockabout, impertinent cat, as unlike jude as he could be; the little one was private, sad-eyed, and gentle). while that should be alright or even a good thing, something in my gut dissolves every time it happens. it always comes together again. it always dissolves.

from this week's new yorker, in a collection of notes by roland barthes:

July 29th
Bibliothèque Nationale
    Letter [from Proust] to Georges de Lauris, whose mother has just died (1907).
    "Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power...that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more."

08.06.10

101 in 1001 {II}: 066 take a photo every day for a year [completed 08.05.10]

truth be told, i was carrying my camera with me at all times long before i started my year of photos last august; i've been trying to earn it since joe gave it to me two years ago. he's always been a thoughtful gift-giver, but that gift was on a different order of magnitude - both a testament to how well he knows me (my camera is small and sly, so i can have it with me everywhere and be ready to take a picture in seconds, but it's also lightning-fast and thrives in low light - which is, of course, the best light) and a vote of confidence, the activation energy i needed to jump in the street, interact with strangers, put my own pictures on the wall. a few months ago, i was at an industry event with jacques torres; he made a beeline for my camera case and plucked it from the table in front of me. "it's wonderful," he cried, "a chocolate camera!" not a bad way of putting it.

while i do think i've become a better photographer in the past year, taking this particular family of pictures wasn't about learning to see, nor was it about learning to present. though i've sat back and admired the photoset's growing array of thumbnails with smaugish satisfaction - treasure! - what i've wanted all along is an agate slice, or an ice core. this set includes the last photo of jude, and our last night at our local in hell's kitchen, and the keys to our apartment an hour after we began to own it, and david lynch, and bedhead, and wonderful and terrible food, and the first time steve and chuck fell asleep together, and me in a bikini in public, and mari at the bridal salon as she bought her wedding dress, and times square, and graveyards, and our home, our home, our home. i approached the very last picture with a seriousness normally reserved for writers ending epic network television shows, and i tried to talk joe into a version of american gothic with two cats instead of a pitchfork or maybe overalls - but i'm no good at staging. we are what we are.



{fin}

02.05.10



{disturbing bob ross cat mashup courtesy of baby jo and george}

finding a cat hasn't been easy for us; for months my visits to petfinder inevitably ended in tears. when i was in the mood to look, our parameters made things nearly impossible: we wanted a kitten (my call*) who needed a home (also my call - i would never go to a breeder instead of adopting a shelter cat) who...was a siamese.** this is how we ended up looking at photos of kittens in berwick, pennsylvania. three blue lynx point siamese kittens there had materialized online around christmas and, presumably, been spoken for; two weeks later, on a random thursday morning, one of them appeared again. joe gave me the okay to put in an application - shelters these days ask for an application before they'll talk to you about a particular cat - and three hours later, i got a call from diana, the little guy's foster mom. "your vet knows you by name," she said with wonder. (well, sure: i was there at least once a week for months last year, and at least once a month for years before that. i also have a tendency to burst into tears in his office, so the staff is rather protective of me.) she'd called our vet and our references - shelters these days also ask for references - and said that our application was impeccable. we even beat out a vet tech who'd also applied for the kitten, a detail that, i admit, really pleases me: if you'll forgive the gaucherie of speaking highly of myself, i'm a damn fine cat-guardian.

two weeks after that, after cat-offers and -deposits and -photo-exchanging and -trip-planning, we set off to meet diana in philly (which was more convenient to her place near baltimore and our place in new york than berwick would have been). i called our hotel and made sure that they were cool with kitten-trafficking in their lobby,*** we spent the afternoon and evening kicking around our favorite places in town, and by sunday morning steve nash was upon us.

i'd forgotten how emphatic the little ones are. steve hasn't stopped moving since we let him out of his carrier at our place on sunday afternoon: there are chuck-tails to attack, books to topple, bulbs of garlic to gnaw (?). he doesn't really meow, but he has the deafening kitten-purr that rattles his whole body. he blows out his energy reserves so completely that he passes out on his stomach, arms straight out in front of him and out in back like a bunny, face-down on the sofa. we're exhausted. it's marvelous.

*though there are lots of wonderful older cats, i really wanted to raise one right from the beginning - and we lost jude so young. i couldn't handle falling for a cat his age with potential health problems i couldn't anticipate.

**joe was exposed to photos of manray at a vulnerable point ("can we adopt him?" "no, that's jamie's cat!"); he insisted on a siamese.

***"we're paying a hundred dollars to spend the night there," said joe, "and they just paid that guy twenty dollars to be on the phone with you for that long."

01.10.10



four months ago i told our little cat the story of how we met. i told him about how handsome everyone at the SPCA always thought he was, how i used to worry about joe rolling over on him in the middle of the night when we first brought him home, how i loved the way he'd curl up like a snail in the crook of my arm and fall asleep with his chin on my hand. i told him that he'd been the only thing about my time in san francisco that really made me proud. i sat on the toilet lid; he cowered between our shower curtain and liner.

a brass band played in the plaza across the street for hours that afternoon. trumpets puked swing music as joe and then our vet joined me in the apartment, as i gathered up and tried to soothe our terrified, skeletal little cat, as i sat and held him while the sedative took effect and the vet laid him out on our coffee table.

i'm no longer in that apartment every time i stop thinking of other things, but i'm there more often than i thought i'd be. we spent three years giving jude what was ultimately a daily dose of subcutaneous fluids, trundling him off to the vet for urinalysis and blood tests, feeding him (and chuck) pasty prescription food. specialists would make me feel like shit for not having $30,000 for a kidney transplant, and poor, sweet jude broke my heart every time he forgave me for holding him down and putting a needle in his back. i can't tell you how good it felt to rip the IV bag hook from our kitchen wall that afternoon in september. i should have used it on the fucking brass band.

joe and i went up to animal care and control in harlem today. we met ziggy, a sweet adult stray, a grey and white fellow who kneaded his towel and butted my head when i opened his cage. "he's a really great cat," joe said, "but it feels like he's someone else's great cat." i don't know if we're ready for one who isn't ours.

i miss you, puppy, and i'm so sorry.

09.15.09

it's hard to transition from talking about our little cat to talking about, well, anything else; many other things have happened in the past week, but i can't say that i care much about them right now. we finally interviewed with the co-op board on wednesday and on friday they let us know that we were approved, so we're circling in on our new apartment; the best thing about that, at present, is that the logistics of closing the deal and of populating our new space with things are very distracting. i've developed weird but probably harmless fixations on spray painting picture frames and hoarding old pendleton blankets. i spin sofa sections around like tetris blocks in my head. i hatch plots to lure birds up to our windows on the eighteenth floor - but that's for the little cat again.

joe and i are more alike than i'd realized, and in the first few days after jude died we behaved a bit like one person. i hate that our family shrank, but i admit that it was comforting to feel thrown together in the contraction. chuck wedges himself between us as he always has. we move together.

09.10.09: jude, 2001-2009



i loved him so much.

05.20.09