Under the Net

I've come full circle to this pedestrian realization that the universal absolute LCD is spending every minute essentially making memories.  The ones that stand with accuracy are of course witnessed, photographed, etc. The witnessing process in our culture has ballooned to full-blown clutter.  The evidence now eclipses the fact that the experience is what mattered-- so much of this slips by while we are texting and recording, forgetting to use our mind to 'set' the moment and relying on technology while life evades us.  

I am currently obsessed with the prospect of mental atrophy, of dementia as I watch my Mom desperately trying to cope.  I think about Iris Murdoch-- her impeccably clever literacy, the way it left her brilliant mind a damaged shell on one of the most coveted intellectual beaches.  I just reread Under the Net--- a small book, in a way, but the intelligence is indelible.

My Mom constantly reviews her memories--- like fading photographs of an old lover, they are; she cannot bear the pain and yet she must.  My uncle is in a box; she refuses this version.  Digital memories-- things on a computer--- are meaningless;  like cartoons in some gibberishy language, she distrusts them and will not look.  They are things in a box.

We who still have everything--- faculties and taste, that is-- we wait in line, we primp and text, we fail to look.  Women spend their lives playing sex games instead of learning to love-- and writing about these things, so other women can waste their time reading about them.  Television-- the final drug.  How many still read Iris Murdoch?  No one is counting these things in New York Magazine's lists of events and celebrities ranked by income, star power and categorical royalty.  People who cannot form a grammatically decent thought earn more in a week than poor Iris earned in a lifetime.

I worry about experience as I stay awake all night....not geographic but static experience.  It is always daylight in my house, or perhaps always night.  I am digging in, surrounding the moments.  This confounds the roaches and rats---they seem to have given up wandering.  Some nights I wait for my muse; some nights I begin without her.  Some nights she cheats on me, doesn't show up until daybreak and we are both cranky and resistant.   The next night she may punish me like the truant mistress she is.  I am teaching her about love, by example.  Or maybe I have traded her flirtatious tease of art for a kind of madness.  Madness is a faithful companion, once you have become friends (not lovers).  In the end you can trade madness for ignorance, but you will regret this.  My muse has been forbidden to bring her mortal enemies or ex-boyfriends,  Boredom and Apathy. I cannot afford to cater to their luxuries.  On the other hand,  I am tired of fighting my causes, of defending the undefended.  I am disappointed in my candidate and hate his opponent.

So I've been reading Burroughs this week.  I miss the broken boundaries of language, the feeling of it--- the discomfort.  Language has become abandoned and misused.  I also miss naked hatred and naked love equally.  We have traded addictions for other addictions.  There is no longer any cure, just the waiting.   I miss the learners and crawlers, the needle abusers, the mad scientists of last century, the unkempt and slovenly poets and paint-martyrs, the stabbed and abandoned, the decomposing kings of the unfamous.

Has anyone ever entered 'death' in their GPS?  I wonder.  I have tons of email inviting me to join 'Women Who Write' from one of the Women Who Write About Men and fail to realize they are not the first to speak about having a man inside them while they are thinking about their mother.  Have these people forgotten James Joyce? They are maybe the literary equivalent of a Beatlemania tribute band... which was actually playing next door to my last night's gig.  Molly Bloom never bought make-up at Sephora or hung out at Flow.  Would she?  She didn't even have tampax.

My poor Mom is so innocent now, so sad and so desperately still trying to put on  her 1950's good face, even though her marriage was a challenge, the familial alcoholism hovering like a black shadow dress in her closet.  She was busy worrying that I was maybe taking a shower with my best girlfriend--- when my pederast uncle was threatening to do all kinds of evil things to us-- that kind of innocence which she has maintained.  She now pretends to read the paper, is so prepared to give me the unconditional love one did not offer in my childhood.  I love her for this, try to share my personal madness with hers;  I can confess things to her now, tell her things she couldn't handle.  This constitutes a kind of truth, even though they just fall through the damaged net of her present.

Some nights I pretend she is Iris; she likes this.  I reinvent a private charade of sisterhood; it is an intimacy I could never have tasted when she was still 'Mom'.  I facelift her onto some kind of beach where she is beautiful and running and my father is a handsome soldier watching her with desire and promise of a future that never really became a past.  It has all has been whitewashed and mentally photoshopped into a version that is a kinder companion, while the clock ticks and the future no longer rocks her to sleep but dissolves into a common past which will undoubtedly wash us all clean in the final tide and hopefully leave a few things of beauty on the shore for our children to find.

Talk is Cheap

On the way from the fireworks last night I began absorbing the noise factor in Manhattan.  From my admittedly luxurious viewing space, the  explosions were thrilling and loud enough to set off nearly every car alarm on the block.  Loved it.  But shuffling east in the massive festive crowd--  maybe it's the heat, the constant cellphone chatter in public space--- it seems to me that the general volume is louder than it used to be.  Like the glutted internet, the billion cable stations--- there is just so much chatter, people have raised their speaking level to compete.  I'm listening to snippets of conversations-- of public intimacy-- that I didn't sign up for.  And not at eavesdropping levels; these abused rock-musician ears have been gouged and tortured with cymbals, drum whackers, bad PAs, deaf guitarists with 4-figure wattage... it's a miracle I can hear my old television at night.  But the value of conversation seems to have not just declined but disappeared, while personal audio settings have skyrocketed.

Of course it follows that people no longer whisper but quite audibly discuss and promote their sex life everywhere-- on buses, in restaurants, in 5000 shades of cheap novels.  It used to be those who could, 'did'.. and those who couldn't, talked about it.  Now who the fuck knows or cares.  It seems to me, an old retired babe, that the quality of sex must be suffering along with conversation, journalism, literature, whatever.  Talk is cheap, the phone companies tell us--- we have become the Yngwie Malmsteen version of talkers.  Remember when telegrams charged by the word?  When e. e. cummings' economical response to the Academy of Arts and Letters' invitation to join was 'drop dead'?  

Maybe America needs a Twitter diet.  Like one a day.  Some quality control.  Levels of internet communication.  Asshole filtering.  And I'm not a complete old bitch; I love great loud rock; I love comedy that humiliates; I like the knife and I like the blood.  I spent a lot of years reinventing my personal sexuality brand and don't regret a minute.  But even minutes have lost their edge.  They're unlimited and cheap and low-res.  Like climbing all the way up Everest and finding you can't see a thing.  Or you get a billboard and 3-D glasses.  A view master if you're over 50.  

Look at our pop icons:  Brittany Spears has become a badly-spoken candidate for talent-judge.  We used to have Marilyn.  She fucked not only baseball allstars and the president and maybe even Albert Einstein,  but married the greatest 20th century playwright.   That was interesting.  The sex--- well, our daughters might certainly have learned something Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton didn't show them.  Now our icons (and I love Brittany--- she's so 'real' (!)) are the Barbie version of what they used to be.  What do we do when our culture is looking up at the American I-doll of what should be...and reality is a fake ill-scripted cheap version of post-Cassavetes television?  Who wants the super sized cup of diet soda?  Not Writerless.  Maybe we should all just give in and go to K-mart online and buy the doll.  Cindy Sherman knows about that.  I will order several of Eating Disorder Barbie.  Bulimic Barbie with a bulge in her stomach/ can be transformed into teenage pregnant Barbie.  Cutting Barbie.  True Blood Barbie.  Collagen lip-enhanced Barbie.  Breast augmentation Barbie in 3 sizes.  I'm not even amusing myself now.  I hate dolls.  PMS Barbie.

Did you women ever think that we spend 25% of our sex life bleeding?  The networks love anything with Blood in the title... but who writes 50 Shades of Blood?  I might.  I'm sitting in Starbucks taking advantage of the free air-conditioning and a young intern is waiting for his iced latte talking about diarrhea.  Loud.  Laughing.  Next to me a hot young Russian trophy wife is talking to her realtor.  Her ring could buy me coffee for life.  To my left a woman is making a reservation and her baby girl is yelling for another M&M cookie.  Another lady had a car accident and is reporting to her insurance company.   Building a case.  I literally hear all of this.  Not to mention the canned coffeehouse Latino-light music which is annoying.  A cheap cowbell.  Sounds digital.  Organ with too many runs... please God, spare us vocals.  Across from me a man with small hands is i-ordering his scarcely adolescent daughter a new phone.  It will be pink.  2 tiny boys in their karate uniforms coming from one of their myriad summer enhancement programs with their over-educated nanny.  Can't be too botoxed or have too many pre-school lessons here in Carnegie Hill.  Who will tell them that all their jiu-jitsu moves won't protect them from what lurks ahead?  

The heat outside is omnipotent today.  My mind is withered.  My Mom who is old enough to have earned a memory award now has Alzheimers and wants to wear an overcoat.  A rebel, she is.  I wonder if she thinks about sex.  She follows my Dad around like a young puppy now.  Tells me how handsome he is.  I wonder if the sex I had is better than the sex I will have tonight.  That 50 Shades book has affected my 1001 Arabian Nights parallel serial virtual novel.  I  don't want the soft whip and satin handcuffs package in any version of a honeymoon suite.  This is corporate soft-hotel-porn.  The Travelocity gnome in heels and black leather.  They ruined rock, they ruined the economy, they ruined medicine and now they're ruining sex.

On the hot asphalt my local homeless true-reality star James-with-no-surname is talking without a phone.  You have to love the guy.