heart and liver

The Astronaut

Summer is over. It came with cold rains, the first we had seen in Kosovo in some time. To me the rains felt right after the heat. I felt it in my skin and inside the belly. I thought it a good time to write you a letter.

I've sat down to write to you a thousand times and retracted because I have nothing more to say. It's true. I've used up the possibilities for connecting that started me writing to you in the first place, since we've met and parted. I pushed the boundaries until I lost it all and somehow this is necessary for me. If you could understand that, understand the process and why you'd understand that those parts, the ones I'd like to put aside and the ones you hold so central are just an inevitable process of going away from you. I want you to say something now, more because I've phrased it enough already. Because I wake up at night in fear sometimes.
There is no love left, she whispers.
Oh, I reply, then what about all those nights and dreams? What about I love you so much.
Now I realize that you were just fucked up, I forgot those.
Then why don't you simply tell me, at some point, to stop contact.
Silence. In a way I have. But I knew better, i knew about the beginning and the end because I was there and lived it. So I left it at that hoping that this life will have another lesson, that I'll be certain again sometime.
Long silence. You think so but it is not worth the contact for me. Just pain there.
Why do you allow it? I had heard that phrase from a friend and tried it now. At first the friend meant it for the lover of direct conflict, not the denial of the conflict.
I mean, if you can just deny that part we could reach a middle ground or ground even.
You're the one that had to put us in orbit Rose, you did that. My back ached with pain.
You're right but I'm on the ground again. I'm here now.
But I'm not. Then the connection dropped.

I had a girlfriend once who was an astronaut. It was difficult because she would have these extended stays in training and then, of course, the time in space on the international space station. I imagine how difficult that is only being able to communicate when my girl passed over the sky (which I always called "the heavens") and even then only when she wasn't working or on a spacewalk. I mean imagine that bullshit! And then even when she was free she'd always be wearing that stupid suit. I began to really have bad feelings about the whole thing. Once, I remember, being at my nephews christening. "What's that," Lordess Elgin asked not being familiar with the customs. "A baptism" I replied, "when Catholics receive a child into the faith." "Ah yes, I know." "Well all of the other girlfriends and wives were dressed normally except mine - she was wearing that stupid spacesuit. I couldn't even really hear her through the faceguard. Plus it was difficult for her to sit down. Even so she stood in the back for most of it. I mean try dealing with that in a relationship." "Why would she wear the suit? It seems a bit crazy," replied Elgin. "Exactly. It was so embarrassing - even stupid. We had to break up. It was a nearly impossible relationship." Lordess Elgin listened intently. "We broke up and haven't spoken since." I began to smile, sort of liking my role in the thing. "I mean we were together yes but she was never really there, instead just existing in her spacesuit when not actually in space. It happened like that though I wish it didn't sometimes." "I don't know when you're telling the truth or a story." I felt the same way.

fjords and tails

A dragon awoke after one thousands years of sleep and burrowed it's way out of the rock that had fallen over the entrance to it's lair. She peaked out onto the night sky and the now glimmering sea of electric lights that sprinkled the valley and her once quiet fjord. The giant beast, as fierce as she was, felt frightened by what lay inside the city bathed in the artificial light. Instead of investigating her new reality she instead took to flight out past the towns and villages to a small unpopulated island off the coast that she remembered being a place of solace before her last sleep. She was among the beasts that lived, on average, fifty thousand years and the only one, that she knew of now, left alive on the continent. In the early days (her first three thousand years of life) there were others but slowly they left to other lands or perished at the hands of clever defenders and disease. For all their fierceness the dragons lose their sense of community because of their extended lives and of course because of their need for space and frequent conflict with human settlement. If a street dog gets angry with a human or passing car it will likely lose the fight and be killed or ejected from peaceful society. If a dragon loses its cool a village could be destroyed or worse. So even after a several hundred year slumber dragons will often seek a place of quiet reflection and undisturbed consciousness in order to pray and reconvene slowly with other living things, eating mostly fish and marine life under the cover of night on the new moon. If she is seen, she knows from past awakenings, she can forget peace and may even need to remit to forced hibernation, a sometimes necessary but painful task of resubmitting the body to sleep outside of it's biological need. This, to try again in another 100 years or more.

Once I met a dragon face to face on a night hike in the mountains just north of Yellowstone park to the West and North of Paradise Valley. The mutual surprise lead us to lock eyes for a long moment as the dragon in flight inspected my nearby camp. I was alone and heading to summit the mountain and stargaze until early morning and the dragon, presumably, was hunting on the new moon. The dragon moved on after our extended moment of contact and only looked back once after six or seven flaps of its enormous wings. I never saw her again though I still recognize our connection as essentially good. It was, I believe, a look of caring - one that forms a memory and a bond and says we will consider each other through time and pray for each others safe return. And I still do.

From time to time, I recognize that my internal rhythm does not flow by the hour or even the day as it is so scheduled and maintained in our ordered life. Rather I feel my life contained in segments of joys and the inevitable letting go. If these are end times I could say that life has been full but I suspect they are not. Instead there will be some kind of reckoning for all the terrible things that have come to pass though even these, seen in ordered space, are not so terrible. Reading a history of Thessaloniki, Greece, I realize my smallness in the factor though inside this beating heart I don't feel it this way. I feel it as a sleeping dragon - cold, quiet and mythical, romantic and organic, set aside from developed time with long inhales and even longer exhales. Then I wake and reach for my lover, sometimes forgetting who I will find but always happy to find at least some hope in those that lay beside me for a time. Hoping now that this extended breath does not fuck up the children in my life or their right to walk and camp in distant places.

There is something about being away for me that limits details. I could and probably should talk about the morning coffee or the evenings guests or the way the street lamps went dark after the lightening strike in that high mountain Albanian village. Or how the old man grazed his cattle through the trash heap or the lady who offered us fruit on the coast. Or my stomach illness from tainted water near the beach. Or the cat who made her way up the landing and spent the evening, until early morning, in the chair beside the veranda. It's in the details but maybe that's the devil in the details I am avoiding. My love.

Mixed Lives

There are certain lives that should not mix. This is not to say mistakes can or can’t happen but when events come to pass, reality is that which we take with us. In the human field this is our drama, or trauma or release or our final resting place. Like Greek memories never written down. I’ll get into these later. What I realize now, after leaving this place, my American space, is that no memory supersedes another and that what I wanted from my friends has been nothing more than a confirmation that I (that ever present I) have purpose and that this purpose is right and good. Most thinkers will see this as a romantic notion and it is. After one year in Kosovo I no longer desire this confirmation rather it (the ever present it) is there like a long sunset or sunrise. Perhaps this is confirmed by the daily interactions with the others, even made up of them, but depending on one’s relationship to god or objectivity is not for one’s own conscious field to determine. “It” is determined by action and inaction within a purpose, until that purpose has been played out to an ultimate living end for better. The details of this thought, as it is formed, are likely the most important message (why else write it down?) though the details will come from walking in the light, then for a good long while in darkness though hopefully not forever. Forever being determined when death arrives. I’ve spent a lot of years in darkness.

A week ago I visited Buttercup’s family on the day after her body was laid into the earth. I was greeted by the cries of an infant, born to her older brother and new wife a month prior. The house was, oddly, a place of joy. The place from which Buttercup came is governed by the soft and reassuring presence of her large and open family, one that is strong enough to mourn and share in her memory with presence. The living with the dead. My presence was surprisingly welcome or it came like this for the grace with which Buttercup had made her exit. “She didn’t want to die” her father explained, even as her breath grew short and labored. I told him about the package she was to send and that it never arrived. “What a woman”, I said to him, to know and leave her memory in such a way. Her package arrived I think in the form of courage and grace. What I had demanded of her was impossible. What she had asked of me was equally impossible. In hindsight, it was her ability to never let go of the will to live that set all petty conflict aside. The package was and remains forgiveness and the will to remain clear – Here is where you now live. Here is what you are. And here is where you must decide. It is here, now, for certain. The candy over coating of will that the story takes is just another present-ness of form. It’s like that.

Driving, on the way back to the States, in the radiant evening spring light reflected from the still waters of Huron, I stopped at Buttercup’s grave to listen for a response. What I found was a mound of dry earth and a black cross near the top of a graded slope near the church where we had Christmas those years back. I sat with the dry earth and the cross and the memory of my lover and her body beneath and mourned her death, at first with my mind, then my heart and then with my hands on that ground warmed by the sun. I collected the remains of small butterflies that had landed on the mound and drove the rest of the way peacefully in the good company of angels.

On return to NJ I didn’t see my Flora, for not willing to pressure my soul into any more loss. Instead I arrived at the kennel, saw the new life as the rain fell and made my exit. This slip, as I saw it, was nothing but a dive into limits of spirit; at least the spirit that is called to hold steady in the beating heart of a living body. This living body.

Dear lord, keep me the least of yours and with it the grace to explore the least in this world. For now, for always. Amen.

Abacus

I sat to mix glue for a canvas in a quiet apartment. The morning sun was warm and my sleep that night had been dreamless. Lately I’ve been more aware of dreams after I had awakened Ana a few weeks prior during my frequent night terror. It was more than terror though; it was pure fear, that’s how it registered with Ana anyway. I don’t recall the dream but I do recall the terror and the look in her sparkling eyes. Those projecting eyes. I sat now alone feeling the closeness of these walls, searching for some direction even though I knew already the canvas would become transformed letter forms so I could feel the labor and code of them without a clear meaning save for it’s symbolic dribbling. That would be enough, almost like the moments of lucidity before the Alzheimer’s erases a history. Here in this quiet room waiting for a heavy abacus.

What I permit myself mostly is a fighting event. It seeks and almost necessitates a limit, then a fight. This is how it goes. So without thinking I move to take out Ana and the boy. “I like you” she says, but as she does (and I’m pleased at this) I think to the restless night before. Ana up to take care of the boy then back into a cold bed for lack of warmth and a decisive mood. This and the insufferable reality that maybe I’m just reading all responses wrong, something like double vision. When presented back with a similar question, “what do you like about me?” I go blank. I recall a love and energy but what I like is like asking heaven to point out the favored ones on a battlefield. My response was just a present-ness though I was on the spot again preferring to let it conjure itself up. I like your smile and all of our talks. I like the way you think. I like the openness we share. I was also aware that this was just a thought, that I remained silent and my distance was once again related to myself. My stupid self again. So I let it go.

Reaching for some measure of assurance I recall a line from psalm 85 "Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other." Lines from these psalms just float up from beneath a whale and surface into the atmosphere, programmed internally from youth to direct the safety of daydreaming. Lately I’m less angry about them. Maybe it’s because Buttercup died and left me with two last thoughts. One was these words, “I’ll get your package to you soon” though the parcel has not arrived nor do I believe there is one for this life. And two, that death, for those who have constructed my long challenged spiritual bed, is not finality. For now.

Ghosts

In Albania a friend told me a story. As it was told, his friend came to visit in the north from Tirana, during communism, when it was dangerous to speak out against the government and nearly impossible to get out where they had enjoyed a good night of reading and discussing the fate of their work. Albania had become, in this man’s world, a dangerous place to continue the writing and as happens with contained talent, a place he felt impossibly constrained to. My friend had endured similar threats for tapestry works he had made. He was in a bad way, though with a good friend and this brought some relief. The night progressed into morning, drinking Raki, making what they could of the situation. Increasingly the friend became agitated, losing at first his sense of place and wanting some kind of release that was not or could not be present with talk just among the friends. In a drunken state the friend stood and pissed there on the floor of the café, lost now to delusion. Concerned, he took control and insisted they leave, get rest and talk maybe again in the morning, displacing the madness perhaps for another day. What happened next both in the telling and the story took a strange turn. His friend, being drunk, began insisting on the impossible, that the flat was in a different building, across a different distance and that the way home was quite opposite the actual way. My friend insisted and prodded his mate in the direction of the flat in the late dark hours before morning. Now again as it was told, the friend sometimes took to fantasy of flight, sometimes hanging from the building’s edge or from the balcony insisting on the reality of flight and disappearance to better pasture over the waters or the mountain lands, anywhere. On the streets his friend quite insisted that home was another way though my friend continued to insist. On arrival he lead the way up the stairwell to his first floor apartment, wanting to get the door open first and to set his friend to rest. Somewhere on the way up however the friend lost his way, made it to the escape entrance, dangled and dropped, onto his head from the 3rd story. He survived in a vegetative state for three days and passed.

That same night my friend told a second story; this one about his sister. Sometime in her early years, before the age of six she had found her father’s pistol under the bed. The gun was loaded. Thinking it a toy she began playing with it, searching the mechanisms that made it work. The gun fired and blasted a hole through her heart. My friend found the body. As he put it, saw her falling as he entered the room. The girl died, his mother’s only daughter. Now after half a lifetime she is attached to my friend’s daughter seeing the soul of hers alive again. This is how it played out. The family is strong from what I could see from the few weekends we’ve spent together and they maintain an ordered balance. A good family I think, as it is told to you.

These ghosts.

Frozen North

I sat to read again the last correspondence Ana had written, then Buttercup, then in searching for a lost transmission somewhere in the blog I found this account of a confessional written some 3 and half years ago. Not so long ago. Ana says, I was in the Turkish islands with my family at that time, and wonders why I would even reminisce at such a thing. Though Ana knows – it (it) being all too much. When I first met you she adds, my mother had just passed and I was looking for something for myself and only for myself. I thought of you as naïve and was angry with your way. But when we met, I recall, we had touched often, we were holding hands behind a pillow where no one would see and there was a connection. So when Ana made the connection after eight years she called me back to her place after placing my hands on her hips. I remember the moment. And now we will never forget. We are both at present in different movies screaming across divides from France to Serbia to Kosovo and echoing through the American plight; for this I think of the frozen winters of Rochester and gray asphalt of Iowa. I will likely never hear from any of them again; these ghosts. Lord Byron did the impossible, not realizing (or realizing all too well) the meaning of our connection and chose to be the victim. After several months of connection and trying I lost patience and called off our courting. Her response remains brutal, at first ignoring any attempt at connection then accusations of abuse, even rape. Rape. This being flung from the quiet din of her parent’s protective home in the quiet of the basement. The weakness of it making me ill beyond reason, the faithlessness of the projection a bold, clear and present lie to what it means to be called to action and left. To give in to ultimate selfishness from the utter center of self focused existence which we had been living. Which we all mostly live. Stupidity frees you from any responsibility. Buttercup at this moment lay dying, her cancer having spread so rapidly as to astound even the most conservative accounts of the disease’ progress. I sent what I could and awaited a response which came as a brief and beautifully written email. This will be the final correspondence and a good one though I think, each day, I will look for something more as I had always looked. Still the finality of her fate and the real and sustained connection we had will drive its beating heart into the soil with the rest to the river. There is nothing more to be said though I think at any moment I will be on a plane to Detroit and in a car up through the frozen north along Huron. If only there were unlimited resources. If only there were more choices.

Confessionals, Un Altro

When I think of the situation in the Balkans what I feel most now is stupidity. I’m an outsider, a foreigner and will remain so. Even stating something, anything about this “situation in the Balkans,” remains a prime example of just how foreign I will remain. This is true also in the States however there are ways through it region by region, to be American or the other. People test each other continually and even a glimpse at a slight of hand here or there reveals too much, maybe reveals all. What it takes is a bit of time or a battering ram of failure to sort it out. To determine if you are who you claim to be and/or why you’ve come. I’m continually finding it more difficult to understand the difference between hero and villain. Even the echo of this mindset is disturbing. Us and them. At the Bughouse life was clear, fight hard or perish inside of it. Friends were often enemies and enemies could be known and unknown. Most, well mostly those who became opposed to my way, morphed somehow consciously into the second of the latter, the unknown enemy. But what could force my mind into such a paranoid state? Pain, likely. Or defeat. Or worse, success, success at finding an answer even though I don’t like its result or consequence either to my body or soul which, in recent years, I’ve fancied merging into one. That mind/body conglomerate that coughs and pukes and twists its ugliness forward through the deep swampy bogs of desire and release. For weeks now I’ve awoken to fear of death. That’s saying something, from here in the world of vampires. But it’s not my own death I think of but the death of Buttercup. Her death specifically because somewhere in my code of the new mind/body I feel I’ve done something wrong in giving death open season in a time of great strain. However stupid, I feel responsible for letting the anxiety hold me down or change my path in any way and let go of being strong or open or a casualty in any way. And now because I lost a battle with demons, death will come to take her away and open bare a sustained pit of horror from which one has no hope of release. That and because, even after these years, I remember her softness and our soft, drunken conversations, in a time where I needed something soft and she needed some kind of cowboy to fulfill each others myths. And we did this well, even through the first phase and the diagnosis and the subsequent realization that this will not get better, that she would not be my girl even in the best of times, for very long. When I called, first we spoke for hours and it was good to hear her voice and to believe in something sustained and good. She is now on a constant drip for pain as the tumor on her brain stem blocks out the remaining life – first taking her ability to move, and then slowly growing deeper into the brain until it blocks her lungs and heart. My impulse is to lie close to her and put my fingers in her cunt. To deny the beast with soft touches and orgasms and warm hands over soft breasts. But being half a world away I just listened and spoke of our superficial experience and sent a package the next week from Kosovo. Buttercup responded with a polite letter, the kind of American politeness that Ana, when she senses it in me, wants to eat up and spit out as dribbles of waste. But from here, for my part, her gracious response was the kind act of a strong soul in a dying body. And I listen and wait in exile from the closed land of vampires hoping for some possible change of fate which has been assured will not arrive. Be strong little boy, find God's song.

time

Travel North

January, from September is the first month since moving to Kosovo where reality came to slap my face. Ana, having escaped France and her situation for a time came to her flat in Belgrade and there are problems – the pain, the flight, the fight, the resounding effects of being a foreigner returning, of never expecting to return, two children, one an infant, a failed marriage, abuse. What problems, she exclaims, can this be, I’m only three hundred kilometers away from you. Trapped in circumstances that are all too clear, I cannot save her and she has done a good thing by coming but I may not be able to come. Afraid, she lashes out at not connecting, at differences in speech and language. And of course the silent fear of being left alone, left without love. So she presents a difficult situation at a difficult time. I understand so I cry for her. I cry for myself at not having a better answer. And then there is my reality which is shaped in the space and pace of just existing and living to observe. Two nights prior I hand Shawn, my boss, the phone after Ana had called to free me from a night of obligatory drinking in which I was caught – alcohol an increasing problem for everyone around because without opportunity people drink and with opportunity people drink. It’s not a Bukowski pastime here though, here it is empty space, unproductive space. Ana makes a stand and it is received poorly. Let my man go for the night because I need to speak with him. In their minds she is now a crazy Serb, a wild woman making demands with even less to offer. Whatever was said it was not the thing to say to 2 forty something bachelors drunk and chasing girls in the impossible Prishtina space. Kolja, in Belgrade, saved me twice now. Both times from the depths of depression by a diagnosis that sadness is a part of life, disappointment a part of life, and that people will usually, on most occasions, look out for number one. A truth I’ve heard time and again and time and again I’ve been surprised at my own lack of submission to the truth preferring instead belief in the impossible. That is the way it will go with me. The road north to Serbia becomes even more entangled…

2011

Brother, what has this year been? This year has been a long climb. Too long. So long in fact I have a hard time determining now which year it is and from which view I stand. Some say I have a failure of patience and move on too quickly. Others say, it is a long life and you are in movement. I tell them I want a silent year, a good one with beautiful happy endings and health and wisdom. And they look back as if I am already arrived, wise and prepared. So what is this life like? This year, for now I say, this one life is like climbing a tall building in the fog. The Fog envelopes the building and gives it a new life, one that extends indefinitely its limits both vertically and towards the horizon. I am scaling the building either in descent or climb but not knowing for sure which at most moments because in each window lay some distraction. On each new story and in each new window I look in and experience a real desire to be content inside or to be held by the space and looking out. Inside each window I may find a warm home or cold flat. Inside looks enticing, like relief, a place to hold onto and breathe with. Inside some windows I see fantasy, sex, desire, hope, family, life, everyday living. And then from time to time an inhabitant will catch my silhouette against the fog and I am invited in. Usually I go and think, this is where I am supposed to be. I stay for a time and describe to my host or hostess what the climb is like and reinvent how and where I started from, having forgotten just why I had left in the first place. I tell of the fog and how each grip of the climb leaves a small trace. How the winters are long and cold. The climb, I imagine, is worth a good story and as a guest I feel obliged to tell one. Then, after a time in some comfort, with a new love, I get the feeling that this is not the place for me, that I have not arrived and that I will need to go back out the way I came and continue on. I fight this impulse and try to stay on anyway; arguments and misunderstandings ensue, then anger until I crawl reluctantly out, or force myself out with a grand gesture or, as has happened on some occasion, I am pushed.

This year, at its end, I have said goodbye to Lord Byron whom took the opportunity to tell me (yet another woman to do this) that I am not a good person and in her state of feeling trapped lashed out in spiteful anger and murderous charge. I am already healing like a god damn wolverine. This year reintroduces Ana, from eight years ago. Ana, one of the few women whom I’ve photographed – whose photograph now sits in a collection at the University of Iowa. Ana, who when we met had recently buried her mother, whose body was eaten by cancer. The woman I brought my wife to and whose home we slept at as 2003 rolled in. Ana and I are survivors but at this point survival may just kill us before our time.

And then there is Kosovo, my new home, fraught with every problem in the book save for the love people here have for one another. Kosovo, the ultimate place to be an outsider, because getting in means being married in and marrying in means to surrendering to the cause of paternity and social dogma. I think 2011 will be a lonely, productive year. I think I should just photograph it. I think.