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.

Ana and the Boy (Paris 2010)

sex once more

All matters of importance have something to do with sex. And since most of you read this to see what happens next in my sex life it may be best to gravitate toward full disclosure in hopes (if nothing else) than to receive some kind of confessional status though I know (as the Catholics still watch from the space they prepared in my brain) a priest must be present. You, then, will be my priest, the rest, who are still reading these words through the same firewall of fear that I write from. Or you are curious and preparing a case against me, in either case I am content with my paranoia and safe enough in the belief it can be cured through insane shouting.
When it became clear that Lord Byron was gone I fell into despair. Despair for at least two reasons: One, I loved her no matter her faults though these faults seemed too grave and two, I knew, after so many hard fought survivals through many near and tragic disappointments, I was, perhaps, not to survive this one. That it didn't matter anymore my stupid quest for truth or honesty or other useless gluts rather I would give up and prepare for the lonely haul having failed. And that this failure would by all rights destroy anything that held me even remotely in favor with the lord of hosts (the same lord who bends me over to spank me nearly each story) (the same lord, if pressed, could make matters far worse) (that same one).
It's a deep tale so I'll start with the latest woe, let's call her Lolita. Lolita is the only woman I believe who could cure me of the Lord Byron blues. I left, of course, the states and did what a man had to do to leave a woman but a woman never leaves a man until some moment or some other releases him. Something better. The lord, they say, does not like fornication, but he sends the temptation like a sweetbrier and asks for contemplation. What makes Lolita so damn edible besides her immortality at twenty one is her focus on the good fight. This, or I am overtaken by soft skin, taught muscles, firm tits, and a seamless flow. We spent nearly three days together, which ended in bed a short hour before she flew away. "I'll see you in June," were the last words spoken. Fucking June, again, a wait, just wait Rose. Just go. Though my dreams they may say aren't as empty.