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Colpo

A very weird personal year, 2015. Two hip replacements, a mother’s death, a 60th birthday, the dramatic end (involving police!) of a 13-year Catholic odyssey. And yet – even in the face of this glut of happenstance – it was quite another experience that came to dominate the year, and my life. Eleven months on, and I still haven’t made any sense of it. Even as I have come to know it in intimate, almost physical ways.

Colpo di fulmine. Are you familiar with this expression? For some reason, I remembered it from watching one of the Godfather movies. Forty years ago now, can you believe it? It happens to Michael on his trip to Sicily, I think. (I will fact check this later.) When it happened to me, I remembered. I went on-line to search for the phrase.

J.M. Darhower describes the experience precisely: “Colpo di fulmine. The thunderbolt, as Italians call it. When love strikes someone like lightning, so powerful and intense it can’t be denied. It’s beautiful and messy, cracking a chest open and spilling [out a soul] for the world to see. It turns a person inside out, and there’s no going back from it. Once the thunderbolt hits, your life is irrevocably changed.”

There’s only one thing I take issue with in his description, and that’s his use of the word love. “Love” is not at all what this thing is about. It is an inevitability. An inescapable reality. And you never get rid of it.

Colpo literally means a physical blow. And that is precisely how it feels. Like you’ve been slugged in the solar plexus. Your very first encounter with the other, and you feel the inevitability as a physical assault. Fulmine means lightning, but it’s experienced more as sound than light. A thunder blow. A percussive effect felt as an atmospheric pressure, like the rumble that takes hold of your body when thunder happens directly overhead.  The English “love at first sight” doesn’t even remotely capture the experience. Colpo di fulmine is a deeply physical, particularized, violent event.

The strange part about it all for me (as if the whole thing wasn’t strange enough already) has been that is not something I can acknowledge. Indeed, when the very specific moment struck me, I was invisible to him. But I remember the encounter with a weird lucidity.  I see his back, the deep maroon of his scrubs, the papers he read, the placement of the other people in the small room, even the smell the space. And though there have been subsequent interactions between colpo other and me … barring some cosmic synchronicity, there won’t be any more. Even were there to be a reciprocation, there is an impossibility to the circumstance. (I use the subjunctive mood deliberately: language employed to express a distinctly uncertain possibility.)

Another strangeness lies in the fact that, after all my adventures in the world among men, for so many many many years, this has never happened to me before.  I turned 60 in 2015 for God’s sake. Of course I’ve been attracted to men. Lots of them. But this is different. I’ve been around the block more than a few times. I know. But this happened. Darhower was right. It changed me forever.

Odd, but the experience has somehow resolved for me the desperate search for other. Somehow the bar has been raised to an impossible, insurmountable height. There’s nothing else to look for. I found it, even if I cannot have it. Indeed, it doesn’t matter if I can have it or not. This only happens once in a lifetime. I can no longer imagine an intimate interest in any one with whom it has not occurred.

It’s not as depressing as it sounds. Indeed, colpo brought me back to life in remarkable ways. The colpo is simply a part of me now.  I don’t talk about it much. It makes me sound nuts when I try to explain it. So I just let it live its quiet life inside me. I am quite serious when I say I don’t think it will ever go away.

Perhaps this is what Beatrice was to Dante. Perhaps this is what the troubadours (and troubairitz) wrote about.

I’m writing a villanelle for him. So that’s probably exactly what it is.

The Recombobulation Zone

There is a wonderful sign in the Milwaukee airport when you’re flying out of town, just after you’ve gone through security. You juggle your shoes and belt and ticket and ID in one hand, try to zip up your bags after their x-ray examinations with the other, and scour the immediate horizon for some place in which you might pull yourself together with a modicum of dignity. Dignity is in fact a hopeless dream as you limp barefoot without a belt or jacket or jewelry, dragging half-open luggage behind you, through any large industrial space.

But in Milwaukee, just when you are about to succumb to reality and sit down on the floor, you see a sign over a group of benches just ahead: The Recombobulation Zone. At this point in my story, you need to understand that discombobulation is one of my favorite words in the universe. Right up there with shenanigans. And discombobulation has been a fairly accurate description of the state of my daily life for most of my life.

But the notion of re-combobulation. How wonderful is that? In desperate moments like those post-security-frisk ones, and other even more existential contexts, recombobulation well describes a wrenching need in our lives. A hunger and hope for wholeness that hovers just beyond the horizon. (That fades forever and forever when we move.) Leave it to those wonderfully practical Midwestern people of Milwaukee to articulate that longing for us and wrestle it to the ground.

Recombobulation of course assumes that some sort of combobulation has taken place at some point in the past. It’s a sketchy assumption. As we get older, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that as combobulated as we may have imagined ourselves to be in any given era, it was probably an illusion. And yet. Assuming that at some point we did in fact have it all figured out and pulled together, assuming that the frayed nature of our more recent past has simply been a blip on the steady screen of our progress … there is in fact something very comforting about the notion of a Recombobulation Zone.

That’s where I’d like to imagine myself now. For me, the assumption of any previous combobulation is even more of stretch than it might be for most. Nevertheless. I feel that maybe, just possibly, things might begin to coalesce. Memory. Music. Words. Songs. The easy connection I’ve always had with music, in particular. To return to that. How it would be so wonderful to have music as the ground of the last chapter of my life.

Last week, my sister and I visited what we call Grandmommy’s house. In fact, the property belonged to and was nurtured for over fifty years by both our grandparents – Paul and Roxie Scates.  The “house” no longer exists. It burned down in 1996. Even when it was still around, “house” wasn’t just a house. Grandmommy’s house was also grass and trees and water, more than 5 acres of heavily wooded land  with almost 100 yards fronting Donegan’s Slough. The slough, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the area, is in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. It was formed when TVA backed up the Tennessee River with the Wilson and Wheeler Dams. All sorts of low lying water ways, in this case McKiernan’s Creek, were flooded to create larger, peaceable backwaters off the river. My mother says that when she swam across the slough as a girl, she could feel the cold creek water still moving through its old course  as she moved across it.

When I was little, we visited my grandparents every weekend.  The only houses around belonged to the families that had lived in Colbert County for generations.  No one lived across “the lake.” We just saw trees on the other side when we sat down to summer dinner on the front porch. These days, there isn’t a porch any more. And all manner of horrifying things abound on the other side: condos and jet skis, multi-storied piers with savage looking speedboats, nasty McMansions and off-water trailer parks.

But even among all this ridiculousness, and even without the house, the land remains magical. (I will find a post-able picture of the log house soon … it was a large hand-built log structure put up by a group of hunter/drinkers for their clubhouse in the early 1920’s.) My sister and I visited at a perfect time. Late May, when all the green was still exploding, lush and full, but the mosquitos hadn’t yet arrived in force, and it wasn’t nasty hot. We didn’t have much time to explore. And we were more than a little wary of critters and snakes, seeing as how no one pokes around the property all that much on a regular basis any more. (Caveat Trespasser: a wonderful man and his wife across the road keep things under control as well as a sharp lookout, if you’re getting  any ideas. And he’s got a gun. More than one, actually.)

There’s something about a special piece of land that has the ability to lodge itself in your heart. The ultimate Recombobulation Zone. The ultimate center of gravity. Grounded earth memory.  An obstinate affection that refuses to die.

My mother is very sick. When she is gone, my sisters and I will have to decide what to do. The property would fetch quite a lot of money on today’s market. Waterfront condos! Raze the trees and squeeze a thousand in! A developers dream! But I will fight savagely against a sale. I have this dream:

I want to make it a music place. Muscle Shoals, after all. Rebuild the big beautiful house. Create a performance space in what was the huge great room of Grandmommy’s house. Put studios in the basement underneath. And bedrooms for family upstairs.

Both my grandparents would love the idea, I think. Both were musicians. It’s how they met, in a Methodist church choir in Knoxville that my Granddaddy directed (and played cornet in), and where my Grandmommy sang alto. She played organ and piano, too. After many years of music together, when I – their first grandchild – was about 12, Granddaddy bought Grandmommy a brand new reel-to-reel tape recorder to set down the songs she had written. She had a dream of making a demo tape – at the age of sixty something – to send to Nashville. She wrote a lot.  Maybe I should cover some of her songs.

In any case – a dream. Dreams are by definition recombobulations, yes? Music once again takes hold of my life. Muscle Shoals. Donegan Slough. A Recombobulation Zone. More to come.

 Subversion Redux: Our Gardens

I resist the blog thing. As you can see. Nothing here for a couple of years. I’ve been busy doing things. None of which are particularly interesting. Same old stuff. A failed relationship. Drudgery for money.

Like many other people my age, without the pressure of a manager or publicist, it is hard to keep up with these media responsibilities. Above and beyond the fact that I really wonder who might even remotely be interested in it all. And yet. there is a newness in all this that I instinctively feel I should tend to. I may not embrace it, at least in any passionate sort of way. But perhaps it is worth a sort of glancing peck on the cheek. Or a lovely kiss. Or a quick butt grab.
(I do still love looking at men who look wonderful in blue jeans from behind.)

So much of what I want to say, I am not able to say, given my current work, and the possibility that someone might look me up on line. There are responsibilities attendant to what I do. To children. To an institution of which I am not all that fond, one that has recently, in Ohio, required workers to sign six page contracts stating that they are, in essence, repressed fascists. It hasn’t filtered down yet to our diocese. Granted our fearless leader is a little slow on the uptake given his girth, but it is bound to arrive sooner or later. And I do in fact need this job.

At what point does one go underground with what one really thinks? Open an anonymous site. Tweet pseudenonymous tweets. I used to be pretty outspoken about things, and in my own voice. And in my own body. Racing around Manhattan, sneaking into Studio 54 with gay guys (cute girls could always get in with two gay guys … who weren’t particularly interested in paying the then outrageous $20 gate, and I was poor, so that used to be a problem). Sliding down Park Avenue blocks on ice with a bottle of scotch in hand and screaming with a best friend. Sweden. France. Falling in love over and over and over and over again. Adventures. A mountain of journals. A vast landscape of beautiful men. Three astonishing children. Art. Books. The world. Much have I seen and known – cities of men and manners, climates, councils, governments. Although probably not in the way Tennyson thought Ulysses did. (I never liked Penelope. Circe is my model.)

Looking back, it hasn’t exactly been a remunerative way to go. I live paycheck to paycheck these days, and the checks aren’t all that big. I do love some of the things I do. The children with their open hearts full of wonder and awe. The dear parents who support me in my work. The people I find hurting that I can help sometimes.

But.

I need to do real work again. Ideas that rock boats. Music that informs life. So many passions toward which I feel a commitment, but from which I feel so removed.

Then there all the dreams. The literal night-time ones. I wake up in the morning feeling like I’ve been to the movies. Wild. But also the daytime ones, of which even at my age I can not quite let go.

There comes a point of necessary synthesis, an excruciating point at which one must pull things together into a final whole, or fail. Outlines and notes, no matter how brilliant, no matter if there are rooms full of them, they just don’t cut it any more. An articulated work must be wrestled to the ground. I wonder if I have the energy to do that anymore. Jacob and the angel. Do I have that energy? Do I have it in me anymore?

The energy to be beautiful. The energy to dance. The energy to teach music to the grandchildren of the people on the bus I ride in the morning. The energy to eat well and exercise and stretch and summon the patience to grow old. I used to have so much energy. Maybe one is given only so much of it in a life. And then you just run through it. Like a tank of gas.

For the most part, I just want to go to bed at night and read books. And, actually, there’s nothing wrong with that as long as the books are very good, and the bed is comfy. But that means an acceptance of an anonymity beyond which the world seems to have moved.

On continue, n’est-ce pas?Il faut cultiver nos jardins. Mine has some lovely herbs and flowers in it.

Subversion

So much for my foray into on-line respectability.  My little “thank you for visiting” place-holder here, a gesture in the direction of what has served as an on-line resume, it also served its purpose, I suppose. At least it gave me something for resumes and applications, hundreds of which I sent out, none of which were successful, few of which were even acknowledged. Which leads me to believe, after these last non-gestational nine months, that I should fly my true colors again. Me, back. Me, writing. Me subverting the dominant paradigm, or at least pretending I do.

I admitted once to a friend, a pretty well-known professional writer friend, that I am probably much more interesting as a character than as a writer. “Oh, that’s not true,” he cooed in response, presuming (somewhat patronizingly) my comment to be some sort of self-denigration.  We were dating at the time, and he no doubt hoped to get lucky that evening. But I have in fact had a wonderfully “interesting life.” It embarrasses me to say so, but I have. Seared somewhere deep in my brain after all lies the T.S. Eliot condescension regarding  “people with interesting lives,” and particularly  people who seemed proud of that fact. Philistines! The work’s the thing, yes? Discipline. Sacrifice. Accomplishment.

Well, I try. Ideas swarm, but do little to ground me at keyboards. I worry too much: money, love, word order. It’s so hard to find just the right balance between inspiration and distraction.

But I’m back, a desperate stamina asserting itself against all odds. To hell with the pretense that I am a normal job candidate. My resume outs me on that one. As good as I am, I am not anyone’s sure bet in these economic times. On to projects which may or may not realize themselves. Riding Buses. Reflections on magic. Sheep and the Faery of Inwood Hill. Interlacings of fantasy and our dour real world. Class. Art. Beauty. Transcendence. Engagement. Justice. Hope. I draw maps. I make notes. I dream.