| KL |
| qwerky cubed Gary |
November 14, 2020 |
Another reason I thought of Linda in October was her birthday, which I recall some Octobers, though the other aspects I indicated last month caused sending a card. A woman I met in 2008, 25 years old then, Terese, who became important for me (and remains so) caused remembrance of my mid-20s freshly. She was wickedly funny, loves writing (former Literature student), and, well, led to very oddly wonderful times between us (no matter that she was sorta married)—I note because I realized a few years ago that she looks like Bonnie in her late 20s. I didn’t recognize that about Terese earlier because it’s tangential. But it’s funny, she lives nearby (still sorta married), and I write for her, to her, or something. I met Bonnie in a James Joyce class that I was auditing at UK. Her appeal was not just that she was a delightful person to know, but also she had a literary aura caused by her admiration for Annie Dillard, her involvement with poetry, and had a dad who was a professor of English at UK. Three years later, when I took the apartment across the hall from her, I was 25 and exuberantly filling black hardbound sketch books with journaling in light of so much happening in Gainesville, then Lexington. Writing was life. That’s continued. Thinking of how life traces back into events and aspects of years before meeting Linda in high school is fun. But Tomorrow (futurity) is always more interesting than Yesterday. I have a theme in some posts which is variably about not wanting to stay at a milestone on my pathway, just in order to write a postcard home (mere blog update). I want to move on—to see what’s on the other side of the next hill. A literal version of that was a slight plague in high school, when I would hike into pas- tures beyond my house, aware that time away would have to be equally time to go back when I wasn’t ready to go back. I wanted Linda to go with me into the fields, literal and literary. I wanted her companion-ship on the road, in Gainesville, in Berkeley. She was a sister one summer, then a dear friend, then a stranger who became a troubled daughter who flowered anyway, leaving into her own life, like a teacher’s beloved student who “flowers and leaves” (the title of a collection of obtuse poems by Guy Davenport). Yet, the potential story remains heartrending for me: How unfortunate—and saddening—that Linda needed to turn away. How saddening that, by implication of her own avowals, she needed to be harmfully duplicitous and exploitive. But I choose a light-hearted frame for our many wonderful times—auratic ambiguity of quirky, uncanny, idiosyncratic, eccentric, and absurd times. Qwerky. Finally, I settled in Berkeley, after seven more road trips between Berkeley and Lexington, including a bizarre affair on the Kentucky River, late summer and early fall of ’74; late fall and early winter in Sacramento with close friends from Gainesville; six months sharing an apartment with Paul Ness; escape back to Lexington, then moving to Berkeley perman- ently, engaged to Jane H., trekking back to Lexington to drive my books back west, car breaking down in Denver blizzard, causing me to rent a truck across the high Rockies of Wyoming in snow storms I barely survived; Jane moving to Boston because better career prospects seemed evident there, the two of us flying back and forth for a couple of years, then no longer. Then insert the next 40 years, which have been fun and tragic and creative and educational—and often enough incredible, in a literal sense. To wit: Step back, then forward. When Bonnie moved out of the High-on-Kentucky place across from me, I quickly found a new tenant, not to spite Bonnie (who became angry about losing the option of giving the place to a friend); rather, because I happened across a darling young woman, Debra, 18, budding artist, who needed a place. She became a close friend, spring and summer of ’74, like a sister, truly. A long story could be made of those times. I moved on. Yet... The night of November 1989 when I passed through Lexington—that one night, when I didn’t go up to Bonnie’s door—I didn’t know what to do with myself. So, I went to a shopping mall in south Lexington, looking for a bookstore to haunt in mid-evening. I walked in, and soon “Gary!” It was Debra working there. I spent the night with her (not sexual), then over months, we wrote each other. Several times in the next year or so, my research job took me back to the mid-Atlantic, such that I did side trips to see her (billed to UC, Berkeley), became pals with her three daughters (Debra was divorced at 33), and met her parents in Danville several times. A Christmas I spent with all of them, her mom, an amateur genealogist, gave me a massive notebook she compiled on the history of the Davis familly in Kentucky. Gary was slated to come home to marry Debra? (I didn’t have the heart to tell her I had no relatives in Kentucky.) Debra’s girls related to me like a father. I loved them. Instant family!—with someone else’s children. OK. But, OK? Debra and I wrote long letters to each other, between Berkeley and Danville. (Where Janna fits into this is another story.) Debra begged me to move back east and marry her. (She seemed desperate: She needed a homemaking partner and co-parent, more than a romantic companion). I loved her very much, but I wanted Sartre-and-de Beauvoir, Henry Miller-and-Anaïs Nin, Burton and Taylor, whatever. Though I loved Debra deeply, I wasn’t going to move back to Kentucky, 1991, which hurt so much to write. Some months later, she married a man who could be the reliable parent and helpmate she needed, while she taught high school art intermittantly (in a world that believed art was a luxury) and struggled to make her own work sell. Hers was a marriage of reconciliation, she admitted to me. I had no idea whether it would last. Soon after Janna died, I messaged her via Facebook. I really don’t know why, but we began to exchange emails. Her marriage had lasted, but her profile photo showed a pensively unhappy woman looking away from the camera, as if not really there. We corresponded for a short while, then it ended. Last year, I got an email from her saying that she and her husband were making a trip to northern California in a few weeks, and could she introduce me to him, because she wanted him to meet someone who “knew me when I was 18,” that is when she lived across the hall from me, a teen just out of high school—she who would someimtes put a note on my door about her upcoming day, addressed to “my knight.” I said I was sorry that her notice was so soon before her trip. I wouldn’t be in town. (In fact, I was quite available.) I was puzzled that she didn’t want to know anything about what I was doing (not to mention contacting me days before her trip happened). She wanted to be seen as 18. She wrote back cheerfully that she realized the notice was abrupt. She’d send me photos when she got back. But she didn’t. The appeal of such a story, to me, is that something in one’s nature often happens to us in our emerging adulthood that we want to never loose. It’s the era of the most passionate art—and legendary for originality in mathematics. (Einstein was in his 20s when he formulated his theories of relativity. The feat of revelation wasn’t to be repeated.) The period of early-adult ferment is well documented in psychological research. Being in late teens through mid-20s somehow seals one’s conception of who one “is,” such that we may be drawn back to that like a revelatory writer positing some great origin of The Word or nostaligia for First Love (which is a topic within academic psychology). Terese was like that: Full of insatiable energy for the sake of who she might become. In college, she was going to be a filmmaker. Then, she was going to be a writer. I praised a “persistence of Romanticism” (which is also a theme in philosophy of literature and canons of capacious genius). My enthralled persistence, by the way, would be two months before Janna suffocated herself. A philosophy of literature may live the whole Shakespearean round of being. Capacious genius may intimate returning from the grave. On one blackbound journal I filled while living across from Debra, I have an image of Picasso’s “Jacqueline with Flowers” as me in composure beyond anyone I could find. So Gary would seek her you see far away whose life is her art or art life. |
love and gravity |