NoraSawyer.com

SO I took a nap this afternoon (as people do, when they work at home and live in california and it’s spring and all is decadent) and I had the strangest dream:

We were looking at an apartment next door. We decided we didn’t want it, but I started having strange dreams about the landloards late brother-in-law. We were dogsitting for my parents, and I was trying to write the dead man’s brother-in-law a letter, but kept making horrible and frustrating typos. Also, I wanted pretzels.

Here’s the letter (I wrote down what I’d managed to get down in my dream as soon as I woke up. It seemed very important):

Dear Mr ___

Over thepast few weeks, I have been having a series of strange dreams. The content of these dreams has led me to beleivethat I am being visited by you late brother in law, Mr Harry Davidson. Through these dreams I beleive that Mr. Davidson may be trying to communicate something of great importance. Please contact me at your earliest convenience.

Sincerely,

Belle Anne

Hello, You.

I know, I know. If any of you are actually still out there you’re wondering what on earth I’m doing in a writing program when I never write, I never call. Communication: not my forte, even now.

So – it is spring (at least today) in San Francisco. Poisonously green foliage. Great blue sky punctuated with columnular, fluffy clouds. A sense of bigness in the world. I wish I could show you the pictures in my head.

There’s a park near our house: Buena Vista. The first week we lived here, Brian and I used to go for walks there every morning, and it was incredible, everything I expected California to be. When I’m walking there, I feel like a child: every tree, every snail crawling on primeveal leaves seems new, representative of a vast knowable unkown.

Reminds me of a hymn we used to sing in youth choir:
Name unnamed, given and shown, knowing unknown: gloria.

Sorry for the stream of consciousness. a combination of school and spring has untapped something for me, grammar be damned. Or maybe dammed. I probably need to drink some tea.

I’ve been oddly out of it lately. I haven’t felt like writing. Not that I don’t have any ideas (though that’s definitely part of it). It’s more of a self-censorship, a problem I’ve had on an off since my late/teens early twenties. I can’t seem to take pen to paper (or in my case finger to keyboard) without asking myself: with so much noise in the world, why add to it?

I dunno. I’m probably just making excuses. Lots of schoolwork to be done. Lots of writng. And me, sitting here, feeling like I should read the Phaedrus again, but too lazy to go over to the bookcase and fetch it. And even if I did fetch it, I’m not sure I’m in the mood to read it.

Perhaps a nap is in order. Or a tub interlude.

Mmnmp.

Sleepy as heck. Brian has bad cough, and wakes the both of us up several times during the night. Need to be writing, but lack story ideas. Also, sleepy.

whaddup?

So. Oddly unverbal days of late. I’ve been having tremendously vivid dreams, though.

Location-wise, my dreams are fairly repetitive. I tend to have dreams that take place (at least in part) in the following areas:

1. The basement of the church I grew up attending with my mother and sister (the best of these was one wherein I was dating Axl Rose. Guns N’ Roses had a ‘clubhouse’ in the closet where the youth choir kept robes and whatnot. Lest anyone think this was a teenybopper fantasy, let it be known that I had this dream last year).

2. The neighborhood on the border between Wakefield and Melrose, MA (a few blocks from where I grew up). In my dreams, however, this neighborhood has several added blocks, and is somewhat modular.

3. Outside my parents’ house (when I was younger I’d havve reoccuring dreams that I’d be outside and unable to open the door. Or rather, I’d keep opening the door, only to find the wrong house inside. I’d have to sort through a pile of doors, trying each one on until I could get the right interior.

4. The stretch of Main Street between my old Jr High & my parents’ house. The woods by my old elementary school (and the shortcut contained therin) usually play a role as well.

Hm. Is my corner of the Jungian subconscious stopped somewhere circa 1987?

Congratulations to Rose and all the other Iraqis who got out and voted today. I’ve never been happier to have been proven wrong (and here’s hoping that I continue being wrongheaded in my pessimism).

Now I’ve Seen Everything.

Seeing as how you’re reading this on the internet, I’m sure I don’t need to recap for you the whole “Postcards From Buster” coontroversy (ok, ok, just in case: some conservatives think that the PBS cartoon’s portrayal of two lesbians in a now-pulled episode exploring the state of Vermont is further evidence of the ‘gay agenda’ at work on the hearts and minds of Our Nation’s Children).

I just stumbled across this choice bit, on a blog called “Crosswalk”:

And does PBS think the public is stupid enough to not catch what the catch phrases “maple-syruping”, and “I like it Vermont style” really reference?

I’m sorry, but I lived in Vermont for several years, and currently live a scant 10 minute walk from San Francisco’s Castro district. Heck, I even share an apartment with a gay man. I’m pretty much down with the current lingo. And I have no freaking idea what this man is on about.

You really have to wonder about folks who see the gay agenda lurking in the maple syrup.

More poetry, posted before my editor’s eye kicks in (as part of my new year’s bid for upfrontness in writing).

Confirmation

At twelve,

I knew something of the longing

That marks adolescence.

I wanted to belong, yes,

But more: I wanted.

I wanted.

The sad-eyed Jesus

Upstairs

In the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum:

A laundered Kurt Cobain,

Jim Morrison, alive,

Understanding.

I am not like the other girls;

I know Latin.

I was twelve

And eager to understand

What made my sister so interesting,

Suddenly

Even though she was only two years older

And I was unusually precocious,

If a bit obtuse.

So I opted for early confirmation

The first step, I was sure

In my eventual sublimation.

And in my confirmation class,

Filled with graduate students

And doctors of Theology

And a man who I now realize

Couldn’t have been more than twenty,

But who was much older than twelve

I broke down

Remembering

The night my goldfish died,

Though I prayed to God for a miracle.

To Abelard, Heloise

(unfinished, I think)

To her master,

nay father,

to her husband,

nay brother;

his handmaid,

nay daughter,

his spouse,

nay sister:

to Abelard, Heloise*

Relations, we call them:

These lines run between us.

Tongued.

Diminished.

Spoken.

Spoken as though

There were something

In speaking,

An essence called forth;

A foundation laid

In the wilderness.

In the begininning was the word

A breath over waters.

In the beginning,

This morning

You breathed

And I woke up

Awaiting definition.

* From The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. and intro. by Betty Radice, (New York: Penguin, 1974)

Autobiography

When I was born, irises were blooming in Missouri. This amazed me as a child. In Massachusetts, where we lived for most of my childhood, the most I could hope for on my birthday was a crocus poking up through the damp spring mud. Sometimes it even snowed. Once there was a blizzard, and the snow came up to my waist (which to be fair couldn’t have been more than two feet off the ground).

Now that I live in San Francisco, spring starts coming in January. I still find it amazing that, on mornings when its so cold I can see my breath, I’m greeted with the sight of purple flowers blooming outside the bathroom window.

I was born at noon on April 23, 1977. My mother tells me that while lying in bed in her postpartum daze, she had a vision. As the nurses bustled and my father futzed and I cooed, she was watching the credits to an old black and white cartoon. A song was playing in the background: “Fairy Tales Can Come True.”

She didn’t tell me this until I was a teenager, but I can remember, when I was about ten or so, watching a commercial for Sprite or Mountain Dew built around the same song. It made me feel so wonderful: melancholy and amazing all at once, as if a world full of possibility were about to open up before me, but just for a moment. I’d like to think that this is my song. My mother says it is.

Growing up, I was an oddly puritanical child. Odd because I can think of little in my upbringing, save a general aesthetic sensibility, that dictated one mode of living as better than any other. My parents taught us (my sister and I) that sex was a natural part of adult life, though probably something that should be avoided until one was ready. Wine was served with dinner, and available to us once we turned sixteen. Nonetheless, I imposed strict censures upon myself. I would not drink alcohol, ever. I would not have sex until marriage. I would not cut or dye my hair. I would carry only wildflowers at my wedding, and only ones I’d picked myself, that morning. Preferably, I’d live off the grid, reading and writing at night by oil lamp or candlelight.

I came up with these rules when I was about eleven, and believed in them, to a degree, well into my teen years. I’d always be setting rules out for myself, like a young Gatsby, or an Hepestus, trying to shape my perfect self from the sticks and mud of my perceived inadequacy. I’d mark my summer calendars with structured activities:

‘prayer and meditation, 9 AM – 10 AM, ‘study 10 Am -11, bicycling 11 AM – 12, lunch.’

I fasted intermittently. Luckily, I have a short attention span.

I fantasized about becoming a nun, but if I were honest I’d admit that I really wanted to be a monk. I remember seeing a movie on TV wherein a man joined a monastery, only to discover he had romantic feelings for one of his fellows. Upon finally owning up to this desire in the darkness of the confession booth, he learns that the monk taking his confession is, in fact the one he’s been lusting after. The monk slides away the screen separating confessor from Confessor, and pulls back his hood to reveal… a woman’s face. That’s what I wanted to be: the woman in the monastery, an object of desire, yet chaste; hidden, yet innately sensed and desired.

Link

sigh