loving kathe izzo: the wilderness of loving yourself

"The stories we sit up late to hear are love stories.  It seems we cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives.  We go back to the same scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning.  Nothing could be more familiar than love.  Nothing else eludes us so completely. . . My search for you, your search for me, is a search after something that cannot be found.  Only the impossible is worth the effort . . . It has a wildness in it and a glory that we want more than life itself.  Love never counts the cost, to itself or others, and nothing is as cruel as love.  There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet.

Merely human love does not satisfy us, though we settle for it.  It is an encampment on the edge of the wilderness, and we light the fire and turn up the lamp and tell stories til night of those loves lost and won.

The wilderness is not tamed.  It waits - beautiful and terrible – beyond the reach of the campfire.  Now and again, someone gets up to leave, forced to read the map of themselves, hoping that the treasure is really there.  A record of their journey comes back to us in note form, sometimes just a note in a dead man's pocket."

Jeannette Winterson
Power Book


DEAD MAN'S POCKET



When I was much younger than my obsession with love, I lived in Brooklyn with my parents.  We would visit the Central Park Zoo and I loved the seal pool.  I loved their hard slippery bodies and the way they slapped themselves down onto the platform, lifting their heads up to the sun, their cat-like whiskers moving as they sniffed at the air. I also loved the squirrels because they could run free and I loved the helium balloons for all the obvious reasons, and we all know what happens to them.  There probably is not anything like buying a balloon for your child if you want to ensure some small amount of post traumatic stress.

One night about ten years ago, I was looking for drugs.  I'm not making excuses but this was something I rarely did.  It's not that I don't like drugs, particularly the kind I was looking for, the kind conducive for both random and focused loving, but I'm rarely shopping for them.  I just wait for the accident that brings them my way and that usually keeps me out of trouble.  But this night I was looking for the kind of loving and drug participation that works on obliteration, the doorway of compensation that causes you to forget what you are compensating for.  In my search for these drugs I ran across a drug dealer with a penchant for compassion & introspection.  She was surprised to hear from me and, while trying to be helpful, she was curious as to my desperation. 

Me (deciding to be honest):  I need to connect.

DD:  With who?  Me?

Me:  No not that kind of connection.  You know, connect.

DD:  You know this isn't real.

Me:  It doesn't matter.  It will feel good.  I'm like a balloon that's starting to float over the horizon.

DD:  Don't you want to see what's on the other side?  Some people never get that far.



MY SKIN IS ON FIRE


My skin is on fire.  For some reason, particularly the skin that sits above my heart.  Not from love, in this moment, but from overexposure to the sun.  A life source that has increased in intensity in my lifetime and yours.  Although it was once nourishing it now could be seen as dangerous.  This health warning is one that fills some with fear and others with an inordinate amount of denial and recklessness.  I am one of the latter, obviously.

I'm sitting by the ocean in a little shack and despite all attempts to soak up the sun and listen to the ocean, or more actively, absorb the little glistening light fragments into my heart like love, I am full of anxiety.  I was given the gift of this shack by one friend and the time and money to enjoy it by another, because they love me, of course and this is beautiful, and, also, because they believe in me as an artist.

This love, lost in my own cavernous heart, becomes an expectation.  If you are an artist, you know how this feels.  Hopefully you might be a writer and you might be sitting in front of your computer at this very moment, taking a break from your work, or needlessly procrastinating.  What is sometimes an invitation, a glistening body of water on a really hot day or a week stretched in front of you with endless time to write becomes the ravenous roiling sea with animals as big as 10 or 100 times yourself that either inhale their body weight in search of food or devour it mercilessly in a hunger for blood, a hunger unfathomable to even the most passionate among us. 

There we are. The gaping mouth of the page.

I have no one to be jealous of today, no one to resent, no rent to heal, not with another artist anyway, at least not at this moment.  I haven't even glanced at anyone else's work in months or read an art magazine.   I haven't had time.  I had three successful engagements this spring, was paid to love the world and I was royally cared for, put up in hotels, fed and fawned over.  I fell in love with people as an act of durational art in one hour time slots, one person at a time for sometimes up to 8 hours a day, after which I would run on the heady steamy of that til late in the evening, going out to dinner, in conversation, walking the streets late of whatever city I happened to be in. 

I am so very very lucky.  Don't think I don't know it.

One night in London, while talking about what we are doing here, this mettaartlove and about working my heart past the fear and resentment of artists I envy, a woman across the table from me leaned over and asked me if I was finished now, now that someone out there could be resenting me, seemingly all glamorous and taken care of, paid for.  I took this a compliment.  But, of course, I still didn't feel like I was there yet.

That's why I am here.  More metta.  Help me.

 

YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE GOOD

I love as art and it looks like this.  I make a cozy and/or seductive environment in a public space, could be a lobby of a hotel or theater, a department store, a gallery or museum.  There is usually only room for two, maybe you can squeeze in another person if they are well behaved.  I will love anyone that crosses that threshold, that sits in that chair.  It's not as hard as it sounds, especially compared to sitting here and writing about it.

It's only an hour after all.  There is a natural momentum that carries you through, even if it can be very very trying, like when you are loving someone who, on first presentation, appears difficult to love, who makes your heart cranky and sticky immediately.  Actually this is actually a very busy time – more busy than usual . . to love someone you don't like is hard work and you need to pay attention, you can't sleep through it –  you have a lot to do . . you make the tea, but first you have to build the fire, you know what I mean.

But there is nothing crankier than an artist who is stuck and there is nothing harder for me today than being patient with myself.

I find it hard to love myself because I feel like I need to be productive.  I feel like I need to be productive because I am afraid of not being held by the world.


AVAILABLE TO EVERYONE


There are two kinds of flow, the flow that is available to everyone and the flow that is available to everyone.  So simple, but let me be an idiot today. 

Let's break it down.  There is the first flow that is available to everyone that is the teaser.  This is play.  We all had it sometime as a kid, no matter how miserable we were.  It is like pretending but we think it is real.  That is why it is effortless, because we just do the next seemingly normal thing.  Because if we were a princess, pirate, robber, troll that is what we would normally do next.  Of course.  And then we joyfully do it, even if it causes us to automatically snicker in a villainous way. 

Of course we forget how to play and we become self-conscious.  This is called growing up.  The self-consciousness is so normal, just like my awkwardness in front of the open page.  Just like the pit in my stomach when I slow down.  It's like the tiny repetitive inverted negative space that formed the shivers up my spine when I connect, the opposite. Actually, growing up is the other kind of flow that is available to everyone, but we don't recognize it.  It feels like loneliness or abandonment.   We are floating over the horizon.  And the weird thing is, we are all doing it together, even though it feels alone.   

Love is like this.  We get so crazy about someone and everything appears effortless.  Then later we scrape ourselves together, loving like looking in a meticulous mirror.

I can get that crazy in my love appointments too, in the best of situations.  I can ride the infatuation by just letting someone into me so totally that I don't have to think about anything else.  We're tripping over each other on our way to God. My intoxication becomes theirs and we are on a lightning bolt through the cosmos.  Hour after hour.  So beautiful.

So special together, sometimes after we part, I forget: I am you and we were perfect long before we started.

Thank you.

THE DESERT ISLAND OF LOVE

Contrast:

A first meeting.  The first time you touch someone else's body. 
Let's make it real.  I am in a café with the person who will become
my husband in a short 18 months time.  We have watched each
other in the incestuous film community of Boston for years, unbeknownst
to each other.  We will confess this to each other in bed later, maybe
just a few days later, but now sitting together in the café, sitting across
from each other, we do not even acknowledge that we want to go home
with each other.  I am looking over his shoulder at a couple who are
sitting together on the same side of the table.  The woman rests her head
on the man's shoulder and then turns her mouth up to be kissed.  They
look to me like an average Central Square couple, no distinguishing
characteristics, she slightly shorter than him, her head meeting his shoulder
at the appropriate level, their soft alternative looks match each other fluidly.
I only see the connection, the lips as they meet, they have hooked up to the
pipeline, I am still a tourist.  By midnight, we will be hooked up too.  It only
takes a moment really.  We leave the café after eating and we walk to the
corner.  Around the corner is the entrance to the subway.  There is the
anticipation of parting.  Somewhere in this short distance is the exit for love. 
The increment of mileage before is interminable and without sustenance,
seemingly, acrid desert, no shelter and the skin is barbed wire, really. 
After the question of continuing into the evening together, climbing into the
boat that has been waiting all this time, rocking slightly in the body of  water that
laps patiently & continuously at the heart, tiny movement but constant, eroding
whatever we have believed that we are until we have dissembled; so not tiny at
all not lapping at all but in actuality the ocean. we are tricked aren't we . . we
enter the boat, and then we touch each other and, somehow the huge beast is
so easily ridden -- oh for hours and hours, so easily, so effortlessly and then
more hours pass til the morning when we separate in what seems like it must
be an artificial wave of self confidence,  I actually couldn't wait for him to go so
I could go over and over the whole thing in my head, him sitting at the diner
around the corner in Chinatown, relieved to order his coffee and sit and look out
the window and then and only then could he see what had transpired or
what he believed to have transpired. 

But then the union moves forward, let us remember that I am young, only
23 or 24 when we marry and then only 25 when I surrender to motherhood
and then what is the frontier of love then, even more time passing, maybe
6 years later, alone together loving? this could be him, my husband, then,
or of course, at another time, it could be you . . .

A vacation, another gift of time, of emptiness stretching out with the
discipline of the home and the children and the careers but just the
hotel room and the bed and the ocean and the overwhelming expectation
of desire, when we have become accustomed to each other.  Without the
recklessness of the momentum of physical desire and the unknown, the
expectations of connection are not so easily navigated.  Without naivete,
the boat appears clunky and functional. 

Technique is necessary, a manual.  Somewhere, perhaps under a seat or
behind a clunky panel closed with a rough hewn fragment of wood, a survival
kit is hidden.  The supplies inside are not inviting.  Hard tack for sustenance,
some gauze and tape, some pills for purifying water, a scratchy army blanket. 
Your imagination of what would be necessary for survival is probably too
romantic.  In the bed on the first day of the vacation you stare at each other. 
It is not boredom.  This is a bad translation.  It is an epicure that is you have
not been exposed to.  The taste is not fanciful.  It is a taste without taste. 
There is almost no smell.  Thin like water.  Clear.  Pure.  But only valuable
if you swallow and swallow again.  Hold it inside til the edges disappear. 

Close the orifices.  Surrender.