Rebounding is evolving
For the last three years, I’ve been living in the horizontal, in bed, with my dog, Ruby, who is now at the age where she spends most of her days sleeping. She has to have her head on some part of my body works as a ledge (my left foot, usually) before she’s settled enough to start her racket of adorable snoring. She’s a French bulldog. That’s why. And, of course, all French bulldogs are adorable, but mine is also psychic (more about that in another post if she lets me).
Part of my self-imposed horizontalness had to do with never getting comfortable enough in Newport, RI (where I’ve lived for the same three years) to go outside. It’s white people here. Very white people, and I’ve always taken the richness of all kinds of people in New York City, in Inwood and Washington Heights, and Brooklyn and other neighborhoods way too much for granted.
In Newport, there are days when I feel like I am living in a place that could one day turn into the book-burning (banning is burning), intelligence-hating town that has taken hold of American towns—where as soon the citizens there go to sleep, their bodies are snatched by Republicans and other kinds of hate-mongers who Americans actually vote in. Why are we still in the cloudy years of thinking we have no power as people living in a democracy? We are a democracy.
Newport has some democracy in its blood, I’m certain of it. And it’s also a lot like Provincetown, where I spent a lot of time over the last 30-something years perfecting my sobriety and fast talking. What I do actually love about living in Newport is the apartment and the fact that I have, for the first time in my life, an office/study/whatever, which, even on a low—energy kind of day, I find myself entering because, on the sunny days, that room is so flooded with light I can barely see—light so spectacular as it floods in from two windows that it would be enough to brighten up the whole apartment, if it could reach that far.
I got out of bed and into the light that promises one day to set the whole place on the fire of sunshine and am ready to get back to saying in sentences what I couldn’t say in the life I might have had before this one.
And for you kind wonderers, I want you to know that I’m going to put a lot of stuff here—little essays about art and artists in the form of praise songs or something more review-y. Or poems and other people’s poems and other people’s essays because I happen to think that engaging with art or being the maker of it is how we’re going to survive as a civilization. There is nothing more noble or more life-affirming of any civilization than the art it produces. But we keep taking a turn off that sacred road to take another road where people kill each other, in what Amy Lowell says in a poem, “a pattern called a war.”
Has art ever started a war, except for the bidding kind at the auction house, the publishing house?
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In the weeks to come, I’ll be posting something about the cartoonist, writer, and playwright Lynda Barry and a longish piece about manifestation called “How to Manifest People.” I’ll also be posting chapters every week or so of a memoir-in-progress called “Happiness Ruined Everything,” which, of course, isn’t really a title I think is true necessarily, but I like its snark, and it’s my most favorite-ist of all the titles I’ve ever dreamed up.
