Afterglow_a dog memoir

by Eileen Myles

  Meanwhile on this earth on this planet we are thirsty. Are we brave enough to see this thirst as longing. We want to go home. So we go to the beach. Understand! We wait for night. The little living human is framed, is continually, by opposites. One of the ways we experience this in the living realm is in the limitations of things. Can we accept this longing, feel it, even maybe occasionally go down to the beach. Jump in, dry off and walk on. Do we accept our fate? The holiest people live by the sea with their dogs. Look at Mary Oliver. That is a saint. But there are a great many challenges to our frame. Think of a mind as a sea. Its own inland sea. We can connect to the enormity of others, the sea in them. We can connect to Dog. Hound of the Ocean as the ancients once said. But there is an agony at first but maybe a little all the time. A kind of oceanic stretch. Aching, impossible thoughts. Some people take a giant leap themselves by being “gay.” Other people need to kill them. Cannot accept the thought, the “gay” thought. That things are not as solid as they seem. So there are many sudden inexplicable deaths. How can we abide. There is a sea. There is Dog. Can we trust in that deep silent underwater bark? The ripples allowing a stretching of thought, a wide lookage. To be living in that lighthouse. Thoreau knew it, wrote about it. Yup, you know him. Hear this. To be standing in that light. All that light. Because every day as we are dying our gaze is getting tiny without Dog. We become sorrowful. We can cry out. Wait for this now! And hear her sorrowful knowing bark. For Dog will come to comfort us. We can do evil. Be violent. Use love as if it were a common bone lying on the ground. An inscrutable bone. Using it there. Yes.

  The only true logic is sound. If you don’t know, listen. Bend yours. Careful here. An angry murmuring, an ill placed yelp, a grrr can set off a maelstrom of pain, tragedy and disease. We need to get it right. To listen well. To not do wrong. We need to abandon our logic and go back. To wait in dog is to get on all fours, not just on your knees, but to worship the dog privately and wait. The waters are coming, we can and we will replace the violence with silence and wait. The peace of the dog is promised and soon will be upon us. His waters will rock us and hold us. He is the sleep. He is the night.

  But normally humans want to drink. I’m a little parched they might say. How about a couple of brewskies? Some smart drinks say the lifted eyebrows under a spectacled gaze. One eye shifts towards another in an office. A tipping gesture like a drink to the lips is made. Glasses into purse. Computer turned off. Okay? There is so much surrounding this urge to drink. A young person might feel, uh, a powerful tugging in their crotch might begin. A thudding inside it is the sea of desire to which all are privy. And all around the youth the message is no. What you feel is wrong. But it is inside me. This is what she says. This is what he says. Is this feeling not right? The youth drinks and the conflict is resolved. The illusion of alcohol is that we are putting the ocean inside. But no get this. Instead we are stilling it. We are dying. Alcohol is mold. Past ripe, a sickly sweetness that makes a person go crazy. Of beer they say the kiss of the hops but it is the hiss of the snake. The snake laughing uproariously whenever a horny teenager takes a drink. Her head cast back in exaltation, her hand fluttering at her chest. She is the antithesis of dog, the agent of counterfeit sweetness that is replete with a message of death not life. SSSSSSSSST. It is not the healthy surf pounding against the rock. Another picture: the balloon of your soul deflating.

  When two people meet and engage in the act of fertilization simultaneously a million pictures are surging in their brains. Think of your parents making love if you will. Pay attention. An academy award, a cavalcade of thoughts of pictures is coursing through their heads. Yes, right up here. You are one of them. The universe is a tiny yearbook but told in seconds. The possible second of each of us. I must explain here for the first time perhaps that the act of sex is not the sex act as we understand it. Oh no. The tiny picture is key instead, a thought entirely understandable to children who intuit pro-creation entirely. They are for it, standing at their drawing pads in kindergarten. Don’t get the wrong idea. The collusion of childhood and sex in our time is the greatest of crimes because we are wiping out their supreme board by imposing too early animal sexuality on a greater moment. I am saying the child is a virtual movie theater, get this, not of sex but of creation. Get this. True creation. The first eight or ten years of the child’s existence are full of these pictures. The supreme board, listen here, your light bubbling portrait gallery, the cattle call of images from which all of us were chosen, this is the wild field of life. People in their natural state are sometimes unable to make a selection. You know how the drunkest people often have children. Easily. While the earnest twos, good people can be plugging away at it for years. Even the lesbians trying. Good people too! It is enormous the responsibility. Which is forgotten after the act always. I tell you now. The two of them engaged in the act must see you momentarily—you are the thought. They must go: Yes, her. Few can sail into this mode of selection readily. It’s a trance, really. Sex is given humans to distract them from a lighter deeper choosing. That is a fact. It is easy, a child could do it, pick a face, a nature they like from the sea of entities ready to be born. But the world already is terribly crowded. The child must pass a few years; this is the waiting time. The true gestation. Later on they may enter into the deep rich valley of sex: the place where the human first encounters the nature of soul. And it is there at last that our widest choosing has begun—as we begin absently putting our arms around vagrants, elves and villains, around thinkers, teachers, pilgrims and beasts—in this rambling sex time and the map of creation is streaming through our heads all the time here on earth hear this it is manifested by the fitting of bodies, one to another. It is a holy place, not a holy act. Like universes if you see where I am going. I have given you many talks. This is one. The greatest crime on the earth of course is rape. Animals commit this crime as well. Dolphins and ducks. The spider many times … she then eats the perpetrator of the crime. I am not saying the spider’s way is useful for us. Rape is … prepare for this thought. It’s stealing the envelope of another. Bodies, though gorgeous, are only containers of the sea. If you force your way into a message that is not intended for you, it’s a kind of suicide. The message will annihilate you ultimately. You’re no one now. On and on. You are no one for generations if you do it repeatedly. It’s very hard for us to understand it on this plane. The greater suffering is endured by the one who has forced their sex on another. Holy people have said this about their torturers too. It is very hard to think about rape this way but it is true. That there are no pictures. If a child is born of this union they either have no mind or they are sage. There is nothing written on these minds and either nothing good will come of these people or they are the saviors of our time. In the future I see a small yellow dog in this position. And he is the prophet and he shall be the end of this story. For today I see my own teacher, Rosie.

  xx

  She smiles because she’s happy galloping off slack jaw and the slopes of the park are a sea variety enabling her watery legs to dance with her rear legs getting a pass as the front does all the work and her ears in the air.

  News of the dog: here’s the fence again, and a willow tree probably Australian. There’s a tall blue and red plastic ride we fall into the shady bowl of it a sec. Aqua bench. Can a park be childless. Teen markings be all that signal we’re on earth. And up the tree into new bright green leaves: birds are singing and the dog is only ass, her forefront dipped entirely into the bushes. She knows the score. Cause she’s old. She can eat whatever she wants now. Shit, chicken bones it’s hers. In fact she may choose her death. Did she.

  Deeper in and she’s gone. So we find on the other side her white maw thoughtfully munching a muffin or a leaf. She turns around her tongue hanging out her white face blazing and this is pure joy. She is fifteen. The sun highlights all the wrinkles in her barrel chest. A soft torso that used to be strong but the width and the heroic bone structure, ripples and inclines now say where the muscles wer
e. She doesn’t care. She wears her body like her favorite clothes. Age is a slight inconvenience on her way to sudden meals. Her paws and lower legs are white & the upper is a splash of honey. Above is pink: inflamed, puffy, raw the sores like the exposed torn joints of a stuffed bear. Watching you is so much yoga. Each new attraction makes your head drop & turn & we see the white under maw which I used to call “velvet” when you were a pup and now I call sort of wash cloth.

  There’s moments when all I can do (and I can’t) (and I did) is rub my palms along the shifting grade of your butt, back, shoulders. It’s a bit of a slide. She’s moving in wood chips round a disc of hot cement. It’s dancer-like: late “Merce”, each paw falls deliberately and ripples with the rest. She snakes. In a way only her tail is testament to how uneven it all is, tadpole to the highly erratic path of her walk. She lowers her head to the base of a slender tree and the silvery bone flickers madly from her neck, her only jewelry, ID.

  As if we’re in another world the sidewalk suddenly is cool blue and yet she’s totally turning to the right, she’s walking away. She looks like she’s going into a restaurant she practically owns, she’s that kind of man.

  Moments are speechless to arrive in a patch of grass shaped by cement on the other side two sworls and they contain grass wood chips sun and pit bull that’s what it has. It’s very still. Holding these events from seven or eight years ago even making a screen shot of some like a lonely applause.4 A bird chimes in knowing. And there’s the here. A world of traffic outside my hotel. I can peel up the corner of the walk. This is a risk. And I hear the rain of another country, another century. Not that grand. Pouring rain. It’s really pouring here, no there … no ecce.

  She’s huge now close. We’re at her back. The physiognomy of dearness unsurpassed. Neck and shoulders soft wide, held up by the bent flagging legs its own form wiggled in dark echo tall taller to its right. We let just shadow walk for a while. No dog only its repetition. Sentimental painting last Indian on a cliff. Then two dogs the shadow dog and the white, the white and black and tan are feeding on something making an eight of legs, a thing and the tail arches to say it’s time waving. She dips and pees and turns around. Okay she says impatiently tired blazing and yet.

  There’s a tree that’s mostly dark. I stand next to it. Enormous legs now enormous dog. The folds on the inside of one chicken bone leg a part of meat of calcified muscle, a folding a friend. The dandruff in her fur, her skin is flaking. The tub of her, the tube of her—intelligence lifted and gazing. Motto: Always aim before moving. Into the same wide procession of green, turning, going. Only two feet left. And we can feel the grass now with our own paw.

  Back into the brightness and you’re still walking a friend, the other dog, and the world is staggering now bouncing complicated green and suddenly your limbs are blurry and close. And it’s simply traffic the exchange of public lawn and dog on and on for a while and we can think our thoughts.

  Dirt feels different. I’ll say that. It’s dirt, a lemon squished and the detritus of willow, a smattering of strands. We hold onto the squished lemon half cause the color is wild and we need that. Cause it’s only green and doglegs entering for a moment. Shaking the jar. She definitely wants to go home. She’s shade and dog. Dark posed one thing before the dark concrete and fence bright reflectively in the sun. We’re done. And smells home half way through and stops.

  And it’s that house, the first one. It looks like a tree: yeah tree but it resolves into dog small fuzzy dog beneath a messy grove before a beige house. Freeze it.

  Go across the room and sitting on the toilet to look at this worship. Such a long reminiscence. And I’m the dog. Luminous somehow. In the room, outside, on the screen. Just a glow of light on gravel.

  Peel.

  She turns a blazing, thirsty white-faced tongue out member of the dead heading home. White stripe of sun on her back. Across the silence I’m calling. I’m your man. She turns and looks back holding still. And she moves which means come. Come with your dumb camera.

  The scratchy swirl of beige you can’t not notate. Grass. And now her head peeks in like marginalia.

  I get it. The corgi is here. Younger with an upright curious sympathetic face. The older dog endures. Stands in grass. She jumps and it’s her chubby legs we’re locked on. Two dogs circling limbs in green grass. I thought we were going home. Everything’s between the lines. Where did this corgi come from.

  My dog’s getting petted by a man. You see the pile of loose hair on her back. You can see his pointed loafers now. His tumbled jeans. And the corgi is running around circling Rose.

  And Rosie jumps. She always has energy for love. The man touches her shoulders. Her neck. He brushes the hair off. The corgi runs around. Then Rosie looks up. Right into the eye of the camera. The unambivalent fact. I thought we were done.

  What is that. A pole? A leash. Just human legs a shadow walking across the grass. Tiny dog mid-field. Oh yes we’re coming home. Face close up. Weary. It’s me that’s weary. Of copying, of writing, of filming. Of killing my dog.

  She’s nothing but a blur. I hold the insubstantial joy like a child. And now my head is out and her face is out. I give her a grey brown treat. A liver square and she engulfs it softly off my hand and I feel the wetness that accompanies the act. I get a lick.

  4. Screenshot produces grey geometric pattern. That’s not Rosie.

  FOAM5

  Hello! I was hoping to start this talk with a recording of foam. Is Juliana Snapper here. I don’t see her …

  Okay. Well let me begin. In 2002 when I taught at the University of California in San Diego I had a student named Tristan Wand and he was a surfer. Whole school was. Flip flop U. Boards hanging out of the back of their cars. Tristan was writing his senior thesis on La Jolla’s past—there was like this guy underbelly he wanted to write about. It had to do with these dudes up here in the ’60s, the pump house gang they’re called in Tom Wolfe’s book of the same name. Guys crashing cars, being outsider in a way that was a little unclassifiable—then and probably always—into surfing and getting wrecked and of course La Jolla today doesn’t have any of this—being sort of Palm Beachy or East Hampton. But Tristan worked at a restaurant with those guys from that generation, men replaceable with one another, a string of them like a line a chorus line manning the kitchen at work, do-nothing dads, my age, who got wrecked last night and so one might not show up today but the other one did and they had a constant laughing mumble among themselves as they stood in the kitchen doing work. They scared and fascinated Tristan while he stood among them and I suppose he didn’t want to be like these dad surfer guys and that got him into the idea of writing his senior thesis about them. I was his advisor and while he was telling me about the guys I drew this:

  I was imagining his guys like a chorus of bubbles not separate from each other but a string of things of words. Not in the ocean, but not far, kind of a strand, like the tiny string of bubbles on the beach when the tide has departed, that strand. Look I told him, or maybe he did this drawing and gave it to me. It’s a squiggle, not much.

  Use that. It’s abstract, don’t you think. Keep returning to it. That was my advice. What it all gets reduced to somehow. And quietly I thought I will also do something with it in the time I’m stuck here which turned out to be five years … those guys, their wasted lives, so beautiful, but what.

  I woke up early today. Figured I’d just keep working on this talk long as I can. I brought things here, to this beach town, a gorgeous fertile animal (when I say fertile I mean like generative) and I also took things back with me. Writing (it is my belief) is sort of a performance and text and ideas and bubbles are always frothing & coming right until the last minute. Foam is kind of a radio show.

  Robert said please don’t be academic. I’m not. What you do in the bum-squat institution is your own thing but I taught a class here called Pathetic Literature. It began with a form of masculinity. Here. Look at this picture I have of myself stealing a nickel from a bank.
I am about nine. I look exactly like a boy but it was a long time ago. I orchestrated the photo so I could be apprehended as a bad boy, a thief. Gender could be I guess just getting caught.

  In the art world in the eighties & nineties pathetic masculinity was a bunch of guys doing fuzzy work. I mean soft and cuddly and a little unclear. Men knitting, making crafts. I even think of Beck. & god rest his soul Mike Kelley. It was hot stuff—loser work these guys were doing. Talking about their feelings. Definitely they were tucking their genitals a bit. They were also dropping couches on their moms and making pornographic elves. Which I get! Elves are hot. But here’s the thing. The secret about the pathetic men is that they had all studied with feminists.