Yes, they are both meditative middle-aged memoirs by great lesbian writers. Both dramatize the writer’s complicated relationship with her mother and both name-drop Woolf and Winnicott all over the damn place. And YES YOU HAVE TO READ THEM BOTH. I don’t care. Cancel your calls.

Henry James did no good when he said that Jane Austen wrote on four inches of ivory – i.e. tiny observant minutiae. Much the same was said of Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. These things made me angry.

I love them at least in part because the NY Times gave Bechdel a shitty review that boils down to “These women! How dare they think their inner lives are interesting?” Therefore reading these books is exactly the same as jabbing a burnt stick into the eyes of the Four Boresmen of the Aborecalypse (Mailer, Bellow, Roth and Updike. Could those guys HAVE more cockish names?) And if that doesn’t make you want to read them I don’t know what will.

I was very often full of rage and despair. I was always lonely. In spite of all that I was and am in love with life.

I remember curling up in Books Upstairs in Dublin, right outside the gates of Trinity College, and reading Dykes to Watch Out For like it was going to save my life. I can’t have been in Ireland for more than a week. And I never connected with Winterson in the same way; I’ve never even seen Oranges. But this book! This book. It took me apart.

I know these are ways of surviving, but maybe a refusal, any refusal, to be broken lets in enough light and air to keep believing in the world – a dream of escape.

Me: “Those people totally had it coming. I was within my rights to kill them with my laser beam eyes.”

Jeremy: “Uh huh.”

Me: “If God didn’t want me to kill people with my laser beam eyes, he wouldn’t have given me laser beam eyes.”

Jeremy: “Do you have laser beam eyes?”

Me: “…no.”

aIMG_6717, a photo by k0re on Flickr.

Bells was a witch today, for Reasons, but by Grabthar’s hammer I am fond of this mare.

I booked the hotel months ago, but I realized on Friday night I never got around to buying eclipse glasses. By Friday night they seemed sold out throughout Northern California. Tears and recriminations ensued. On the bright side, during the make-up family hug, Claire said: “I took it out on Julia but I was actually mad at you,” which is a pretty sophisticated bit of emotional insight for a 9yo. The next morning I called Scope City as soon as they opened, and before I said hello the man on the other end said “We have a shipment of eclipse glasses arriving at 11.30am.” I laughed and said “We’ll be there,” and we were.

Christmas saved, we drove to Chico to see Tina and JD. Chico has dammed its river and built a swimming area around it.

There are so many storybook-style houses, it looks like the freakin Shire. It’s gorgeous. My daydream now is to be writer-in-residence at Chico State.

In Redding we saw the Sundial Bridge. What can I say? I’ve wanted to see it ever since I knew it existed. It sits on a bend in the Sacramento, with the snow-streaked Cascades to the north and trees all around. It’s a cantilever spar cable-stayed bridge, so its modernity stabs you with its sharp gnomon. What I didn’t know is that it also has Spanish ceramic mosaic all around the dial and down into the plaza at its base, so it feels like Parc Guell had a love baby with a James Turrell earthwork.

There’s a big science museum right there, too, so we got to watch the animal show with an iguana and a black vulture and a turkey vulture and a red-tailed hawk and a Stellar’s jay and a porcupine called Spike and a raccoon and a grey fox and a barn owl called Cricket and two cockatoos. Claire was the audience volunteer for the Stellar’s jay. She was given a hat with antlers and the jay perched on her head!

And then we hung out in the plaza under the bridge until the moon ate the sun, and we watched it through our eclipse glasses.

And it was epic. At totality, everyone clapped and cheered.

We drove all the way back. We had dinner in Williams, which is literally a cowtown. Our restaurant prides itself on cutting its own sides of beef, and is decorated with the brands – as in branding-iron brands – of local cattle ranches. The garlic bread was a mountain of garlic and butter on a baguette. J and I still smell of garlic 24 hours later.

I am so not Hollywood’s demographic any more. A good way to annoy me is to pretend to blow up the Very Large Array and Grand Central Station and the New York Public Library. I’ve had enough explosions in Manhattan to last several lifetimes, thanks. But there was a fun ragtag-band-of-misfits story in there somewhere. Thor is adorable – I keep calling Jeremy to say in my best baritone “DO I LOOK TO BE IN A GAMING MOOD” – and I could have watched three hours of Tony/Bruce and Clint/Natasha casually invading one another’s personal space. To me there is more jeopardy in an exchange of looks than in a nuclear missile. I am so not Hollywood’s demographic any more.

Claire: In real life there would be tons more benders. There would be over a hundred benders.

Jeremy: Technically it’s using “element” in a different sense.

Rachel: No! I’m with Claire! I wanna be a uranium bender!

Jeremy: I’d be a tungsten bender.

We have a rice cooker – we bought it after the first Cambridge trip, when a rice cooker saved our lives – and last night I’d shown Claire how to make a cup of white rice with a pinch of salt, a glug of olive oil and a cinnamon stick.

There were leftover sausages, which Claire cut up.

Julia made Julia Salad:

A grated carrot
Corn kernels
Torn-up nori

Julia has a glass of milk, Claire is drinking mineral water and I am kicking back with a cold Marlborough sauvignon blanc. It’s a beautiful evening, the door’s open to the terrace, the Daleks are on the telly and all’s right with the world.

…is that these days I ride her on the lightest imaginable contact with the lightest imaginable aids, and yet when Sonya says “lengthen!” and I ask invisibly for a lengthened stride, Sonya then says “good!”

I used to haul this mare around like a school horse, and now I hold her in my hands like she is made of spun crystal, and she does not put a single hoof wrong. I sink into the saddle in front of fences and feel her locking on five strides out. “Everyone chill out, I got this,” she says. I soar. I am a hawk.

I don’t remember when I first read Maus. I think it was probably the year I lived in Ireland, when I went on my first big graphic novel binge, but it feels like I read it earlier than that because it has become so much a part of me. Did Marie Suchting put it in my hands? Seems like the sort of thing she would do. Bless you, Marie, wherever you are.[1]

Maus is kept in the same area of my memory where I keep Olga Horak, a docent at the Sydney Jewish Museum who told me the story of the blanket in which she was carried out of Auschwitz. Olga’s blanket is made of a mix of animal and human hair.

Olga said to me: “I survived Auschwitz. One day all the survivors will be dead, and then there will be only you: the people who have met a survivor. Now it is your responsibility to remember and to tell the truth about what happened.”

Because I stand in this once-removed relationship with WW2, I am as interested in Art’s story as I am in that of his father. You can’t be a sheltered white Westerner and read history without knowing the terrible price of your peaceful, privileged life.

And of course Adorno was right: no poetry after Auschwitz. You can’t engage with the death camps in any meaningful way and then walk away feeling hopeful about human nature, or God, or life, or anything else at all, really. Ask Primo Levi.

But you can’t despair, either. What you do is you become Schroedinger’s human, both hopeful and hopeless. Everyone is a potential genocidaire; I, too, am a potential genocidaire; therefore I must do my work and be kind to other people and raise my children well. Or as Beckett put it: I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

It’s the human condition. This is what MetaMaus is about. It is the story of the story of Art, and of art. It is the impossible poetry after Auschwitz.

[1] Oh, Marie. I’d been meaning to call. I am so sorry. I hope you knew what you meant to me. You did your work and you were kind to me and raised me well.

Imagine if you mashed up Hurry Down Sunshine with Mountains beyond Mountains and, oh, a liberal (haha) dash of Atul Gawande or Siddhartha Mukherjee. You’d get this book: a gorgeous wrenching memoir of someone who had three psychotic breaks, went to Harvard Medical School and became a pediatrician, and then had another psychotic break. It’s incandescent.

If you take good care of any disease by eating well, sleeping well, being aware of your health, consciously wanting to be well, not smoking, et cetera, you are doing all the same things you should be doing anyway, but somehow having a disease makes them easier to do. A human without a disease is like a ship without a rudder.

It’s a good enough book that you should read it for its own sake. I feel bad even bringing this up. But yes, his father is who you think he is.

When Kurt tried to sell Saabs, he usually did the test drive with the prospective customer in the passenger seat. I tried to tell him to not go around corners so fast, especially if the customers were middle-aged or older, but he thought it was the best way to explain front-wheel drive. Some of them were shaken and green. He didn’t sell a lot of cars.

“Maybe you should just let them drive,” I suggested.

The mister is off building a robot thunderdome with the downstairs neighbor, so I called the wife and invited her and our boys over for dinner. While she was here her phone rang and the ringtone was Weezer’s “My Best Friend.”

Me: sharp intake of breath. “That’s MY ringtone. You have ANOTHER best friend???”

Salome: “I am totally busted. It’s my default ringtone.”

“YOU TOLD ME IT WAS SPECIAL FOR ME. I GOT ALL TEARY.”

We had BBQ chicken from a place on 24th Street with arugula and avocado salad and broccolini and brown rice. I made a compote out of leftover strawberries and we had that with cream for dessert. Salome and I got a little tipsy on limoncello from Lucca’s deli.

This is what my life is like now. Yesterday I was weeding our little front flowerbed and Colin the carpenter stopped by and we chatted about the shelf he is making for Claire’s yarn, because Claire took up crochet after Rose taught her how. Then Kathy came by on her way to pick up Julia and Martha from the math circle Vali runs in the place on the corner. It’s been difficult to blog these past few months because happiness writes white and I have never been so happy before in my life.

I showed the wife pictures of the house I grew up in.

“But it’s beautiful,” she said.

“I see that now. It’s a jewel of mid-century modern, and it was full of teak and Hans Wegner originals. My mother had flawless taste.”

“I pictured you growing up in a place with no light! Like, a dungeon!”

“But that’s what it felt like. I look at it now and all I can think about is how miserable I was back then. When I was a teenager I could not put together a simple declarative sentence about my internal state to save my life.”

“You were a bit like that when I met you.”

One of my catchphrases nowadays is that closure is bullshit. Scar tissue is what it is. I still feel the cold where the broken bones in my ankle fused back together. But the other California cliche, validation, is not so much bullshit. Having a third party acknowledge the you that has spent the last umpty years tunneling out from underneath all your own garbage: well, that’s not nothing, as we say. It’s a thing, as we say.

It’s even possible I will forgive her for her lies about the ringtone.

“Call Peter the Rocket Scientist! We’re going to brunch like it’s 1999!”

Felt as if I’d died and gone to the Mission District.

And then I went to Seattle and then I went to London and now I am back.

Took Rose and the girls to CuriOdyssey. River otters high-fived my dottirs.

I guess it’s nine years since the Iraq War began. FP has an only slightly half-assed postmortem. I’m not claiming any superpowers of prescience when I say that the disaster played out exactly as I expected it to. I was, after all, only one of at least ten million people who were against it from the start, and that’s only counting those who felt strongly enough to march against it. Everyone I knew was at that march, if not in San Francisco, then in London or Sydney. I had six-week-old Claire with me, in the tie-dyed rainbow footy pyjamas my mother had brought with her from Barraba.

People – like, for example, my Dad – are vaguely surprised, even now, when I say that I consider the Iraq War the most serious failure of my adult life. It’s easy enough to blame the war criminals, Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice and Wolfowitz and Feith, and to be sure, it was their fault. They overreached and they betrayed the trust that was placed in them, to put it mildly. They should all be in gaol.

But I knew. I knew there were no weapons of mass destruction. I knew Judith Miller was talking out of her ass and that the Grey Lady was publishing lies. I knew the casualties would be in the tens of thousands, at least. I knew the war would drag on for at least a decade, and that its cost would spiral into the stratosphere. I don’t mean that I had a strong hunch. I mean that I never doubted any of that for a second. Knowing what I knew, why the hell didn’t I protest harder? Why didn’t I fight more? I feel those deaths on my conscience. I always will.

I knew the banks were going to crash, as well, for all the good that did. With those two awesome feats of clairvoyance on my record, you might be wondering what I know now. Well, I’ve known for a while that Romney’s going to get the GOP nomination and that Obama’s going to win reelection. So I haven’t sweated over the outcome of this campaign like I did over the last one. (Pretty cold comfort, though, I have to tell you. The whole women-as-the-punching-bags-of-the-GOP-primaries thing is surprisingly painful anyway.) I’ve also felt the center of geopolitical power shift from Washington DC to Beijing. And I’ve seen the future of work, and unfortunately, it sucks.

I keep writing and trashing posts because it is so hard to put into words what I am thinking about. I am thinking about Trayvon Martin and my heart is aching. I haven’t blogged much about Najah because his story is not mine to tell, but he is my best friend’s little kid and I love him as much as I love my best friend’s big kid, which is to say: like my own. And he looks like Trayvon.

I sure as hell used to think I was radical. I sure as hell got treated like a radical, for taking mad radical positions like single-payer health care and progressive taxation. It turns out, though, that nothing ever radicalized me like loving a Black child. I am deathly afraid. Now multiply that fear by everyone who loves every young Black man in America.

I had no idea. I had no idea. I am so sorry.

ETA: icouldbetrayvon (ETA: not that *I* could be; I’m white.)

DSC_9762, a photo by Goop on the lens on Flickr.

Also epically cool.

When the boat sailed out you can see we were on a silver bay under a pewter sky. As Jeremy noted, you could have rendered all the waves using Fourier transforms. It was exactly like sailing into a mathematical function. I thought that for the first time I understood why people love the sea.

Five minutes later, as I was hurling into it, I had forgotten again why anyone loves the sea.

ETA: Tonstant weader fwowed up.

Elephant seals: hella, hella charming.

My calves are absurdly hypertrophied from trying to keep my damn heels down, such that the field boots I bought with an already-widest-possible calf are currently at Anthony’s being stretched.