First Kiss
The first time she kissed me, I knew she had a boyfriend. I’d spent the day washing dishes with him at the cafe where we both worked after all, while she waited over a cup of coffee for the shift to be over. She turned up at my house that evening though; we cooked dinner and ate, just like we had a thousand times before. When we went outside for a walk, I stopped to lock the door, and then ran to catch her up, tucking my arm into hers, as though that too was something we’d done a thousand times before. She didn’t seem to mind though and the rest of the evening was like a distillation of all the little flirty moments and unspoken fantasies and accidental touches of the whole long lazy summer. We walked slowly, still linked together, and when I unlocked my door and held it open for her, my eyes lingered on her chapped lips, smiling. I remember thinking very clearly that it was a pity I could never kiss them and wondering why I wasn’t more surprised that I wanted to.
She lay in the crook of my arm, the tips of my fingers just barely brushing her cheek. We’d been lying like that for hours, pressed close, silent in the dark, tracing each other’s faces. The outer shell of the ear drawing fingers down to the tender taut skin of the throat, down further, the ridge of the collarbone, no, stop, too far. A curving eyebrow curling into the soft straight planes of cheekbones, the narrow sweep of the nose, warm air rushing over fingers, close, so close to her parted lips, no, stopstopstop, too far. Sudden firm jawbone, rising as her head tilts back, curving again at the chin, and this time I can’t help it, my fingers touch the fullness of her lips, and the whole world pauses while they open under me. Somehow we’ve been slowly moving, tiny shifts in position, until by now we’re lying perfectly aligned, my lips bare centimetres from hers, breathing the same air. I am petrified, knowing what has to come next, but not able to believe it, not able to move, to breathe. She finally leaned that last infinitesimal distance forward and then we didn’t stop kissing until it was light enough to see.
midnight ponderings
My girlfriend and I were walking through a rather sketchy neighbourhood late one night. As far as I remember, we were both bundled up and she was wearing a hat, and I’d tucked my arm into hers, and we weren’t talking much. At one point, we came up to a guy arguing with his girlfriend about something; she was in a car, and he was leaning in through the window, trying to change her mind, while she seemed to be about to drive off. He was really agitated and loud, maybe a little drunk, and when he saw us walking towards them, he broke off and came right up to my girlfriend, still speaking quickly, something about no guy would baby, I’m tellin ya, now c’mon man. When we talked about it later, we wondered if he thought she was another guy, someone he could bring in to bolster his side of the argument — it took some time for us to realise that, because my girlfriend is not particularly butch and doesn’t get regularly mistaken for a guy, but that day, with the baggy clothes and the dark, and her hat, it’s possible. Anyway, at that time, we were both jumpy and feeling a little unsafe already, and this confrontational guy was getting right up in her space, so I yelled “Hey!” and we got out of there as fast as we could. The guy was really surprised at my yell; I remember his face — and I think that was when he got a good look at her too, because then he followed us in a half-hearted fashion for another block or so, shouting, fucking dykes, motherfucking bitches, before giving up.
This incident came up the other day, and she said it was really surprising to her that I’d yelled at the guy. I guess that’s fair: it’s pretty unlike me to be belligerent or loud, and I’m not physically threatening at all; in fact this is exactly the sort of thing that would leave me petrified if it happened to me. At that moment though, all I felt was an overwhelming protectiveness about her. This is a feeling I get quite often; about my little sister for example, particularly when hearing about her sleazy boss, but when I feel protective about my girlfriend, I want to stand in between anything harmful and her, specifically take it on myself rather than letting it hurt her. I know she’s completely capable of taking care of herself, doesn’t need anyone else to do it at all. It surprised her when I talked about it because this has never been our dynamic at all, and even less so now, when we are no longer a couple. Still, every once in a while something will happen, and I will want to be her shield.
I want to say that this must be a universal reaction, to want to protect the people you love, if they are in danger, even at the risk of harm to yourself. It just seems like the natural unthinking reaction, and after all, parents do it all the time, and it’s a staple in romantic fiction across cultures and through the ages. But the more I think about it, the more I feel like I’m missing something gendered here, because all the examples I can think of are about men protecting women and never vice-versa. The only place where I can see a straight female being protective towards a straight male is as a mother or older sister or similarly unequal relationship, and frankly that really confuses me. Are we really being asked to believe that straight women don’t have these protective instincts towards husbands, boyfriends, lovers? Maybe they’re generally supposed to channel them into emotional protectiveness and other forms of compassion? Or…? I’m not sure of the answers here, but I’m always fascinated by the narratives we tell each other and ourselves, and how they define how we behave, and this is one of those places where the social narrative and my gay reality just don’t add up.
Thoughts and a meme
I’ve been meaning to post here every day for the past week, but a couple of things distract me every time:
- WordPress keeps informing me when I log in that I can blog in Hindi, Marathi and presumably Tamil, judging from the script, if I want to, but they’ve managed to spell Hindi wrong — it says ‘Hanidi’ in an overly-elaborate font. How is that an incentive??
- I thought I’d found a clever hack to put the password protected posts announcement at the top of the page, with the rest of my posts updating as usual below, but it doesn’t seem to be working, and I keep wasting my time trying to tinker with it.
- I’ve been distracted pleasantly by more of Khadi’s photography, and by this quirky site all about maps, which are another one of my obsessions. Together, they’ve been giving me ideas for things to make….
I actually have a more serious post in the works, but it’s just not coming out right, no matter how I wrestle with it, so have a meme found on MLC’s blog instead.
1. Name one book that changed your life.
My first semester of grad school went quite relentlessly from bad to worse, and by the end of it, I was seriously questioning whether I was in the right university, the right field, even the right life. By the time it was time to start the next semester, I’d spent most of break either in self-pity or a black rage, and for the first time, could seriously think of killing myself. Then I found myself stuck overnight in a creepy hotel room in Baltimore. I was too scared to leave the hotel, and not able to sleep in the room, which was dingy white from floor to ceiling, with tall, narrow mirrors that sliced the whiteness into jagged angles, so I bought a book from the lobby’s collection of pot-boilers and gardening magazines, locked myself in the bathroom, tuned out all the sketchy sounds from the other rooms, and read all night. The book was Reading Lolita in Tehran, and reading it was like being plunged bodily into another world: I completely forgot who I was or where I was, what I planned to do, where I was going, and just inhaled the whole thing. By the time it was morning, I had finished the book, and covered every bit of blank paper on the flyleaf and endpapers with tiny notes about what I was going to write, what projects I was going to research, goals, dreams, hopes, bits of poetry. I remember the experience as an awakening, alive, passionate, eager, hungry, after the dull grey stupor of the last six months. Up till then I was planning to try to transfer, maybe start all over again in another field, maybe just quit, but reading that book made me stick on in my programme — which was not an entirely wise decision as some of the things that were upsetting me were large enough red flags not to ignore. But at that moment, it somehow reminded me, under the surface of the story and the writing, neither of which were that impressive, of exactly why I wanted to go to grad school in the first place, why I write, why literature matters to me, and that has definitely changed the entire course of my life, for better or for worse.
2. One book you have read more than once.
Just one? I tend to think that if a book is good and worth reading through once, it’s worth reading again and again, so there are a lot of books I visit frequently. (Not Reading Lolita in Tehran though; I still have it, but don’t intend to reread it for a good long while). But one book I go back to very often, for comfort and for hope and to wrap myself in, like a comfortable shawl, is Mary Renault’s The Charioteer. I read it for the first time about a year ago, but my copy is already battered and held together with tape. I find it endlessly easy to get lost in: the small self-contained worlds in school and in the army hospital; the intensity and significance of everyday events; the unbearable poignancy of the relationships that have to remain always just barely trembling on the verge of being acknowledged fully; teasing out everything that is not explicitly mentioned but still comes pressing eagerly through the silences in the pages. It should be completely alien but I find myself in this gay WWII British soldier’s story each time.
3. One book you would want on a desert island.
I think, masochistic though this is, I would like a big, glossy all-colour, picture-crammed book about food. Maybe a recipe book, but more likely something that muses about different foods in different cultures: ways of preparing things, and seasoning them with different spices; how the way foods are eaten at certain times of the year or in certain ways influences the way we think about them. I don’t have a particular book in mind, but something that’s a cross between a coffee-table type recipe book, and a culinary anthropological ‘thick description,’ written by somebody like Jhumpa Lahiri while she wrote her short story about the man who could tell, just from one sniff, all the improbable ingredients in a dish, down to the last delicate spicing of a night in the moonlight. After all, if I’m going to be stuck alone eating crabs and coconuts, I might as well nourish my imagination, seeing and thinking about all that food means, not just to the body but to a civilisation.
4. Two books that made you laugh.
i) Anything by P. G. Wodehouse generally will have me chuckling throughout, but I particularly like his Jeeves and Wooster books — dry humour, a little slapstick and a lot of sly little allusions to other books.
ii) Trying to Grow by Firdaus Kanga also had me in stitches. It was so unabashedly irreverent and so cheerfully making light of his situation; you knew that if he weren’t laughing about it, he’d be crying, and that somehow only made it even funnier. I love the language in that book and the ease with which he talks about the strange mixture of science and astrology, faith and finances, quarrels and community and over-the-top characters that make up Indian society.
5. One book that made you cry.
I just finished Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go a couple of days ago. I’ve been hearing about it ever since it came out, and there were no surprises left for me, and anyway, the writing style, after reading The Remains of the Day was enough of a clue to me that I should look out for something unexpected and nasty, but after reading through the whole thing stoically unmoved, I put it down and 10 minutes later, found myself in floods of tears. I think it was because of the sheer fatalism with which Kathy and Tommy accepted their role at the end. There was a brief line somewhere about being in a river and the current being too strong and the two people having to let go which kept echoing in my mind when I put the book down; it seemed like the most terrible waste, the most hopeless thing I’ve ever heard.
6. One book you wish you’d written.
Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I’m in awe of her ability to take in so much, to pay such attention, and then write about it in such beautiful poetic prose. I used to imagine, dimly, that I would write something like this, and then I read her and it was one of those times when you have two simultaneous but opposite reactions tearing you in two: I wanted to cheer with every page because the writing was so good, so exactly right; I wanted to sink into the ground and die because it wasn’t me who was writing it.
7. One book you wish had never been written.
I don’t know how to answer this one. There are lots of books I wish, at a sort of academic, detached level, hadn’t been published (Eragorn), or weren’t read so widely (anything anti-feminist/misogynist/violently homophobic), or read in particular ways (the Bible springs to mind), but I can’t honestly say about any book that I’ve read myself that I wish it hadn’t been written in the first place.
8. Two books you are currently reading.
i) Creating a Life Worth Living, at least I’m attempting to read it, for the second time, and hoping it clicks this time; so many people I love and respect have recommended it to me over the years, and I do want to change the pattern of my current life and need all the help I can get. It’s slow going though, and I can’t quite believe in it fully; my general scepticism towards anything that seems like a self-help book is getting in the way.
ii) Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje, which I’ve just begun, and can’t finish reading till I go back to the library and check it out. I read the first three chapters and am hooked on this strange man roaming from Canada to Dutch remnants in Sri Lanka, imagining families of acrobats walking from room to room in giant pyramids, searching the stray dogs and ghosts of mosquito-netted skeletal beds for his story.
9. One book you have been meaning to read.
Again, just one? I generally have a running list, and a precariously balanced To Be Read pile at the side of my bed. OK, at random, I’ve been meaning to read Stone Butch Blues ever since college, and never got around to it. I had a college roommate at one point who had almost a shrine to it, and that is the image that flashes up every time I think I am going to finally get a copy, and I wind up buying something else. I think I’m still a little unsure about the whole butch-femme dynamic — I completely stand by the people for whom it works, and who find it freeing up space for themselves, and there is a lot that is attractive about the dynamic, but every once in a while, that same feeling of obsessive cultishness that my roommate had around her butch identity creeps up when I think about it and I shy away. Which to me is a pretty strong sign that I should be reading the damn book already.
About Password Protected Posts
I’m writing two sets of ongoing entries, both password protected, but once you have the password for each, you will be able to see the whole set. The first one, beginning with “Headless heed and swirl” is about my current, ongoing life, while the second one, beginning with “Unfettered” is about some of the experiences that led me to decide I needed to explore ideas about sex and identity in this blog format. Anyone is welcome to ask for the password by either leaving a comment here with an email address, or emailing me directly at pestleandmortar@gmail.com.
Thanks to khadi for letting me use this lovely shot from our afternoon together. Please do not use it without permission from Khadi.
Words to live by
There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium. It will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compared with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.
You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a bessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive.
– Martha Graham to Agnes de Mille
Shifting Equinox
I’m just back from a weekend in the hills: no cell phone, no TV, no internet, lots of winding roads, long walks and fresh air, and peaceful time to think. I wound up writing every evening; candlelight flickering on the wooden furniture, stars wheeling bright above the lights of the town below, and the moon bright and full of promise soaring above the trees. I wrote painful, honest, confessional letters to the people I love in my journal every night, and then wound the string around and around it securely; I don’t think these are to be sent just yet. Now I feel lighter, happier, ready to finally take on all the things I’ve been meaning to do to create a life worth living. Sometime this week I will make two plans: one for life now, with time alloted to exercise, social life, writing, maybe a couple of classes in things that I’ve always wanted to learn — the flute, classical Indian dance, finally becoming fluent in French. The other one is for the future: to finally reach the stage of financial and physically distant independence from my family that I’ve been struggling to for years; I can see at last what it will look like, what it will take to get there. It’s a good feeling.
On Seeing
After the emotional intensity of the last two weeks (more on that later), this week, I feel like a camera, all eyes, detached from brain, heart, soul. I go through my day automatically — I’m interested in whatever I’m doing while doing it, but don’t think about it any more than strictly needed — and periodically I just stop and stare and do nothing else. I’ve been looking out of car, office, bathroom windows, into shop TVs and doorways, at paintings and photos and videos, at people passing by, with a sharp focus, a sense that I’m recording it, like a camera, but with no emotional resonance to go along with the image.
I’ve been going out into the hallway to stare down through the window at a tree. Till yesterday it was bare, then there were shiny, sticky, rubbery red and orange baby leaves, today it’s a spinning, shimmering mass of bright green.
I’ve been watching a group of women combing each others’ hair in the sunlight. They spread a sheet on the ground and kick off their sandals before sitting down, almost in each other’s laps, so casually close to each other. I alternate between seeing the patterns the different pairs of sandals make — spots of blue and brown and red radiating around the edges of the white square sheet — and the way the pale fingers move through the dark hair, all the thousands of different shades of brown from almost cream to almost jet-black, intermingled. We see the individual people, the individual trees or leaves, but not the patterns they make in and between everything, forming and dissipating constantly.
I’ve been looking at eyes, how they sit in faces, how they move, how what someone says changes, contradicts, underlines what their eyes are saying. A woman’s grey eyes changed the blue shirt I saw her try on; they pulled out the grey in it, and it wasn’t blue anymore. Black eyes lined with kajal looked up, and the little kid with its hair in a ponytail changed in a flash from a girl to a boy. All the light in the world would gather and glisten in my ex’s eyes when she laughed; I would sometimes be afraid to look at them.
And I’ve also been looking at k. d. lang. Have a look at the patterns and colour and eyes here and you’ll see what I mean:
Housekeeping
Just getting a little tired of mehendi-green all over the place and trying some of the other options. I always go for certain combinations of black and green, so this feels like a good theme, and I like the cleanness of it. The other one was beginning to feel a bit too full of frills and furbelows, a little girl’s frock.
Thinking again about poems, because Jen asked me for my favourites. I keep exchanging poems with friends, of course I have favourites, but I’m having a hard time being definite about it just now. At the moment I’ve been immersed in Adrienne Rich. This one, Transcendental Etude, is too long, too complicated, to post entirely, but here’s one stanza I’ve been mulling over recently:
But there come times–perhaps this is one of them–
when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die;
when we have to pull back from the incantations,
rhythms we’ve moved to thoughtlessly,
and disenthrall ourselves, bestow
ourselves to silence, or a severer listening, cleansed
of oratory, formulas, choruses, laments, static
crowding the wires. We cut the wires,
find ourselves in free-fall, as if
our true home were the undimensional
solitudes, the rift
in the Great Nebula.
No one who survives to speak
new language, has avoided this:
the cutting-away of an old force that held her
rooted to an old ground
the pitch of utter loneliness
where she herself and all creation
seem equally dispersed, weightless, her being a cry
to which no echo comes or can ever come.
