Dreamt that on the day the visions came I woke and said everything must change now. In the dream my mother was cruel. I was twisted in the dropsheets on my father's living room floor, my mother painting the walls the color of orange sherbet and putting up dark green drapes with fist-sized cherries on them. She is leaving the house to live with my father. She has become someone else to be with him. Look at yourself. I don't know how you can live with yourself, she says to me. Why are you talking this way, I ask. You know why, she says. In the vision my father appears in a black limousine screeching around corners and I appear to myself with a fistful of cigarettes. I cannot see my mother though I look for her. I am engaged to two women who are looking for me in the house. They know each other, know of each other. They are happy. I am a balding man of 36 in the mirror, and they love me. In my father's house I see men being strapped down and raped in the corners of avocado green rooms. I look for a way out. I look for a vision of my mother. She appears as a grainy halo of light. I wake as a woman again with long wild hair on a river beach and regret not having what it takes to keep seeing. Everything must change now I say aloud while leaving the shore, but I don't believe I can make the turn.
***
And it is because they've just spoken to each other again for the first time, really, in twenty years, about the divorce, and because they had the same argument, the one where he claims he's done enough and she reminds him he did nothing. Because she is entitled to part of his retirement; because he is close to his money and can't fathom having to give it to her. Because she tells him the money is also for his kids, his first family. Because he tells her he gave me a car--the 84 Honda Civic--and because she reminds him I took out a loan, paid blue book price for it. Because he says he did everything he could do: I have four kids. Because she says, No Charlie: you have six kids. Because this little thing--this not very interesting thing--that in his head my father stakes his claim as a good responsible father. That he believes it. That he is not sorry. That's the reason for the nightmare, obviously. The not very interesting nightmare.
***
Would rather write beautiful poem things.
***
"This play gave me nightmares," a student says of The Cenci. We laugh. She does too. It is an old story, that Beatrice Cenci is her father's daughter, as much like him in name as in recourse to action. Incestuous rape the final turn for Beatrice: she chooses to act precisely as her father does: retaliation. If she is defined in The-Name-of-the-Father, if she is a daughter of the master's house, she has no recourse but his. And the Father's weapons will not bring the Father down but perpetuate Him. Resurrect Him. Reify His reality as the only reality. We know this. It is an old story. But do we know how to stop its production? Does the play tell us that?
Undoubtedly no person can be truly dishonored by the act of another; and the fit return to make to the most enormous injuries is kindness and forbearance and a resolution to convert the injurer from his dark passions by peace and love. Revenge, retaliation, atonement, are pernicious mistakes. If Beatrice had thought in this manner she would have been wiser and better; but she would never have been a tragic character. (Cenci preface)What is pernicious, perhaps, is the imagining of a cause and effect relation behind retaliation and revenge, quid pro quo: this for that when no relationship exists at all between the threat of incestuous rape and the execution of the father--no necessary relationship, I mean. Further, that we then assume retaliation has an ethical value, can be termed good versus evil, or even more hierarchical--gooder less good, badder less bad--without recognizing that if cause and effect relations are constructed--imagined--the same logic applies to moral hierarchies: imagined "wiser and better." --The poet, of course, just as guilty as the rest of us.
***
Well, one cannot live a life without imagining things. Of course not, that's silly. It's all in how you imagine things. Oh and how did you learn to do that, imagine them how? Oh, I got acculturated.
***
Should Beatrice have suffered? That's it?
***
Bathtub epiphany: if you're going to believe that suffering is not subversive, you'll have to wipe out Christianity and most of Western European and American culture while you're at it. --What I meant was, is no longer subversive. Really? Are you sure? Maybe you're just like the rest who don't want to look at it anymore. (Well and when did they ever?) Maybe you meant: ought not be subversive. We're back to that again--? I thought we'd settled that argument, the "ought" and it's value as a moral thing. You can't use ought with any seriousness. What about: is it subversive to conflate subversiveness and suffering or is it merely what you'd expect of my acculturated imagination? Depends: what are you trying to subvert? Not the Father again I hope--I mean, nothing subversive about that.
***
Right. But I admitted it already, "this little thing--this not very interesting thing." This "not very interesting nightmare." Then I guess the question is why bother with these old things? Why not throw them out if they no longer fit? I didn't say they didn't fit (they fit only too well) but that I am tired of them. We are all tired of complaining about the Father. It is your weariness, then, and not the old things, that is not very interesting (that we find weary)--and don't even think about connecting weariness to suffering--I won't allow it.
***
