Aliveness

A few more minutes with you.

You get used to nothing. You wake up every day as if anything can happen. What do you mean by anything. It’s not the same as November 9, 2016. You can’t jump in the same river once. I mean I wake up each day a feminist, and it’s still funny to be in love with seeing how the world works. I mean the long history of what is going on in that woman suit. “What is going on in that dog suit?” Gardner, the man I loved for many years, used to say to my dog, Sasha, sitting with him nose to nose. Everything you think you know about what a woman is you don’t know. The same is true of men. You can think about men all you like on your own time and over there. There are so many things to love, and I like to count them, and that’s how now is. Aliveness, Richard, feminism, waking up surrounded by trees and hearing the seasonal sounds of other animals. We have been visited by bobcats and eagles. I’m not going to dignify by naming the animals that eat my plants. I love writing these pieces and getting to know some of you. We are, together, feeling one emotion one moment and another emotion another moment. I have long been amazed that words, being immaterial and at the same time so real they can arouse you, including sexually. When that first happened, I thought damn, how beautiful it is our minds are hooked up this way to language.  

Sauna

In my twenties, I began swimming a mile a day at Columbia University. For several decades more, I swam at the Paris Health Club. Afterward, I would sit in the sauna with naked women.

Some women sat with a towel around them, but most of us stretched out on the wooden planks. I studied their bodies quietly. It was a brilliant and beautiful sisterhood. We were never free from ourselves.

At the Columbia gym, I was young, and I remember studying the bodies of women my age now. I remember a woman who was very thin and had lost most of her pubic hair. It had not occurred to me this would happen. It didn’t occur to me any rules of nature applied to me, and I think in this way I was like everyone else.

At the Paris Health Club, there was a beautiful woman named Barbara or Carole, who would swish sweat from her long, beautiful limbs. She developed a form of blood cancer and eventually died. When she was diagnosed, she wondered if sweating for long periods had produced the cancer. We all thought whatever we enjoyed would kill us.

I wanted a hard body. Not enough to make one. I remember watching a young woman walk to the water fountain. Her skin glowed even in the florescent glare. Blond hair curtained her face. She had one of those asses that is contoured, each cheek slightly indented and meeting the upper thigh without a crease. She had the ass of a boy as a girl, the ass we are all looking for. I was fifty-four. I couldn’t breathe.

I liked the stories women traded in the sauna. Some women were silent and sat listening. The talky women talked about their problems with men or with work or with their families. I don’t remember stories of celebration. Sometimes, after a yoga class, I would sit in the steam room with a woman from the class. She had long legs and a slim waist. She would stand on the top platform, whisking away droplets that collected on the ceiling. When she wasn’t there, the droplets would fall down like hot little bullets.

I liked the sing-song recitation of her days. I didn’t mind she was dull. When the door opened, I would look through the cloud of vapor to see if she had come, and I would feel the droplets waiting for her on the ceiling, thick and indolent. When she wasn’t there, I sweated until I felt soft, thinking at any moment she would break through the fog. “Do you understand men?” she would say. “Not really,” I would say. I thought she was talking about loneliness.

When Richard and I walk on Warren Street, I often want to walk faster to regain my normal gait, which is the gait of walking in the city, which is the gait of walking the streets of Long Beach as a kid, which is the gait of Lucy, my primate ancestor, walking along the savanna three and a half million years ago.

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The hand-gun bursting from the TV body in David Cronenberg’s film Videodrome.

Take the kitchen.

Take the comforting smell of toast. Take any path, then turn left. Take the couch and your leg against mine. Take the sound rain makes. Dogs are better than chimps at following the pointed finger of a human. Chimps, like humans, are thinking about themselves. In the British TV series Years and Years (2019), set in the near future, a young girl has her hand turned into a phone. Nearly forty years earlier, in David Cronenberg’s movie Videodrome, the hand of James Woods becomes fused with a gun. If your friends are jumping off a bridge into freezing water, are you going to follow them? Certainly. I don’t find it pleasurable to judge. I like the slow way you eat. Have you ever been an interchangeable character in a Shakespeare comedy? I met a man with a titanium leg. He pulled up his pant leg and showed it to me. He was wearing a running shoe at the end of it, and it attached above his knee. There was a prosthetic knee joint he could swivel. It was beautiful. When he showed me his leg, he looked happy to be alive, and I remembered optimism is for everyone. He twisted the leg around in a way a human leg doesn’t go. Since the evolution of the opposing thumb and the enlarged frontal cortex, humans have been fused with their tools. You have to impose your own order over that much invitation to melt.

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Every sentence has a biography. Every sentence tells you about the life of the narrator through their vocabulary, their inclusion of foreign words, their syntax, grammar, and punctuation, their comic outlook, the music in their cadences. These elements swirl into a distinctive sound with the ability to seduce the reader into continuing. How do you make written language register with the immediacy and intimacy of spoken language?

LIVE ZOOM TALK FOR MY FIVE THINGS

Richard and I have rescheduled our upcoming LIVE ZOOM TALK, presented by My Five Things for Sunday, DECEMBER 22 from 8 to 10PM EST. It’s called, “How to write a seductive first sentence”—about feeling pleasure as you write and producing pleasure for the reader. After you register, you can attend the live talk and also watch the video as often as you like. Everyone is invited.

Here is the link register and to learn more about our talk: https://myfivethings.com/class/how-to-write-a-seductive-sentence/

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