love, mourning, despair, money

DIFY

August 11

Dear friends,

Hello from another side. I quietly turned off paid subscriptions a few weeks back, and will turn them on again, perhaps, in future. For now my erratic access to the resource of time and the resource of mind is too compromised to feel ok receiving your money. I’ll let you know ahead if and when I flip the switch back on to gladly receive your monetary support. Thank you, I love you, do keep reading 💗

When I told my Ayurvedic doctor I am frequently uncertain why I am practicing, or should practice, Ayurvedic medicine, she said, Do It For Yourself. (The positive feedback loop, she elaborated.) This shocking sentence, I slowly realized in the days following, is an orientation toward the world I have never been able to understand as a motive. Though I don’t fail to be as self-interested as the next person, the fully formed idea that I might do anything at all from a starting point of doing it for myself has been quite revelatory.

This revelation is common, isn’t it, for middle aged women? Even us childless, cat-less freaks can spend our lives in a sort of mindless (and, not infrequently, resentful) orientation toward self-obliterating service. I’m aiming for total freedom of motivation by age 60, shall the universe grant me this time on earth and well beyond. I’ve a few years yet to get there.

Another middle-aged wisdom: time moves fast and change is slow.

August 6

I’ve been obliterated by mom care and the family dynamic. Fear and despair take over and I lose a full week to this care and despair. I never know when this kind of week is coming, and sometimes the week lasts a day, or a month, or more. The feelings are ugly. They are tremendously, horribly, ugly. Mom has Parkinson’s, and Lewy body dementia. The future is not bright, even when there is joy in the present. Stay in the continuous present and try not to fear the future is the only way to live in it and who is good at always succeeding at that?

May 28 - July 5

The only way to find the form and function of poetry is to find silence and time, of which I am dreadfully poor. I’m down in the dumps over being poor, a failure. If I’d made myself rich I’d have space and time. (Or would I?) As it is, I’m cluttered with the anxiety of objects and options. A wealth of both with no discernible path thru, and I’m tired. I’m dead bone tired and I have to drive to the land-dry barren heart of no place, Santee, to take my mother to lunch in a loud bright shiny diner and, on another day, to a funeral in L.A. I bought her a pair of black pants to wear and later a shirt but the pants went missing in the assisted living facility laundry, so now what will she wear to observe the interring of her younger brother’s dead body?

Is poetry dead to me, or am I dead to poetry?

I have a younger brother. He’s handsome, alive, loving. He and his daughter, my niece, boisterous and tender, brought six kinds of chocolate dessert to celebrate mom’s 84th anniversary of birth, 8 days after the death of her brother.

Rich and poor, relative terms. Relatively, I’m neither. What does it mean to turn everything to money? Nothing. It’s a Las Vegas of the mind. I love the pure intent, the pure transparency of The Meadows. The clang of coins falling into a trough and scooped into a bucket, though one-armed bandits don’t do that anymore, they’re all just screens. Did you know that the showgirls left Las Vegas nearly a decade ago? No more showgirl. Today, instead, you can step inside a massive orb, an eyeball, a massive orbital screen, see visions its producers produced for you. The inside of whose mind’s eye? Not yours, and that’s the glory and the tragedy of it.

If you don’t appreciate the veracities of Las Vegas, you’re suspect to me.

Let me tell you what it is to turn everything to money. An actor plays a role for a period of time and for the duration of that period their soul is the money of character. It’s the only fluidity. Everything affects it, nothing transforms it, the abstract essence of energy, the great damage, the great purity.

We interred my late uncle. He was brilliant and strange. I come from a long line of the brilliant and strange and Paul Ballonoff was exceptionally both, plus interested, loving. He was a mathematical anthropologist (a what?), taught himself law and then passed the bar, avid photographer, lover of art and music, he traveled the world as an energy consultant (what?), his efforts brought the grid and its gifts to millions of people. He never married; he closed out his life with his closest companion, Alice. As is one custom we poured dirt from the land of Israel on to the lid of the plain yet fragrant pine box before it was slid into the vault. I’m confused by this Jewish funeral, being of the lapsed-Jew slice of the family. Don’t we go straight into the ground? Reading up, it seems that’s an assumed custom. But assumed since when? In what millennia past were dead Jews placed in a wall, a vault, a crypt? I’m not much of Jew, I haven’t followed the path of my ancestors past, nor do I know what they knew. But for as many of my ancestors are in the vault, the same many are in the ground.

Tell me, what does the word “Zionism” mean to you? (No, don’t tell me.) I’ve thought a thousand paragraphs on the sufferings of Gaza and the sufferings of antisemitism—I’m a Jew after all and these distinct and immeasurable problems are knitted together violently, immeasurably in the shape of Real Estate (land, dirt, sand; money)—but I can’t bring any of those paragraphs to form and fruition. The pain is too great, it is beyond the great orb of the great eye.

Regarding poetry: I’ve said it a thousand times (“dead to me!”), meant it every time. It’s only ever true the way Eurydice is dead to Orpheus — continuously, also endlessly not yet. It’s the long Covid of form; tinnitus, herpes, illumination, true love. Can’t be undone, once infected.

All writing is fiction. Writing concretizes energy to be released again through the fresh cells of the new reader; it never has anything to do with truth, which cannot be made material. Good to remember when reading — reading poetry, reading prose, reading memoir, reading memes, reading news. Reading faces, reading tea leaves? That’s another story.

yours in the ether, DIFY,

Suzanne

Mom & her brother Paul. Elder sister Sharon is missing from this picture.

---