sadi ranson, founder & editorial director of fibonacci editions

for goodness' sake | new work by sadi ranson-polizzotti

solstice, 2009, june 21st - sunday

sadi ranson-polizzotti, author, publicity contact information

author photo

P U B L I C I T Y

contact information

type.fournier@gmail.com

or

gregfreed@gregfreed.com


all ordering or pre-orders should be placed through Twilight Times Books. To contact the press, please use one of the email addresses above and address your note to either Lida Quillen or Greg Freed.

for goodness' sake - new poems by sadi ranson-polizzotti, forthcoming book

Forthcoming From

Twilight Times Books, America
&
Alyscamps, Paris


(for goodness’ sake)

new poems by

Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti



In his introduction to Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti’s new book of poems entitled (for goodness’ sake), Chris Madoch notes that Ranson’s latest book reads like “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” meets “In Cold Blood.”

Here is book of poetry that is, by turns, both daring and delicate. It is, as the cover image suggests (a woman’s exposed neck thrown back and lain bare before us), a work of honesty and surrender, rendering both the narrator and the reader exposed and vulnerable. Ranson-Polizzotti’s writing borders on the recklessly-honest. The choice she offers us: do we go for the jugular and slit her throat or do we offer a kiss and a caress?

Whichever we choose, she is yielding. She is “sapling green”, as she notes, “I am growing.” Always, there is a choice, and if we will not make it, the narrator is quite clear, she will make it for us.

The writing here touches on all of the senses and hits the high note, taking it’s cue from Yeats, reaching, yearning and beckoning to us with all the tastes and sounds and smells of the different seasons as we navigate our world and our lives. This is done spoken almost spoken in one giant mind-breath of prose-poetry reminiscent of Ginsberg with lyrical touches of John Ashbery and other New York School poet influences and more that intertwine like a partita in Ranson’s writing. Still, like Capote, while Ranson has drawn on her influences, and her work is fully owned and occupied by her.

As she writes in the poem *P.S.,

“I occupy this space now.
X. marks the spot.
The next move will be mine.”

about | chris madoch

image by chris madoch

about |

chris madoch is an associate editor of the tant mieux project incorporating tant mieux on cyrano. CHRIS MADOCH- writer and artist/photographer

A maverick Poet for GLBT issues, Madoch has published
what some may consider (perjoratively) "subversive" poetry, alarming fiction, odd articles and he has staged many interesting plays. Known for his often escoriatingly honest writings and editorials, Madoch also edits the new online ezine ‘Queer Times Press’. His visual sense is crucial and utterly cutting-edge. He is writing the introduction to the forthcoming collection of poetry, "For Goodness' Sakes!", due this Spring from Alyscamps, Paris - Twilight Times Books, USA in an international edition. For more information or to contact the editor, please email: je_jeune@yahoo.com, addressed to Editor.

walk this way

These shoes - these shoes have seen so many things, I suppose like anyone's shoes, if we stop to think about it, they would have a story to tell. They have been with me through the good and the bad. The happy the sad. The ecstatic, the heartbreaking. The momentous, the boring... and the vodka-tonic colorless inbetween days that add up to nothing in particular.

These I remember buying in Paris in a small shop near St. Sulpice, a quiet neighborhood, just after I had dropped in to, for whatever reason, even though I am not at all Catholic (or catholic) felt compelled to challenge my French and myself and every ethical thing I had or have and do study my whole life in university and beyond to meet with the very-French and obviously, very Catholic priest, and make a confession of some kind, never mind the fact that A. I felt I had nothing to confess and that B. I don't believe in confession really because I feel strongly if you are going to repent, then don't do a thing in the first place and C. This whole "sin" business just makes me want to pull out a peashooter and spitball the whole lot. If this is offensive to you, I apologize, but I find it offensive that I am judged so harshly by those who would not even know me - when I am an ethical person - so shall we sit in our respective corners and play "nonny nonny boo boo" all day long or shall we try to enter into some kind of dialogue (Socratic?) and reach reasonable conclusions about faith and belief - This, this is not going to happen.

It did not. The minister looked at me with his cloudy hazel eyes that were showing the first white stratus of glaucoma and asked me if I was "sorry" with a lot of "pardons" and me with a lot of "desole, et une autre fois, si'l vous plaits....merci bien..." but we made our way through this confession of sorts, and while i explained that I was not there for absolution (which puzzled him to no end, for why was I there then?) I tried to explain that I was there to serve him my good news, which was that he need not live by the tight restrictive confines of this particular faith. That yes, of course, the choice was and always will be his, but I suppose I was making the point that No longer was this my choice.

I never was a Catholic anyway.... I was always Anglican - in this country, Episcopalian. The high-holy Episcopal, the St. Thomas on Fifth Avenue, the Church of the Advent, the Trinity in Copley Square, the Saint Emmanuel, the St. John's in Winthrop, etc etc and the list goes on and on and of course let us not ever forget The Church of the Resurrection which, I believe, is by West 11th. These and many others and my alma - St. Anne's in the UK, which is where it all began.

So back to the shoes. Why the shoes? Because i bought those shoes right next door to St. Sulpice after the so-called confession non-confession where i left absolutely unblessed although it had been offered, and absolutely unrepentant, although this was offered but i felt i had nothing to repent for, and i felt blessed as altar linen regardless. I could have floated away for i was light as helium and my face shone bright white, no doubt - clear as any bell, as any saint. And then I bought the shoes because I had never seen anything so delicate, so beautiful, so absolutely feminine and almost impractical (although they have turned out to be among the most practical shoes I own), in my life.

Since, I have worn them (needless to say), all over Paris - that trip and others. They have walked the broad avenues of New York many, many times in times both good and bad, hard and not so hard, lost and found. They have tapped their way through Grand Central for reunions of the greatest joy, and they have tapped the same corridors past the violinist who plays the aching O Mio Babino Caro and I have wept. These shoes have seen me through a lot.

They have seen me at different publishing houses, at meetings with agents, at meetings with people who would consider themselves important - and who perhaps I might as well, surely a few, I did and still do and feel lucky to have the privilege of having known or knowing still or having met. These shoes have seen me almost arrested in New York City for passing through a gate for not knowing that this was not allowed even though I flashed my MetroCard and a transit cop stopped me and held me for over an hour, asking for my passport (yep, which is illegal in New York City, along with such questions as "Where are you from?" etc etc I was waiting for the "Known associates...." but she had already radioed in the station my social security number so it was only a matter of time before she knew my entire (rather, or somewhat, radical history and all because I went through a fucking gate, I thought). I remember I had these shoes on then when Officer Negrod stopped me, unclipped her cuffs, as if I were a threat to national security.

Hey, you can never be too careful.... Listen, I'm serious about that. I do not underestimate any threat. I remember the day well: It was about 4:30 on July 22nd, 2008 and I had just finished interviewing the filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker and was on the upper west side of New York city about to get into the subway when I walked through an open gate along with a bunch of other people, flashed my Metro card, which seemed appropriate, when suddenly, at the foot of the stairs, a rather brief looking police woman grabbed (yes grabbed, my arm and asked me why I had gone through the gate). I explained politely what I knew (which was what I knew, which was that I didn't know that I had done anything wrong, etc etc, all of which was true), and asked if she wanted to inspect my bags.

I remember I was wearing my hair pulled back into a sleek pony tail, these shoes, bare legs, a black wrap skirt that fell to the knee, and a taupe silk shift that clung to the body in what I would say were the right places and I had on a pearl choker and pearl earrings. Maybe there is no "type" - anyone could be a terrorist, yes. But did I with my little MacBook and notepad, on my way to the F train look really (come now, really?, let's be honest here) like I was going to blow up, or even had a thought to, or care to, or cross my mind! anything except maybe the gum in my mouth? That would be the only thing I was going to pop.

I get it though. I really do. What I don't get is the discrimination because I had or have an accent. That it is illegal in New York City to ask for another form of identification if someone presents you with an American driver's license (I did), then you cannot ask for further ID. Yet she did. I felt singled out. Make the example of. I wondered if it was the shoes. The shirt? The pony tail?

I flashed back to a girl in school when I was about fifteen who, as I was walking down the hallway one day (and my hair was long then as it is now), said loudly enough that I could hear her, "I'd like to take that fucking pony tail and just grab her by it, fucking thing always swaying back and forth...." And I remember not understanding that hostility either. Does this make me guileless? It doesn't make me stupid - I know this. It means that I do not think whatever way it is that this or that particular person thinks or thought. That a pony tail swinging should be so freakin' upsetting or cause such ire and envy is a source of great mystery to me. But hey... I'm living in the real world.

My shoes - the buckle is broken now. Of course, one cannot have such a history with a pair of shoes like this, all the interviews I have done in these shoes (given and taken as a journalist), and let them slowly dwindle away. No, they have to be fixed. The buckle broke one night this past winter - an absolute deluge was falling. I remember it well, and I walked with a friend through the pouring rain in a desperate attempt to find a taxi (futile, really) after our cheap umbrellas had surrendered to the wind (what do you expect for $5 from the local Korean shop on the corner, or any local shop on the corner in the city - they are built to last about five blocks - a dollar a block, I figure).

So there I am, in my lace and finery (jewels and binoculars, as Dylan says) splashing a path down the avenue arm-in-arm and laughing and freezing and awfully stepping into ankle-deep puddles and there it is, my buckle breaks, just unlooses itself somehow, slips, like the Gordian Knot.

It's funny how under some circumstances this would have been a frustration and would have just pissed me off, but under this, it was simply funny and yet another piece of a sweeter taste that was already in my mouth, honeyed and good. So there was no regret, no remorse, no need to "confess" my broken buckle, no need to run to the church down the street and say "Mon frere, mon frere, vite vite...aidez-moi, j'ai besoin de......" Quoi? What exactly?

Nothing. Spring is coming.
I am making my right way.

Thanks for listening.

s.r.p.

half of me

38th & Madison - May, 2008

I must put forth dual images of myself and neither is correct. There is the perceived strong she-can-handle-anything me (not true) and the she’s-so-fragile me (not true) but never is there the strong yet vulnerable me that even Bob Dylan had met, not knowing me, but someone like me, who was a woman in every respect yet when she breaks, she breaks just like a little girl. I don’t know if there is any other way to break, quite frankly. Do you break like an adult and fake it and pretend everything is fine? Is there some organized way” of having a minor breakdown of which I missed the mass mailing and details because if there is, I don’t know the rules.

I found myself, after months and months of pressure, after accomplishing so much in the past few years that I am honestly proud of. Whether or not anyone else is sort of relevant and sort of not. Yes, I care: but I care more that I did it. That’s the key. You do it for yourself. So after a crisis a year or however long ago, I threw myself headlong into work – unthinking, what about that space, that maybe even an inch or nth of a space, when the work is over – the space between projects – when suddenly everything stops and the work is done and handed over and there you are and the world is spinning and you realize suddenly that you have stopped.

This happened to me, of course unexpectedly, on Madison Avenue the other day, rush hour. I was seeing my friend Jacob, who is a kind man and a jeweler there and whom I have gotten to know because he works across the street from The Morgan Library where I spend and have spent a great deal of my time these past two and one half years for a project. So there I am with Jacob on an 80 degree balmy night and about to visit a dear friend just up the street at Grand Central, my favorite place in the world – Madison and Grand Central and Lex and all because, let’s be honest, we fill these places with memories and they are chock full for us and these are mine and the last time I was in this or that place, things were wholly different. It was the same weather, the same warmth, the same time of day, I had also just seen Jacob when I met a friend and we walked, as we did every day, hand-in-hand to Grand Central through the haze and the humidity, sides bumping and it was just our end of the day routine.

One time, Tom Wolfe crossed our path and I remember thinking, is it good luck or bad luck if Tom Wolfe crosses your path, as if he were a cat. I am a superstitious Scottish girl. It is in my heritage to be such. I am a witch – I consult our family’s book of white magic often. It’s been in the family for eons – it dates back to 18-something and is a rare book and I use it. It works on cosines really and algorithms but to me, it is pure magic. And more, it is always right. Or it seems to be.

I could be wrong.

I digress, as always. So there I was, after a particularly successful trip to New York again, and it’s May and I’m happy and I feel good and I know I look healthy right now and perhaps I can allow myself some light – that someone tells me, You look light, as I’ve been told a thousand times over so I buy it. Okay, I look light. So I leave Jacob, and why is it then that I get a half block and begin to bawl? Why is it that even before I left Jacob, I began crying? Much to his confusion, I just began to cry. I believe it was “Are you going to see your friend?” and he meant my friend from last time. No – I said, A different friend now.

Nobody would be meeting me on this day. Nobody would be waiting for me or me for them or holding my hand or carrying the proverbial books home from school. No. It was just me and my heavy bag and my sun-freckled face and my dress and my Converse sneakers and suddenly I felt stupid and lovesick and years of yearning came flooding in.

Jacob does what he knows how to do – all he can do. He hands me tissues. He says, “It’s okay, it’s okay” knowing it’s not really okay. Then because he knows I collect gold bands and that I show him one that is very sentimental to me and he is one of the few who knows the story, he brings for me a three ring band like a Cartier rolling ring of rose, white, and yellow gold and he says, Please, take – I want you to have it for $35.

It is at least a three-hundred dollar ring, but when he slips it onto my middle finger it fits like Cinderella’s fragile shoe, and the ring makes me cry more. Jacob is lost. I pay him the money because I can’t say No because he won’t let me, so I take this ring and with this ring I leave and I wear it next to my other gold bands on the wedding finger on my right hand (European wedding finger and I am European) and it makes it all the worse. Here I am, a lucky girl: I have everything going for me, so I’m told these days especially. And I am on the corner of 38th and Madison and by now, I am really crying and trying hard not to show it and walking slowly because I can’t carry the weight of my own anything anymore; that which I carry literally, that which I carry figuratively.

I did – that is, before all of this I did. I never let my friend carry my bags really. Sometimes, the biggest ones I could not manage. But it was just having a hand in mine at the end, the beginning, any part of the day really, that made it more bearable somehow, because life can be so unbearable. I do not mean to say that mine is so awful, only that there are considerations that others do not have to consider and that’s fine. I ask for no special accommodation than that handhold, and so there I was, without it, with no consolation, no shelters from the storm anymore, no safe harbor, mix all the metaphors and I felt utterly lost.

A few kind people asked if I was okay. And they say New York is a rude city. Hardly. People stopped, concerned, worried. I told them all the same lie: I am fine. A simple lie, and I put on my big sunglasses and lit a cigarette and said to myself Enough, and Stop and made my way to Grand Central on the main concourse where I did meet my friend and we had drinks and it was lovely. Truly lovely with someone I adore – and was looking, am always looking, forward to seeing, for there are few people with whom one can truly trust and share. So me, the wine, his Cosmopolitan or something like that, and me in my summer-dress and outside we go afterward for a cigarette because even though neither of us “really” smokes, I happen to have cigarettes so why not – so there we are on Lexington, smoking cigarettes by the door of the terminal, trying to give the damn things away to homeless people who are scrounging the ashtrays for half-smoked cigarettes, yet even in that, they will not take a full one form us. They retain their pride. Nothing’s for nothing, they think, and they move on. We decide the best approach then is to plant the cigarettes like tulips in the sand of the “ashtray” and we pop them out as if arranging flowers, ready for the picking. This way, there is no obligation. We leave them there.

He tells me, my friend tells me, after looking at me: my hair, falling down but held in a bun by two pins, falling about a flushed and freckled face and a summer dress and my shoes in my bag and my Converse on my feet because I just have a “thing” which he says is a “Lolita thing” which is attractive, or is to some. I’ve heard that before to. He said that. Always said it was the “juxtaposition” of the feminine of me with such things as my Yankees hat or my Converse. Me in a beautiful silk dress that drops to my blue Converse. That’s me. Unmistakable. Untrying. I’m not cool. I’m not “arty” I’m not anything other than me.

So, back to the beginning: I am vulnerable, I am strong. I am neither, I am both. I am that girl you saw on the street corner on Madison, triumphant in the moment, entering Jacob’s shop with a bright and luminous smile on my face and I am that same girl you saw leave, lost and sobbing, trying hard not to show it, missing everything I do not have and wanting only to rewind or move forward in some way that is possible. I believe anything is possible, but it takes two. It takes two and I am one. I walk alone these days, arms loosely at my side, and my nightmare, so stupid, it takes the form of listening to O Mio Babino Caro – I am listening, trying to get my friend to listen to because it is his, truly his, as I always knew, but he cannot hear, or won’t hear. I can’t say. I only know I am there, standing in the same place with the same aria and the same Converse and looking, later, over the same Harlem River and everything has changed and nothing has changed.

lettre pour un ami

Function: adjective - Epistolary. 1566, English - def. 1. Of or carried on by letters (an epistolary affair...).

I wrote this letter to a friend just this morning - an email - and I realized that I had just said everything I want to say for this editorial, this Word, because it is the truth of the moment. It is, at least, how I feel. So I send it to you in it's entirety, with all of the boring details and the other details that I think are perhaps, worth sharing.

* * * *

Goodmorning love,

Health is holding up okay. I need a bloody root canal, which I am having this Friday and am naturally, less than thrilled about, but what choice? So i am going in for that - people tell me it is not as bad now as it used to be and that, in fact, it is no worse than a filling, which I find hard to believe, but I don't really have much choice in the matter, now do I, so I have to go... ugh.

Great about promoting the Carroll. I've attached the cover for you (two images; i think one is smaller, so you pick) and it would be great if you could build in any links. I have a piece to run on Cyrano, but don't know how to promote the piece. I want to run it on Tant Mieux on Cyrano. It is about Lewis Carroll and is called Love as Nonsense (which I thought you would appreciate - I know that I do... these days, I feel love is nonsense in that it makes no sense, and as Carroll wrote in one of his books, Reason? and Rhyme?

Good questions to ask any lover, because is there ever any reason or rhyme to the things we do to each other when we are together in the moment and after, after the split - no matter what caused it, even if caused by the boom of a third party - it becomes irrelevant because to my mind, someone who truly loved you would regardless "find a way" and I don't mean that in a Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights kind of way (one of Carroll's favorite books - an odd choice for a man who was an ordained Deacon and by all accounts, asexual and died a virgin, yet clearly, from his poetry, he had a clear sense of the romantic and surely it was purely an act of will not to act on it... an act of will... this is key).

So we make ourselves promises: I will not call "x" and further humiliate myself because the lines go both ways; I will no longer think about "x" because no doubt, "x" has moved on and is no longer thinking about variable "y" (that is you) and perhaps there is even a new variable on the scene, let's call that variable "?" for unknown, and we all know that it was variable "f" that came between x and y. F for fuck you, get fucked, fuck off, drop fucking dead, fucking cunt (not a word we are afraid to use in Scotland - it's tossed about so casually that I think no-one could ever say that word to me and offend me at this point: interesting that for the most part, especially in America, I have noticed that when you use the word cunt to apply to a woman she is so offended (and yes, I generalize here) that it seems to me she will practically melt or die of embarrassment or some such). To me, the question is Why? It's really not that big of a deal. We say in Scotland, or even in Tottenham where I was raised, "It's been a cunt of a day" as in, the day stank or sucked or however you want to put it. It was a difficult day would be the translation.

But here, the word "cunt" takes on an entirely different meaning and one is supposed to be leveled flat by it. That is the intent of the person mouthing the word. Screw me for laughing, but I find the whole thing rather absurd. Sort of like the way variable "f" had labeled me a "whore" (and just in case I didn't get the message, I was "whore whore whore" then oh-oh, the big capital letters came out and it was there, in black and white sans serif (bien sur, because she would never use a classy serifed type) and it just said "WHORE WHORE WHORE WE DON'T WELCOME WHORES INTO OUR HOME YOU WHORE." That's five times in the all capital, which I assume was intended to, oh dear, frighten me (it didn't), intimidate me (it didn't), make me believe it (it didn't - labels only stick if you believe them yourself and I do not. I refuse the notion). I know myself as otherwise and it is not as "whore" it is, my friend, au contraire and you and I both know it. Undoubtedly, it is likely that I have been with fewer men in my life than variable "f" (and "f" is for fucking!!).

No. In fact, variable "y" once told me that he was standing before a mirror and he saw my reflection next to his (as did happen in real life very early one morning as we stood before the bedroom mirror when he was zipping my green crochet dress), and he said he saw nothing but "all innocence". "It was strange," he continued, "It took me by surprise. There was just such Goodness."

I can only tell you all of this, mon cher, because I saved both sides of the correspondence for years, so I know verbatim what he wrote. Too bad I didn't tape conversations, though that would be creepy.

Isn't funny the things we miss - a voice. There is so much in a voice. A whole person is formed from a voice. His rich as molasses accented voice that he always claimed was a "whine" which it is hardly. It is thick and rich and most of all, it is what I want to hear. It is how he says my name and likewise, it is my voice his ears longed (and maybe still long) to hear. He wrote, "...the way you say my name...just as I like it). We know what that means. It is held within a sigh, within a moment, within an August or July or any summer day while the linden and the musk trees are in bloom and you sit with your skin summer-damp and humid and you breathe it all in and the subway smells good, and then you can smell the river as you cross it on the metro-north, and then you can smell the privet as you walk up hill and take the long way home and the privet and the mown grass (he used to say "moan grass") smells like him, or some thing you associate with a woman in your life. The city becomes, as one person said, a timebomb. Everywhere you go, because it is a small island, becomes yet another reminder of what was - or if you are still in it - what is. When it is what "is" then it is good and wonderful and joyful and you feel invincible as if it will never end and if you ask me, there is no reason for something that good to end. Not unless one of you wants it to - for reasons I cannot fathom if a third party (again with variable "f") determines to build / construct a wall between the two of you.

A love can be that threatening to someone that they actually think they can "forbid" two grown people from seeing each other. Forbid! That's akin to being "forbidden" to do something as a five-year-old. How preposterous and yet, variable "y" is so intimidated by "f" that this person you so once loved, you thought you knew, suddenly turns into someone totally different. And life as you knew it explodes, or implodes, but the building comes crashing down all around you - your whole world, (so implodes) and the weight of it, the weight of gravity, is just too much to bear and you sit Shiva for months, maybe years, I don't know. I just know that you don't simply "recover" when neither of you ended it. When it is ended by a third variable. But maybe that is just me, love. Maybe that is just my heart - I cannot know "y"s, because I don't know Why. I don't understand any longer the Why of "y". I am utterly lost, confused. Where did the "y" I knew and loved go? And why?

So you see, my friend, I am utterly lost still. Trying to sift through the rubble to see if there are any bodies left and the horrible realization in a dream last night that the only body beneath the rubble is my own and I am looking for myself but it is no longer a search and rescue mission, but a "search and recover" mission. A palpable difference. There is no rescuing anymore (I used to have dreams in which he would rescue me from even my epilepsy... I was being chased by 10,000 bolts of blue and suddenly, a hand would reach out from a giant helicopter and pull me in and it was him. I would be running down the broad avenue, past the United Nations building, my clothes tattered, my ballet-slippered feet bleeding and ripped to shreds and by magic, there he would be, pulling me on board and I would climb in and sit next to him, but in my dream, or maybe in my sleep in real life, I was seizing, and I said nothing, only flipped his palms over and traced the fine lines there - and odd dream, yet so beautiful. It was one of those repeating dreams. I had it over and over and over).

Now, I dream there is a wide-gulf between us. That he is on the other side of the river. Same things - I am running, I am a gamine from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, only I have no-one to dance with, no-one to turn a ramshackle shack into a home for. Nothing. It is gone, he is gone, and as they way in the Song of Solomon, the only worthwhile line in the song, to me, "I walk these broad avenues in search of my beloved..." Yes... That is how the city is for me. A horrible reminder of what was, and what is no more.

So, I am being boring. Have been utterly boring. I will end only by saying that I realize that there is no answer to "?" at the moment, that we have "x and "y" who were and, at least on one side, in love, and then variable "f", that cunty variable that comes between and casts asunder (oh spare me the talk of vows - it's so bloody boring, n'est pas?). So where does that leave you? It leaves you with a future that is so indefinite that you try to move on, but you don't know which way you are going. A time for departure, like Tennessee Williams said, even though you have no idea where you are going and no place to go.

Maybe I shall go back to Woodlawn or something (yet another self-torture), but in a way perhaps a cathartic thing and I will remember all of the good and I will think of the "since then" and the behavior and how I have been discarded like nothing, as if I ought pin a scarlet A on my breast - here, let me brand it in, feel the burn - she's like that. Never!

Gosh, I didn't know I had so much of this on my mind and all in response to your brief and kind email I send you this mornings Philosophy. How funny; how sad.

Life is bittersweet, isn't it. Perhaps this is my editorial for this week - and I won't say anything trite like "you can't enjoy the sweet without the bitter" because that's crap. I can do without the bitter - I've had enough of it. I deserve better and I know it, and frankly, so does, or so should, he. He deserves better, only doesn't believe it.

Well, as Bob Dylan would say in his song, "Tomorrow is a Long Time" which I have been listening to far too much:


If today was not an endless highway,
If tonight was not a crooked trail,
If tomorrow wasn't such a long time,
Then lonesome would mean nothing to you at all.
Yes, and only if my own true love was waitin',
Yes, and if I could hear her heart a-softly poundin',
Only if she was lyin' by me,
Then I'd lie in my bed once again.

* * *

I send you all of my love, and of course, gazillions of baisers.

S.

spring wrap-up, wrap-out

It is spring. Finally spring arrives and we quickly forget the long and bitter winter, praying that the spring and the summer will usher in something new, something positive. I can say that I love to see the beautiful women suddenly reappear, no longer hidden beneath layers and layers of clothing and fat coats, but to see them, as I see me too, morph into something completely otherwise - strappy shoes, spring silk dresses, loose underthings, slips and silks (if they like me, value what it means to be truly feminine, an almost lost notion, I think that is slowly slipping into an almost art-form).

I have long valued both the feminist and my femininity and never seen them as contradictory. One can be a radical feminist and still wear and want hand-made lace slips from Paris; it doesn't make your intellectual points any less valid. What you wear is, and should be, a reflection of who you are. I do not let others "choose" clothes for me - and despite having worked at a top fashion magazine (Vogue) I remain largely uninfluenced by contemporary standards of so-called beauty, because I live in the backward era, I think, still in the forties (tho I was never there) most of my clothes hail from that era because of a friend whose aunt passed away and left me all of her clothes, that were not in her size.

Why she didn't buy clothes in her right size - a larger size - says something right there about how we are "supposed" to be and how we are perceived. In this case, I benefited and am grateful, but in some sense sadly so, although if my friends aunt could see her clothes now, she would no doubt be happy that someone is wearing her white gloves, her beautiful net hair-snoods (yes, I said snood) and hats, carrying her suede-lined handbags, walking about with the light flutter at the hem of a katydid green dress. If you can pull that off, if you can do that in today's society then it is more than style, but it is about you and who you are. You may or may not stand out, likely one does, but not in some "art girl" way, or any other type, because you refuse all typecasts by being true to yourself and your own taste.

None of this means that I do not wear my Bob Dylan t-shirt with an old pair of Levi's and my cousin's gift of a hat that says "Bronx Baseball" or his Yankees cap. I still do... and they look good. I wear them, as I often wear my dresses, with a pair of Converse slip-ons and that makes all of the difference. He once told me, It is the contrast that makes the sex-appeal and I would agree with that.

Try to be sexy and you will almost certainly fail for there are a million other girls in exactly the same, let's face it, "uniform", and you look no different from the rest. You may "fit in" but is that all you want from life? To fit in? Or do you want to stand apart from the crowd and be glowing and glorious in the moment and more, memorable. I don't see anyone else wearing snoods and white gloves, yet i get more compliments on these things, on me as a whole person, precisely because they are different. What's more, one sees a feminine woman and doesn't expect the candor for which I am known because perhaps this is too forward but here again, it is precisely this contrast that makes it work. So work it...

I'm tired of seeing women - and men - but down. I'm bored with the 'metrosexual' and i was bored with Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie years ago and don't see either of them as particularly chic, but instead as cookie cutter versions of what I expect to see on a red-carpet. Paris Hilton is still up to her old tricks, and Nicole Richie looks better because she lost weight and the awful hair extensions that clashed with the rest of her hair, but one senses that both of those things had more to do with a lack of self-confidence; i'll certainly give her her due for now having that confidence and acquiring a certain elegance that far surpasses that of her (ex) friend, Paris, who remains in my mind, essentially what she became known for in the first place - her internet video that is what really made her known. Not her modeling, for she was never particularly good at that, nor stood out the way some models do and have (Kate Moss, for example). No, Paris Hilton will always be the "party girl". Boring. I'm bored. If you're bored, stop reading now.

My point to young women, and even older women, women of any age, is to simply Be. Be not just yourself, but transcend yourself; be beautiful in the moment, try to eke out joy, for life is full of too much pain and you must realize that the moments in which things seem "calm" are always an opportunity for joy. That joy lies not with another person - as I recently and mistakenly thought - believing I could be only joyful with "him" what I realized, what a friend helped me realize, was that joy is and always has been inherent in me; it was yes, brought forth by him and that is no small feat and that symbiosis I doubt I will ever feel again. Maybe that's okay. Most of the time, it doesn't feel okay, but again, life can be difficult and you cannot regain yesterday no matter how much you may want to. It's gone. Nor can you carry forward what another cannot, for myriad reasons, carry forward even if they wish to themselves. Alas, not everyone is like me, or even like you; not everybody will stand up for what they believe in.

Me, I fought and would fight for that relationship still. But I cannot force another to fight the good fight. If one wants to cower in the corner, afraid of a bully, and that is what we are talking about here - a real bully - then who am I to say "jump". It may be the right thing to do, the right thing indeed may be escape and to my mind, he'd be happier and better off running a small chicken farm and other things he or we dreamed of and spoke of. In the final account, he may have meant every word. A lot of people mean what they say and yet they never follow through. Following through takes courage and to some degree, a certain lack of guile and naivte. You have to have faith and take the Ontological leap even if it doesn't always make sense because you have to believe that in the final account, it will make sense. In short, you have to be brave, you have to have courage, for love is the domain of the courageous. A coward, Gandhi said, can never truly love and he was right and this applies to this day. So watch who you spend your time with...

One cannot control the heart, the inner-workings of the mind and love does warp the mind more than a little. We become by turns someone else, we become an amalgam of something else as we mix and blend with another person and share a certain symbiosis that is not to be found elsewhere. I think perhaps this happens only once, and once it is gone, it is gone. This whole "there are many fish in the sea" is true, but it's also crap. Yes, there are many fish in the sea, but can you really, to stretch the metaphor, swim with them; is the cadence the same? If you do not naturally fall in step with another, perhaps it is time to give up the ghost. Or even if you did fall in step and they veered off because of some "STOP" sign, then so be it. They are living in a state of stuck, as someone once put it. I don't want to be there.

To be honest, the warm weather doesn't help me much, but neither did the bitter winter. The winter was empty and hollow and the warm weather is a reminder of what was. I smell privet and think of slow, meandering walks - the long way home. I think of silver-grey viaducts. I think of certain songs. I think a lot... and I try not to, but on some level, perhaps I know it is better to think it through (read: not obsess) but to truly think things through so that you grow as a person, even if the other didn't. There may be no lessons to be learned, not for you anyway. You may have done everything right and been glorious and beautiful and fabulous and as Nelson Mandela said, Who are you not to be? Your playing small doesn't serve the world any... and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same.

He was right. I let my light shine and for a while, someone else let their light shine back and I - a fool and yes, naive - took to it as a beacon in the night steering me clear of the rocks when really all it did was draw me to the rocks were I pounded hard against the sea-wall. Sometimes there is nothing to be learned.

I would rather live as I do - risks, naive, guileless, gullible, and in many ways, love like a child because that is the only way I know how to love. Fully and completely, diving headlong into the cool waters where I break water ceilings and see the crystalline drops shining in the sunlight as I emerge, glowing and going and going and going.

All of this by way of saying that perhaps the change is not necessarily necessary on your part, but the change is required of some other or society or an industry and that you are just fine as you are. That being yourself is the best you can be if you allow yourself, if you give yourself permission, to simply be yourself... this is key. Don't forget it.

You can sit Shiva for as long as you want, mourn if you need to, move to Italy and get a job as a professional mourner and cry until you think the tears won't come anymore but they come and come and come, but at least you'll be paid for it and be honoring the dead. In short, put whatever it is you feel to some use... much as I write this now, I know not whether anyone will care, see it, relate, hate, etc. or think pissy pithy thoughts and it doesn't matter if they do think the latter. What really counts is that if I have reached that one person who can relate, then my work is done. I know this and I know whereof I speak, both fortunately and unfortunately.

I heed the roadsigns, but I still drive. As C.S. Lewis said wisely about life, "You play the hand you're dealt; in the end, I still think the game is worthwhile."

Thanks for listening,

s.r.p.

spuyten duyvil, bronx, train station

From the train station at Spuyten Duyvil, the Bronx, New York - this photograph taken in May or so, 2007, very early morning. Tant Mieux will publish a series of images from Spuyten Duyvil or that area of the Bronx since there seem to be few and far between that we could find on the Web and were not surprised (since we've been there) to discover that it is actually one of the greenest boroughs of New York City.

Spuyten Duyvil is surprisingly beautiful; i know a limited area - the walk from Arlington Avenue to the train tracks that led up a meandering hill as I walked the long way home, a rather incredible experience and so different from what one would expect. There are privet hedges everywhere, lime trees (plain trees, in this country you call them Linden trees - that bloom a glorious green scent), the waxy privet and mown grass scent of its delicate flowers, musk trees in full bloom, houses nestled into the side of the hill as if birds had built their nests there and settled like cliff swallows. I am not American and never knew this side of New York and certainly this isn't the impression one is ever given of the Bronx, so it is in the interest of this that I shall post some of these photographs and make an effort when next in NYC to visit and take more photographs of the general area. For now, these few shall have to suffice, but I found the whole of it most inspiring and therefore it crops up in my poetry as well which you can always find on the Tant Mieux page so feel free to click here or visit Tant Mieux.

Be well, welcome to summer,

s.r.p.

some things hurt more, much more than cars n' girls

I was just listening to the song “Cars n’ Girls” by a group called Prefab Sprout (if you don't know them, they are worth looking up and are an Irish band and well worth the time). The song is their response to Bruce Springsteen and before I can say anything, that is, if it remains that I have anything to say, let me quote from some of the song for you here and remember, the song is intended for Bruce Springsteen, whom I also happen to like, but Paddy-boy’s point is well-taken here (*note that Paddy is the lead-singer for the group);

Brucie dreams life's a highway too many roads bypass my way
Or they never begin. Innocence coming to grief
At the hands of life - Stinkin' car thief, that's my concept of sin
Does heaven wait all heavenly over the next horizon ?

But look at us now, quit driving, some things hurt more much more than cars and girls.
Just look at us now, start counting, what adds up the way it did when we were young ?
Look at us now, quit driving, some things hurt much more than cars and girls.

Life's a drive through a dust bowl, what's it do, do to a young soul
We are deeply concerned, someone stops for directions,
Something responds deep in our engines, we have all been burned
Will heaven wait all heavenly over the next horizon ?

But look at us now, quit driving, some things hurt more much more than cars and girls.
Just look at us now, start counting, what adds up the way it did when we were young ?
Look at us now, quit driving, some things hurt much more than cars and girls.

Little boy got a hot rod, thinks it makes him some kind of new God
Well this is one race he won't win,
'Cos life's no cruise with a cool chick
Too many folks feelin' car sick, but it never pulls in.
Brucie's thoughts - Pretty streamers
- Guess this world needs its dreamers may they never wake up.

But look at us now, quit driving, some things hurt more much more than cars and girls.
Just look at us now, start counting, what adds up the way it did when we were young ?
Look at us now, quit driving, some things hurt much more than cars and girls.

But look at us now, quit driving, some things hurt more much more than cars and girls.
Just look at us now, start counting, what adds up the way it did when we were young ?
Look at us now, quit driving, some things hurt much more than cars and girls.


I want to sing or say all of this to some people in or in and out of my life right now. I want them to know that some things hurt more, much more than cars n’ girls as Paddy says, because he’s just so fucking right. I say this but I suppose my own situation has to do with relationships - but not a cruise by the beach in a hot-rod summer-romance kind of thing, but something based in reality that was fully and wholly a part of my soul and in this way then, holy.

Something about some relationships that are wholly holy, if you follow... sacred and sacrosant and this may leave you scared, but the force of such relationships can throw you into a full-blown fugue-state; it can mean you fall in love. Meet someone who just knows you - a way of knowing unlike any other as if your two souls were pressed together - and it can be a blessing or a bane or both. It all depends, doesn’t it, on what happens in the final account and whether or not that relationship comes to fruition. If the attraction is that strong, then yes, I believe it is sustainable, it is what you will do about it that counts in there here and the now because the Now, baby, that's all you've got.

Personally, I believe anything is sustainable if you want it to be. That it is your choice. That life takes work, and I think that’s part of the message of this song. Yes, I guess this world does need its dreamers and that’s great, but it also needs the pragmatist who sees all of this joy and potential for joy and knows the means of holding onto it so that it is not just a fast ride in a hot rod or a fork in the road you take for some brief time. One needs to have the courage to dream and the courage to act. It was Ghandi who said that only the truly brave can love. A coward is incapable of love, he said, and I quite agree for pursuing love, a love that is worth it, takes backbone because it may not be an easy road. For the spineless, it is a fork in your love-line that you pay no attention to because that would be just too inconvenient. How insipid.

Life, love, are often inconvenient. Rarely has my life accommodated me, but rather, I accommodate and bend and yield to it and that is okay. One has little choice anyway except to sit there like a slug and do nothing, or remain paralyzed as if stung by a man o’ war jellyfish – and I hate that. I hate that some people are just paralyzed and just sit there waiting for the strong among us to do the work and puzzle our way through stuff, as if we are cutting a swath through the heavy brush for everyone else to cross. Yes, I will offer my hand to help you through. More, if you want to jump and we are in love, then I will surely jump with you because I am that brave. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about Brucie's cheap ego-validation and his refusal to acknowledge or pursue a greater kind of love. His idea of "love" is a ride on a roller-coaster at Playland in Rye and then you get off and it's all over. Yes, ride the ferris wheel in Playland, but don't leave off there...it doesn't all end in the Tunnel of Love; there must be something at the otherside. You must, quite simply, have the courage to follow through as in a game of tennis. Ping the ball back. Love-Love.

I am tired. I am weary. As Shakespeare wrote, Love, I have grown weary of this fond chase. Which wasn’t to say “Enough” or “I don’t want you” only, help me out here. Don’t make me do all of the work and let’s stop “dancing in the dark” to quote Bruce and get real. It all sounds so complicated, but life is as complicated or as simple as you make it. You can make it a very complicated thing, or you can leave off and stop trying to define things that are indefinable anything… take a lesson from our Bob Dylan, latest winner of the Pulitzer (and isn’t that about time!) and don’t try to define things. As Dylan noted, “I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.”

Things only require definition when they become known by more than two people. A thing between two people need not be defined, unless one of them feels some absurd, howling need to define, to clarify, I think you know the status of a relationship and what is going on between you and another. If you need to hear it out-loud, then the relationship probably isn’t working out. Clarification is not always necessary; I feel strongly one should just “know” and while yes, a validation is nice and sometimes important, you cannot hinge your actions on that.

I’ve had people ask me to define certain relationships I have had in my life. What sort of “friendship” was it – was it “beyond” friendship – whatever that really means because I do think some relationships absolutely transcend friendship and between people of the opposite sex, but does that necessarily equate with sex? No. Does it mean necessarily that it likewise does not equate with sex? No. It could swing either way. With enough of a soul connection, I think it’s natural to seek out a further physical connection and that grows out of that connection. Most importantly however, I think there really is no need to define unless a third-party gets involved and I don't see what a third-party has to do with two such people who share this bond. So long as there is no third-party, there is no need of definition. It does not require it. It is only when we, or often when we, begin to try and define our relationships that we run into trouble because we question what is essentially a transcendent gift.

I’ve seen this when there is or was no initial “chemistry”; so love can and does “grow” with the right person. What begins as an ordinary friendship, acquaintance will blossom and that person becomes “worth all the time in the world” or one of my favorite expressions, you’re favorite waste of time (thanks to Marshall Crenshaw for that line). If someone makes you feel more alive, invigorated, enlivened again, and you feel your blood move where once it was stagnant, hell, I would and do fight for that. I don’t understand anyone who would not. Who would willingly let that slip away and fall easily back into a “Cars n’ Girls” like life, because there is so much more to life than the simple fling, the girl on the train you see and wonder ‘what would she be like’ etc. etc.

Such things are trite, and I like to believe I don’t or haven’t gotten hooked on anyone this trite, although I am sorry to report that perhaps my choices, in as much as one could call them “choices” were not always so wise. But again, I think you are drawn to who you are and that can be problematic because it conflicts with prior commitments etc. One has to learn how to make myriad vows and keep them all without breaking another and this is tricky business, but it is wholly possible. I believe that.

Believe it or not, I too make oaths, the difference is I keep the oaths that I make; I do not pick and choose one particular person and say, “then I shall keep my oath to him or her”. If I make an oath to a friend, I shall keep that oath as well. And more, if I have a friend who moves beyond the bounds of any ordinary friendship, then I shall keep my promises to that person. I see no conflict there. I think to see conflict is a provincial way of thinking. Yes, provincial and boring, just like the way I began this piece about Brucie dreaming life’s a highway – so many roads bypass his way…

Yup.

for cyrano no. 1

les jambes ~ du matin

dysmorphia

image by j. best

oaths, promises, the gauntlet is down

It's that time of year when one begins to grow bored and not only with the self - because winter is long and unlike in the summer-time, I anyway, feel less dynamic. Energy is lacking, projects seem to move slowly, the sap doesn't rise as it does in the spring - though we long for it - and we move slowly against the wind down the broad avenues of the city or head into the wind of a country field or path. Either way, we are met with obstacle. Small wonder that some animals choose wisely, to hibernate and wait the whole thing out, not showing their face until the winter is passed and the sun is here again. Maybe I like George Harrison's "Here Comes the Sun" because it so perfectly captures that long cold lonely winter and the coming out of it.

"People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent." - Bob Dylan

***

He told me as we were driving along the shoreline on the way to look at a big old house and the sky was grey, "Life can be viewed as tragic or comic," and i didn't believe him then. It sounded cold-hearted and dismissive. I didn't believe him because from the depths of my grief - a very real grief, i could see no comedy or nothing comic in the situation and could not imagine any day when i would. That day would never come. Never.

This, i suppose, or i know, is what all of the broken-hearted with hearts heavy as frozen-winter stones say. We say we will never recover and we mean it. We say we will not let this happen to us again, and I trust we won't. Whatever it was that caused us so much hurt, christ, i hope we have learned enough to not let it happen again, unless it was truly the wrong doing, and one hates this word but it sometimes does apply, "fault" of the other person - and in this case, the case i speak of here, there was fault so i lay it squarely at his feet, not my own and given that what is there for me to learn?

As Dylan said above and what I quoted, people do what they want, and then repent. In this case, he does what he wants or wanted, then tells me, which is funny because Bob changed his name too, but he's thankfully now proud of his Jewish roots as he should be otherwise it's a diss on the rest of us, i think anyway. Just as this person had told me that Nah, no more, he had decided that being Jewish wasn't really what he wanted anymore. It was to be a "WASP like you [me]" that he really wanted" (which is funny because i'm mixed blood anyway; neither here nor there. I could walk in either door, and anyway, i've never been a big believer in organized religion, although i like ritual so i've practiced as an Officiant for years because i love mouthing the words to the Evening Vespers and i like taking confession, even making it, i like the Episcopal Church - i like it because it isn't like other churches. But i digress too much. I suppose all religions have their things to recommend and not recommend, so I can't say much on the matter as i remain ignorant of other religions for the most part.

But "he" wanted to be "like me" (whatever that means - and again, I'll quote Dylan because that's why i chose his photo here because he seems to find the words that I cannot, "I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be." I wear a bracelet on my wrist that twists the old words "What would J.C. {Jesus Christ] do, to say engraved in gold and by Shreve's "What would B.D. do?" I consult it often. And no, the answer is not, "He would just sit down and write a song." You'd be amazed at how helpful this is. It's my own magic eight ball, only smarter. I'd put my faith in Dylan's words more than most. Sorry to anyone I've offended here. I don't mean to. Truly.

So he wanted to be a WASP, like me. That's funny. With my green eyes, blonde hair, freckles, dead-white skin (peau laiteause, as my friend in Paris says). The "sort of hair you constantly have to flick out of your eyes" he said. It all seemed so funny to me; i never took it too seriously, and when he said he needed to go to church for real and have me be not a friend so much be an Officiant in the moment and a true Spiritual Advisor, i naturally fell back into the role and sat in the twilight of the church on Fifth and read from the prayer book and ran through the service privately and although i would not this for anyone, and never have, I held and helped as he cried out demons through the service. That is my job as an officiant. I read the confession of sin in which one can make either a spoken confession or a silent confession. He chose to make a silent confession. All fine with me, i thought.

Did i know that i was part of that silent confession? No. I did not. Had i known, i would never have been the Officiant. I would have been, as I am today and will remain forever, truly disgusted and used. Right, he does what is convenient, then is penitent, then leaves the cool, even cold twilight of the half-lit church and does what is convenient all over again. Of course, it won't be, and was not, the only time he would go back to that church. No matter that he is Jewish. That like me, we two half-Jew. He decides now that, despite the fact that there is not an Episcopal lead in his family, that this on Fifth is his place now. That the God i took him to has taken him away from me. I say then, the hell with that God. I brought him to You and You took him from me. That is Him. That is God. Or perhaps that is human fallibility. I haven't made up my mind.

What i do know is that what i perceived as so tragic when i last went back to that church, alone this time, I sat there on my birthday, sobbing over the loss of something that perhaps i never really had - who knows, right - in the final account, words mean little, even though i deal in them every day, they are my currency and i mean them, to so many people, they simply shoot without thinking. They will say and do anything to get what they want... what is "convenient in the moment." So he said what he said for his own ends then. But when push came to shove, this person was no good friend of mine. I have been kicked to the curb, pushed down, discarded, and no matter if someone else has put the kibosh on it and said "nien, nyet, rien, pas" you "can't", one makes one's own decisions in life and although I can understand tricky and difficult situations, I think it's not unfair at all to ask for some common decency from one who was, I thought, a best-friend. But hey, screw me. So is that tragic or comic? Me sitting in a church on Fifth in New York City on my birthday, rocking back and forth for three hours straight, making not cries, but sobs that sounded like a wounded animal as i sat in a pew before a stone cold altar and thought about how much I hated God in that moment because I did and reading the Song of Songs in the Bible, which I could tell was not popular in the church for the pages remained clean and un-thumbed. I read the story twice over and thought this must be the most beautiful story in here, so why isn't it spoken of more. I read the line, "For I am the Rose of Sharon..." and thought, how odd that i had used that line before, but no doubt it had stuck there from a previous time. But all of the symbolism was there and it made me sad. "His left hand should be under my head, and his right hand should embrace me." It seemed right after so many years. And since I had no closure (i hate that word) I wanted to see my (ex) friend one last final time to try to understand what had happened. Rather, I knew what had happened, but I had questions and valid ones at that and wanted only to discuss those and to say goodbye properly as one would. We owed each other that, and i felt, he owed me that. At least that. But no, such was the mandate that had come down from on high.

Instead, on that blazing day in September, I left the church on Fifth after the sexton handed me a big wad of tissue for my sobs - and after a young Rector almost approached me to "help" until I flashed him a look and he caught my eye and backed off for that look told him, as Graham Greene once wrote, "I hate your God. I hate him as if he existed." So I left, I "rose now and i "went about the city, the streets and in the broad avenues" I sought him "whom my soul loveth" the words still thick in my head from the Song, and the bell rang high over Manhattan and I smiled through my still pink and damp face thinking of the last time I was there but it was a wry smile and not one of happiness but of irony, but that's another story.

I suppose the point is this, to come full-circle, that what he told me that day, not the him of this story, but another him who was right about life being tragic or comic is true. Life can be one or the other and some things are just truly tragic and there is no comedy in that - auto accidents, suicides, natural disasters, terrorism, there is nothing comic in any of these things. But in some matters, in time, you learn to see something comic about the whole thing. I am not quite there there, but as the days go on, the less my best-friend contacts me, the more he remains static and in place and lets this once-close and what i thought was meaningful, friendship slide, the more I am forced to withdraw back behind my RayBans and into my corner and the iron-gate comes down again, never to open. for him, and perhaps not for anyone for it rarely opens or has opened (as I said, he was the first in twenty years, so it seems doubtful that it will open again...).

I caught myself the other day listening to, of all things, "I Will Survive" by Cake, which is funny because it's meaningful but a parody of the original but still has all of the same wallop and I thought for the first time, "O, fuck you" instead of "O, God, I miss you and I'll die..." O, Blah blah blah... shut up. How boring this grief is. How very boring of me. Then i thought of how he walked. Then I thought of all the times he acted like a coward, how he is acting now and I started to see a flip-side and I thought of what Ghandi said, (who else would quote Dylan and Ghandi in the same article, yet somehow they seem to make sense together,) and I'll end here because Ghandi says it all with here:

"Cowards can never be moral. A coward is incapable of exhibiting love: it is the prerogative of the brave."

thanks for listening,

sadi ranson-polizzotti

september, wednesday, 10. 52 a.m.

Endings are hard. Hard endings, that is that drop you fast and hard like a sack of winter-cold stones.

I took this photograph at six a.m. in New York City on West 11th at my favorite haunt where i used to always meet my best-friend for our three-hour tea talks. Always sitting there over steaming pots of camomile tea with a table-centered jar of honey and me eating spoonfuls of honey that i poured from it, sticky-lipped and smiling and laughing, always always laughing.

But not this time. This time, things caved in on themselves and on this day, which was also my birthday, the most awful September day I can think of (though I've never much liked my birthday anyway, this made it all the worse), I found myself, not by accident, at the same cafe only this time, I went alone at the early hour of the day before I was set to go to The Morgan Library for research on my book.

It was empty there at this early hour. Nobody but me, which gave me all of the room I wanted to take photographs (later that day I was to meet my agent who represents my photography also, so why not take more photographs; if nothing else I am a documentarian as I have said many times in the past - documenting in the last three years some of the happiest times in my life only now to find it crashing down all around me. People come and go, yes, but some people you expect to be in your life forever because every sign points in that direction. What do you do when that is not the case. When they suddenly up and go?

Not only was I in New York for research for my book, but to eulogize and speak at a memorial for a dear, dear friend (author Hans Koning, who if you do not know, you should look for his work Hans Koning (www.hanskoning.net) or Google him. Hans I knew first as an author I published while running my publishing house, Lumen Editions, and from there, my relationship with Hans and subsequently, his family and particularly his lovely wife, Kate, grew. If you want to read what I wrote and read that night, you can find on the web, but to find the original text go to my own home site on Tant Mieux and read O To Be As Cool As Hans Koning. I never met anyone as cool as Hans Koning. I doubt I ever will again. Read and you'll see.

People come and go in our lives and we accept that for the most part because we know that life is nothing if not change. But some people come and go, or they die, and they leave a hole. Yes, we grieve always those we miss, but somehow we manage to move on. Lately, these last, I find myself stuck, unable to quite move on, much as I still find it difficult to move on from losing a sibling. Some things you just never recover from and all of the trite "give it time" and "the indefinite future" that people talk about and "never say never" and etc are mere platitudes that add up to nothing in the face of real grief.

I am not at all ashamed to say that when I was in New York I spent my birthday at St. Thomas's on Fifth Avenue where I thought I would seek some sanctuary. Instead, I found none. I found only a cold and forever twilight-lit church and wondered what kind of God what take from me, take such people from me that I loved so deeply. Yes, that's selfish. Yes, that's part of life. But what if one of them is still living? Yes, that's part of life too, and as everyone's favorite quip, "God doesn't micromanage." Apparently not.

So I sat in the twilight of St. Thomas's on my birthday for three or more hours and I cried, or sobbed more like, sounds of a professional mourner you would hire for funeral of an unpopular deceased and I would be there crying and so there I was, my hands buried in my face, soaking the tissue-thin paper of a prayer book that was doing me little good because at that moment, and perhaps forever now, I have given up on God. I never thought I would say that. I never thought that after so many years of serving the church in the capacity as an Officiant that I would do such a thing, but there you have it - . So that was my birthday, at 1:37 p.m., Fifth Avenue, New York City, 2007.

sometimes, you need perspective to see things as they are. and sometimes that takes distance - physical distance away from any given situation. for me anyway... so i leave. call me a child. an escapist. whatever. i don't care. it's the mature way for me and the only way i can reach any sort of meaningful and i may say, adult decision. perspective. so this is perspetive, New York City, somewhere in the West village, in February, 2007.

les vertes

more than this - the kiss

I keep coming back to this film, and if you don't know this scene, then it is the final scene, or the almost final scene - the bitter before the sweet - the bittersweet - from the film Lost in Translation.

It is the moment we wonder whether or not will happen (or I do) for the entire film. I wonder, or keep wonder, whether or not they will kiss, for there is clearly a 'thing' going on between the two, and never mind the age difference, which may be 13, 14, 15, or more years, but does it matter? It may even be more than that, but i'm not certain that's the point. In fact, I'm quite sure it is not the point.

What I am sure is that each is going through a crisis in life and in their separate loves and having doubt and here they are, somewhere in Tokyo, utterly lost and alone, lost in life, their spouses far away (in Charlotte's case, for that is her name here), her husband may be with her, but he's not 'with' her. He's too busy taking photographs, flirting with stupid action star 'Kelly' and leaving Charlotte to wonder who whe has married. It's even funny when she calls a friend from her hotel room, over-looking the city and hum and buzz and says "John has started using these hair-products, you know... and I went to this shrine, and these monks were chanting, and I didn't feel anything..." Her friend (some friend) on the other end of the long-distance wire, seems clueless to Charlotte's upset, tears, or seriousness and ends the call with "Have the best time..." Charlotte, as she will tell Bob later, is 'stuck.'

Like Bob, who may not be as vocal about his problems - at least not to Charlotte - he too is stuck. He is not connecting with his wife Lydia (even when he seems to genuinely try it fails) and no matter what, both Charlotte and Bob seem or are rather fated to keep crashing and smashing and falling into each other. It's so obvious and inevitable then that they may as well become friends and actually just go somewhere instead of keep up some absurd pretense or ignore the fact that they keep running into each other - why not run into each other ono purpose? That sounds like more fun anyway, yes?

To keep it simple, for I don't want to get too deep into plot more than the main point I wish to make, Bob and Charlotte spend a great deal of time together and in a brief time, there is between them a real and palpable connection. It's the sort of thing that you know it when you see it, and maybe you've even had it in your life and if you have, then you really know it. What you want to know, is who, if anyone, is going to make the move from simple friendship to the validation that both need - perhaps a kiss is all that is needed - that little line - to take that little tiny skip (for that's all it would take here). All it would take on Bob's part would be perhaps just to just hold her hand and kiss her. This doesn't seem sordid to me. It seems sweet and under the circumstances, it seems wholly understandable.

It would mean something; yes, both are married, and if we are to judge in this context then we can overlay all sorts of moral issues, but the situation is too complex for that (and i say this after studying philosophy for most of my life, and seeing now that life is nothing if not shades of grey). What I want, perhaps what every viewer wants, is for something definitive to happen...again, that word validation comes back, because even though we know there is more at work here, we don't know. Does that follow?

We want some declaration. There is an 'almost' hovering here. Bob and Charlotte will fall asleep on the same bed; he will gently hold her foot while she sleeps; he will hold her hand when they run across the street; she will lean her head against his shoulder when she tires; all of this and yet... She will even get jealous when he, and even knows, stupidly sleeps with the hotel lounge act. When Charlotte sulks, and he knows why, he also calls it right when he says, "Wasn't there anyone else there to lavish you with attention?" But it's not a question. It's a statement and not a nice one at that. The point though, is that no matter what Bob may say, he does want to lavish Charlotte with attention and has been. He has grown to love her in some way and she him.

The problem for most people, and this is why perhaps the film is called what it is: Lost in Translation - is that this relationship defies any neat categorization. It's not as simple as Right or Wrong. Sometimes, capital letters do not apply. And you cannot say that it is love or non-love or friendship or non-friendship because it is love and friendship and a love that transcends friendship so the two are by no means "ordinary friends" the way one would be with other friends. They are, in every day parlance, "more than friends."

But the end scene. The one I chose to show you here; this is after Bob has said goodbye to Charlotte at the hotel. It is already now "over." Partings have been said and we think, somewhat disappointed, after all that, then it is after all, just like life. Nothing happened. No, we perhaps did not expect the two to have a wild affair for that would be unfitting, but a kiss - this is all... but that did not happen at the - goodbye-scene - and this much breaks our heart.

It is when Bob's car, on the way to the airport passes the sidewalk and he sees Charlotte that he tells the driver, somewhat impatiently, to stop the car now... and after fumbling with the lock and door, he is free on the street and runs through the crowd to Charlotte. It is certainly unexpected. We certainly do or did not expect it. Charlotte did not, and I doubt Bob himself expected it either. But there you have it and there they are, on a crowded street in Tokyo, now facing each other when he just holds her in his arms and pulls her close and she has to stand on her black ballet-flat tip-toes just to reach his shoulder.

It is then that Bob whispers something in Charlotte's ear. We are not privvy to his words and never will be. I can take no guess at what this could be or was and maybe that's just as well because i can fill in the blanks this way and make it my own. Maybe that is what Coppola intended when she wrote that end. I'm not sure. I know that it makes, as you see here, Charlotte tear up, break down almost, and that she holds on as tightly, yet with such gentleness, to her friend.

It is only after this - after he has said what needs to be said - what he has needed to say all along, one thinks, that Bob does what, thank god, we have needed him to do all along - he kisses Charlotte. Not a brief kiss on the cheek, but a full kiss on the mouth that lasts and lasts, with neither wanting to let go as Charlotte stands on the tips of her toes still, reaching up to his mouth while he embraces her.

Thank god, I think. I can breathe. It's not that the whole film is about a kiss. It is rather that the film has been building up to this moment and one thinks at the end that the moment was going to slip by and to watch this so, to think it so the first time is almost painful.

But after this - after the car has stopped, after Bob finds Charlotte on the street, after he whispers what he whispers, after she leans on his shoulder as a friend yet not friend, after they kiss as lovers yet not lovers, after they do what they do have done and will always have as friends but more than this (which is a song that Murray sings in the film - "More Than This" by Roxy Music, during which he looks at Charlotte a great deal - another part of a long, drawn-out flirtation in which both are coy, shy, bashful.)

It is good to know that sometimes, as Milton said of so-called 'backward lovers' that the 'coy shall bashfully yield..." How much it must have taken for Murray (Bob Harris in this role) to step outside of himself and walk up to Charlotte so boldly, and how brave of her to accept what was offered and not freeze, not run, and more, to steady the course the entire way through all of this. To maintain her patience and believe that this was or was not meant to be.

Some things are fated and there is nothing you can do about it no matter how hard you may pull against it. One has to ask anyway, why the need to pull?

Thanks for listening.

s.h.r.p.

be brave | bare your throat

I only know one way to live and that is bravely.

could be ....

disheveled elegance | falling hard in love

What is it about the in-love or the newly in-love that makes them so awkward, yet so elegant in their way. How they seem all elbows, knees and ankles, leaning conspiratorially over tables, having conversations about nothing, about everything, comparing palms and making eye-contact meaning with eyes that gleam in some way that is obvious to all others and if we are in love too then it makes us smile and recall our own beginnings and if not, then we see those others whose bile seems to rise and who seem to practically spit with yellow-green hatred and think such things as “get a room” when a perfectly normal kiss is passed between lovers at a café table. >> more >>> more

les mains - these hands | how much they say

It's true. The old adage, a picture is worth a thousand words, especially in the hands of the right photographer and that doesn't mean the 'best' photographer, just the one for the moment or the one who knows his or her subject well and can really get them, capture them on film; this is a gift, a friend told me, that not every body has. She said that I'm lucky I have I; which was news to me because I've never thought of myself as a photographer of anything other than snapshots and really when push comes to shove, that's all these are, snapshots; just a little more interesting perhaps, but that's all >>more

home

who me?

a time for departure?

Tennessee Williams said, “There is a time in life for departure even when there is no place to go.”

It’s a slippery statement but at this juncture, I can relate in that I feel a need for departure – be it from a relationship or place – it is a departure all the same. The scary thing about departure is that you don’t know where it leads, as Williams says. You know where you were, or you think you know here you were or perhaps you did and now it has been changed, dare I say edited, revised, history rewritten? This happens: people can be conveniently revisionist when it suits, and this hurts. They will take years of a shared history and with one mark of a red-pen and a red swoop erase the whole thing as if it never happened at all. They do this as a way of saying “you never have met” (Reference Bob Dylan: “I Don’t Believe You” who tells us, “I said it’s easily done, you just pick anyone and just act you never have met….” Clearly he too had his run-ins with the type.) But departure – departure is a strong word because it means leaving. It is a verb. It is an action. It means you actually physically or emotionally or both actually divorce yourself from a situation, place, state, person, and you divest certain symbols of their meaning such that the place from which you depart becomes not the fertile land that it once was, but you too, in order to make the leaving less painful, revise and leave in you past a vast tundra with endless horizons and in it, there is you and a whipping wind and the person who once was but is no more (or not as you once saw anyway; now a stranger – the known now then foreign, this is the nature of estrangement.) From this place you must both depart. It is barren of all that it once was. You have both emptied it now. Who started it is really unimportant. The fact is, one of you did, and no matter which one did, both hearts are heavy, both hearts feel the whipping wind. Both may deny any involvement or entanglement to save face; in fact, such is often the case – after all, this is part and parcel of the divesting, “There never was anything…” Thus, philosophically, if a thing never was, how then can it hurt? It cannot. It’s a neat trick, but emotionally, it’s not that simple. This is no more than simple denial. It works for a while, maybe even years, but it wears and wears under the heart is whittled bone thin or until it ceases to exist at all, making it impossible to love or empathize. This is departure. This is a time in our life. And it may recur again and again, depending on your life and circumstance. But again, Williams “There is a time in life for departure even when there is no place to go.” The second is the tricky part. We know about the departure. We all know that we have to go. But where? It’s the where that keeps us bound and afraid and in a state of stuck. How to get there from here? I never used to think I was good at reading maps, yet somehow, I navigated all through the Peripherique through central Paris, which is quite tricky during rush-hour. Sure, I know, big deal. But that’s besides the point anyway. The main point is that there is never just one way to get anywhere. These days, I keep seeing signs that say Caution, Detour, Dangerous Turn, Stop!, Bridge Closed or the finality of Dead End… Imagine that! Caution! Children at Play. In the end, it all comes down to you, the navigator. The Map is there for the reading, but yes, there will be obstacles and maps are notoriously wrong and roads ever-changing. Usually, the answer is the simplest. You see an obstacle and you think, “Climb,” when I say Why not just walk around? So why not take the long meandering path? I don’t know where it goes either. I don’t even know I go alone. I’m prepared either way, I suppose. What choice anyhow? It would be nice to have a hand to hold, someone who really cared to help me get from here to there, but perhaps some roads you need to walk alone. There are no cautionary signs here. No signs at all. Not even a detour. Just a route so small that it’s off the map, a tensile thin trail, you find precisely because you are so lost.