the write stuff

I write every day for a living, and as a hobby, I also write (and take photos).

If I could do this any other way, I’m sure I would. But perhaps you can relate–knowing what you are here to do brings a kind of peace along with torment . . . the poison and the antidote . . . the creative imperative . . . the sleeping and waking. Elaine Pagels quoted it best here:

“If you bring forth that which is in you, what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is in you, what is in you will destroy you.”
– Elaine Pagels quoting from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas

of the Moon

Last night, Kit and I went to the Full Moon Drumming, which was particularly wonderful during this, the Blood Moon. There was a big turnout. Instruments of all kinds were spread out on the ground for any newbies (like us) to borrow—fully engaged participation is the unspoken expectation. Interspersed were various art supplies that had presumably been used to put up promotional posters about the event, at least that’s what we figured the markers, scissors, etc., were beside the tambourines and maracas. Yet there was a tin can, fly swatter, knitting needles, and a knife sharpener, so who could be sure?

I’m not a musician but I can keep a beat, at least I thought I could. Then the tattooed guys with pony tails started beating rhythms out of the congas, snares, steel pans and African drums that were powerful and primal. Everything I tried to sync to that skewed highchair-baby-with-spoon. As soon as the first session winded down, I switched to cow bell and spent the next session trying to keep Will Farrell/SNL images out of my mind.

Maybe the fourth or fifth “drum conversation” in, I was finally getting the hang of it. I had settled at last on the triangle because…well, I just didn’t think you could mess up on the triangle. It always sounds nice. After a while, Kit gave me a look that inferred otherwise.

“Play something different,” she hissed.
“This is the only song I know on the triangle,” I replied.
“No, I mean a different instrument…anything…like a skein of yarn.”

She looked around desperately then handed me a glitter-glue stick, but I just tuned her out.

4/2014

the sister wives of Ignacio Rocket on the Vernal Equinox

After an hour in the labyrinth of the French Quarter, Elizabeth remembered, “I think I know a place where we can dance—it’s near the water.” So we moved like a herd of cats towards what turned out to be a polka bar. “Perhaps I should have been more specific,” I said to no one who could hear me above the drone of accordions. My friends drank dark beer from a big boot being passed around. Elizabeth said, “Just let this happen to you!” Then she went off shrieking and leaping around the dance floor like it was electrically charged, bumping and battling for space. Lisa yelled over the din directly into my ear: GOOD GOD, THE POLISH ARE A CLUMSY PEOPLE.

Terri, Helen, Connie and I decided to find the gay bar instead. By now it was raining, so I shed my sandals and ventured barefoot into the late twilight. “There are diseases on the sidewalks here,” said Terri. “There is certain death in my shoes,” I countered.

Four sore blocks later, Helen said this whole night was beginning to feel like a pilgrimage. Terri said we should be getting close. Then Elizabeth was running at us from up ahead, “It’s up here!!” We had no idea how she got ahead of us. “My head feels like 11:59pm in 1999,” Connie said. There was no cover, so we all went in, absorbed by a purple haze of music.

The fog machine made us cough so Terri bought a medicinal round of drink. We danced wild and primitive to a pulsing thrum of ‘90s rock with one hundred of our closest, sweatiest new friends who indiscriminately gyrated against any gender. A tall skinny kid limboed into me . . . he asked my name and I said my name is too old for you . . . he looked affronted. WHO ARE YOU? WHO ARE YOU? Well, of course that is the question ‘xactly I said… ah come on he smiled Sid Viciously don’t you wanna dance with me… sure ok I’ll dance with you and you and you and you dervishing around everybody until a little Filipino man constricted me. His eyes glittered and his hands slithered but he couldn’t hold me so he conjoined Connie who later worried that some sort of fully-clothed consummation might have occurred and Elisabeth admitted she, too, most definitely felt his filipenis, so hey, maybe we are all sister wives now.

Only Helen made the final leg of the journey with me, into the dripping wet night with naked feet sore from conflagration . . . stepping over the No Trespass chain onto an old loading dock tilting into the delta. We watched reverently on our knees as the Moon revealed a dabbled path of light across the water in the first hour of morning. Before the perfectly balanced scales of the cosmos, we silently spoke the names that weighed heavily on our hearts. We tossed flowers of their faces into ripples that widened with grace and absolution on the equinox.

 

~ Leeanne Seaver © 2012

bleeder

Early in her amazing career, my friend Leslie spent some years in New Guinea teaching English quite unsuccessfully to remote villagers, the Papuas (the fuzzy-headed people). Over a lovely dinner at L’Ybane last week in NYC, she described the difficulty of finding a way to bridge their pigeon English to its proper mastery. It wasn’t that they weren’t capable of the cognition, she explained, it was that she found herself not wanting to change the way they expressed their world. They said “mouth-grass” instead of mustache. She didn’t want to alter that, and found herself adjusting to their way instead.

The papuas didn’t adopt new words indiscriminately—they would jerry-rig something they were already familiar with to the essential meaning of some new thing. For example, they were familiar with 1) the shape of the blades on an electric mixer, and they knew that 2) the white man’s Jesus lived up there in the sky somewhere. So when a certain hovering aircraft made its first appearance over the island nation during WWII, the locals referred to it as a “mix-master-belong-Jesus.” That said helicopter to them. Whenever she corrected them, they would nod sweetly and affirm the circumstances of their lives relative to the object: yesyesyessss, mix-master-belong-jesus bring medsin. That was all they wanted to know about helicopters.

Nowadays Leslie is a consultant to federal asylum program based in DC. She works with foreign victims of horrific torture—usually young women—helping them learn English and adjust to life in the states. She tells me those years with the papuas helped her develop a skillset she now relies on daily to avoid common word-triggers including “darkness” and “men.”  She says a creative vocabulary is also essential in understanding what the women are trying to say to her. Knowing how “push-me-go/pull-me-come” translates to handsaw helps Leslie comprehend what she is hearing from these women who were brutalized in ways that words can’t contain. Leslie said that under certain circumstances, some of these women still bleed sometimes . . . and will bleed for the rest of their lives.

© L. Seaver 3/13

1. Anaphora on Me: My favorite review ever was when B called me a “polyglot.”

2. A guy in my group at the famous Iowa Writer’s Workshop I attended always wrote on my work, “enough w/the ellipses” and crossed them out.   I like love ellipses… they are so SOC (stream of consciousness), so conversational…  so thought-full.  So  “I could keep going…” because “I’m still thinking” about all this…  I like using them and I like it when others use them.  So this guy criticizes my use of … which only makes me want to use … more (3. OK, I just outted some passive-aggressiveness here).  I think I’ll start including them on grocery lists and client invoices—right after the Balance Due total.  Maybe even when I sign my name:  Leeanne…or Liana.  (See what I did there?)

4. My three children are all named after a person and a place. I kinda want a do-over on one first name because it doesn’t fit him all that well, and he doesn’t like it so much. Maybe we should have held off until his personality started showing up. That’s what my kids did with their new kitten because they couldn’t decide between Seamus or Kitty Man or Clement Parmalie.

Maybe someday my son will choose a name for himself that works better—fine with me.  Do what you gotta do so you can Be Who You Really Are…like the poet/performance artist at said Iowa Writer’s Workshop who renamed herself “Blueberry Morningstar.” Apparently, this feels better than “Louise Johnson” when demonstrating how to make noises with your body and pencil to an audience of sardonic writers.

5. I genuinely enjoy smart, tasteful cursing.  In my writing group, (www.lakeeffectwritersguild) all members are required to demonstrate intelligent use of the F word in order to remain in good standing. So it was with no small disappointment that I heard my friend Kristine, who had just polished off her second margarita, announce that her New Year’s Resolution was to stop cursing. She wanted her sons to be able to recall something honorable about her, but she doubted that she had many admirable qualities, at least compared to her own mother.  She felt guilty that she hadn’t been a more exemplary mom, but maybe she could just accomplish this one small thing. I could tell she had started out trying to say something funny, and was as discomfited as the rest of us by this turn towards vulnerability.

The light, tipsy mood of the New Year’s Eve party faltered as we heard her confession. I thought I should maybe save my friend by owning some dark truth of an equivalent nature… just dismal enough to norm regret, but not spiral us down too far, it was New Year’s Eve after all.  Before the pause in the room got really awkward, my other friend Suzy blurted out “what the hell kind of resolution is that?” And Tom jumped right in with “yeah, f#@k that.”  A group release of expletives and laughter rescued the evening, the glasses were refilled, and the subject quickly changed to the canoe trip we all took on the Meramec last spring when Pete got Ann’s swimsuit off WHILE she was driving home because the sand in it was just chapping her ass, (she didn’t want to pull over to strip down because she’d lose our caravan). In the interests of curse-accuracy, Rick pointed out that this was not how to use ‘chapping your ass’, and Ann said, well, you didn’t see my ass. Pete said “well, I sure did” and Ann suggested that maybe he’d like to kiss her ass.

The rest of the night we played board games, drank more margaritas, ate too many rich foods, and did our level best to shoot Kris’s resolution all to hell.

6. I like roller skating and ice skating… and not reading long blocks of copy on a blog. For being a person who finds it hard to read long blocks of copy on a blog, I sure am writing some long blocks of copy.

7. I apologize to anyone who also doesn’t like reading long blocks of copy on a blog…sorry. You’re welcome.

I’m a little unfocused sometimes.

8. But speaking of audiences, once I attended a lecture on reincarnation by famous psychiatrist and author, Brian Weiss, MD. He said he was going to attempt to hypnotize the entire room for a past-life regression.  I was skeptical, but settled into the relaxation exercise, the whole while thinking, rats, I’m still here and I’m still me.  Finally, he said, “ok, I’m going count back from three, and when I get to one, just look down at your shoes.” I slowly opened my eyes and saw smartly pressed wool pinstripe pants leading right down to a man’s polished wing-tips, circa maybe 1912.

9. I travel a lot for work, mostly by air. Typically, there is an oversized John Deere executive passed out beside me, blissfully unaware of his snoring or that his black leather wing-tips are squeaking rhythmically against the seat frame in front of me. The woman in that seat is coughing virally in the general direction of, but not actually into, her bent elbow, her head craned sideways so the germs are propelled directly back into my breathing space.  Sometimes I just loathe air travel, but not always. There was that time an inexperienced father traveling alone with his miserable wailing baby took me up on my offer to walk the aisle with her.  I swaddled her snuggly into her blankets, sang with the hum of the engines, and felt her little body relax into sleep. When I looked up, everyone’s grateful, soft smiling eyes were canonizing me.

10. Global Warming is my fault because I voted for Ralph Nader.  Jon told me I’d just thrown my vote away, and that people like me cost Al Gore the election…I explained that I’ve just grown too apathetic to find a greater motivation at election time than cancelling out my father’s ultra-conservative vote.  Jon shook his head, sighed, and told me that I could not afford to remain so blissfully unaware of the world around me.

I only wish I was blissfully unaware of the world around me…if only.