Back in NYC just in time for sad anniversaries (or T.S. Eliot was right about April)

So, I'm back home in NYC and glad to be here though am missing John terribly.  I will end this post with some photos from Brockville, because there were some truly spectacular sunsets and moments on the river.

But today and tomorrow are the hellacious anniversary days - the one-two punch of wedding anniversary-miscarriage - that I kind of dread.  The day I was married to my soon-to-be-ex-husband (divorce papers wending their way through the weirdly-endless-considering-we-don't-disagree-on-anything British court system) in London was bright and sunny - full of hope - my pregnancy announced (we thought safely after 12 weeks), happy families and friends all around.  There were the moments of weirdness with in-laws and such, but then when does that not happen?

There was the spotting of blood that night at the hotel and me thinking, hmmm.  Then there was the train ride to Cornwall the next morning.  There was a little bit of blood, then more...then more.  I was freaking.  We kept heading towards Cornwall on an endless train/bus excursion.  What were we thinking?  I wonder now.  But on we went.

We arrive in drop dead gorgeous Cornwall and get to our self-catering place.  I go to the bathroom and there is more blood and I am truly freaking.  There is the emergency room.  There is me looking out the window in the cab at the sunset on the ocean saying "It's so beautiful here" over and over again before we get there.  There are the nurses looking sad.  There is the brusque doctor.  There is the weary sameness of it all for the professionals.  Just go home, they say.  And it'll either come out or it won't.  We aren't really a hospital here.  If you need a hospital you need to go to Truro.  I despair.  We go back to a place we don't live and I don't even have sanitary pads.  Bill has to go upstairs and ask our landlord.  The wife of the landlord sends down stuff with him and her sympathies.  She too had a miscarriage.

I will discover this as time goes on - practically every woman you know who has been pregnant and/or has children has had a miscarriage.  One in three pregnancies end in miscarriage.  You don't find this out until you have one and join the silent grieving club.  Why the silence?  Why the shame?  Why does no one Talk about it?  Such a miasma of secret grieving.  I wonder will women ever be on par with men until we get to grieve our losses as loudly and without shame?  Soldiers die and everyone cries.  Miscarriages happen and everyone is silent.  It's a mistake, an accident, a sign of divine disapproval.  Something did Not happen.  You can Not conceive.  Something is Wrong with You.  There is the endless self-doubt - what did I Do Wrong?

There is the moment the little sac that should have become a baby comes out.  There is the confusion about what it is.  There is a lot of crying.  I cry.  Bill cries - something I've never experienced - his tears.  There is so much fucking blood you cannot even imagine.  And pain.  So much pain.  And despair.  Then shock then some weird calm.  Maybe I'll get pregnant again.  It'll be OK.  The next day the Virgina Tech mass shooting happens.  All that is on TV is mass killing.  The sun is out and it is relentlessly beautiful.  I try to take hikes and pretend I'm OK because I'm afraid of being alone with my pain.  But I am bleeding and bleeding.  There are weeks and weeks of blood that follow and growing despair and more hospitals and hospitals and hospitals...for weeks, months, years...Much of this when alone because Bill is traveling for his work.

Then not getting pregnant again.  Then there is the anger, growing, that I ever was given the hope that I could have a child at age 43-44.  Then - insanely - there is the hope - sometimes it seems cruel - that I could get pregnant even now.  There is desire and hope.  That is all.  My body will not cooperate.  Cannot.  Will not?  What is it?

So many dysfunctions of shape of uterus and such, it's endless.  And now?  Now I am 49 about to turn 50.  Who do I think I am to even try?  Crazy of course.  Going to an appointment with a gyn tomorrow to see how crazy.  Weird coincidence that the appointment is 6 years to the day of the miscarriage.

Now, after all this, I have found my one true love, who I had always hoped existed but despaired did not but shockingly he does and in a weird twist of fate we have found one another - which is more than either of us dared to dream - but we are in fact 49 and 53.  This means the chances of having a child are slim to none even though it's something we both want so much.  Life is so strange and this is why I do believe T.S. Eliot was right when he wrote "April is the cruelest month."  Because the great beauty that arrives and all the hopes that come with it cannot last forever.  All bright light casts a shadow.  That doesn't mean the beauty is a lie or the hope is a lie.  It simply means that all great love sets us up for great loss, there's no way around that.

Don't get me wrong.  I am not complaining.  I am deeply grateful to have found real love, to know what it is in this life and experience all that it means.  I would not trade it for anything.  Speaking of which, below is a hilarious photo that John took of us with a timed camera.  That is our last night at the B&B in Brockville.

here we are laughing at our own jokes...someone has to....

So, yes, dark is the shadow side of light but on the other hand if I only look at that aspect, I lose the enjoyment of the light.  So, once again, after allowing myself to be happy and having it yanked away so violently, I am allowing in the light again.  With a big difference this time.  The person who I'm letting in loves me unconditionally as I do him.  Not only have I never been loved unconditionally before, I don't think I ever Have loved unconditionally either.  It seems there is a symbiotic process here - or some kind of alchemy.  Whatever it is, I'm grateful for it.

Plus, and this is the weirdest outgrowth of the time in Brockville, I am now having really good ideas about my grandmother book and am raring to go with it for the first time ever.  John thinks it was research being in a small town and essentially being a 'mall wife' for 6 weeks.  I was cooking and such.  John was working at a mall.  I did some writing but it did feel weirdly house wife-like.  Also, I am not a small-town girl, so there was a sense of claustrophobia (not because of being with John but being in this small town where I could not do and be the things I can do and be in NYC).

So yes, the sense of compassion for my grandmothers' restricted lives is much greater and more experientially based, especially for my grandmother who I've had the hardest time cozying up to because she was so cold.  A sense of judgment that has lifted and feeling instead her sense of necessity in keeping her shit under wraps and under control and how threatening anything  that could elicit any real emotion (including classical music, anything out of order, Evangelical Baptism or a pubescent girl) was to her.  So not only did I finish a draft of a play and apply to a bunch of places, I was also - without realizing it - feeling my way deeper into the book.  This makes me very happy because it gives a sense of purpose to some time that had felt in the moment pretty drifty and vague...

Plus, there are pictures!  Here's some of them...from my last days in Brockville.  Because of exhaustion, I will let these images end this post:

my favorite photo from the whole time - that's NYS across the river

another drop dead gorgeous Thousand Islands sunset

same sunset...the colors are just astonishing to me

Nostalgia, Memory, Small Towns & Snow (or: Blame Canada part 2)

So, it's been a while since I wrote anything here.  Why?  Well, in part because I've been trying to wrap my mind around Brockville, which is a small town-city both so similar in ways to places I grew up in New England and experienced in England (old school) that it feels familiar and yet being in Canada is wildly different.  I am aware now that this is the longest time (a month) I have spent in a town this size since I was a child.  As readers of this blog will no doubt have surmised my childhood was not very fun so the memory resonances are not the greatest.  Among many issues I had as a child, one was continually being the "new kid" at various schools in small to medium sized towns where there were very codified sets of dress, behavior, expressions, etc. that I would of course not know and/or to which I could/would not conform because of either (a) not knowing said codes and/or (b) having parents or caretakers of some nature that were not of this place so having no access to required clothing, attitudes, accent, etc…

If the above paragraph does not make it clear why I live in NYC, nothing will.  In a place like NYC, (and in my experience so far on earth, only in NYC), can I be who I am without any editing necessary and be accepted as such because really, who cares?  The place is huge.  There's room for whoever you want to be.  I realize more and more that in many ways it's a city of misfits.  There are exceptions of course including those I refer to as fair weather New Yorkers who are there to succeed in something and having succeeded or not at a set task leave for the suburbs or elsewhere as soon as possible.  There are people born there who wish they hadn't been and would leave if they could.  Then there are the rest of us, those drawn to this city because it's big enough, beautiful enough and multi-faceted enough to contain the restless misfit soul.

So what has this month been like?  Well, I've finished a draft of a stage text, sent out applications for jobs and funding, publications, etc., sent off final paperwork for divorce in UK (with minimal fuss, though with annoying delays due to international nature of things and whatnot…but that's basically done, and now it's a waiting game) and the rest of the time is spent time with John, my beloved Canadian, when he has time between work and dealing with some complex matters that are best not written about here.

I've also been taking lots of photos and video….The St. Lawrence River, which I can see from where we are staying, is gorgeous.  The sunsets while cold as shit have been beautiful.  John, who is an excellent photographer, has been patiently showing me how all the bells and whistles work on my digital camera.  As anyone who has ever tried to teach me anything can tell you: this can be trying.  He assures me I am not as grouchy as I know I am…bless him.  But slowly, slowly I'm learning.  Also collecting video paintings for: what?  I think probably the stage text recently completed as draft…but maybe something else…I'm still in divining rod living mode…feeling out next steps one at a time…

The nostalgia element of things here has to do with the weird echo of childhood, but also listening to music with John, which at times (when listening to e.g., Genesis, Talking Heads, etc.) brings us both back to our teens and 20s and this odd way in which we can envision having met one another back then (there having been at least two times in our younger lives wherein we were tantalizingly close - but not quite intersecting) so there is this odd parallel world in our not-memory (yet this not-memory has an inexplicable resonance) in which we met then and have been together since that time.  It's really hard to describe this, but it's quite precise and strong.  Of course in reality we could have driven each other nuts if we had met earlier and the people we are now we are because of past experiences, so it's a weird thing to contemplate, but somehow impossible not to have some weird nostalgia for a past we did not live…

Meanwhile, in real life, we have been together for four months and this month has given us time to get to know each other a lot better in real time and space, which has been invaluable and kind of amazingly great.  There have been bumps and learning curves but we have dealt with each of these events with grace and without causing each other any undue anxiety.  We seem to be able to focus on whatever the presenting issue is and move on.  I've never found it so easy to communicate with a partner like ever.  It's a revelation and a truly positive one.  This is why I secretly (not so secretly) believe if we had met earlier in our lives we would have fallen in love and still be in love.  There is a very deep sympatico that is so effortless that I have a feeling it would have been there from the beginning no matter when that beginning may have been…but that kind of thinking is clearly impossible to 'prove' and of course presents the even more problematic issue of non-acceptance of my actual past as it was lived…so the only truly affirmative way of looking at this is to say: yes to the whole thing...

So in lieu of continuing to whitter on in such bizarre hypotheticals, I will leave you with some photos of my time here.  Where, for the record, it's still Really Cold…But at times also astonishingly beautiful… All of these photos are taken during various sunsets, which bring to mind Artaud's observation that "the setting sun is beautiful because of everything we lose by it."

St. Lawrence Park

reflection in river of sky and trees from Block House Island

sunset reflections from Block House Island

seagulls of Block House Island with Canadian Air Force plane 

Writing in Canada

So I'm in Brockville, Canada now…which is in Ontario, north of New York, almost equidistant between Toronto and Montreal.  I'm staying with my beloved while he is working and dealing with some other personal matters and I am writing.  I was afraid having the time and space to write would leave me in some way helpless but happily, no: I am writing…and reading…a lot.  Having a place to stay in a small city/town where I have no distractions at first excited me, then kind of scared me and now I see it as a relief.

I am however now listening to This American Life on WNYC via the internet, about guns and gangs at Harper High-school in Chicago.  There is something weirdly comforting and incongruous about this sitting in a peaceful town in Canada where the city will shut down in about a half an hour.  When I look outside the window, there's the St. Lawrence River and beyond that New York State.  I am not in NYC so feel the need to connect…even here.

In terms of my writing/research, I am reading William James again.  The James I'm reading now is his essays on pragmatism, which I found in a local used bookstore.  That led me to revisiting a play text I wrote and kind of abandoned in 2010-11.  I re-read this text in a cafe here and was pleasantly surprised that it didn't all suck.  It deals with grief, Job and James' Varieties of Religious Experience.   A number of losses have occurred since then, but then along came falling in love with John, which gives a new tone to certain parts of the text…So I'm working on it again.

Some of you following this may wonder where the grandmothers book is.  The answer is: it's here, but I abandoned this play first and somehow it's calling to me right now.  It was the week I decided to let go of linear working that I discovered John, so I'm continuing my faith in divining rod living.  Opening up to the openings as it were.

The other surround is living on a more daily basis with John, which is of course more like real life and that is good.  It feels grounding in terms of who we are together.  I realized with a shock how few actual days we have spent together in person, because it feels like a lot more and then of course in certain ways not at all.  The good news is we are still deeply in love and even some challenging events have not changed that love.  That is what I felt would happen, but it's a big relief to see it is true in real time.

Listening to this radio piece about the high-school a kid says how much it means to him that someone cares about him and worries about him.  I realize that is how I feel now.  It is such a relief to know someone cares what happens to me from moment to moment, worries about me even.  Not that I want him to worry, but it's so nice to know someone cares.  It is so different than anything I've ever experienced that sometimes it just feels awkward, but then I relax and realize this is normal when someone actually loves you.  I imagine many of you reading this are wondering why that matters so much to me, but you'll just have to trust me that it does.

So, once again, I will say, I wouldn't trade this experience of being in love with John for anything in the world.  It makes me happier than I ever thought anyone had a right to be or even could be.

Speaking of John, he was born and grew up here in Brockville and has lived the last 10 years of his adult life here.  So what is this place like?

I've only been here a few days, so don't know yet, but some basic observations: it's almost a perfect conflation of a town like Brunswick, Maine and a small town in the UK.  From moment to moment I feel I am in one or the other place.  Houses are a mixture of wooden New England-like houses and stone Scottish-like houses including pebble-dash covering stone.  To make it even weirder, I can see New York State across the St. Lawrence River, so I'm very close to the U.S.

I am struck by how much more different Canada is than the U.S. than I expected.  There is a peacefulness here, probably due to lack of guns - well lack of handguns and automatic weapons.  In rural areas lots of people have shot guns but that's different.  In this town there is a friendliness mixed with a certain wariness of city people (especially that they will be judgmental) that I associate with Maine.  Being from New York City then causes a certain potential issue.  I find people assume I will be thinking that this is a less interesting place, etc.  There is little I can do to dissuade anyone from this assumption.  I just try to smile a lot.

Then there's the issue of Being an American…which means there is a raft of movies, TV, cultural Stuff, not to mention products, interventionist foreign policy, global capitalism and assumptions that come along with you…Visa - it really is wherever you want to be…in the way.  It sits there in your place, so being a human being in any environment outside the US at times feels almost impossible.  Yes I can pretend that's not the case, but then I am delusional.

This of course does not affect deeply personal relationships as much - though there can be cultural hiccups.  I have not found the Canadian/US relationship as tricky as the US/UK dance.  However, being in Ontario (which is waaay different than Quebec - which is French), I do see in architecture and demeanor the obvious British influence.  I am also very sensitive to the effect I am having on people, not to mention not being the biggest patriot in the traditional sense, so I probably take a lot of this on board more than most.  Brockville was a town to where lots of British Loyalists during the Revolutionary War fled, so there's that vibe, too.  When I went happily to an Excellent fish and chips shop (including old-school wrapping of fish and chips in newspaper), I was regaled with the Loyalist heritage of the town, along with declarations of how scary New York City is, etc.  I just laughed.  Nothing else to do really.

Then there are more idiosyncratic characteristics like a certain sense of humor, an interesting mix of American-like open-ness with a certain British dry wit.  I find myself very glad I spent 8 years in the UK before being here.

However, I do have my usual fish out of water feeling when I'm outside of NYC, the one place where I know I can be who I am without reserve and never feel out of place or like I'm too much.  The sense of having to hold myself back from being who I am is something that plagues me no matter where I go outside of NYC for the most part, including the U.S.  So I want to make sure this does not sound like a criticism of Canada, because it's not.

What I do like about travelling and being outside my personal comfort zone is that I need to pay attention even more, see how certain things feel, watch the way people interact and how I find a way to do the same.  Everything is challenged, all assumptions, ideas, habits, even tones of voice.  I need to weigh every habitual way of speaking, being, etc. and see if it holds up here in this new place or needs to shift.  How to connect - here?

For all my complaining about feeling like a bull in a china shop in the UK, in the end I learned some more skillful behavior there that has made my life in NYC go a lot more smoothly.  The basic trick is: can I see that all of my little ways are not necessarily 'wrong' if they don't fit in a new place but that they are not necessarily 'right' either?  Can I use the challenge of a new environment to become a more sensitive human basically?  Without someone diminishing my own sense of self?  This is a real challenge.

This is also why I'm happiest where we are staying reading and writing for the most part because sometimes the whole interpersonal challenge can be too much for me.  The interesting thing however is that with John none of these issues come up.  I mean we have had some moments, but I don't think they are primarily cultural.  In fact our temperaments are kind of shockingly well suited.  Perhaps the complimentary nature of our personalities derives from our different backgrounds…but having grown up as a young child in rural Maine, I certainly have a template for some of what I see in Canada.

There is more to say of course but will leave it here for now as my make-shift lentil stew simmers in the background.  Make-shift because I don't have my usual spices…the drama of cooking in remote locations (!)

Now back to William James and my new-old stage text…until the love of my life returns home from his job...

Falling in love with/and Bergsonian intuition, Valentine's Day and butterflies

[First part, written at Toronto Airport on Feb. 13, waiting for flight to Montreal to see my beloved Canadian for Valentine's Day:]

If you'd told me even a few months ago that certain philosophical ideas from a turn of the last century philosopher would give me insight/guidance into matters of intimacy and love, I probably would have been skeptical.  As a matter of fact, if you'd told me anything that's happened in my life since December 6, I would have been skeptical.

So why not drag Henri Bergson into this blog along with his ideas about intuition?

Because here's the thing, when you fall in love - especially if you fall in love mid-life - with someone else in mid-life - you bring a lot of stuff with you to the party.  Bergson's whole deal (and he was good friends with Proust, who was best man at his wedding, which makes sense when you put his ideas next to In Search of Lost Time) has to do with memory, recollection, the past in the present and how intuition is the moment when (to oversimplify and with all due apologies therefor) you basically can see outside of your own blinkered view of an event to the fact of it having various levels - which include impressions from the past as much as the present moment.

So, like, when you are looking at this person who you love now more than anything and loves you the same way but realize - wow, I'm treating him/her like ______ [add person from your past - could be former love, could be family, could be any number of things] and feeling as if I am with _______ [same] - you have a choice - what I will hereinafter refer to as the Bergsonian choice - of moving outside of your own compulsions and habitual frameworks, to see the person in front of you with as much vulnerability and uncertainty as possible….uncertainty being in reality the only place intimacy - true intimacy can happen…Uncertainty not as a negative but as a positive stance, as in "Actually, I don't know what happens next."  I don't know because I am surrendering all the habitual frameworks.

Which doesn't mean you can just junk them or pretend they aren't there.  Bergson would definitely not agree to that and neither would I for that matter.  You have to find a way to befriend these parts of yourself, these reactivity masks, recognize them, name them, somehow give them milk and cookies and let them be, but not let them have their way if at all possible.

Gilles Deleuze cut his philosophical teeth in part on renovating Bergson - below is an excerpt from his take on Bergsonian intuition (on p. 27 of Bergsonism for anyone wanting to sing along with the sheet music):

"Intuition leads us to go beyond the state of experience toward the conditions of experience.  But these conditions are neither general or abstract.  They are no broader than the conditioned: they are the conditions of real experience.  Bergson speaks of going "to seek experience at its source, or rather above that decisive turn, where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility, it becomes properly human experience."…..But on the other hand we push each line beyond the turn, to the point where it goes beyond our experience, an extraordinary broadening out that forces us to think a pure perception identical to the whole of matter, a pure memory identical to the totality of the past…"

So what does that have to do with intimacy?  To my mind, a lot, because this implies an oscillation between acknowledging one's own biases and how memory works in actuality, but knowing that intuition, which to Bergson is a precise move, allows us to see outside of our own experience…which links these particulars to the broader movements of the "whole of matter" and the "totality of the past."  We are both in particular and part of this whole.  Our particulars are both real and masks.  The totality is both virtual and yet we have access to it via intuition, as Bergson defines it.

In other words, when in moments of intimacy (vulnerability, uncertainty) we can see [boarding call interrupted this sentence....involuntary caesura as they call it in the academic biz - sorry one too many academic conferences...]

***
Feb. 20 - NYC

All of the above still applies...and the broken sentence...I believe was talking about moments of vulnerability and uncertainty wherein we can see what we do and don't know...have a kind of humility in the face of that...I'm not really sure that's what Bergson meant at all to be honest, but it's what I get out of it anyway...the moment when I can see outside of my small self POV into my Self POV, which is somehow both me but also encompasses the larger picture in which this event is occurring.  I am both me and not me...That kinda thing.  But this is a human experience I am discussing...

Something I'm obsessed with is the idea of immanent transcendence or transcendent immanence... wherein through a kind of radical presence one touches what perhaps could be considered divine in that there is no boundary of space and time to the experience, though it is happening on a very human level.

I have always understood this in terms of two kinds of events in my life: a spiritual experience I have described a number of times and in my play Word To Your Mama and in the theater - in rehearsals and sometimes, extraordinary moments, in performance.  What I have never experienced until now is this immanent transcendence in a relationship with another human being.

So, please excuse my attempt to drag philosophy into this, but it's an attempt to describe something, which defies easy description, perhaps more for me than most because it is so far outside any past experience.

I could also say simply: I am deeply in love with John or I love John more than anything and in a way I've never experienced.  But the reason that doesn't do it for me is that I could have used the word love in the past, have used the word love in the past, but it was not referring to what I am referring now.  That is of course the funny thing about words always, especially loaded words like love.

We can think we know what we're talking about, but each be bringing a wholly different experience to the table.  To borrow from Bergson again (which I'm reading thanks to John - so like blame him/Canada) the love I am experiencing with John with its lack of boundaries of space or time is a difference in kind rather than a difference in degree...so I'm impelled to attempt to describe its specificity.

But back to what can be described: Valentine's Day in Montreal at the Botanical Gardens was pure magic, because it was the opening day of their exhibit Butterflies Go Free (or, as listed: Papillon en Liberté!) wherein there were hundreds of butterflies in a space with gorgeous flowers and fruit.  We spent many hours there, watching the butterflies and taking photos.  I shot video mostly, which I want to review before posting...but a nice gentleman took a photo of John and I that we both like very much, so here it is:

Sadly no butterflies in this photo, but they were there, promise!

Here's one of John's photos from the day that I think looks a bit like a portrait of this butterfly more than "a butterfly":

I have written a lot about butterflies, especially my experience of witnessing a caterpillar turning into a Monarch when I was little in Maine.  It is quite lovely to share a passion for butterflies with your beloved, especially on Valentine's Day!

The transformation of a butterfly is quite extraordinary, especially the fact that when in the cocoon the caterpillar to butterfly transition includes a liquid state.  This is a warning to any and all that try to wrench off other peoples' protective covers.  If someone tried to "help" a butterfly get free of its cocoon rather than waiting for it to break open its own shell, that could kill it.

Or: I don't know what anyone/thing needs, not really.  Plus, as with the butterfly, nature takes care of itself without my 'assistance.'  Many transitions happen wherein I don't know the timing nor need to know (note to self: remember this).



 

What does sheer joy look like?

For those of you who have been following this blog recently who may wonder what it was like when John, my beloved Canadian, and I were finally in the same physical location, here is your answer:

I took this photo holding the camera away from us not knowing the framing precisely and was delighted with the accidental result.  We were walking the Highline (the disused tracks above old meatpacking district in Chelsea that have been redesigned as a gorgeous walkway from 14th-30th Street).   I can assure you that I've never been or looked this happy like ever.

Since John and I met in part because of our mutual interest in photography, I will let this photo stand in for many words....

Love letter to New York City and Coming Home

As anyone knows who has been reading this blog this past month, I am deeply in love with a Canadian named John.  Because he will be arriving on Tuesday to visit me for the first time and see NYC for the first time, I am falling in love with NYC in a new-old way all over again.

As anyone who's read this blog since I started it knows, I love NYC passionately.  But now I am re-seeing it, remembering when I first encountered it and how much I loved it then, too, even though I could not even wrap my mind around what I was seeing and experiencing.  I am also seeing, with renewed intensity all the little things I love - the color combinations, open and closed spaces and sights and sounds of the subway for instance.  The combination of beauty and grit, the quiet dignity of most of the subway workers and all the people that make this city hum.  The way light shines off glass, brick, trees, water, people, cars and store fronts.  The rhythm of the city, the way it has a beat always, the way you can look up, even somewhere you've lived for a while and see something new, hear something new but it all fits into the beat of a city that never stops...except for the moments it does - those gorgeous grace notes, when there is suddenly no traffic, a kind of pause, like the moment between the in and out breath...and then it continues.

Things that John has noticed while we were Skyping that I sometimes tune out - the rhythm of the beat of the steam heat radiators when they are clanging - the sirens that come in loud - the salsa from the street, and suchlike...

But there are the many practical grace notes of NYC.  This week I want to write a paean to one that is close to my heart and is saving my uninsured ass: the free and low cost health clinics.  The one I have signed up for recently and at which I have had the most astonishing set of experiences is the William F. Ryan Center.  If you are uninsured or indeed have insurance they take, please avail yourself of this incredibly well-run facility.  This is a clinic where not only are you treated like a human being, all the doctors I have had are great and the level of care is Very high.  All the staff are polite and appointments happen on time or very close thereto.  Because my income is low, for each appointment I pay $35.  That's right: $35.  One was a comprehensive physical, including blood tests.  Another was an eye appointment (with in depth testing).  The last was dental, including at least 14 X-rays, a precise diagnosis and excellent cleaning.  I have been referred to gynecological services at a partner hospital for specialist treatment and have a follow up medical appointment with my lovely female doctor in six weeks.  Each visit, I repeat: $35.  OK, if it was the NHS it would be free, but for the U.S. and for top flight care, this is astonishing.

So between John who continues to astonish me with his love, generosity and care (not only in words but many concrete actions) and NYC itself with its many places someone like me without insurance or money can get care (including: Harlem Breast Clinic: mammography & pap smears - where when I needed a second test, I was sent - for free - to Sloan Kettering and the HHC low cost hospital care plan, which means I have access to emergency room and hospital care for very low rates), I feel so Taken Care Of on both a very deep emotional, spiritual level but also in practical, physical terms as well.

The world is conspiring to allow me to exhale.  This showed on my blood pressure checks, which were perfect.  I am so much calmer than I have been in ages, if ever.  I am way happier than I've ever been in my life, ever.  But it's a calm happy, a deep joy, that pervades most every interaction I have with people.  This can include conflict, too, because I am feeling less like eating shit these days, so if someone is pissing me off, they get to know that.  In the nicest possible way of course (!)  This makes me feel happier, too.  Because as the old saying goes: if you don't want to be a doormat, get up off the floor.

So as I prepare for the love of my life to visit the city that I love, I am feeling pretty damn fine.  I am hoping John will feel at home here as I do.  He believes he will and since we share so much in terms of temperament and perspective, I am hoping that is the case.  It took me so long to get back here and I don't relish the idea of leaving any time soon.  The fact remains, ever since I lived in NYC the first time (1982-83 working for the now-defunct WPA Theater as their production manager at the wise old age of 19), I've felt like I was in exile whenever I lived anywhere else.  You either love this city more than anyplace else in the world or you don't.  I am one of the former.

Finally, I am overjoyed to be living in Inwood, an area of NYC I did not know existed until I moved back in October 2011.  This is the best place I have ever lived in the city.  I would never trade the wild mix of nature and city, its edginess (as in being on the top tip of the island), its Lack of Hipsters (though there are some signs of a few in the new cafe near the 207th St. stop - the laptop-latte crowd with the thick glasses - you know the kind - but so far they seem harmless enough...) and its still affordable rents...Long may it continue!

I love New York!

I love John, too!

So, putting these two loves of my life together will be marvelous.  Assuming we can work out all the many details in order to make this happen, I will not only feel at home, as I always have in NYC, but I will be able to create with my beloved Canadian a Home where my heart, soul, mind and body can rest.  This will be a first.  I am delighted that it looks like the place this most marvelous event in my life ever will happen is my beloved New York City.  Which is why when I see John for the first time ever at a place as strange as Port Authority Bus Terminal (!), the first thing I am going to say to him in the midst of that fluorescent-lit chaos too early on a Tuesday morning is: welcome home.

The war is over.

This phrase "the war is over" keeps running through my mind these days.  The main reason of course is John, the love of my life, having appeared so unexpectedly, spectacularly and irrevocably in my life, blowing my mind in every conceivable way.  I have written about that in the past few blog posts, so will not review that territory other than to say: yes, it is real and happily, as of today, he got his passport so we will finally be in the same physical room (not to mention country) together relatively soon.  That has been a cause for general merriment and celebration between us.

So, the war is over in this deeply personal part of my life.  No need to fight, defend, hold back, etc. and that is just an astonishing gift, the gift of the resting heart - held safely by another.  Breathtakingly beautiful.

But happening alongside this (and this movement had begun before John and I connected and is part of how we did connect - because I was following this train), I began to give up other wars as well.  I decided to stop fighting the fact I am an artist first and foremost.  And, most relevant to my recent past, I have decided to stop my war with academia by surrendering the field for now.

Yes, I have a PhD, which means I fit myself into that ill-fitting model long enough to do that, like the proverbial jigsaw puzzle piece that almost fits, but doesn't quite.  The role chafed.  I chafed at everything to do with the process.  I succeeded, but almost as soon as I had, I thought: really?  Why on earth did I do that?  The irony being that in defending the artistic process as a methodology, I feel like I seriously hurt myself as an artist and independent thinker.

Don't get me wrong, I have lots of friends who are academics and know people who thrive and do great work in that environment.  This is not about: academia is horrible, etc.  This is about: academia is horrible for me.  At least for now.  [update Aug 2013: Glad I said 'for now' because as all things turn, so has this - again.  I am seeing places in academia (which is of course a big 'place') that I may be able to thrive.  The main thing I need to do is make sure it's the right fit, in the Spinozan sense, wherein we make each other bigger rather than smaller.  I am re-opening my mind to this possibility, and I feel the need to write this here in case one of the places I apply and/or contact reads this blog post and wonders WTF I have applied at all...]

It's been 3 years since I received my PhD and only now do I feel I can go back and read my beloved philosophers like Deleuze & Guattari with joy again.  Instead of looking for proofs, justifications and footnotes, I get to listen to their music, enjoy their provocations and make work and have ideas in response to their actual, activating playfulness and subversion (humorously enough, autocorrect tried to change subversion into supervision!)...

And my work, which I am tentatively moving back into now can happen outside of the stultifying frame of "research."  It's not research other than into the creative process itself and in order to make better work.  It doesn't exist as raw material to make better theory.  Not for me anyway.

I feel like I'm detoxing from having been in a cult of some kind...which means that I was in the wrong place.  Again, I will say, for lots of people this is Not their experience in academia, but for me it has been. [update: and again, as above, I am beginning to see, now that I'm not locked into the places I was that there are alternatives where people are experimenting with new models and where I may fit]

So, the war is over.  I go away now.  I let the academics do their thing and I come back into myself.  All of my goals now are about becoming a self-sustaining artist and teacher (preferably doing independent teaching, such as at The Brecht Forum, and every once in a while at any institution that likes what I bring to the table as an artist-teacher such as Hunter).  [update: I have recently been hired to teaching writing at Fordham and am deliriously happy about that, hence my reassessment of this whole situation.]

I love teaching.  I love my students, passionately - and therein lies the rub for me.  Because I can't teach except with 110% of myself involved, which means it depletes my creative energies.  If it didn't, I would not be bringing everything I can to the table, which would be robbing my students.  That is unethical and frankly impossible for me to do.

So, I have to balance even teaching with my creative energies.  In June, I will turn 50, so my energies are not infinite anymore.  They haven't been infinite for a while, but the fact of their limitations is more and more obvious the older I get.

There is a paradox, though, which is: when I surrender the idea of what I "should" be doing or become,  and instead focus on who I actually am and what I do best, I have way more energy and things seem to flow.  I met John during a week when I had thrown up my hands to the Universe and said: OK, where next.  I woke up every morning and before checking email, etc. on my "smart" (aka idiot-making) phone, waited to remember my dreams and wrote them down.  I was doing this partly guided my Marion Woodman's experience as recounted in Stephen Cope's excellent new book The Great Work of Your Life (which I highly recommend).

Hilariously, one dream was about a dating site (!) that a friend had recommended.  So, against all my better judgment I decided to sign up to this site (OKCupid in case anyone wants to know...) and within minutes, John appeared, because he had put into his search field "Deleuze" and "photography."  Much to his surprise, someone showed up (only one): that was me.

I hated the dating site, except for this interesting Canadian dude with the philosophy/art thing going on, so signed out of it fairly quickly but not before exchanging email addresses with John, who I thought would be an interesting pen pal (seriously)...so, there you have it.  Oh, and in case anyone wants my sage dating site advice, here it is: if you want to filter out creeps, don't publish your photo (because if someone can't be bothered to get to know you without knowing what you look like, what's the point?) and be honest about who you are.  Don't try to give answers you think people want to hear, because then you will be dating someone who is dating a facsimile of you, not you.  Simple, but true.  It was the very idiosyncratic nature of our profiles that drew John and I to each other.  They simply did not look like anyone else's.  That's kinda the point.

Another random piece of advice, completely subjective: Canadians are great.  Believe it or not, the daughter of my best friend's husband met her partner, now wife, on OKCupid, too - and she's Canadian.  Not sure what is going on with our friends North of the Border, but whatever it is, hooray!  You all are the best.

Speaking of which, one of my best friends, also Canadian, Dr. Kélina Gotman, is an academic and she rocks the house.  She is a perfect example of someone who is creative, vital and sustained by academia.  She and I work together beautifully, because there is a synchronicity there.  Her writing about my work (links to that on blog in right margin) is gorgeous.  This is why I know academia itself is not stultifying in and of itself.  It's the Spinozan thing wherein certain bodies enhance one another and others diminish one another.  The interaction between the bodies is all.

So, the war is over.  I am not attempting to fit into jigsaw puzzles with pieces that almost fit but don't quite, whether it's professionally, creatively or personally.  I was beginning to feel my way along this road again when John came along, but his presence has lit the path and made me feel held and more secure on what had seemed like a pretty damn lonely road for many, many years and looked to be pretty gloomy up ahead.  What a difference true love makes!

Here's to finding the right traveling companion (and your very own path - because if you're not on your own true path you won't find your true traveling companion) and a wish for you all that you find the right companion or, if you already have, that you never, ever take that person for granted.  He or she is the greatest thing that's ever happened to you, so please don't forget it.  I hope I never lose the knowledge of deep love I have for John right now, the sense of cherishing and deeply felt, abiding joy.  There is simply nothing like it and certainly nothing better on this earth.