Pasadena

V:

I haven’t written you in a long time. I keep intending to do it but something always gets in the way. People say the same thing to me all the time and I immediately think—what a crock of shit! Now that I say it, however, I believe it. Please know that you have not strayed far from my thoughts; my actions however have.

The writing continues to go well. It seems, like a chariot with a horse on fire, to drag me wildly forward into ever new countries. I had either ought to slow my mind down or speed my hands up to keep things in sync, yet it seldom works out right. I always lose something in the calibrations.

My imagination, like a raging wildfire, consumes everything in its path, leaping past, present, and future indiscriminately like so many roads. If you’ve read my writing blog lately, you know how wildly I have conflated fact, fiction, history, and hope.

In fiction, truth, like a lotus flower, blooms most beautifully.

I exercised in the backyard this afternoon, despite feeling utterly exhausted. As I did so, I spotted a hummingbird sitting on a lithe, yellow branch of my avocado tree. The bird—a twist of avocado, brown, and orange colors—exactly resembled one of the dry, shriveled leaves of the tree. I feel confident—I always feel confident—that no one else would have noticed it but me.

I stood on some roof tiles stacked by the fence, on tip-toe, and peered over at the almost vine-like branch to watch him—of course it was a x him x—and he let me. He reminded me so much of myself that I could have looked in a mirror: unselfconsciously still; meaningfully turning his thoughtful head; gazing slightly upward. Without question, with his whole body, he x listened x.

Hummingbirds, as you know, consume monstrous amounts of energy. As such, among animals, they have mastered their supply chain. Besides maintaining—and vehemently defending—their precious feeding grounds, they display equal adeptness in managing their own energy levels: they have to. That said, how many times have you seen a hummingbird, “at rest?” I watched him until he, sufficiently restored, vanished.

How I wish, like a hummingbird, I could fly forward and backward, not in space but in time, and side to side, but into adjacent dimensions of myself. The wingbeat of a hummingbird, after all, makes the shape of infinity. Yet we can’t mistake that the hummingbird has a single Holy Purpose—to bring joy like a kinetic Valentine, to say, you are loved. Each time I see one—I should say each time one sees me!—I try to do likewise; hence this note.

I have known you since I was 14 years old. When I think back on myself at that age—that untuned version of myself—I did not know myself at all because I listened only to myself. You, because when we met I really saw you, brought me out of myself and as a result to myself. With your garden smile you made me me. Irrevocably we tend our own fields now. If we crossed paths again, we’d pass one another at the speed of light. Unadversarially, we color different worlds.

You colored my heart so I could color others.

:E

Pasadena

O:

Artichokes have hearts, fist-like, chambered, tender, filling the center of them, protected by depths of barbs. Onions, on the other hand, taunt you with their skin which, once peeled, reveals another skin and another. No wonder onions make you cry—they have no heart, no soul.

People say, —have a heart!, or, —he loves her, with his whole heart… Growing up, I never knew what to imagine. I knew these feelings didn’t course through the pericardium, nor etch themselves, graffiti-like, across some red-winged paper hung on a rib.

Even if I interpreted the term loosely, as I later did—our most true self, necessarily within, protected, revealed and given cautiously—I couldn’t place it, and that bothered me. I had no place to stick a pin. At best, I thought, it must all be in the head.

It shouldn’t surprise you—it didn’t surprise me—I eventually discovered someone else had arrived at a similar conclusion, and, for lack of a better term, simply called x it x the “heart-mind.” Really, why use some dopey term when you can just call the thing the “heart-mind” instead?

For some reason, whenever I hear that term, heart-mind, I think of an hour-glass. Whatever we think, whatever we love, gets turned around, conflated, between these two chambers, endlessly, until we really no longer know which is which anymore.

(Incidentally, I think that explains why, sometimes, we don’t know we love someone when we do, or we can’t allow ourselves to love them when we want to—the signal gets lost in the noise, we lose our bearings, we confound ourselves, we can’t tell what we think from how we feel.)

Men more resemble artichokes than onions. Men—not merely women—resemble hour-glasses. Contrary to the romantics however, I don’t consider this thing we carry within us, this tedious instrument, a brave and resilient thing, but rather, an intensely fragile one, an ocean in a snifter.

When I finally knew I loved her, I told her, and she, summarily, “broke my heart.” My love, an onion, made an onion of me too. I yet wonder though if somewhere she remembers me, whether perhaps, inside her, an hourglass still turns for me—maybe it will turn like that forever.

Within me now I seem only to have shards and grit—slicing and scouring me, abraiding and miscarrying my mind and heart both. Eventually men must take after the oyster. We must make pearls, else endure an endless agony.

:O

Ermine,
(Lemon County)
Calif.—

Dearest Y:

I really should go to sleep right now—I can literally feel myself falling asleep between blinks here—but I had something I wanted to share with you. It’s a part of a letter I wrote you but never sent. One part of it has stayed with me; of all the things I’ve written, this one part has; I could not not share it—fuck the rest of the letter though, it was an awful letter. Tell me if you think any of this is true: “Did you ever notice how much ‘love’ enters into everything we do or say or think or share, or desire, or wish to give? I fucking love that, that it does. I think that means something good, about you, about me, about us, about everything we touch.” (There’s more, but I will save that for another time.) I think we should measure the success of a man or a woman by how much they love. I think, judged like that, we would do lovely.

This evening I walked through the park. On one side of the path through is a stream and on the other a grassy expanse. As I walked down the path two ducks, a male and a female, tried to cross, from the water to the grass, but they saw me and stopped and turned to go back. I stopped and I think I said out loud, —it’s okay, you can cross, and they did. Half-way across the path the male duck, leading, looked back for his companion. She paused when he paused and resumed when he resumed, as if they were connected by some invisible string, they affected one another. I don’t know why it impressed me so much, but it did. Not that she followed him—that they moved together, that they were connected. I will be honest with you—I thought, if they can be connected like that, maybe one day I could be too, but not to a duck—no offense to ducks though.

Speaking of ducks!, the Chinese, who eat everything, have the deepest reverence for pigs and ducks, second only to the French (though you could argue who loves them more) and I love that: there are no better meats than pork and duck; yet another reason to love the Chinese people, and the French. Exhausted, I have now also made myself starved by thinking about this.

Goodnight. You mean the world to me, more even than pigs and ducks. Hahaha.

Yours,

E.—

P.S. — Yeah, I talk to ducks.
Don’t judge.

Ermine,
(Lemon County)
Calif. —

My Irreplaceable Y.,

As I stood in front of my kitchen window last morning, a hummingbird fluttered before me — cruciformly — golden, garnet, and kaleidoscopic in the sunlight.

Hummingbirds rarely visit my kitchen window. I only keep cacti there, not flowers.

First she turned her head and looked at me from one eye, then she turned her head and looked at me from the other. She seemed to recognize me, and I seemed to recognize her, too.

Immediately, I had the feeling I should check my mail, and I found your long letter in the mailbox. I saved it to read right before I went to bed. I wanted it only — in my last waking moments — in my head and heart.

This may sound odd, but I saw your face in the letter — first serene yet intent, ethereal, then effulgent and unguarded, beguiling. Sweetheart, your face is my music — no words can express my love for you.

I knew the hummingbird then. She was you. Do you remember doing that, my love?

Forever yours, E. —

15 Feb XX 
Pasadena

W:

I apologize. This letter will either make you hungry or sick to your stomach! I hope you spent your Valentine’s Day well and with loved ones. I spent mine with a chicken.

Chickens tasted better once. I don’t say that nostalgically; I say that objectively. Once there existed as many varieties of chickens as colors on a peacock’s feather, but only one variety really exists anymore, The Bland Variety. Out of agricultural expediency, we have bred the preciousness right out of them. When you buy a chicken now, you have a choice—just how bland can you tolerate? I buy the best I can, and work with it. I bought a chicken yesterday, so you could say I have chicken on the brains.

In my junior year of college my then girlfriend—you remember her—and I sat in the dining hall across from one another. I don’t know why, but that afternoon we had lunch in the freshmen dining hall; maybe we had had a class near it that day, I don’t remember. That day they served that rubbery, gelatinous chicken they always served, painted sloppily with thin barbecue sauce—the whole chewy, dripping, tasteless mess grossed the heck out of me, but I had a whole chicken on my plate anyway. I ate like a gladiator back then.

I don’t remember doing anything particularly special that day other than eating my lunch, then she said from the silence, “you cut chicken beautifully.” I stopped cutting momentarily, before then completely unaware of my actions. We had not yet broken up, but soon would. We each sat facing one another on an ice-floe; we could see the crack clearly separating us, but it had not yet given way. She didn’t cry but clearly saw everything through, literally, misted eyes.

we cannot help but love more what we love and know we’ll lose

Love acts as a kind of lens through which everything we see looks different—not merely colored, but objectively different—either in or out of focus, present or, in some cases, entirely absent from the frame. I don’t know if she saw me in or out of focus at that moment. She loved me, so, I suppose, loved everything about me, deserved or not—love finds things to love; further, the loss of love amplifies it: we cannot help but love more what we love and know we’ll lose. This included watching someone eat an entirely revolting and particularly inedible bird.

Ego functions much the same way. I will admit that I have always maintained an exceptional amount of pride concerning my knowledge of chicken anatomy. (As with things in general.) I do in fact cut chicken like a skilled poultry surgeon. Under my knife it tends to fall apart as if only a single stitch had held the pieces together. People have given me a lot of compliments over the years—some of which I can repeat!—but that compliment still remains among the ones I most cherish.. I suppose it touches both truth and vanity. Everyone needs one thing they do beautifully.

Latter when I lived with V., we would shop for groceries together, toting the tall, brown paper-bags out to the T-stop and into the green, clacking toy-like train cars. We carried the bags on our laps like immobilized, yet still unsteady children, then later up five flights of stairs, one in the T-station then four more in the apartment building.

Later in the week she would ask me to “chop her chicken.” I would quit whatever occupied me at that moment and sidle up behind her and, containing her covered meadow in the palm of my hand, I would say, “I’ll chop your chicken alright.” She always elbowed me, and hard; she always gave me exactly what I deserved. Yet I relied upon her relying upon me to cut her chicken.

(I think of her moving behind me while I chopped it, the way she would talk to herself quietly in that low, softly confident voice of hers and the way she would pivot on one heel quickly, low and securely—teetering just enough—in some sort of game with herself.)

We would work separately, independently, but together—and make some wonderful meal for just the two of us, a private pleasure, which, like a child, grew out of the both of us; something which, even if we’d followed the same recipe, would have never turned out the same if we had made it without the other.

Yesterday I bought a whole chicken. I do about every other week. I prefer it. This afternoon I unswaddled it from its paper and it sat there on it, legs splayed and wings reaching out, as plump, ruddy, and healthy as a newborn baby. Of course immediately I crushed its chest and carved its backbone out, cracking it in two like a branch with my bare hands. It snapped plaintively.

Next I scooped some duck fat from a jar, a healthy dollop the color of cappuccino ice cream, and dropped it into a smoking hot cast-iron pan. It raced around frantically trying to escape the heat but eventually, drowning in it, succumbed. Fat tells you when to add other ingredients to it. Just look at its surface—it shimmers gently like a quiet pond at sunset.

I added the broken back and the giblets—the heart, the gizzard, the kidneys, and the liver—and let them sear, crackling and popping in a fierce, unrelenting agony, like a soul in hell. Before long, they too had succumbed, emitting only an exhausted, squeaky moan. I dusted them in heavy, gravelly salt and left them to themselves, out of respect.

A few moments later I pulled the pieces out of the pan and put them on a white plate—together they looked like a Chinese character written in the running style, dashingly haphazard, charmingly emotional—and with my bare hands, the bones burning my fingers, I ate the strip of crispy skin and veil of meat off the small, knobby bones.

I have eaten many great meals in my lifetime—innumerable dishes of grace, nuance, caprice, and virtuosity, deliberation and maturity, and eaten them with many spiritedly beautiful, achingly fascinating people—and yet as I ate these fried discards, alone, standing in my kitchen—like a brick they shattered my reflection in the window, broke everything I thought I knew.

Rumi says “the desire to know your own soul will end all other desires—but I do not think that that desire either satisfies us nor our other desires, not desire alone, especially not as concerns what we eat. We have to have the thing itself, the object of our desires. Do we want the recipe for our favorite dish or the dish itself?

We must really know a thing—especially a thing that pleases us—to begin to know ourselves. Anything that really satisfies us satisfies us completely—if only because we do not consist of a hundred different beings, but one being. Yet one bite can easily equal a hundred meals. People over-eat, I think, because a plenitude of something terrible will still never equal a single morsel of something sublime. So, “stay away from the buffet!”

In what we eat and in who we love, we search for something—not a part of ourselves or a reflection of ourselves but the knowledge of our body we get when our lover lays on top us, and the knowledge of our soul we get when it, like air over water, lies over another. As one good bite inevitably leads to another, so too one true kiss leads to another: if only you could reach from flesh to bone to soul. No matter—I already have a more than full serving of happiness eating alone. Soon I will double it. Soon it will double me.

How do people not love chicken?! I will never understand. Do not blame the chicken for this letter, though! Blame the brandy that went with the chicken!

I wanted to become a saucier once; no surprise there—sauces possess a magic. You often have to inebriate the sauce first with healthy amounts of wine or liquor—think of it as an anesthetic—before ultimately burning all the alcohol away, either by boiling it or igniting it. The sauce loses the sting of the alcohol but retains its colors, flavors, and nuances. It loses a body but gains a spirit.

So too, pain inebriated me, time boiled me, and reflection ignited me. The recipe—the fire—purified me, leaving me with the memory of joy, the knowledge of love, and an imperturbable certitude. Like a chicken, my old life has fallen apart by the seams; it has set me free; it has seasoned me, preparing me for some great banquet ahead—one that does not diminish through feasting but instead increases—for some great, real, and enduring love.

I apologize for ending this letter so abruptly, but writing makes me hungry, and I need to get another helping of that dish…

:E