I really do love Facebook memories, because they are the scrapbook I wander through daily in my tattered Miss Havisham dress, visiting my past lives.
Today my digital memory recalled that it’s the 10th anniversary of Lou Reed’s death. I loved Lou, but this milestone is interesting to me because for the past week I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Laurie Anderson.
It started because this has been another season of loss and death in my community (arriving hand-in-hand with autumn). Then a friend shared Laurie’s beautiful words about marrying Lou.
So I went back to listen again to her 2019 record “Songs From The Bardo”. It’s one of the most profound and healing things I’ve ever experienced, as is her film “Heart Of A Dog”.
Anderson has always been a poet of dread and tragedy and loss. She’s funny, she’s clear, and she’s never sentimental, which is why she has usually been classed with a bunch of men. But from the day she came to New York from the Midwest, she’s felt the apocalypse coming. She has always successfully captured the eerie vibe of living in the absurd present while you are waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Lately, though, her work is deeper and softer and more…female, exploring the special flavor of losing a creature you’ve cared for – a dog, a husband.
Lou was Laurie’s husband.
They were both eccentric iconoclasts, and when they married in 2008 after 16 years as mates, it was because Laurie was fretting to Lou that there were so many things she hadn’t gotten around to – learning certain languages, getting married…
He proposed, again, as he had done before, and they married.
They didn’t always live together, they had no children, neither was especially gender-compliant, and who knows what their intimate life entailed…but she was very much his wife. That was clear while they were alive together, and since his death she has mourned and honored him in a wifely manner.
She is the keeper and representative of the world’s love for Lou. She holds it and keeps it alive, reflects it and shares it. She has carried the DNA of his work into the future.
This past week, while I was making 4 pounds of baked ziti to bring to Milo’s robotics practice, my father casually mentioned that a cousin was surprised I had become such a “traditional wife”. He shared her sense of surprise. It especially surprised him that I seemed to be happy doing caretaking work, because I am a feminist.
I wouldn’t say I am “happy” doing it. It often brings me pleasure, but it’s not always comfortable. I certainly don’t do it reluctantly; I have a family, because I chose to have one, so I love them. Love is a verb.
Since moving to the Midwest with my family, to follow my husband’s work, I have done an awful lot of thinking and talking and writing about the paradox inherent to a female identity. About what love, the verb, means for us.
I am not alone. I have Done The Reading my whole life, so I know myself to be in the ample company of generations of women exploring the constant tension between the pull to caretake, and the pull to center oneself – one’s pleasure, one’s art. I have lived my life with women, in the questions of where to place our effort at any given moment, and what it looks like to love.
This week is also the anniversary of the death of Diane di Prima, and few write about this matter better than she did. The below anecdote comes in the words of Ariel Gore:
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In Recollections of My Life as a Woman, the poet Diane di Prima tells of a night at Allen Ginsberg’s place in New York. She’d gotten a friend to babysit her young daughter and headed over to Ginsberg’s apartment because Jack Kerouac and Philip Whalen were in town for “one of those nights with lots of important intense talk about writing you don’t remember later.”
Well, Diane had promised her babysitter that she’d be back at 11:30 that night, and 11:30 starts rolling around, so Diane bids her farewells. “Whereupon, Kerouac raised himself up on one elbow on the linoleum and announced in a stentorian voice: ‘DI PRIMA, UNLESS YOU FORGET ABOUT YOUR BABYSITTER, YOU’RE NEVER GOING TO BE A WRITER.’”
How do you like that?
Kerouac just props himself up with one arm and drunkenly slaps us with the great fear we all share. He embodies the archetype of the selfish, self-destructive male artist, and he announces that unless we, too, are willing to be irresponsible to our relationships, we’ll never quite measure up.
“I considered this carefully, then and later,” Di Prima writes, “and allowed that at least part of me thought he was right. But nevertheless I got up and went home.”
Three cheers for di Prima!
“I’d given my word to my friend,” she explains, “and I would keep it. Maybe I was never going to be a writer, but I had to risk it. That was the risk that was hidden (like a Chinese puzzle) inside the other risk of: can I be a single mom and be a poet?”
A serious question, that one. Serious not only for moms but for all of us. Can we be present in our relationships and still do the work we feel called to do? It’s like my friend Lynn says: “A woman has to make a real effort not to dissolve into everything that needs her.” Our relationships need us, but we don’t want to dissolve. We refuse to dissolve, but we choose also to be responsible to our relationships. We’re tired of the drunk guy on the linoleum telling us we can’t do both. Women have always done both.
Looking back, di Prima recognizes what is true: Had she opted to stay that night, “there would be no poems. That is, the person who would have left a friend hanging who had done her a favor, also wouldn’t have stuck through thick and thin to the business of making poems. It is the same discipline throughout.”
The same discipline.
And discipline, like motherhood, is good for the soul. Poetry is good for the soul. Responsibility to all our dysfunctional relationships is good for the soul. The archetype of the selfish male artist tells us that we can’t manage all these things at once, that we can’t be simultaneously responsible to children, babysitters, self, and art, that we have to sacrifice, to abandon – but we know that’s a lie.
As I write this, Kerouac has been in his grave for nearly forty years. Diane di Prima is down in San Francisco, mother of five children, author of thirty-five books of poetry and several memoirs, powerhouse, and twenty-first-century radical.”
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Yesterday, I listened to Marc Maron interviewing Laurie Anderson, and at one point she said that she has never made art out of a desire to be known. She is curious, wants to see how things work, wants to push limits.
But, she said, “I’ve always wanted to disappear”.
She is, indisputably, a woman who is Known. She has made so much art, has made her mark on so many, that her comment might seem disingenuous. She’s still out there, constantly. But so much of her art now is about grief and Buddhism and caretaking and the eternal nature of love – how to “FEEL sad, without BEING sad”.
What is art, if not finding beauty in the world? Including in the care and loss of junkies and junkyard dogs?
This has been the central preoccupation of all of the feminist artists in whose tradition I hope to place myself. To me, “feminism” declares that there is no inherent tension between love and art, there is merely (murderously) a social tension, because women have always been rewarded socially for “dissolving into everything that needs us.”
The art is actually IN the dissolving, the disappearing, into work, love, life. It’s only the social-facing aspect – the ego, the reward – that makes this surrender dangerous.
It’s only fatal for women to abandon ourselves when we transfer our power to a malevolent force that might abandon US – drop us down the well, fail to care for us back.
History is stuffed with those stories. Women are forced through patriarchy into service and dependence, and then we are abandoned, and then we suffer, and then we are dead. While others hold the power and thrive, we are left with nothing to show for our lives. That’s the fear.
That didn’t happen to Laurie Anderson. It didn’t happen to Diane di Prima. It didn’t even happen to Andrea Dworkin.
It has happened to many women, many times. It will not happen to me.
I am moving to the Midwest and baking this ziti with my eyes wide open. I am seeing and listening, writing and loving, disappearing every day, until I join Lou and my Mom, Jack and Diane, and all the dogs in the great junkyard beyond this world.
In the meantime, this world may one day abandon me, leaving me sick and weak and alone and powerless. Who knows – that story is not yet written. I cannot live today protecting myself from that tomorrow, because if I do, I will lose too much. I will give myself away.
So for now I will be fully here, taking care. One day, at last, I will be gone.