Haiku for K. D.

Days-dead grasshopper,
His vital goo dried and bright--
Short April for him.

The Woeful Tale of Chauncey Bloodmouth (Written in Decidedly Unheroic Couplets)

"Where is my mind?"--The Pixies

Once there was a man.
Let's call him "Chauncey Bloodmouth."

Chauncey Bloodmouth had a wife,
Chauncey thought he'd have for life.
'Til one day she engaged in sin,
One that Th'Book of Books is in.
She took a man outside the bond,
The one of which ol' Chaunce was fond.
Her plan to him she soon made plain,
"I'm leaving you, and fuck your pain!"
Bloodmouth took a bloody whim:
"Find the fucker; bloody him!"
The so-called fucker cringed and hid,
Seeing Bloodmouth flip his lid.
Mrs. Bloodmouth called The Law
('Twas the last of her he saw).
So callous Mrs. Bloodmouth was
To see sad Chaunce and call the fuzz.
Chauncey stood in a drizzling rain,
Thought,"How is it she feels no pain?"
Bloodmouth felt a pang himself,
So Bloodmouth tried to hang himself.
But just as they aided her contempt,
The cops interfered in th'attempt.
Chauncey had "to go away,"
The cops told him, "But for a day."
But one day soon enlarged to four
And Bloodmouth's sorrow plagued him more.
In the ward he would not eat
(He'd already a surfeit of defeat).
They gave him pills of sundry kinds
To numb emotions, chasten minds.
He's on these pills some two months later
And still he thinks his wife a traitor.
Pills alone can't change the facts,
As air alone can't blunt an axe.
He thinks, "Oh, were I two months dead,
"Out of this skin, out of this head.
"But there are those who want me 'round:
"'We love ol' Bloodmouth; he's profound.
"'He thinks big thoughts and loves big words,
"'Speaks of Manfred and the herds.'"
But for all his love of Keats and Byron,
Bloodmouth keeps a coin for Charon.
For should it ever come to pass,
That he can't stop feeling a total ass,
He'll once again put on the noose,
'Cause from this life, he would be loose.
The cops, the pills, the puling herds
That seek the beauty of his words,
Will never, never countermand;
Bloodmouth's going to take a stand:
"As is my life, so is my death,
"As is my pulse, so is my breath.
"They are mine; they're within me,
"So herd and fuzz, please let me be.
"O'er a life like mine, no greater boss
"Than the overwhelming sense of loss
"I feel with each and every day:
"Myself to spare, myself to slay!"
Thus if you learn that Bloodmouth's dead,
His blood'll be on his ex-wife's head.
For Bloodmouth was a lover true;
The loss he could no longer rue.
And so he met a lover's fate.
Pray not for Bloodmouth; it's too late.

"Behold me, this Hell-ward forced to eat scabs"

Behold me, this Hell-ward forced to eat scabs
Of wounds e'er dehiscent--queer Lenten meat,
Seasoned with cuckoldry's age-old defeat,
For penitent husbands of wives become drabs
(Such wound-lickers know no savor more sweet).
But, oh, you wronged husband, is justice complete
Without your fair false one infested with crabs,
And her cowardly 'complice topped with French crown?
Will you suck sores and not wish her quince
Variously verminous, known through the town
As bruised, blighted fruit that makes ev'ry man wince
From the strange nether burning to ev'ry man known?
Yes! May he burn--and more, that he dabs
On salves that soothe not from Satan's own labs.

"You came to me in another dream"

You came to me in another dream:
Remote, cold in aspect, impassive eyes.
You did not quite haunt me, but did seem to rise
From mel'ncholic milk as rich ebon cream
Dark as the day I plumbed all your lies,
Dark as the project you sought to disguise.
Hateful agenda! worth not a scream
But a pitiful sigh for my dignity maimed.
To tilt at my honor and drive home the lance!
Are you pleased with your deed and the victory claimed?
Such a sad send-up of high old Romance:
The plund'rer wins pathos, the wounded lies blamed.
Guard your foul horde, Whore, though no peace it buys!
'Twill serve as your cairn; e'en the conqueror dies.

The Pip of These Pages

"Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces--and as it gets older and stronger, it will tear deeper--love her, love her, love her!"--Ms. Havisham, Charles Dickens's Great Expectations

Enforced strangers,
Who once exchanged intimate fluids,
Forefended by law,
How did such a thing come to be?

I am the solitary one,
Poring over books that find no home
In the mind of one who lives in their marks,
Because each word recalls my abandonment.

She was my muse, gone and left,
Her spit drips from my bangs
Today, tomorrow:
Scorn is the brand that burns the deepest.

Lover with new cock inside her,
As she moans herself to my erasure,
And I am alone, the Pip of these pages--
Tempestuous tedium,
Oh, to be me.

"The Still, Sad Music of Humanity"

. . . For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue . . .--William Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey"

I have heard that Zen Buddhists believe that the world, and humanity's presence in it, are like music, and thus the purpose of enlightenment is to attune ourselves to this music, to which most of us, in our unawakened state, are largely deaf. I have been thinking about this trope for some time. As in any musical work, there movements: movements of spritely joy and playfulness, of pomp and grandeur or harrowing sublimity, of heart-wringing pathos. But I ask, what if the music of the world begins to strike the mournful chords of a requiem--a requiem to a life buried in the past, as my life with my ex-wife is? What music is there to play after the tribute to the dearly departed? Isn't it then that the music should cease with the last doleful notes?

I feel as if I am an audience member who, fearing the silence of the soon-to-be empty hall, lingers long after the maestro's last bow and the end of the applause, demanding that the orchestra reprise the overture as a way of denying to himself the finality which the requiem signals.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Failed Husband

For the poems that will remain unwritten, for our children who will remain unborn, for the boundless sea of future happiness that will remain unsailed, I write this.

Though we lived as husband and wife, she alone lived in my heart until she rent and flayed her way out, pulling the ragged meat behind her.

I pour alcohol in the hole she left, but its astringency only doubles the sting. This besotted shambles shall never offend her sight, however; she recedes into a grainy smear of memories.

Every divorce decree is a cenotaph.

Oh, how I cherished the secret hope that I would die before her, so I could seek God's permission to speed to her on angel's wings, and she could . . . maybe . . . possibly . . . behold me magnificent, enrobed in Glory, as I took up sword and shield to beat a tranquil path through Chance to her final day when I would sweep her Heavenward to dissolve with her into The Greater Mind -- we the commingled smoke of two extinguished fires.

But this will never be; her love died before I could. Thus I shrink in Faith. I listen for snatches of joy with a tone-deaf ear, but miracles find not me.

godpleasebringmywifebacktome

godpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebingmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleaasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywiifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywifeback tomegodpleasebringmywifebacktomegodpleasebringmywife back to me.

Pills sicken. I'm a waste. Sooner gone the better.

Dispatch from Samsara

Woe befalls the wayfarer (who enters the cycle of births and deaths). Therefore, be not a traveler (in samsara); fall not a victim to sorrow!--Buddha, The Dhammapada, Sutta 302

Over the past several months, many people have offered me insights and observations concerning my divorce, which my now ex-wife pursued with a singular, and quite puzzling zeal. Of all the wisdom I solicited, I was most keenly interested in that of women, who I thought could help me decipher my wife's bizarre behavior. There seemed to be a rough consensus among the women I spoke to concerning my wife's behavior. They would all tell me, "This divorce is not about you; it's about her. She's at a point in her life where she feels like she needs a change." They'd also tell me, "A woman changes a lot between twenty and twenty-four."

As much as I appreciated their kind consideration of my plight, these conclusions always seemed dissatisfactory, as if they were all too eager to justify my wife's unconscionable behavior. They seemed to me a contemporary twist on the "Nuremberg Defense": my wife was simply following the imperatives of biology; the thick ragout of blood and hormones coursing through her compelled her to her course of action.

I have to say that I categorically reject this justification, because it puts animalistic drive in a position of prëeminence. Instead of being extraordinarily wonderful and ennobling, distinctly human traits like reason, empathy and conscience become, in this behavioralist paradigm, simply vexatious anomalies, peculiarities of evolution that are undeniably present, but which should not distract us from the real explanation for human action--action that is fundamentally indistinguishable from our simian brethren.

Bottom line: my ex-wife systematically destroyed our marriage in order to pursue her own egostistical ends. Existence is, as the Buddha proclaimed, indeed suffering. Suffering in Pali (the Buddha's native tongue) is dukkha, which has no exact translation into English. The Buddha's take on dukkha is interesting, because, whereas one typically associates suffering with pain, the Buddha claims that pleasure is also a source of dukkha, because one knows the pleasure cannot last in this realm of causation, of conditioned conditions (samsara), and this also brings her suffering.

What does one attempt to achieve, then, in getting married? To carve out of samsara a little piece of nirvana? Nirvana, like dukkha, has no exact English equivalent, but is sometimes translated as "extinction." One's desire becomes extinct, or extinguished, freeing her from samsara. "Man proposes, but God disposes," I guess. It's funny, though, because many Buddhist sects around Asia have a concept of hell eerily similar to the Christian one. Consider, for instance, this display at a Thai Buddhist temple. Very Dantesque, wouldn't you agree?

I guess, all things considered, samsara ain't such a bad place to be.

Textual Divination

"There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will"--Shakespeare, Hamlet V.ii

On the day I learned that my odious divorce had been finalized, I called my friend, who is also divorced, to tell him the news. After he offered me some consolatory words, welcoming me to "the club," our conversation soon turned to things occult and conspiratorial. I told him that I had developed a recreational interest in stichomancy and bibliomancy, two forms of textual divinition, the latter typically limited to Holy Writ (early Wesleyan Methodists practiced bibliomancy: cf. the character Dinah Morris in George Eliot's Adam Bede), as a result of my recently hearing an NPR story on Jung's theory of "synchronicity," a phenomenon in which events in one's life take on a meaningful relatedness or consistency, thus defying pure chance or coincidence.

My friend, who earned a Master's in Classics, told me of a form of bibliomancy practiced by ancient Romans known as sortes Virgilianae, in which passages from Virgil's poetry were selected at random and scrutinized for prophetic import. Intrigued by this, I asked my friend if he had handy a copy of Virgil's works. He said he did, so I asked him to open his copy of Virgil's works to a random page. The passage that his eyes first lighted upon was Aeneas's account, in Book Three of The Aeneid, of he and his crew's encounter with the Harpies. Since his copy of Virgil was in Latin, he offered me his translation. I cannot remember his translation verbatim, but I found the same passage in Robert Fitzgerald's English translation, which reads as follows:

Into their [the Harpies] midst my men
Attacked and tried a strange new form of battle,
To cut the indecent seabirds down in blood.
But they received no impact on their feathers,
Took on their backs no wounding cut: too quick,
They soared away into the upper air,
Leaving the prey half eaten and befouled.

If you don't know what the Harpies are, let me give you Fitzgerald's definition, found in the glossary to his translation of The Aeneid: "monstrous creatures: birds with the faces of women; associated with the Furies."

Now, if you're familiar with the circumstances of my divorce (if you're not, see my "The Sorrows of a Thwarted Young Werther" post), then perhaps you feel the same shudder I felt as my friend translated this passage, because, I tell you, my divorce certainly me made me feel as if my ex-wife had left me "half eaten and befouled."

Coincidence? Synchronicity?

I leave it to you to decide.

A Puerile Little Piece of Doggerel

Here's some silly verse of mine I just found this morning. I wrote it about twelve years ago, but had since forgotten it. I published it on my blog because I don't have time to copy it onto a bathroom stall. Though its stupid, I think it has a certain Wordsworthian quality to it.

When we sleep alone,
It's in mute anticipation;
When we sleep as two,
It's the soul's emancipation.

When we sleep as three,
We're like nestlings in a tree;
When we sleep as four,
We had better lock the door.

When we sleep as five,
We're bees in a buzzing hive;
But when we sleep as six,
We'd better start counting dicks.

Stew-Meat for Cerberus

A one-armed man stands across the street, smoking a cigarette and looking at me. I look at him. "How many women have scorned him for his nub?" I ask myself. Nubless, I too have been scorned. Many men out there are simmering in their desire to dump cum in the velvety grip of an intimate embrace.

We are born, we wander about awhile, and we die. Everything is a show. Everything signifies. We love, spurn, ignore, move on. This is our condition.

Habeum papem! But what does it matter? Blood spilled two thousand years ago has since been washed away by as many summers' rains.

How many millenia will pass before we see a generation that will twist swaddling clothes into nooses when it sees the horror confronting it?

When we come into the world, the first sound we make is a scream.

The Undeniable Grace of Functional Alcoholism

"Stay away from booze; it's no solution to your troubles." "Drinking will only make your problem worse." These and other such words of wisdom are familiar, I'm sure, to anyone who has turned to the bottle in a time of crisis. Is it really a matter of human weakness that so many not only surrender to the siren song of alcohol, but return to hear the tune again and again? The bottle sits there, waiting to anoint me with blessed oblivion. "Come to me," she says. "Rest ye a while in me, and I will ease your burden."

At heart, we all seek to be Homer's lotus eaters.

Christ's blood is wine.

I shake for liquor through the dreary march of my day. Duties discharged, I chase my new love, now that my old love has abandoned me--a new love easy to approach, willing in her submission. Would that all lovers were so.

Though I shake, I continue to function, but I want out of my own mind. It's a garment long worn, unfashionable, not in keeping with the times. Liquor shows me the heaven of naked insentience. How I wish she would take me there, now, instead of showing me its far-off vista. Perhaps I'm Moses, doomed to see the Promised Land but never to live in it.

Every drink brings an upwelling of welcome, sacred numbness: anaesthesia for the ragged Dawn-shaped wound that still weeps and festers.

I wake each morning swollen and haggard, waiting for the next lover's kiss as I bring cup to lips.

Life is not for me, anymore. It has been hostile environs for some time. Those of you who are to inherit the earth, I wish you well. Burn my corpse and pour my ashes in a whiskey bottle.

The Lurking Fear

When it comes to discussing the conventions of the Gothic novel, I have to admit that I am somewhat at a loss, having never made any sort of real study of the genre. In fact, The Castle of Otranto is the only Gothic novel—the only Gothic novel from the eighteenth century, I should say—that I have ever read. I am certainly aware enough of the hallmarks of the genre to identify Gothic elements in other works, but I had never really paid attention to them, dismissing them as simply the necessary machinery of a novel of that genre. I suppose that I had always considered the Gothic novel a special case; it's unreality, I believed, disqualified it from the sort of attention I paid to realistic novels—novels I held in higher esteem because of their purported aim of faithfully representing social reality. The gothic novel, on the other hand, I dismissed as simply a spooky, but ultimately inconsequential, piece of entertainment devoid of any probing critical commentary or compelling insights. It is only by returning to The Castle of Otranto, by reading it a second time, that I came to understand that it did indeed have a scholarly value exceeding that of its historical significance in the development of a genre, that it does serve as a window on its times—an ornate, highly wrought one to be sure, but no less effective or useful for being so.

Before I discuss the contents of The Castle of Otranto, I will offer a few remarks about I regard it within the context of the eighteenth century novel. I have noticed the terrible plight of women in these works. The female characters are usually in a tremendous amount of jeopardy, both physically and financial (the latter largely presumes the former). That is, eighteenth century England struck me as a veritable house of horrors for anyone unfortunate enough to have been born female. Potential deflowering lurks at every turn. Every address from interested young gentlemen carries with it a tinge of foreboding. In short, every woman of that period seems one amorous misstep, one lapse of caution and judgment away from financial devastation and a brutal life of utter destitution. It is therefore fitting that the gothic novel should be in ascendancy in the late eighteenth century, a time when women have already been subjected to the horrors of sexually predatory rakehells for sixty-odd years.

One of my first encounters with the plight of women, in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, held some promise. The title character of that work is certainly a survivor in that she does not allow her early tryst with her eventual brother-in-law lead her into permanent ruination. Her incredible resiliency, and the cunning that make this resiliency possible, led me to expect that the plight of women would indeed improve in the following novels. I have to say though, that this improvement was long in coming, and subject to reversals and detours, the sort of which we find in Eliza Haywood's The British Recluse. After Cleomira, the titular recluse, and her new friend Belinda gain satisfaction in Belinda's public exposure of Courtal, the man who, unbeknownst to them, jilted them both, they retire from society, two jaded women, one deflowered and the other still virtuous, interested in nothing else than retiring to anonymous sorority. Moll, however, stays in the game, as it were, but has nothing to show for it in the end save imprisonment in Newgate.

The truly revolutionary figure in the novels we read before The Castle of Otranto is the titular heroine of Richardson's Pamela, whose virtue is compensated by her would-be rapist's hand in marriage (?!). Though often silly, I found Pamela promising. I felt that I was seeing a woman match wits with a man quite out in the open, not covertly, as was Moll Flanders's modus operandi. Part of her power of resistance lies in the fact that she writes her own story. She controls the discourse and thus eventual outcome. The women of The Castle of Otranto, however, represent what I consider to be a step backward from Pamela's revolutionary promise. In the novel, Walpole supplants the power of the woman's pen with a supernatural apparatus. The women of the novel, Hippolyta, Matilda and Isabella, are placed in a much more passive position, forced to do little than seek refuge with each other and endure Manfred's outrages until the supernatural machinery can finish its work by declaring Theodore the true heir of Alfonso, whose throne Manfred's ancestor had usurped (Walpole 104). Matilda must even be sacrificed before imperiled women's plight is over.

It also bears mentioning that, when confronted by Manfred, the woman express the wish to retire to the nearby monastery to finish their days in pious seclusion, which recalls the desire of Cleomira and Belinda to do the same, if not so pious. Admittedly, Hippolyta convinces Manfred to join her at the monastery. One could thus claim that, despite Matilda's death, the women of this novel certain prevail and perhaps triumph over oppressive patriarchy. The supernatural apparatus does seem to favor the women of this novel, but nonetheless it is a shame that this supernatural power comes at the expense of real, individual power, the sort of power of which we glimpsed in Pamela, and will hopefully glimpse again before the semester is over.
Since I was very young and first began to experience the pleasure of reading, I have been a believer in the power of the written word. I always appreciated its power to affect change, and it is reassuring to see hints that the female authors and characters of these eighteenth century works cherish a similar notion. After all, a mere twelve years after the publication of The Castle of Otranto, some strokes of the pen, albeit in masculine hands, will bring forth a new nation defiantly declaring its independence from its mother country. Perhaps this power of the pen in the hands of women is part of the reason why Walpole had to distance the time of the events of his novel. Only woman of a bygone era would be as believably passive as Hippolyta, Matilda and Isabella, seeking refuge in a nunnery.

Rant

"Goddamn her! Goddamn her! Goddamn her!" How many times, friend, have I screamed this, both inwardly and aloud! I want so badly to see my ex-wife succumb to the slow poison of her perfidy.

My rage is astonishingly inexhaustible, and astonishingly exhausting. It is the ourobouros, the serpent that consumes its own tail. Insatiable is its appetite, but limited its provender: soon to wink out, to implode.

Do not, however, pronounce my death as the author of these words. Speak me no Derridean shibboleths. These marks are not but empty traces, not the furrows dug by the tenaciously clinging nails of the author as he is swept toward the textual limbo of an absence of presence. Ask yourself who suffers the worse fate, Dante's virtuous pagans, or his eternally masticated Judas? Oh, to be banished to the lightless, loveless margin! I'd choose being Satan's cud over my fate.

Ecce homo! I AM HERE, I assure you, stalking Nietzsche's prison-house, beating bloody forehead and fist against its impenetrable walls.

How I wish these words could make your computer screen quiver and smoke from their splenetic intensity. But, alas, they are dumb and pliable, serenely ordered and orderly--pleasing font, regular margins.

My rage is impotent; its issue stillborn.

Apply the ointment of oblivion, false wife, and find the fly--the fly born a maggot, fed on the carrion of our love.

On Marriage, Money and Table Dances

To me there's something perversely, despairingly beautiful in the image of a creased dollar bill lying lengthwise across the labia of the stripper's (ahem, ... "sex worker's") upturned vagina. The beauty, I guess, rests in its maddeningly paradoxical implications: an intimacy that is truly estrangement, a contact that is not, that simply recalls to us the immense gulf between a being and all other beings. Metonymies, always metonymies, in an endless, centerless network that can never include entirely the being in her Being.

The above-mentioned image eternalizes, hypostatizes an existential problem akin to that of the figures that are the subject of Keats's meditation in his "Ode to a Grecian Urn"--a meditation that culminates in a chiastic circularity: "Beauty is Truth; Truth Beauty." The sex industry offers a homologous circularity: "Sex is Power; Power Sex." And perhaps, pace Keats, *that* "is all ye need to know on earth."

Marriage, then, seems no more than a wishul attempt to slow this dizzying circularity, to establish or imbricate some sort of Foucauldian heterotopia in which we comport ourselves to an imagined fullness and authenticity that the world, in its true character, denies.

The creased dollar bill upon the upturned vagina is, finally, the *conditio humana* redacted to its essence.

Remember, on that dollar bill there is also a symbol of incompleteness: the unfinished pyramid.

Every Fashion Victim Is a Michelangelo Writ Small

Artfulness is always gestural, always performative. It is remarkable in just how alien from nature it truly it, because the artful gesture, or artfully turned object always diverts attention from its natural origins and toward the agent who has supervened to give the gesture or object its heightened sense of singularity, which this agent has cultivated. For instance, Michelangelo’s David is not famous for the quality of the marble from which it is sculpted, because, though undoubtedly impeccable, the quality of the marble does not sufficiently command our awe and admiration. The quality of marble certainly contributes to some extent to the overall aesthetic effect of the sculpture, but our admiration is ultimately commanded by the various excisions and alterations which stand as the traces of the sculptor’s altering intervention on the original shape of the marble, as determined by nature, and later the quarrymen, who unearth the marble and divide into slabs. We invest these traces with a certain amount of significance, because we see them an inscription of the human creative power upon the very body of nature.

Michelangelo’s David is a highly revered expression of humanity’s fascination with its own creative powers, but the world is certainly rife with more trivial examples, such as those found in the demimonde of *haute couture.* "Capital-F" Fashion, as an appendage of the culture industry, is interesting because it represents agentive intervention on the surfaces of one’s own body. Fashion as artfulness, then, exchanges an absolute exteriorization of one’s creative powers represented by the plastic arts of sculpture and suchlike—the block of marble is absolutely physically and materially other than me, absolutely not-me—for the relative exteriorization of the textile arts, which adorns my external surface—a surface that is both intrinsic and external to me, a contiguity that also represents a limit, my limit. The relative exteriority of fashion as a sort of flourish unites agent and patient in that one inscribes one’s artfulness or creative powers upon oneself.

Fashion as an expression of artfulness that unites agent and patient brings to mind another peculiarity. Namely, fashion is always already refashioned. Nature already fashions each one of us with the genome; we are shaped and turned according to this information. However, because we collectively deem our natural fashion unsightly, we refashion ourselves by covering our external surface, effectively obscuring it, hiding it from view. Our bodies are the palimpsests upon which nature inscribes itself, only to be covered over by fashion of our own devising, which enables our forgetfulness of our naturalness. Sometimes nature returns with a vengeance, mingling itself with the vestiges of artfulness that we inscribe on ourselves, but a consumerist society nevertheless attempts to keep nature at bay with the commodities that promise greater ease and convenience through progress, thus establishing among consumers a sense of possible immortality if one but manages to remain alive long enough to see to market the goods that will make such an immortality possible.

The Blessing of Nothingness

I've never really had my heartbroken before, because I had never been as deeply in love as I am with my ex-wife before. If you would've met me before I met my ex, you'd find no one more alienated from, or more skeptical of, notions of "true love," "romance," than me. I was too postmodern, too hip; I cast too jaundiced an eye on the world to ever buy into those lofty fictions.

But my now ex-wife changed all that. Not volitionally, not by any overt act, but by simply being who she was. As we dated and our love grew, I came to see an undeniable authenticity in the way we related to each other. This eventually abraded away my postmodern husk, and she brought me to a state in which I could simply be myself: to love fearlessly, to relinquish the various self-protective gestures, verbal or otherwise, that had been such a part of how I engaged with the world. In a word, she disarmed me.

I have a facility for language. I wrote beautiful words to my wife, but they were not enough to keep her. She used to tell me that I was the funniest person she ever met in her life. The walls of our home constantly rang with laughter; we could communicate whole volumes of thought in a glance, in a touch. I believed we were two souls that had groped toward and found each other in this dark, adversarial thing called existence.

She was my Laura, my Juliet, my Beatrice--she was my Penelope, the woman I always wanted to come home to.

"Closure" I should seek? Relief? Impossible. Scars, whether physical or emotional, are simply the signs of past trauma that we are doomed to drag through the rest of our lives, just as we will drag our broken first marriages, in one way or another, into future relationships. Our ex-spouses will be in bed with us and our future lovers, no matter how much we try to keep such influence in check.

A core conviction of mine: the world is characterized by cruelties of greater or lesser magnitude, of greater or lesser consequence. Love is simply the handmaiden to Hatred, Contempt, and Indifference, the three Fates weaving our destinies as we slide towards Nothingness. Our minds are but feeble bulwarks against this reality, which is why no one gets out of life alive.

Someday my ex-wife and I will cease to be, and thus all that I now endure at her hands will likewise cease to be. Time heals all wounds only because it allows them fester and accumulate, ending in the demise of the wounded.

Grasping, Grasping; Seizing Nothing

Bloodied and broken, I address you. I want to address you with all of the candor that is only possible to the dying or poor in spirit. If not necessarily the former, I certainly count myself among the latter.

I have been scanning, and sometimes contibuting, to an online divorce forum, and have found that most of the divorce and break-up advice seems to have one principle in common: to seize the "now" as the moment in which to take decisive action. Seductive advice indeed. But practical . . . practicable? Where is the "now?" When does "now" become "then?" When does "then" become "now?"

You see, I'm skeptical of this whole therapeutics of seizing the "now," because I doubt that there is any "now," and, if there is a "now," it is too transient, too ephemeral, to ever really be seized. To me there is only past and future, the one pouring forth and consuming the other the way a flood sweeps away everything in its channel. The future is consumed by the past, moment by moment, passively awaiting the latter's approach. The present is simply that ever-shifting, inscrutable zone of contact, of consumption.

Think about it. Each moment of your life-- this moment right now . . . this moment right now--has poured into it your individual past, which grows and grows, but never changes its essential character. You had a relationship that lasted, say, eleven years. Does this moment change that, even if you were to take some sort of "decisive action," to "sieze the now" as an opportunity to effect some radical change? Even radical change is informed by the inertial effluence, the unstoppable onrush, of your personal history. To summarize Hegel: "Everything is its Other." The facticity of your eleven-year relationship alters not, though you seize "the now" as a means of contending with it. The "now" is the frothy ribbon of the wave meeting the shore, as long as the shore itself. Can you seize that ribbon? And, even if you could, what would you have? Froth. The residue of a wave that's already receded--a wave that, moreover, had behind it the history of all the forces roiling in the deep, wine-dark sea (all props to Homer).

I don't say all this to encourage defeatism. I simply want people to realize the true nature of existence--what is past is prologue, after all. Therefore, knowing that the past is dynamic, that there is no past, only constant passing, I exhort you to luxuriate in your disappointment, in your heartache. It reminds you that you are alive, that you are a creature of History with a unique relationship to your parent. It reminds you that you are human, and that your departed lover is human, because only a human could do this to you.

A writer whose name escapes me once claimed that one could not read Proust until one had reached a stage of her life in which she will have more memories than she will make. I love this claim, because, as the poet Wallace Stevens said, "Death is the mother of Beauty."

Deus Absconditus

Deus absconditus: the God unknown to man; the God who fled, taking His justice with Him, leaving humanity, in the words of nineteenth-century British poet Matthew Arnold, "here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight."

I had a moment of clarity the other night, in which I realized that what I'm going through--the whole agony of an unwanted divorce--can be explained in purely biological or anthropological terms. I'm simply an undesirable mate. After seven years of a childless marriage, despite the fact that the childlessness was the result of "family planning," my wife simply moved on to a different mate, a more potentially fertile seed-bearer.

There is no transcendental truth other than that of reproductive efficiency. All our belief in "God," "the higher Good," "first principles," "karma," what have you, are simply consoling fictions we craft to distract us from the horror of existence. There is no ideal realm; there are only fluctuations in the field. Intensities. Love is an intensity, as is wrath. If the state sanctioned my love by licensing my marriage, why can it not also sanction my wrath? I want to see my ex-wife's lover's face crushed beneath my boot.

Yet I cannot fault my ex-wife for leaving me no more than I can fault a tigress for disenterating a gazelle. What is, is--and "is" does not imply "ought." My wife ought to have gone to counseling with me in the proper spirit, but she did not. I ought to still be married to her, but I am not. I am alone, though I ought not to be.

No merit acquired; no justification through works--Martin Luther taught us that.

The Sorrows of a Thwarted Young Werther

My divorce was finalized just a couple weeks ago--a divorce I absolutely did not want. God help me, I still love my now ex-wife dearly. I'm really at sixes and sevens. I've been medicated now for several weeks (Clonazepam [sp?], Lexapro, and, a recent addition to the "cocktail," Wellbutrin) after a divorce-related suicide attempt won me a "voluntary" commitment to a psychiatric ward, and yet the medication just does not do enough. Every night I wake at four or five AM from a dream I have about her, unless I supplement my meds with liberal amounts of alcohol, allowing me to fall into a black, dreamless slumber. The nights I remain sober, which have grown fewer and farther between as the months wear on, are hellish and completely draining.

Before my trip to the booby hatch, I was averaging about three or four hours of sleep a night, and I would go days without eating. My inanition and dehydration were so severe that, immediately after my admission to the hospital, I was put on an IV. I had to go through detox (thoroughly unpleasant) but have been drinking steadily since my discharge in mid-February. Lest you think me an emotionally incontinent little wuss, let me say that my suicide attempt was a reaction to the fact that my life was unraveling. The constant exhaustion I felt from the insomnia I had since my wife left, the inability to eat, and the constant drinking brought me to a state of utter collapse. I felt as if all I could look forward to each day was the same thing: missing my wife, and the despair that this brought me. My work and studies were suffering. I could read nothing. I could write nothing. My mind would inevitably drift back to my utterly baffling, yet no less immanent, divorce. The reasons which my wife gave me for her leaving--I "loved her too much," "put her on a pedestal," "came to rely on her emotionally too much"--didn't seem to me insurmountable problems. I've always been a man of my word to her (Well, I did start smoking again behind her back after having quit for a year-and-a-half), and thus I pledged that I would work on those things about me that bothered her. She agreed to go to marriage counseling, though she stated repeatedy that she didn't see much hope in that. She wasn't in love with me, and didn't believe she ever could be again.

After she told me she "didn't want to be married anymore," totally blindsiding me, as we were to leave the next day to spend Thanksgiving with my brother and his wife in Kansas City, she ended up living with me for almost another month (I went to KC alone), during which time I was banished to the couch. That month was utter agony. She made no firm plans to move out, and I carried on in a husbandly capacity, though she would not let me sleep with her, or even touch her. My exasperation reached such a critical point that I flew to Madison, WI to spend Xmas break with my father and stepmother. It was during this second absence that my wife found a place of her own and packed whatever it was she decided was hers. No negotiation, no apprisals of what she planned to take. I was in Madison for nearly two weeks, and came home to an apartment full of boxes. And yet she lived with me for another week-and-a-half, claiming some delay with the preparation of her new pad!

Our separation was informal. She led me to believe that she was just having a mid-twenties crisis (I had had such a crisis myself), and needed some time apart--a marriage sabbatical, if you like. Thus appealing to my sympathies and my nobility of intention towards her, she persuaded me, the complete fool that I am, to not only sign my car--our ONLY car--over to her, but also to allow her to empty a special bank account we'd started the previous summer to save toward a trip to London--an account that I had sold many cherished books and CDs over the internet in order to fill. She said she needed the money in order to buy a new laptop computer. It was either concede that money in the account to her, or sell the computer we shared and give her half the money. Goodbye vacation fund!

After she'd been gone a couple of weeks, I was driving my "Divorce-Mobile," a Nissan Ultima with 170K miles on it that my brother was getting ready to junk, to a farmer's market here in Tucson, when I came across my wife's car--MY car--outside an apartment complex in which I was reasonably certain none of her friends lived. I got a sinking feeling in my stomach, and thus surrendered to the impulse to stop. I went to the apartment that I believed her to be in, and rang the doorbell. No one answered, but a dog inside was barking with great gusti. I then began to march around the complex, yelling my wife's name, and eventually my wife came outside, looking as if she'd just rolled out of bed (the time was 4 PM on a Friday afternoon). The was some guy I'd never seen in the doorway. Needless to say, I went insane, because I must have asked my wife thirty times during our protracted separation if she was involved with someone else, to which she invariably replied, "No." She told me to leave or she would call the police, but I lingered, begging her to explain why she had lied to me, why she had betrayed me. During that encounter, I came to the realization that I was the victim of an elaborate swindle: my wife, knowing that she'd not the resources to retain a lawyer, while I did, courtesy of my well-heeled father, tricked me into an uncontested divorce, and was thus able to get more from me than she'd otherwise get, given the fact that it was her who left and her who was being unfaithful. There I was in my absolute defeat and humiliation, hoisted on my own petard of selflessness and large-mindedness, qualities in me my wife knew she could exploit to her advantage.

She'd surprised me with divorce papers in our bank's parking lot earlier in the week. We went from an informal separation to a quickie divorce in a veritable blink of an eye. And yet, even on that day, just a few before I discovered her at that dude's apartment, she maintained that she wasn't interested in anyone else. There I was, however, outside "anyone else's" apartment. I confronted him, challenging him to a fight, but he cowered inside his apartment and said he was going to call the police. I soon left, but not before I groveled before my wife, whose look of absolute contempt is forever seared in my memory, begging for an explanation I knew I wasn't going to get.

That was the last time I've seen her in person.

I eventually left, but not before I kicked a sizeable dent in my old car's driver-side door.

The cops showed up at my apartment while I was calling my in-laws to inform them of my wife's swindling, whoring ways. They (the cops) browbeat me for a while, but I think that my wife was reluctant to press charges out of what I like to think is shame in having been caught in a lie. She did call me the following Sunday to tell me she was getting a restraining order against me, because she "needed to feel safe from me." From me! A man who couldn't love his wife more, who waited on her hand and foot the whole time we were together, who was virtually the sole source of income while she pursued a Bachelor's degree, who told her every day how much he loved her and how she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen! God, I adored my wife, and was constantly grateful that I found a woman who seemed to me the perfect combination of beauty, grace and intellect. She did the one thing I swore to her I'd never do: throw her over for someone else. This other guy must really be something, if my wife was so willing to speed along our divorce.

Everyone on her side of the family and mine were totally nonplussed. They told her what a good husband I was. I was committed (in the oher sense) bright, funny, articulate, and firmly on my way to a comfortable career in academia. Yet she threw it all away for this choad who probably knows far more about me than I'll ever know about him.

The Sunday on which she told me that she was getting a restraining order against me was the day I tried to hang myself, but was thwarted in the attempt. And here I speak to you across the wires, alive but not living. I'd take her back, even now, even after all this. Such was the love we shared, or, at least that I thought we shared. On the day she left, she lingered by the front door and said, "I'm scared." I asked her why. "Because I'm afraid I'm going to live to regret my decision."

I haven't heard from her in a month.

"But what a woman says to her ardent lover should be written in wind and runnning water." --Catullus

* * *

What I'm most frustrated about is that I imagine my ex-wife is much happier than me, which seems a gross miscarriage of karmic or providential justice. She committed a crime--a whole string of crimes, actually--and I am suffering the punishment. I go to bed alone each night; she apparently doesn't. I'm on a whole smorgasbord of meds that make me feel lethargic and apathetic, when not in the throes of an abiding, seething resentment; she is apparently content and fulfilled, having freed herself from me.

We were so close. We shared so many common interests. We enjoyed the same sorts of films, the same sorts of activities, the same political views, the same aspirations, and, perhaps most importantly, the same worldview. I really and truly believed that we had the foundation for a lifelong love. I wanted to grow old with her. Her face was what I wanted to gaze into as I died. When we were good, we were great. I wrote her a love poem every Christmas, and in every card she gave me was an econmium to my husbandly virtues. She took all of these cards, which I'd saved over the years, with her when she left, except one that had fallen behind a nightstand. I found it just a few weeks ago as I was refurnishing my bedroom. In it she wrote, "I love you more than you will ever know." She also took every photograph, including our wedding pictures (and their negatives), from our nearly seven years together. She took journals that we kept together, and all of my favorite novels. She has all the mementos, or should I say, relics, of a dead marriage. I imagine they're probably in a box buried under her bed, as I am now buried in her heart. She has erased me.

All of these billet doux from her now smack of insincerity or dissimulation. How could she go from those sentiments to the ones she now has, which have allowed her to treat me with such self-interest and cruel indifference, to pursue a secret agenda with such Machiavellian machinations? These questions plague me. I know I will never have the answers, and thus I fear this plague will become a terminal condition.

I love her as much now as I did when we got engaged. We married out of love, with much deliberation and forethought. We were under no duress: she wasn't pregnant, nor was I ready to ship off somewhere. And to my dying day I will believe that our marriage could have survived, had my ex-wife made slightly different choices. Now all I do is scratch my head and get drunk to dull the heartache that never subsides. I try to hate her. I catalogue in my mind all of her transgressions, but then immediately forgive her. I just want to know that she feels remorse, that she feels the injustice of how she repaid all of my kindnesses.

I would have loved her forever, because my notion of love is precisely that of Shakespeare, who said,

"Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds, / Or bends with the remover to remove: / O no! it is an ever-fixed mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken; / It is the star to every wandering bark, / Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken."

That is what I feel; that is what I believe. I therefore pray daily for a reconciliation. I keep lit a candle in the window of my heart, my wife's true home--if she could just see it as such.