Molly has been with us for almost a month now. She is beginning to overcome her fear, hides under the bed much less, and sometimes even sleeps on the bed with us! She’s happy to be petted but doesn’t approve of being picked up. She still eats voraciously, but not so much as at first. We don’t know how long she was a stray, but long enough to make her skittish and eternally hungry. We assume she was hungry a lot, in the wild, and now wants to stuff in as much food as possible, to prepare for a food-draught. Habits remain.
She’s not interested in playing. She’s a little bit afraid of toys. We got a laser-light, thinking it’s less threatening, but even that, she just casually bats at once in a while. My daughter Kelly, who’s a therapist in DC, is co-planning a conference on the issue of play. Why do some people not play? What are the necessary conditions for play? Generally, people who’ve been traumatized aren’t interested in playing. They want to hold fast to the earth they know, not engage in levity. Levity is scary. You don’t know when you leave the ground, when you release normal expectations, when you find words with double meanings, or shifting meanings, what might happen next.
Likewise, I’m pretty sure poems are scary for the same reason, for some people. What to make of lines that don’t follow logical trains of thought? That bounce around, that burrow under the facts, that don’t make “sense”?
I’ve noticed that people who grew up in an authoritarian environment don’t see the humor in much of anything. Have you ever seen our former president do anything more than grimace?
Play is loose. It trusts the world to bat the volleyball back. Humor is loose. Humor hears the facts and at the same time is playing games under the surface. It’s funny when you get the something that’s unstated. What’s the best thing about Switzerland? I don’t know but the flag is a big plus.
Or, New Jersey’s governor, Phil Murphy, responding to a question about people growing tired of wearing masks: “You know what’s really uncomfortable and annoying? When you die.”
Interview question for Steve Martin: Do people mistake you for any other celebrity? Martin: Absolutely not. They always say, “Look it’s Steve Allen!”
Humor can be nasty, but that’s not really funny. It gets its laugh from demeaning others. It’s more like a shared uneasiness, a gathering of those who belong to the same “tribe” who gain their credentials by making sure others are on the outside. Teenage humor.
Back to poems. You have to loosen up to hear poems, to write poems. To write fiction, for that matter. You have to ask “what if?” What would happen if she fell in love with the man who had no arms? What would happen if I switch these two lines in this poem? Start with the ending?
It’s what children do when they play. What if I be the mommy this time and you be the daddy? What if we have a dog named Dog?
Jazz
I’d like to know everything
A jazz artist knows, starting with the song,
“Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.”
Like to make some songs myself:
“Goodbye Rickshaw,”
“Goodbye Lemon Drop,”
“Goodbye Rendezvous.”
Or maybe even blues:
If you fall in love with me, I’ll make you pancakes
All morning. If you fall in love with me
I’ll make you pancakes all night.
If you don’t like pancakes
We’ll go to the creperie. If you don’t like pancakes
We’ll go to the creperie.
If you don’t like to eat, handsome boy,
Don’t you hang around with me.
On second thought, I’d rather find
The fanciest music and hear all of it.
I’d rather love somebody
And say his name to myself every day
Until I fall apart.
-- Angela Ball, from Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds, Univ. of Pittsburg Press.
The mind, after all, is not linear. It’s like a dream in there; it is a dream in there. What we do with it is, we take the dream, shake it out, heat up the iron and iron it flat so the neighbors will think we’re well-dressed. Or at least sane.
We’re not sane. We’re just scared, like Molly.
P.S. I’m reading for the International Women’s Writing Guild on March 11. Join me for this, (and/or for my virtual book launch from Brilliant Books on March 18. More on this one later).
For the IWWG reading, register free at https://iwwg.wildapricot.org/event-4173813
Also, my book of memoir-essays is coming out from Wayne State University Press on Sept. 7! I am sorry to throw two books at you so close together. More on this later, also.