Love I

There was,

was a point when

I no longer shied

from an incommensurable fact.

The woman and my

love for her had

together conspired

to eliminate me.

When,

when I first thought in

this fashion I held

back from speaking.

On one

hand it was, simply,

outrageous. How could

it be possible, intention

aside?

And on

the other, if I spoke it

would end all

possibility of amicable

relations and I still des-

perately needed, could

not bear it to be

otherwise. No, I

said, no end to

amicable relations:

Or I die.

What kind

of love is

that?

Clearly insane. But I

had said

repeatedly

that if my

future did

not include

her I would

prefer death.

And so it was.

Clearly insane. But my

children and friends

worked mightily to

beat back the beast.

And I compromised.

If I died it would be

well and if I lived it

would be well, and

all manner of thing

would be well (said

Hildegard). And I

trusted Hildegard.

Love II

There was,

was a point when

I no longer shied

from an incommensurable fact.

The woman I loved quite madly

had long, long before

dismissed me from her

heart (but no, I said)

and from her bed.

I could say no because

I could, and because

she being variable, perhaps

mercurial tried now and

again to extend a hand

or so, so it seemed

to me. And so I

clung (clung) to hope.

Hope most tenuous,

hope most spare, hope most

bloodied but unbowed.

As time passed so did her

tolerance and as time and

distance are equivalent so

did her distance daily grow,

one by one my points of pride

were pecked, pricked;

life leaked from the

opened wounds.

She would pour the same

salt on the wounds described

here. Where once early on she

would be full of excited

praise now nothing could:

Could engage her interest.

With that disappearance

went any remains of respect

or need or desire or need.

Long long gone now,

No more worth

looking for; no. No more.

All this robbed

me of integrity (as I

understood it) and with

that, self respect; sense of worth:

sense of worth had sustained me.

I now knew myself contemptible.

Here, the proof. The one without

whom I counted life a loss

made clear there was

no point continuing.

She ran so away

to see not me.

Love III

There was,

was a point when

I no longer shied

from an incommensurable fact.

The woman who like

the God of Jonathan

Edwards dangled me over the

Pit with a thin, thin thread,

Pit of fire and brimstone,

capriciously suspended

by a loving angry God he

described as a malevolent

spider I would never my-

self speak so but the parallel

seems suitable because he

(Edwards) praised dark

judgement, fear, and Puritan

moral ligature and poured con-

tempt— harsh judgement and

fear, on; left his listeners, in;

torment, weeping and begging,

for Mercy. A state of desperation

teasing his fearful listeners, yes

weeping miserable wretched;

not altogether unlike a state in

which I was suspended for the—

better? part of five years and even

yet I am in awe of what she was

able to sustain for so long:

misery abject desperate never

more than a rare smile yet I

her supplicant remained locked

outside finding what

comfort I could, alone always

never other because she

made clear my abject

worthless state, obstacle

to everything she planned

just like God.

And, so, it was.

Clearly insane, Me? She?

Me, to endure, cling, hope.

Wrong. Wrong, Wrong. No

other possible conclusion. But

all the while, unimagined, un-

suspected in sinister darkness

nourished by antagonism and

bottomless fire and brim-

stone contempt fed by loss

despair and an end of hope the

End and Final Judgement,

thank Heaven; not hers.

Love IV

There was,

was a point when

I no longer shied

from an incommensurable fact.

The woman who when

she heard ‘cancer’ turned from

antagonism and distance to be-

come comforting and gentle,

was yet calculating

if not then, when, sub

rosa my eviction from my

home our property might be

arranged. But it would come.

Until the heard word occurred

all unseen inside, the growths, the

aggregate organism growing feeding

towards her final resolution of our

metastasizing divergence happy

solution soon to be my remains.

The woman I loved and loved and

never needed more, wept begging

for mercy for comfort for a visit:

Was engineering my exclusion

eviction final dissolution dust and

ashes. She will bury me. I imagine

this may make her (sub?)con-

consciously happy, it will clearly

be a relief from fears a load off her

mind, an end of blockages and

barriers. Bound she will be never-

more. I doubt she will thank God.

Nor any one any thing else but

her own proud self, and her friend

and her mater’s mind. These seem

to be material and contributing

witnesses to her fears and desires

offering their own neurotic angers

in her service to eliminate me for

good, her good my death. In-

credible. Yet accurate.

For my good, an end.

Good bye.

further along (more history)

Time—years—passed, during which a pattern repeated itself, at varying intervals. We, LL and I, would begin to find the other approachable, then be drawn, as moths etc. into points of disputation, and end with someone, usually LL, because she would come down to my studio to talk things over, walking out. Then radio silence would descend like the proverbial pall, for an indeterminate, but usually lengthy, span. A great deal of characteristic narrative may be found at blogs composed, usually in a spirit of protest, during the period following the earlier narrative below and preceding and overlapping with the narrative attempted here. They have already been mentioned: suinolopxilef, squeasy, and privypage. The latter may be reached from the first, and the first pretty much has a Google page to itself, unsurprisingly.

I will take up the story at what remains for me a pivotal scene.

Nuit Blanche, a one-night all-night Toronto arts festival, had been the night before. She had dropped by to wish me good night as she was leaving for the festivities with friends. I would have loved to have tagged along, but knew it was pointless and it would likely have been offensive to ask. She was with three women, two young, and what I remember as an opulently appointed overweight man of indeterminate age. The other woman, LL’s age and friend from university, had shown herself as a congenially sexual woman, successfully so, and had flirted with me in our palmy early days; so I imagined her and LL to be, or hoping to be, collaborators in sexual adventure, particularly on such a night.

So the next day when LL greeted me cheerfully from the second-floor balcony, ready, it seemed, to take part in high-spirited banter, I fired back with jealous irony; quite possibly, I don’t recall, jealous anger. She, shocked and enraged, turned and left the nascent conversation; never ever to return. What I lost in that characteristically stupid moment I will most likely never even be able to guess; but it could easily, if I had been less irritable, ended congenially, and everything would not have been ruined. Forever. Even, perhaps, I might never have come down with cancer; because what follows, so congenial to cancer, would not have occurred.

That Winter she lived elsewhere. As she intended, I never found out where, but for the neighborhood. In late Spring I realized she was back, living in one of the recently vacated apartments, but still no word was spoken, in greeting or need.

For myself, it was my winter of deep misery. When LL disappeared I felt doubly abandoned, doubly alone.

Here it becomes necessary to backtrack; to speak of my father, his last years, and his end. And I imagine it best to devote a separate post to him.

Foreword to the Following

The story told below is, self-evidently, expressing the writer’s viewpoint. A modest effort at balance has been made, but the reader may more readily understand LL’s actions and feelings to the degree they may be clearly implied, than the writer, who to those more understanding will be seen the more clearly as a clown or a fool.

The likelihood is acknowledged, even embraced, in the cause of accuracy; as well, the knowledge on the writer’s part that such a likelihood exists as almost certainly something more than a likelihood.

I have not stressed sufficiently a central element in both the experience and my narrative: LL had and presumably still does, an intense sense of privacy. This lay behind her determined pervasive silence about large and important areas of her life that I found so endlessly frustrating, and encouraged a variety of suspicions that served to block my impulse to and desperate desire for intimacy.

This is not hard to deconstruct; we didn’t trust each other, clinging to our distrust as protection against emotional damage.

All this is, I suppose, simply to say that my effort to engage the reader’s sympathies should be watched carefully, and that LL has not taken part in the telling, nor, I’m sure, would she.

Finally, it is to say she is surely not nor will not be happy with my telling this story, because it has worked against her privacy. Because I strongly regard her notion of privacy as flawed, and because it was my best, perhaps my only way to put the pieces together in a way that made sense, I disregarded her privacy and wrote this account.

There is another episode to come, in which LL will play a significant role at the beginning, in a way I imagine she would be willing to find not invasive, and she will remain a presence, because she was more or less a presence, in her absence mostly, in my mind and heart throughout. But I expect she will move into the background and shadows.