Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Wabi Sabi Girl: A Story of Utopia



















Henry;

You selfish bastard.  Your sister told me about you, your self absorbtion, your utter self worship, but i dismissed it because she was family and family is always trouble.  And because you were so strange and i have always been fasfinated by strange.  I always think that under the strange or the exotic some wounded wisdom will be discovered, and because you were a poet, or something that looked like one, and an exotic creature and the New Yorker had published your work as any dolt might get hit by lightning once in his life - that one time i felt as though i were in the company of some kind of glory.  You are only one out of a long line of failed gods.  You will drain me dry, people like you, until there is nothing left to believe in.
Fuck you.

June

PS  You have no grasp of trochaic meter and your poems suck.  Now I've said it.
PSS 
That docked pentamic line in the second stanza about self contradiction?  You stole that from Whitman you fucking fake.  The next time you steal don’t be so obvious, Stay away from Uncle Walt.  Steal your lines from a Hallmark card.
PSSS
I have value you smug shit!  I am a human being!!!!



June;

Its 3 AM and I'm wide awake trying to smother another stubborn erection from laying in the dark and thinking of you.   I haven’t slept in nights. I get up and make a strong cup of genmai tea, not to drink, no, but to hold under my nose and breathe because the aroma of tea leaves and burnt rice conjures the memory of having my face buried in your cunt back there in our little room again, in paradise.  Hamlet said he could be bounded in a nutshell and count himself a king of infinite space (see I’m not stealing it) and so would I if for my nutshell I could only have you all to myself again in that little room in your aunts boarding house where we were alone and hid from all the world and ultimately from each other.  I swear the room is haunted.  If it were not before, it is haunted now, by me and you and by that moment playing in an endless loop for eternity.  Any man who sleeps in that bed will be haunted by wet dreams of you.
Listen June, I think I am dying.
You are not a human woman, You are a succubus, some tentacled lamia that has poisoned me against all other women,  There is a great gulf between me and others, a dark void and you are the only one in my universe.  I move inside you still.
There is a moment a man experiences, unknown to you, during the act of love.  In the rising of pleasure to consummation, you remember the moment I slipped my arms under your naked back and crushed you tight until I felt your ribs bend, as I felt the great rising crisis of pleasure, I hugged you tight and whispered in your ear "You, only you,"  I lost myself utterly in the light of you and in that little nutshell of the room and the bed and yourself all the world faded away and for a shining moment there was only you.  There was no other being in all the world, and not even myself, but only you and utterly possessing you and pouring myself into you unto extinction of self.  It was as though I had crawled back into your womb, and wanted to live incestuously inside the great earth mother of you forever.
My balls are aching for you, I want to fuck you silly.  I want to stick it in your rear and bang you until you cry.  If I get my hands on you I will tie you up and spank you.  Beware of me. I want to be reincarnated in my next life as a brassiere so I can spend my days carrying your breasts for you.
Henry


Henry -

Oh shut the fuck up.
I'm on to you.  I have your number.  Your slick words.  Its Friday night and you don’t have any pussy so you’re writing love letters to me?   Poor baby.  Tell it to your wall, bookface.
You don’t know anything about me.  A woman feels her destiny not out in the stars but in her womb, inside of another.  In union.  Its men like you that exile us, that make us shut the door on pleasure.  How can you turn out to be one of those men and go on taking up oxygen?

I feel that void and chasm now also, and a great falseness in myself that you revealed to me.  Maybe this is why I resent you so, because you reveal me to myself.  i tried to write in my journal and couldn’t stand the sound of my own thoughts.  I wanted to read a book of poems, good poems, and felt sick.
 
I want that little perfect room back, I want that moment back for myself, because like you I replay it endlessly.  When I closed the door behind you I felt as though I had brought you into a trap of warmth and safety as mothers trap sons, and women have always trapped their men.  And when I locked the door and when you took off your shoes and pushed them under the bed, I felt not horny but cozy.  Soothing and utterly domestic. 
Some devil taught you how to caress a woman.  Your hands are light, they float above the skin, with a touch slow and soft.  Your hands moved over my bare skin with such evanescence I felt myself vanish as I responded to you.  You have respectful fingers, teasing and insinuating, playful and warm and leading me after you hound and hare while you pressed us together like perfect puzzle pieces, each masculine swell and tumescence finding its home in each curve and vacancy filling me up with you like a pox virus.

You would hover inside me, hesitating and then withdraw into some secret place inside you that made me want to call you back to me.   Your hot breath on my ear and your strong thighs and my stronger answer to your exertions, pulling you back into me harder each time I felt your attention drift.  You wove your spell over me, making me greedy for you so that I wanted to squeeze all of you into my womb and carry you around with me like some deep sea lady fish.
Or rather like a poor caterpillar mounted by a parasitic wasp.  You fiend.

You will not get me back.  I shake off your infection - thus!
June

PS
Why?  How do I deserve this?   What did I do?  Honesty!  Honesty!




June;

Now you’re setting traps for me.  What did you do wrong?  And then I say something and then I'm the condemned.  There’s where honesty gets you.  No, the condom was not from you.  Yes it was not from you.  Yes I'm a pig.  In the arms of another woman I discovered the great revelation about you.  While we are being so Catholic, you and I, I have a confession to make.  Would you like to hear it?

The woman I fucked was beautiful; she was more beautiful than you.  That was how I discovered my true feelings for you.  The woman threw flower petals in your path.  But that is not the confession.  Some things cannot be given without being asked. 

Would you like my confession?

Henry




Henry;

I'm amazed at myself, how consoling it is to hear a man simply say it and discover your unfaithfulness is a consolation, an affirmation of myself as i understand myself.  But what does it mean?  I will always seek out unfaithful men?  My father abandoned us when I was a girl, am I dammed to seduce my unfaithful father in a string of feckless men and will i seek him out again and again?

So you see, you are my journal now that I can’t bear to write in my own.   Paper does not satisfy me.  I must stab my pen into a human heart and write with blood. I long for our little room where everything was so carnal and so simple.  For the open window and the breeze and the sounds of the street and to lose myself in perfect paradise in your arms.  It was our world, our little nutshell alone before you shit on it.

What confession can you possibly make to me?

June

PS  No, fuck off.  Don’t write me ever again you prick.  Take your 3 AM hard on and stick it up your ass.  I don’t give a flying fuck about your whining justifications.  You see?  I have arrived also!  Hate is not the opposite of love, no, for in hate there is passion.  I am indifferent to you and so there.

PSS
Maybe

PSSS
Henry!!!!!  Why did you do this to us?

PSSSS
What confession?



June;


My confession.  Here it is.  Attend.
When I first saw you in your modest, flat footed Mary Janes, peaked by painted toenails, your absurd flowered dress, tented by the nubs of your nipples each time I spoke,  some ravenous bone in me wanted to devour you and possess you for a while.  But that is not the confession. 

But the truth is, when you lustily lifted the dress over your head, pooled your panties by your heels, dropped upon your back and waited for some performance by me – I was startled by your physical ugliness.

The cleft of your neck, the scar upon your fecund belly.  Pale unsunned skin pink not like a red headed Irish colleen but rather like a mole rat. 

I was repulsed by you.  I had not the heart to laugh or turn away having brought you so far, I could not bear to crush you or be unkind to you in your hopefulness.  Never was a man more unselfish or dutiful than I as pushed your knees apart and lay upon you and imagined you as some other woman from a magazine or found under a street lamp.  I slipped into you with affected vigor and patience that came not from skill but confusion, as I regarded your greasy pores and odd scars as some pyrric conquest like a dog who has suddenly caught the car and doesn’t know what to do with it.

My hands floated, I’m sure they did.  And stamina I had too as I assumed the manly position above you and ground my teeth.

Laying in the arms of the other woman, all I thought of was you.  You are all I have thought of since.  I was impotent with her.  I will be impotent with every woman after you.  That is why I must have you and only you, or I will die.  There is in ugliness an addiction, like a bitter drink.  Beauty is all alike, one beautiful woman is interchangeable with another.  But an ugly woman, a lumpy body is unique and a surprise each time it is unveiled.  It gets under your skin.  It cannot be recreated.  In Japan, great Zen artists often place a flaw in a painting or flower arrangement because the imperfection gives it beauty.  In Japanese this is called “Wabi Sabi”.  You are my Wabi Sabi girl.  I have made everything over in some pursuit or hope of you.  I would forgive you of anything.  Won’t you forgive me?

Can we go back June?  Tell me we can back to our little room in your family's boarding house where everything was unselfish and innocent, and perfect except thankfully for you and shut the door and shut out the world of shallow beauty and make it perfect.  Not allow ever a single weed again in our garden until all our leaves have fallen and returned to dust, fruitful and full of years.  Tell me we can still do that.

Henry




Henry;

Blow it out your nose you old fart.

There is no garden anymore, you’re so full of shit.  That’s only given to you once. 

But hey, man.  Let’s have coffee anyway, and leave your notebook at home. 

Let’s talk.

Wear knee pads.

June



6 comments:

  1. Oh, Garce,

    Week after week I struggle to come up with a comment that's even worthy of your post.

    This is brilliant and despite appearances, brilliantly on topic.

    But not at all what I expected.

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  2. This seems to be a familiar refrain with you, Garce, that women are interesting to men not for their beauty, but for their flaws. I had not heard about the flaws deliberately put into art, but that's a good analogy.

    When you fall in love, you think your beloved has no flaws.

    When you progress to loving that person, you think you love him/her in spite of his/her flaws.

    But when you really love someone, you love them BECAUSE of his/her flaws because without the imperfections, it wouldn't be the person you love.

    My husband once told me he didn't care how many men I had before him, as long as I didn't have any after him. How can you not love a man like that? He didn't ask for perfection but offered acceptance. In return he has me for the rest of his life. I hope he's happy, because I am.

    P.S. Is this supposed to be THE Henry and June, as in Henry Miller and his paramour? Wasn't there a movie about them? Or did you choose the names as an homage to them?

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  3. I agree. This is brilliant. I visualize Uma Thurman from the movie as June in your piece. Like many actors, she looks striking but not beautiful in a conventional way.

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  4. Hi Lisabet!

    The original post i was going to write was probably more like what you may have expected in that I intended to write a summary of my thoughts about Utopia. But I wanted to challenge myself at the last possible moment. I'm trying to find a way back to the old creativity I felt, and maybe yourself too, with that beginners mind we start with. I've been reading a lot of Anais Nin and she credits her obsessive diary writing as the source of her creativity. I'm fascinated by her erotica style and would like to learn it. So I'm noodling a lot and I'm trying to challenge myself to write stories from random elements whenever possible. Consequently I wrote this whole thing with my eye on teh clock Monday night and Tuesday morning. That's why there's so many nits and klutzy mistakes in it. Talk about Wabi Sabi - I accidently chopped out a whole paragraph and didn;t notice it till now! That's why Henry talks about a condom ("What condom?") because the paragraph about his unfaithfulness was accidently deleted. The funny thing is the idea works better that way because you have to think about it. Sort of serendipitous Wabi Sabi . . .

    Garce

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  5. Hi Fiona!

    Well flaws can make or break a marriage. I think you;re lucky. So much of marriage is about friendship and learning to love or work around the flaws. LIke Henry in the story I've always found myself much eroticised by the physical flaws of women, the way women really look, as compared to teh idealized look of women on TV or in Playboy. Natural women are very erotic.

    THese aren't the original Henry and June but there's definately a connection. I admired the intensity between Henry Miller and Anais Nin (June was Miller's wife, not Nin.) People like that who are intensely passionate about each other can hardly stand to be under teh same roof together, they eat each other up. I was trying to get a sense of that. Henry and June was only the working title but since I only had a couple of hours to write it I just plastered the names on and keep running.

    Still waiting to read your novel which I have on my ereader. Thank you!

    Garce

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  6. Hi Jean!

    Uma Thurman is sort of skinny and flat chested but she has that weird energy that makes her interesting. Its exactly that flawed beauty. Uma Thurman is Robert Thurman's little girl, the great Buddhist scholar and lecturer.




    When you have a chance, google images for "Frank Frazetta women". Frazetta was the greatest of the fantasy illustrators. He did a lot of book covers, and his primitive women have this very flawed quality, a kind of lumpiness which seems to come from a combination of female fat and savagely powerful muscle. They are sexy as hell.

    Garce

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