Whatever became of the wildwood flower?

In one of his most compelling songs, Gates of Eden, Bob Dylan wrote: "At dawn my lover comes to me/and/tells me of her dreams/with no attempt to shovel the glimpse/into the ditch of what each one means."

Not at dawn, but at morning coffee hour, I get up and find my mate sitting in his Lazy Boy reading the paper, listening to the radio and drinking coffee. I add one more activity to his multiple roster: listening to my dreams.

Not every morning, but just when I have had an unusually vivid one, one that stays with me for a while. This one is already dissolving like frost into the winter air.

 

I was about 20 years old. I wasn't "I", but this slender, pale wildwood flower of a girl, as if I were barefoot except I couldn't tell if I was barefoot or not. I was wearing a dress like Pippa Middleton's at Kate and Wills's wedding, very close-fitting white satin. My hair was streaming down my back, long and brown and straight and completely unstyled. (I have never looked even remotely like that in my life.) Anyway, I was in a church and was about to be married. I didn't recognize the church at all, or any of the people, though my mother was supposed to be there and I even had dealings with her but didn't know it, didn't recognize her. I had the feeling she might have been one of the people who tried to fuss with my hair.

At one point I even asked someone if the sides shouldn't be pulled up at the back in a ribbon or a rose, and someone else said, "You mean up? Please don't put it up, it looks so pretty that way," but I worried it would look a little too informal or even make me look uneducated and "backwoods". I only recognized one guest, my former English professor from 1991 who kept bustling around very urgently in a suit and tie, as if he was supposed to be doing something. The minister (a youngish guy with a lot of tousled brown hair, whom I had never seen before) kept getting up and blabbing to the congregation about things that I don't remember now.

At one point a woman ripped open buttons on the neckline of my dress (which went all the way up to my chin), leaving the front sprung wide open, and I thought of the man's collar in that Bugs Bunny cartoon, the tenor, when he couldn't stop singing. Then she said, "Ahhh, that looks better," though I worried it didn't look good at all and would look unkempt and out of control, but I couldn't check it because there were no mirrors in the place at all. All the way through this dream I kept hearing the music on this video, which I recently heard on an old Star Trek, a favorite episode called Shore Leave in which the crew of the Enterprise was on a planet where all your thoughts immediately materialized and became real.

There were all sorts of things, a knight, Don Juan, a tiger, Finnegan (asshole from Kirk's Academy days), but suddenly there appears Kirk's old girlfriend Ruth, dressed like an Athenian goddess and so heavily made up (like all Star Trek babes, probably for the grainy b & w TVs of the time) she could barely keep her eyes open. She looked like his date for the Academy grad party or something. Yes, this music came on and from the beginning I loved it, not for its sweetness but for the almost agonizing dissonance in the strings that underlay the innocent flute melody. Anyway, as I was preparing to get married, three girls I vaguely remembered from high school (actually, I only remembered one of them, Janet, who always beat the hell out of me in grades and getting awards) pulled up chairs at the front of the congregation and sat in a sort of triangle (not facing everyone) and began to discuss contract work and contractual obligations and how it was important to know exactly what you were signing.

At this point I stretched out between two chairs in my Pippa Middleton white satin wedding gown and took a nap, thinking I would look more refreshed for the ceremony. The three girls (only about 15) were giving a sort of seminar and no one thought it was unusual. Then I began to worry about the vows, which I had had nothing to do with. I was afraid the minister, who seemed somewhat fundamentalist, would say "love, honor and obey", and I didn't want the "obey" in there, I wanted "love, honor and cherish", but didn't know how to change this because I seemed to have absolutely no control over anything that was happening that day. In fact I seemed to be the least important person in the place, almost as if I were invisible or a walking ghost.

It was not until after I woke up and analyzed this dream that I realized the strangest detail of all: there was NO GROOM - no one, nothing! He was just a cipher, a non-entity. I did not even think about this, did not wonder about it, nor did anyone else. It did not matter at all who I married, in fact it was clear I was not marrying anyone. Hmmm, what else? In a side room, before the ceremony started, a few people I sort of knew from my old church were watching a video on a large flat-screen TV, a movie featuring dangerous mountain climbing. I watched it for a few minutes, then realized it was getting close to the time of the ceremony, so I said, "Will you pause it for me, please?", so I could watch the rest of the movie after I got married.

That flute music appears throughout the classic Trek series, whenever a particularly fetching young woman appears. It's almost a "fetching young woman" signal. The most poignant isn't the one about Ruth but the episode with Jill Ireland, long dead from breast cancer, who falls agonizingly in love with Spock on that planet with the spores that make you fatuously happy. At the end of it she doesn't just shed a tear, she really weeps, with red face and running nose, and Spock speaks to her as tenderly as a Vulcan can.


Watching these Treks again, they're better than the heartless parodies, though of course most of it is standard '60s action/adventure, and Sulu is particularly amusing in his ongoing romantic advances to Uhura (implying it's more acceptable for a gay Japanese man to romance a black woman). Kirk isn't as bad as you remember. Really, he's not. He only overemotes about 10% of the time. This is not the place for Shakespearean soliloquys (though one of these times I'm going to post his Hamlet from one of the daytime  shows of the '60s), so he pretty much sticks to the action/adventure hero mode. But as the series wears on he gains levels of humanity, transcending such hokey lines as "No blah, blah, blah!" 

The dynamic between Bones and Spock is brilliant, unique to television. DeForest Kelley has some real moments, especially in The City on the Edge of Forever, in which he runs around crazed but is still compelling and completely believable. I can see how and why this quirky little series somehow spawned a dynasty. But what does that haunting flute music have to do with getting married to an invisible groom? And if that pale wildwood flower really is me, whatever happened to her?

I hate clowns

 

 

I hate clowns, I hate clowns,  I truly hate clowns,

They always depress me and drag my soul down.

 

 

 

When somebody puts on such strange things to wear,

The human condition is truly laid bare.

I ask, what's the point of all this tom-foolery?

It triggers in me a deep incredulity.

 

 

 

 

Now here is a clown who caused me great dread.

In childhood this creep rented space in my head.

His name was Milky, which was awfully scary,

Just clowning and whoring for Twin Pines, the dairy.

 

 

 

 

Before John Wayne Gacy came ambling along,

There was this guy here. And he was just wrong.

He wore stars and stripes for some unknown reason,

Though flag mutilation's a high form of treason.

 

 

 

Back when I lived near old Detroit town,

I saw a strange act performed by a clown.

When he mounted his friend, to my child's mind, 

of course he

Was riding on Bozo, just playing at horsey.

 

 

 

 

When I saw this old photo of black-and-white clowns,

I climbed on a bridge and just threw myself down.

There's Milky and Bozo, the two that were lovers,

Jingles, and Whatsis - who cares, they're all mothers.

 

 

 

 

 

This clown guy I mentioned, and those of his ilk

Did a lot of hard-selling by sucking down milk.

In Milky the dairy thought they would invest - right?

Then found out that he was a flaming transvestite.

 

 

 

Twin Pines weren't aware that they'd started a fashion.

Soon clowns 'round the world drank their milk with a passion.

And poor Pagliaccio was filled with a rage,

So he drank milk, then  killed his poor wife right on-stage.

 

 

 

With hijinks like this, some dark force was released.

The ringmasters shot themselves: all were deceased.

Clowns threw nasty fits, banged their heads on the wall:

These Komedy Kapers weren't funny at all.

 

 

 

 

If this gets much weirder, I'm going to be sick.

I've never laughed once when a clown did his trick.

I can't speak for you, but I think this is rude -

I never knew clowns were this nasty and lewd.

 

 

 

 

Milky is dust now, and Bozo is dead.

Their romance still haunts me and lurks in my head.

I hate clowns, I hate them, I'll never be free,

They never will get one guffaw out of me.

 

 

 

 

 

The pills I took were a bad idea

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. T. S. Eliot The wishbone   Today I had the thought, Do not, do not, on pain of freaking death, look backward, Look backward over your shoulder at anything that you Have done or that has transpired, Because you will have one of two reactions: You will hate what you have done, who you were, all the mistakes You have made, all the chances not taken, Or else you will so love the times that were sweet blossomings, Heady gardens of the mind, That you will ache for those times and die inside, Knowing they will never return.   Today I had that knowledge, but did I absorb it? I never knew when things were crowning anyway, When moments were sublime, For they slid out from under me even as I experienced them. Far from trusting that these moments would come again, Which they would not, I tried to seize them, to keep them close, but they only changed form In some incredible miracle from solid to liquid A collapsing snow castle.   My life has been a road steadily pulled out from under me By some unseen hands And I’ve had to run to keep up with it To keep from falling on my ass Or hitting the back of my head. Run, run, fucking run.   My life has been some sort of awful conundrum, An impenetrable puzzle that the newspaper Forgot to publish the answer to, With too many gifts of the wrong sort, things I could Never share because I was never given the chance: No, not never, for I tasted of the thing I wanted most, Or thought I wanted most, Like a tongue on powdered sugar.   Births slingshot into nine-year birthday parties, And I see the infant I watched slide into the doctor’s hands Blowing out her nine candles, Looking about fourteen years old, Her hair up, her eyes knowing, Her smile splitting my heart. She looks nothing Like me or my side of the family, And the Spanish blood that lurks several Generations back is clear in her almond-eyed, Almost Castilian beauty. It can’t get any better, God won’t let it, In fact God is the reason for all this: I want to say, take me NOW so I don’t have to see any more, So that I will not be dragged to the awful breaking point, The point of disaster that I know is coming If I don’t get out of here soon.   This puppet dance amuses me, Though the first time I saw it in that odd old movie It tore me to pieces. I forgot to mention in the labels That the music is by Bartok Who knew a thing or two about horror. I could say something now about puppets and strings, But I know it would be awful.       I am in a labyrinth, somewhere in the middle so that It is possible to move in any direction And be equally lost. I hit Dead end after dead end, the board Tilted nastily so that the little silver ball Keeps on dropping through the holes.    I don’t want to read any more biographies, Don’t want to read about How lavishly gifted people Threw everything away with both hands Continually Because I don’t know what these things are Supposed to do for us anyway, Inspire us, Inspire revulsion or pity Or embarrassment or discouragement or what?   I am told to try and try. But it turns out That this is what they tell people anyway, it’s kind of Standard, A form letter of advice, And I am the only one who pays attention to it. It has become clear to me Just today,  just this minute That my efforts are an embarrassment to everyone Because they didn’t really mean I SHOULD try – It is the best way to get rid of me quickly With no sticky feelings involved Or perhaps it makes them feel better, Which is what apology is really all about, It has nothing to do with the wounded party, Who smugly assumes the person is truly contrite.   I have a certain  fascination for divination and Signs, Splintery snaps of the wishbone Dried on top of the fridge for months Yielding only the dessicated remains of a turkey or duck Knowing none of this ever comes true, That there is in fact no special protection, No amulet that holds off disaster, And the realization is strong, and inspires all sorts of Awful visions: Dancing along the edge of the Skytrain platform Feeling a little woozy As if the couple of pills I just took Might after all have been a bad idea.

Happy-face Nipples: or, how Helen Hunt's forehead died

I'll watch just about anything with Helen Hunt in it (or so I've thought up to now), and I haven't seen her in a movie in a long time. So when I heard about that new film called The Sessions, in which she plays a sexual surrogate working with a lonely, virginal quadriplegic man, I just had to see it.

It had "alternative film festival", "warm human drama" and "taboo-shattering exploration" written all over it, but I still had to see it. The "client", a paralyzed 38-year-old man in an iron lung, still has sensation all over his body but can't move his muscles at all. I cannot think of a more torturous situation, especially since he feels strong sexual attraction to women.

The quirky thing about the movie isn't the fact that an immobilized man feels desire and wants sexual contact: it's the fact that he confides all this to a Catholic priest, who at first has pretty grave misgivings about encouraging a young man to "fornicate" outside of marriage.

But after talking to his friend for a while and sensing his loneliness and longing, he begins to experience an attack of the kind of compassion that has felled the career of many a clergyman. Looking up at one of those plaster icons of Christ, he finally sighs and says, "I think he'll give you a free pass on this one."

The fact that the priest, played to craggy, earnest perfection by William H. Macy (a character actor who can play just about any sort of character, from meek to fierce) is by far the best part of this movie, tells us that there are going to be some serious problems. The priest is the best part, in a movie about sex?

But - that's another problem. The movie isn't really about sex. Not sexuality, anyway, not that messy, magnificent sprawl of experience and sensation that expresses itself, whether we will or no, across a huge and riotous canvas all through the course of our lives. In other words, no fucky-wucky here.

The polio survivor who must spend 20 hours a day in an iron lung is played with almost squeaky cuteness by John Hawkes, who does not convey any of the torment of passively watching life go by while trying to write and operate the phone with a stick in his mouth. This isn't a man so much as an overgrown Boy Scout who just happens to have a mobility problem. His constant good-natured quipping to prove how OK he is with everything renders the overly-jokey script kind of tedious. One longs for a little My Left Foot with Daniel Day-Lewis flailing around in rage and despair.

But when the sexual surrogate, played by Helen Hunt, enters his unimagineably isolated life, our expectations rise. Will there be some action - some sparks - something kinky, or just something approaching real erotic awakening?

I remembered Helen Hunt's true-as-blood performance in As Good as it Gets, the authenticity that burned through any kind of stereotype, and I was hoping for more of the same. But it didn't pan out that way. Though Hunt whips off her clothing several times in the course of the movie, even revealing (gasp, shock, horror!) her nipples, and though her nearly-50-year-old body is in enviable shape, something is definitely missing.

What's missing is juice, heat, scents and groans, that which makes sex - sex. What's missing also is the humanity that changes sexuality from the clinical/mechanical, the "insert tab (a) into slot (b)", into something - more. I'm not saying every sexual encounter has to be a supreme act of love between a man and a woman. Hell, I'm not even saying it has to be between a man and a woman (though it would help if they were both the same species.)

But one hopes, at the least, that partners will have the courage to take off their psychic armour along with their clothes and open themselves up to real contact, which can only happen through a kind of mutual vulnerability. But though that is supposed to happen here, I didn't see it.

For one thing, the poor guy keeps ejaculating as soon as he sees her, prompting her to teach him the kind of advanced techniques I haven't seen since How to Really Swing by Tiger Woods.

The ultimate goal of all this, of course, is penetration and "full sexual intercourse". I kept thinking all the way through this: why? Didn't the script-writers realize there's more than one way to skin a cat? The conservatism of staying within the "decent" bounds of a sort of reverse missionary position stultifies the whole enterprise. They aren't having sex: they're rubbing parts of themselves together, and it might as well be their elbows. Nevertheless, this full intercourse bit is held up as the ultimate prize, kind of like winning the U. S. Open (pardon the pun). In fact, he won't really lose his virginity until it happens.

It has to go in; it has to go off. Those are the rules, folks. I guess that means lesbian women must all be permanent virgins, a strange thought indeed.

At one point, a particularly excruciating one, he asks her to have an orgasm. She dutifully complies, though I kept waiting for it to happen. I guess squinching your eyes shut and sighing "ohhhh" passes for an orgasm. Hey, I'm about a million years old and so far past menopause that periods are but a distant nightmare, and even *I* can do better than that. In a heartbeat. That is why my pillow is covered with teeth marks.

(By the way. A movie from a few years ago called Get Him to the Greek features the most convincing orgasm in all of film history. Elisabeth Moss of Mad Men fame is responsible for it and should have won an Oscar. Made me wonder if she sneaked her vibrator on-set.) 

Even artificial/clinical sex is better than no sex at all, I guess, and disability activists are calling the movie earthshaking because it implies that disabled people MIGHT even be sexual beings (though we still secretly hope they're not). The story, based on real people and events, took place in 1988, making one wonder why it took this long to reach the screen. My suspicion is that it squicked out potential backers too much, visions of disability-related kinks dancing in their freaked-out little heads.



Sex is risky business, always, even between people who've known each other forever. It has interconnecting rootlets that snag so many aspects of ourselves, our pride, our shame, our joy, excruciating pleasure, jealous rage, and horrible despair. It's the thing that makes babies and keeps the human race moving forward, for good or for ill. So how can it possibly be as bland as this -this "Now I will rub your penis against my", etc.?

But that isn't even the worst of it.  The worst of it is

. . . is. . . Helen Hunt's forehead!

There are those who have said Helen Hunt hasn't aged well. I've seen mean internet pictures of her in which her mouth turns down and her neck looks kind of stringy. As the possessor of a stringy neck myself - and a jowly one at that - I can sympathize. If you live so long, it happens.

But what she has done to deal with it makes me quail. She has gone on record to say her face is totally natural, that she hasn't done anything to bugger it up and Joan-Riverize it, to turn it into a House of Wax relic of arrested youth that eventually caves in like the sagging edges of a spent candle. 

  

Her body, which we saw an awful lot of, was fine, though I don't see how you could tamper much with a body anyway. Her breasts looked like normal middle-aged breasts, refreshingly unperky. The lower part of her face did show some signs of wear and tear, the curse of the slender woman who loses the layer of subcutaneous fat in her face by mid-life.

But I kept wondering what was wrong with her looks. Was she clinically depressed or something? For one thing, her eyes looked so dead. In As Good as it Gets (and even in Mad About You and St. Elsewhere) she was so expressive, so full of quirky passion. But all that was gone now. Her brows were such a straight line that you could have set a ruler along them and joined them up.

Then I realized, to my horror: aaaggghhhhh! It was her forehead!

It had been Botoxed out of all existence. It had died. It was as smooth as the dome of a cathedral, motionless as a statue. Not one line existed on it to prove she had been alive more than 40 years: lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow. All erased. Someone had frozen it solid, so solid that it did not look "young" but merely petrified, maybe even mummified. Then I realized that the strange sense of detachment I felt all through this movie may have had something to do with the total lack of emotion in Helen Hunt's eyes.

If you can't move the upper part of your face, at all, can you show emotion? If you can't show emotion, for fuck's sake, how can you be an actress? Why destroy yourself like that (and lie about it to boot)?

When Botox first burst on the scene, to many people's horror (including my own: botulism toxin injected into your face??), it was pushed very hard at women as the solution to the living nightmare of ageing: wrinkles, sags and other signs of putrid decay. It would prevent the obsolescence that immediately follows the expiration date on the "product" at around age 40. That expiration date has been sneaking up, getting younger and younger by degrees, with the ultimate horrific result: Lindsay Lohan, face frozen stiff, lips blubbed out grotesquely (and I won't get into WHY women want fat, blubbery lips and think that they are at all sexy or desirable. Do men want to kiss a bratwurst?).

I remember hearing some women protest against all this early on, before they all caved in and threw themselves over the cliff like lemmings. I recall some Botox expert going on a daytime talk show and reassuring everyone that it was all good. "But I won't be able to raise my eyebrows!" one woman wailed. The expert looked at her, incredulous, as if she'd said something obscene. "Why would you want to do that? If you want to raise your eyebrows,  just use your fingers."

Maybe Helen Hunt should have used her fingers for something besides the therapeutic grasping of "tab (a)".  She could have raised one eyebrow for shock. The other for arousal. Both of them for revelation. Or maybe when she's having an orgasm? At least then we'd know.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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