The Dream of A Naked Blog

Language is like a garment I'm accustomed to styling, fashioning. But here in this forum, I'd like so much to be transparently simple, without artifice.

I live in a large house surrounded by woods with a small dog named Anakin. He, the woods, the changing sky, the wind, these are my companions. But I have these other companions too:

I sit at home, when I sit at home, in front of the altar I've set up on a small green blanket chest. The altar cloth is a plain white hand towel which I bought at one flea market or another. In a handblown glass vase, a gift to Joy when she was up to her ears in the work of the Gay Men's Health Crisis, I have two stems of blue hyadrangea and one stem of the yard high beefy white snapdragons gardener Myra (Goddess of the Pruning Shears) has put in. The incense bowl was a gift from my friend Joe from Vermont. The tea candle holder is jasper from a rock store near the Hoover Dam where Joy and I went one afternoon when we were visiting her brother Stan and his wife Cheryl in Las Vegas. The figure is all that's left of the Buddha Joy and Evan gave me years ago; I took it with me when I went to teach in Oklahoma. Twice, it had an encounter with a tennis ball I was throwing for Anakin and each time there was less of it left afterward. At this point he is head and upper torso, and kept upright in a glass blown by Georgia Lee Hussey, a former Sarah Lawrence. The glass sits on a very small leather bound journal given to me by my friend Darren Henault years ago. It's pages are full of notes about a book I either finished and published or am still working on. I don't remember which.

I remember teaching a class in which I asked my students to explore the history of a single object belonging to a character in the story they were working on. My altar is a novel, each object a chapter, each relationship a complex web of love and sorrow and gratitude.

Above the altar hangs a piece of old linoleum which my then girlfriend Linda framed for me when she was working for Laurie in her frameshop. Black wood. White matting. Blue floral linoleum, worn edges, and every footstep that crossed it, every spilled cup of coffee or tear or blood, every table dragged across it, the feet of every bed that held aloft someone sleeping or making love or dying--it's all there. On a small brass upholstery tack next to the framed linoleum hang beads: mixed stones from Francis and Sondra, tiny green beads from which hang a floral jade charm from Amra, Iranian worry beads with a long silky green tassel from Taha, jade beads from China from Marc and Jen.

Nearby the altar is a narrow bed, the bedspread from a tag sale in Peekskill. Who slept under it? My writing table from an antique story up near Rico and Eloisa's country house, where someone served many someones scrambled eggs, baked ham, day old bread. And on it goes. On the shelves near the table, framed pictures of Francis and baby Evan, Elise and toddler Natalie, my grandmother, me at 9, me and Marc, me and Kris's boys Zev and Leo, a framed letter from Robert Farber, a small painted work by Robert from the period during which he was working on the show which became "I Thought I Had More Time."

If I say more than this about the woods and the wind, about the altar and the bed and the pictures and time, I'll lose something I think I've gotten close to here. It has to do with speaking and being quiet at the same time.



Thank you for listening.