"The interior life expands and fills; it approaches the edge of skin; it thickens with its own vivid story; it even begins to hear rumors, from beyond the horizon's rim, of nations and wars." –Annie Dillard
"I began to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father."—E.B. White
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It began with a sea.

Clay down in rivulets in red orange.

We walked to roses of cliffs
Each glass house of remembering
Shatters it further crystal onion
My arm linked through his he was trying
Toll
By wrinkled sheath
Wait to be moved
By grace
The windless rocks
Of gain, of
Shock.
In slow heaves, rusticity
Of woodwork
He we are put
On earth
To be sad

We stood by the sea.

It was raining and storming. The cliffs were like a huge watercolor, dripping oranges out of the clay.

***

Some folk musicians touted as my generation's Bob Dylans go on record saying they doesn't want all their songs to be about politics. Some songs are about the other things. Living, and loving, and the freedom to do so, are freedoms endangered by political events and situations and climates, which necessarily makes living, loving, and let's not forget—writing—political events. Someone who thinks they are living outside of politics or taking a break from politics is someone who is enjoying a political climate conducive to their being free, free to feel as though they are not restricted by politics. The sky might change. The climate is always political.

Luke was reading a book of Russian fiction. I lay next to him reading Sontag. The sky moved gray over us. Luke pointed to a sentence about an enamel teapot with vodka in it. When the close, wet oaks flew past our bus window he mentioned that the author was killed by Stalin's secret police.

It matters when and where we are born. That we can make art in the first place. That we draw another breath.

That it matters is a Darwinian, maybe, but certainly a political truism.

It matters when and where and in what kind of body we were born.

That it matters is a social, maybe, but certainly an unfair truism.

("unfair," as if justice objectively existed) (if it does not objectively exist then it is only available through a medium. Which subjects it to the same limitations and fallibilities of any of the problems of representation and mediation.)

There is a place where theory—the words, the page, the abstract, the writing--fails.

Luke drove Pauli's rusty little 80's toyota in the wet weather. I told him that I do not think the human heart has an inexhaustible quota for breaks. He was driving stick shift and the car kept thumping around. The truth is I am still in the middle of a broken heart and no amount of thoerizing or talking about it will get me through it any faster. Aloud I said, "Sometimes people just get screwed. You get hurt and no one comes along, it doesn't get better. The person you loved left you and there you are." Luke, who's of an older age bracket, the bracket marrying itself off, said "Yeah, but it hurts me to see how scabbed over the hearts of some of my peers are. They trade lovers in for other ones so fast."

The acts, our love, what we say, how we say it, what we do, how we do it. The acts. The act of love is something done by people who are free to do it.

Some of the best work done by translators is in translating the work of those in exile or coming out of a period of oppression. The oppression, "political," reached into their families, their soul, their hands. They could not write. They could not, sometimes, live.

I'd met Luke, a grad student who's involved with unions and strikes, at a reading in Brooklyn in February. His cousin is getting married to a man on Martha's Vineyard, so Luke came to visit and invited me along. Pauli and Nate are in love, that much is clear. It is also clear that I am not in love with Luke. The invitation to the vineyard was without strings. I slept well, platonically, beside him. He woke me in the middle of the night to tell me about a dream. "I was walking on a beach with a lighthouse. It was completely black and quiet, then when the lighthouse light swept over the beach I was surrounded by people talking with one another. None of them noticed me. It's the loneliest fuckin dream in the world," he said, arms around his knees. I knew he might have been comforted were I to rub his back or put an arm around him. I did not feel the right way about him to do that. Whether this event, or the telling of it, is described as a social, political, emotional, or critical event, doesn't change things. It's just as illegible and final, like a dead body.

Lovemaking is a political act the same way literature is a cultural script. It depends on how you look at something; it depends on your lens. Which implies mediation.

A piece of literature is always a cultural script. The author never knows all the factors that go into their product. Art tells more than the artist meant it to, always. All that it needs is time, and otherness. Others can look into a text and discuss it, others who are not the authors and often not from the same time period as the authors. This is where commenting, which seems the accepted special field of criticism, comes in. Part of the reason I have a hard time writing cultural criticism is that I don't know what "cultural" or "criticism" means. Rather, I don't know what those terms don't mean. "Cultural" is not a word that applies to some things and not to others. "Cultural" is a lens through which to look at those things, either always or never true. The same is true of "political." "Criticism" appears to be applicable anytime anything discerning is said.

***

Luke and I took turns reading from his favorite book, Invisible Cities. The sky was clogged with dark twisting roots, huge fat ones. Their feet were our sky, etc.

It's never the artwork itself. That much I gather. Criticism happens after, and about, the artwork.

After I returned from the Vineyard, Tim and I met in the street. Cottony clusters of leaves lit up in gold green. We met on Thayer street where it gets quiet. Dappled light on houses. I was sad to be away from the separate color set of the Cape, the green water and grey trees, and back to Providence and its myopia. My myopia. "My heart got broken in the myopic sense and then the rest of grief came crashing down into it," I said to Tim: the death of the world, or each living being in it: the cruelty of time, the unknowableness of violence.

When we met, walking in the rain on an island years ago, I told Tim that I'd give him a word and then he would have to tell me the first story or memory or thought he associated with it. We took turns. It was how we got to know each other. We'd play it later on the subway in New York, then at school in Providence. "Tell me about..." Snow. Loveliness. Dread. Edges.

The one line from Invisible Cities I remember: "All signs form a language, but not the one you think you know."

That rift in the heart has filled in with cement, or something as permanent, rough, heavy, and hard. The wound will never heal because though a managable thing, a boy, began it, the wound took on a life of its own, widened and extended for indefinite time by larger truths that are heartbreaking. The heart is not supposed to heal from these things, nor is a mature person supposed to be run over anew by the mack truck of the Bad Things that Happen every time it comes, according to Sontag.

A professor I had once demonstrated this problem of discourse on pain: he took a piece of paper, meant to stand for discourse on torture, and ripped it. He said this is violence. This is what violence does. It is not discursive. It is violence. It is pain.

It's Marco Polo telling of the invisible cities he's seen. He's telling the stories to Kublai Kahn. Marco Polo, the fragmented, calling back and forth, blindfolded. From this the images come, of roots in the sky and clouds underfoot.

I know it has something to do with metaphor.

Wet raspberry bushes.

In order to write well one must be truthful about writing: it is a medium, and so loses potency in areas that cannot be mediated because these areas tear through the structure endemic to medium. That's why writing about violence in no way approximates it. At the end of the day, they are words on a page; at the end of the day, we are in mortal bodies. I circle and scribble around this topic because it's a place the written road cannot go.

As Luke and I stood under the umbrella, arm in arm, looking formally out at the sea, it felt like a ceremony. I remembered asking a gray sea whether I should do something with a boy when I was sixteen. The grayness seemed evidence of the neutrality of the universe. The ocean does not think less of you. You're on your own on this one.

The shape of the pink rock in the sand looked like a whale. There was a boy's picture stuck in the cliff, with dead roses around it, and more dead roses at its base. I looked again at the rivulets of clay, which seemed now to be moving in a way that was suggestive of blood.

I told Tim, aware of how it sounded, "The world is so full of sadness I'm surprised the sky doesn't fall."

"I'm reading Yeats's autobiography and he says that one has not fully lived until every moment is a tragedy," said Tim.

Gaining experience isn't a question of that, of gain, but of losing what you had. Our eyesight is so tenuous. Any reception is a translation, encoded, a collision between an idea and its architect.

It's what happens when everything you see reminds you of someone, when you feel sad and the rain seems evidence of the world's being sad with you, what happened to my friend when she was in high school after a breakup, crying over her science homework "because the cells had to part and then die and it was so sad."

My grandmother Gertrude searched every list of survivors from World War II's concentration camps. Only her younger sister Alice survived, unable to bear children. We do not know what happened when they were reunited on the dock. I look at their story from the wrong end of the binoculars, but even when I look at things from their magnifying end I really can't see anything at all, just a frustrating little hole and the strange blurry, dark blossoms of my own lashes.

I.

I am accustomed, now, to being in a room with seven men who are drawing my pubic hair. I have been on the other side of the drawing board, and I know that bodies are reduced to shape, distance, and shadow: hold up the pencil. This is how far the nipple is from the armpit. Squint. It is not even a nipple anymore, not to them, though my nipple has not changed any since I took off my clothing.

The first time I posed naked in the basement of the man whose ad I answered there were only two artists. The host would grimace and then relax his face in quick succession like a broken smile doll while he sketched. The other rubbed my shoulders over the thick blue robe during a break. The music was incredible: blues, and old music from 1940's Japan. Bad luck for the band, my host comments, because then Hiroshima happened. I found something to focus on so my body would hold still and steady. One time it was a finished drawing. Something about the light on the woman's breast made it look like the shape bread dough takes before rising. I do not know why there are no women in this group. I wonder sometimes if I would feel differently about shedding my clothing for a woman. I do not think I would; though I am using my naked body in a way a man dictates, I have sanctioned this and am making forty dollars in three hours. I also love the bluegrass, I love lying down during breaks and reading essays and books for my courses, I love the corner with all of the records and pastels strewn like pick-up sticks.

When I arrived I asked for the bathroom. Perhaps because I come from a place where basements and attics are rare I love them, and his basement smelled pleasant and damp, pastel and cardboard everywhere, with a cat who wound round the artist's legs. The kitchen and bathroom betrayed the smell of the five cats who live there total. I have five cats also, but they spend their time outside accruing foxtails. The wife had headphones on and didn't look at me as she hurried into the car he had taken to pick me up from campus. He spoke to her as if he didn't know she had tuned him out. I stood bare under the hot lamp unsure of whether I was welcome, holding onto the curtain so my arm would catch the light, staring into the face of the clock until it became an object representative of nothing important, bread, an elbow, skin, scattered records.

They are drawing my person but it is not personal. If it were not my body, but another's, they would still be gaging, squinting, marking. The only time the fact of their masculinity becomes acute to me is when it occurs to me that I know as little of their minds as they know of mine, that any or all could have committed a rape twenty years back, or two days back. I do not fear for my safety. I only would rather they not see me when I slide the robe off and hang it over the chair: that is the one moment that feels intimate.

How are you? one of the irregular comers asks the man who leads and hosts the drawing group. I'm okay, he says, in the kind of way that suggests both men know he has recently not been so okay. This man, who teaches at a nearby art school and whose figure drawings sell, tells me which way to roll my hips and whether to expose my ear, but I have no right to ask about these other things, just as I have no right to sneak a dried apricot or two or a vanilla cookie from his kitchen when I take my bathroom break, though I do just that.

At the end of the evening sessions there has started to be that clarity of star winking above the deck, a bite to the air, to the shadow of roof: autumn. At the end of an afternoon session I straighten my jacket on the deck, scoop-shaped yellow leaves heaping all over the deck and deck chair, and turn to smile at the men filing out, saddled with art supplies. Take care, they tell me.

II.

During the first broken heart I ever had I woke up feeling like ropes were tying me to the bed, crisscrossing plushly but firmly, and I could not move my body under their weight, and my mind did not want my body to move under their weight. That was also the way it felt when I woke up after election day 2004. Certain thoughts I have make me a political leftist. The thoughts have a lot to do with my body, actually, and its landscape of hip and skin being one over which I, my thoughts, preside. I read the results of the election and I floated on my bed, floated and was also tied there: I could not nudge my thoughts or my body and so they could not nudge each other, either. And when I talked the next day to a dear friend who devoted her vacation time to liberal activism, she had a hollowness to her voice, and described it like this: it feels like I have had a break up, it feels like someone has died. Neither of us could move either our thoughts or our bodies in ourselves or in each other, but it was a lucky feeling to not nudge together, to not be able to nudge together.

I remember to think sometimes, in the middle of the twenty minutes between breaks, the muscles in my calf or neck or arm starting to ache, the tiny muscles I did not know were there and certainly have never used for this long continuously, that these men have traveled, been married, probably been divorced, probably been discovered masturbating by their mothers, perhaps discovered their own sons masturbating, perhaps raise their voices when they are angry, like cream in their coffee, do not like cream in their coffee, prefer Toyotas to Acuras and rain to sun, hate their job, love their job, remember that year they spent hating their first out-of-college job in Phoenix, regret smoking so much weed or starting to smoke cigarettes, miss their grandmother Doris who smelled like rice pilaf.

It does occur to me that it is the right of any person to say I do not want to be naked anymore in front of you and step down from under the bright lights, and that were I to do that nothing more than losing this job would come of it whereas over history this may not have always been the case. I have never needed to do things with my naked body that I did not want to do, as is my right, and for which I also feel guilty since most women I know and most women who ever lived have had that right taken away from them at one or many points.

Slavery, also, has been described as not owning one's life; in other words, not owning one's body. Since we can think whatever we like and not say it, for one's life to be controlled is then the control of the body, which is trackable and seeable in ways our thoughts are not. We can even use our bodies to say exactly different things from what our minds are thinking, like I hate you when we are thinking I love you, or the other way around. I cannot tell if one of these happens more than the other. They both seem to happen a lot. Sometimes my fingers fall asleep from holding onto the blanket hung from the ceiling, but the artists need the arm upraised so I keep the fingers there and rub them when the clock's wide face looks roundly up at me with the right whiskers and then I move.

III.

There is a red rose on my desk that has been opening since Friday. It is Sunday. On Friday my new Boy's only very recent ex-girlfriend came into town for a tournament between universities. I have not met her. At 3am Friday morning my new Boy bought me the rose in a Providence Seven Eleven. My new Boy is not actually mine; I do not own him. The rose is in the only thing that I could find to serve as a vase at 4am on a Friday morning in a dirty apartment shared with three dudes: a washed-out forty-ounce beer bottle. The rose has done quite well, blooming an aching red on my white desk next to my printer (though the desk is not mine either, it belongs to the university) and I have somehow attached my hope that the Boy will still want to hold my body and call it his--in the nice way that we can lay claim to one another's bodies sometimes--to the rose and how well it has done over the weekend we agreed he would be sorting things out with the ex. Now on Sunday evening one petal, full and triangular and on the lower left end of the blossom from where I am sitting, looks like it might drop from the flower soon. There is only a faint smell, but even during more difficult moments this weekend when I have thought in my mind of imputing things to say to the Boy if things do not go as I would like I have touched my nose to this, this cracking-open red star, and pushed my face into a smile to get my mind to follow.

Sometimes, on break, I hold my breath through the kitchen that smells like cat pee to the bathroom and take off the robe and look. I take off the robe and look at what they have been drawing; it is strange that they know better the shapes of my shoulders than I do, strange that I forgot about the tattoo on the back they have been drawing and on which they must have seen the tattoo. There is a New Yorker Cartoon on the wall: "I'd invite you in, but my life is a mess." Up in front of all of those grown men, on display, I do not feel vulnerable.

IV.

After modeling I walk with my book into my kitchen where there is a poster of Andy Warhol. The one with two of the same picture, two of his faces ringed by a tambourine. Paul's pressed leaves are on the hall wall. The floor is littered with trash. Take care, meaning, take care of yourself. And the self that takes care of me, the me that is different from the self that does the caring for, are these two different parts of me, even, from the me that does the thinking and the me whose shapes and breasts and thighs seven men just spent hours drawing? Even to owe something to oneself is a schizophrenic term, someone told me once. To do anything to oneself. There is I, there is I doing something to myself, to my self. I think now that our language just does not know what to do with this: if someone cuts their own wrist, then the giver and receiver of the action are the same. Why isn't it my self is doing this to my self? I am doing it to me? But no, the correct way to say it is that I am doing something to myself, and so I am a different entity from my self.

I pause while reading an essay about holocausts and crimes against humanity because my roommate Chris has enlisted me to help with a short film for his media class. I am to act. I am glad to, because I need a break from the part of myself that is trying to gather up feeling good about anything after the election and an essay that is about what this one is about. I need a break from the part of myself that looks at the rose every few minutes. I need a break from the part of myself that is imagining all of the bodies in Sudan and Rwanda and back centuries in the Ottoman Empire and back decades in Germany. I need a break from the part of myself that thumps painfully whenever the part of myself that looks at the rose every few minutes looks at the rose every few minutes.

I have done theater before, and I like to assume the expression of someone else with another set of memories. What I think is interesting is how many actors say that in order to cry for a scene they think of something sad from their own lives, not of the sad thing that has happened to their character. If that is true, then people watching the film or play are something like the men who draw my naked body: they are only getting part of the whole, they are seeing the part of the actor who cries but not the part of the actor who thinks of reasons to cry.

It was Chris who decided on Wednesday to be nicer to everyone than he had been during the preceding weeks and think of people primarily as systems of family and friends and not as participants in the body politic. My roommates and I know about and read about and talk about the body--and by the body I mean the bodies we use to get too drunk and make love and have sex (which are different things, even we know) and get our selves to classes, and by the body I also mean the big body whose disconnect I feel in this, my small body, when I cannot nudge this, my small body; I mean the big body that is the body politic.

Brendan sits on the curb in his beret and moccasins and watches, waiting to help Chris move the dolly. I crouch in the street and wait with the matchbook. I do not know what Brendan thinks. I do not know what Chris, fiddling with the big clunking camera, thinks. I do not know what the Boy, who has light green eyes, thinks. I do know that I love them all, Chris and Brendan and the Boy, as I crouch in my jacket with my hair on my face and matches in my hands. I know also that in some way I love the seven men who have drawn my pubic hair, not because they have drawn my pubic hair but because the room is quiet save for the bluegrass music playing while they draw and I stand still, and there is buzzing and whirring inside them that I cannot hear, memories inside them that I cannot see.