Afterglow E-Book

Eileen Myles

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 260

Beschreibung

Skinny's Book of the Year, 2018 In 1990, Myles chose Rosie from a litter on the street, and their connection instantly made an indelible impact on the writer's way of being. Over the course of sixteen years together, Myles was devoted to the pit bull and their linked quality of life. And starting from the emptiness following Rosie's death, Afterglow launches a playful and incisive investigation into the mostly mutually beneficial, sometimes reprehensible power dynamics between pet and pet-owner. At the same time, it reimagines Myles's experiences with alcoholism and recovery, intimacy and mourning, celebrity and politics, spirituality and family history, while joyously transcending the parameters of memoir. Moving from an imaginary talk show where Rosie is interviewed by Myles's childhood puppet, to a critical reenactment of the night Rosie mated with another pit bull; from shimmering poetic transcriptions of video footage taken during their walks, to Rosie's final enlightened narration from the afterlife, this totally singular text combines elements of science fiction, screenplay, monologue, and lucid memory to get to the heart of how and why we dedicate our existence to our dogs.

Leseprobe

Also by Eileen Myles

I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014

Snowflake / different streets

Inferno (a poet’s novel)

The Importance of Being Iceland / travel essays in art

Sorry, Tree

Tow (with drawings by artist Larry R. Collins)

Skies

on my way

Cool for You

School of Fish

Maxfield Parrish / early & new poems

The New Fuck You / adventures in lesbian reading (with Liz Kotz)

Chelsea Girls

Not Me

1969

Bread and Water

Sappho’s Boat

A Fresh Young Voice from the Plains

Polar Ode (with Anne Waldman)

The Irony of the Leash

First published in the United States of America in 2017 by Grove/Atlantic Inc.

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc.

Copyright © Eileen Myles, 2017

The moral right of Eileen Myles to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by Eileen Myles in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All insert photos and drawings courtesy of Eileen Myles, with the following exceptions: page 1 (the letter): Mud Howard. Page 18 (men running): Paige Gratland. Page 119 (fig. 1): Joe Winter. Page 120 (fig. 2): Clark Thenhaus. Page 127 (Kurt Cobain): Frank Micelotta. Page 147 (Eileen askew): Julie Payne. Page 173 (Rosie’s shark mouth): Andrea Lawlor.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Grove Press, UK

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.groveatlantic.com

Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 61185 514 2

Ebook ISBN 978 1 61185 943 0

Printed in Great Britain

for Genevieve Hannibal

Contents

[The Letter]

Protect Me You

My Dog/My God

The Death of Rosie

The Puppets’ Talk Show

Goodnight, Sweet Queen

The Rape of Rosie

Just Before and Just After

x (transcription)

My Father Came Again as a Dog

xx

FOAM

xxx

The Navel

The Order of Drinking (3-D)

xxxx

Dog House

“The Dog’s Journey”

To the Post Office

The Walk

One day, in 1999, an awkward hand-addressed letter appeared in my hallway.

The mailman threw everything on the stairs. I grabbed the letter & headed with Rosie to the dog run which in that neighborhood was a skimpy little triangle at 39th Street west of 9th Ave. It was an amazing perspective on mid-town roofs and also dull traffic heading to New Jersey. My neighbors were weird. Sad former actors. I liked the pink-cheeked older woman named Doris who walked everyone in the neighborhood’s dogs including mine. This is like sixteen years ago so Doris is probably dead. Sitting on a bench while Rosie sniffed the ground I tore open the strange note. It read:

Dear Eileen,

I take the liberty of calling you “Eileen” to begin the unpleasant duty of forcing you to legally take responsibility for the damages you have inflicted over a period of nine years upon the being you have taken to calling “Rosie.” I am Rosie’s lawyer. Dog lawyers have only become possible in recent years, even months. Which is not to say crimes of all kinds against dogs are “new” in any way. Crimes against dogs are ancient and widespread, but dogs having the wherewithal to attain legal representation is new indeed. My services have been retained thanks to a generous bequest by an anonymous donor who set up a foundation in her will for the explicit purpose of identifying dogs who were likely litigants, candidates for beginning the long and arduous process of getting the ball rolling on dogs’ rights. It’s been clear to my client during her life and most pressingly at the time of her death that the best way to make this need known would be to take up an individual dog’s case, not the case of “all dogs” which is too ubiquitous to pursue in the explicit way the law makes possible for human litigants, who are generally assumed to be individuals. A wealthy individual, of course, does not have more rights than a poor one. We are all brought up to honor “human rights,” but only wealthy humans are able to use the full force of the law; i.e., obtain high quality representation. By this logic, there can be no freedom for dogs unless there are wealthy dogs. There is one today, the dog formerly known as Rosie. She has been left a significant sum of money in my client’s will. She may spend it as she pleases with the single stipulation that she obtain counsel and press charges against her owner for a variety of abuses and crimes against dog kind. As you know. Eileen Myles, that owner is you.

It seemed unbelievable to me. Rosie was about ten. I looked at her licking an empty wrapper against the fence. She appeared entirely innocent of the letter’s content. What? Are we already going home she seemed to say. Okay. I don’t think she knows anything about this. I popped the leash back on and walked home planning my day. The loft we lived in was right across from Port Authority. Day and night I watched the lights of buses sail in and out of the building. I thought about the letter from time to time. I mean for years. I showed it to people. They laughed and smiled. Could Rosie and my entire relationship be framed as blame. I did force her to have sex with Buster that one time. No twice. Could I write a book about that. I’ve never been an “idea” writer. I have like a spurt then I go do something else. But this would be her book. A dog book is a great idea . . .

Protect Me You

September, 2006

You’ve just fallen down on the grass. I thought this would be a nice place to sit in the afternoon. The cat shows up, black, looking out. When I’m surrounded by trees, a condition I’ve sought out pretty persistently throughout my life, the thing I think I might like the most about them is this whisper like all the hair of the world passing through the tunnel of one single breath—if that is a form of percussion. This irregular hiss of trees and wind. I think it is my mother. And I am her son, and you are my dog.

Our relationship is part discomfort & humiliation and part devotion. Oh once upon a time I wanted a dog exactly as much as I wanted to be alive. Maybe I didn’t even want a dog then. I wanted to say that I was alive. Even to be a dog would be enough and how good if I could be seen wanting one and could begin asking for it incessantly—if I could summon up asking in every possible manner. Please. Leaving notes under pillows and toilet seat covers. Did I want a dog, really. No I was a kid who was desperate to be seen in a state of desire & supplication. That was many years ago. I wanted to already be my yes. A positive child in a state of knowing & reaching out. Not for myself but towards a friend. The child was denied. In the manner of my family they said yes and then they said no. Somewhere there is a picture of this. A little boy in bangs and a plaid cotton shirt. (I remember it was red but the picture was taken with my father’s Polaroid land camera which took black & white photos then which added to the beauty of them because the past is so often a place whose colors are only in my mind.) How hard it would be to be a movie star. To be in full color in front of everyone. To be applauded and owned. Isn’t that like being a very good dog. You’re lashing out at photographers who are adamant about capturing you, your every movement again and again. I admit I’ve wanted to be a movie star to be seen in that disgraceful and hungry way—the buttered toast of everyone. There I am with my beautiful smile. A big piece of bread. Angry, covering my face. I held my dog in the black and white world and I knew that this was the moment I had wanted so keenly. To be still, to be fixed, to be sad. I was just like a little prayer card holding my dog. I would never know myself as clearly again.

Did that dog go on to her death when we returned her to the ASPCA after that one long crying night that disturbed my mother to no end. A tree will push this way and that be permanent in its breath of time. It’s hardly the color it is, a white pole, some green some red. I would think a tree would know exactly what it was and be so peaceful. As long as she’s breathing a dog is not at rest. So I was a child who wanted a dog. I became myself. I certainly wasn’t thinking I wanted a dog the day we met. I was watching the rollers turn. I mean time. You have to touch on something repeatedly but what could it be? How could that happen if time was your problem. What could you touch?

That’s why I’m a poet. Even in the bathtub as a child I was syncopating my blubs because I didn’t know what to do with the light and the wetness and my mother and when would it stop. I had a horror of life’s never ending-ness which made me really hate art. Its spectacles. Rodeos. Circuses. People skating around on ice. And in the world on ponds. My feet hurt. And look—all the trees have lost their leaves and are black. Isn’t it time to go in? It seems like the people around me wanted to do happy things and a child is supposed to be a little dog and bark happily in response—at the ice & the trees & the day. And now here it is all around us.

This morning I was reading in the paper how the governor of New Jersey a secret gay man had hired apoet of all the ludicrous persons on earth to be his director of homeland security. And then the poet realized the governor wanted him. How unabashedly corrupt of a governor to entice a total fool—a poet—practically a clown’s occupation to take care of the people of a state. The state of New Jersey at that. The governor wanted the poet to hold him and love him and kiss his toes. Possibly the governor wanted to exercise his dominance over the poet shoving his penis in the poet’s butt. I had already heard parts of this story, mostly about the governor’s secret gayness, but it seems like they saved this one tiny detail for the end. The fact that the young man was appointed to a position in which he could only reveal his incompetence—who could blame him for that. He was young after all. But the later, more laughable tidbit. Like the room stopped laughing and then the little dog lifts its butt and poops. Homeland security! How could a poet do that. How could a poet do that. Twice a fool. And twice the governor’s crime.

And speaking of such—now that we’ve seen really good photos of how really bad it was in New Orleans and we’ve seen also that the man in charge there, Brownie, knew about horses, not safety, there were problems really much bigger than his unknowing, the unknowing is always getting larger, and we’ve looked at them all publicly together, and realize that there are always people of greater authority equally incompetent people like the president who once owned a baseball team and now laughed publicly at a woman, Aileen, he whinnied at her who was being sent (by him) just then to the electric chair—he mocked her.

And supposedly when he was governor, he actually improved schools that was his big claim but now we’ve learned that in fact the books were cooked, that’s all. And the schools got even worse under him and when he was a kid he used to blow up squirrels and he farts in front of his interns today—kids who went to good schools and studied hard—I’m not particularly impressed by those leadership types living or dead, maybe if one gets shot or mugged you see the kid’s picture in the paper and think—what a shame he or she got good grades. But say he survives—winds up delivering papers to the oval office and there’s the president laughing & farting. And you tried hard & he hadn’t and now he’s your boss and you’ve got to smell his farts. You’re a dog.

The final insult to everyone was that what little New Jersey had to protect itself with was a poet. There’s a little red up in the trees. And my dog wants to go upstairs. And I probably should let her have her way. Because she is dying.

Not only are her legs stiff, but her joints are swollen and covered with sores. I don’t have another life partner. It’s almost five decades after the perfect photograph of my desire and because Rosie’s pacing all over the house and slobbering her food the ants are swarming around her like candy. She’s a sweet dying clump. Today is the day when summer turns into fall. Surely the light is shorter or longer today. My planet is in some angle to the sun so that people say this is September a beautiful month when it’s not too hot, possibly the sweetest time of the year. There are already waves and waves of what I am saying. I’ve set something in motion I can return to again and again. Anywhere. Dogs begin barking. You have never been a barker unless you were left outside a café tied to a post, then you yelped like hell. You like company.

I do too. I’ve discovered I’m an essentially social person. I like to sit in groups, or move with them. I like when they all decide to go see some art or celebrate the number of years a person’s been on the planet. I even like when they all get loaded in honor of that. Though I get out of the room fast. I go for the rebounding energy of heys and hugs and awkward kisses and the opportunity to raise my flag and see it light up in your eye. Your flag tells me where I want to go next. It’s like the world I live in is a field of flags whapping and waving and I want to see them all waving. I want to stand in the crowd or the small group. I like the small and large crowds that talk about how they feel. Who listen to one another, who let the collective listening and talking build up a head of swarming energy that fills and delights us. These are the groups that show me that I do like groups. I like to be alone. But then I need to talk to someone. I like god. When I was a child I was taught that there was someone listening and I chanced tiny hellos that frequently felt empty but longer conversations often silences felt like I was sitting in an enormous radio, like I had big headphones on when I felt separated from the world but tuned in to this show. And that’s where you came in. Whether you listen or not, you’re in there too. My dog. You’re a part of the great silent show of this morning’s sun. Turns out it was the most even day of the year, one of the two when dark and light counter balance each other. I have a round board in my house with balls underneath and I climb on while I’m waiting for water to boil or trying to escape the pressure inside, not god but a kind of weather I inhabit & control. I think it comes from Ireland which is why I feel I need to live there for a few years. I will. Just to understand the minerals and substances that spawned me. I come from Poland too but I live with Poland. This is Poland. Ireland is the mystery, Ireland is gone but like magic, it calls me home. I get on the board in my house it’s in the kitchen so there’s a square window. When I was a child we lived across the street from the ocean. It was a perfect spot. I learned to make sandwiches for myself in that house. That was adolescence. Squeezing a pepper and making it spurt. Eating my own food with you. In the sun. At last my life had begun. I had one job which was to do the dishes after dinner with my young arms and there was a stone church outside the window its bell. Sounds spreading out and landing in the marsh.

Up on my board I look out the window in my kitchen. That animal glance is enough. To connect me to the first suns, the first light and jobs. To be in and out within the reach of square light. The round board at first seeks to confound me. One orientation is pure reaching forward so you attempt to not tip yourself, not quite jerking back but asking a wave not to curl and you beg by little movements of your hip. Another, the side to side orientation demands that you use some bell inside your crotch to ring in the middle so to speak and there is a glorious feeling of hip no dick sway it makes me want to dance, and my calves planted and working, working continually. I discovered a new direction the other day I mean I had always been aware that the board made me TALL. It was simply that and there were people I wanted to be tall around and I mostly accomplish that with boots but you know boots aren’t really for walking they’re for promenading so you’re going around in stilts in a way. You won’t fall but when you think about them, and for all the pleasure of being a little higher the trade-off is your own absence from presence. You’re losing your own fealty to the ground. Which can’t be ignored. You lose your earth for your sky. When I’m on the board in my kitchen, when I get still, just for a click I am high—I think oh . . .

My Dog/My God

People said you’ll know when I asked them how they knew it was time. When it was okay to take your dog’s life. You’ll know they said looking me right in the eye. And I did.

Rosie began dying in June, having those mysterious fits. At the end of each was a puddle of piss. I went to my meeting on Adams Ave. in the evenings and I talked about it. The one near the park with the working people: the beautiful dog walker, the pale curly haired man who taught law and came in covered in sweat, almost naked from running. One night he & I stood on the sidewalk under those shady trees. He said my name is Philip, lover of horses. He smiled. I thought he was flirting with me but it was part of his euphoria. I understood. Because I was the one with the dying dog. My friend the older woman said you’ve got to stop. I was biting my fingers. My dog is dying. I kept saying it. I wash her ass and then I wash all the towels. One evening I was feeling a little extra naked after describing the ritual of mopping her piss and I thought that’s it. She’s god. And I felt so calm. I’ve found god now. My God—My Dog. I chuckled. That’s it. Our room. This is ecstasy & everything got bright. She’s dying & I’m watching her. I’m not thinking about it. Not that that makes any difference. I got this intention. This understanding. Did anyone ever say suffering was about difference. It sops it all up. We are this picture of ourselves now, Rosie and I and we want to be seen.

I took such care of her when she was dying. I relished it. She made me go slow. I’d hear the rustling of her limbs and I’d run to her because she couldn’t get up and there was generally a puddle already there. In my house I have beautiful wooden floors. Now I had a pile of facecloths, torn towels, rags. I’d mop up her urine with a clean dry towel and then I’d come back and wash her ass. I’d come back with a damp one, wash it again and then I’d wipe her dry. I made sure she was really comfortable. I’d do it with love. I attended my dog’s ass, the collapse of her rear legs that I saw as little high heels. I imagined her a drag queen or a young girl unsteadily teetering. A touching failure. I swooped in and made it better, made it comfortable. I felt loving. I felt like a god too. I felt less ambivalently loving than I have ever felt in my life. Now I know what love feels like. I do it and I think it. I love feeling this. Love loving your doggy ass. My home became a shrine. The bird of paradise around the door. The late night and early morning dog barking in the dark canyon beyond the yard. When I bought the house it said on the deed: disclosures. “Dogs in canyon.” What could that mean. Hundreds and hundreds of dogs barking day and night. Not all the time. Just when any one of them got an idea. Then they all got it.

There’s a growly picture of me standing in the screened-in porch light flooding in over that canyon and I look like an animal. But the animal looks great. You see a movie sometimes in which someone is doing something really difficult, waging war, defending their family, walking very far, and very long and they look terrific, they look great. The hair looks good, the person looks well, they look hot. And I would watch these spectacles with a doubleness. I’d keep watching cause unless a movie is really bad I’m usually enthralled but I always think no one would look so good doing that. But in fact people often look radiant suffering. How often have you told someone they look fabulous and they say thanks cause I feel terrible. And you can see it right behind their eyes. Terrible puts a candle in there. Terrible turns on the light. You wonder if people are just empty when they’re moving forward with the plan. When it’s all on the outside and the world is full of light, but when you suffer the light is in. It’s all yours.

I’d mop the floor after I took care of her body and I’d wash the animal print rug. The sound of the washing machine churning was a huge part of the day. And I felt it deeply. The expensive cost of water. On the west coast you are living on this shaky shelf that’s gonna get choked. Everyone knows one day will come when there won’t be any water. California is crazy. Water’s getting sucked there through those long pipes from Colorado or someplace. Where are they getting this water from. I think Colorado is it. Some underground world slowly getting poisoned. Or drained. It’s all very thin and it’s going to end soon.

But we’re spending the end of your life together. That is our vacation, our purpose. First Myra came and stayed with me and she agreed it was hard. I can’t believe you’re doing this & alone she said. I know but I love it I said. I understand she twinkled. Myra’s around 50. It’s interesting to see your friends grow old and when I say she twinkled I mean the moment Myra smiled all the versions of her were twinkling right at that moment. It’s not just the dying who are filled with light. Myra was smiling from her experience which was cute. It was a light from far away, from many places, arriving here now.

Watching Rosie die made me a little in love with the whole wash of light, of time, its twists which must be why I ended it with Paige who visited me next. She was a young Canadian artist, and I met her at an opening in New York in the midst of a crowd of people all her age mostly female which is just like this world in San Diego where I’m living except in New York there’s not a school. Here there’s millions of young women. I almost can’t see the young. They’re like the greenness and the sky and the beach. Paige comes up to me at the opening. Are you you she goes. Ten years ago someone told me you’re the only one your age who goes out. Now they don’t go out. They’re gone. People turn and look at me and say she’s here. I’m like a breeze, I’m like punctuation on a text which is them. Which is why I am grateful to be home in California with my dog who is dying. Who is now dead.

California has great dog beaches. There was one in particular I was very fond of which was next to a naval base. You’d get to the end of the road and turn to park but there was this guard building and a guy in uniform standing right in front of it with a gun. Behind him the giant base perched on the beautiful beach with the ocean rocking all around—an island in California and we’d be driving there over the dazzling bridge from the mainland—you with your nose sniffing out the rear window—the window that when open produces what I think of as the convertible effect.

The most perfect thing about being there is that it is an island. You can feel it most of all at night. When you walk around the air comes from every direction and it reminds me of P-town, of those bars on Commercial Street in the summer. Here all that beauty and sexiness is owned by the military which is strange. The air in Provincetown was prowling around us inside and out and you could hear things not far away, knocking in the water, old, clunking and honking. That one dimly lit music club that was open to the street. You could see the wind rock the orange lamps inside. Inside it reminded me of something else, all the air. Is it necessary for there to be a first air—an air that simply is yours? A place supremely young and old where you’ve spent your whole life. Growing up dying, going down to the beach, drinking, kissing. Are there people who have never lived in their air. Is this mine. I have never been one of a pair of young lovers, a young couple—but this air is mine. I know my air. Drifting, never landing, a life at sea. The sounds and the smells of that restless night, the lights, the feel—a body, if an animal didn’t need a body. A drift.

I’m thinking of the beach I used to bring you in the morning—really early, about nine. About twelve years ago. The light was magical. It was just you and me and one fag—a waiter and he was swimming nude. It was his ritual. My own shirt was off—it was an abandoned part of the beach in a pretty gay town. All the other women were way on the other side of the beach. I liked this loner set up and I felt I was more than a bit of a man. A friend of mine used to have a crush on this waiter in New York. He had a kind of over-developed upper lip like a duck and he was slim and combed his hair back in a classic old-fashioned style. Not extravagant at all, but he was hip in a continental way. The fact that he could be with me on this beach in another city almost fifteen years later and not recognize me at all made me comfortable. It was like family. I had my dog and I had him who didn’t know me. I have a striped towel—orange and dark blue. One of two. I buy one, forget it and buy another one. You’d think it was a straight town now. The beach is littered with couples and people with kids. Some man flies his kite delightedly and I want to say hey can you please go back the other way, you are taking way too much space. Yet I think it’s wrong to talk to people like that. I can leave—go to the gym I think staring at the dunes. I can go walk the street looking for people to have dinner with. Then I put my nose in my notebook and I’m writing again.

Save.

The problem with getting Rosie to the beach on the little military island is that you have to walk here from way back down there cause the beach is right here by the guy with the gun. So the dog would have to be able to walk that far and this dog can’t. This dog has become a puppet in her own life. I lift her up and talk to the dog head she is now. The permanently alive dog breathing in here. In fact I’m writing this book to keep talking to her.

Paige came to visit (I told her it’s not going to be a vacation, she said very seriously I know) and she would get out with the dog at the mouth of the beach and I would go park and then join them. At some point sitting on the beach in the morning it seemed like maybe about a hundred guys in crew cuts went by running. She took a picture. She smiled at me and shrugged. It was the army training on the beach. I thought of her being Canadian. This was a whole other kind of beach.

After you died I went over there and I heard on the radio that the president George Bush was there and I stuck my head out the window and started screaming at people. He’s a killer don’t you know. Then I realized I couldn’t go there anymore. You know they took Emma Goldman’s boyfriend out in the desert here and anally raped him. The San Diego paper said they should do it to her too. It’s still that paper. That’s why I was so mad. He’s my president too.

She changed suddenly that week. We went up to LA for the weekend cause there was nobody left in San Diego she could stay with. It was getting harder and harder to find anyone to stay with a dying dog. I’d call this one and she’d refer me to