The Orient

Inside, the radio rides from “I Walk the Line” to “Big Yellow Tazi.” Because the door is open, the outside traffic rhythmically blurs each song. I sit in my aerobic leggings and tee waiting for a cup of coffee and buttered bagel. The girl behind the counter switches up to The Temptations. 

Your husband called here Monday—looking for you, she says loudly in my direction. She smiles. the air is sweet with women—even the men who wander in to order tea or shoot pool are this kind of sweet. And it doesn't have to do with orientation. The barkeeper knows I'm married to a man but suspects I may be more than a patron or tourist. 
*
ORIENTATION: to be located or placed in a particular relation to the points of the compass; to be familiar with or adjusted to a situation—

“The Orient,” according to Said, is not only adjacent to Europe and one of its richest colonies but also is “its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other.”

This is where I write.

This is where I write zuihitsu––for the permission, the blur, the rooms created by the little blocks of text.

Not unlike Duras or Wittig, I think to myself. Or Paterson.

This is where I write almost everything—at a little café on 5th Avenue in Brooklyn. A small table just out of the sun. Hey girl. Hey Kimiko. Hey. Mornin’. They blast the music. Joan Armatrading maybe. Salsa at times. Other times a radio channel.

Turn the channel.

Static.

She’s losing the frequency. Turn the channel, someone suggests.

Said, going further in his introduction writes: “the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.”
*
Switch the station.

I am the only Asian-looking girl here. From my bookbag I pull out Ki no Tsurayuki’s Tosa Diary where he writes in the voice of a woman who has lost a child. Writes in a woman's-hand to permit greater emotional license, the men of the tenth century too restricted by their own conventions. They needed the women for an expansion of form and content. They needed the women in order to use a new language. They needed difference. 
*
An old boyfriend meets me for coffee and kisses me on the cheek. The barkeeper eyes us and scowls. I am embarrassed. Her name is Cicely.

I dream about her I am so embarrassed. Or something.

Is it the channel?

What’s at stake?
*
The zuihitsu, spatial in every way, differs from the nikki, a “poetic diary” which differs from the Western—that is, differs from documenting fact unless we mean an emotional fact. Differs from what is really true.

Translated as running brush, I love the way the zuihitsu runs with the content.

But even with a hint of narrative, the form also relies on sensibility and spatiality—and a way to identify with the most important writers in the world, who happened to be Japanese women. I love them.

Like some teas? she asks. Or drinking your usual? I smile and reply, the usual—but I do like the tease. She grins back.

I love the unabashed first person—it almost risks the confessional quality that a diary exudes, or that diary-like information can contain in a conventional poetic form. Even the tone becomes altered by the form.

(What is true here?)
*
I return home after rewriting a short story. Peel off a sweaty unitard. Shower and slip on a velvet skirt and loose cotton top. I sit at my computer to see where the words have taken the heart. The brain enters now.
*
From Ki no Tsurayuki we know that kokoro and kotoba combine as the basic dynamic in Japanese poetics: the heart and the words produce passion, even if subtly placed.
*
On my way to Harvey’s book party I stop by the café for a take-out decaf. It’s evening, Cicely remarks and from a table of girls where she’s hanging now, off hours. You're confusing me, she continues. I smile and reply, Sweet.

From confusion to clarity. From clarity to ambiguities, blurs, fuzziness. Haze.

In her Gender Trouble, Judith Butler asks, How does language construct the categories of sex? Does “the feminine” resist representation within language? Within a language of presumptive heterosexuality, what sorts of continuities are assumed to exist among sex, gender, and desire? Are these terms discrete?

construct
constrict

I am wired from Cicely’s caffeine-mixed decaf.

Otherwise—what?
*
Maybe I am attracted to this elegant mongrel because it blurs categories: those "grade B” forms of the Western canon: letters, diaries––even gossip. Plus lists, fiction, criticism, online sites. I love blurs. I appreciate categories but as I grow older, have less of a need for the absolutes I sought in my twenties. The form suits this desire to blur.

She asks what I’d like. I ask for more caffeine. To wire the whole room.

Let me get something straight: I love cocks and often the men to whom they’re attached; and I’ve never even slow-danced with a woman. But I'm increasingly drawn.

the pulse—

the impulse—

The impulse is to categorize: bi, lesbian-wannabe, a gay man in a straight woman's body, queer but straight—

Maybe she thought that ex-boyfriend was a girl? Or a gay man? Is he?
*
Curious how crazy straight guys are about lesbians—as if women's sex and sexuality are destined to be about the male. For me there's no quiver in seeing a gay porno flick. It isn't about my desire.

And this isn't about coming out. But emotional truths.
*
I know where are times when I feel boyish: regulation push-ups
(fifty), chinos and boots, JD (my dad’s preferred drink—one of the few things we have in common)—

Maybe Cicely is thinking to tell me, Easy for you girl—you can imagine, you can play, you can return home to the husband. The safe, straight life. Right? 

To the female sensibility: lipstick, gauzy clothes, . . .

(Can we allow ourselves to feel what we want?)

(The gendered feelings fit into cultural categories—it’s true, but like the zuihitsu, they may appear splintered to a Westerner—which I am. I would prefer—prefer?—rejecting particular categories. Would she say, Easy for you to say—from your privileged position. I have come to realize what I desire is not so much to make love to a woman but to be deeply and openly intimate in a way that is as physical as my already emotionally open intimacy. Is this “queer”?)
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“Drawn”?

“Drawn and quartered”?
*
Did you think this would be about ethnicity? That blur?

(Artists can weave in and out of categories like class—though I always forget which fork to use first. When to slip on one’s elbow-length gloves. I am partisan but get off on bourgeois niceties. Benefit from them. )

I love words that confuse—

—how words can arouse. So the words are mine. The lover is mine. The lover's attention is mine. I am powerful. The lover is powerful. The words themselves.

Mine—the noun and verb. That blur.

The blur where the skin feels prickly. Pleased and desirous. Delirious. 
*
Is there a place in the English language for women? Yes and no. Yes, because women teach children language—even at this end of the century. And no, because men still own the means of production. But because culture is so incredibly susceptible to change the more women publicly use and abuse words—and its very syntax—the more women revise it in their own image.

Construct. Construe.

Perhaps diaries and letters are too feminine or female to become canon fodder.

In publication women come very close to owning their words though in that instant it becomes both the property of the capitalist and available within the market.

canon
cannon

cannot

I tell several female friends about this piece and only one does not change the subject.
*
I would love to have a drink with k.d. lang. Wouldn’t you? Which outfit would she wear? Suede jacket and cowboy hat? Which would I wear? What would I drink? (Jack—remember?)

Change the subject. Change the frequency.

Change the static. 

What does become clear through the blurring is the experience of blurring itself.

Do I know how to slow-dance with a woman? Who would lead?