My friends are my "estate." Forgive me then the avarice to hoard them.
I met Ronaldo in 1998 at a monastery in upstate New York. Everyone still smoked then, and we spent hours under a huge tree outside swirling in a decadent vortex. I admired his fortitude as he played tennis in the heat and ran up and down to the Hudson River and back, past the fields of fireflies. I lived in DC then, and we sent each other letters, when one still did that sort of thing, and cards, and his were inevitably filled with wild musings and drawings that had been scratched out of some late night dementia or new tree obsession. When I visited him in Brooklyn, we watched old videos of Herman the German that reminded me of Maya Deren, which was the only way I could make sense of any of it. He is, to paraphrase Morrison, a friend of my mind.
In relationship, one mind revises another; one heart changes its partner. The astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revisions: the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love...Who we are and who become depend, in part, on whom we love.
--from A General Theory of Love, Lewis, Amini and Lannon
Ronaldo was kind enough to submit to a psychic interview with me. Here is the result.
RED: how did you awaken?
RVW: Tonight, I awoke in a state of loss, totally attached to technology, my headphones, long cord to the iPhone I thought was on the small bed in a Hello Kitty bedroom painted by my ex-brother-in-law, where my niece used to sleep, then where a faux-nephew, also slept, but he stole money from his faux-grandfather, who has real dementia. This snake-eyed thief after my dad would go the the bank, over and over, would be stealing $50's at a time. I felt like suffering there in that bed this hot Sacramento night, no AC on, TV blaring the Tennis Channel, and worried my cell would hit the floor. I have a big bed, one room over in which I grew up, and on this bed I thought was my "travel" wallet, which contains the excess of my cards: emergency credit, health insurance, Panera, new campus ID (UC Santa Cruz in paper), stamps, but it is now lost. I've been up since 3AM searching, in a frantic state looking, thinking should I drive to my sister's, send out more emails, pack to travel back to NY. I'm glad I have my real wallet and Driver's license, since I'll be on a plane late tonight to JFK. All this to say, I awaken in these sorts of states quite a bit, and I know it's connected to moving, to how when one moves, one is fractured, new job, and my quest has been to stay organized in the chaos to capture my poetry work, which is about forcing myself to sit and to work in these states, wherever, however. I was moved by your Chrystos post, mostly because of what she says about machines and the earth, ditching the former to be connected to the latter, and this speaks to my need to stay grounded, or as whole as possible, to get real about what matters, not the objects lost, or the things that threaten one in stages and fits of sleep, but what edges one awakens against. All these echoes of loss, of what's lost. I was actually thinking about awakenings while rollerblading today, and thought of seeing an older neighborhood kid once when I was a kid biking around my old elementary school. He was snorting drugs in a corridor, and I rolled by feeling shocked that I saw him. He seemed so normal, and nice, never knew his name, or him. I wondered, today, about that sensation of seeing him, and moving past his sniffing and red face, his looking up at me. What accretes from the dream of loss, or site of it, the discomfort that's connected to moving and looking down into his face, at this act, mine, rolling by, the wheels of my rollerblades singing across the pavement now in another schoolyard, a blacktop, I look down, and back as I look for patches of tar to not swerve around, but to weigh down upon with my heel's wheels, or to leap a little over them, or I'll fall.
RED: your most hilarious poetic moment?
RVW: Imagine a closed circle, one where expectations are bound by manner, and manner by histories, and no-one really knows anyone beyond the very expectations of these histories and how they may press upon expression, and the present which is carved in by making, adding, revising, so imagine in this circle, a kind of performative expectation held by decorum's throat, where one might chant to persuade, pay homage to people, gods, ancestors. A drum starts. A banjo. A dancer, two, one round object, the other, a thin line. Marks happen, they help to keep the circle closed. They reassure, they guide. The drama and tension is too much for some, and the whole thing is meant to build to some sense of: One can cry. Sing. But to laugh at such a moment would be insane, mean, surely to be black balled, black listed. I was fat once. I am fat now. I rollerblade in circles to avoid falling, or to avoid rocks, but when I fell in front of the church in the hood, and got up, wrist guard protected, a few rocks, a scrape on my back, and got barked at by thick pits and black shepherds behind business fences, I thought more about limits. Chanting in my face, "YIHYIHYIHYIHYIHYIHYIHYIHEHEEEEEYiiHEEEEYIHYIHYIHYIHYIHYIHYIHYIHEHEEEEEY" "Uh,Peace?" "Love?" -- it's all so much. A big belly in bangled wrists, sad eyes, drops at all my feet in the circle . Someone's mounted by a spirit. My hand is held tight. Do not laugh. Shut up. I can't take it, and all the fractures fracture in my face, my chest can't take it, either, and I burst.
RED: literature that popped into your mind during a sexual interlude.
RVW: Literature does not pop into my mind during sex. But sexual moment as adventure, narrative pointers, story, query, the hot places, where during a sexy dinner that prefigures the sex, the yacht, the oysters, the Jag, the life, or the trailer, the ball piercings (the first from his dead lover, he tells me, "It was a double homicide," the stories (or unappreciative lovers), one can become a boy, a cock hound, the first time, cute. "He was a Skinny Nigger," a lover in a mobile home once told me, describing a black man in the sauna we'd seen that day, and I wanted to know more, what invisibility I am to receive this, the safety in this long narrative, his story, his telling, his quick apology between realization and freedom? That did pop into my mind.
RED: where does your work come from? where is it going?
RVW: The more and more I write, the more and more I want to write from the point of total emptiness, to be a free flown self in the world. All I want to do is let what I know intersect with what I want to find out in a way that's natural to my mind and body, which often means getting active, running, blading, yoga, dance, whatever, cleansing to open up the stream of what I teach, which is mainly what (and the only time I truly) read, and here, where the work comes out, it's a purging. And it's different by season. I'm shut off in a way now. I feel like teaching allows me to unload, so that the poems come out touched by or in that stream, too, then. It's summer, but. But it's summer, all I do is relax and take in (room full of pictures of a dead mother who was beautiful, pudding in the fridge, not my own, a Costco chicken, polo on skin, heaven, daddy, 4 on 2 sex addiction tests, I'm OKAY) AND find we share one particular history, love of a powder blue GALAXIE 500, and I'm sure this will go somewhere, cat medallion on my desk my dad found on his walk. "I have something for your mom or your sister," But I take it. It's elegent, the neck rusted. He expectorates everywhere. I can't take much more. Vomiting. Dead cat on the street, mine, the neighbors, dead and gone, letters between us, poems about my lost dad, the cat is a note, and my endless anger, valves.
RED: what excites you right now?
RVW: My father's lost face. My mother's absent teeth. My little nephew's smile. And the way he wanders. And plays. The sun light on my fingertips. Rodney Yee's body I want. Serena William's green waistline and her big reddening hair. My rollerblades when I am on a smooth surface, floating. Falling, and not getting too injured. That my hips are not in pain, none shooting down my leg, either. Grey hair, and blue eyes, and my iPhone. My newly fixed trackpad after telling the Apple Genius her logic was insane if she thought all the machines could look like mine after such a repair. Wine at the bar at BJ's while I waited for perfection. The thought of smelling sea air and soon to be standing up and lecturing for my J.O.B.. about poetry and fiction, and forecasting teaching days as a set of performances. 10 Weeks. A Lecture Series. Secret Recipes for Poetry Classes. The feeling of exhaustion as joy that I felt at Naropa after giving my heart back to the work that I will give forever. My dad's scooting, and belching. Caught in many intersections, unsure, newness, freedom, sun. That I found my wallet by daylight, hugged behind the seat of my mother's Z4, after my sister, Ceo, told me, how her wallet and cell slid back to Aisle 22 from 5 on a plane she was on. That I will now drive, top up on the way out, top down on the way home from a Sauna, the sun dropping down after I'm relieved, my hope, the wind, and the heavy engine's opening up and calming.
I think about identity particles all the time; they hover like bees or clouds depending on my mood, I contemplate consciousness beyond the body itself, my poems circling piranhas tearing out a chunk here and there. It’s okay if you can’t tell what I am. I know.
I know. I am trying to stay awake. I am trying to do all of this with love.
--from "Negroes Make Me Hungry," R. Erica Doyle
Great interview. He was one of my best friends in high school.
Glad to know he's still magical.
Posted by: Marie | November 14, 2018 at 04:48 PM