M.E. Breen

It will come as a surprise to no one who knows me that I become very lame very fast without structure. Just now, for example, when I was supposed to be working on, oh, I don’t know, a novel? I decided to eat a pomegranate. First, how come I never noticed before how much the seeds look like roe? Second, is there any fruit that takes longer to eat? In a sort of reverse-Persephone I decided to eat the whole thing, every seed, standing over the sink, as though determined to remain stuck for good in this underworld of none-to-low-literary-output.

So why should freedom feel like such a trap? Why should the feeling, I can eat that fruit! mean I must eat that fruit? There’s the problem: when no one is watching you, there is no reason for self-restraint, and without self-restraint there can be no priorities, and without priorities, who are you? If one thing is just as possible to do as another it becomes just as worth doing. And that, I believe, is a disaster.

Let me start at the beginning. I was laid off from my dreamy part time job on November 30. The sensible part of me knew this was bad. I was facing not insignificant losses, among them income and health insurance and colleagues and a place to go that was not my apartment. (I live in the sort of apartment where you can see the bed from wherever you’re standing. You try to write a novel someplace where you can always see your bed.) Anyway, this was a good job. We’d been going steady for about four years. But I couldn’t help thinking it would be fun to hang out more with No Job. The wild times we’d have! The pages we’d write! As the end of November approached, I started to persuade myself that I was breaking up with Good Job instead of the other way around.

“It’s time,” I said kindly to my office desk with its smooth-tracking and capacious file drawers.

“We had a good run,” I said to my office printer of endless cartridges.

“Where’s the magic?” I asked my ergonomically-self-specific office chair.

“I need a challenge,”  I said to the prepaid office postage meter.

So I felt pretty good on December 1st, and I felt pretty good on December 2nd. I was even feeling good on December 10 when I went to Walgreen’s to refill a prescription. I told the pharmacist what I wanted and wandered off to get cotton balls and read US Weekly. Ten seconds later my name sounded over the intercom.

“That was fast,” I said to the pharmacist.

“Your insurance has expired. You still want this?”

The “this” in question is not a life or death prescription. It’s what you might call a vanity prescription. It’s a cream. For the face.

“I’m getting COBRA,” I said. “Obama is paying for part of it.”

“Um,” she said. “You want this now?”

“How much is it?”

“Seventy-three ninety-nine.”

All of a sudden the skinny tube of skin stuff seemed not vain but insane. And I felt embarrassed, like I’d been spotted in the couture section of Saks by a saleswoman who knew I couldn’t afford one of the t-shirts two flights down in Juniors. What I mean is I felt pretentious and guilty for wanting to buy something that cost more than it should have in the first place, and, even weirder, I felt ashamed that I didn’t have insurance. Health insurance allows you access to medications you need, of course, but it also means you don’t have to differentiate between kinds of need. It makes things feel tidy, as though all your wants are normal and important, and everything is ok.

So now I find myself in a position of having to decide, at every moment of the day, what is necessary and what isn’t, what is more important than what, what is worth doing at all. It’s exhausting. I make mistakes all the time, and mostly they’re the kind of mistake that involves outlay and regret. I bought the cream. I ate the fruit. I lay on the bed.

I hope I get the hang of it. I hope one of these mornings it will feel more worth it to get up early than to sleep late. I wonder whether Persephone really ate those three seeds because she was hungry or thirsty. Maybe she just wanted to know where she had to be for three months of every year. Maybe she wanted to know what were the rules and what the limits, so she could plan her damn life.

I spent part of Thanksgiving weekend reading the first two books in a series of comics called Fables. The premise is that all the characters from the world of fairy tales and fantasy have been driven from their homelands by an evil being called the Adversary and forced into exile in the human world. Humans are called “mundys,” short for mundane. The fables who look human (Snow White, Blue Beard, Jack of beanstalk fame, etc.) live in Manhattan, holding various jobs in the fable government. The mice, pigs, foxes, giants, pusses-in-boots, animated playing cards, bespectacled Mr. Moles, etc., live on a farm upstate screened by enchantments.

As the series unfolds you meet different characters from different stories. The Wizard of Oz characters are there, and so is everyone from Lewis Carroll, the Just So Stories, Aesop, the Jungle Book, Grimm’s, Mother Goose, etc. Those last two get the most page time, since the stars of the series are Snow White, who runs the fable government (though merry King Cole is the figurehead), and Bigby Wolf, the chain-smoking big bad wolf who goes around in hairy and disheveled human form. He works as the sheriff for the fables in Manhattan and isn’t allowed on the farm because he’s tried at some point to eat almost everyone who lives there. (All the fables received amnesty for past crimes upon moving to the mundy world, but no one has forgotten or forgiven.)

The comics have their bawdy and violent scenes (they have a Mature rating, I think, or the equivalent of an R for movies), but mostly they’re concerned with the fables’ uneasy relationship to each other in a world much more morally nuanced than their own. They are used to solving their differences by eating each other or tricking each other or getting married and living happily ever after, so it’s fun to see them bumbling through modern life with their basic personalities intact. Prince Charming is a smarmy serial philanderer; Snow White is frosty and rule-bound; Rose Red is a rebel with a permanent chip on her shoulder because people have only ever heard of her sister. Blue Beard is a terrifying millionaire. None of them age, and they all have to support themselves and somehow get along for eternity.

I guess I find this series interesting for the same reason I find the comic Unwritten interesting: they both turn fictional worlds inside out, shaking the characters loose into the real world. I understand the impulse, because maybe it’s a way to see, and test, the strength of a fictional creation. Can your character adapt? Does she have legs of her own, or can she only survive buoyed by magic? Can you shore up someone else’s unsteady creation and make him or her do some different kind of work?

On the other hand, part of me resists this porousness between fantasy and real worlds. I want the world of a fantasy novel or story, perhaps of any novel and story,  to feel complete and intact and, frankly, safe: safe from me as I am safe from it. I don’t want to be bringing my mundanity in with me like some kind of pox, and I also like to take breaks from these worlds which tend to be scarier and nuttier and more intense than daily life. When I set down a book to feed the dog or brush my teeth, I like that feeling of closing a door that I can open again when I want, or leave shut. (I shut the door on Lolita for eight months the first time I read it — I think the longest time I ever did that and eventually opened it again.)

I’m not in any fear of the three little pigs (turned bloody revolutionaries in Fables) showing up in my living room, so I’m not sure what I’m after here, except I think my attachment to reading is essentially that of a child: to run toward danger and yet be safe, to be lost but always feel it in my power to be found. In one scene in Fables Snow White races to Bigby’s assistance armed with the vorpal blade, and you laugh and also feel nervous seeing her carrying it around, because it seems it should never be used against any less (or less ridiculous, or less murkily defined) foe than the Jabberwock. It seems it can only be misused in the mundy world, which is probably one of the points of the comic: look how we misuse our fantasies, or look how they misuse us.

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

I’ve been wanting to write about my trip to San Quentin for a week now,  but the odds of striking the wrong note about visiting a prison — too sanctimonious, too nonchalantly un-sanctimonious, too cloying about how gracious the inmates were, too TV-stereotype-confirming about how creepy the walk across the yard was, too too too — were great enough to keep me away. So I decided I’d just blog about any old thing, and then I got hung up there, too, because I couldn’t think of what the title of the post should be. So then I decided to look at my bookshelf and give the post the title of the first book spine that grabbed my attention. And there you have it: Michel Foucault’s Discipline & Punish, big gold block letters on a black background.

Full disclosure: I have not read this book. It’s my mom’s book. She has definitely read it. A lot of her books wound up at my house when she moved last year, and now I look at least 75% more erudite than I actually am. But I know the book is about prisons.

Fuller disclosure: My mom runs the program that invited me out to the prison to read. The invitation went something like this: “You’d better come and talk about your book on my show, young lady,” except I just put the ‘young lady’ in there for tone, since she doesn’t actually talk like a 1950’s schoolmarm.

The program is called the Video Literacy Project. Inmates collaborate with my mom on choosing books. They read everything: books on law, tales of terror, self-help, literary fiction, a biography of Janis Joplin.  Once they did a show on the history of rock and roll. After they’ve read the books they discuss them with my mom or with each other while the inmates who run the AV lab videotape the discussion. When possible, they read books by local authors and invite them on the show. Tobias Wolff, who has many fans at SQ, came out once. The show is broadcast on San Quentin TV, and, ideally, the inmates who watch will check out the book being discussed from the prison library.

It doesn’t always work like that, of course, because no organization I can think of is more baffling and changeable than a prison. Actions that are encouraged one week are verboten the next, which means you walk around the place feeling guilty when you haven’t done anything wrong, because maybe you have. I’ve been there three or four times now, and the mood strikes me as a mix of painful opposites: chaotic and subdued, courtly and sneering, hopeless and wildly cheerful.

Maybe those are the contradictions we all live with, only bigger.  You encounter something that gives you a feeling of freedom, a burst of imagination or connection or discovery, and then something else happens to remind you of all the ways you aren’t free. Bobby, the man who interviewed me, had read Darkwood with the kind of close attention that makes an author feel like a million bucks. He asked questions about sentence structure and the recurring motif of proof, and why I had given Serena a small person’s name. (We agreed to disagree on that.) Later, off camera, we talked about the ending and he told me he missed his mother’s touch, which was moving and surprising in a way that seems particular to people who cannot hide the trouble they are in. When any stranger can see the restrictions and humiliations of your life, when everything you can’t have and can’t do is so obvious, maybe then you are free to speak matter-of-factly about pain.

My mom wrote once that growing old was what made her want to work with prisoners. The restricted body, the amplified sense of time, the importance of memory, the troubling daily uncertainties, the worse certainty — it makes sense. There’s not one easy thing about prison. I’m glad I went. My mom runs a great show.

I’m in one of those odd states where all signs point to Good: sun outside; a reasonable level of tidiness inside; a pocket of free time, not too wide or deep; a recent series of affectionate phone conversations; a palatable thing in the fridge to eat for lunch; tedious back exercises already completed for the day. But my mood arrow insists on sticking in the Poor-to-Bad zone. What color would that zone be? A muddy green?

Anyway, I thought maybe I’d go into the mood, and see if there was something interesting in there, or at least see if I could overcome ennui through actual sadness. I dug out a double live Ani DiFranco CD that performed cathartic wonders during a cross-country drive in my early twenties, but all that’s done so far is make me feel irritated by Youthful Intensity, Ani’s and, apparently, once, mine.

They had a sand-castle competition on Ocean Beach a month ago. I missed the competition, but Truckstop and I came across the remains the next day. These were giant castles, and I think most of them actually hadn’t been castles, but animals or towns or scenes from books. There were the remnants of a very hungry caterpillar and ruins of the pyramids of Giza, and lots of indeterminate valleys and hillocks. The undulations in the sand reminded me of walking around the fields on the coast of Normandy. A week later there were still a few dents and lumps, which was sort of amazing, considering the strength of the tide out there and the force of the wind. Today I feel like a person made of sand, slowly being blown to bits by small worries and indecisions and hesitations.

Eliot says something about this in Middlemarch. The section starts with Lydgate’s growing uneasiness about his relationship with his wife, Rosamond, especially as it touches on his ambitions as a scientist, and then moves on:

“But [Lydgate's] endurance was mingled with a self-discontent which, if we know how to be candid, we shall confess to make more than half our bitterness under grievances, wife or husband included. It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstance would have been less strong against us. Lydgate was aware that his concessions to Rosamond were often little more than the lapse of slackening resolution, the creeping paralysis apt to seize an enthusiasm which is out of adjustment to a constant portion of our lives. And on Lydgate’s enthusiasm there was constantly pressing not a simple weight of sorrow, but the biting presence of a petty degrading care, such as casts the blight of irony over all higher effort.”

I should add that the dog, maybe sniffing out my incipient blues like these dogs they say can smell disease or detect seizures coming on, sympathetically manufactured her own petty degrading care by eating tripe. So here we are, sad and bilious, but not so alone as Lydgate.

How can I not like that band, when the main guy is also in a band called Wolf Parade? He has all my chief interests covered. Speaking of the first: it’s only 6:00 and already the sun has gone down behind the roof of the house across the street. Barely–the house still has a sort of halo over it, what a good house, the lady always sweeps out front–but in another two minutes my apartment is going to turn sad and gray and I’ll start noticing the carpet again.

I have a Monet sort of apartment (that’s a Clueless reference for any of you youngsters out there: go rent it!): it looks great from a distance and weird up close, if by a distance we mean all flooded with beachy sunlight, and by up close we mean how it looks on foggy days, rainy days, cloudy days, early in the morning, late in the evening, or at night.

But what doesn’t look better decked out in glittery motes? The rows of books look suitably nerdy, not dusty. The duvet looks electric pink satin superpoof, not sadly behaired and beflecked. The rug (the rug goes over the carpet; the carpet is unspeakable) looks almost Persian. Even the pets look better in the sun, mostly because they are likely to be asleep instead of mewling, grimacing, scratching, biting, barking, or washing in despicable places. Even I look better: hello, tan illusion! Hello, summertime feet!

Now the sun is definitely down as far as I’m concerned. Foolish romantic people from other parts of the city may still be getting off the train to watch the great egg yolk plop into the sea, but they had better turn around and go home again. They always forget about the wind. It’s 50 mph! It will practically blow away the egg, never mind your dermis. Sometimes I feel there is a cord, with one end tied around the sun and the other end tied around my mood. Not that I can’t cope with the fog and rain, because that can be interesting, but I like to take a bright view. Or rather, I don’t naturally take a bright view, and the sun touching my books and my pets and the little drawings by my niece and my might-as-well-be-niece and my collection of wolf miniatures (wolf parade!) and all the rest reminds me that such a view is possible, and just as good as any other view, and just as true, by drat!

There is one thing in my apartment that looks better in the gloom. It’s an old framed wood print of my mom’s. The image is of a man so sad he can’t open his eyes. He is holding his wife’s hand but turned away from her. Her face is buried in her arms. Above them is printed this poem in dark, irregular block letters:

Westron wind when wilt thou blow,
The smalle rain downe can rain.
Christ! If my love were in my armes,
And I in my bed againe.

16th C, Anonymous