Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.
― Victor Hugo

Take your hand
and place your hand
some place
upon your body.
And listen
to the community of madness
that
you are.

You are
such an
interesting conversation.
​
You belong
here.
 — Pádraig Ó Tuama

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

...

I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands

...

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.
 - Margaret Atwood

These poems
they are things that I do
in the dark
reaching for you
whoever you are
and
​are you ready?
 - June Jordan

The term Wicked Wednesday has never been more apt.
 
I find myself wondering if sexy pictures even matter in the world I woke up in today. I suspect they still do but I wanna get this out first.
 
Trump is president. I can’t even believe I’m typing those words.
 
I knew Hillary wasn’t popular – hell, I didn’t like her either – but given the choice between a seasoned politician and a reality show? I didn’t think that choice would be so hard.
 
The more worrying thing proven by this election, however, is the American level of insularity. We Americans have shown how much we fear change and that we would prefer to lock our doors and block our borders and hope we can return to a mythical “easier” time when definitions were simple. When American presidents were white(ish) and marriage meant a man and a woman, when there were only two bathroom signs and when boys could be boys behind closed doors with no harm to their public reputations.
 
But this isn’t a thing. Trump will be able to do a lot of things, like make us the talking point of the world stage and cause every American traveler to suffer through the question “WFT just happened to your country??”, but he will not be able to put all Americans back in the closet. He doesn’t have that power.
 
The world is connected. We are connected. No one person can tell us how to act and who to fuck and who to love. We’ve come out of that dark place and we won’t go back.
 
But somehow we all have to wake up to the world as it actually is. We Americans need to learn to see our country as a multi-colored lusty community of humans, some of whom vote for Trump and others who want to visit Mexico. We need to accept that this is America and stop yearning to live in a country where everyone agrees with us.
 
I’m included in this group.  
 
I clearly live in a country where a man I disrespect who horrifies me can be elected to the highest office. But I'm the minority. It will take me some time to figure out how absorb that. How to accept that my view of the world has also been insular and padded by people who agree with my views. That I too am intolerant and out of touch with people who don’t agree with me.
 
There are deeply disappointed and heartbroken people in our nation this morning. And there are those who feel like it’s Christmas morning and they’ll finally get everything they’ve always wanted. Their disappointment and heartbreak is coming because no one gets everything they want.
 
We all have to wake up to reality. This is it. We are a nation of vast differences and we are not helped by wanting all the tolerance for ourselves while refusing to give tolerance to anyone who disagrees with us.
 
We are all connected. To each other. That reality will be a harsh mistress for the next four years. So, we all have a job to do. All of us Americans.
 
We need to learn to live with each other. 

Recently I was in a city where all of the public art had themes of failed romance, yet with overtones of hope. One depiction after another of lost dreams and gutted, broken love with a live undercurrent of promise and the optimism of next time—like a bright green tendril curling through a blackened, burned-out building. 

I think of this art when I read Fear of Flying—a book of so many questions. 
​
Erica Jong's heroine, Isadora, spends a lot of time talking about men and the conflict of being an artist and a woman. She asks the very real questions:

"Who do women look to for guidance? Who are our mentors? Who are our heroines?"

She lists the beacons of literary greatness such as Sylvia Plath "sticking her head into an oven of myth" and Lillian Hellman obsessed with Dashiell Hammet so "he'll love her as he loves himself," as well as Georgia O'Keefe "alone in the desert" and Simone de Beauvoir who "never makes a move without wondering what would Sartre think?" 

She calls this group of female artists "shy, shrinking, and schizoid," and notes that they are almost all suicides or spinsters so "Was that where it all led?"

Do these great ladies reflect history or do they shape history? Are they simply a mirror in which we see ourselves or are they a window? 

Mythology is a strange beast. I think of it like tattooing. When people get tattoos, does the art take life from being endlessly visible? From being talked about and explained and thus acquiring its own story of a time and place and mood? Or is the story an expression of something already inside the person that has simply taken shape in visible ink? 

In that same way, are these strange, severe, suicidal heroines of literary mythology our future as female artists? Are they showing us what we are? Or are we female artists shaping ourselves around their example? Do we use them as wayposts, following them into the swamp where great art only comes from a shit life because there's a limited amount of energy accessible to us and if we spend it all on art, there isn't any left over for life. 

I struggle with that balance as a writer. I find that if I'm living a story-worthy life, I have less energy to document it, and if I'm not documenting it, is it really happening?

Conversely, the times that I've spent the largest percentage of time in my daily life just writing, I'm the most cloistered and solitary and miserable. I'm not sure how to pour my lust and love and energy and passion into art without sacrificing the actual art of living. 

Isadora asks, "Where was the female Chaucer? One lusty lady who had juice and joy and love and talent too?"

​Where are those women who are creating great art and living great lives? Do they exist?

Juice, joy, love and talent. Isn't that a glorious description? 

I want to be that. A green tendril of hope in the shit swamp because we all deserve better options than suicide or spinsterhood, especially in the service of art.

Juicy and joyful. Let it be so, world without end. Amen. ​