Carole Maso - Break Every Rule - Essays on Language, Longing, & Moments of Desire

Not possible.

Why not? she asked.

Her good sense. Her strange faith. Her practicality. It was a consolation like no other. Certain things could actually be done, could be controlled, demystified. When her colleague, a psychiatrist I had been sent to see, decided to try to seduce this seducer, seduce this basket case in the usual business-as-usual, garden-variety abuse of power, she reports him, without hesitation, to the proper people. Her clear-thinking, straightforward sense of things. One could not help but be impressed. She acts swiftly and without fanfare. And that is it.

And how, and I do not know how exactly — that Upper West Side address over time became a saving thing — a place to go — a place to look forward to in the way I look forward to that which is extremely difficult, challenging, and mysterious and essentially impossible — what I mean is — the way I look forward to writing.

How did she reach me in time? The charm of this life. How did I find her? This one particular woman — who never uttered a word of psycho-babble, who never pretended there were answers, who never displayed anything but wisdom and care.

Her cat, her sullen teenage daughter, her lovely husband, who would from time to time make appearances — the magic of those afternoons in that prewar Upper West Side building — it was a weird bliss — even when I left frightened, or in tears.

Never known such respite.

What was happening to me?

Here is a crimson dress .

Yes?

And I stepped out of my white shift.

A memory, a pressure. Color — in a world bereft of color. Red. Timbre of blue. Touch of ochre. The beloved world — a slow coming to.

I did not dare to hope. A memory of vibrancy. Step. Ascent. Motion. Memory of motion. Not dare. Memory of scent. Of collecting mosses in the forest. Plush. Green. Once she dreamed. Grace notes. Moments of grace. I did not dare. My father and I again in the moody Saturday afternoons listening to music. Every flower. Each and every. Blooming in the snow white of my mind’s eye. Like a rose in winter opening.

Blue and red and gold brocade, stitch.

Streamers flying after.

Here is a wish, stitch.

What happened there?

Two women sitting together in a dark room on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on those days of bottomless misery when nothing seemed to give way.

We make a dress together. Something it might be possible to wear. Invent a room. And imagine somewhere it might be possible to live again.

There was safety there in that place with her, harbor, rest, comfort. Intimations of limitless possibility, integrity, pure health. Creating a place for one’s deepest longings — a child perhaps, a piece of writing never seen before. The wanting comes back. It took years. All the hope. I scarcely can believe.

In that world completely drained of color we choose red. Here is a thread.

Pass the black line through the needle’s eye and watch. Be patient. Here is a silver fish, a star, a sequin, released on a red velvet sea, swim to it. A bead of blue glass.

Two women in the perfection of the struggle. To be alive. One guiding the other. One older, wiser. Here is a strand of gold.

To live outside the thousand impositions. To live one’s life without inordinate fear, without needless apology. To invent oneself from scratch, if necessary. Against a field of possibility. Against the promise of green.

Accretion of the afternoons, years. Time passes. Years pass. Something happens. Impossible to describe or quite understand.

That opening. That clearing in the woods.

Gertrude Stein: When she shuts her eyes she sees the green things among which she has been working and then as she falls asleep she sees them a little differently.

The incredible dimensions of her kindness and intelligence and discretion. Her compassion, her intuition, her open-mindedness. Utterly free of dogma or cant. The exact opposite of what the young woman expected, grimly waiting in that foyer the first day.

To examine calmly all the destructiveness — and to look at it as if from a distance — and not judge.

When the world is snow, is flat, is cold, when all you want to do is to lie down and die into it — step into that dress.

Stitch all your wishes, fears, and the words you love most. Inscribe a hope, a worry, a sentence of your own.

Embroider your name someday. In your own handwriting.

Yellow flowers — those were buttercups. Do you like butter?

Running through a field of green.

No epiphanies, no closure, just patterns, trends, an inkling of a design. No reasons. The embracing of complexity, ambivalence, contradiction. No false crescendos. Only one’s life there, there —stretched out before one — open again. Given back. Taken back. Those endless afternoons.

Blue and green and gold brocade. Feathers, bells, someday.

The soul’s journey toward small light — the struggle toward freedom. The same journey I continue on now alone, as is necessary, as it must be.

I write every day — to be well. Have done it now for some time. Revel in it — the solace that comes from making shapes, the joy that comes from high seriousness, the humility I acquire at every turn.

It was the reach in that room Dr. E., that was so beautiful.

Is there any way I can ever let you know all that it meant to me?

How extraordinary to try and write oneself free. To live inside the language. The lifelong motion toward original expression. What an extraordinary way to spend one’s little time here.

I know I have never been ordinary — not even back then — though I did not realize it of course. As I called to my mother whom I loved so much— Mommy, Mommy , it was as if from a great distance. I was always a little outside. It might have been a clue.

Human voices — they come, they die away.

Have I ever thanked him I wonder? I think I have not. My father with his unconditional love, and his unspoken, silent but complete support. My melancholy father, with his ghost trumpet, the only figure of genuine consolation — because he understood what the others could not — in this whole universe.

A few connections now — more than enough — Helen, my parents, a handful of friends…

And this. This luminous alphabet.

And oh how now the syllables move to round and soft, to coo and smooth. To safe. To dream. Look, how it is possible to invent one’s life — on one’s own terms — entirely — almost entirely. And I am happier than I have ever been — seven months pregnant today. How can I describe this state of grace? Having finally moved through another construction, another constraint, as if through water and on to the other side.

Blue and green and sparkling. This miraculous life.

It was the reach in that room that was so beautiful.

REMARKS MADE AT BROWN UNIVERSITY GAY AND LESBIAN CONFERENCE 1994 AND AT OUTWRITE, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, 1998.

I F WRITING IS LANGUAGE and language is desire and longing and suffering, and it is capable of great passion and also great nuances of passion — the passion of the mind, the passion of the body — and if syntax reflects states of desire, is hope, is love, is sadness, is fury, and if the motions of sentences and paragraphs and chapters are this as well, if the motion of line is about desire and longing and want; then why when we write, when we make shapes on paper, why then does it so often look like the traditional, straight models, why does our longing look for example like John Updike’s longing? Oh not in the specifics — but in the formal assumptions: what a story is, a paragraph, a character, etc. Does form imply a value system? Is it a statement about perception?