Blog 41-Some Relics

I was alone by the sea on my dune, sitting in a pastel world, fawn sand, the sky barely gray, pale blue and pink. The whole encampment was asleep, except for the group of women elders, my peers. When I walked from my shelter to the beach they were already at one of the picnic tables stolen from the old Eco-park campground and moved Beachside, sorting beans to serve later in their Comedor de Las Señoras de los Frijoles. Yesterday morning I'd joined them. I felt obligated to join them along with Julia, do what the real women my age did. Even here where there was next to nothing, there was always something pulling me away from writing, some other work, even when I no longer had paid pseudo work. This day I came Beachside with my notebook, my laptop, my sack of flashdrives, my whole knapsack, to get away, try to find my mind. Later there would be no solitude, no time to think at all.
I opened an old journal at random and read.
And all along I was writing. Keeping my odd ritual, my ancient habit, of writing in the mornings, and always feeling I wasn't writing at all.
I looked away from the page. I felt an inner shudder, shame or panic that after so many years my struggle was still the same. I sat on my dune, close to the sea grape, although I didn't need its shelter yet. The sun was rising to my right, on the Base side of Palenque, and its slanted light was still gentle. I had my notebook and the knapsack filled with relics.
I remembered there had been a big box that had come with me throughout all my moves. All but the move from Ventura. But even from that move that predated my acquisition of the box, I had made sure to retain some relics: the small jewel case with the lock of my dog's hair, the birth certificate now torn at its folds, the cellophane nurse doll, the only one I had chosen among sixty dolls my father had brought me from his evangelism travels. The doll had been given to me by Enriqueta, the crazy lady who lived in an old shed in the back of the church yard in my father's first church and slept on a bed made from flattened cardboard boxes laid out on the ground. When I asked why, my father told me she refused the bed they offered her. She had a cardboard box that she took everywhere. As a little girl I used to watch her writing on the outside of the box. My Mother had forbidden me from hovering around Enriqueta trying to spy into the box. But I had managed to spy anyway and been disappointed to see what it was she wrote. Zeros. Lots of zeros in rows. And the box was completely empty!
In my own box I kept relics from every move since I left home at the age of 16. Each move I weeded and selected. My father had finally persuaded Enriqueta to move to an asilo de ancianos, and he went to say goodbye to her, with me, just before we left Ventura. I saw now that he had gone because he loved her. He knew he was one of the few people Enriqueta could tell cared for her. The asilo was a crumbling place and she lived in a room whose wall onto the patio had tumbled. I remembered thinking during that visit that at least here Enriqueta had a small cot but that probably she slept on the ground anyway. My father cared enough to include her among those he got around to saying personal goodbyes to, among the thousands he knew from his several churches and his hundreds of evangelistic campaigns. Little, wrinkled, toothless Enriqueta gave me a small doll, a cellophane nurse. That was the only doll I brought with me from my coleccion de muñecas, and the nurse doll was in the box.
But to come to the encampment I had only what I could fit in the knapsack, the jewel case with a lock from my dog's hair, the birth certificate, the nurse doll, some journals I couldn't make myself reread, an old black book of Machi's full of graffiti designs, a few manuscripts I chose because they were thin enough to fold, an envelope of tiny agenda notebooks from my years in the Partido, a handful of photographs, a small zippered case full of markers and pens...the distillation of my life.
And my own row of zeros?
I'd printed Dying at Work in block letters in the middle of one of the marble notebook covers. Here was the first entry.

Here is the list of the jobs.
Chef Emanuel, Verdad, Justice Works, InfoDes, Centro Libre, the burocrazy (several incarnations )
I looked out at the sea. I was no longer alone. The tide was coming in and with it the breaking waves on the other side of the wall of arrecifes. In the far distance to my right I saw the small bodies of the surfers.
There had been the jobs and there had been the writing. There had been the lovers. There had been the revolutions. And there had been the child. And then there had been no job. I read on:
Funny that I didn't include writing among the jobs. Nor being in the dead zone ((the dead zone, being in the dead zone was an occupation...waiting took up lots of time, waiting for the dead zone to give a sign of life. Or is it waiting to find bedrock, waiting to find the real, allow the real to manifest...The progress is from dead zone to leaving the dead zone (but taking everything in the dead zone, everything good I found there that is real...)
In the Chef Emanuel days I wrote poems out of the dead zone, and took myself to open readings, and braved getting up and reading my poems out loud, looking out at the blank, cynical faces. Had that been when it began? My hating my jobs because they kept me from writing, but then using the jobs to run away from my inability to sustain an identity as an artist?
I wrote, and then there were the voices screeching in my head, “It's not for me.”
Chef Emanuel (poems, stories, trying to go public, read; a few of us who met at open readings published a small booklet. One whole page belonged to me...)
Verdad.. (Oh the relief! I was now writing for the revolution. A few political poems I wrote in those days I published in political Islander journals...)
Centro Libre...I used to tell myself teaching reading by scribing for women, writing with women, midwifing women to write was also writing, making a living from my art.
I did make some money from the writing now and then, got paid for some readings, for putting on some plays, won two artist's fellowships.
There was the other strand of the tale, the lovers....Chef Emanuel had been Jimmy...With Danny always in the wings but then Verdad was Ori, and he was, must be, would be again when I tracked him, my partner for life, as much a part of me as my own self (and so as hurt by my self-destructions as I was)
Centro Libre...self-salvation indistinguishable from self-destruction led me to run away with Danny, who had rescued the boys when Julia and I lost them on the train.
Teaching writing at Centro Libre to the women of All Read, I discovered who I wrote for, and that to be a writer I had to collaborate with my true community to make community literature so we entered the world of print with a voice. We rooted our writing in the stories we told...
Then came the Burocrazy...didn't take long before I lost any semblance of artist identity, the biggest zero on my box. First the incarnation of the burocracy that was still about creating community literature, teaching others how to teach reading through writing. Then neoliberalism took hold, the burocracy shifted further to the right, went rogue, went burocrazy. We became, controllers, surveilers.
I sweated, my hands were cold, I looked around me and saw that if I needed to I could vomit into the trashcan. I put the notebook back into the sack. I was not yet ready to look at these things inside the box. Or I had to look at the earlier notebooks first. I took out the three notebooks I brought and shuffled them and put them into chronological order. I touched them and I cried. I looked out to sea, watched a surfer be swallowed by a wave, and I remembered a moment that belonged in the box, the sack, except I had no artifact.
I constructed a relic.
The image of little Marina came to me. The moment of the first poem, or the first poem that I remembered. This was a photograph I wished I had, so I took out my markers from the sack, Machi's old markers, and his old graffiti blackbook with just a few pages of designs for tags in the front. I 'd inherited the blackbook when graffiti fell off. I drew Little Marina lying on the cold tiles of the casa Pastoral in Todos Santos. I was writing poems in the empty room where Papi had an old battered, small, rectangular, table that had once been white, and a chair and sometimes met with the parishioners who dared to follow him to the house far away from the church where Mami had moved our little family precisely to get away from them, those parishioners who never left Mami any time with her knight. I remembered the floor tiles of all the houses when I was quite young, I lived so close to them. The floors, and the undersides of the beds, where I used to hide from beatings, flat wire meshes bolted onto wooden frames, or bare coiled springs.
In this memory that came now as I gazed at the sea and watched the surfers' heads bobbing beyond the reef wall, Papi was at his table, writing a sermon. I watched Marina and Papi in my mind's eye. I watched little Marina sneak into the sermon room quiet enough to be allowed to stay, so quiet Mami didn't know I was there. I lay on filigree design moorish tiles, cool, smelling of pinoleo, shiny from the luz brillante kerosene drops in the mop water. They were a brownish shade of yellow and had black and red Moorish filigree all over.
I had a school notebook with a brown cover and pages with lines ruled far apart.
I was writing a poem.
There were poems in the exercise books from first grade, the small block of words was to the rest of language like I was to the grownups, and I wanted to write a poem myself.
The poem was about how beautiful Mami was. I wanted to write about other things but I wanted to write and I also wanted to live, and I wanted to write near Papi, so that he would be pleased, so that I would be like him. Even then surviving as an artist involved compromise. Mami wouldn't hit me over a poem about how beautiful she was. In my heart I wanted to write just for the pleasure of putting down the words inside my mind onto a piece of paper, the pleasure of making something out of thoughts, smaller than the sea of thoughts, a place inside thought, a torchlight in there.
And now gazing at the surfers I felt little Marina's rage. I heard little Marina scream at me. You wasted my life, you threw it away. Sometimes I caught the words of her terrors, her screams inside my head. Sometimes I caught the words of the silences in the dead place.
Now I saw it, the dead place was the place where I didn't love Mami, the place where love for Mami should be. What happened to little girls who failed to bond with their mother? (Whose mothers failed to bond with them.) Did they live unreal lives in their bubble like me?
I heard Patria reply to me inside my head. "Look around you. You are living in Palenque, you've gotten ahead of the future. What life could be more real than this one?" I felt tears run down my face. I grieved for little Marina and for big Marina who struggled so hard to feel her own life. I grieved for Mami who'd done her best and it hadn't been good.
I placed the drawing and the reflection, this reclaimed memory of my first poem, in the knapsack and got up to walk. I followed the beach and then turned into Palenque on a path I'd never walked before. I made my way to La Fabrica through the maze of lean-tos, tents, campfires, clotheslines, seapines and seagrapes. I waved to Guille who sat bent over his enormous, ancient laptop typing with his index fingers very fast. I settled into my usual spot.
Where to begin to sort out the rest of the random relics in the knapsack? On the very top of the pile of artifacts, just under the first poem drawing, was a manila envelope. Life with Jimmy was written in black sharpie on the outside. I pulled out a typed manuscript, looked through it and saw it was divided into chapters each with a photo or a drawing clipped on top, each chapter like a long caption...Rather than simply read it I made a new page and began to transcribe it word for word.