The Rising Sun Neighborhood Newsletter

More from Anne Herbert, whose Rising Sun Neighborhood Newsletter has appeared here before. Random House will publish a collection of Anne’s writings, illustrated by Kathleen O’Neill, in the Fall.

— Ed.

Reagan’s now moving toward an acceptable form of birth control — kill off those horny nineteen-year-old boys.

The plants are tired of the guns. They think they’re more than dumb. The plants made people for entertainment and because they wanted to taste the inside of our mouths and feel the propulsive force of our assholes, but they’re really tired of the guns.

The plants are going to let us do the bombs, because that’ll get rid of the guns and us gun makers. (How much of your income last year did you contribute to the manufacture of guns?) Then they’ll start again to make a rootless clown, this time aiming for someone with bigger feet and smaller brains and a non-metaphorical heart.

And on April 15 it says, “Bought any good wars lately?”

The planet wanted language, but what did she want language for?

I’m tired of three times a day figuring out food. I’m going to eat the wind.

Blind people touch trees. We’re not allowed. We just walk by.

The Earth is the clit of the universe. Rub it gentle. Suck it long.

How would you react to a being with iridescent shoulders and how would you react to a pigeon?

“Everyone assumes that if humans go to space at all it will be our culture or none.”

— bus voice

“If what you do to prove you’re a real woman is get pregnant and make people and what you do to prove you’re a real man is go out and kill people . . . how are we going to get out of that?”

— Kathleen

The other day my brother-in-law was kidding me about his picking up my habit of calling his male cat, Max, she. I said unless I consciously think about it beforehand, I call dogs, he, and cats she. This went back to my childhood when I thought that dogs and cats were, respectively, male and female versions of the same animal. That even though it was not a matter of importance I had found it a habit difficult to break.

He laughed and said that when he was young he knew how many puppies would be in a litter. Eight. He could tell, he said, by counting the number of tips of their tails that protruded.

— James Webb

My little grandmother who had everything wrong with her — arthritis, phlebitis, anemia, to say nothing about her nerves — said to me, “The one thing I don’t want to do is lose my mind. As long as I have my mind. . . .” She used it mostly for playing cards, the horses, memorizing the words to her favorite songs and bugging my mother. Nevertheless, she thought her mind was important to her.

And she did, in the last year of her life, lose it. At first she only wrote cheques on banks where she didn’t have accounts and phoned us in cities where we didn’t live, but gradually hallucinations took over her days and nights, mostly in bizarre sexual forms. Then she was convinced she was in a motel or rest home or hospital and begged to be taken home, not to the house where she then, in fact, lived, but to her childhood home, to her parents, sisters and brother. Reclusive as a result of illness and fear, she hadn’t gone out socially for years. People kept sending her invitations because she refused with flowers. Now, after twenty years, she began to accept those invitations, and members of the family had to take her to garden and cocktail parties of the retired military, the garden club. She swung in on the arm of a grandchild, wielding her cane, found a place to sit and raffled off the cherry in her old fashioned to other bemused and ailing old people.

Once, on the way home from one of these parties, she said to me, “Do you remember how I used to say to you I was afraid of losing my mind?”

“Yes,” I answered cautiously.

“Well, it’s not so bad,” she replied. “I think, is that the world I was afraid of for all those years? Is that all it is?”

Divorced when it was not the thing to be divorced, married a second time to an alcoholic she wouldn’t divorce because a second time would prove she was at fault, my little grandmother had to lose her mind to lose her shame, to be free of all that social garbage. Her last night of consciousness, she sang every song she’d ever known and my mother sang with her, everything from “Dixie Dan, ambling, rambling, gambling minstrel man” to “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and “To Kiss in the Sunlight,” two favorites of mine as well, since I was also afraid of my loneliness and the secrecy imposed upon my heart.

— Jane Rule, “So’s Your Grandmother: Free to Live,”
Body Politic: A Magazine for Gay Liberation, March 1983

The piece I just quoted from is about coming out, coming out of the closet secretly gay people hide in. I like how it says there are so many closets, so many people carrying around what they’re sure is (to them? to others?) the awful thing — I think we should have international coming out day where we gather our assorted courage and tell a few friends or the world The Awful Thing and find out — they already knew and didn’t care, they didn’t know and can’t see what the problem is, they’re shocked but get over it and are bigger in a while . . . or, or, or it’s awful to them too and we lose a friend. But of course after international coming out day was over our less tolerant friends and we ourselves might have to be more tolerant because of finding out how many flaws, how many deviations from the Father Knows Best world there really are walking around on two legs.

Organic orchard people have a hard time selling their apples. Their apples taste better, much better, transcendently better than the ones from the store, but they have little marks on them from bugs. Little marks! Yuck! People won’t taste them and even if they do may be so busy still seeing them they don’t listen to their mouths.

Organic apples taste better and look bumpy because they grew up in the real world they were made for and not inside a poison tent that protects supermarket apples from flaws and life. A man who manages bands who appear at Holiday Inns says the most important thing he has to teach his clients is how to dress. He’ll fire them for sloppiness much sooner than for not practicing because, he says, Americans know much more about clothes than they do about music.

Where are we living? In closets made of poison lies? How perfect do we expect our friends to be and where did we pick up that idea of perfect? Would you rather have a relaxed friend with a few bugs showing or a tense one who looks just the way people in your culture, whatever culture you share, are supposed to look? What kind of friend would you rather be? How long since you’ve eaten some food that looked like it grew up in dirt?

What is property? Property is what they can take away from you.

What is wealth? Wealth is what we share.

The sidewalk says “Trees are brothers,” “Smash the state,” and “Anarchy” and “Agamazu.” I wonder what that means. The window by the sidewalk says “Massage Studio. Come in.” The tree beside the sidewalk doesn’t say.

If I walk on concrete, drive in vinyl, stare at video all day, I’m nature hungry when I fuck with you. Will you be my forest and my ocean and my friend and the family that I can barely stand? Will it work out? I’m sure it would if I had enough money.

— “I don’t know about that — it being a miracle. I think it’s relatively simple. Rare . . .”

— “That’s often what miracles are — relatively simple and rare.”

— someone and Kathleen

Witchcraft is the technology of anarchy.

— Alice Molloy, In Other Words

We didn’t go through darkness but the twilight of dawn, and there were so many birds singing you couldn’t help noticing it.

— Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks

Anti-Semitism

They don’t smile, you know. They must not like me. They work longer than I do (always in the store, money-hungry), selling things I need — they’re sneaking up on me.

Why are they so dark without being black? It isn’t fair.

Why do they work so hard? I know they’re rich, some of them, all of them — it says so in the paper. They’re hiding something.

But that’s not why I hate them. I hate them because they killed gas. It was divine, I remember, filling the tank for a couple of bucks and driving — driving because I felt bad, driving because I felt good, driving to find out who else was driving and they can’t take that away from me and they did. Now they’re down the street with their back rooms filled with gold bullion that should be gilding my car, selling me cigarettes at 1 a.m. and not smiling. I don’t understand. I hate.

What would real life be like if it were real?

“You’re magic,” said Martha.

“Naturally,” said the turtle. “When a race lives as long as mine does, it stands to reason it would pick up a few rudiments. Of course,” it added proudly, “I happen to be a particularly intelligent specimen, even for a turtle.”

“Can all turtles talk?” asked Katharine.

“Oh, that!” said the turtle. “We pick that up the first fifty years.”

“Why don’t you do it oftener then?” said Jane.

“We couldn’t be bothered!” snapped the turtle, looking at her with no great liking.

— Edward Eager, Magic by the Lake

“It took me all afternoon to get someone like Don or Irving to help me run my program and then I got both of their attention and if you have the attention of both Don and Irving it’s trouble because it’s brain overkill. They talk so fast and they know what they’re talking about — to each other.”

— bus voice

Remember, smartasses. We’re here to help.

— “Father, this is the day to stand up.”

— “No, I’d rather stay in my chair.”

— Werner Herzog, Heart of Glass

“Life’s greatest danger lies in the fact that men’s food consists entirely of souls.”

— an Eskimo shaman quoted by
Fred Donaldson in Lomi School Bulletin, Fall 1982

Never has so much information been available in such quantity and with so little effort. Never have there been so many scholars and scientists to use it, to walk the colonnades of the great library. But a deluge of information may mean a dearth of creation, and it may be that our intellect works best when it relies more on feeling than on fact. Although that may be to go too far, it is clear that information, and its efficient management, is not invariably valuable if its effect is to constrain exploration, and resist creativity and imagination. Books, and whole libraries, are of themselves mere inert artifacts, which can incapsulate only the shell of the living culture they seek to preserve. Imagination, not management skills, will make it resonate again.

— W. Donald McTaggart, “Rolls or Pages”
in Rising Sun Neighborhood (the book)