Eileen Myles reads an excerpt from INFERNO (a poet’s novel) from Rattapallax on Vimeo.

by Eileen Myles

My house was about seventy acres. There was a maze of bushes with blackberries on them that squirreled around the pond. Me and Rose would play Minotaur and hero – I was always the hero, she was always the Minotaur and invariably we wound up in the woods. It was truly easy to get lost in these winding trails, but having nothing else to do I developed a knack for their twists and turns and for a very long time well a couple of months I was content to push daily through these itchy furrows, craning my head from time to time to spot the white bird house, a bird mansion, on a tall stick that indicated the direction I had come from. Someone had given the birds a house as least as good as the people’s. It was a very in-joke.

If all went well I arrived in the woods — plowed through a ring of them, not so wide, then arriving in the upper meadow which was an occasion to rejoice with Rosie who would throw herself down in the bright green grass and roll and I would then turn around in all directions to grin and admire it all and think look where I am. Sometimes we’d break out from the woods into the grass to find a couple of bright young deer leaping along the opposite edges of the forest. She’d go leaping afterwards. The whole Pennsylvania adventure was a disorienting one for me vis-à-vis my dog since she was like an old friend you go traveling with only to realize she is fluent in several languages she never mentioned to you before. With the deers she also began to perform these kind of sprung leaps through the deep grass, a kind of swimming, it seemed. When she stood in the woods for the first time and heard something and stopped abruptly and stood still. She then bent her right paw in an animal salute to the hunt, to attention. C’mon Rose you’re from New York, where d’you learn that. Instead she was deaf and dumb to all that she had known before. She was another dog. I gave her a native name: Pasquati. And when I changed her I changed myself. I took my shirt off and I simply became no one, no name, no sex, just alive moving across the land with a dog. Art brought me this.

The period during which I had unlimited access to the house and the land was about two years but felt much longer. I had friends come to stay once in a while but to maintain the illusion of timelessness and infinite space I was mostly alone writing pages and pages of novels and poems making a fire talking on the phone, watching every movie Pasolini ever made, and the Dali Lama – just a hair each night (he spoke of “refuge”) while I was lying in the grand bed, also reading Deleuze’s great book, Masochism.

He said the masochist habitually lays out a story, a fetischized chain of objects or events, which the seeker must thoroughly immerse herself in in order to reach the unexposed but desired conclusion. Which was . . .

A myth got built in my time at the house. That there was a perfect way to be and a perfect way to write. I woke every morning, kind of early, eight and began to drink coffee and read. In those mornings I read Manuel De Landa’s War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, which explained through a careful analysis of the history of explosives how an engine (and a general, like Napoleon) capitalizes on inherent differences in order to build a story chaotically. I read the thick emphatic sentences of Lucia Berlin. I read swift little Neuromancer. I read every day till I was full – and anxious, which took a little less than an hour. Alone a person begins to know herself like a clock. I was a 43-year old calendar of shifting desire that summer. Do other women notate their cycle, imagining themselves not an open plain exactly but a pond, not enclosed so much as focused in a way so that the shifting density of my itch, my urge, like a radio station of sex or fertility was now on this setting or that. In some quiet completely absorbing way I read me every day, especially when I was reading. I read my tone which altered along the slope of the month and it would inform me when the reading must end and I couldn’t bear my body anymore in its fake agreement with my mind, the body then vaulting over the mind’s walls. I got up from my lounge chair in the front yard and swiftly tugged on my running clothes.

Rosie was young, 2-years old, so she came along for the forty-minute gallop two laps around our estate. Up the dirt road, down the paved hill, Round Hill Road, along the shady tree-lined street where other houses peaked out behind the leaves, people to have sex with I wondered, and finally up a back road onto our land again. And birds watched us, a few dogs and always the hen and her chicks. I’d do it once, then again. One morning when I started out I saw up in the sky something that resembled an old set-in fan that had removed cooking odors and smoke from the kitchen I grew up in. Now that fan was turning in the sky. I felt dizzy watching the tiny spiral of blades flickering and I thought I am going to die — not today — but exactly like this. My insides will cast a whirling image for me to concentrate on — my heart or something even older, failing. My light. I named it all – the trees, the road, the frightening fan — the undiscovered country – which yielded a tiny poem I could never get right — the tenses always at odds, but it really happened. I saw my death in the sky.

Running was followed by sitting. I wasn’t a buddhist or anything. I just created a pile of pillows, set the clock and meditated on everything as little as possible for half an hour. It felt good after the run, though usually I was starving and sat there on my pillow thinking about food. Shredded wheat and bananas, a huge portion, which I quickly devoured after the alarm rang and with a tiny prayer I sat down to write. The whole process took two or three hours and if any element of it were protracted or removed, I not so much couldn’t write, but didn’t trust my day’s work which just had a lousy feeling. Cause on top of everything, I wanted my writing to feel good and for that one summer it mostly always did. It’s an impossible standard, but I was actually there once.

My joke about the room I wrote in was that it looked like Goethe’s studio. In college I wanted to study Spanish but the line was long so I wound up studying German. By the second year we were already reading entire books. Werther was our first. To read The Sorrows of the Young Werther in the original German when you’re young — if you were young like I was young. Well, I was just fucked. My incessant longing was now validated by the genius of the past. Even later when Frank O’Hara took pot shots at yearning in his famous essay Personism I felt like well he’s just being old-fashioned.

The summer I lived in the house I was actually part of a reading tour organized by Semiotext(e) that brought us to Goethe’s home, in Weimar.

Our host, Sasha Anderson, was a small dirty guy in leather jeans and sandals with an illustrious girlfriend — Rheinheld — long flowing blonde hair and her family had a barbecue for us in their vineyard. Millions of sausages were smoking away on a vast outdoor grille. Sylvere, who was Jewish — I think everyone was on the tour except me, but Sylvere had barely escaped the Holocaust as a child and at the barbecue he was having fits. On the whole tour, really. Some Jews can go to Germany but not Sylvere. And one by one, during the barbecue, we were led away alone into a small library and told by the cameraman and his friends to sit on a stool in front of a wall of decrepit gilded books. A light shone right in my eyes. The moment had come. I was being interviewed by German teevee.

How do you like Goethe? Do people in America think much about Goethe. I was actually very excited to answer the questions of the cameraman and his friends but it was my discomfort and ignorance that they wanted. My American stupidity. My knowledge was not of great interest to them. People don’t care I told them. They nodded knowingly.

Goethe’s studio was one of the rooms we got to peek into — across a rope. I remember his big black carriage filling the garage, his serene private garden out back and the great classical busts of his men friends that punctuated the house’s furnishings but I actually don’t remember the study. Who’s asking these questions anyhow. I think a poet’s study is just an idea. Wherever I’m writing, it is.

In Bellfast my studio had extremely high ceilings with wooden beams and stark white stucco walls and large windows onto the front. The room was in fact the summer kitchen. It’s a landmark German farmhouse, a little gem Eden said. It cost us a million bucks. It was sort of cool that she told me.

Faye and Laurie visited once most of the writing was done. I had been alone for a couple of months and they broke the ice. I remember walking to greet them as they got out of their car. How can I explain that the house was situated on grass and you walked up the slope from the house still on the ubiquitous greenness and now the two of them were standing outside of their car, which they had parked on grass and I felt like a Martian floating out of my ship. I guess cause they were seeing me. To write you get really alone. Now I had the sensation of having just landed or was dwelling in the softest space. It was this insane country living. Rarely does a lesbian, not this lesbian — rarely had I ever felt this cool. I was wearing this green shirt and my hair had grown into some condition of excess. Kind of Wildean, I thought. I was part of this place, and now was even the host of my friends’ enjoyment. We all wanted female artists to look and feel this well. It was that rare narcissistic moment — a rousing pleasure for all of us. Coming up from my estate I greeted my guests. I showed them my pile of manuscript and later I think Faye cooked – oh she brought food and Laurie was just kind of wild and generous, everyone was.

My dog’s snoring. And it’s pouring outside right now. I enjoy thinking back. It wasall so perfect.

Until recently – maybe this summer or the last one — I have been trying to return to that perfection of feeling, setting and — because the only virginity I am really familiar with is the past. And, happily, the one unambivalent fact of getting older is I don’t still want that place, or any place anymore. It’s a realization I can trace like the growth of an idea.

Take the time that him and I had sex. It was a poet friend, many years ago. He didn’t fuck me but he had his hand way up inside and acknowledging that I was a lesbian he proclaimed what a waste. I thought what is so special about this cunt but I also I thought how great that it’s special. He wanted to fuck me and I knew for sure in that moment that I would become pregnant. It was why he was admiring my cunt. He felt it was his. If it was mine his feeling was wasted. Without thinking too much about it I enjoyed being wasted for him.

Like a spilt glass of milk, my life. A white pool shimmering on the floor. My corrupt womanhood: A waste. I feel the same way about being a writer. Staying up all night burning my brain cells, for years, swallowing tons of cheap speed, also for years, eating poorly, pretty much drinking myself to death. And then not. Contracting whatever std came to me in the seventies, eighties, nineties, smoking cigarettes, a couple a packs a day for at least twenty years, being poor and not ever really going to the doctor (only the dentist: flash teeth), wasting my time doing so little work, being truly dysfunctional, and on top of that, especially my point, being a dyke, in terms of the whole giant society, just a fogged human glass turned on its side. Yak yak yak a lesbian talking. And being rewarded for it. Not only wasted, but useless, rancid, a wreck. It has come to me slow. Ten years ago Jane De Lynn said let’s face it, Eileen, we are ruined. She didn’t mean by some romantic sadness. She meant in fact. Jane’s a little older. I wasn’t ruined yet.

Jane had a good education, Iowa, Barnard. She may’ve fucked up, but she’s basically rich. I mean she may’ve been ruined earlier for some of these same reasons – and privilege of course will make a person rot . . . look at men. Nothing good there. But probably she was just being contrary or ironic. Or wanted to tell me that I was ruined and didn’t think I could handle it alone. I was actually pretty hard working and nervous in my forties and still thought it was possible to be good, to get it right, to win.

Nope, I am destroyed. A shattered boat of a person. A broken window here, a lousy bell there. An old crappy dyke with half a brain leaking a book. A drippy excrescence. A schmear.

I read a long time ago about a man who seemed normal but when he died they performed an autopsy (why do they always perform an autopsy if he was so normal?) they discovered his brain was just this little piece – the part that connects the left to right — he had only that. Like a headband. The doctors couldn’t imagine how the guy lived and functioned, never mind thought. It made me shiver. I felt that could be me. Not only wasted but partial. A blur on the handle. I wrote the first chapter of this book, my fucking inferno, and New York blew up. If I died tomorrow I could really care less. I’d be relieved. Look at me: My face is an old catcher’s mitt. Blam. Thunk. Reactions and dents. A cold bent lighthouse. Brrr. A melancholy lava lamp. A woman. A man. A butch. A bitch. Rots of ruck. Watching the fragments float by for years. I’m done. . . H’wo.

It’s me.