Barbara Streisand |

And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers!

June 19, 2008

One might be able to tell from the title of this post that Viv is back to her old self. Well, though, not quite. Not quite. Viv is not quite back to her old self. The Angst Mines are not completely back in operation, but the Angst Miners have realized now that their holiday was short-lived, as a definite possibility for the discovery of new underground stores of Angst has emerged, and though they are still whistling, it is a different tune — a happy tune with a hint of sadness, a hint of regret, a hint of the sense that happiness is really, after all, just the absence of the Complete and Utter Bone Chomping Despair that causes one to bum cigarettes from undergraduates and lie in the floor with an ash tray (which looks suspiciously like a bust of Joan Crawford) balanced on your chest while listening to Eliot Smith’s “Condor Avenue” over and over on repeat. The Angst Miners are not yet whistling “Condor Avenue,” though, or even “Waltz XO,” but “Happy Days Are Here Again” by the luminous vocal virtuoso Barbara Streisand. And there is hope, here, as Barbara Streisand herself would later become the kind and benevolent Dr. Lowenstein, who would teach us to embrace our grief, to cry, to love, goddamn it, to love.

But before we learn to love, this: cognitive dissonance (though sometimes Vivienne wonders if learning to love is not, in fact, learning to accept — or, in her Moments of Angst, ignore — cognitive dissonance). An explanation of this rambling: so, we all think we know who we are, right? Or, at least, we all see ourselves as a certain person. What causes a problem — what causes the cognitive dissonance — is when we’re forced to realize that other people do not see us as the people we think we are. To wit: Vivienne has, upon occasion, been dragged, after multiple shots of tequila, to a Dance Club. After multiple shots of tequila, Vivienne has taken it upon herself to dance. And, under the influence of said tequila, Vivienne has thought she was a damn good dancer. A solid gold dancer. A pure solid gold wonder of dancing technology. Vivienne has, through her tequila-blurred eyes, seen people staring at her, and assumed they are admiring her solid freaking gold dancing skills. And then Vivienne has realized that they are laughing, because they do not see her as a solid freaking gold dancer, but instead as an octopus pulled from the water and left to thrash its ungainly limbs upon the dance floor. To wit the second: Vivienne has, in conversation with those dear to her, sometimes realized that they do not see her as she sees herself. Vivienne has, in fact, realized that she is very definitely playing A Role in their lives, and that who she is, actually, really, makes very little difference at all. Dissonance. Which leads me to this point, where I get all meta on you: you are a text constantly re-envisioned through the eyes of other authors. The world is OuLiPo, and OuLiPo is the world. We are trapped in a labyrinth of our own making, and we will never escape because we will never be able to see others as they see themselves, and vice versa.

Vivienne is now amazed at how quickly that crashed down into hopeless desperation, and would like to make up for that with this:

And with this! My OuLiPoPoem for the evening. The restriction I used was homoconsonantism, in which the sequence of consonants is kept and all of the vowels replaced. I have provided 8 variations on the line “Foul is fair and fair is foul.” Because if nothing else is true, that is. And, of course, lollipops. Gum drops. Kittens with sweaters on. Kittens with sweaters on. Kittens with sweaters on.