The Post-It Always Sticks Twice

Frequent visitors to the blog will probably already have surmised that both Zelda and Vivienne are big fans of the ever-Fashionable SatC.  Frequent visitors to the blog will probably also already have predicted the fact that, often, when regaling each other with tales of dating woes past, present, and potential, Zelda and/or Vivienne will respond with, “This is like that time on Sex and the City when Charlotte is baking all of that bread because she thinks Harry will marry her if she changes enough” (actually, that example would be Zelda talking to Vivienne, really.  Vivienne will be honest).  And frequent visitors to the blog will probably be fans of SatC themselves, or, at least, be familiar enough with the life and times of Carrie Bradshaw to know that the title of this post relates to the time when Carrie awakens to find that Berger has broken up with her … on a Post-it note.

Which raises an important philosophical question: is there any possible break-up worse than a Post-it break-up?  Which raises an important philosophical answer: oh, yes, yes, my friends, there is, and Vivienne has experienced it: the phone call, received a-day-and-a-half-post-major-surgery-with-four-month-recovery, when one is on ridiculous amounts of opiates and isn’t even quite sure that one really exists, when one’s boyfriend announces that he “just has some questions” and proceeds to launch into a litany of outrages that end on a break-up.  That might just be worse than a Post-it.  And what might be worse than THAT might be the fact that, two months later, said now-ex-boyfriend began to leave a trail of obviously-passive-aggressive poems on his MySpace page clearly addressed to his now-ex-girlfriend-who-refuses-to-speak-to-or-of-him, including but not limited to Yeats’ “When You Are Old and Grey,” the intended message of which very clearly seemed to be that despite the above-mentioned phone call, no one, and he meant NO ONE, would ever love his ex-girlfriend the way that he did.

Now, gentleman.  Seriously.  Here is another lesson in the Wooing of Vivienne: if you must be passive aggressive, be creative about it.  Don’t be passive aggressive with YEATS, for Christ’s sake.  What could possibly be more obvious?  At least respect the Viv enough to produce original examples of passive aggression.  Be passive aggressive with vague references to Stephanie Strickland’s V.WaveSon.Nets.  Be passive aggressive with quotes from Martin Buber.  Be passive aggressive with pictures of The Nothing from The Never-Ending Story, or with cartoons of hedgehogs, or with Tootsie Rolls.  With Yeats?  Please.  Gentlemen.  Seriously.

Which brings us to tonight’s FaOuLiPoWriMoFaPo: a passive aggressive OuLiPo-ization of Yeats (which, gentlemen, would, incidentally, be acceptable).  For this poem, I am using the constraint of antonymy, or antonymnic translation, found on page 50 of the OuLiPo Compendium.  This constraint, which “means the replacement of a designated element by its opposite,” has been applied by Lynn Crawford, Marcel Benabou, Raymond Queneau, and, below, an embittered Vivienne, who seeks to reclaim her love of Yeats from her general blech towards her ex.

When You Are Young

When you are young and bright but empty of wakefulness,
And shaking your head by the water, put back this scrap of paper,
And quickly scan, and forget the hard ignoring
Your ears had forever, and of their light shallow;
How few hated your hours of sad blundering,
And hated your ugliness with hatred true or false,
But many women hated the settled Devil in me,
And hated the happiness of my unchanging fist;
And straightening up away from the darkened freedom,
shout, very happily, how Hatred returned
And stood still upon the valleys below
And shone her fist in front of a solitary dark.