Dark Tales from the Other Side of Identity

[Editor's note(s). Mme. Wren is shelving her 'comic, snarky, etc.' side and 'being real,' as the expression might go, were one appropriate for it, this morning.

I am prodding her to it, both of us being tired & blue & caught in the August uselessness.

Sifting through old words, looking for a post...looking for a life or a reason for one...]

In the South, when asked who you are, your answer begins several generations back, for in the South, we are the people who formed us.

But how does a woman of a particular age tell the story of her own life, much less the tale of those who made her. To limit the self to the pages revealed—in reviewing a lifetime, only fantasy can suppose such limiting. As though each millisecond of a life held the half-dozen tales – and on a “good” day, each fractional diminutive could hold the quarto more—and one must pull from such richness to tell “the” tale of a life; it is like sifting sand through the fingers – which words – which stories – the tide comes in and the sand washing from the fingers and the whole beach yet before you.

How does one tell a woman.

She is like a cat, yet she has nine times ninety-nine lives and if she has lived them well—.

Even then, the living of most of them is hidden. In the half-awake eyes of a cat repose many secrets.

Near a thousand thousand lives in the one life of a woman and which secrets does she tell.

How do you tell the secrets of a woman.

I was born in a small town in Georgia. My mother was a writer - what it is to be a writer in this world where art = howmuchitpays, we will not challenge here - and daughter of a writer. My grandfather's mother drafted a family biography in a time when women did not write – or maybe they did, but the Good Mother did not, nor the Good Wife; my great-grandmother was a quaint thing given to quaint notions and society did not allow much else of her; she died before I was born.

Of her sons, two were writers and one an artist. All three would die before I was born.

The arts were vivid through the generations of my mother’s family on her father's side and her mother was an artist as well; my grandmother's paintings are handed down now; some hang on my walls.

Yet for the women of my family, the call to be the Good Mother or the Good Wife was strong; one could have a gift and one could encourage it in one’s children, but to pursue an art as a profession was not done.

That is the culture of the South in which I was raised. A South filled with tales of Southern women who wrote - Carson McCullars, from the very town in which I was born - Flannery O'Conner, Georgia bred & born...older now, I am not so certain Which Tale was Told the more strongly.

And more aware now, perhaps, of the strength (or weakness) of Who Hears the Tale.

But (or because?) the hearing engendered a dichotomy in me as much as in the women who are mine now, all of them, living only in the memory & the stories I tell.

And I will allow here - for it is the Greater Story - it is not just the story of A Woman & Her Art - but of The Artist & His/Her Art...that intolerable stamping out of existence; of identity, that is the real story all artists know too well...

But that dichotomy in a woman - that specific dichotomy in a woman that rigidly divides even now a life into two parts which are distinct and contradictory and which, because of that contradiction, war inside one. Many women break out of the ambivalence to achieve more through their gifts than mere hobby, but as many do not, whether it is in the South or the Midwest or New England or a myriad other countries of the world.

My mother never achieved the brilliance of her gift, though she was of a generation of gifted and soaring women. She left behind a novel – too much of it missing now to pull to completion, but it was said once to have been complete. I read it after she died, pages scattered in several drafts amidst the poetry that survived.

But I remember a large moving box filled with my mother’s papers.

A woman who taught me that the words of a writer are sacred and none must ever be destroyed. (But o freedom...the words destroyed...

But no writer should know The Freedom of Words Destroyed...)

And after she died, only the smaller box, less than one foot by eighteen inches and not completely filled.

But I know she kept every word she ever wrote. Where did her words go? That rain-soaked corner, the storage shed where the cousin kept her boxes...

More to the tale than that. But a tale that at present cannot be told.

So my story begins with my mother, for we were twins. During the years of marriage, I faced the same defining points. Writing was never far from me; I thought to make sense of the dichotomy of being a Southern womanartist by raising my children first and then returning to write (and complete an aborted education; still, now, aborted).

My son—the younger of two children—told me a story once. For it is never just a woman’s story-- to struggle through to allowing art to survive; it is the story of all artists.

Because even though the artist requires the art to breathe, that breathing is a rasping breath; it is the asthmatic struggling for breath while the airways constrict because it invades too deeply; the air is too rich—too pure—too piercing.

It is the cold air of a winter morning in the great height of a mountain and the lungs cannot tolerate such purity.

I spoke of it to a friend once; all writers run from writing, I said, and he agreed.

Art invades identity; it is too intense.

The boy's story presses for the reality against which it was given.

Because he told me that he liked to ask people what was the first learned idea they could remember. I queried him a moment to discover exactly what it was he meant, for children do not learn abstract ideas until the mind reaches a certain maturing.

But it was the first stirrings to recognized thought--. Pre-thought, as it were. Because to know a thing as 'first' requires knowledge of before it was; of before it could be thought...

The boy told me his first remembered “learned” idea. The first thing taught him. And it was creativity.

He was at an age when he told me the story that a boy does not admit to a relationship with his mother. As he said it, his story was finished. He moved to leave the room.

But Nick, I said.

Who taught you that idea.

The boy of mere eighteen years was already stepping outside the door.

Oh, he said over his shoulder as he morphed through.

It was you.

The gift in those words. Because during the years of raising my children—both of whom I educated at home—creativity was the mainstay of our endeavor. But when I returned to writing after my responsibilities with those born to me were lessening, I began to understand just how far from believing I had strayed.

To hear—for all the ambivalence by which I was beginning to understand my own struggle was defined—that clear idea came through as the essential—not just the essence, but First Idea Learned.

They were words that redeemed.

We are not defined only by those who came before us and perhaps that is good. We catch intimations of who we are in those we cudgel into being - to live is not a choice we made, now is it. Someone chooses for us, and we don't get to argue it out before it becomes the actuality.

But for those of us who have chosen, we are defined as well by those we dreamed, who will one day cast words across their shoulders to us like salt.

But this is an unfinished tale. Perhaps another day, dull in the insensitivity with which all Augusts pummel, I will need words...I will need tales told years ago that need to be remembered ...