[Editor's note(s). The following was drafted on the day noted; however, due to the reality that Mme. Wren is not very fond of birthdays, she held it & would not allow me to even look at it.
It was indeed writ upon the day noted above: however, it is actually released on this later day that is only noted by those who are faithful readers & will wonder whether they Missed Something: after all, what is time anyway - in the world of blogging, all of it occurs backward (which the Wren notes she is Old Enough to Chortle about)...in any case, here the post is, as Wren thinks she (possibly) can deal now with the day having happened.
Err.
Comprenez ??]
Today is a nativity of my entry onto the planet. Happy birthday to me. And these things do happen: both second cups of coffee & birthdays and more often than not, likely, on the same day.
One of those days wherein I can ponder small necessities such as 'a' nativity or 'the;' 'onto' the planet or 'in;' how many cups of coffee a day should be allowed, and so on. Won't say how many such nativities I have known. Seems to at least be at that point where it is 'many' - and said point allows (if not mandating) careful review of all the days - of all the years: not just nativities.
I thought of posting a poem here to commemorate the day.
But it turned out that the only one suitable was one which neither Isobel, the Editor or I could remember - err, writing - which is to say, all of us remembered its writing but none could be quite certain which one of us wrote it and - to be sure - none of us really wanted to claim it, even as none of us wanted to let any other claim...
One of the more amusing things about being fictional.
Which is to say, do you ever consider that - for whatever protection(s) he needed in starting out as Mark Twain, the Good Mr. Clemens likely grew to become Mark Twain? What is, after all, a persona but a skin we wear...that only we could wear but does not quite fit: like a pair of the original denim jeans - do you remember, back when you had to wash & wash & wash & then still wear into them...
Oh for a place where you could find real denim.
Trading masks, yes, at the carnival - we can look at it that way, too, and everyone knows some people choose to wear UPS masks & some choose to wear - err, 'sanitation engineer' masks and some choose to wear...teacher or preacher or bluestocking or...
Well. You get the point. One could suppose some of us like to maintain the costume room itself and when no one is looking, we try on all the masks with great glee...
But I did wander away for a moment there, didn't I. And one must wonder, do I wander at will or wander at loss. You see, some words just need to be plain. You can do with them as you choose, working & reworking until something sublime has been made of the moment. And (as all Resident Personages Mentioned Above are women) to declare a thinking such as Said Poem declared when One Is A Woman immediately gains a Political Edge...the empowerment of women, etc.
Times there are when even I will concede to a wee bit of power needed.
But not the kind that is so popular today. So the poem languishes, needing to be tended yet still pushed away; claimed by too many & yet not claimed by anyone. Needing perhaps words with more weight but preferring the simple, unadorned Nabisco cracker plain of exactly what it says & exactly how it says it...
Choppy & disconnected, like a dream. Veering over into a redemption song. But not anything that could be crooned, even when one were needing a lullaby to soothe - to remind - to give a rucksack & loaf of bread, jug of wine or ale for the journey. Poetry can be plain but Resident Personages Herein don't tend to like plain poetry, even in recognizing that poems exist outside the poet who is summoned by them...they are like chillens - once they are 'out there' they have their own intactness - their own personhood.
Mais oui. Even words.
I have a problem with 'taught' creativity. Sometimes you read some of the modern - err, I suppose the words I am wanting are not kind - verbiage...
The poems constructed loom like dissected parts leftover from a high school biology class: you can see the poet (how many cups of coffee into it one can only fear) huddled over each image, crafting & recrafting - waiting desperately for the image that will do...
But losing the poem in the process. And what is left might be created in the mind of those readers who are still outside cheering that Emperor (err, the one who is in need of new advisers) (to say nothing of a new suit) - but perhaps one should surmise they would like smaller words - ones that chant well. So Dissected Frog Part Poetry would scarcely amuse them anyway.
But it does.
I have little regard for such. Yes, much that can be said for the poem a poet tenderly waits - and much can likewise be noted for poets who wrestle a poem into its full identity: poems there are out there whose progenitors are indeed products of Masters Degrees in Creative Writing and resident bird & birdlings would Very Much Like to be able to turn out even a Shadow of what they produce.
But it remains that the only poetry Wren can claim is a lyrical phrasing to prose (here & there) that Isobel likewise possesses (nothing like a good friend on a morning that is Your Birthday) - though Isobel can in truth be said to be a poet. But only on random mornings very far from each other.
So it is likely Isobel's poem but then she gets cross & will not claim it...too much of it reads like that draft which needs further work and really, my second cup is too sweet and cloys rather than wanting to be swallowed. Did I mention it was my birthday.
Well. Some days are better slept through. This particular one began rather forced. Glum. Chewing the ear off anyone that remembered to wish me good cheer. Wishing for a bottle of cheap Italian red wine...
And worse. But we won't mention worse. Just go away. Everyone. I'm tired. Birthday. Another year. The inevitable peering back at last year : did I retrograde or get better. Divided identities because it's easier that way (toss an undrinkable Cup of Cloying) we are not Renaissance people whatever we dream we are small boxes it's easier that way one focus plus perhaps two left over for afterhours because it's easier that way sometimes dreams may surface is it easier that way but we can leave them to the night and then we're sleeping again because it's easier that way and only had to waken for the merest of moment to eye the clock (because it's easier that way) it's still night okay roll over more hours left for sleeping because it's easier that way and the day will be thrust upon us when we least need it and we will stumble to the coffee-maker then pour the morning cup but is it easier that way is it easier that way is it
easier that way.
Well. Allergies & the brain that becomes as sodden as the lungs & yesterday by five it was as if I were an Egyptian mummy & instead of siphoning the brain out (properly liquefied) through tubes poked up the nostrils in good Egyptian form, I'm without antihistamines & the day is long & there goes my thinking place, blown out in unending sniffles - the trashcan overfloweth with Kleenex and that meandering brain...
At least birthdays only come once a year. With or without extra cups of coffee and the memory of drowning in a bottle of cheap Italian red wine.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Saturday, September 20, 2008
On a Pensive Morning, When the Battlefield is a Dull Grey
My mother had dementia.
She was also clinically depressed, and spent most of her life in bed, asleep.
And my mother was schizophrenic.
She was also a redhead, vivacious & charming, and had iced blue eyes - that blue that is so pale as to be almost white (i.e., without colour). The eyes, perhaps, of angels. And that Nordic complexion which disallowed sunbathing.
As those of you who are faithful readers will remember, my mother was a writer, and a brilliant woman who never resolved that divide between family & creative & woman & small southern girl & err, - bluestocking. (That is a statement which contains details with which few others would agree.)
Because everything there was in being cultured & literary & even 'a writer' (in those years when it was still possible to do New York - and to dream)...
But that was not being a bluestocking. (And the New York Mama did had scarcely anything in it but dream...)
Because being a bluestocking meant quite as much exactly then as it did in the days of Dorothy Sayers - and (if I may) as it does now. Kind of a Tennessee Williams sort of sorrow to it all, even now. You could belong to a South that is no more. But you could not be a bluestocking.
I would not want to be a bluestocking. Yes, I suspect it is possible to gain even several college degrees (I have none & am speaking from disinterested detail) and still avoid becoming a bluestocking.
And all of that is aside anyway: avoiding the tale to be told. Which is not quite 'wander at will,' though close cousin.
Mama dropped out of college after a single year, having catapulted headfirst into The Marriage, early Fifties American style - all the money that had been left her, she would tell me in a story I don't remember hearing until that last year before she died - having gone to the wedding with none being left over to continue college.
The story might have been told before, once or twice. But it was not like other tales, told & retold. Waiting to be handed down in the telling.
Said marriage lasted six and a half years. I was thinking about it this morning, having followed the facebook page drama of a wee friend who is living a life with two children & a dissertation and speaks frequently of those lovely old alcohols that always mean more than mere drink: motifs for a certain living my mama would have known well.
All of it motif, to be sure. Even Mama's sometimes tales about Suburban Lives - the cocktail parties - the brittleness inferred - the husbands (other women) swapped (we did not do such things, the rueful unsaid: that small town girl, even in the Suburban cocktail Fifties)...the poetry of Anne Sexton...you see, Mama was sleeping. Dad was at parties.
But Mama was sleeping.
Oh decade of bright promise, America!
But I have other memories that do not require stories told to me, and parties were not the constant in any of them. Mama and the red kitchen. Maybe two years old, sitting in my father's lap, and Mama was yelling while she cooked, and Dad was laughing, and Mama threw the frying pan across the red, red room at him. Missing both of us.
And Daddy kept laughing.
I remember the living room. A single butterfly chair. A floor lamp. A chest of some sort. Grey carpeting that may or may not have been there. The floor lamp on. All that grey emptiness, lit by yellow light. Mama yelling. Dad disappearing behind the newspaper.
My brother bit me.
Dad's voice from behind the newspaper, never acknowledging my plea. Bite him back.
But we will leave those stories for now. I believe Mama's first breakdown occurred as the marriage ended, though it is all opinion from that point on. We're all so crazy now, you see.
No less then. Astrology, spirit guides, Ouiji boards...
But I think something in Mama held back from it, always. Same sort of something that was the Good Mother, and would have been the Good Wife. I can say that. I can say many things, and I can know the places where they are true, in spite of the things which counter.
I am thinking of my mother this morning. Because The Telegraph (UK) has this week presented an interview with a (or 'the,' as you prefer) Baroness Warnock concerning dementia and a necessity for those who have it to do the world a favour and exit the planet. And I, the snarky & wee bird who is the only daughter of a woman who should have been the very first one in line for such jumping, am angry. Almost a slow anger, like a snake wakened from sleeping. Waving about like a drunkard about to topple.
World being what it is in present reality, I am becoming fond of excerpting small clips of phrasing noted by others - the printed version, to be sure, of sound bite, but in the modern world of too much & too many & all of us, really, thinking the same thing, merely cast into this camp or that of Others Who Think the Same by virtue of...err...what we think...may the battles begin, each of us roaring, joining the fray with those already at battle - those long at battle, while we have been sleeping...
The article mentions living wills, which have long been the reality here in America. In my recent forays out into the blogosphere, I encountered a UK blogger who was kind enough to respond to several questions I proffered regarding issues & legal framing in the UK: faithful readers may remember both my exuberance & later difficulty with the American website that is one of several which keep me up-to-date with much that is happening in our world today.
The American website pulls feeds regularly from world news headlines, so I read UK news at various points - though with an American lens, which made the information contained in the UK blog helpful. A ready sense, however (regardless of the lens borrowed), exists in events in the one country egging on events in the other: it is of much importance to note what 'influential medical ethics expert(s)' in either are saying...
As much as of importance that the ordinary among us are saying & saying & saying...anything & everything we know of truth...
Faithful readers will note that of late I have not felt like tackling much of anything...
My maternal grandmother died as the result of a living will she'd signed - I did not know it for perhaps a decade after her dying.
She was diabetic (as was my mama) and had had many cancers - a mastectomy, as I remember - and the loss of one (or both) kidneys. She was on dialysis. Only two (as I remember it, and memory is created) heart attacks - both at a younger age. Missie (as she had us call her) was vital in a way my mother was not - a prima donna woman - an artist - and a woman Extremely Aware of the Realities of Life in Any Social Structure.
Eighty-two years old, as I remember it. Battle ax, right up to the end. And worse. But we don't need the worse, here.
It is that force of vitality - that insistent presence in the life that was hers to live - that overpowering sense of personhood, if I may - that I note here. Because she signed a living will. And when she got that last cancer - it was bone cancer, for which no cure exists: you might get the one remission, but it returns & you die a painful death, the likes of which we do spare beasts - her husband (our step-grandfather) refused my offers (still a stay-at-home mom at that point) to help him in her last days.
And as noted, it was only the decade later that I understood why.
They took her off dialysis. Death comes within days. I remember her screams, that last time I saw her before all such transpired. Morphine could not daunt her pain.
The relationship my mother had with her mother & step-father is the sort from which Southern Gothic tales are born. And is perhaps why I avoid telling my own tales - and/or tell them in the fashion in which I do. For all that my mother had stories, the woman for whom Wren is fictional character has tales as well. When people egg me towards writing them, I laugh. I lived them, I say. Why would I want to write them?
I write fiction.
Why do I write this story. Others manage the horrors well enough from merely the possibilities - why add details (and such details) - we don't need stories to point the necessity of a higher ethical base; those who look, but do not see, are likely not going to see if they read a story.
Why tell another one.
Because I think stories are what we are. Stories are what waken the sleeping, even as (when we were young), they helped us to sleeping...if a story cannot lull us to that quiet place where we hear, nothing ever will.
If a story cannot do for us what must be done...mere science will have its sway & we will be done for.
And so I begin my mother' s story again: schizophrenia is like a mansion with many rooms, and some of the rooms are lighted, and some of them are dark, but the person who is mentally ill wanders those rooms (like those of us who wander well-lit rooms) from a complete personhood - even though fractured - even though fragmented.
Does that make sense? Personhood is more than the sum of its parts. The psychosis of the illness is not a constant; people who see the mentally ill caught in the one room are witnessing either a mere episode of psychosis - or something akin to a deer caught in the headlights of a car in a dark night - a frozen instant that does not end; cannot be moved forward - but is merely its moment with you; with others the headlights do not glare.
Whether doctors recognize the 'way we are (i.e., the energies & dances of human interaction)' in their work with mental & emotional illness is not something I know.
One wants a pretty story, but this one is not. Dignity is a nice touch, but this story catapults on into very little. Maybe that is so for a reason. By the time her mother died, Mama had already been a number of years in need of help the whole notion of 'civil rights for the mentally ill' managed to get outside her reach some long years before.
I hesitate to say the actual conditions under which she lived. Because to hear my mama through the din of those details...don't know that too many can. I could tell more easily the stories I have been told - for I do not remember many of the one(s) I witnessed as a small child; I have my own, but they are far quieter. Some were later, after my father gained custody of the three of us (a difficult enterprise in those days).
Mama chasing my older brother with a baseball bat, enraged - though who could say why...She was intent on killing him. Which is to say. It was not merely enraged.
It was a murderous rage.
The antebellum home could be circled in two separate spheres - I don't know how far they ran before he darted through a swinging door - was it the kitchen into that side room with the copper floor - I can imagine them running & running & running before he darted through the swinging door and slammed it back on her hard enough to stop her - and knock her out cold. He told the story one day a mere few years ago, over lunch - my brother, dad, sister-in-law. Seemed a casual story, from his tone. One of those places where the details don't match the telling.
I likely witnessed it. Have no memory of the event - or any like it. I laughed, thinking he was telling tall tales while we sat drinking iced tea after the meal was over. I pushed the story away from me, amazed that such might be said to have been.
Mama and the cat she'd befriended... my grandfather told me this one. After awhile, he'd got to where he didn't see the kitty anymore when they went to pick Mama up to take her to the store.
But those long, deep scratches on her arm...had someone told him the tale - you see, memory is created - why is the rest of the story Mama squeezing the animal in a cold fury, thinking she wrestled with an evil spirit...my grandfather could not say what had happened to the animal - did I create the ending or did it supply itself unsaid.
I remember third grade. The bathtub with its porcelain scratched & pitted & rusted - sometimes, a dead roach upended near the drain - one of the large old things that was more creature than insect and quite enough to terrify any young girl - its legs in the air spectacle the eye of death watching you like a thing that could swoop up from the white & orange streaked surface and overpower you in its dull caress...the room dark even when lit in that way only old & high-ceilinged could be...the huge window (for that portion of the home was an octagon, and the bathroom was about the size of a small closet in one of the octagonal corners) with the screen blackened by the long years...
And outside, the cats.
Those wild ones that are predatory; whether it was two males fighting or a male after a female, I can't say: I believe the former. 'Always clueless' - we were looking for mottos last post and I caution, a motto can as well be assigned as chosen...
I was one of those quiet creatures not quite aware...
The kind that grow up to be writers...
The cats, and I was young, for all my nine years, and did not know the sound. It was right under the window. Little to protect us from it but the mereness of a wooden wall - the mereness of glass & blackened screen. Windows are such dark terror at night.
Evil spirits, my mama told me, then added a few more specific details about what they wanted - I do not remember the detail & it is unimportant; merely that perhaps a young girl could have overlooked the general designation.
But not added detail.
But we were protected! Some other spirit was out there & would protect us so that they could not get in.
Fancy going into that dark triangular bathroom, favourite cemetery of dying creatures that could not be mere roach - and taking a bath after that.
I do not remember many baths, you see.
Or, really, meals being regular. But I was a grown woman and my mother had died before I began to suspect that one.
Why tell this tale. Because it is the only tale that makes sense of what the Baroness proffers. And I say it if only to keep a future I know is 'now' still, somehow, at bay. Living wills are the predecessor of a society that will one day be as she says - the focal point becoming 'being helped to die for the sake of their loved ones or society' - the thing no one ever mentions about abortion, you see, is the moral imperative - the weight, as it might better be termed - of government in a society that separates religion from government...in a society that is the 'consequence' of the action which separated...
The law morphs in the lesser reasoning to being moral authority. That 'freedom' from being forced to choose (i.e., unable to freely choose) how you would worship the Creator - becoming instead (law interprets - it is not commandments writ in stone) a constraint against the free exercise of worship is only one of many such results in the separating of religion (a place of moral decision) from government (the place of moral consequence)...
Which is one reason why this wee bird does not necessarily approve the separation of church & state...too much inherent in how we 'appropriate' such matters (how we internalize when we aren't really paying attention) to risk such. Or, as Washington once mused, this great experiment of whether man could govern himself or no...
The UK, wherein church is not separated from state, legalized abortion in 1967 - six years before America did. While that (to the one view) seems to defeat the above, the principle remains. I could perhaps substitute 'lawlessness' for mere separation (within the law) of church & state: when lawlessness (i.e., a disregard for moral underpinnings that are now regarded as 'religion' - and now thought either limiting or repressive) becomes legally mandated, that law gains the moral weight which a higher responsibility once owned.
Which is merely to say, the law that allows abortion (and will one day allow euthanasia(s) and more) mandates the moral approval of the deed. It is the only way otherwise sensible people can mouthe, I am opposed to abortion. But I respect a woman's right [or necessity; the words have the same weight here] to make that choice on her own.
But I digress from the story at hand. My mama wanted to live. That is where I close, because as has been said elsewhere, all posts must end. Something vital to identity wanted to stay - and something vital to love made her daughter know she would do everything possible to keep her here. Because Mama died here, in Atlanta.
She'd had a heart attack. Been ten minutes without oxygen - they brought her back when the proper ambulance finally arrived - I don't really know why. She was in a coma. The hospital asked about a living will. Tried to tell me what she'd be like, coming back from that coma.
Tried to tell me she wouldn't.
I wasn't listening. Keep Mama alive.
They finally asked for another family member to contact. My older brother, several states away. I must suppose I was in shock. Things were very slow, and happening at that far-away distance needful. I remember them putting my brother on. Remember him telling me - and this is a day of long hours - hours & hours & hours and all of them were slow - he was coming to Atlanta to 'take care of Mama.'
No, I told him.
Because I knew what he was saying.
I can take care of Mama.
Because I knew he would think what I needed him to think.
And I would keep Mama alive.
Other stories live here - perhaps one day to be told - but for the present one, all that is needed is four heart attacks within the space of some eight or nine hours - and Mama was dead.
I always hate the euphemisms for dying. We do not pass...or pass on...or pass away. We die! And far worse, the good Baroness' people who will be licensed to put others down...
We put animals down here!
Not human beings.
My mama died & she is gone and it has been many years now - over the decade - since. But my mama who was schizophrenic & diabetic & had dementia & slept all day & lived a life of which I shall not tell you the horrors was a human being - and was entitled to that life - and that life was needful as long as possible to be preserved.
For the struggle to be human - is a struggle against being devolved to mere animal in a kingdom of mere creatures.
And that is the battle. To know what it is to be human.
To live what is known.
To hold to that knowledge on behalf of those who cannot know it.
I loved my mama. End (& beginning) of tale.
[Editor's note(s). That dull day - and Wren has wrestled with this one again, editing for the hope of better clarity...]
ADDENDUM: 27 Sep 08 - for a report on what has been happening in America while everyone has been sleeping, follow this link.
She was also clinically depressed, and spent most of her life in bed, asleep.
And my mother was schizophrenic.
She was also a redhead, vivacious & charming, and had iced blue eyes - that blue that is so pale as to be almost white (i.e., without colour). The eyes, perhaps, of angels. And that Nordic complexion which disallowed sunbathing.
As those of you who are faithful readers will remember, my mother was a writer, and a brilliant woman who never resolved that divide between family & creative & woman & small southern girl & err, - bluestocking. (That is a statement which contains details with which few others would agree.)
Because everything there was in being cultured & literary & even 'a writer' (in those years when it was still possible to do New York - and to dream)...
But that was not being a bluestocking. (And the New York Mama did had scarcely anything in it but dream...)
Because being a bluestocking meant quite as much exactly then as it did in the days of Dorothy Sayers - and (if I may) as it does now. Kind of a Tennessee Williams sort of sorrow to it all, even now. You could belong to a South that is no more. But you could not be a bluestocking.
I would not want to be a bluestocking. Yes, I suspect it is possible to gain even several college degrees (I have none & am speaking from disinterested detail) and still avoid becoming a bluestocking.
And all of that is aside anyway: avoiding the tale to be told. Which is not quite 'wander at will,' though close cousin.
Mama dropped out of college after a single year, having catapulted headfirst into The Marriage, early Fifties American style - all the money that had been left her, she would tell me in a story I don't remember hearing until that last year before she died - having gone to the wedding with none being left over to continue college.
The story might have been told before, once or twice. But it was not like other tales, told & retold. Waiting to be handed down in the telling.
Said marriage lasted six and a half years. I was thinking about it this morning, having followed the facebook page drama of a wee friend who is living a life with two children & a dissertation and speaks frequently of those lovely old alcohols that always mean more than mere drink: motifs for a certain living my mama would have known well.
All of it motif, to be sure. Even Mama's sometimes tales about Suburban Lives - the cocktail parties - the brittleness inferred - the husbands (other women) swapped (we did not do such things, the rueful unsaid: that small town girl, even in the Suburban cocktail Fifties)...the poetry of Anne Sexton...you see, Mama was sleeping. Dad was at parties.
But Mama was sleeping.
Oh decade of bright promise, America!
But I have other memories that do not require stories told to me, and parties were not the constant in any of them. Mama and the red kitchen. Maybe two years old, sitting in my father's lap, and Mama was yelling while she cooked, and Dad was laughing, and Mama threw the frying pan across the red, red room at him. Missing both of us.
And Daddy kept laughing.
I remember the living room. A single butterfly chair. A floor lamp. A chest of some sort. Grey carpeting that may or may not have been there. The floor lamp on. All that grey emptiness, lit by yellow light. Mama yelling. Dad disappearing behind the newspaper.
My brother bit me.
Dad's voice from behind the newspaper, never acknowledging my plea. Bite him back.
But we will leave those stories for now. I believe Mama's first breakdown occurred as the marriage ended, though it is all opinion from that point on. We're all so crazy now, you see.
No less then. Astrology, spirit guides, Ouiji boards...
But I think something in Mama held back from it, always. Same sort of something that was the Good Mother, and would have been the Good Wife. I can say that. I can say many things, and I can know the places where they are true, in spite of the things which counter.
I am thinking of my mother this morning. Because The Telegraph (UK) has this week presented an interview with a (or 'the,' as you prefer) Baroness Warnock concerning dementia and a necessity for those who have it to do the world a favour and exit the planet. And I, the snarky & wee bird who is the only daughter of a woman who should have been the very first one in line for such jumping, am angry. Almost a slow anger, like a snake wakened from sleeping. Waving about like a drunkard about to topple.
World being what it is in present reality, I am becoming fond of excerpting small clips of phrasing noted by others - the printed version, to be sure, of sound bite, but in the modern world of too much & too many & all of us, really, thinking the same thing, merely cast into this camp or that of Others Who Think the Same by virtue of...err...what we think...may the battles begin, each of us roaring, joining the fray with those already at battle - those long at battle, while we have been sleeping...
the influential medical ethics expert(the Baroness)
elderly people suffering from dementia should consider ending their lives
nothing wrong with people being helped to die for the sake of their loved ones or society
she hoped people will soon be "licensed to put others down" if they are unable to look after themselves
sparked fears that they may find wider support because of her influence on ethical matters
The article mentions living wills, which have long been the reality here in America. In my recent forays out into the blogosphere, I encountered a UK blogger who was kind enough to respond to several questions I proffered regarding issues & legal framing in the UK: faithful readers may remember both my exuberance & later difficulty with the American website that is one of several which keep me up-to-date with much that is happening in our world today.
The American website pulls feeds regularly from world news headlines, so I read UK news at various points - though with an American lens, which made the information contained in the UK blog helpful. A ready sense, however (regardless of the lens borrowed), exists in events in the one country egging on events in the other: it is of much importance to note what 'influential medical ethics expert(s)' in either are saying...
As much as of importance that the ordinary among us are saying & saying & saying...anything & everything we know of truth...
Faithful readers will note that of late I have not felt like tackling much of anything...
My maternal grandmother died as the result of a living will she'd signed - I did not know it for perhaps a decade after her dying.
She was diabetic (as was my mama) and had had many cancers - a mastectomy, as I remember - and the loss of one (or both) kidneys. She was on dialysis. Only two (as I remember it, and memory is created) heart attacks - both at a younger age. Missie (as she had us call her) was vital in a way my mother was not - a prima donna woman - an artist - and a woman Extremely Aware of the Realities of Life in Any Social Structure.
Eighty-two years old, as I remember it. Battle ax, right up to the end. And worse. But we don't need the worse, here.
It is that force of vitality - that insistent presence in the life that was hers to live - that overpowering sense of personhood, if I may - that I note here. Because she signed a living will. And when she got that last cancer - it was bone cancer, for which no cure exists: you might get the one remission, but it returns & you die a painful death, the likes of which we do spare beasts - her husband (our step-grandfather) refused my offers (still a stay-at-home mom at that point) to help him in her last days.
And as noted, it was only the decade later that I understood why.
They took her off dialysis. Death comes within days. I remember her screams, that last time I saw her before all such transpired. Morphine could not daunt her pain.
The relationship my mother had with her mother & step-father is the sort from which Southern Gothic tales are born. And is perhaps why I avoid telling my own tales - and/or tell them in the fashion in which I do. For all that my mother had stories, the woman for whom Wren is fictional character has tales as well. When people egg me towards writing them, I laugh. I lived them, I say. Why would I want to write them?
I write fiction.
Why do I write this story. Others manage the horrors well enough from merely the possibilities - why add details (and such details) - we don't need stories to point the necessity of a higher ethical base; those who look, but do not see, are likely not going to see if they read a story.
Why tell another one.
Because I think stories are what we are. Stories are what waken the sleeping, even as (when we were young), they helped us to sleeping...if a story cannot lull us to that quiet place where we hear, nothing ever will.
If a story cannot do for us what must be done...mere science will have its sway & we will be done for.
And so I begin my mother' s story again: schizophrenia is like a mansion with many rooms, and some of the rooms are lighted, and some of them are dark, but the person who is mentally ill wanders those rooms (like those of us who wander well-lit rooms) from a complete personhood - even though fractured - even though fragmented.
Does that make sense? Personhood is more than the sum of its parts. The psychosis of the illness is not a constant; people who see the mentally ill caught in the one room are witnessing either a mere episode of psychosis - or something akin to a deer caught in the headlights of a car in a dark night - a frozen instant that does not end; cannot be moved forward - but is merely its moment with you; with others the headlights do not glare.
Whether doctors recognize the 'way we are (i.e., the energies & dances of human interaction)' in their work with mental & emotional illness is not something I know.
One wants a pretty story, but this one is not. Dignity is a nice touch, but this story catapults on into very little. Maybe that is so for a reason. By the time her mother died, Mama had already been a number of years in need of help the whole notion of 'civil rights for the mentally ill' managed to get outside her reach some long years before.
I hesitate to say the actual conditions under which she lived. Because to hear my mama through the din of those details...don't know that too many can. I could tell more easily the stories I have been told - for I do not remember many of the one(s) I witnessed as a small child; I have my own, but they are far quieter. Some were later, after my father gained custody of the three of us (a difficult enterprise in those days).
Mama chasing my older brother with a baseball bat, enraged - though who could say why...She was intent on killing him. Which is to say. It was not merely enraged.
It was a murderous rage.
The antebellum home could be circled in two separate spheres - I don't know how far they ran before he darted through a swinging door - was it the kitchen into that side room with the copper floor - I can imagine them running & running & running before he darted through the swinging door and slammed it back on her hard enough to stop her - and knock her out cold. He told the story one day a mere few years ago, over lunch - my brother, dad, sister-in-law. Seemed a casual story, from his tone. One of those places where the details don't match the telling.
I likely witnessed it. Have no memory of the event - or any like it. I laughed, thinking he was telling tall tales while we sat drinking iced tea after the meal was over. I pushed the story away from me, amazed that such might be said to have been.
Mama and the cat she'd befriended... my grandfather told me this one. After awhile, he'd got to where he didn't see the kitty anymore when they went to pick Mama up to take her to the store.
But those long, deep scratches on her arm...had someone told him the tale - you see, memory is created - why is the rest of the story Mama squeezing the animal in a cold fury, thinking she wrestled with an evil spirit...my grandfather could not say what had happened to the animal - did I create the ending or did it supply itself unsaid.
I remember third grade. The bathtub with its porcelain scratched & pitted & rusted - sometimes, a dead roach upended near the drain - one of the large old things that was more creature than insect and quite enough to terrify any young girl - its legs in the air spectacle the eye of death watching you like a thing that could swoop up from the white & orange streaked surface and overpower you in its dull caress...the room dark even when lit in that way only old & high-ceilinged could be...the huge window (for that portion of the home was an octagon, and the bathroom was about the size of a small closet in one of the octagonal corners) with the screen blackened by the long years...
And outside, the cats.
Those wild ones that are predatory; whether it was two males fighting or a male after a female, I can't say: I believe the former. 'Always clueless' - we were looking for mottos last post and I caution, a motto can as well be assigned as chosen...
I was one of those quiet creatures not quite aware...
The kind that grow up to be writers...
The cats, and I was young, for all my nine years, and did not know the sound. It was right under the window. Little to protect us from it but the mereness of a wooden wall - the mereness of glass & blackened screen. Windows are such dark terror at night.
Evil spirits, my mama told me, then added a few more specific details about what they wanted - I do not remember the detail & it is unimportant; merely that perhaps a young girl could have overlooked the general designation.
But not added detail.
But we were protected! Some other spirit was out there & would protect us so that they could not get in.
Fancy going into that dark triangular bathroom, favourite cemetery of dying creatures that could not be mere roach - and taking a bath after that.
I do not remember many baths, you see.
Or, really, meals being regular. But I was a grown woman and my mother had died before I began to suspect that one.
Why tell this tale. Because it is the only tale that makes sense of what the Baroness proffers. And I say it if only to keep a future I know is 'now' still, somehow, at bay. Living wills are the predecessor of a society that will one day be as she says - the focal point becoming 'being helped to die for the sake of their loved ones or society' - the thing no one ever mentions about abortion, you see, is the moral imperative - the weight, as it might better be termed - of government in a society that separates religion from government...in a society that is the 'consequence' of the action which separated...
The law morphs in the lesser reasoning to being moral authority. That 'freedom' from being forced to choose (i.e., unable to freely choose) how you would worship the Creator - becoming instead (law interprets - it is not commandments writ in stone) a constraint against the free exercise of worship is only one of many such results in the separating of religion (a place of moral decision) from government (the place of moral consequence)...
Which is one reason why this wee bird does not necessarily approve the separation of church & state...too much inherent in how we 'appropriate' such matters (how we internalize when we aren't really paying attention) to risk such. Or, as Washington once mused, this great experiment of whether man could govern himself or no...
The UK, wherein church is not separated from state, legalized abortion in 1967 - six years before America did. While that (to the one view) seems to defeat the above, the principle remains. I could perhaps substitute 'lawlessness' for mere separation (within the law) of church & state: when lawlessness (i.e., a disregard for moral underpinnings that are now regarded as 'religion' - and now thought either limiting or repressive) becomes legally mandated, that law gains the moral weight which a higher responsibility once owned.
Which is merely to say, the law that allows abortion (and will one day allow euthanasia(s) and more) mandates the moral approval of the deed. It is the only way otherwise sensible people can mouthe, I am opposed to abortion. But I respect a woman's right [or necessity; the words have the same weight here] to make that choice on her own.
But I digress from the story at hand. My mama wanted to live. That is where I close, because as has been said elsewhere, all posts must end. Something vital to identity wanted to stay - and something vital to love made her daughter know she would do everything possible to keep her here. Because Mama died here, in Atlanta.
She'd had a heart attack. Been ten minutes without oxygen - they brought her back when the proper ambulance finally arrived - I don't really know why. She was in a coma. The hospital asked about a living will. Tried to tell me what she'd be like, coming back from that coma.
Tried to tell me she wouldn't.
I wasn't listening. Keep Mama alive.
They finally asked for another family member to contact. My older brother, several states away. I must suppose I was in shock. Things were very slow, and happening at that far-away distance needful. I remember them putting my brother on. Remember him telling me - and this is a day of long hours - hours & hours & hours and all of them were slow - he was coming to Atlanta to 'take care of Mama.'
No, I told him.
Because I knew what he was saying.
I can take care of Mama.
Because I knew he would think what I needed him to think.
And I would keep Mama alive.
Other stories live here - perhaps one day to be told - but for the present one, all that is needed is four heart attacks within the space of some eight or nine hours - and Mama was dead.
I always hate the euphemisms for dying. We do not pass...or pass on...or pass away. We die! And far worse, the good Baroness' people who will be licensed to put others down...
We put animals down here!
Not human beings.
My mama died & she is gone and it has been many years now - over the decade - since. But my mama who was schizophrenic & diabetic & had dementia & slept all day & lived a life of which I shall not tell you the horrors was a human being - and was entitled to that life - and that life was needful as long as possible to be preserved.
For the struggle to be human - is a struggle against being devolved to mere animal in a kingdom of mere creatures.
And that is the battle. To know what it is to be human.
To live what is known.
To hold to that knowledge on behalf of those who cannot know it.
I loved my mama. End (& beginning) of tale.
[Editor's note(s). That dull day - and Wren has wrestled with this one again, editing for the hope of better clarity...]
ADDENDUM: 27 Sep 08 - for a report on what has been happening in America while everyone has been sleeping, follow this link.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
In Need of a Bit of Tropical
A week or so ago I began to wade out into the blogosphere. Number of different directions I am exploring along the way that will eventually become posts; for the moment, however (a dull one), I am in need of something light-hearted & fun. By way of introductory note (can one merely have fun?) before I allow frivolities:
A meme is a newness (proper definition, to be sure, at wikipedia) that seems to have developed completely from the new technology. (Maybe it didn't, but MUST a poor bird think all the time?) It is what happens, I think (okay, so thinking is the Only Option), when people see something on-line and email it to everybody they know. And everyone is changed a little (or not) by the new something.
Or something of the sort. While it perhaps (upon occasion) throws Intellectual Property into tailspins, enough of us remain old school about such things so that documentation remains de rigueur...
The following delight was found at Still Seraphic and I recommend both reading the post (and links to others who memed) - and doing as I have done in copying said meme into your own files for a like foray into a morning's brief fun (which is, after all, what a meme accomplishes). (Said bird thinks.)
The seraph (if I am correct in the origin of her Chosen name) who keeps the blog seems the loveliest of angels. I mean. The sort we have here on the planet in resident century - a little bit kicky, a little bit bold...
[Yes. I know. Angels are not female. That was a rather 'ordinary' use of the term. Becoming rather big on ordinariness now, thanks to the quote from Chesterton (see sidebar) stumbled across (part of it) in my journal & tracked down (in full) on the 'Net. Don't know where I have been wandering of late but it does not seem to have been anywhere ordinary & times there are when a wee bird just wants to go home.]
(And yes. I know. How much can we actually 'know' someone based on a few moment's overview of words scattered about on lighted screens...But I will leave that one for now...)
Enough of necessity! Frivolity - may it rule! Let the questions begin!
What is your chief characteristic?
Overexuberance. Or, as you prefer, excessive effusiveness. I know these things because Daughter tells me often.
What is your principal fault?
Overexuberance. Or, as you prefer, excessive effusiveness. But on such dependeth to whom one is speaking. Others say (and far too readily, wee bird tells) 'CONTENTIOUSNESS.'
But said bird is scarcely contentious. My job, you see, in this place where tables are hard, is to observe, analyse & Point Out Insufficiencies.
Or, to put it another way, my job is to ROAR.
(And I am thinking these days that those who do not quite 'get it' might need to be...
Shown the door.)
All lives have a door, n'est ce pas?
But it's just a thought. In passing. It's just the Extreme Damage it does to Said Bird's Unbearably Delicate Nerves to be told she is contentious! Would that I were! (My job is to roar!)
What is your favourite quality in a man?
Ooh-la-la. Resident bird does indeed like men.
Err. Quality in.
Ahh.
Laughter. But I could never stop with a single favourite. I mean. We are not sheets of paper! One must have truth - that hound of heaven pursuit of truth first - truth only - because then the laughter has a tempering that makes it both necessary and light.
And restorative. Gentle. Healing.
And could you have those without love? Servanthood? Intelligence? Creative drive? Dark shores and a keening soul? Devotion to God? (The real stuff.)
Where is he? That would be the better question....
(Umm. No, I don't read romance novels.
Yes, I do know what men are like.
But I persist in the thought that one could be - just one! - what I describe above & still be charismatic & bold & the sort who would...well. Not make all women faint. You'd have to worry if a man were too good-looking, just like you have to worry when a man has too much money...)
(Or too little.)
And in a woman?
I almost don't want to answer this one. Okay. In a woman, the ability to think like a man.
To be sure, a woman who thinks like a man is not going to be mannish in her thinking. Mais non!
Because when you add hormonal drive to the way a man thinks (and what he thinks about) you end up with something not at all like what said bird is thinking.
Reasoned. Capable of analytical trajectory and non-personalized thought. Women are bad to personalize things. Hell hath no fury, etc. (Umm. Like a woman offended, as I always finish. The language doth change.)
And in the event I just offended half the planet...
(On to the next question. Quickly.)
But no. Before we go. That ideal feminine principle. That is what we were after, n'est ce pas?
Ready sense, there, of un-definability. But if I were to be asked literary excursions into women resident bird tends to find of note...well, that is a different story.
Because we get a little bit of Tess, a little bit of Lady Chatterly, a little bit of...
Stop while we're ahead.
Well. You get into that reality that literature (at least) has not yet done the female sex the favour of, "Ahh. Yes. A woman..."
(And now Resident Bird has indeed got half the population more than a little perturbed to be even thinking Such Things...
Had - in point of fact - an odd little conversation with a retired priest the other day who said - in response to my half-apology in that bewildered tone regarding the spectacles young women wear these days:
"They don't seem to be so concerned with the idea of beauty any more," I lamented.
He mused that this was so.
But then surprised me with the further muse, maybe it's better that way. Said in that slow muse which realizes what is being said as it falls from the lips.
I haven't quite got over thinking about that one yet.)
Next question! Please! Before I have to counter all the above with that necessity to modesty & virtue & you see by now, don't you, how difficult defining is - how difficult singling the one thing out when so many are needful to refine, to temper, to contradict insufficient vision!
Who is your favourite historical figure?
Now, now, now. History. Lovely, lovely subject. And does the question ask about a person who lived once and was - err - famous (i.e., about whom stories are still told) or do they merely mean someone from the annals of the story of men (umm, and women) (and not literature or theology or any of the more interesting possibilities, which would have to be where I pull my answer anyway).
But let me think, first. History. Like Rome or ancient Greece or early American or English...Well. Multitude of fascinating people having lived & contributed to this wonderful thing I still prefer to call mankind; how indeed could I limit to a single favourite.
But, next morning bright & early correcting typos wee bird keeps hearing that chatterbox in the rear rows - jumping up & down she is - hand in the air, mouthing, me! me! me!
The men who signed the Magna Carta.
Now, narrow the question down!
Who is your favourite Apostle?
Thank you. Well, to be sure, St. John, the beloved disciple. Because he was a mystic. Though (to be sure) one mustn't forget St. Peter - impetuous & always jumping in before he knew what he was getting into.
Always liked that man. And could scarcely leave out St. Paul - if only because he is so roundly trounced these days.
Who is your favourite literary figure?
Don't ask. Could not stop there and posts must end. They must. It is written on the portal atop each blog: all who enter here must at some point stop. It is written in other places, too, but we won't mention them - we won't, we won't, we won't - even overeffusive & unending as we are.
Who is your favourite saint?
Well, that is a good one. I'd almost want one of the women who was a mystic & wrote what she knew - (there were several, to be sure) - but I'd find something to worry that over - next choice, one of the women who made it to Doctor of the Church (which considerably narrows, but does not eliminate the field) - I'd have to consider St. Augustine, purely on the fact that he lived a life then spent the rest of his life regretting it - plus that lovely detail of the mother who cried over his dissoluteness (which, of course, had nothing to do with him per se - as much as everything to do...)
Perhaps I should try Celtic saints - way back in the days before Bede. I am quite fond of a book I read on Columba, written by an art historian, that opened the notion of a Celtic church that would have been a place I needed to be...and there are many ancient Celtic saints; I always thrill to hear their very names in the feast days noted still by the Anglo-Catholic fold.
Really, my favourite would be Bede, save he's not a saint.
Who are your living heroes?
Oh, for a hero, living or dead. This question is un-kind. It presupposes that heros can exist, and you just don't know how much a poor girl - err, bird - needs a hero.
Every day. And there are none to be found.
Who would you like to be, if you could?
I think probably Rapunzel. Wasn't she the one with the long, long hair & imprisoned in the very safest ivory tower one could ever imagine and as beautiful as beautiful could be and her Prince Charming found her anyway (umm - the ivory tower) & came to the foot of the tower every night in spite of it all, singing, Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair...
Time once was when a girl could have heros.
What is your idea of earthly happiness?
Funny you should ask. I was thinking along that line this very morning, in an email to a friend.
Because said bird must admit to not having had very much of it in a lifetime & can well remember the days when all she asked of happiness was that red brick wall outside her bedroom window - it was the corner of the house - and sunlight playing in the magnolia trees that lived there, too. And if just one magnolia blossom, 'larger than a man's head,' were blooming there - what more could be asked. A cup of tea, her journal & a pen.
People breathing in other parts of the small house.
But to be sure. Perhaps one should ask more of happiness. Which is not to say that above is not a really lovely sort of happiness. Just that one should ask more of happiness.
There. I just did.
What is your idea of misery?
Gracious we're getting personal. Should it be 'not being at home (i.e, working for a living when your heart needs to be sitting somewhere that you can see a red brick wall & a magnolia tree and...see above)' or 'not having enough money to survive' or 'not having anything but work & a computer screen for a life' or...
Gheesh. The questions a person gets asked in a lifetime...
One might wonder, however, why these things should be misery. To not have the freedom to own my own thoughts, 24/7 - that is misery. To have my thoughts & my hours owned by another.
But other miseries abound and...
Where would you like to live?
Anywhere but here. But I think often that even if I ever could get away, I'd be - err.
Miserable. I'd be confused and (even were it English) not understand the language (because, after all, it is the language behind the language that we all speak) and pine for Something Known.
What talent would you like to have?
I'd like to sing. (What else should a wee bird long for?)
For what fault do you have the most toleration?
Hysteria.
Who are your favourite painters?
Another one of those questions that assume in the multiplicity of Present Universe only the few could be chosen. So I will answer by saying I am very fond of those who painted with gold (& blues & reds). And their work normally hung in cathedrals. Often near the altar.
And had very many small boxes and other plain items ringed together in rows that made the loveliest designs...
Who are your favourite composers?
Extremely found of Faure. (How is that for stopping right there....)
What is your favourite colour?
Another of those difficulties! One colour? Hmm. Partial to blues - but most especially when in the company of whites or creams. Aquas - and especially when in the company of blues. Golds - likewise with blues (or reds). If a rose, that salmon or peach is inexpressibly sublime. Black is my best handsome when wearing clothes. In my kitchen - back again to blues. In my bedroom, khaki with gold trim...
On my blog...
Well. You see where we went, there.
What would we be without colours.
Of all things, what do you most detest?
Lies.
Have you got a motto?
My family does - or - to be sure - one branch of it did & it was a real motto. In Latin.
Something like 'out of the ashes we rise.'
But do I have one? I likely have too many & pinning me down to any one of them on top of all these questions....
What would you like to do right now?
This very instant? Or this very phase of my life. Oh. Forgot who was asking the questions, now didn't I. Well. That's why they call me contentious, you know. To be sure, you didn't know, but when a poor bird just has to know before she leaps into a thing....she is like an Overflow of Questions that Some Might Think Contentiousness.
I want to travel. Right now. Walk out the door with several million dreams tucked in my back pocket and see the world.
But I don't want to see it all by myself. So I guess I should perhaps be wanting other things. Okay. Bar-be-que. I'd like to be eating a bar-be-que sandwich - right now - this very instant...
[Editor's note(s). For those who did not link back to Seraphic's blog, her notes on the origins of this meme follow: "In a chamber of the Yves Saint-Laurent exhibit in Montreal there is an audiotape playing an interview with the designer. The interview is transcribed on the wall in French and translated into English... "
And the book mentioned above would be Columba, by Ian Finlay, 1979. Wren's copy came from one of the lovely annual book sales we used to have in Atlanta and is a UK edition.]
ADDENDUM! Alarmed addendum! Did I forget? A man who does not read - for these do exist, and I have met them - could scarcely be a part of my life. It's just that when one asks for a 'single' favourite - and gets a whole row of them - to leave out any essential quite so important in that row as READING...! Please! I write! He must read what I write.
What in the name of goodness a poor bird would be doing in the company of a man who did not read what she writes...
Some tales indeed must end...
A meme is a newness (proper definition, to be sure, at wikipedia) that seems to have developed completely from the new technology. (Maybe it didn't, but MUST a poor bird think all the time?) It is what happens, I think (okay, so thinking is the Only Option), when people see something on-line and email it to everybody they know. And everyone is changed a little (or not) by the new something.
Or something of the sort. While it perhaps (upon occasion) throws Intellectual Property into tailspins, enough of us remain old school about such things so that documentation remains de rigueur...
The following delight was found at Still Seraphic and I recommend both reading the post (and links to others who memed) - and doing as I have done in copying said meme into your own files for a like foray into a morning's brief fun (which is, after all, what a meme accomplishes). (Said bird thinks.)
The seraph (if I am correct in the origin of her Chosen name) who keeps the blog seems the loveliest of angels. I mean. The sort we have here on the planet in resident century - a little bit kicky, a little bit bold...
[Yes. I know. Angels are not female. That was a rather 'ordinary' use of the term. Becoming rather big on ordinariness now, thanks to the quote from Chesterton (see sidebar) stumbled across (part of it) in my journal & tracked down (in full) on the 'Net. Don't know where I have been wandering of late but it does not seem to have been anywhere ordinary & times there are when a wee bird just wants to go home.]
(And yes. I know. How much can we actually 'know' someone based on a few moment's overview of words scattered about on lighted screens...But I will leave that one for now...)
Enough of necessity! Frivolity - may it rule! Let the questions begin!
What is your chief characteristic?
Overexuberance. Or, as you prefer, excessive effusiveness. I know these things because Daughter tells me often.
What is your principal fault?
Overexuberance. Or, as you prefer, excessive effusiveness. But on such dependeth to whom one is speaking. Others say (and far too readily, wee bird tells) 'CONTENTIOUSNESS.'
But said bird is scarcely contentious. My job, you see, in this place where tables are hard, is to observe, analyse & Point Out Insufficiencies.
Or, to put it another way, my job is to ROAR.
(And I am thinking these days that those who do not quite 'get it' might need to be...
Shown the door.)
All lives have a door, n'est ce pas?
But it's just a thought. In passing. It's just the Extreme Damage it does to Said Bird's Unbearably Delicate Nerves to be told she is contentious! Would that I were! (My job is to roar!)
What is your favourite quality in a man?
Ooh-la-la. Resident bird does indeed like men.
Err. Quality in.
Ahh.
Laughter. But I could never stop with a single favourite. I mean. We are not sheets of paper! One must have truth - that hound of heaven pursuit of truth first - truth only - because then the laughter has a tempering that makes it both necessary and light.
And restorative. Gentle. Healing.
And could you have those without love? Servanthood? Intelligence? Creative drive? Dark shores and a keening soul? Devotion to God? (The real stuff.)
Where is he? That would be the better question....
(Umm. No, I don't read romance novels.
Yes, I do know what men are like.
But I persist in the thought that one could be - just one! - what I describe above & still be charismatic & bold & the sort who would...well. Not make all women faint. You'd have to worry if a man were too good-looking, just like you have to worry when a man has too much money...)
(Or too little.)
And in a woman?
I almost don't want to answer this one. Okay. In a woman, the ability to think like a man.
To be sure, a woman who thinks like a man is not going to be mannish in her thinking. Mais non!
Because when you add hormonal drive to the way a man thinks (and what he thinks about) you end up with something not at all like what said bird is thinking.
Reasoned. Capable of analytical trajectory and non-personalized thought. Women are bad to personalize things. Hell hath no fury, etc. (Umm. Like a woman offended, as I always finish. The language doth change.)
And in the event I just offended half the planet...
(On to the next question. Quickly.)
But no. Before we go. That ideal feminine principle. That is what we were after, n'est ce pas?
Ready sense, there, of un-definability. But if I were to be asked literary excursions into women resident bird tends to find of note...well, that is a different story.
Because we get a little bit of Tess, a little bit of Lady Chatterly, a little bit of...
Stop while we're ahead.
Well. You get into that reality that literature (at least) has not yet done the female sex the favour of, "Ahh. Yes. A woman..."
(And now Resident Bird has indeed got half the population more than a little perturbed to be even thinking Such Things...
Had - in point of fact - an odd little conversation with a retired priest the other day who said - in response to my half-apology in that bewildered tone regarding the spectacles young women wear these days:
"They don't seem to be so concerned with the idea of beauty any more," I lamented.
He mused that this was so.
But then surprised me with the further muse, maybe it's better that way. Said in that slow muse which realizes what is being said as it falls from the lips.
I haven't quite got over thinking about that one yet.)
Next question! Please! Before I have to counter all the above with that necessity to modesty & virtue & you see by now, don't you, how difficult defining is - how difficult singling the one thing out when so many are needful to refine, to temper, to contradict insufficient vision!
Who is your favourite historical figure?
Now, now, now. History. Lovely, lovely subject. And does the question ask about a person who lived once and was - err - famous (i.e., about whom stories are still told) or do they merely mean someone from the annals of the story of men (umm, and women) (and not literature or theology or any of the more interesting possibilities, which would have to be where I pull my answer anyway).
But let me think, first. History. Like Rome or ancient Greece or early American or English...Well. Multitude of fascinating people having lived & contributed to this wonderful thing I still prefer to call mankind; how indeed could I limit to a single favourite.
But, next morning bright & early correcting typos wee bird keeps hearing that chatterbox in the rear rows - jumping up & down she is - hand in the air, mouthing, me! me! me!
The men who signed the Magna Carta.
Now, narrow the question down!
Who is your favourite Apostle?
Thank you. Well, to be sure, St. John, the beloved disciple. Because he was a mystic. Though (to be sure) one mustn't forget St. Peter - impetuous & always jumping in before he knew what he was getting into.
Always liked that man. And could scarcely leave out St. Paul - if only because he is so roundly trounced these days.
Who is your favourite literary figure?
Don't ask. Could not stop there and posts must end. They must. It is written on the portal atop each blog: all who enter here must at some point stop. It is written in other places, too, but we won't mention them - we won't, we won't, we won't - even overeffusive & unending as we are.
Who is your favourite saint?
Well, that is a good one. I'd almost want one of the women who was a mystic & wrote what she knew - (there were several, to be sure) - but I'd find something to worry that over - next choice, one of the women who made it to Doctor of the Church (which considerably narrows, but does not eliminate the field) - I'd have to consider St. Augustine, purely on the fact that he lived a life then spent the rest of his life regretting it - plus that lovely detail of the mother who cried over his dissoluteness (which, of course, had nothing to do with him per se - as much as everything to do...)
Perhaps I should try Celtic saints - way back in the days before Bede. I am quite fond of a book I read on Columba, written by an art historian, that opened the notion of a Celtic church that would have been a place I needed to be...and there are many ancient Celtic saints; I always thrill to hear their very names in the feast days noted still by the Anglo-Catholic fold.
Really, my favourite would be Bede, save he's not a saint.
Who are your living heroes?
Oh, for a hero, living or dead. This question is un-kind. It presupposes that heros can exist, and you just don't know how much a poor girl - err, bird - needs a hero.
Every day. And there are none to be found.
Who would you like to be, if you could?
I think probably Rapunzel. Wasn't she the one with the long, long hair & imprisoned in the very safest ivory tower one could ever imagine and as beautiful as beautiful could be and her Prince Charming found her anyway (umm - the ivory tower) & came to the foot of the tower every night in spite of it all, singing, Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair...
Time once was when a girl could have heros.
What is your idea of earthly happiness?
Funny you should ask. I was thinking along that line this very morning, in an email to a friend.
Because said bird must admit to not having had very much of it in a lifetime & can well remember the days when all she asked of happiness was that red brick wall outside her bedroom window - it was the corner of the house - and sunlight playing in the magnolia trees that lived there, too. And if just one magnolia blossom, 'larger than a man's head,' were blooming there - what more could be asked. A cup of tea, her journal & a pen.
People breathing in other parts of the small house.
But to be sure. Perhaps one should ask more of happiness. Which is not to say that above is not a really lovely sort of happiness. Just that one should ask more of happiness.
There. I just did.
What is your idea of misery?
Gracious we're getting personal. Should it be 'not being at home (i.e, working for a living when your heart needs to be sitting somewhere that you can see a red brick wall & a magnolia tree and...see above)' or 'not having enough money to survive' or 'not having anything but work & a computer screen for a life' or...
Gheesh. The questions a person gets asked in a lifetime...
One might wonder, however, why these things should be misery. To not have the freedom to own my own thoughts, 24/7 - that is misery. To have my thoughts & my hours owned by another.
But other miseries abound and...
Where would you like to live?
Anywhere but here. But I think often that even if I ever could get away, I'd be - err.
Miserable. I'd be confused and (even were it English) not understand the language (because, after all, it is the language behind the language that we all speak) and pine for Something Known.
What talent would you like to have?
I'd like to sing. (What else should a wee bird long for?)
For what fault do you have the most toleration?
Hysteria.
Who are your favourite painters?
Another one of those questions that assume in the multiplicity of Present Universe only the few could be chosen. So I will answer by saying I am very fond of those who painted with gold (& blues & reds). And their work normally hung in cathedrals. Often near the altar.
And had very many small boxes and other plain items ringed together in rows that made the loveliest designs...
Who are your favourite composers?
Extremely found of Faure. (How is that for stopping right there....)
What is your favourite colour?
Another of those difficulties! One colour? Hmm. Partial to blues - but most especially when in the company of whites or creams. Aquas - and especially when in the company of blues. Golds - likewise with blues (or reds). If a rose, that salmon or peach is inexpressibly sublime. Black is my best handsome when wearing clothes. In my kitchen - back again to blues. In my bedroom, khaki with gold trim...
On my blog...
Well. You see where we went, there.
What would we be without colours.
Of all things, what do you most detest?
Lies.
Have you got a motto?
My family does - or - to be sure - one branch of it did & it was a real motto. In Latin.
Something like 'out of the ashes we rise.'
But do I have one? I likely have too many & pinning me down to any one of them on top of all these questions....
What would you like to do right now?
This very instant? Or this very phase of my life. Oh. Forgot who was asking the questions, now didn't I. Well. That's why they call me contentious, you know. To be sure, you didn't know, but when a poor bird just has to know before she leaps into a thing....she is like an Overflow of Questions that Some Might Think Contentiousness.
I want to travel. Right now. Walk out the door with several million dreams tucked in my back pocket and see the world.
But I don't want to see it all by myself. So I guess I should perhaps be wanting other things. Okay. Bar-be-que. I'd like to be eating a bar-be-que sandwich - right now - this very instant...
[Editor's note(s). For those who did not link back to Seraphic's blog, her notes on the origins of this meme follow: "In a chamber of the Yves Saint-Laurent exhibit in Montreal there is an audiotape playing an interview with the designer. The interview is transcribed on the wall in French and translated into English... "
And the book mentioned above would be Columba, by Ian Finlay, 1979. Wren's copy came from one of the lovely annual book sales we used to have in Atlanta and is a UK edition.]
ADDENDUM! Alarmed addendum! Did I forget? A man who does not read - for these do exist, and I have met them - could scarcely be a part of my life. It's just that when one asks for a 'single' favourite - and gets a whole row of them - to leave out any essential quite so important in that row as READING...! Please! I write! He must read what I write.
What in the name of goodness a poor bird would be doing in the company of a man who did not read what she writes...
Some tales indeed must end...
Sunday, September 7, 2008
But My Dear Girl, You Cannot Exist
Seems the very most frightening thing about being a female creative is daring to exist.
No. That is the second most frightening. The first is daring to create. And as another post reminds (Dark Tales from the Other Side of Identity), that terror is not merely a female thing. But one could say (and not be so far from the mark) that it is primarily a female thing, and/or, resonates with Particular Cruelty in a woman.
To be sure, 'audacious women' are the Present Seeking of a particular foundation (A Room of Her Own) which does indeed put its money where its - err, mouth - is.
I am not an audacious woman.
In point of fact, several might disagree. So perhaps I should reframe. I have no desire to be an audacious woman, nor sympathy (at the present moment) with those who are.
And in point of fact a.m. n.o.t. o.n.e. AND not will be, ever, ever, ever. (I tend more toward enfant terrible & sorry I am of that but what can you say.) (Enfant terrible & audacious are not at all the same thing.)
And for all those who Think Otherwise (regarding how audacious or not said woman might be)...something there is about an inability in men to - umm, receive - certain things from women...let's reframe that one, too...to receive Certain Things from Certain Women and the rest manage to be received quite well & exceedingly easy...
Until they Transgress the Same Way.
O woman!
And as is Pointed Out Often by Daughter of the New Generation, it is just Some Men... (hmm. Seems I visited that point just recently, too) (Random Notes from a Wayside Café) (err, ...and those who are not lucky enough to be in said group NEED TO CHANGE.)
Umm. Pardonne. One does not borrow the use of All Caps in present century. But the Point to be Made (in lesser capitals) remains she is young; they are young; the men in question are young. Mere pups. Have to lift the tail (A Favourite Image) to see which is male & which is female...
Oh for a new generation that made it past the bedevilment of the old. (And we will ignore that Significant Person from above link is in fact - umm - not young.)
But - it remains that they won't. No good trying to hope they might. They won't. And in point of fact (it is a pointy sort of morning), I don't really want to see them doing so.
I like the old ways.
So we have now introduced another point.
Oh well. Wander at will is a motif of mine, in the event you have not yet read so far into me as to know this. Some pointy finger at the Current Read of the Educated Class...that the universe is a Random Creature.
Which, to be sure, it is.
Only not quite so random as certain folk would like us to believe. Nor quite so un-ruled. I am eating sweet 'tater fries this morning (for it is still morning to me, though, 2b sure, the clock no longer considers it so), for those of you In Need of Further Randomness. And I could easily toss the Above Randomness (the one prior to the 'taters) in Doctrinal Divides, Enlightened Church, Ontological Christianity - or none of the above.
I perhaps need a new label: Tired of It All.
Hope in that one, you see. After all, it is only good to be tired of everything when something else beckons. Something else replaces. Something else reminds of hope, and youth, and once-known.
Bad place to start, anyway, to be sure. Audacious women. And it's only Sunday. Have the rest of the week to trot my Lack of Audaciousness about, limping along to That Job (Part-Time Though It Is) that doesn't even begin to Hold Said Life Together...yet becomes all a drifting woman can be consumed by...night...day...night...day again. Work.
Which tends to be the problem.
The day world is not what the creative world is and certainly more audacious women might find it easy to dangle between the two, each foot firmly placed [my Very Favourite Image: that place wherein two worlds are spitting distance, and each has a door - perhaps the worlds are the size of a four story building (perhaps merely two or three), in my imagining, and the door (neatly set right there at the equatorial line - the doorknob, what - a latitude or two below that equator - and opening - both of them - to the inside of said world) the size of a regular door...all that black night of space - do you see all that black, and that almost eiree green-and-blue of earth, glowing, perhaps, like a computer screen photo in a darkened room - all that expanse, above and below said door and do you think you could comfortably stand stretched between the two?
Thou'rt made of better stuff than I am.]
But to be sure, that is where we started. Because that voice always resident in the inner portions does indeed occasionally have a sense of humor and today at least it is 'my dear girl-ing' me. One wants a bit of my dear girl here & there.
But I am dangling between two separate topics, as is my wont (& faithful readers know too well). The one, that great 'how dare you' of both identity & creative identity. The other - that impossibility for the creative (even in the necessity) of living in the day world...
That necessity [as the venerable Woolf (for those who do not know her actual biography) (and I for one seem to love to Read Biographies of Creatives) (and inevitably Wish I Had Not) reminds us (it having been Said by Others Before Her, in one form or 'nother)] to a room of a woman's own to write...
But of course (as my side bar notes), the actual quote by Woolf states a woman needs money and a room of her own...and as my own commentary on said matter notes, an alarm clock to waken when sleeping...
Because once you get that place of Great & Necessary Solitude Wherein One Can Close Out the Whimpers & Needs of Others - can, as we might say in an ADHD world - concentrate...the fact becomes that, without the solace of others in your room quietly breathing (More Notes from that Other Side of Identity), you end up--.
Sleeping.
Because, for women, as for Most of Us (and Resident Blogger is indeed a Woman), it is what we surge against that gives us power. Not what we surge towards. What we try to reframe, to rethink, and/or to rebut, defines.
I don't think too many of us necessarily notice that, however. Standing as I so often do stretched out between two worlds - one foot just barely toeing the jamb of the other one - and you do know the two worlds are spinning, and unfortunately, in opposite direction...I have Too Much Time on My Hands & randomly (umm) pick apart the milli-seconds that divide...
But exist? Dare I exist?
Nah. That part requires, I am thinking, more courage than Resident Downtrodden (& Lacking in Audaciousness) Woman dares.
Now what in the name of goodness could have prompted all this on an otherwise rather well-behaved morning fully intent on finally washing those dishes & Cleaning Place Wherein One Resides...
Posting something.
Posting something from the heart.
And posting it with all the intensity - umm, resident - in said heart of a woman with too much heart, and too much intensity...
After all, when you do dare to put all of yourself on the line - right out there, drying in the sun (and that breeze that is the only thing that makes the thought of line-dried garments palatable)...when you dare...the exposure is Not Very Pleasant.
And the where/who/how of my fictional & fictional again self (because, 2b sure, somewhere, a real person resides, complete with life & family & facebook page & social security number, etc., etc., etc.) is - umm, never quite revealed.
All that turtle inside the shell stuff. Or crab within same. Or, as the tiles borrowed from Isobel (Dreaming) note: how can we be hiding, even now - even now...
(And by the way, the sweet 'taters were...sweet.)
ADDENDUM(S) 15 (& 16) Sep 08: For those faithful readers who know passeres well, I am uncertain whether to apologize or cheer. That vitality one must repress and/or doubt and/or allow with all the madcap overeffusiveness a wee bird can sing...
The safety thing. Said bird has a Distinct Problem with Things Changing So Much (and So Often) in this very un-safe world in which we all live & roost & have our being.
But sometimes a day needs a mite of colour.
[Err. And for those of you who are Not Faithful Readers (which would be Most of You) the reference above is to the transformation from Wren to this Bejeweled & Bedecked in Such Colours Tropical Bird that passeres has undergone.
Almost hurts the eyes to peer at her. The blog used to be so - properly brown wren. Brown, blue & grey it was, wasn't it - all the titles and texts and borders (and even the 'illustrations')in such staid colours...
Sort of beaten down wren colours...sort of 'I am still hiding' colours. The visceral quality of the New Tropical Bird quite has the power to undo said Wren, even now.
How dare she? But the Very Proper Tendency of the creative to Examine the Self from a Safe Distance leaves said bird watching as the colours work their way out from the shell...pecking, pecking...
Yet so very visceral, one must almost shield the eyes from the impact...
Must shield the Self...
Is that bird trying to fly on the back of an eagle again?
Who can say...]
[But what can be said is this: that chatter of the 'whimpers & needs of others' will always be the easy part to screen out...it is the overpowering lurch of Identity that cannot be withstood...]
No. That is the second most frightening. The first is daring to create. And as another post reminds (Dark Tales from the Other Side of Identity), that terror is not merely a female thing. But one could say (and not be so far from the mark) that it is primarily a female thing, and/or, resonates with Particular Cruelty in a woman.
To be sure, 'audacious women' are the Present Seeking of a particular foundation (A Room of Her Own) which does indeed put its money where its - err, mouth - is.
I am not an audacious woman.
In point of fact, several might disagree. So perhaps I should reframe. I have no desire to be an audacious woman, nor sympathy (at the present moment) with those who are.
And in point of fact a.m. n.o.t. o.n.e. AND not will be, ever, ever, ever. (I tend more toward enfant terrible & sorry I am of that but what can you say.) (Enfant terrible & audacious are not at all the same thing.)
And for all those who Think Otherwise (regarding how audacious or not said woman might be)...something there is about an inability in men to - umm, receive - certain things from women...let's reframe that one, too...to receive Certain Things from Certain Women and the rest manage to be received quite well & exceedingly easy...
Until they Transgress the Same Way.
O woman!
And as is Pointed Out Often by Daughter of the New Generation, it is just Some Men... (hmm. Seems I visited that point just recently, too) (Random Notes from a Wayside Café) (err, ...and those who are not lucky enough to be in said group NEED TO CHANGE.)
Umm. Pardonne. One does not borrow the use of All Caps in present century. But the Point to be Made (in lesser capitals) remains she is young; they are young; the men in question are young. Mere pups. Have to lift the tail (A Favourite Image) to see which is male & which is female...
Oh for a new generation that made it past the bedevilment of the old. (And we will ignore that Significant Person from above link is in fact - umm - not young.)
But - it remains that they won't. No good trying to hope they might. They won't. And in point of fact (it is a pointy sort of morning), I don't really want to see them doing so.
I like the old ways.
So we have now introduced another point.
Oh well. Wander at will is a motif of mine, in the event you have not yet read so far into me as to know this. Some pointy finger at the Current Read of the Educated Class...that the universe is a Random Creature.
Which, to be sure, it is.
Only not quite so random as certain folk would like us to believe. Nor quite so un-ruled. I am eating sweet 'tater fries this morning (for it is still morning to me, though, 2b sure, the clock no longer considers it so), for those of you In Need of Further Randomness. And I could easily toss the Above Randomness (the one prior to the 'taters) in Doctrinal Divides, Enlightened Church, Ontological Christianity - or none of the above.
I perhaps need a new label: Tired of It All.
Hope in that one, you see. After all, it is only good to be tired of everything when something else beckons. Something else replaces. Something else reminds of hope, and youth, and once-known.
Bad place to start, anyway, to be sure. Audacious women. And it's only Sunday. Have the rest of the week to trot my Lack of Audaciousness about, limping along to That Job (Part-Time Though It Is) that doesn't even begin to Hold Said Life Together...yet becomes all a drifting woman can be consumed by...night...day...night...day again. Work.
Which tends to be the problem.
The day world is not what the creative world is and certainly more audacious women might find it easy to dangle between the two, each foot firmly placed [my Very Favourite Image: that place wherein two worlds are spitting distance, and each has a door - perhaps the worlds are the size of a four story building (perhaps merely two or three), in my imagining, and the door (neatly set right there at the equatorial line - the doorknob, what - a latitude or two below that equator - and opening - both of them - to the inside of said world) the size of a regular door...all that black night of space - do you see all that black, and that almost eiree green-and-blue of earth, glowing, perhaps, like a computer screen photo in a darkened room - all that expanse, above and below said door and do you think you could comfortably stand stretched between the two?
Thou'rt made of better stuff than I am.]
But to be sure, that is where we started. Because that voice always resident in the inner portions does indeed occasionally have a sense of humor and today at least it is 'my dear girl-ing' me. One wants a bit of my dear girl here & there.
But I am dangling between two separate topics, as is my wont (& faithful readers know too well). The one, that great 'how dare you' of both identity & creative identity. The other - that impossibility for the creative (even in the necessity) of living in the day world...
That necessity [as the venerable Woolf (for those who do not know her actual biography) (and I for one seem to love to Read Biographies of Creatives) (and inevitably Wish I Had Not) reminds us (it having been Said by Others Before Her, in one form or 'nother)] to a room of a woman's own to write...
But of course (as my side bar notes), the actual quote by Woolf states a woman needs money and a room of her own...and as my own commentary on said matter notes, an alarm clock to waken when sleeping...
Because once you get that place of Great & Necessary Solitude Wherein One Can Close Out the Whimpers & Needs of Others - can, as we might say in an ADHD world - concentrate...the fact becomes that, without the solace of others in your room quietly breathing (More Notes from that Other Side of Identity), you end up--.
Sleeping.
Because, for women, as for Most of Us (and Resident Blogger is indeed a Woman), it is what we surge against that gives us power. Not what we surge towards. What we try to reframe, to rethink, and/or to rebut, defines.
I don't think too many of us necessarily notice that, however. Standing as I so often do stretched out between two worlds - one foot just barely toeing the jamb of the other one - and you do know the two worlds are spinning, and unfortunately, in opposite direction...I have Too Much Time on My Hands & randomly (umm) pick apart the milli-seconds that divide...
But exist? Dare I exist?
Nah. That part requires, I am thinking, more courage than Resident Downtrodden (& Lacking in Audaciousness) Woman dares.
Now what in the name of goodness could have prompted all this on an otherwise rather well-behaved morning fully intent on finally washing those dishes & Cleaning Place Wherein One Resides...
Posting something.
Posting something from the heart.
And posting it with all the intensity - umm, resident - in said heart of a woman with too much heart, and too much intensity...
After all, when you do dare to put all of yourself on the line - right out there, drying in the sun (and that breeze that is the only thing that makes the thought of line-dried garments palatable)...when you dare...the exposure is Not Very Pleasant.
And the where/who/how of my fictional & fictional again self (because, 2b sure, somewhere, a real person resides, complete with life & family & facebook page & social security number, etc., etc., etc.) is - umm, never quite revealed.
All that turtle inside the shell stuff. Or crab within same. Or, as the tiles borrowed from Isobel (Dreaming) note: how can we be hiding, even now - even now...
(And by the way, the sweet 'taters were...sweet.)
ADDENDUM(S) 15 (& 16) Sep 08: For those faithful readers who know passeres well, I am uncertain whether to apologize or cheer. That vitality one must repress and/or doubt and/or allow with all the madcap overeffusiveness a wee bird can sing...
The safety thing. Said bird has a Distinct Problem with Things Changing So Much (and So Often) in this very un-safe world in which we all live & roost & have our being.
But sometimes a day needs a mite of colour.
[Err. And for those of you who are Not Faithful Readers (which would be Most of You) the reference above is to the transformation from Wren to this Bejeweled & Bedecked in Such Colours Tropical Bird that passeres has undergone.
Almost hurts the eyes to peer at her. The blog used to be so - properly brown wren. Brown, blue & grey it was, wasn't it - all the titles and texts and borders (and even the 'illustrations')in such staid colours...
Sort of beaten down wren colours...sort of 'I am still hiding' colours. The visceral quality of the New Tropical Bird quite has the power to undo said Wren, even now.
How dare she? But the Very Proper Tendency of the creative to Examine the Self from a Safe Distance leaves said bird watching as the colours work their way out from the shell...pecking, pecking...
Yet so very visceral, one must almost shield the eyes from the impact...
Must shield the Self...
Is that bird trying to fly on the back of an eagle again?
Who can say...]
[But what can be said is this: that chatter of the 'whimpers & needs of others' will always be the easy part to screen out...it is the overpowering lurch of Identity that cannot be withstood...]
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Random Notes from a Wayside Café
I was once a bookseller at a bookstore/café combo. One might call it a 'two-fer' position. Got to don an apron and visor more often than I should wish and pretend I was a barista. Not the most pleasant occupation for a woman who has raised two kids and now holds the telescope, looking for a life of her own.
This is a tale about a barista and a gentleman. Baristas are the people who get cups of hot coffee thrown in their faces when the customer(s) gets riled and the baristas don’t get to do anything but smile and say, may I fix you another cup?
But perhaps it were better to say it is a tale told from real life about a sexual encounter.
Or non-encounter, as it were. Its saving grace.
And it is sad, for all its hilarity. I still remember it, laughing, even knowing how it all played out. I remember it laughing.
He was sitting in one of our oversized leather chairs when I first noticed him. The chairs kept the balance in our little café askew—small tables and their matching chairs pristinely lined up in rows with a large emptiness between our counter area and their space. A reigning café worker’s determined order—each table accompanied by only two chairs, though even in their petiteness, they were intended for three. I’d finally taken the liberty of rescuing the leather chairs from their discordance against the wall and placing them in the center of the café; they added a quirky dimension of sealed-off peace which the tables surrounding them took on in echo.
He was an old man, easily in his eighties, and seemed to be positioned there, with his book, like a toy might sit patiently on a shelf until needed again for play. I imagined he lived somewhere where he was not alone and others oversaw his daily activity but otherwise ignored him; it seemed he might be out with a son or daughter, who placed him there while shopping.
The Day Out with the Family.
But the family was busy and needed him to be quiet.
Why think all these things when glancing over the café on my shift.
Because I do. Who does the telling always affects the story told. The medium is the message no more. The teller is the tale.
He seemed drowsy. Yet as I moved through the tables the next hour, I noted the gentleman watched. Half-closed eyes—easy to think he was better accustomed to rest at that hour, as much as that he lived now in that hour of somnolent reflection.
But that hidden thought—the one we ignore. Other men had looked at me—I knew what it had meant with them. But he was an elderly gentleman, and if anything, how he followed my progress through the tables confirmed my thought—anything moving would catch the eye, like the darting flames of a fire’s beguiling warmth—something primal and before the time of conscious thought—something made of the stuff that would linger long after its demise.
I left for my ten-minute break. When I returned, he was at the counter. My back-up was counting the money he had given her.
“That will be twelve cents, sir,” she pointed out politely.
“Twelve cents.”
“Twelve cents.”
He could not hear. I slipped into the back to put on my apron and visor and as I stepped through the door to the counter area, she tossed back over her shoulder, “I took twelve cents out of your tip box. Hope you don’t mind, but it seemed ridiculous to keep on yelling at that gentleman for such a small amount when he couldn’t hear a word I was saying.”
I shrugged and went about my tasks. He sat now at a table with his tray of food. I kept an eye out for him as I worked. My great-grandfather was a gentleman and a cultured man when the words still had meaning; I looked for him in the eyes and faces still of the elderly.
And if my suspicions were correct, I reasoned the elderly fellow might need help with his tray. When I saw him struggling to rise, I moved over quickly.
He seemed to have difficulty forming words and gestured before the words stumbled out—the gestures and a pleading about the eyes saying what he could not find the words to say.
In point of fact, whether we ever made it to words is more than I can remember.
I carried the tray to the sink in the back room and returned to the back to wash dishes. Business was slow and that small bell people ring for service stayed silent. I wandered out to check for customers after a few minutes and saw my elderly friend at the register. I stepped to the counter. Did he need anything?
He smiled at me and held up his hand in a slow pantomime. He was holding quarters—two, not even three—he gestured again to be sure I saw what he was doing.
The quarters clinked as he dropped them into my box. I thanked him and, seeing he did not want to order, returned to the other room. Day there was when one or two quarters made a tip! But it was not my day and - in any case - I had not helped him in order to 'earn' any tip.
Minutes later, I checked the front again. He’d moved from the register to the espresso machine—some two, maybe three feet. Thinking perhaps I’d missed something, I stepped out. Did he need help.
The man stared at me through mesmerized eyes.
“Looking at–” his voice was garbled. “–the woman.”
His look made which woman clear. But the labor with which the elderly fellow forced the words out, coupled with the awkward compiling, made me think perhaps his private thought had inadvertently been voiced rather than the response he hoped.
Many ways a woman could respond.
I looked around the empty space about us.
“What woman?”
My voice was bright.
He walked to the end of the counter, where no partition divided. I moved there as well, not knowing what else to do—that burgeoning need to keep things from bedlam.
The elderly fellow spoke again. His striving still to connect words—to even find them, perhaps—ruled the encounter. But his next comment continued the edge closer.
I drew back, again—resorted to one of my stock phrases for the unwelcome advances of random men.
Don’t know that my guy would be too happy to hear you say that!
Laughing.
He persisted. Whether he gained in confidence as he got the wheels which connect thought and speech moving or something else stirred him, he lurched on.
“See…the woman…without her shirt…on—.”
That high screech of the track I careened along now, trying to keep things calm—. Back in the day - and that necessity to preserve civility as the first response - that small voice that can only hear 'first thing' and allow nothing else...repeat it like a chant, first thing, first thing, firstthing, firstthingfirstthingfirst...that small voice that skulks along the outer wall, keeping peace, keeping quiet, keeping...small and unnoticed.
All the safety in the world in keeping to those words - all the necessity in the world of keeping to the only reasoned thought possible: you cannot get from Point A to Point B to Point C...the train has derailed and Point A must be held at all cost...
Else the world will crumble. World and identity and all that is resident within...
But I was not a small girl, no matter how small that voice in me. I laughed again. “It would certainly liven the store up,” I returned, and stepped toward the back room, for all the world as though I’d been having a most enchanting conversation but needed to return to my work.
What else could a woman do. That beastly thing named civility. That roaring note called quiet. That haunting creature called 'not draw attention to oneself.'
But we are made of many things, n'est ce pas, and most of them are at odds. I remember laughing - remember thinking this was some comedic caricature, some lame dance on a vaudeville stage - some comedy performance scripted for pointing fingers at humanity - comedy is the first defense, n'est ce pas.
The first defense, gentle, yet sharp.
My shift ended and as I left the café, I saw the co-worker who had taken his order—she was a manager. I have something to tell. We walked into the store’s back office where I swam into rivers of hilarity—oh, laughter—oh deluge of dizzy, silly, overwhelming mirth.
I will always remember laughing...
Another co-worker in the next room, fiddling with channels on the TV, overheard. On the floor the few minutes after, he asked where the man was.
Sitting in the leather chair in the café—he’d returned there with his book.
My co-worker walked over before he returned to his station downstairs.
Sober. Saying nothing except to affirm the man’s age.
I was shelving books some twenty minutes later when I saw the elderly man standing at the edge of my section. In the store environment, barring violence, there is not much a man can do to a woman—and certainly not an elderly fellow in any environment.
But to face it again. My fear was a social one—I’d managed to put a good face on the episode between us—kept things easy, harmless—cloaked in at least a tattered dignity—.
Whether my fear showed or not, the man disappeared in the moments it took to shelve the remaining two books. As I left the area, picking up more books left in the floor by customers as I moved, I saw him walking with his daughter toward the second-floor elevator.
I huddled with the arm full of books at the end of a long bay of CDs, peering around it as the two disappeared from my view. Perhaps as aftershock, I turned and walked back down the aisle to a co-worker.
Let me know if he is on the elevator. The young girl walked over to where she could easily see them then returned to tell me they were on the elevator. I moved to the window that overlooked the parking lot to wait and see them leave. It had ended.
“It’s good you weren’t mad.” Store chitchat later, the co-worker who’d overheard all.
“Why would I be mad? He was an old man. Besides, I have brothers. I know what men are like.” My comments were quick, decisive. Whatever had happened, it was finished. My eye to the larger meaning(s) of life resident in any small & noteworthy item caught on a limb in this river-race we call life would likely examine the matter again - but now that is was over, the comic aspects reigned.
I liked comedy.
But even if I had not, vaudeville ruled, here.
We left at that. It had ended. Just another incident in a bookstore—or, as you prefer, a life. A random incident capable of its moment’s amusement (or not), then forgotten.
But incidents amuse or otherwise depending, largely, upon the one who—.
Tells the tale.
Reflection and the subsequent opinion of others altered the detail rendered; only the simplest believe the past does not change. That night, telling the tale to my Significant One, my laughter was even more raucous than that of the earlier telling.
But as I came to myself, I realized my listener was silent.
Don’t you think it’s funny?
Dead air.
Don’t you think it’s funny?
Silence.
Are you there?
I've seldom heard air so dead.
Hello? I was alone. All & completely alone. I waited, no longer so certain of anything.
But of course the Significant One was there, and his comment after that silence was swift and a thrust (was he displeased with me for misreading?) into my mirth; that faux pas quality emerging - overtaking, as it were - my hilarity—that silence on the other end of the line had finally warned.
That was sexual harassment. That clipped quality to his voice. I became a young girl again, shamed by that thing everyone knew that I did not. Didn't really matter what it was. 'They' knew everything. I knew nothing...
The afternoon took on a different hue. I remembered the solemnity of my [male] co-worker’s walk to the café to check the man out. And another co-worker with his quick pushing away of “that pervert;” a conversational device that unequivocally lets everyone present know “we” are not like that.
The co-worker's quick denunciation had amused me, to be sure, bearded and pony-tailed as he is and garbed in somber black at all times—sort of a radical kind of guy, n'est ce pas? But beneath that cultural ‘uniform’ of goth and art lurked a rather proper young man…as quick to denounce as he would be on another occasion when a transvestite, all dolled up in finery no woman would dare wear, sailed into the store and I was the only bookseller who would talk to him.
Walked all the way across the store while the undercurrent of hisses simmered behind me to greet and ask if he needed help...
I will never forget the haunted look - the pain - in the man's bloodshot & mascara-ed eyes.
But that is another tale.
My Significant One's condemnation of me seemed acute. What had I missed? Worse, was something wrong with me that I had not “recognized” the tenor of the experience. Forget the attempt to keep it from becoming something I didn’t want it to be—I think anyone would have tried to contain it out of respect for the man’s age, mirth or no.
Young girls—the very young—often shimmer in that innocence. Not all of them—many, to be sure, are born knowing. Others—replete with that innocence not really naïveté or stupidity but something more primal—a defencelessness that waits its wolf. Was there something in me that was—not innocent...but naïve?
Lacking?
Unable to understand a critical element of what is appropriate and what is not?
Days once were when female employees had to listen when a man said such things—and were forced to smile in a different fashion.
Though perhaps, after all, not quite so different?
Maybe my encounter had been with a man who—rather than an inability to differentiate between the confusion of private desire and appropriate behaviour—that cruelty of old age—was unmasked by a different confusion—yes, age certainly took some of the finesse away—but in his day perhaps he had said the same to many counter workers…women who had no comic sensibilities to protect them.
He was old enough to belong to another day.
The whole picture changes then. Simmers in a place wherein it is difficult, perhaps, to find compassion or mirth. That image of the same counter, decades ago, and women who had no way out of counter jobs, smiles for a tip, smiles when lewdness tossed out by a man who held too much power in his hand stepped up to...visit them. To taunt them.
A man who knew he had the backing of all men - of society - of the society of all men - to say whatever he chose to say.
I think it is that all times have their social injustices. Something about creating the story that moves those who must be moved (err, us sheep) often takes things over the edge that separates...the true stories of life are all at odds, remember, and a proper 'story' must tell in a straight line, without the ambiguities of reality...(for those looking for lessons in writing, do note the modern tale preserves the ambiguity of life).
Yet the first rule of propaganda remains that straight & uncontradicted line that casts into severe detail only one part of a tale...
I am not a feminist. But that encounter at a counter...
No, it does not leave me telling a story in a straight line. Not even now.
But said story lurched on. My belovéd instructed me it is sexist to say, “men are like that.”
It is appropriate to say some men are like that.
I retorted quickly that all I have ever known are (and that does include you, my dear).
But one rarely states words hidden by parentheses.
The take-away of all of it is sad. I do not look so innocently into the eyes of elderly men now, seeking men of a different era.
I have become wary.
We end up, after all, where we started. Who am I.
Because the story just told, after all, depended on who was doing the telling. Had my co-worker(s) told it. That pervert.
It’d be a different tale. Was it a story about a barista and an elderly man. A story about an encounter at a counter. Or a story about men and women.
Or was it a story about me.
Curious world we live in.
But I remember laughing. One thought remains, and it surfaces in that random way as an addendum some two, perhaps three years after the incident - and returns us to where we started. That other thought, hidden in the glare...
Why a woman would think (in a world where baristas have coffee thrown in their face & obligations to the Company That Employs Them demand they smile & offer a second cup) a company might be concerned whether she were offended or no by a...pervert...
Why indeed. But I'll leave you to stew over that one, whether it takes moments - or years - to come up with the answer.
[Editor's note. One might wish to google the stories floating about on Dame Helen Mirren and her commentary to incidents from her own youth to gain further perspective on that question of civility, young girls...and men.]
This is a tale about a barista and a gentleman. Baristas are the people who get cups of hot coffee thrown in their faces when the customer(s) gets riled and the baristas don’t get to do anything but smile and say, may I fix you another cup?
But perhaps it were better to say it is a tale told from real life about a sexual encounter.
Or non-encounter, as it were. Its saving grace.
And it is sad, for all its hilarity. I still remember it, laughing, even knowing how it all played out. I remember it laughing.
He was sitting in one of our oversized leather chairs when I first noticed him. The chairs kept the balance in our little café askew—small tables and their matching chairs pristinely lined up in rows with a large emptiness between our counter area and their space. A reigning café worker’s determined order—each table accompanied by only two chairs, though even in their petiteness, they were intended for three. I’d finally taken the liberty of rescuing the leather chairs from their discordance against the wall and placing them in the center of the café; they added a quirky dimension of sealed-off peace which the tables surrounding them took on in echo.
He was an old man, easily in his eighties, and seemed to be positioned there, with his book, like a toy might sit patiently on a shelf until needed again for play. I imagined he lived somewhere where he was not alone and others oversaw his daily activity but otherwise ignored him; it seemed he might be out with a son or daughter, who placed him there while shopping.
The Day Out with the Family.
But the family was busy and needed him to be quiet.
Why think all these things when glancing over the café on my shift.
Because I do. Who does the telling always affects the story told. The medium is the message no more. The teller is the tale.
He seemed drowsy. Yet as I moved through the tables the next hour, I noted the gentleman watched. Half-closed eyes—easy to think he was better accustomed to rest at that hour, as much as that he lived now in that hour of somnolent reflection.
But that hidden thought—the one we ignore. Other men had looked at me—I knew what it had meant with them. But he was an elderly gentleman, and if anything, how he followed my progress through the tables confirmed my thought—anything moving would catch the eye, like the darting flames of a fire’s beguiling warmth—something primal and before the time of conscious thought—something made of the stuff that would linger long after its demise.
I left for my ten-minute break. When I returned, he was at the counter. My back-up was counting the money he had given her.
“That will be twelve cents, sir,” she pointed out politely.
“Twelve cents.”
“Twelve cents.”
He could not hear. I slipped into the back to put on my apron and visor and as I stepped through the door to the counter area, she tossed back over her shoulder, “I took twelve cents out of your tip box. Hope you don’t mind, but it seemed ridiculous to keep on yelling at that gentleman for such a small amount when he couldn’t hear a word I was saying.”
I shrugged and went about my tasks. He sat now at a table with his tray of food. I kept an eye out for him as I worked. My great-grandfather was a gentleman and a cultured man when the words still had meaning; I looked for him in the eyes and faces still of the elderly.
And if my suspicions were correct, I reasoned the elderly fellow might need help with his tray. When I saw him struggling to rise, I moved over quickly.
He seemed to have difficulty forming words and gestured before the words stumbled out—the gestures and a pleading about the eyes saying what he could not find the words to say.
In point of fact, whether we ever made it to words is more than I can remember.
I carried the tray to the sink in the back room and returned to the back to wash dishes. Business was slow and that small bell people ring for service stayed silent. I wandered out to check for customers after a few minutes and saw my elderly friend at the register. I stepped to the counter. Did he need anything?
He smiled at me and held up his hand in a slow pantomime. He was holding quarters—two, not even three—he gestured again to be sure I saw what he was doing.
The quarters clinked as he dropped them into my box. I thanked him and, seeing he did not want to order, returned to the other room. Day there was when one or two quarters made a tip! But it was not my day and - in any case - I had not helped him in order to 'earn' any tip.
Minutes later, I checked the front again. He’d moved from the register to the espresso machine—some two, maybe three feet. Thinking perhaps I’d missed something, I stepped out. Did he need help.
The man stared at me through mesmerized eyes.
“Looking at–” his voice was garbled. “–the woman.”
His look made which woman clear. But the labor with which the elderly fellow forced the words out, coupled with the awkward compiling, made me think perhaps his private thought had inadvertently been voiced rather than the response he hoped.
Many ways a woman could respond.
I looked around the empty space about us.
“What woman?”
My voice was bright.
He walked to the end of the counter, where no partition divided. I moved there as well, not knowing what else to do—that burgeoning need to keep things from bedlam.
The elderly fellow spoke again. His striving still to connect words—to even find them, perhaps—ruled the encounter. But his next comment continued the edge closer.
I drew back, again—resorted to one of my stock phrases for the unwelcome advances of random men.
Don’t know that my guy would be too happy to hear you say that!
Laughing.
He persisted. Whether he gained in confidence as he got the wheels which connect thought and speech moving or something else stirred him, he lurched on.
“See…the woman…without her shirt…on—.”
That high screech of the track I careened along now, trying to keep things calm—. Back in the day - and that necessity to preserve civility as the first response - that small voice that can only hear 'first thing' and allow nothing else...repeat it like a chant, first thing, first thing, firstthing, firstthingfirstthingfirst...that small voice that skulks along the outer wall, keeping peace, keeping quiet, keeping...small and unnoticed.
All the safety in the world in keeping to those words - all the necessity in the world of keeping to the only reasoned thought possible: you cannot get from Point A to Point B to Point C...the train has derailed and Point A must be held at all cost...
Else the world will crumble. World and identity and all that is resident within...
But I was not a small girl, no matter how small that voice in me. I laughed again. “It would certainly liven the store up,” I returned, and stepped toward the back room, for all the world as though I’d been having a most enchanting conversation but needed to return to my work.
What else could a woman do. That beastly thing named civility. That roaring note called quiet. That haunting creature called 'not draw attention to oneself.'
But we are made of many things, n'est ce pas, and most of them are at odds. I remember laughing - remember thinking this was some comedic caricature, some lame dance on a vaudeville stage - some comedy performance scripted for pointing fingers at humanity - comedy is the first defense, n'est ce pas.
The first defense, gentle, yet sharp.
My shift ended and as I left the café, I saw the co-worker who had taken his order—she was a manager. I have something to tell. We walked into the store’s back office where I swam into rivers of hilarity—oh, laughter—oh deluge of dizzy, silly, overwhelming mirth.
I will always remember laughing...
Another co-worker in the next room, fiddling with channels on the TV, overheard. On the floor the few minutes after, he asked where the man was.
Sitting in the leather chair in the café—he’d returned there with his book.
My co-worker walked over before he returned to his station downstairs.
Sober. Saying nothing except to affirm the man’s age.
I was shelving books some twenty minutes later when I saw the elderly man standing at the edge of my section. In the store environment, barring violence, there is not much a man can do to a woman—and certainly not an elderly fellow in any environment.
But to face it again. My fear was a social one—I’d managed to put a good face on the episode between us—kept things easy, harmless—cloaked in at least a tattered dignity—.
Whether my fear showed or not, the man disappeared in the moments it took to shelve the remaining two books. As I left the area, picking up more books left in the floor by customers as I moved, I saw him walking with his daughter toward the second-floor elevator.
I huddled with the arm full of books at the end of a long bay of CDs, peering around it as the two disappeared from my view. Perhaps as aftershock, I turned and walked back down the aisle to a co-worker.
Let me know if he is on the elevator. The young girl walked over to where she could easily see them then returned to tell me they were on the elevator. I moved to the window that overlooked the parking lot to wait and see them leave. It had ended.
“It’s good you weren’t mad.” Store chitchat later, the co-worker who’d overheard all.
“Why would I be mad? He was an old man. Besides, I have brothers. I know what men are like.” My comments were quick, decisive. Whatever had happened, it was finished. My eye to the larger meaning(s) of life resident in any small & noteworthy item caught on a limb in this river-race we call life would likely examine the matter again - but now that is was over, the comic aspects reigned.
I liked comedy.
But even if I had not, vaudeville ruled, here.
We left at that. It had ended. Just another incident in a bookstore—or, as you prefer, a life. A random incident capable of its moment’s amusement (or not), then forgotten.
But incidents amuse or otherwise depending, largely, upon the one who—.
Tells the tale.
Reflection and the subsequent opinion of others altered the detail rendered; only the simplest believe the past does not change. That night, telling the tale to my Significant One, my laughter was even more raucous than that of the earlier telling.
But as I came to myself, I realized my listener was silent.
Don’t you think it’s funny?
Dead air.
Don’t you think it’s funny?
Silence.
Are you there?
I've seldom heard air so dead.
Hello? I was alone. All & completely alone. I waited, no longer so certain of anything.
But of course the Significant One was there, and his comment after that silence was swift and a thrust (was he displeased with me for misreading?) into my mirth; that faux pas quality emerging - overtaking, as it were - my hilarity—that silence on the other end of the line had finally warned.
That was sexual harassment. That clipped quality to his voice. I became a young girl again, shamed by that thing everyone knew that I did not. Didn't really matter what it was. 'They' knew everything. I knew nothing...
The afternoon took on a different hue. I remembered the solemnity of my [male] co-worker’s walk to the café to check the man out. And another co-worker with his quick pushing away of “that pervert;” a conversational device that unequivocally lets everyone present know “we” are not like that.
The co-worker's quick denunciation had amused me, to be sure, bearded and pony-tailed as he is and garbed in somber black at all times—sort of a radical kind of guy, n'est ce pas? But beneath that cultural ‘uniform’ of goth and art lurked a rather proper young man…as quick to denounce as he would be on another occasion when a transvestite, all dolled up in finery no woman would dare wear, sailed into the store and I was the only bookseller who would talk to him.
Walked all the way across the store while the undercurrent of hisses simmered behind me to greet and ask if he needed help...
I will never forget the haunted look - the pain - in the man's bloodshot & mascara-ed eyes.
But that is another tale.
My Significant One's condemnation of me seemed acute. What had I missed? Worse, was something wrong with me that I had not “recognized” the tenor of the experience. Forget the attempt to keep it from becoming something I didn’t want it to be—I think anyone would have tried to contain it out of respect for the man’s age, mirth or no.
Young girls—the very young—often shimmer in that innocence. Not all of them—many, to be sure, are born knowing. Others—replete with that innocence not really naïveté or stupidity but something more primal—a defencelessness that waits its wolf. Was there something in me that was—not innocent...but naïve?
Lacking?
Unable to understand a critical element of what is appropriate and what is not?
Days once were when female employees had to listen when a man said such things—and were forced to smile in a different fashion.
Though perhaps, after all, not quite so different?
Maybe my encounter had been with a man who—rather than an inability to differentiate between the confusion of private desire and appropriate behaviour—that cruelty of old age—was unmasked by a different confusion—yes, age certainly took some of the finesse away—but in his day perhaps he had said the same to many counter workers…women who had no comic sensibilities to protect them.
He was old enough to belong to another day.
The whole picture changes then. Simmers in a place wherein it is difficult, perhaps, to find compassion or mirth. That image of the same counter, decades ago, and women who had no way out of counter jobs, smiles for a tip, smiles when lewdness tossed out by a man who held too much power in his hand stepped up to...visit them. To taunt them.
A man who knew he had the backing of all men - of society - of the society of all men - to say whatever he chose to say.
I think it is that all times have their social injustices. Something about creating the story that moves those who must be moved (err, us sheep) often takes things over the edge that separates...the true stories of life are all at odds, remember, and a proper 'story' must tell in a straight line, without the ambiguities of reality...(for those looking for lessons in writing, do note the modern tale preserves the ambiguity of life).
Yet the first rule of propaganda remains that straight & uncontradicted line that casts into severe detail only one part of a tale...
I am not a feminist. But that encounter at a counter...
No, it does not leave me telling a story in a straight line. Not even now.
But said story lurched on. My belovéd instructed me it is sexist to say, “men are like that.”
It is appropriate to say some men are like that.
I retorted quickly that all I have ever known are (and that does include you, my dear).
But one rarely states words hidden by parentheses.
The take-away of all of it is sad. I do not look so innocently into the eyes of elderly men now, seeking men of a different era.
I have become wary.
We end up, after all, where we started. Who am I.
Because the story just told, after all, depended on who was doing the telling. Had my co-worker(s) told it. That pervert.
It’d be a different tale. Was it a story about a barista and an elderly man. A story about an encounter at a counter. Or a story about men and women.
Or was it a story about me.
Curious world we live in.
But I remember laughing. One thought remains, and it surfaces in that random way as an addendum some two, perhaps three years after the incident - and returns us to where we started. That other thought, hidden in the glare...
Why a woman would think (in a world where baristas have coffee thrown in their face & obligations to the Company That Employs Them demand they smile & offer a second cup) a company might be concerned whether she were offended or no by a...pervert...
Why indeed. But I'll leave you to stew over that one, whether it takes moments - or years - to come up with the answer.
[Editor's note. One might wish to google the stories floating about on Dame Helen Mirren and her commentary to incidents from her own youth to gain further perspective on that question of civility, young girls...and men.]
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
On the Impossibility of Love (Portion 4)
[Editor's note(s). At long last (we hope) - the final installment. For those of you Reading Backward, this essay begins at On the Impossibility of Love (Portion 1) and (but for the needed interruption yesterday afternoon), continues in - err, reverse order - or link by link.
A number of years have elapsed since Athena, I mean Wren, leaped from her own head fully formed (i.e., wrote the original draft of the essay). She may indeed wake up tomorrow morning (or the morning after) and stumble to the computer (which she turns on then heads to the kitchen to fix - err, prepare? that highly esteemed (at least by the woman who drinks it) cup of coffee with cream & brown sugar) and devise a final final commentary to the matter.
Which will necessitate a Portion Five.
That being as yet the future, however, we must wait & see.]
I should absent us from her notes on the subject after this. Because one inevitably wearies of even the – err, best subject(s).
Only touched the beginning of her reflections on love – and you see, all I have shared is the one element of it: him.
But other essays await and her journals are in my firm possession.
Busy woman that my friend is, reading her journal at any time is arduous; she is a fairly close friend and I know there was much afoot at that time in her life that required detailing.
Even though, the more pressing the details of her life became, the less one heard of them and the more of him.
Is love, then, sanctuary?
As life becomes difficult, love seems the greater haven? (And would it be the less of what it is were that so?)
Too, much of the particulars of her love have more to do with other facets than the mystery of what is between a man and a woman – though that is much of what has not yet been shared. In some sense, then, this is as though one is reading a story and abruptly, the author decides, enough said – or worse, did say all and somehow – natural disaster, whim of fate, whatever – the essential part of the story disappears and (life being what it is) is never recovered.
Much has to be left out.
Writers these days, as we all know, either tell too much (Life as Violin) - or tell too little.
Leaving you to figure out what happened on your own.
But This Writer (at the present moment Mere Essayist) is about to leave you with our Sparrow...repeating herself, for the very reliving of it:
And I just want to state it again, if only it could be a secret between us—just this—the playing at being aware then the questioning that awareness – but nothing ever revealed, nothing ever spoken, nothing ever certain. Our secret.
But I play with fire.
[And yes, poet that our Sparrow is, that worked its way into a poem. How many times she reworked, discarded, hid - and that one time only she dared let anyone read it - we won't say.
His commentary (a mere friend) was, it is too intense.
Mais oui! Is not intensity her Chosen Artform: to reduce an experience to its Most Excrutiating Existence - to present a moment undiluted...
But such moments. Perhaps men (err, the male of the species) are less comfortable with these pristine moments. Came a time when Sparrow at least began to suspect so.
Perhaps Manuscripts in the Raw (wherein we Read the Writer Rather than the Poem) diminish that necessity to private 'merging with the material' that is so - umm, necessary in any reading.
And perhaps (we will allow such) it was that the poem itself was...err, too intense. Whether future readers will ever have the chance to know is at present...unrevealed.]
We will leave her, in any case, to her fire. Aware, to be sure, of the irony in her 'play.' But barrelling along ahead regardless. Poor thing, if only one could live in fire.
If only in the being left, she could stay forever. But we are mere flesh, and mere flesh can be consumed. One becomes too hot. One moves away from the fire.
But in what direction does one move.
And in what dance.
I feel I have cheated you. But you have forgiven me; I know this because I, too, am a poet and poets know. So we move on. Wanted to tell you the things my friend thought about love – the lovelies she discovered. But all we covered was…him.
You know.
The man. The belovéd.
But what is love, save the belovéd. One could almost believe in love, if that were what love is. And it does seem we began there, n'est ce pas? Quoting the highly esteemed work on the matter?
Not the feeling we all float through - but rather - the person whom we love.
This essay is on the impossibility of love, though, isn’t it, and it is from my poor friend’s experience that I draw my final thoughts. Perhaps it could be said that no poet makes a good wife. I only mentioned, didn't I - woman of the world that I am - the husband she left behind.
He seemed, finally, not a part of the story. In the twilight of the last century, we learned to think lightly when marriages fail. Or (at least) to pretend to.
Long as it wasn’t our best friend. Long as we didn’t have to watch it happen around us. Long as it was on a screen somewhere or in the pages of a book.
But a “my turn” sensibility, poet or no, as we aged and saw castles tumble.
Wasn’t it deadness, really, long before she met the man she loved?
(And if it was, does that excuse anything? But this is not a moral treatise; it is merely an exploration on one topic. On with it, as they roar.)
Yet how much deadness can an individual withstand. Walk a mile in my deadness, as the old Indian used to say. Before you judge me. Because as my friend discovered—did I leave out all the good stuff that might have shown you what she knew—some things there are that are bigger than what we are made of.
And what do you do then.
Perhaps you shouldn’t ask whether poets make commendable lovers. The best love the kind that leaves a trifle yet before its time?
Oh, but poets must remain alone, you see—not always, but forever.
Forever.
Sounds like a word you might hear in the circles love frequents; it is one you should want to hear, n’est ce pas.
For what is love, if it is not forever.
It is not love.
Do we hear that often, I thought I was in love? Perhaps it should be said then that love requires forever – and if it is not forever…Fidelity, then, love’s higher aim….
Ah yes. Can we discuss such after where we have been.
Long time, forever is, in any case: time slowed, you know, late last century; the great clock wound down and the little man isn’t there anymore to wind it up again.
Love requires separation. In the one sense, love mandates leaving the larger community of many to be sequestered as one. What is it to be one; how can what is disparate and forever separate—the archetypes (for I know them, too) of male and female—cornerstones of the universe as it is constructed; how can they be one?
Mystery of love, they say. The greater mystery, then, that even in the being one, they must remain separate; must remain individual; a new math; one plus one equaling two equaling one.
But that, the ideal. In our play of it, isn’t love, finally, what my friend saw in her dawn; only some greater mirror through which we—in the delight of another—view only ourselves. A stage to dance upon, that we may be the more cosseted and admired.
Most of us never able to grow to what love requires to be love?
Even in the notion that it is a force from a design larger than ourselves – the line crossed, the door closed, no return exit—love as kismet – love as something we could not have chosen – something that, patterned out like love from a higher calling, chooses us—love is still the stuff of those mightier than mere man.
Is love as we know it real. What is the “chemistry” that draws us. I don’t know the answers. You see, I know the End of my friend’s story. Sometimes I think it is All I Know.
But I’m not telling.
She still believes in love. Though I for one cannot imagine why. But I am a poet, too, and it seems poets believe in everything – and nothing.
Oops, time’s up. As all good girls know, Cinderella is always felled by midnight. Hey, you didn’t know this was a faery tale? But I thought we established that at the first. I don’t believe in love. The most romantic of us never do. Doesn’t that make love the stuff of faery tales?
My friend spoke in the beginning of the will vs. reality—that the will possessed the power to maul the lesser entity—to pummel it into whatever shape it might desire.
Isn’t the shape of a thing its substance.
But you know it’s not, don’t you.
So maybe you’re ready for something more than faery tales.
The larger battle, you know, is the will versus love.
But that is the stuff of another essay.
I did not get so far as even the entry portal to my friend’s journey. Left out all the stuff that Resident Essayist tends to read instead of what is - err, real...You see, I'm not so sure, even after all my reading, what love is.
Can something carried around in the mind like dream be 'real?'
Unconsummated, unspoken - only that place where the eyes meet, then dart away, then meet again...as it were, look back to find the other has trespassed as well...can that be love?
If it stretches out over months, years - then more years - is it love then?
If it sickens one for its very strength and unendedness - yet never played out in real time, never tested...two dreamers dreaming...but neither moving past dream...is it love then.
But perhaps those are not the sort of answers a mere essayist can give. I did not get so far as proving (or disproving) love exists. How could I dare query whether it existed for her - or for them? I only got so far as to know – for you do know, now, don’t you know? – that love is made of the same things the universe is constructed of and it is too mighty for any of us to maul or think to force or shape into being.
Or pull from it what we might think our desire, our play-pretty.
One could almost believe in love…
But a frightening sort of pulling, love. That mere man could suppose to dally in it…Yet one hears the poet calling in her night, I think. Isn’t that her voice? Some tiny thing - yet pure as a wee bell - pure and fragile and transparent as a small thing made of clearest glass: Love, come. Oh, love, come.
Foolishness, to be sure. Such a small thing, that poet. You could almost crush her like a gnat flying in your face and it’d be done before you knew it. I guess it is, in love, that there is a necessity to hold back parts of yourself and it is that, finally, which remains the antithesis of love, even as the substance of those who - err, love...
And did she ever discover it...
But you will not know, will you.
Because I am not telling the end of the story...
[Editor's note(s). "Walk a mile in my moccasins" is the old Indian (err, Native American) proverb referenced above.
(Sheesh. These days~! Can't assume anyone is on the same page now, can we....
Which, to be sure, necessitates that the Good Editor notate that Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom (the necessary thing), sprang from her father's head fully-formed. Various myths about her exist - daughter of the sea...one can suppose that, through the centuries, all the goddesses (back to archetype & Ideal) became intermixed & confused with each other...but it is also true that the originals fell to the same...
Whether or no the Greeks actually believed in their creations - or found them to merely represent the above (archetype & Ideal) - is Another Item Not Explored Herein.
And for those of you who might be interested in that pull between the thinking life & feeling life (head vs. heart?) as it plays out in Extremely Intelligent Women (or Creative Women) (or Just Plain Thinking Women), we can recommend James Brabazon's biography, Dorothy L. Sayers, Charles Scribner's Sons, NY 1981.
It may well indeed be one or the other...]
A number of years have elapsed since Athena, I mean Wren, leaped from her own head fully formed (i.e., wrote the original draft of the essay). She may indeed wake up tomorrow morning (or the morning after) and stumble to the computer (which she turns on then heads to the kitchen to fix - err, prepare? that highly esteemed (at least by the woman who drinks it) cup of coffee with cream & brown sugar) and devise a final final commentary to the matter.
Which will necessitate a Portion Five.
That being as yet the future, however, we must wait & see.]
I should absent us from her notes on the subject after this. Because one inevitably wearies of even the – err, best subject(s).
Only touched the beginning of her reflections on love – and you see, all I have shared is the one element of it: him.
But other essays await and her journals are in my firm possession.
Busy woman that my friend is, reading her journal at any time is arduous; she is a fairly close friend and I know there was much afoot at that time in her life that required detailing.
Even though, the more pressing the details of her life became, the less one heard of them and the more of him.
Is love, then, sanctuary?
As life becomes difficult, love seems the greater haven? (And would it be the less of what it is were that so?)
Too, much of the particulars of her love have more to do with other facets than the mystery of what is between a man and a woman – though that is much of what has not yet been shared. In some sense, then, this is as though one is reading a story and abruptly, the author decides, enough said – or worse, did say all and somehow – natural disaster, whim of fate, whatever – the essential part of the story disappears and (life being what it is) is never recovered.
Much has to be left out.
Writers these days, as we all know, either tell too much (Life as Violin) - or tell too little.
Leaving you to figure out what happened on your own.
But This Writer (at the present moment Mere Essayist) is about to leave you with our Sparrow...repeating herself, for the very reliving of it:
And I just want to state it again, if only it could be a secret between us—just this—the playing at being aware then the questioning that awareness – but nothing ever revealed, nothing ever spoken, nothing ever certain. Our secret.
But I play with fire.
[And yes, poet that our Sparrow is, that worked its way into a poem. How many times she reworked, discarded, hid - and that one time only she dared let anyone read it - we won't say.
His commentary (a mere friend) was, it is too intense.
Mais oui! Is not intensity her Chosen Artform: to reduce an experience to its Most Excrutiating Existence - to present a moment undiluted...
But such moments. Perhaps men (err, the male of the species) are less comfortable with these pristine moments. Came a time when Sparrow at least began to suspect so.
Perhaps Manuscripts in the Raw (wherein we Read the Writer Rather than the Poem) diminish that necessity to private 'merging with the material' that is so - umm, necessary in any reading.
And perhaps (we will allow such) it was that the poem itself was...err, too intense. Whether future readers will ever have the chance to know is at present...unrevealed.]
We will leave her, in any case, to her fire. Aware, to be sure, of the irony in her 'play.' But barrelling along ahead regardless. Poor thing, if only one could live in fire.
If only in the being left, she could stay forever. But we are mere flesh, and mere flesh can be consumed. One becomes too hot. One moves away from the fire.
But in what direction does one move.
And in what dance.
I feel I have cheated you. But you have forgiven me; I know this because I, too, am a poet and poets know. So we move on. Wanted to tell you the things my friend thought about love – the lovelies she discovered. But all we covered was…him.
You know.
The man. The belovéd.
But what is love, save the belovéd. One could almost believe in love, if that were what love is. And it does seem we began there, n'est ce pas? Quoting the highly esteemed work on the matter?
Not the feeling we all float through - but rather - the person whom we love.
This essay is on the impossibility of love, though, isn’t it, and it is from my poor friend’s experience that I draw my final thoughts. Perhaps it could be said that no poet makes a good wife. I only mentioned, didn't I - woman of the world that I am - the husband she left behind.
He seemed, finally, not a part of the story. In the twilight of the last century, we learned to think lightly when marriages fail. Or (at least) to pretend to.
Long as it wasn’t our best friend. Long as we didn’t have to watch it happen around us. Long as it was on a screen somewhere or in the pages of a book.
But a “my turn” sensibility, poet or no, as we aged and saw castles tumble.
Wasn’t it deadness, really, long before she met the man she loved?
(And if it was, does that excuse anything? But this is not a moral treatise; it is merely an exploration on one topic. On with it, as they roar.)
Yet how much deadness can an individual withstand. Walk a mile in my deadness, as the old Indian used to say. Before you judge me. Because as my friend discovered—did I leave out all the good stuff that might have shown you what she knew—some things there are that are bigger than what we are made of.
And what do you do then.
Perhaps you shouldn’t ask whether poets make commendable lovers. The best love the kind that leaves a trifle yet before its time?
Oh, but poets must remain alone, you see—not always, but forever.
Forever.
Sounds like a word you might hear in the circles love frequents; it is one you should want to hear, n’est ce pas.
For what is love, if it is not forever.
It is not love.
Do we hear that often, I thought I was in love? Perhaps it should be said then that love requires forever – and if it is not forever…Fidelity, then, love’s higher aim….
Ah yes. Can we discuss such after where we have been.
Long time, forever is, in any case: time slowed, you know, late last century; the great clock wound down and the little man isn’t there anymore to wind it up again.
Love requires separation. In the one sense, love mandates leaving the larger community of many to be sequestered as one. What is it to be one; how can what is disparate and forever separate—the archetypes (for I know them, too) of male and female—cornerstones of the universe as it is constructed; how can they be one?
Mystery of love, they say. The greater mystery, then, that even in the being one, they must remain separate; must remain individual; a new math; one plus one equaling two equaling one.
But that, the ideal. In our play of it, isn’t love, finally, what my friend saw in her dawn; only some greater mirror through which we—in the delight of another—view only ourselves. A stage to dance upon, that we may be the more cosseted and admired.
Most of us never able to grow to what love requires to be love?
Even in the notion that it is a force from a design larger than ourselves – the line crossed, the door closed, no return exit—love as kismet – love as something we could not have chosen – something that, patterned out like love from a higher calling, chooses us—love is still the stuff of those mightier than mere man.
Is love as we know it real. What is the “chemistry” that draws us. I don’t know the answers. You see, I know the End of my friend’s story. Sometimes I think it is All I Know.
But I’m not telling.
She still believes in love. Though I for one cannot imagine why. But I am a poet, too, and it seems poets believe in everything – and nothing.
Oops, time’s up. As all good girls know, Cinderella is always felled by midnight. Hey, you didn’t know this was a faery tale? But I thought we established that at the first. I don’t believe in love. The most romantic of us never do. Doesn’t that make love the stuff of faery tales?
My friend spoke in the beginning of the will vs. reality—that the will possessed the power to maul the lesser entity—to pummel it into whatever shape it might desire.
Isn’t the shape of a thing its substance.
But you know it’s not, don’t you.
So maybe you’re ready for something more than faery tales.
The larger battle, you know, is the will versus love.
But that is the stuff of another essay.
I did not get so far as even the entry portal to my friend’s journey. Left out all the stuff that Resident Essayist tends to read instead of what is - err, real...You see, I'm not so sure, even after all my reading, what love is.
Can something carried around in the mind like dream be 'real?'
Unconsummated, unspoken - only that place where the eyes meet, then dart away, then meet again...as it were, look back to find the other has trespassed as well...can that be love?
If it stretches out over months, years - then more years - is it love then?
If it sickens one for its very strength and unendedness - yet never played out in real time, never tested...two dreamers dreaming...but neither moving past dream...is it love then.
But perhaps those are not the sort of answers a mere essayist can give. I did not get so far as proving (or disproving) love exists. How could I dare query whether it existed for her - or for them? I only got so far as to know – for you do know, now, don’t you know? – that love is made of the same things the universe is constructed of and it is too mighty for any of us to maul or think to force or shape into being.
Or pull from it what we might think our desire, our play-pretty.
One could almost believe in love…
But a frightening sort of pulling, love. That mere man could suppose to dally in it…Yet one hears the poet calling in her night, I think. Isn’t that her voice? Some tiny thing - yet pure as a wee bell - pure and fragile and transparent as a small thing made of clearest glass: Love, come. Oh, love, come.
Foolishness, to be sure. Such a small thing, that poet. You could almost crush her like a gnat flying in your face and it’d be done before you knew it. I guess it is, in love, that there is a necessity to hold back parts of yourself and it is that, finally, which remains the antithesis of love, even as the substance of those who - err, love...
And did she ever discover it...
But you will not know, will you.
Because I am not telling the end of the story...
[Editor's note(s). "Walk a mile in my moccasins" is the old Indian (err, Native American) proverb referenced above.
(Sheesh. These days~! Can't assume anyone is on the same page now, can we....
Which, to be sure, necessitates that the Good Editor notate that Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom (the necessary thing), sprang from her father's head fully-formed. Various myths about her exist - daughter of the sea...one can suppose that, through the centuries, all the goddesses (back to archetype & Ideal) became intermixed & confused with each other...but it is also true that the originals fell to the same...
Whether or no the Greeks actually believed in their creations - or found them to merely represent the above (archetype & Ideal) - is Another Item Not Explored Herein.
And for those of you who might be interested in that pull between the thinking life & feeling life (head vs. heart?) as it plays out in Extremely Intelligent Women (or Creative Women) (or Just Plain Thinking Women), we can recommend James Brabazon's biography, Dorothy L. Sayers, Charles Scribner's Sons, NY 1981.
It may well indeed be one or the other...]
Monday, September 1, 2008
Dreaming
Sometimes a day needs a mite of colour.[Tiles © Copyright 2008 Isobel Freer. Used by permission.]
On the Impossibility of Love (Portion 3)
[Editor’s note. Parts One & Two of this - err, four-part essay (which should, we come to discover, have been a five-part essay - if not six- or seven...gracious, a whole week of inquiry!), for those of you Reading Backward, begin at On the Impossibility of Love (Portion 1).]
And for those of you quite so chaste as Wren (& her Editor), if parts of that last portion (after all, the essay itself was compiled a number of years ago.
Years change perspective, n’est ce pas?) – err, if parts of that last portion read a trifle more – err, ribaldly than a wee bird (& said Editor) might have remembered...
Excuse it, please, on the basis of - could we say, innocence? Naivete?
Having set out to publish the essay, helter-skelter, pell mell (more, perhaps, in common with Mme. Wren & her wee friend than one should wish to allow - but after all - birds of a feather....) & without careful forethought or fore-study...
One rather gets stuck (if we may) at publishing the essay. If age, experience and/or simple distance leave one needing a paper fan to cool one’s - err, face behind…
Well, so it is! May we proffer a fan!
Last time I checked, we were all in need of one here & there; some, perhaps, more than others.
But on with the tale, with or without that [now blushing] jaybird in the back row who roared for it to begin…and (with or without) those particulars mentioned above.
Which is to say, on with the 'how' of realizing she (our Sparrow) had fallen in love with the man....]
What my friend details next in her journal is the particulars of the Thing That Happened.
But that is, to be point blank, sacred.
One does not reveal such particulars in so casual a place as an essay purporting to disbelieve in love.
(And if there is anyone out there quite so curious as I, let me assure you that it is not what you are thinking.
And to be honest, you would be disappointed to hear that 'That' had happened.
Now wouldn’t you?
Don’t you really, in your heart of hearts, want a love that is forever unconsummated; forever pure?
Or am I projecting, believer as I am in the perfect ideal of love.)
But I can share her notes on decorum. A very important reality to our Sparrow, as I am sure you note.
But for the very real sense, she writes, that he was aware of me and wanted me to be aware of him – I will not go into why – I must say that nothing was untoward. One must project artificial barriers. Because there are places between a man and a woman where boundaries are not kept.
[And, sly puss that I am, I will note for you that the above lines, too, managed to work their way into one of her poems.
For we all do know, don't we, that our little Sparrow is quite so fictional as moi.
And that a real person waits behind her.
All things wait their time, n'est ce pas?
I have indeed heard it said...]
Not good, not good, not good, she continued. He is old enough to recognize (I hope) the difference between the illusion of chemistry and the reality of where one must live. I have fallen into illusion a thousand times over in my small life.
But I understand now what I could not when I was younger. That it is illusion and an illusion caused by chemistry – by the places where we are men and women – and the artificial barriers are there to restrain waywardness. That is life.
[At this point, I suspect we are all either applauding or weeping, depending upon where in the philosophy of love we rest. Moi.]
Innocent to the end, however, my friend continues. So why doesn’t the illusion disappear. Oh well. I have been through illusions enough in my life to know I must wait this one out as well.
[But as she meanders on, it is apparent that something about this illusion is not quite so obedient.]
So why the problem. Why am I still undone. I have had illusions before. [That sense, if I may, of repeating a thing for the necessary emphasis. Moi.]
You must understand illusion. I have carried fantasies of other men about before. This is not fantasy. It seems a line has been crossed. And I am in trouble. Oh, the day life is still intact. No one knows.
[Thank goodness, one has one’s dignity. Moi.]
I think that my thinking now is that I will behave – I will behave – if I can only keep this one small secret between us – if only it can be real between us but quiet and hidden and unknown. I keep turning over in my mind [the two of them] standing side by side.
[An episode that I am afraid must wait until the Judgment to be revealed. Moi.]
I have always believed illusions were transitory; one had only to wait them out.
Suppose one is not.
It only takes one.
Dancing towards the inevitable conclusion. [Moi.]
But no, each time she backs away.
Edges toward the prize again.
If you be lacking in the patience that I possess, you might have been ready to knock her out of her misery (or perhaps you out of yours) long before you reached the top of the eleventh page of her journal entry—and do grant me pardon, please—I promised privacy, but there is the slightest streak of irreverence in me that kicks the very stars about for play when I am bored – but yes, the eleventh page of that day’s journal entry—two long months of introspection and inquiry and setting aside and disbelief—before she finally (and reluctantly?) says the words…
I am afraid I am falling in love with [--].
[We will leave you there. The shortened form for today. And your homework for tomorrow is...
And tomorrow's assignment includes reading the final part to the essay, found at On the Impossibility of Love, (Portion 4). N'est ce pas?]
And for those of you quite so chaste as Wren (& her Editor), if parts of that last portion (after all, the essay itself was compiled a number of years ago.
Years change perspective, n’est ce pas?) – err, if parts of that last portion read a trifle more – err, ribaldly than a wee bird (& said Editor) might have remembered...
Excuse it, please, on the basis of - could we say, innocence? Naivete?
Having set out to publish the essay, helter-skelter, pell mell (more, perhaps, in common with Mme. Wren & her wee friend than one should wish to allow - but after all - birds of a feather....) & without careful forethought or fore-study...
One rather gets stuck (if we may) at publishing the essay. If age, experience and/or simple distance leave one needing a paper fan to cool one’s - err, face behind…
Well, so it is! May we proffer a fan!
Last time I checked, we were all in need of one here & there; some, perhaps, more than others.
But on with the tale, with or without that [now blushing] jaybird in the back row who roared for it to begin…and (with or without) those particulars mentioned above.
Which is to say, on with the 'how' of realizing she (our Sparrow) had fallen in love with the man....]
What my friend details next in her journal is the particulars of the Thing That Happened.
But that is, to be point blank, sacred.
One does not reveal such particulars in so casual a place as an essay purporting to disbelieve in love.
(And if there is anyone out there quite so curious as I, let me assure you that it is not what you are thinking.
And to be honest, you would be disappointed to hear that 'That' had happened.
Now wouldn’t you?
Don’t you really, in your heart of hearts, want a love that is forever unconsummated; forever pure?
Or am I projecting, believer as I am in the perfect ideal of love.)
But I can share her notes on decorum. A very important reality to our Sparrow, as I am sure you note.
But for the very real sense, she writes, that he was aware of me and wanted me to be aware of him – I will not go into why – I must say that nothing was untoward. One must project artificial barriers. Because there are places between a man and a woman where boundaries are not kept.
[And, sly puss that I am, I will note for you that the above lines, too, managed to work their way into one of her poems.
For we all do know, don't we, that our little Sparrow is quite so fictional as moi.
And that a real person waits behind her.
All things wait their time, n'est ce pas?
I have indeed heard it said...]
Not good, not good, not good, she continued. He is old enough to recognize (I hope) the difference between the illusion of chemistry and the reality of where one must live. I have fallen into illusion a thousand times over in my small life.
But I understand now what I could not when I was younger. That it is illusion and an illusion caused by chemistry – by the places where we are men and women – and the artificial barriers are there to restrain waywardness. That is life.
[At this point, I suspect we are all either applauding or weeping, depending upon where in the philosophy of love we rest. Moi.]
Innocent to the end, however, my friend continues. So why doesn’t the illusion disappear. Oh well. I have been through illusions enough in my life to know I must wait this one out as well.
[But as she meanders on, it is apparent that something about this illusion is not quite so obedient.]
So why the problem. Why am I still undone. I have had illusions before. [That sense, if I may, of repeating a thing for the necessary emphasis. Moi.]
You must understand illusion. I have carried fantasies of other men about before. This is not fantasy. It seems a line has been crossed. And I am in trouble. Oh, the day life is still intact. No one knows.
[Thank goodness, one has one’s dignity. Moi.]
I think that my thinking now is that I will behave – I will behave – if I can only keep this one small secret between us – if only it can be real between us but quiet and hidden and unknown. I keep turning over in my mind [the two of them] standing side by side.
[An episode that I am afraid must wait until the Judgment to be revealed. Moi.]
I have always believed illusions were transitory; one had only to wait them out.
Suppose one is not.
It only takes one.
Dancing towards the inevitable conclusion. [Moi.]
But no, each time she backs away.
Edges toward the prize again.
If you be lacking in the patience that I possess, you might have been ready to knock her out of her misery (or perhaps you out of yours) long before you reached the top of the eleventh page of her journal entry—and do grant me pardon, please—I promised privacy, but there is the slightest streak of irreverence in me that kicks the very stars about for play when I am bored – but yes, the eleventh page of that day’s journal entry—two long months of introspection and inquiry and setting aside and disbelief—before she finally (and reluctantly?) says the words…
I am afraid I am falling in love with [--].
[We will leave you there. The shortened form for today. And your homework for tomorrow is...
And tomorrow's assignment includes reading the final part to the essay, found at On the Impossibility of Love, (Portion 4). N'est ce pas?]
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