I’ve reached the State of
I’m not sure what’s beyond the metaphorical gazebo I’m sitting in now. The thing about Equilibrium is that it doesn’t particularly matter what’s out there. I’m counting crows and seagulls. A three crow morning today, matter of fact. And that’s about the only fact worth knowing. I’m pretty much happy with breathing as my primary activity.
You do have time to think here, though. And I realized today (with no sense of alarm or disappointment) that when people (okay, male people) hail you on an internet site, it is merely a reflexive action - a man passing by rotates his cranial unit and seeing apparatus in your direction. Rather like a nervous tick. A flicker that sputters out in the time it takes to send an automated compliment. I’ve stopped answering the flickers.
In November, I decided that a period of celibacy was in order. I cut the last thread with my used-to-be, who took it in a spirit of bad grace, foul temper and threw in a couple cutting remarks. No one else was in view, so it was pretty much a done deal. And I was happy with the decision for a week.
The fretting began soon afterwards. I was celibate for over seven years once. By the end, it was neither a happy nor a healthy experience. I began to dwell on that. Began to ponder years, possibly all the rest of them (because I-am-no-spring-chicken, as they say) alone. Alone except for the cliché of a cat. Woman and cat. How long, I wondered, until I was dressing the cat or making little hats for him and then taking pictures. Ohmygod posting them. Here.
I moved from Fretting to Hysterical Inertia over a period of weeks.
And here’s the thing – I have no idea how I got to Equilibrium. One minute I was considering packing a duffel bag and running for my life – to anywhere else. And the next, I was in the gazebo not even remotely considering haute couture for the cat.
And feeling like my life was…pretty much okay. Maybe it was the hours of making mandalas – or just plain old divine intervention. At any rate. I’m manless. The cat is hatless. And there was just one crow on the way home. No seagulls.
I've gone Mandela mad. Kaleidoscope Krazy. I'd snitched this photograph from Secret Hill, having fallen in love with a certain blue-grey that seems to be everywhere in Western Australia, and this morning, because I had Far More Useful Things To Do - I made Mandelas instead. This is much nicer to look at full size. So please click to enlarge.
The cover of a book on Claude Monet is tacked to the bulletin board on the wall in front of my desk. It is, specifically, a reproduction of one of Monet’s paintings of the Garden at Giverny. I’m caught in butter yellow water lilies and the water itself, a shimmery reflection of surrounding greenery.
I’m dressed in jeans, a sweater, socks, boots, my winter coat and a scarf. My hands are icy.
The new heating system for the college is having one of its frequent unreliable days and outside, it’s -14C.
I’m imagining strolling the garden at Giverny, eating in Monet’s blue and yellow dining room, drinking coffee in his studio, talking a little about the work, the light…
Later, I plan to visit Frieda Khalo’s blue house.
Mostly, I plan not to be here – where the
I will take myself to Frieda’s, where tropical flowers bloom year-round – fiery reds and flaming oranges, exotic pinks and purples…the scent of heaven in the air.
Frieda waits in this alternate dimension. A pet monkey on her shoulder, flowers in her hair, the jungle breathing green behind her. We will walk to the blue house together, holding hands and laughing.
“Once Saturn enters the twelfth house a subtle change occurs within the psyche…the time of dissolution.”
I’m cliff climbing up that rock face, sleeping or waking these days. Struggling to write something witty or even slightly, minimally upbeat. Sorting through my bag of spiritual answers and handy little mantras and folks, I’m coming up empty. Coming up dissolved you might say. I thank you from my heart for your patience – but I don’t see any immediate possibility of a change in weather patterns.
“There are many times the client has said ‘I don’t know who I am’, when Saturn is deep into the twelfth house. This is not to say that other people do not think that they know who one is.”
Which could explain the disorienting sensation that people are talking to someone who is not me. Someone who is occupying my exact location in space.
“The boundless deep of the unconscious is filled with primordial images that arise spontaneously, both while awake and while asleep. Images and sensations creep in, occupying what used to be superfunctional space in the consciousness.”
Well. There we go. Then everything is unfolding as it should. Do not adjust your monitor, there is merely a leak in superfunctional space. A sense of “terror and anxiety” is to be expected.
You see? This is also why, when friends ask me to look at their current transits, I know that they are likely twisting on any one of a hundred hooks like this. And I am plumb out of soothing phrases like "transitional period" and "opportunity for growth." It's the equivalent of telling a woman pregnant with huge triplets that she "will experience some discomfort" during delivery.
I am apt to use phrases like "Flaming Shitbrick" - and really, it's not very professional to do that.
...Once my friend KD dreamed she was sitting in a boat with an angel who was standing, (looming, I assume) at the front. She was trying to shoot it. And she was missing. “At close range,” she told me, in a tone of disgust...
I think I know the feeling.
(Quotes from Saturn in Transit – Erin Sullivan)
I've been staring at the screen for a long time. Words refuse to type themselves and thoughts refuse to shape.
The future fumbles
blank and blind
while tidal waves of memory
cover me.
Flotsam and jetsam.
Tide in, tide out.
Swallowing the ground
underneath my feet.
No one here but me.
A little shy,
I gave you music
I bought for you
on a rain-soaked lunch hour
and you smiled.
You said:
I’ll have to pay you back.
I’ll call you next week.
You meant to favor me
with your presence?
Alms for the past?
I swallowed shock.
I couldn’t reply:
A gift is a gift.
Not a trade.
I’m not cashing in
the chips of our history.
I didn’t tell you.
I can’t explain the obvious.
I never could.
Not that you wanted
very often
to know.
Well. That was underwhelming.
Hurricane Juan hits us as easily as a Harlem Globetrotter lobbing a basketball into a flock of sleeping pigeons. We count on it subsiding into the nice kind of tropical storm we’re used to but no.
So this time, as Noel scuds up the
It’s no small deal to have 170,000 people lose power – especially if you’re one of them and it’s two days later. Crews are in from
When we’ll all be effectively reminded that Mother (Nature, that is), at any moment, can fling us back two centuries.
The winds were fierce. Up to 180K in
Personally, I woke up Sunday morning to flashing digital clocks – and the sudden understanding that dried apricots and almonds (I just had to have a few) are about as effective as peanuts and prunes.
But really, nothing to see here, folks. And hence, no material.
Perhaps I should try another date if I’m seeking disaster material.
Only two people ahead of me in the line at the postal outlet – just in front of me a young black woman with a notice of delivery in her hand. I’ve already fished my notice out of my purse. “She Bop” is blasting out of my head phones. The customer at the desk is an elderly lady who is gesturing broadly, waving what appears to be an empty Purolator Courier envelope. The very young clerk is registering barely contained distress. “Time After Time” starts. Finishes. “I drove all night” becomes “Hat Full of Stars.” Five, ten minutes. I unhook my headphones.
Something about a letter to the passport office not being picked up until 5:00 o’clock, after she paid twenty dollars and thousands of dollars are involved here and what did she pay for if the letter is still there at five o’clock and her son needed that passport and…
You get the idea. I’m not without empathy. I’ve had those days on a regular basis, when everything that can screw up, will. When you hit the wall of bureaucracy and I’m- sorry- but- I- can’t- help- you at high speed, with your face. Where the wheels fall off and the universe seems to have roundly cursed your every effort to stay sane.
Loop loop. Echo trap.
We are now up to “True Colors” though, and there are six people in line. Twenty minutes, thirty minutes. The woman spins through the same story over and over. The clerk, who is too young and good natured to have any idea how to stop it, proffers her best explanation and advice over and over again.
The man behind me explodes, “Jesus Christ!” Everyone else is sighing heavily and shuffling, including me.
Finally I work up my nerve to say, “Ma’am, I’m very sorry to interrupt and I know you’re having a bad time, but there are five of us waiting now.” She whirls around, five feet of grey-haired, tired-out, fight and frustration.
“I have as much right to be here as you do. I have a problem and I’m not satisfied with the answers and my son needed this to be delivered and I paid twenty dollars….” and it’s none of your business!.”
This is a finger on the trigger of the rather large man behind me.
“It’s our business when none of us can get our business taken care of. The lady has answered you. She can’t do anything else. There's a one-eight-hundred number you can call….”
And so on. Raised voices. The air is shuddering with crappy energy. Full moon.
The woman steps aside. It’s the bass voice that does it. The testosterone voice.
As I’m leaving I comment sheepishly to him, “I guess we both get Creep of the Week for that, right?”
“Somebody had to stop it,” he replies. He thinks a second. “You started it but I was only too happy to finish it.”
Hell hath no fury like that of the powerless. I consider that she’s a generation before mine and most of her life, complaint has been met with actual assistance. By a human. No one gave her a 1-800 number and told her to get lost. Certainly no one charged her twenty bucks for the privilege.
Someone had to stop her. She was stuck, looping. There was no foreseeable end to it. But I don’t think that made either of the creeps in question feel a lot better.
Drink, anyone?
I am hanging onto the edge of a cliff by my fingernails. The cliff is a metaphor for my lifelong belief that love matters, that people are innately good. My fingernails are, well, my fingernails – French-polished and neatly filed, but not much help in the staying alive department. And they make bad philosophers.
In this moment, it is the cliff, the fingernails, a lot of Tracy Chapman songs and Cyndi Lauper howling out “Who Let in the Rain.” It is wine. Whine. Whine. Woman alone music. Apologizing to the cat for being so little fun. It is buying craft supplies, books on soft sculpture, bags of fabric rose petals I-might-use-for-something and lime green dagger beads. It is copying pictures of the Venus De Milo and red apples to print on silk and plans to make a doll with mirror eyes. I’m going to call the doll “romantic love.” Naturally, the doll will have no arms. And I have a strategic spot for the apple. She may, in fact, have wings – or a Virgin Mary halo and horns. It’s part of the overflowing, moldy laundry basket that passes for my mind right now and any month or year now I’m going to sort the laundry and make art.
Or maybe I’ll write a self-help book. When Good Women Fall for Plaid Men. Or Vlad Men.
I want to be an art nun. But no, I keep dating.
Peter Pan. In wolf's clothing.
What.
A warm misty day. Fog blots out the usual neighborhood activities – street conversation and kids playing in the parking lot. Everyone is huddled at home. At times it rains – a staccato conversation, water on pavement. The whoosh of tires on the road sounds like ocean rolling in and out from the shore.
My beading hand went into a charley horse yesterday, so I am holed up resting my it and come to think of it, the rest of me. Silence, then a movie, then silence. The day has no time sequence. It just rolls slowly, like the fog.
For some reason, I think about a doomed pregnancy that ended in my fallopian tube and with the doctor’s pronouncement that I could easily become pregnant but it would probably be life-threatening. I wonder, if that baby had come to term and been born, how old it would be now. Twenty-two or so, I calculate.
I wonder, if there was a soul, a spirit, waiting to come into the world. If so, did it find another mother? And inevitably, it occurs to me that I’ve spent twenty years working with people the age that child would be now. Although that child never became a part of my life, many others did.
I think about the students at Toronto Dance Theatre and my student assistants at the library– a few of whom I’ve reconnected with by putting a profile up on Facebook. E. found me.
E. graduated a few years back and was, last time I saw her, a successful entrepreneur, looking very big city and glamorous, compared to her student days. E. has beautiful eyes, a quick, quirky wit. She's a natural scholar. She is funny, pretty and kind.
I almost didn’t hire her. I was worried that, with cerebral palsy, she’d find it difficult to cope with all the physical motion at the library desk. Back and forth, hauling down course reserves, having to move quickly when it was busy. Marko knew her, and he was a friend so I confided my dilemma to him.
“She takes sculpture,” he said. Sculpture is a heavy, physically demanding art form. “And if you’re not sure if she can handle it, ask her. She’ll tell you.” Right. It was good advice, as well as a mild rebuke.
So I hired her. She hefted the heavy hard-cover books onto tall shelves without a whimper of protest. She waited on the public, and handled the cash and helped people find the material they needed. She showed up on time, every time and often filled in when someone blew a shift. She sat, to my shame, in the same broken-down, second hand chair – the one with the wonky wheel and no back support – that all my student assistants put up with. And she never asked for anything, even though student services told me there was a fund, if she needed a good chair or anything special. It killed me that she had to sit in that refugee from a second-hand office furniture store.
I found out about her sense of humor and kindness because of the chair. I insisted on a new one, budget or no budget. An expensive, ergonomically correct chair. One with all the requisite wheels attached and functioning. When it finally arrived, I was beside myself. None of my student assistants could come near the library without me joyously urging them to sit in the wonderful chair and try it out.
I learned later that E. had whispered to the others, “Make sure you notice the chair. She’s so excited about it.”
I realize that most of you probably imagine me to a kind, patient, loving and occasionally amusing person – clear and articulate about my feelings and sensitive to the feelings of others. A virtual model of consistency, level-headedness and at least a little comic attitude. Certainly someone who doesn’t deserve the unfeeling sons of bitches who litter my love life.
This concludes fiction practice for the day…
“What is it you really need?” he asks.
“Not to die alone….but that’s stupid because, let’s face it, no matter how many people are around your bedside, they aren’t making the trip with you.” He smiles and nods and I continue, “I want to feel protected. Like some man actually wants to protect me. But the minute any man tries it, I wheel around and ask who he thinks he’s talking to – I demand to know if he thinks, for some reason, I’m incapable of looking after myself.”
That’s probably as accurate a picture as I can paint of what it’s like to deal with me.
Now him…the recent villain of the piece…he’s afflicted with the same damn set of emotional paradoxes. Or at least the male version of them. He's just as emotional as me too, only he's stuck with the macho inability to rant and rave when aggrieved.
And this. Both of us have good-sized betrayal issues (I know, who doesn’t?) stemming from our relationships with parents of the opposite sex. Both of us are hyper-sensitive to rejection – real or imagined - and both of us are disposed to think death is preferable to indignity. Our honesty levels (along with our tactless blundering) are about the same. Our sensitivity to undercurrents is very close and we are both very observant - except when it comes to ourselves. Our certainty that only we know what’s really going on is the same. We are independent, passive-aggressive and horribly stubborn. We laugh and cry and care about many of the same issues.
That's why we understand one another, why we connect effortlessly, almost always. Except, of course, for the times when we don’t connect and the whole thing proceeds into the toilet with great haste. And then comes anger. And pain. On both sides. Have you ever seen the tarot card, "The Tower?" It's like that when it happens. Babel. Suddenly we need a universal translator because we are from different planets and cannot make ourselves understood.
Having blabbed my own hurt and innermost feelings all over this blog, I feel compelled to emphasize now that I was talking about my feelings, my interpretation of the whole sorry fiasco. That’s all I knew at the time. And so I write it out and he, this unnamed man whose side of the tale you never hear, comes off sounding like a cad and a bounder. And it’s just that he doesn’t get a speaking part here.
Officially, as narrator and the recently distraught, I want to clarify: he isn’t a cad. My boyfriend is not a twat. And his last two weeks were about as lousy as mine. Only he couldn't talk to anyone.
Just for the record.
I call to leave voice mail, tell him I hope his upcoming biopsy is over with quickly and the results show he’s holding his own. The wish for his good health is real, but only the top layer of the message, which is I am still your friend, no matter what. I call when I’m certain he’s not there, because I’m not challenging his decision.
And he responds to the message sounding like it’s the first time he’s breathed in two weeks. We talk for two hours on the phone and I say, “I’m glad we could have this conversation. I’m glad it didn’t end in anger.”
He says, “Are you free? Can I come over so we can talk in person?”
At the end of the afternoon, he looks at the bead journal page – studies it for a minute before he says anything then,
“You really thought I was gone for good, didn’t you?”
“Every time.”
Archetypes come in all shades: the good nurturing matriarch and the destroyer, the strong, protecting patriarch and the tyrant…the trickster, the fool, the rebel, the child. You get the idea. All these archetypes exist inside us in some measure.
In dreams, I work on the premise that each element of the dream is a fragment of myself.
So what I’m going to talk about here is personal. It is not about a man or men, or about my conscious views on the subject of the male of the species. I’d like to be clear about that.
“Your patriarch had a dream,” KD says, after I tell her about the nightmare.
The light is dim in the dream, a brooding near-dark. I am standing on the bank of a large flat-bottomed pit, about six or seven feet deep. It resembles, slightly, a skate board park but it has been built for the purpose of torturing women. In this dream, there are a group of nearly grown boys. They are wearing the uniform of an exclusive private school – shorts, white shirts, jackets and striped ties. I know that the uniforms mean they are the children of wealthy, powerful people. Above the law.
One of the boys is in the pit, mercilessly kicking a woman who is only half-conscious and curled into fetal position. He is doing this simply because he can, because he thinks she is less.
I am down on the floor of the pit suddenly and find a shovel nearby. Raging, I hit at his legs with the edge of it, over and over, as hard as I can. He continues, somehow, to kick the woman anyway and I keep swinging the shovel at him.
The dream shifts and I am at the far end of the pit, back on the bank, face to face with an older man wearing the same uniform. The boys have retreated to a kind of underground bunker behind him. “No one is going to get to those boys,” he says.
“I’m calling the police,” I tell him “and we are going down there.”
Another shift and I’m at the opposite bank. In my hand is a crumpled medical document in a wrinkled paper bag. My father’s wife is there and I’m telling her that it’s medical information about my father. I’m anxious that it might be important and might be lost. And then I realize that my father is never coming back.
I wake up crying.
Patriarchal power gone mad and corrupt. Right next to the beloved father.
All in my own little psyche.
Somehow, the job is to own all this. I feel like I’ve been in a hit and run. From the pavement, I look up and see that the driver is someone I love and trust. I know perhaps, that he couldn’t swerve in time. But what kills me is that instead of getting out of the car, he screams into reverse and gets away from the scene as fast as possible. That’s how it feels.
In my heart of hearts though, I know that at some level I’ve allowed it to happen. The same corrupt patriarch embedded in his psyche – the one that tells him he has the power and I don’t, that he is justified in his feelings but I am not – is embedded in my psyche, too. The same beloved and good protector in his psyche is in mine too.
I’ll tell you though. I’m damn proud that I didn’t back down to the boss of the bully-boys.
And maybe, I’m going to own it all a little more. And stop blaming myself – and him – a whole lot more.
I'm not foolish enough to think that this ends with one dream or realization. Or that I won't spend more days in tears. But right now, I'm upright. I'm walking and I have that shovel.
