It Is Margaret You Mourn For
Aug. 7th, 2012 09:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraFrom time to time I dream about this labyrinth house. At least, I think I dream about this labyrinth house – I suppose it’s completely possible that I only dreamed about it last night and that embedded in that dream was the sense that I’d been there (i.e. dreamed about it) many times before. I’d left a bunch of possessions there – random strings of beads and other glittery magpie things – and I was trying to reclaim them except the people living there now were an entirely new set of people and I didn’t recognize any of them.
And when I looked at the house – a wooden house with myriad rooms on all different levels – it was a completely different house, all metal and modern and gleaming architectural embellishments.
“What happened to the house that used to be here?” I cried to one of the new inhabitants.
“Oh, that was torn down years ago,” the man told me briskly. “And I see you’ve come back for the orientation –“
“What orientation?”
“The orientation. We gave you yesterday off.”
“Excuse me,” I said, “but I’ve never seen any of this” – airy wave at the metal building – “ever before.”
“Yes, you have. You spent four days here last week.”
“I don’t remember spending four days here last week.”
The man shrugged impatiently. “Nevertheless, you did. Don’t be late for the orientation.”
###
Been here a little over a week. Liking it. Doing basic maintenance in the garden for an hour or so every evening, weeding, watering, excavating the slate maze from under a mesh of crab grass. Haven’t quite decided what to do about the roses. They desperately need to be pruned but if I prune them now the meristems won’t grow and I think that might damage the plants further.
Some time this week I must tackle the mass of rotting apples and leaves in the entertainment area. There’s a huge old apple tree there that looks as though it might even predate this area’s subdivision into suburban living back in the fifties. It’s showing its disapproval for the materialistic Nassau County lifestyle by raining down unripe apples by the bushel. There are still hundreds more on the tree. I think this might be due to underwatering. Also, there is a type of fruit tree moth infestation that typically manifests in fruit falling before its time.
Ah, nature. Endlessly fascinating.
Emotionally, I still feel incredibly fragile. Have been in several social situations this past week and held my own, but I could feel the strain.
Cassandra tells me I draw people out as a way to avoid talking about myself. Partly true, I suppose. What’s mostly true is that the endless prattle about sports teams and mileage and reality TV stars and Tom Cruise’s divorce and the Olympics doesn’t interest me in the slightest, so I naturally change the subject to the narrative of the other conversationalist’s life. That does interest me. I like narrative.
At Cassandra’s a capella get together a week ago, I did somehow end up talking about myself, at least enough to say I’d ended a long marriage two years ago, that I had enjoyed being married, that I was sad it seemed likely I would never marry again –
“You’re still in mourning,” said one of the women there. “That’s natural.”
“But it’s been two years –“
“Eh. That’s nothing. That’s not long at all.”
Thing is, of course, the marriage was a mess, the faithless husband a real pain in the ass. Intellectually, I think any continuing mourning on my part is neurosis bordering on pathology. And it’s not exactly as though I’m mourning the marriage or him. No. I’m mourning the loss of that other voice in my inner dialogue – which probably didn’t exist in the first place. Consummate hustler that Ben has always been, he probably fed me exactly what he intuited I wanted to hear on that end.
Still. The Pathos of the Only Child. Longing for that imaginary playmate.
Of course, karma is the ultimate bitch goddess. Ben texts me several times a day with his medical updates. I care, but not a whole lot. He isn’t the person I loved anymore. Hasn’t been for quite a while. Some kind of imaginative edge there was lost years ago. Must say, I understood Ben a whole lot better when I finally got to experience him against the backdrop of the Finger Lakes. The Finger Lakes are beautiful but man, that area is provincial. I suppose his compulsive lying over the years was a way to appear less provincial.
Anyway, I’m very close now to the city I was born in. Like literally. Five miles away from the Queens border. I think I’ll give Carl a holler and see if he’s available to play later this week.
Oh – also I saw a movie I liked very much. Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret. I shsould write about it at length if I get some time. The film got uniformly bad reviews but I thought it was a masterpiece. Messy, human lives making narrative. I also liked the fact that there is not a single character named “Margaret” in the entire film. The title is drawn from the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that ends: It is the blight that man was born for, it is Margaret you mourn for.
And when I looked at the house – a wooden house with myriad rooms on all different levels – it was a completely different house, all metal and modern and gleaming architectural embellishments.
“What happened to the house that used to be here?” I cried to one of the new inhabitants.
“Oh, that was torn down years ago,” the man told me briskly. “And I see you’ve come back for the orientation –“
“What orientation?”
“The orientation. We gave you yesterday off.”
“Excuse me,” I said, “but I’ve never seen any of this” – airy wave at the metal building – “ever before.”
“Yes, you have. You spent four days here last week.”
“I don’t remember spending four days here last week.”
The man shrugged impatiently. “Nevertheless, you did. Don’t be late for the orientation.”
Been here a little over a week. Liking it. Doing basic maintenance in the garden for an hour or so every evening, weeding, watering, excavating the slate maze from under a mesh of crab grass. Haven’t quite decided what to do about the roses. They desperately need to be pruned but if I prune them now the meristems won’t grow and I think that might damage the plants further.
Some time this week I must tackle the mass of rotting apples and leaves in the entertainment area. There’s a huge old apple tree there that looks as though it might even predate this area’s subdivision into suburban living back in the fifties. It’s showing its disapproval for the materialistic Nassau County lifestyle by raining down unripe apples by the bushel. There are still hundreds more on the tree. I think this might be due to underwatering. Also, there is a type of fruit tree moth infestation that typically manifests in fruit falling before its time.
Ah, nature. Endlessly fascinating.
Emotionally, I still feel incredibly fragile. Have been in several social situations this past week and held my own, but I could feel the strain.
Cassandra tells me I draw people out as a way to avoid talking about myself. Partly true, I suppose. What’s mostly true is that the endless prattle about sports teams and mileage and reality TV stars and Tom Cruise’s divorce and the Olympics doesn’t interest me in the slightest, so I naturally change the subject to the narrative of the other conversationalist’s life. That does interest me. I like narrative.
At Cassandra’s a capella get together a week ago, I did somehow end up talking about myself, at least enough to say I’d ended a long marriage two years ago, that I had enjoyed being married, that I was sad it seemed likely I would never marry again –
“You’re still in mourning,” said one of the women there. “That’s natural.”
“But it’s been two years –“
“Eh. That’s nothing. That’s not long at all.”
Thing is, of course, the marriage was a mess, the faithless husband a real pain in the ass. Intellectually, I think any continuing mourning on my part is neurosis bordering on pathology. And it’s not exactly as though I’m mourning the marriage or him. No. I’m mourning the loss of that other voice in my inner dialogue – which probably didn’t exist in the first place. Consummate hustler that Ben has always been, he probably fed me exactly what he intuited I wanted to hear on that end.
Still. The Pathos of the Only Child. Longing for that imaginary playmate.
Of course, karma is the ultimate bitch goddess. Ben texts me several times a day with his medical updates. I care, but not a whole lot. He isn’t the person I loved anymore. Hasn’t been for quite a while. Some kind of imaginative edge there was lost years ago. Must say, I understood Ben a whole lot better when I finally got to experience him against the backdrop of the Finger Lakes. The Finger Lakes are beautiful but man, that area is provincial. I suppose his compulsive lying over the years was a way to appear less provincial.
Anyway, I’m very close now to the city I was born in. Like literally. Five miles away from the Queens border. I think I’ll give Carl a holler and see if he’s available to play later this week.
Oh – also I saw a movie I liked very much. Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret. I shsould write about it at length if I get some time. The film got uniformly bad reviews but I thought it was a masterpiece. Messy, human lives making narrative. I also liked the fact that there is not a single character named “Margaret” in the entire film. The title is drawn from the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that ends: It is the blight that man was born for, it is Margaret you mourn for.
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no subject
Date: 2012-08-07 10:13 pm (UTC)You can invite your NYC area friends here, by the way. It's fine with me! In fact, we might want to co-host a little gathering of your NYC friends here sometime soonish. What do you think of that idea?
no subject
Date: 2012-08-09 08:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-10 01:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-08 01:40 am (UTC)The good dreams, it's buildings I think I know, but they go on and on. There are many people there. They all know me and I don't want to go.
Kind people glad to see me.
I think home is always the same, in some way we don't understand. What matters is you know what's home and what's not. Screw the world. It changes but what matters doesn't, somehow it's outside the world and here both and you'll know when you find it.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-09 08:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-10 01:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-08 05:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-09 08:22 pm (UTC)That's a good thing, I think. I was way too porous, had way too little sense of self, in Ithaca.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-09 05:37 am (UTC)i am sad for the self i lost in each person i miss too.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-09 08:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-09 07:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-09 08:18 pm (UTC)I should warn you that this is very much a movie that is Not For Everyone. But as a film that explores the conseqences, combinations and permutations of slight, throwaway acts, it literally made the hairs on my neck stand up. That darn ripple effect, y'know.
If you do end up seeing it, let me know so we can gab about it!
no subject
Date: 2012-08-10 03:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-10 11:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-10 02:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-10 02:42 pm (UTC)Gotta tell you I found Life During Wartime purty darn depressing.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-10 02:51 pm (UTC)Dark Horse is the new one
no subject
Date: 2012-08-10 03:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-10 03:52 am (UTC)I've been divorced since 1998 I think. Still, when I'm carrying 8 bags of groceries at one time up the three flights of steps to my front door I'm thinking "Nathan, why aren't you here? you were supposed to be here." or monday when I bought that car. "shouldn't we be driving off into the sunset? there's our cue...."
instead I google pix of him and his homely lesbian wife and their ugly backward children and tell myself I'm not bitter
no subject
Date: 2012-08-10 11:17 am (UTC)"shouldn't we be driving off into the sunset? there's our cue...."
Oh, I do that too! And the cyberstalking. I have no idea why I'm doing it, though. It's like I'm a computer caught in a do loop, because I don't love him anymore. And I wasn't happy with him when we were together either.
My abandonment issues are really profound, I suppose.
Did you ever see that wonderful Truffaut movie, The Passion of Adele H? Adele, the real life daughter of novelist Victor Hugo, pursues her one-time lover relentlessly to the point of plentiful personal humiliation. The last scene in the film portrays a bedraggled Adele marching through the muddy streets searching for her lover, and she passes him, and she doesn't recognize him. Chilling. I feel like that often.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-11 05:25 pm (UTC)There were pieces that were interesting, though. I was also really exhausted when I saw it and we saw the shorter version (that was all they had on Netflix). Supposedly the longer version fits together better and makes a lot more sense. (Also my friend & I disagreed about her thing with Matt Damon. He thought they had sex and I thought they just made out a little and then he was like "no, this is wrong." I was like "why would she imply she got an abortion because of him if they just kissed? Was she just being provocative 'cuz she was mad he was walking with some other woman?").