The Elephant Waiting To Be Asked To Dance
Apr. 4th, 2018 12:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraI think it was sunny on Saturday.
I think.
I honestly can’t remember.
I’m one of those people who lives in a temporal cave defined by my last 48 hours of sense memory. If it happened 49 hours ago, I may be vaguely aware of it. Kind of like a frieze painted on the walls of the cave: Oh, right, it was sunny on Saturday; I went for a long run; Columbus discovered America in 1492.
I don’t do well when it’s perpetually overcast, and no amount of Vitamin D, full-spectrum lightbox illumination, or exercise can disguise that fact. It’s my Sicilian mitochondria or something. They crave bright sunlight, olive trees, heat ripples in the air, glints of light dancing off shallow turquoise coastal waters.
When I don’t get that, I get weird. Broody.
What I’m really craving is sunlight, but the brain exists to make up reasons why the autonomous nervous system wants what it wants.
So, I think I’m brooding over all sorts of other things.
Like, Why are you the biggest failure in the history of mankind on this planet?
###
Anyway, last night my brooding took me to the years 2009 through 2012 as chronicled in this very diary.
Typically, I don’t reread anything I write in this diary. The benefit is all in the act of writing. Writing gives me narrative distance from the events of my own life, and since the narrative mask I assay most often is a kind of ironic, self-deprecatory, comic persona, the diary writing works well as a coping mechanism.
I do go through the diaries after I’ve written first drafts of fiction pieces to harvest bits of prose that might work in the context of those first drafts.
This, though, is a methodical process done with outlines, index cards, and specific referents: Chapter 4, scene 3. NEEDS: (1) Epiphanal conversation with flaky father; (2) description of Grand Army Plaza Brooklyn Library. That kind of thing. I’m not reading what I wrote with any degree of emotional openness.
Last night, though, I was just a wounded little girl wandering through all the bad shit that happened to me once upon a time, and it was really quite painful to read and remember.
How did I ever manage to survive that time in my life relatively intact?
I’m lucky to have survived that time in my life relatively intact.
Somewhere, somehow, something was looking out for me.
Because the odds were not in my favor.
###
I was waaaaay too hopped up to sleep when that was through around midnight or so, so I watched a movie I can remember liking a lot in the early 80s when it first came out. An Officer and a Gentleman. Starring Richard “Why-does-this-man-have-a-career?” Gere and Debra “Why-isn’t-this-woman-in-more-movies?” Winger.
I think I may have seen this movie three times, that’s how romantic I thought it was. Broody male loner who doesn’t understand that life’s real adventure is not a motorcycle ride but the LUV of a good woman. The Kerouac myth!
When I saw it again last night, all I could do was cringe.
Man, I was brainwashed as a young woman.
A week or so earlier, I’d watched Five Easy Pieces, a more nuanced, sophisticated and realistic look at the Male Loner Archetype. Five Easy Pieces was my mother’s favorite movie. She thought Five Easy Pieces was romantic!
Five Easy Pieces stands up across well over 40 years, partly because of the acting but mostly because of its complete lack of sentimentality: Whatever my mother may have thought, Bob Raphaelson knew he was making a movie about an asshole.
But that was my mother’s primary romantic archetype: Men who treated her like shit. Men who abandoned her.
One of whom was my father.
Since my father abandoned us when I was very young, I don’t actually have any conscious associations with that abandonment. It’s another one of those psychological exercises where the absence of something has to be construed as the presence of something else.
It seems far more likely to me that what I feel when that great black void begins to close over my soul is my mother’s panic, and because she was a borderline personality, and because she dominated me so thoroughly in the first 12 years or so of my life, I’m still very inept when it comes to walling out my mother's panic. Even though she's dead.
###
“You’re not in the least bit like your mother,” Rik told me once matter-of-factly. “I get that you suffer from your mother’s nightmares. Only remember: They’re not yours.”
This was back in the days when we used to go to wild Berkeley parties together so he could hit on all my girlfriends. Hitting on me would not have been at all socially acceptable, though I suppose that was the elephant in the party dress waiting to be asked to dance.
I think.
I honestly can’t remember.
I’m one of those people who lives in a temporal cave defined by my last 48 hours of sense memory. If it happened 49 hours ago, I may be vaguely aware of it. Kind of like a frieze painted on the walls of the cave: Oh, right, it was sunny on Saturday; I went for a long run; Columbus discovered America in 1492.
I don’t do well when it’s perpetually overcast, and no amount of Vitamin D, full-spectrum lightbox illumination, or exercise can disguise that fact. It’s my Sicilian mitochondria or something. They crave bright sunlight, olive trees, heat ripples in the air, glints of light dancing off shallow turquoise coastal waters.
When I don’t get that, I get weird. Broody.
What I’m really craving is sunlight, but the brain exists to make up reasons why the autonomous nervous system wants what it wants.
So, I think I’m brooding over all sorts of other things.
Like, Why are you the biggest failure in the history of mankind on this planet?
###
Anyway, last night my brooding took me to the years 2009 through 2012 as chronicled in this very diary.
Typically, I don’t reread anything I write in this diary. The benefit is all in the act of writing. Writing gives me narrative distance from the events of my own life, and since the narrative mask I assay most often is a kind of ironic, self-deprecatory, comic persona, the diary writing works well as a coping mechanism.
I do go through the diaries after I’ve written first drafts of fiction pieces to harvest bits of prose that might work in the context of those first drafts.
This, though, is a methodical process done with outlines, index cards, and specific referents: Chapter 4, scene 3. NEEDS: (1) Epiphanal conversation with flaky father; (2) description of Grand Army Plaza Brooklyn Library. That kind of thing. I’m not reading what I wrote with any degree of emotional openness.
Last night, though, I was just a wounded little girl wandering through all the bad shit that happened to me once upon a time, and it was really quite painful to read and remember.
How did I ever manage to survive that time in my life relatively intact?
I’m lucky to have survived that time in my life relatively intact.
Somewhere, somehow, something was looking out for me.
Because the odds were not in my favor.
###
I was waaaaay too hopped up to sleep when that was through around midnight or so, so I watched a movie I can remember liking a lot in the early 80s when it first came out. An Officer and a Gentleman. Starring Richard “Why-does-this-man-have-a-career?” Gere and Debra “Why-isn’t-this-woman-in-more-movies?” Winger.
I think I may have seen this movie three times, that’s how romantic I thought it was. Broody male loner who doesn’t understand that life’s real adventure is not a motorcycle ride but the LUV of a good woman. The Kerouac myth!
When I saw it again last night, all I could do was cringe.
Man, I was brainwashed as a young woman.
A week or so earlier, I’d watched Five Easy Pieces, a more nuanced, sophisticated and realistic look at the Male Loner Archetype. Five Easy Pieces was my mother’s favorite movie. She thought Five Easy Pieces was romantic!
Five Easy Pieces stands up across well over 40 years, partly because of the acting but mostly because of its complete lack of sentimentality: Whatever my mother may have thought, Bob Raphaelson knew he was making a movie about an asshole.
But that was my mother’s primary romantic archetype: Men who treated her like shit. Men who abandoned her.
One of whom was my father.
Since my father abandoned us when I was very young, I don’t actually have any conscious associations with that abandonment. It’s another one of those psychological exercises where the absence of something has to be construed as the presence of something else.
It seems far more likely to me that what I feel when that great black void begins to close over my soul is my mother’s panic, and because she was a borderline personality, and because she dominated me so thoroughly in the first 12 years or so of my life, I’m still very inept when it comes to walling out my mother's panic. Even though she's dead.
###
“You’re not in the least bit like your mother,” Rik told me once matter-of-factly. “I get that you suffer from your mother’s nightmares. Only remember: They’re not yours.”
This was back in the days when we used to go to wild Berkeley parties together so he could hit on all my girlfriends. Hitting on me would not have been at all socially acceptable, though I suppose that was the elephant in the party dress waiting to be asked to dance.
no subject
Date: 2018-04-04 05:06 pm (UTC)Right?? I do this too. And I have Sicilian heritage too and never thought that that might have to do with my yearning for bright, hot, tropical places. (Though I do like New England a whole lot too. But man. the winter is long.)
Re: your mother's panic, it's so true that other people's moods and fears can bleed into us and become ours, especially if the people are important to us...
no subject
Date: 2018-04-05 03:19 am (UTC)I've always been susceptible to being infected (for lack of another word) with other people's moods. I think that's because I'm a writer. :-) As a writer, I need to cultivate a kind of porousness. You're a writer too, aren't you? Do you feel that as well?
no subject
Date: 2018-04-05 03:29 am (UTC)But I do think it's definitely good to enter into how other people think and feel--I guess I just want to be aware that's what I'm doing. I want to be aware where those feelings truly live.
no subject
Date: 2018-04-05 03:12 pm (UTC)