5:10 p.m. - 09/01/03
odds and middles...
I realize now I mentioned scattered journaling attempts, and then only shared the one long, coherent entry I actually wrote. So here are some of my other scribblings from the past few days, to be followed (energy willing) by a more current update...
August 25th - 8:15 p.m.
It's funny how afterward, in the trenches of emotion, I tend to say being there or doing this brought up whichever thought or memory or obstacle. As if I know. I suppose I do know, somewhat, but I tend to simplify it. To say, "sitting in the corner during my mom's art class for the men at the rehab center brought up strong feelings of Rogers - the schedule of Rogers, the groups, the tasks, the steps" isn't untrue...I guess it's incomplete. It's incomplete to tell the story that way, as if the memories aren't affected as much by the half-empty residences that signal moves, by the anniversaries that - when you're used to getting through them with a fairly steady step - decide to knock you over again. By everything, the past few days, weeks, months, and years. Today, I saw the doctor and he asked if I was wearing a new necklace; indeed the "one" I kept around my neck this past year has been exchanged for a small silver house with a red heart and a brown roof. He brought up the fairly obvious association with "home is where the heart is" - and I, forgetting that home could mean anywhere else, said, "Yeah. And also the heart is red, and when I was at Rogers the unit was called Red and..." Only as it poured of my mouth did I realize that this could have been a symbol of everything, of all that is home and will be home. That he'd been thinking in broader terms, and I'd narrowed it down to Rogers again. Down to Rogers where the sadness stains the carpeting and throws shadows on the walls. Pitiful, impossible Rogers with its tremendous sickness and tiny, hidden miracles. Of course, he could have easily made the connection to Rogers as I did without thinking. There's no point in censoring myself by thinking obsessively ahead of time. He knows what it is and what else can't be it. He knows that if I build a home outside of it, if I am slowly weaving bricks and sticks and straw (and skills and loved ones) it's only because I want more of what I had there.
*
August 29th - 8:54 p.m.
A few days ago, I lounged - feeling loved and scholarly - in the chair of a bookstore, reading almost the first half of The End of The Affair. I'd been in need of a book to pass the time; Mom had art to hang in the cafe and afterward a meeting with the realtor. Today, I lounged at a second bookstore, pushing past the middle mark, before tiredness began to push past my eyes, and I thought about this book - this book that I'm reading because I need, at nearly every minute now, to be reading something, and specifically because Sara and I discussed it as being her equivalent of my Rose Garden. This book is beautiful. It brings me to the verge of tears, and I'm not using that as my testimony to its greatness; God knows even the barest attempts at art are enough to make my eyes pucker and push out the sour tears, but it has me thinking again around a concept that crossed my mind this morning. I was playing a few tracks from my copy of Les Mis for Inge, who had mentioned some discontent with her own recording, and I realized the relative novelty of my own relationship to this CD. I acquired it as a Christmas present, my main Christmas present - supplemented by a squashed-looking but perfectly functional CD player, which accompanied it only on the grounds that the recording I so adored (the concert celebration from Royal Albert Hall) could not easily be found on audio tape. I thought about the way that I first watched the performance, interrupted by pledge drives on public television, broadcast after broadcast. I was sick with something, probably the Sunday syndrome, and I sat on the floor of the first part of our basement, at the bottom of the stairs (one of the many places the "family room" resided over our years in Neverland). I pieced the story together from the character names and the libretto. I never managed to see it from beginning to end, but I started to understand the concept of the story, and I started to become obsessed with the characters, as well as the bodies and voices seemingly so inseperable. Fantine, Eponine, Valjean, Javert - Ruthie Henshall, Lea Salonga, Colm Wilkinson, Philip Quast... I watched it with the same compulsive desperation that I've devoured novels, destroyed tapes, and brought videos nearly to the burning point. I realized that all of this has been an ongoing need and deep admiration, gratitude, respect for that which is genuine. That which comes from true human experience into true human experience, at best enhanced by art, but certainly not tainted through the medium. I've come at relationships this way, too - this starving, desperate way, begging for more time, more depth, more of what is real. And it comes back, of course, to Rogers, to the place where people burrowed deep beneath the bullshit, moving the seeds of reality, and waiting to sprout or suffocate. I come back to the relationships built in that soil, down deep in those trenches, with the sterility and fertility of our beings so unblushingly borne. I have that genuineness packed inside me now; I remember the place where we would-be-women, known for our desire to disappear, allowed ourselves to be seen. Not without fear, not without shame, but without restraint. Without false notes and tapered phrases. I see the imperfection genuine.
And I know that what the doctor said, what I knew and had forgotten in my fear, is true: There is no losing Rogers. There is no throwing it away. There is no becoming anyone else I know, because the seeds were too deep and the gardens too real. I see, I breathe; it isn't only art that stirs the soul and has it waking.
*
and this is just here because I'm happy that, in spite of the fact that I'm compelled to take a "which sylvia plath poem am I?" quiz in the first place, I'm a poem about growth and love. not that it's a *happy* poem, but, you know...considering the source...
Which Sylvia Plath Poem Am I?
by scintilla
chord
�
�
