I had a dream; it was probably in the seventh grade. I was with you, or Elizabeth; some family person. I had a whole series of family dreams around that time. But this one, we were outside; there was a giant grill--huge grill. Like probably, it would have been about ten stories tall, with a coal on top. A giant coal, you know, the size of a house. I think I was with Elizabeth, because I knew smething bad was going to happen because this peice of coal was going to fall off the grill and chase us, and it did. It did, and it was Dad, somehow. It chased us, and it was rolling after us and it was red hot. Then it turned into a bear, and it was still chasing us, and I woke up.
And it was Dad. But I really don't know why.
Then there was another dream. Different night. This one was really complicated. We were in England, our whole family was there and we were solving this mystery all together. It was the mystery--someone had stolen something--it was probably during the time that I was reading the whole Agatha Christie series that we had, all eighty of them. So, we, only remember the ending of it pretty clearly; I don't remember the middle circumstances. But I remember being in the attic of a house, and there was a dollhouse. And there were people outside that we were hiding from, shadowy people. But in the dollhouse, there were pearls, and I think that's what we were looking for. So then I remember we were on a flight going back to our home, back to the US, only the plane was set up the way trains are, so we had our own little cabin for our family. Our own little gray room in the plance. (Laughter from the transsciber.) This is an awful dream, just warning you. Um, so Dad's there, and we're all happy because we solved the mystery. And then, um, jeez, I don't want to finish it, but, he pulls out a gun and he shoots us. All of us. And then I wake up.
What does this say about me as a seventh grader?
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Heather corrects use of term "lake" in Power Animals part 1
You know I spent a long time researching what is a lake and what is a pond. For a while I thought that it was just that a lake needed water running into and out of it. But no, it really is the size. Or possibly the depth. I forget, this was about fifteen years ago. Um, well, ours was a pond. Especially because it looked like a tennis court in summer. It was covered in algae, because it was only about three feet deep. Anywhere. Elizabeth and I would row in it too. And possibly because everyone put a lot of fertilizer on their giant lawns. Up at the north end of the pond we would run aground. Except if you got out you were up to your knees in sludge. It's hard to row in sludge.
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
NYC MTA Haikus
Since I now have a 60-90 min commute (each way) I am trying to write then. Haikus are convenient because I can write them while standing. The titles of the first 4 correspond to the line and station where they were finished.
N 36th street
If you touch my ass
One more time I swear to God
I'll lose my balance.
Atlantic/Pacific Street
Do not send your kids
To ask me for my number.
MUY unattractive.
2 Chambers Street
Beautiful gold cross
On beautiful black cleavage
Peripheral lust.
2 Penn Station
"Tell me something, babe-"
"Do I look like I fucking
want to talk to you?"
For Mr. Wall St., #1
If I wanted to
I could read complex math books
And never look up.
For Mr. Wall St., #2
Haven't seen you since
I bought this pink push-up bra
You selfish bastard.
For Mr. Wall St., #3
You're almost too hot
(Why? The eyes/hair/height/yes/lips)
Almost. But not quite.
For Mr. Wall St., #4
Soft swept hair, bored eyes
Maybe, hopefully, someday
I'll stop wondering.
N 36th street
If you touch my ass
One more time I swear to God
I'll lose my balance.
Atlantic/Pacific Street
Do not send your kids
To ask me for my number.
MUY unattractive.
2 Chambers Street
Beautiful gold cross
On beautiful black cleavage
Peripheral lust.
2 Penn Station
"Tell me something, babe-"
"Do I look like I fucking
want to talk to you?"
For Mr. Wall St., #1
If I wanted to
I could read complex math books
And never look up.
For Mr. Wall St., #2
Haven't seen you since
I bought this pink push-up bra
You selfish bastard.
For Mr. Wall St., #3
You're almost too hot
(Why? The eyes/hair/height/yes/lips)
Almost. But not quite.
For Mr. Wall St., #4
Soft swept hair, bored eyes
Maybe, hopefully, someday
I'll stop wondering.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
The Power Animals Of Scotland, Part Three
After lunch, I walk to the north beach By Myself. I pass through the picturesque ruins of a nunnery, which the plaque says was founded in 1200 by Reginald of Something. Its first prioress was his sister, "Beatrice (or Bethoc)". I look up from reading this to see a sparrow prone on the gravel path, twitching and shivering. Oh no, I think. It is fatally injured somehow. It is having a death convulsion. Then another one flits down and starts convulsing in the sunlight, too. Oh, I think. A dust bath. It is windier now as I climb the headland, and the sheep are mostly lying down, facing into it, the lambs behind their mothers, using their flanks as a windbreak.
Walking along the beach, which is an expanse of sculpted pink and green granite curves, I consider whether she might be possessed. What would the early Christians think? But the possessed are supposed to be full of anger, I think, and she is mostly full of tears. That night I skim two books from the breakfast room downstairs, a history of St. Columba and a history of Glasgow. The history of the saint casts much doubt on the theory that he was being punished for anything, because he seems to have gone back and forth and where he pleased. But I like the fact that he was first christened Crimthan, "The Fox", and only later given the name "Columcille"--dove of the cell, pidgeon of the church. I like the fact that the course his life doesn't seem to have reconciled these two names.
Later I dream that my mother has turned into a dog with a semi-human face, and is lunging up from a pit or tunnel toward me, grinning and barking and slavering, full of force. I am appalled and frightened and feel powerless to stop this almost joyful attack until gradually I realize, resignedly, that I will have to turn into a dog too, to counter her, though I am afraid of this. I do--I change--and am full of power and ease, and chase her back down the hole. It is like having a body again, and in the dream it is a great relief, but I wake worried and scared about my own mortality.
Walking along the beach, which is an expanse of sculpted pink and green granite curves, I consider whether she might be possessed. What would the early Christians think? But the possessed are supposed to be full of anger, I think, and she is mostly full of tears. That night I skim two books from the breakfast room downstairs, a history of St. Columba and a history of Glasgow. The history of the saint casts much doubt on the theory that he was being punished for anything, because he seems to have gone back and forth and where he pleased. But I like the fact that he was first christened Crimthan, "The Fox", and only later given the name "Columcille"--dove of the cell, pidgeon of the church. I like the fact that the course his life doesn't seem to have reconciled these two names.
Later I dream that my mother has turned into a dog with a semi-human face, and is lunging up from a pit or tunnel toward me, grinning and barking and slavering, full of force. I am appalled and frightened and feel powerless to stop this almost joyful attack until gradually I realize, resignedly, that I will have to turn into a dog too, to counter her, though I am afraid of this. I do--I change--and am full of power and ease, and chase her back down the hole. It is like having a body again, and in the dream it is a great relief, but I wake worried and scared about my own mortality.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
The Power Animals Of Scotland, Part Two
Mom emailed me detailed instructions for every step of my journey to Iona--including reminding me to ask at the bus station ticket counter "which pole to stand by" to catch the correct bus--so I am able to walk from the ferry dock to her B&B without hesitation. I call for her at the bottom of the stairs and there is no answer. "Just go up," the owner says.
I knock and there is a pause and then the door opens. She is wearing a purple zippered fleece sweater and dark green fleece pants, a genre of outfit I swore to myself I would never wear, even alone, when I left Michigan. The skin under her eyes is puffy and her face looks tired. I think she has been crying. "I was just meditating," she says.
What is wrong, I quickly begin calculating--in fact, I have been calculating what might be wrong for the last several days. "I wanted to be there when you came. I can't believe I wasn't there to meet you. I feel really bad I wasn't there." She twines her hands and tears start to leak out of her eyes. I give her a hug, step into her room and sit down on the twin bed opposite hers. I twine my hands. The room is several shades paler than the purple of her fleece, brightly lit by sunlight with a view of the sea; the walls seem to be resonating with her shirt.
"This is a nice room for you." She seems confused by this. "It matches your shirt."
I offer to help her with her digital camera. She gets up and looks for it, sits down, gets up and looks in another place, sits down. She tells me how since November her thyroid has been "off"--the level of something in her blood a hundred times the normal level--"But WHAT is the substance?" I say over and over, until I feel like she must be deaf or my vocal chords not functioning. Three long straight gray strands of hair hang down over the center of her face and as she talks they tap airily against her nose and the bridge of her glasses. I wish very much that she would push them back but she does not. She tells me how from November to February she was sleeping three hours a night and editing for twelve hours or fourteen.
My mother writes books. For years--perhaps 15--I buried this fact from myself because I too write and I could not be like her. Last Christmas I asked her to send me the two that have been published--one by herself and one by a small new-agey press. I have managed to read through the introductions. The rest of the text in each is a explanation of the 144 levels of color/light/love that a person on a spiritual journey has to pass through to get to--something like enlightenment, I guess. The books detail helpful correspondences between material objects and spiritual journey, with sections on clothing, continents, pets (particularly dogs), food, plants and trees...
I have avoided this information wholesale in the same way I ignored what my sisters and I termed "the apocalypse kit" she gave each of us a few years later after the power animals. This was the first or second year I went off to college in Connecticut. Mom was convinced that there was a shift happening from a 2,000 year dominance of the universe by "masculine energy" to a new reign of "feminine energy", which was evident if you studied what the sunspots were currently doing. She warned us that there would be global disturbances as this power shift was taking place, and made me promise that if she called me I would drive to a bed and breakfast she liked in Northhampton, MA, because there might very well be flooding as far as Hartford.
For herself she purchased a large RV, so that she could drive around and visit us once the apocalypse untethered her from her house--unphased by my repeated "Where are you going to get the gas for it if there really is an apocalypse?-- and for each of us she assembled a large bundle of things to help us survive the "disturbances". My bundle stayed in the trunk of my car, unopened, for years after college. I finally raided it before going on a long backpacking trip, because I remembered her saying she had bought us each a campstove. There was indeed a stove, which I have just been using in Scotland. There were also several pairs of good wool socks. There was a snowsuit. A bag of cough drops, bandaids and expired antibiotics. A spray bottle of Chloroseptic.
I was glad for the socks and the stove, and angry about the rest. This was what I was supposed to survive on in the event of natural disasters and mass panic? Chloroseptic and bandaids?
Now she is telling me about how my dog, who she has been taking care of while I travel, became "really weird" and was preventing her from sleeping just before she left--nevermind that she was taking sleeping pills every night and her thyroid levels were bouncing back and forth between a hundred times too high and six times too low. She won't let the dog sleep in her bedroom--fair enough--because she says the dog would keep her awake. So the dog sleeps in my bedroom.
"But the week before I left, she got really--weird."
"Weird how? What do you mean, weird?"
"I don't know--just kind of strange and--almost threatening. I was really nice to her, but at night her eyes would get really big, and her tongue would start hanging out. Like she was slavering. And at night she would go back and forth outside the door, and slam her body against it. Just slamming and slamming. I barricaded the door, but I couldn't sleep. I don't know, it was creepy."
I try to picture my seven year old overweight husky-lab mix dog as a slavering, B-movie horror-creature. It doesn't work very well. I concentrate on physically restraining myself from the strong desire I almost always have in the presence of my mother, which is to flee, or, if flight is impractical, to fly into a rage until I have managed to obliterate whatever she is saying or doing. In her presence I almost always feel that something else is going on, something invisible and unintelligible, which makes language useless. A swirling vortex of unpridictability, against which it is hopeless to reason or even listen, it defeats all communication.
"On Valentine's Day--I had been taking A--- [some sleeping pill], and I took some melatonin, too, because I had read that helped you with sleeping--I took a little extra. Just a little bit. And I felt like I was going to explode. I could feel all this blood in my head and my heart was beating really fast. I thought, this is it. I am going to die. So I went to the ER. Well, I did a healing too--that cleared a lot of it, and I could feel some of it lifting off--but I still went to the ER. They gave me medicine--not for blood pressure, but for anxiety. But my brain isn't right. I don't know, I just felt--" She is curled forward with her head to one side, and she puts clamps her fingers to either side of her temples to demonstrate the pressure. I resolve as I watch--or reresolve; it is like feeling over and over an old interior Braille--Never never never never never. I hunch also, and try to notice something specific, something factual, about the room. The yellow speckles in the brownish carpet. Stare at those, keep listening.
"My brain just isn't right. I am tired. I can't remember things. I don't know, I'm just--tired." She gets up and searches among her socks for her camera. Finally she finds it, and we start back down the road toward lunch. I take a few pictures of a weathered wooden bench in front of a cracked stone wall, the cracks fetchingly blossoming with violets. I show her how the zoom works. The camera is tiny, and there are only about three buttons on it. The day is sunny--unusually, for the western part of Scotland--and not too windy. There are sheep and lambs in the green fields, and little white flecks on the dark blue water. Mom has been planning on leaving her MA eco-community and moving to the Isle of Skye once her retirement fund kicks in, and starting a spiritual community that would include a small publishing house, organic gardening, eco-building, and some kind of program for "the children of the world". She has come here, this time, partly to scout out land and talk to builders.
"But I'm tired. I thought I would meet people but it hasn't happened. I might just give it all up. I'm almost sixty." She is wearing a thick purple parka and wooly calf-high boots; her hair is looped inside the neck of the parka and she looks to me like a purple turtle stumping on two legs down the road. I am surprised by her giving up, and sad, and surprised to be sad, as I have spent the whole time she has been talking about moving telling her not to get her hopes up, to take things one step at a time, and to not try to do too much at once. Is this the same woman who told me over the phone just before Christmas, full of righteous indignation, "Do you realize that 80 percent of Scotland is owned by about 400 British families?" Mom against the English. Mom against the land codes. Certainly it was always Mom against the school, whenever she thought a teacher wasn't being completely fair to one of us--as one of our old teachers laughed with some relief after Elizabeth graduated, "Well, finally no more, Look out, here comes Mrs. MacKenzie."
I remember, too, when I was little and she would dress up to go out to a play or a fancy dinner with our dad. She favored tiny low heels with tiny straps and buckles, and pastel dresses with fluted hems and tiny stiff pleats; she wore Tea Rose perfume and a long wool coat with a strip of fur that ran the length of the coat, ankle neck ankle. I used to rub my cheek against it; it was always cool, and I still remember its mild, slightly musky smell.
"Then this giant golden sun--a Masculine energy--came in and held me. For like, four hours! Just held me and held me, and said, you are mine. That never happens!" She is crying as she walks. "Then that night this Tao lady came--she was wearing a Chinese dress. And she was sending ocean waves through me. Like the moon. And I could feel them removing all these fear channels and terror things, lifting them off. I only slept like one and a half hours. Then I would wake up and more would come. All night, just lifting and lifting them."
As we walk I find myself turning into my father. I say, "Huh. Yeah," a lot, in an expressionless voice, and keep my hands in my pockets, staring at my shoes or out into a middle distance. The lambs are trimly fuzzy, like small stocky white poodles, with black spots on their faces and rumps. They duck their heads and then charge their mothers, bleating and butting them, and drop onto their two front elbows to nurse. Mom has been collecting beach glass and periwinkles, she tells me; which beaches have which shells, etc.
Over lunch I ask cautiously about St. Columba. "He killed someone in a church," my mother says, "and his punishment was to be exiled to where he couldn't see Ireland. So you can just barely not see Ireland from here. Maybe he killed several people."
"And he's a saint?" I ask, vaguely indignant.
"Well, it's all very male," my mother says.
I knock and there is a pause and then the door opens. She is wearing a purple zippered fleece sweater and dark green fleece pants, a genre of outfit I swore to myself I would never wear, even alone, when I left Michigan. The skin under her eyes is puffy and her face looks tired. I think she has been crying. "I was just meditating," she says.
What is wrong, I quickly begin calculating--in fact, I have been calculating what might be wrong for the last several days. "I wanted to be there when you came. I can't believe I wasn't there to meet you. I feel really bad I wasn't there." She twines her hands and tears start to leak out of her eyes. I give her a hug, step into her room and sit down on the twin bed opposite hers. I twine my hands. The room is several shades paler than the purple of her fleece, brightly lit by sunlight with a view of the sea; the walls seem to be resonating with her shirt.
"This is a nice room for you." She seems confused by this. "It matches your shirt."
I offer to help her with her digital camera. She gets up and looks for it, sits down, gets up and looks in another place, sits down. She tells me how since November her thyroid has been "off"--the level of something in her blood a hundred times the normal level--"But WHAT is the substance?" I say over and over, until I feel like she must be deaf or my vocal chords not functioning. Three long straight gray strands of hair hang down over the center of her face and as she talks they tap airily against her nose and the bridge of her glasses. I wish very much that she would push them back but she does not. She tells me how from November to February she was sleeping three hours a night and editing for twelve hours or fourteen.
My mother writes books. For years--perhaps 15--I buried this fact from myself because I too write and I could not be like her. Last Christmas I asked her to send me the two that have been published--one by herself and one by a small new-agey press. I have managed to read through the introductions. The rest of the text in each is a explanation of the 144 levels of color/light/love that a person on a spiritual journey has to pass through to get to--something like enlightenment, I guess. The books detail helpful correspondences between material objects and spiritual journey, with sections on clothing, continents, pets (particularly dogs), food, plants and trees...
I have avoided this information wholesale in the same way I ignored what my sisters and I termed "the apocalypse kit" she gave each of us a few years later after the power animals. This was the first or second year I went off to college in Connecticut. Mom was convinced that there was a shift happening from a 2,000 year dominance of the universe by "masculine energy" to a new reign of "feminine energy", which was evident if you studied what the sunspots were currently doing. She warned us that there would be global disturbances as this power shift was taking place, and made me promise that if she called me I would drive to a bed and breakfast she liked in Northhampton, MA, because there might very well be flooding as far as Hartford.
For herself she purchased a large RV, so that she could drive around and visit us once the apocalypse untethered her from her house--unphased by my repeated "Where are you going to get the gas for it if there really is an apocalypse?-- and for each of us she assembled a large bundle of things to help us survive the "disturbances". My bundle stayed in the trunk of my car, unopened, for years after college. I finally raided it before going on a long backpacking trip, because I remembered her saying she had bought us each a campstove. There was indeed a stove, which I have just been using in Scotland. There were also several pairs of good wool socks. There was a snowsuit. A bag of cough drops, bandaids and expired antibiotics. A spray bottle of Chloroseptic.
I was glad for the socks and the stove, and angry about the rest. This was what I was supposed to survive on in the event of natural disasters and mass panic? Chloroseptic and bandaids?
Now she is telling me about how my dog, who she has been taking care of while I travel, became "really weird" and was preventing her from sleeping just before she left--nevermind that she was taking sleeping pills every night and her thyroid levels were bouncing back and forth between a hundred times too high and six times too low. She won't let the dog sleep in her bedroom--fair enough--because she says the dog would keep her awake. So the dog sleeps in my bedroom.
"But the week before I left, she got really--weird."
"Weird how? What do you mean, weird?"
"I don't know--just kind of strange and--almost threatening. I was really nice to her, but at night her eyes would get really big, and her tongue would start hanging out. Like she was slavering. And at night she would go back and forth outside the door, and slam her body against it. Just slamming and slamming. I barricaded the door, but I couldn't sleep. I don't know, it was creepy."
I try to picture my seven year old overweight husky-lab mix dog as a slavering, B-movie horror-creature. It doesn't work very well. I concentrate on physically restraining myself from the strong desire I almost always have in the presence of my mother, which is to flee, or, if flight is impractical, to fly into a rage until I have managed to obliterate whatever she is saying or doing. In her presence I almost always feel that something else is going on, something invisible and unintelligible, which makes language useless. A swirling vortex of unpridictability, against which it is hopeless to reason or even listen, it defeats all communication.
"On Valentine's Day--I had been taking A--- [some sleeping pill], and I took some melatonin, too, because I had read that helped you with sleeping--I took a little extra. Just a little bit. And I felt like I was going to explode. I could feel all this blood in my head and my heart was beating really fast. I thought, this is it. I am going to die. So I went to the ER. Well, I did a healing too--that cleared a lot of it, and I could feel some of it lifting off--but I still went to the ER. They gave me medicine--not for blood pressure, but for anxiety. But my brain isn't right. I don't know, I just felt--" She is curled forward with her head to one side, and she puts clamps her fingers to either side of her temples to demonstrate the pressure. I resolve as I watch--or reresolve; it is like feeling over and over an old interior Braille--Never never never never never. I hunch also, and try to notice something specific, something factual, about the room. The yellow speckles in the brownish carpet. Stare at those, keep listening.
"My brain just isn't right. I am tired. I can't remember things. I don't know, I'm just--tired." She gets up and searches among her socks for her camera. Finally she finds it, and we start back down the road toward lunch. I take a few pictures of a weathered wooden bench in front of a cracked stone wall, the cracks fetchingly blossoming with violets. I show her how the zoom works. The camera is tiny, and there are only about three buttons on it. The day is sunny--unusually, for the western part of Scotland--and not too windy. There are sheep and lambs in the green fields, and little white flecks on the dark blue water. Mom has been planning on leaving her MA eco-community and moving to the Isle of Skye once her retirement fund kicks in, and starting a spiritual community that would include a small publishing house, organic gardening, eco-building, and some kind of program for "the children of the world". She has come here, this time, partly to scout out land and talk to builders.
"But I'm tired. I thought I would meet people but it hasn't happened. I might just give it all up. I'm almost sixty." She is wearing a thick purple parka and wooly calf-high boots; her hair is looped inside the neck of the parka and she looks to me like a purple turtle stumping on two legs down the road. I am surprised by her giving up, and sad, and surprised to be sad, as I have spent the whole time she has been talking about moving telling her not to get her hopes up, to take things one step at a time, and to not try to do too much at once. Is this the same woman who told me over the phone just before Christmas, full of righteous indignation, "Do you realize that 80 percent of Scotland is owned by about 400 British families?" Mom against the English. Mom against the land codes. Certainly it was always Mom against the school, whenever she thought a teacher wasn't being completely fair to one of us--as one of our old teachers laughed with some relief after Elizabeth graduated, "Well, finally no more, Look out, here comes Mrs. MacKenzie."
I remember, too, when I was little and she would dress up to go out to a play or a fancy dinner with our dad. She favored tiny low heels with tiny straps and buckles, and pastel dresses with fluted hems and tiny stiff pleats; she wore Tea Rose perfume and a long wool coat with a strip of fur that ran the length of the coat, ankle neck ankle. I used to rub my cheek against it; it was always cool, and I still remember its mild, slightly musky smell.
"Then this giant golden sun--a Masculine energy--came in and held me. For like, four hours! Just held me and held me, and said, you are mine. That never happens!" She is crying as she walks. "Then that night this Tao lady came--she was wearing a Chinese dress. And she was sending ocean waves through me. Like the moon. And I could feel them removing all these fear channels and terror things, lifting them off. I only slept like one and a half hours. Then I would wake up and more would come. All night, just lifting and lifting them."
As we walk I find myself turning into my father. I say, "Huh. Yeah," a lot, in an expressionless voice, and keep my hands in my pockets, staring at my shoes or out into a middle distance. The lambs are trimly fuzzy, like small stocky white poodles, with black spots on their faces and rumps. They duck their heads and then charge their mothers, bleating and butting them, and drop onto their two front elbows to nurse. Mom has been collecting beach glass and periwinkles, she tells me; which beaches have which shells, etc.
Over lunch I ask cautiously about St. Columba. "He killed someone in a church," my mother says, "and his punishment was to be exiled to where he couldn't see Ireland. So you can just barely not see Ireland from here. Maybe he killed several people."
"And he's a saint?" I ask, vaguely indignant.
"Well, it's all very male," my mother says.
The Power Animals Of Scotland, Part One
On the bus ride across the Isle of Mull, the driver is pointing out various Sights to us. Do we see that patch of trees on the hillside to the left? Heads turn. Do we see how it is in the shape of a badger? Indeed, some of the trees form a lighter outline of some form--I am slightly upset that I can't tell whether or how much of the front part is a head.
"That's because the foreman of the logging crew that put those trees in was a Douglas. The badger is the clan animal of the Douglases," the driver informs us.
I have just arrived to Scotland from Paris--that is, from warm chocolate cake with fresh cream to leathery bus station lasagna--and find myself evidently defensive and critical. I am going to visit my mother on Iona for Easter. She is, among other things, a MacNeil. The MacNeils, as a Scottish heritage website put it, were expert sailors who made a living through exchanges with other islands--I think, a diplomatic way of saying pirates. They also claimed not to be descended from the race of Noah because "the MacNeil had his own boat."
When our mother divorced our father and we moved to an expensive, eccentric low house that sat at the edge of an artificial lake, one of the first things she did was to order a yellow plastic rowboat from the Sears catalogue, which she rowed thunkingly around and around our new lake. She said it reminded her of her childhood summers in Maine. It made her upper arms extremely strong--and baggy, I would think critically--but it made me nervous of her, too. Still I have to laugh at the aptness of the saying, even if it seems sometimes to express itself as the dementia of a human goldfish. (Nevermind commercialism, or nostalgia.)
"Where do the Celts come from," I asked her recently over the phone.
"Well, some stories say they are descended from the godess Danu, who rose out of the river Danube. I don't know..." she replied brightly.
Our mother raised us in an environ of fairies, selkies, records of Scottish folksongs like The Skyeboat Song, and Robert the Bruce. After the divorce, this morphed into Native American trancework, reincarnation therapy, crystals, and I don't know what--I yelled and sulked and hid and toyed with converting to Catholicism. While the white-bearded man on the bus to Oban leans over toward my seat to point out each castle and tell me about the past and present Dukes of Argylle--"they are Campbells; the reputation of the Campbells was that they got what they wanted. They might not have gotten it at first, but they stuck around till things went their way"--I wonder silently what value there is in a tiny, primitively armed and culturally identical group of people glowering at each other for centuries across small ridges and bodies of water. Nevertheless, when the man tells me he is a retiree from England, my mind silently, clearly and sedately ennunciates, Traitor.
Even as I take my first view of the country, out the bus window from Glasgow at a flat, green, bland landscape that could be Michigan on an overcast day, I add to my sense of peevish disgust that there is zero evidence of fairies to be seen. Then, before I can get really topsy-turvy over this, my mind further produces the comforting thought that it would not be to the fairies advantage to be too obvious.
Under absolute resistance--kicking and screaming--I seem to have zero recourse to anything but absolute naive belief. This is worrisome, to me, but not anything new. When I was 14--15?--our mother "got into" Power Animals. She was so excited about having found her own that she wanted each of her daughters to find hers, too. I protested, as usual, that it was completely stupid. But then after a few weeks, my sisters gave in, and all I heard about was their amazing visions.
"Heather saw an owl. It's a symbol of wisdom; you know Heather has a lot of owl qualities. And Elizabeth saw a squirrel; it was incredible..."
I was a little curious, and a little jealous, so finally I agreed. I lay down on the long weird built-in sofa of our weird new house--in "The Lake Room", the entrance to which my mother later had painted in huge Gothic script the first few lines of Psalm ?, "The Lord Is My Shepard I Shall Not Want..." I pretended to close my eyes. My mother sat on a low stool hunching toward me, rocking slightly, panting, and banging on a drum she had made herself. Behind her the lake, which made the flood insurance so expensive, flickered. I tried to picture crawling into a long, dark tunnel. I wished my mother wasn't so close to me; her breathing was embarassing.
Traveling down the tunnel. Traveling, traveling. "Now you are coming out. Now--what do you see?"
Nothing. Exactly nothing appeared in my mind--the blank anxiety was already there. The most I could squeeze out of my perceptions was a distant vague whistling sound. "Maybe its like the sound of wings?" I hedged. Geese and swans were both very sacred birds, my mom assured me. But I was secretly desolate. I had lost my innocence; I was too old and jaded to enter the spirit world; I was an exile forever and forever...
Years later, when Heather and I were working at the same summer camp in Maine, we started remeniscing. "Remember when mom made us find our power animals?" Heather said. "Elizabeth and I had so much fun making stuff up."
WHAT?! I was shocked. "You guys were making that up? You guys were LYING?!"
Heather was unruffled. "She wanted us to see something and we told her what she wanted. Elizabeth told her she saw a squirrel running around a tree, but on the INSIDE of the branches. She had to work really hard not to crack up as she was saying it."
"That's because the foreman of the logging crew that put those trees in was a Douglas. The badger is the clan animal of the Douglases," the driver informs us.
I have just arrived to Scotland from Paris--that is, from warm chocolate cake with fresh cream to leathery bus station lasagna--and find myself evidently defensive and critical. I am going to visit my mother on Iona for Easter. She is, among other things, a MacNeil. The MacNeils, as a Scottish heritage website put it, were expert sailors who made a living through exchanges with other islands--I think, a diplomatic way of saying pirates. They also claimed not to be descended from the race of Noah because "the MacNeil had his own boat."
When our mother divorced our father and we moved to an expensive, eccentric low house that sat at the edge of an artificial lake, one of the first things she did was to order a yellow plastic rowboat from the Sears catalogue, which she rowed thunkingly around and around our new lake. She said it reminded her of her childhood summers in Maine. It made her upper arms extremely strong--and baggy, I would think critically--but it made me nervous of her, too. Still I have to laugh at the aptness of the saying, even if it seems sometimes to express itself as the dementia of a human goldfish. (Nevermind commercialism, or nostalgia.)
"Where do the Celts come from," I asked her recently over the phone.
"Well, some stories say they are descended from the godess Danu, who rose out of the river Danube. I don't know..." she replied brightly.
Our mother raised us in an environ of fairies, selkies, records of Scottish folksongs like The Skyeboat Song, and Robert the Bruce. After the divorce, this morphed into Native American trancework, reincarnation therapy, crystals, and I don't know what--I yelled and sulked and hid and toyed with converting to Catholicism. While the white-bearded man on the bus to Oban leans over toward my seat to point out each castle and tell me about the past and present Dukes of Argylle--"they are Campbells; the reputation of the Campbells was that they got what they wanted. They might not have gotten it at first, but they stuck around till things went their way"--I wonder silently what value there is in a tiny, primitively armed and culturally identical group of people glowering at each other for centuries across small ridges and bodies of water. Nevertheless, when the man tells me he is a retiree from England, my mind silently, clearly and sedately ennunciates, Traitor.
Even as I take my first view of the country, out the bus window from Glasgow at a flat, green, bland landscape that could be Michigan on an overcast day, I add to my sense of peevish disgust that there is zero evidence of fairies to be seen. Then, before I can get really topsy-turvy over this, my mind further produces the comforting thought that it would not be to the fairies advantage to be too obvious.
Under absolute resistance--kicking and screaming--I seem to have zero recourse to anything but absolute naive belief. This is worrisome, to me, but not anything new. When I was 14--15?--our mother "got into" Power Animals. She was so excited about having found her own that she wanted each of her daughters to find hers, too. I protested, as usual, that it was completely stupid. But then after a few weeks, my sisters gave in, and all I heard about was their amazing visions.
"Heather saw an owl. It's a symbol of wisdom; you know Heather has a lot of owl qualities. And Elizabeth saw a squirrel; it was incredible..."
I was a little curious, and a little jealous, so finally I agreed. I lay down on the long weird built-in sofa of our weird new house--in "The Lake Room", the entrance to which my mother later had painted in huge Gothic script the first few lines of Psalm ?, "The Lord Is My Shepard I Shall Not Want..." I pretended to close my eyes. My mother sat on a low stool hunching toward me, rocking slightly, panting, and banging on a drum she had made herself. Behind her the lake, which made the flood insurance so expensive, flickered. I tried to picture crawling into a long, dark tunnel. I wished my mother wasn't so close to me; her breathing was embarassing.
Traveling down the tunnel. Traveling, traveling. "Now you are coming out. Now--what do you see?"
Nothing. Exactly nothing appeared in my mind--the blank anxiety was already there. The most I could squeeze out of my perceptions was a distant vague whistling sound. "Maybe its like the sound of wings?" I hedged. Geese and swans were both very sacred birds, my mom assured me. But I was secretly desolate. I had lost my innocence; I was too old and jaded to enter the spirit world; I was an exile forever and forever...
Years later, when Heather and I were working at the same summer camp in Maine, we started remeniscing. "Remember when mom made us find our power animals?" Heather said. "Elizabeth and I had so much fun making stuff up."
WHAT?! I was shocked. "You guys were making that up? You guys were LYING?!"
Heather was unruffled. "She wanted us to see something and we told her what she wanted. Elizabeth told her she saw a squirrel running around a tree, but on the INSIDE of the branches. She had to work really hard not to crack up as she was saying it."
Monday, April 2, 2007
Aquaria, Love Costumes
In 24 hours in Tokyo I have fallen in love with the seafood, especially the seafood that is still alive. I walk past it--a small sample of it--passing the restaurants that line the main street between my hotel and the nearest subway station. Restaurants keep it--them--in narrow aquaria that face the street; through the frizzy plume from the bubbler you can also watch the chefs in profile, chopping things on counters, with bowls of long pale vegetables to one side of the knife.
In the morning there are fewer--this morning only a few pale squid, several crabs that had divided themselves into two piles, one in either corner of the tank, and some bulbous-jawed, stupid-looking fish backing up anxiously and flicking a white membrane like a bubble up and down just inside the o of their lips, rapidly, like blowing a bubble of gum inside their mouths and sucking it back.
But tonight there are several other kinds of fish in the same tank: motionless stern-looking fish that have protruding, gorilla-like brows; zebra-striped fish whose blurred patterning suggests panic, especially around the eyes, which the stripes make look puckered and askew; and sharper, lither irridescent fish with translucent pointy fins as delicate as dragonfly wings and a motion-sensing stripe along their sides. There is a spider-legged crab, red legs like shiny satin and back a bulb of brown-red silk, glowing defensively from one corner, all elbow-angles, and there is a large snail just under the level of the water, bright apricot foot kissed obscenely to the glass. Best of all is the octupus, coiled glowering and kept to itself inside an orange mesh bag, all arms crossed like the thick line used to tie up ships but hoary with white fringe and white protruding dots just larger that those that come from a hole-punch; occasionally all of these flinch together, in an octopus sneeze or shrug.
And it is strange, having exchanged San Francisco for Tokyo, to be in a place that is so safe. Without fear, life feels like a theme park. The landscape--cityscape--is candycolored and frictionless, and there seems to be a national schoolgirl fetish. On comic-book covers this is the girl with ponytail, glasses, and butterfly-collared shirt unbuttoned to reveal breasts so enormous they would be worse for her back than the enormous backback parents are warned against letting their children carry, and on the subway, and on the street, it is women in tiny shorts and navy-blue or black thigh-high stockings and heels--on an overcast day, in wind and drizzle, me in my practical raincoat, still chilly, asking, how do they do it--yes, I am jealous. I want ivory fishnets with a tiny weave, shirred black leggings with hanging diagonal slashes reminiscent of the Jellicle cats, and a white trenchcoat excessively, delicately darted at the waist. I want to be a creature whose pattern is always changing, who is as bound by necesity as a sugarpuff, the Prospero of my own surface.
Only once, briefly, did I really start to panic. That was when I was trying to cross through Shinjuku Station, from the west side to the east. I would guess a direction, walk through the tides of people (reminding myself to keep to the left--the side from which it would be more convenient to draw my sword and defend myself against a knight riding up from the opposite direction, I also reminded myself--if I were right-handed) until I found an "i" infomation map, and look for the "You Are Here". Every time, I found that I was still well inside Shinjuku Station.
In the Shinjuku train station, a sign for the company Ranking Ranqueen:
For real media producing sympathy of newage.
For a selling channel between goods having the support of a number of people and newly born goods.
For a factory of information. For new module of business.
The password is "Whats up! Whats NEW!"
Ah, newly born goods. Ah, octopus. How good of you to visit us.
But I am beginning to think that power is the no-face, the navy blue suit. In the flow of pedestrian traffic I began to think, perhaps our bodies are for the city's purposes immaterial, in their gangly-star form; really we are part of a liquid, being sucked along. It seems a kind of conservatism that the women are so elaborated into showy idiosyncrasies and the men, once they stop being students, become the same suit multiplied into the millions.
It's not true, though, about the body being immaterial. In Shibuya, on top of a low hill, is the highest concentration on the world (says my guidebook) of "love hotels". $30-$50 for "rest", $70-$90 for "stay". If Matisse ripped a lot off of Japanese woodblock prints, the love hotels have returned the favor--very badly--though the majority of the rooms, displayed in photographs in the lobbies like Chinese food is in photographs in the menu, are more photographic--they have tropical fish or city skylines painted across the walls; one has what I think is a race car. There are also posters advertising Love Costume: Sell or Rental [!]. These picture grids of women in different uniforms of the service industry, smiling under the caption, "May I take your order?" Some of the women are just in a bra and panties--there is even one in military camoflage-pattern holding a plastic machine gun.
And there are shops. I went into one and wrote down the names of the products.
High Quality Two-Layer Hole
Super Real Anal Inner
Super Real Hall
Virgin Road
Salvation Style [?]
17
and my favorite, Femipet Crashhandle
These also remind me of undersea creatures, but dissected. Or, more exactly, they remind me of some kind of science exhibit on large pink worms, with oversized plastic models of the specimins. I am a little too squeamish to learn much about my own anatomy from them; they remind me of the diagram in my seventh grade "health" class book, a cross-section of a man's reproductive organs in profile. I remember memorizing it diligently, and diligently thinking to myself, ok, I guess when I find this sexy, I will be ready to have sex. I wasn't even bewildered by the fact that it wasn't remotely interesting to me; I think at that age I regarded everything that had to do with interacting with other humans as a kind of treadmill that one had no choice but to slog along, avoiding being looked at and saying as little as possible. I am still exhibiting this posture as I leave the sex shop, in fact, but it is crossed by the desire (supressed, by rolling my eyes upward and pursing my lips in an expression I hope is vaguely bemused and superior) to hoot as I escape.
Finally--speaking of the weirdness of representations--there is the Street of Food Displays. This is where restaurants go to buy the plastic models of their lunch and dinner specials. There are fish with flaky concave baked skins curving from the plates; their is a forkful of spaghetti held in mid-air, mid-twirl, above the bowl by an invisible hand; there is a glass of beer being poured foaming onto a mound of rounded ice cubes. Some stores cater to the tourists by selling sushi keychains, and some put up small indignant notices about how this is a serious art, tourists keep your grubby hands off.
But these shops gradually thin and are interspersed with actual restaurants. I have been staring hard at each storefront, looking to see if there's anything particularly gross that I could get for certain members of my family for a Christmas present. And even though I am hungry by the time I decide there is nothing I want to buy, I cannot turn off the part of my mind that is evaluating each restaurant's display aesthetically. It is like the way you can trick your senses by crossing your fingers and rolling one marble around with them, and definitively feeling two marbles: except, in this case, it is the dislocation of finding one kind of wanting, one appetite, displaced by another. It is a little like the estrangement of self-conciousness, of viewing yourself from the outside--to paraphrase John Berger, of watching yourself being looked at.
In the morning there are fewer--this morning only a few pale squid, several crabs that had divided themselves into two piles, one in either corner of the tank, and some bulbous-jawed, stupid-looking fish backing up anxiously and flicking a white membrane like a bubble up and down just inside the o of their lips, rapidly, like blowing a bubble of gum inside their mouths and sucking it back.
But tonight there are several other kinds of fish in the same tank: motionless stern-looking fish that have protruding, gorilla-like brows; zebra-striped fish whose blurred patterning suggests panic, especially around the eyes, which the stripes make look puckered and askew; and sharper, lither irridescent fish with translucent pointy fins as delicate as dragonfly wings and a motion-sensing stripe along their sides. There is a spider-legged crab, red legs like shiny satin and back a bulb of brown-red silk, glowing defensively from one corner, all elbow-angles, and there is a large snail just under the level of the water, bright apricot foot kissed obscenely to the glass. Best of all is the octupus, coiled glowering and kept to itself inside an orange mesh bag, all arms crossed like the thick line used to tie up ships but hoary with white fringe and white protruding dots just larger that those that come from a hole-punch; occasionally all of these flinch together, in an octopus sneeze or shrug.
And it is strange, having exchanged San Francisco for Tokyo, to be in a place that is so safe. Without fear, life feels like a theme park. The landscape--cityscape--is candycolored and frictionless, and there seems to be a national schoolgirl fetish. On comic-book covers this is the girl with ponytail, glasses, and butterfly-collared shirt unbuttoned to reveal breasts so enormous they would be worse for her back than the enormous backback parents are warned against letting their children carry, and on the subway, and on the street, it is women in tiny shorts and navy-blue or black thigh-high stockings and heels--on an overcast day, in wind and drizzle, me in my practical raincoat, still chilly, asking, how do they do it--yes, I am jealous. I want ivory fishnets with a tiny weave, shirred black leggings with hanging diagonal slashes reminiscent of the Jellicle cats, and a white trenchcoat excessively, delicately darted at the waist. I want to be a creature whose pattern is always changing, who is as bound by necesity as a sugarpuff, the Prospero of my own surface.
Only once, briefly, did I really start to panic. That was when I was trying to cross through Shinjuku Station, from the west side to the east. I would guess a direction, walk through the tides of people (reminding myself to keep to the left--the side from which it would be more convenient to draw my sword and defend myself against a knight riding up from the opposite direction, I also reminded myself--if I were right-handed) until I found an "i" infomation map, and look for the "You Are Here". Every time, I found that I was still well inside Shinjuku Station.
In the Shinjuku train station, a sign for the company Ranking Ranqueen:
For real media producing sympathy of newage.
For a selling channel between goods having the support of a number of people and newly born goods.
For a factory of information. For new module of business.
The password is "Whats up! Whats NEW!"
Ah, newly born goods. Ah, octopus. How good of you to visit us.
But I am beginning to think that power is the no-face, the navy blue suit. In the flow of pedestrian traffic I began to think, perhaps our bodies are for the city's purposes immaterial, in their gangly-star form; really we are part of a liquid, being sucked along. It seems a kind of conservatism that the women are so elaborated into showy idiosyncrasies and the men, once they stop being students, become the same suit multiplied into the millions.
It's not true, though, about the body being immaterial. In Shibuya, on top of a low hill, is the highest concentration on the world (says my guidebook) of "love hotels". $30-$50 for "rest", $70-$90 for "stay". If Matisse ripped a lot off of Japanese woodblock prints, the love hotels have returned the favor--very badly--though the majority of the rooms, displayed in photographs in the lobbies like Chinese food is in photographs in the menu, are more photographic--they have tropical fish or city skylines painted across the walls; one has what I think is a race car. There are also posters advertising Love Costume: Sell or Rental [!]. These picture grids of women in different uniforms of the service industry, smiling under the caption, "May I take your order?" Some of the women are just in a bra and panties--there is even one in military camoflage-pattern holding a plastic machine gun.
And there are shops. I went into one and wrote down the names of the products.
High Quality Two-Layer Hole
Super Real Anal Inner
Super Real Hall
Virgin Road
Salvation Style [?]
17
and my favorite, Femipet Crashhandle
These also remind me of undersea creatures, but dissected. Or, more exactly, they remind me of some kind of science exhibit on large pink worms, with oversized plastic models of the specimins. I am a little too squeamish to learn much about my own anatomy from them; they remind me of the diagram in my seventh grade "health" class book, a cross-section of a man's reproductive organs in profile. I remember memorizing it diligently, and diligently thinking to myself, ok, I guess when I find this sexy, I will be ready to have sex. I wasn't even bewildered by the fact that it wasn't remotely interesting to me; I think at that age I regarded everything that had to do with interacting with other humans as a kind of treadmill that one had no choice but to slog along, avoiding being looked at and saying as little as possible. I am still exhibiting this posture as I leave the sex shop, in fact, but it is crossed by the desire (supressed, by rolling my eyes upward and pursing my lips in an expression I hope is vaguely bemused and superior) to hoot as I escape.
Finally--speaking of the weirdness of representations--there is the Street of Food Displays. This is where restaurants go to buy the plastic models of their lunch and dinner specials. There are fish with flaky concave baked skins curving from the plates; their is a forkful of spaghetti held in mid-air, mid-twirl, above the bowl by an invisible hand; there is a glass of beer being poured foaming onto a mound of rounded ice cubes. Some stores cater to the tourists by selling sushi keychains, and some put up small indignant notices about how this is a serious art, tourists keep your grubby hands off.
But these shops gradually thin and are interspersed with actual restaurants. I have been staring hard at each storefront, looking to see if there's anything particularly gross that I could get for certain members of my family for a Christmas present. And even though I am hungry by the time I decide there is nothing I want to buy, I cannot turn off the part of my mind that is evaluating each restaurant's display aesthetically. It is like the way you can trick your senses by crossing your fingers and rolling one marble around with them, and definitively feeling two marbles: except, in this case, it is the dislocation of finding one kind of wanting, one appetite, displaced by another. It is a little like the estrangement of self-conciousness, of viewing yourself from the outside--to paraphrase John Berger, of watching yourself being looked at.
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