Recap: My Literary Beginnings, Second Edition
This is the second post in a series of my silly writing before college. I’m both announcing-to-everyone-at-a-bar proud and crawling-under-the-covers embarrassed by the seven page epic poem about a love affair during the Revolutionary War that I wrote in the 8th grade. It’s time it was shared with the internet. What better occasion than Valentine’s Day. Like everything of mine, it’s a romance that ends in improbable tragedy. They’re killed by a Redcoat sniper. Fourteen-year-old girl’s imagination, that’s what you get.
Here we go: Excerpt from Maura Pennington Original Middle School Poetry
Oh my god. Okay. No. I’m going to do this. Also, in case it was not evident, this is COPYRIGHTED.
So they see each other six years after they first met, realize they care about each other, but end up discussing their other romantic prospects.
“Oh…” Now Caitlin was intrigued
For she had found love indeed
In the charming Paul that first night
And never had her love taken flight
“I have been courted,” she started out,
“But I do not love him.” She gave a pout.
“All he cares about is his gold,
And, well, he’s rather old!”
“My dear, don’t fret, ’tis not so bad.
At least your heart’s not broken, don’t be sad.”
“How so sweet Paul, what is the matter?”
“The war and Emily; mostly the latter”
“Who is Emily?” Caitlin inquired,
But at the war she was not inspired.
She wanted the war to be no more
But they would not be free until it was o’er.
ARE YOU CRINGING, SMILING, OR SOMETHING ELSE ALTOGETHER?
Here’s my favorite couplet after they get engaged:
“Tears of joy, Paul, not of sorrow.
Let us tell our families tomorrow.”
SIGHHHHHHHHH.
Recap: Madness and Jane Eyre
When I was 15, I wanted to be Jane Eyre. I wanted a Mr. Rochester and a Thornfield. I’m 25 now. And I’m not Jane. I’m Berthe. The madwoman in the attic.
My original copy of Jane Eyre is lost forever and all my wonderful adolescent highlighting is gone with it. In my replacement copy, I’ve always kept a bookmark at my favorite passage.
Two nights ago I moved the bookmark.
Here’s the original paragraph:
“Because,” he said, “I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you—especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communication will be snapt; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you,—you’d forget me.”
“That I never should, sir: you know”—-impossible to proceed.
And here’s the new part:
“Sir,” I interrupted him, “you are inexorable for that unfortunate lady: you speak of her with hate—with vindictive antipathy. It is cruel—-she cannot help being mad.”
“Jane, my little darling (so I will call you for so you are) you don’t know what you are talking about; you misjudge me again: it is not because she is mad I hate her. If you were mad, do you think I should hate you?”
“I do indeed, sir.”
“Then you are mistaken, and you know nothing about me and nothing about the sort of love of which I am capable. Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear. Your mind is my treasure and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still: if you raved, my arms should confine you, and not a strait waistcoat—your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me; if you flew at me as wildly as that woman did this morning, I should receive you in an embrace…”
Sigh. and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still. MR. ROCHESTER.
Also, I don’t feel so bad about my high school story. Check out this Charlotte Bronte original sentence:
“I thought you would be revolted, Jane, when you saw my arm, and my cicatrised visage.”
Cicatrice is one of my favorite French words. But that is out of control.
Recap: I could write about Byronic heroes for the rest of my life
Okay, so I wrote this back in June (no way, just no way) and submitted it to something, but they never even bothered to respond. Whatevs. Here it is. Does anyone else care about Byronic heroes? Because they pretty much make my world go round.
Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know. Which Byronic Hero Is Your Man?
1. Did he flirt with your sister who, by the way, was engaged to his friend? Then you just happen to be infatuated with Eugene Onegin from Pushkin’s novel in verse! So maybe you wrote him an e-mail late one night baring your soul after you’d had too much Chardonnay and then he told you he couldn’t love you because he was “not intended for happiness.” There’s no shame in that. Because one day, he’ll realize that he’s crazy over you too, but you’ll already be married to someone rich.
2. Is he suicidal because of what he did to you? Like, standing on the summit of a mountain, talking to spirits kind of suicidal? Then you’ve been screwed by Manfred from Lord Byron’s poem! It’s not your fault that it “were the deadliest sin to love” as you two do. Just go with it, girl. His passion will rock your world. We all die in the end anyway, right?
3. Have you known him since he was a child growing up without a dad? Then you’re in love with Anakin Skywalker, the Jedi-turned-Sith who brings balance to the Force! You fought your emotions for awhile but, there’s something about the angry, obsessive way he wants to protect you that just makes you weak in the knees. Literally. Because he’s strangling you. But he really, really cares about you, I promise.
4. Is he way older than you and probably hiding a deep, dark secret? Then you’ve found yourself in the employ of Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre! Rest assured, even though said deep, dark secret is going to make you run away, you’re totally soulmates. Remember that time he dressed up like a gypsy just to touch your face? Yeah. Exactly.
5. Sure, some of your friends may think your boyfriend is the devil, but can you say he really is? Then it looks like you’re dating Satan from Milton’s Paradise Lost! Lucky you because he’s an angel who fell from heaven. The details, of course, are just part of his murky bad boy past. So maybe he defied the Creator of the Universe, but, how does that go again– “better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven”? With all that brooding arrogance, Satan will seduce you right into perdition, but, as you can imagine with a man who turns himself into a serpent, there’ll be pleasure along the way. Wink.
Recap: My Literary Beginnings
When I was in high school, I loved writing. That didn’t mean I was good at it, though. At some point in college, I seemed to get better at it? Not really sure. I’ve hinted in the past about how out of control all my stories were before the year 2006. But maybe you need proof. So, I give you this…
Classic Maura Pennington High School Fiction: Volume I
Excerpts from “A Fairy Tale Like No Other”
“Would you care for something to eat?” the gentle goatherd asked. “I don’t have very much to offer: porridge from breakfast and of course, cheese.” He began to rustle through a small cabinet in search of something to appease the girl’s hunger.
1. Here we go. Gentle goatherd.
She found a spark in his clear blue eyes that sent a chill down her spine as he glanced over to reply.
2. aghghhhaah
Trying to brush everything aside, Mary focused her attention out the window at the setting sun. The golden haze over the forest mesmerized her, and set her mind whirling. Caught in a sudden impulse, tears swelled in her eyes. She hid her face in her arm and wept.
3.Which is worse: the cliche tortured past or the dangling modifier?
It had been so long since she felt this way about someone. Her heart had been petrified to open up to anyone, but there was something different about Finn.
4. Seriously, you JUST met him two paragraphs ago and you are both allegedly 17.
He knelt on the floor before her and leaned to embrace the quaking beauty.
5. ughhhhhh
“This shall be short, Cecil. I am here to warn you that there is a servant who had fled from her duties at my manor. If you or any other of my serfs should house this wretch, you can expect a grave punishment.”
6. I had recently learned about feudalism.
Finn was dumbfounded. Who could this extraordinary, yet pained girl be?
7. It’s ME, Finn. MAURA. I am the heroine of all my terrible stories!
Mary was special, his soul continued to tell him. An uncontrollable force pushed him along in his vain pursuit.
8. gaahhghghahahh
“I was born in the glorious castle on the Mountain of St. Bartholomew.”
9. That is the BEST name of a castle I could come up with.
“I was falling in love with you, an emotion completely foreign to me.”
10. Because that’s how people talk.
His mind could not begin to formulate anything for his mouth to present.
11. WORD SALAD.
She had finally told someone the truth and got exactly what she feared.
12. Story of my life.
A man in a deep cerise cloak snatched him and pulled him forth.
13. Gratuitous use of vocab word.
Finn tried to boldly confront his master, but he was crushed by the undying fact that he was but a serf.
14. Gratuitous use of “but a…”
Worthington stepped closer to Finn, now being held by the man in sanguine garments.
15. Oh, come on. No need to drop ALL your pretentious synonyms for red in one paragraph.
Her soft eyelashes flickered nervously.
16. aghghgaaaa
They were taken to the small, cold jailhouse at the edge of the property. There was but one cell.
17. More gratuitous use of “but…”
She showered him with light kisses and embedded her face in his chest.
18. Wait, what did she do?
“You speak as if you were some zealot.”
19. And another vocab word.
She now held in her clement hand the seal of her family on a bronze tag.
20. And there’s another one.
Originally intended as a buckle, it was momentarily the only proof of her true appellation.
21. And another.
There journey to the manor house was hasty and a mess of strange themes coming together.
22. Oh boy, okay, blatant typo and then…WHAT?? No, I’m sorry, but… a mess of strange themes coming together. I don’t. I don’t even know.
“Quite peculiar weather, was it not warm and sunny this very morning? Hmph, such is life.”
23. I actually kind of like the villain in this.
Worthington now spoke with great force and piquancy.
24. Oh and another one.
“You are so agnostic! You doubt any words not coming from your own mouth.”
25. Damn. I was doing so well using my vocab words correctly.
“No, Mary. In fact, this is the only mature and reasonable decision I’ve made in the past five days.”
26. Says the hero as he goes off to fight a duel.
“What will become of me should you not be victorious?”
27. Maybe people did talk like that in the ambiguously Middle Ages?
Before he left, he gave Mary one splendid kiss. A single tear escaped her eye, which she quickly brushed away.
28. Single tear. Nope. Not even remotely plausible.
There she stayed until she sighed her last heartbroken [breath] sob, and closed her eyes to meet him in heaven.
29. Yes, yes I did make all my stories in high school end with murder, murder-suicides, murder-dying-of-a-broken-heart, murder-hate-forever, murder-move-away, etc. And yes, I did cross out “breath” and then pencil in “sob” which meant that I had read through the story in an attempt to edit it and that was the ONLY thing, apparently, that needed fixing.
But, please, friends! Read the stuff I write now! I swear I’ve improved! I aver that I have ameliorated my writing style as of late!
Recap: Byronic Love (or what happens when I open a book of poetry in the middle of blogging)
Some of them (Pechorin) give up on love. Some (Onegin) realize they love too late. Some (Manfred; Anakin Skywalker*) destroy their love themselves. Some (Bazarov; Heathcliff) choose (as much as choice is involved) women who are too similar (again: how can one anti-hero love another?).
They’re (almost) all able to love** passionately,*** but in the end they’re all Rick Blaine watching Ilsa leave for Lisbon, meaning they never end up with the girl, no matter how much she might love them (and often she loves them too much).
So…okay I started writing this like an hour ago and got distracted and now I have no idea what my point was. OH RIGHT. I basically just wanted an excuse to go back and re-read Byron after I read the “I must tell you, I love you stupidly, madly…” scene from Fathers and Sons. Now I’m just lost in my Byron anthology…
Basically my point was that Byronic heroes love in a strange, self-involved way. And I seem to find those people in my life, always. Without fail. Forever. I can’t even begin to explain. Except that maybe I seek them out…
—
*Don’t laugh, he’s totally a Byronic hero. What’s even more: he probably had borderline personality disorder.
**I have to share this excerpt from Byron’s The Giaour to explain just what I mean by ‘love passionately’ — I’ll bold my favorite word pairings:
‘The cold in clime are cold in blood,
Their love can scarce deserve the name;
But mine was like a lava flood
That boils in Etna’s breast of flame.
I cannot prate in puling strain
Of ladye-love, and beauty’s chain:
If changing cheek, and scorching vein–
Lips taught to writhe, but not complain–
If bursting heart, and maddening brain–
And daring deed, and vengeful steel–
And all that I have felt–and feel–
Betoken love - that love was mine,
And shown by many a bitter sign.
‘Tis true, I could not whine nor sigh,
I knew but to obtain or die.
***RE: passion. I’ve been trying to expound (is that a transitive verb? I feel like it’s always followed by “upon”) anyways, I’ve been trying to expound the theory that Jesus is a Byronic hero. I’ll share more of that at a later point, but here’s a great JC quote:
John 15:18
If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first.
Recap: I got it from my mother
Note: I had surgery in November. This is part of the story.
——
“You know what this means, don’t you?”
I shrugged.
“It’s a wake up call. You have to go back to being the good girl you are inside. Which means, exercising, going to church, and caring about others. I know you can do it.”
I rolled my eyes and left my mother where she was standing in the kitchen. My room was an obstacle course of clothes piles, hardly a haven, but it was the only place I could go. Having delayed independence in a time of turmoil, I was now trapped, no matter how ready I was to leave and live on my own.
My mother liked to think of me as a potted plant, one which she kept dutifully on her kitchen windowsill, like a doll on a shelf. She knew that I could bloom just as brightly out in a garden, but there were too many variables there. So, she held me close. I missed my opportunity to extricate myself. In years before, when I was the most unwell, everything she did to protect me in reality crushed me. I would scream and cry over the slightest comments she made. She could be critical with ignorant brutality. She could cut me down with a word. Yet, I had to love her. It was a painful relationship, fraught with feelings of helplessness. We had mended things, though. We had to. I got better and we moved on. I went back to school, I succeeded. Everything was repaired. I loved her again.
I was still trapped at home, however. I had begun the process of looking for a new place to live, but in November, I hit an unexpected obstacle: at a routine visit to the uncomfortable “lady doctor,” as my sister would say, it was discovered that my laughably inadequate, barely-b cup left breast was home to a small, unwelcome lump of something.
My mother, a cancer survivor, took it as an inevitability. She was quick to make me an appointment with a specialist, circumventing the gynecologist’s recommended clinic and going straight for her own doctor
We returned to the hospital where I was born, to the very surgeon who made my mother a one-breasted amazon woman when she was only 36. She couldn’t have imagined then that I would be in that waiting room at 24 or that my own lump crisis would strike me when I was mentally the healthiest in years. But she seemed prepared to deal with it.
“Welcome to life,” she said, as if to express the idea that our existence was marked by ailments and not improvement, that we were in a constant state of breaking down and falling apart from the minute we stopped growing.
The waiting room was populated by a strange crowd of people. I was the youngest patient by far. One Life to Live was playing on the television mounted in the corner. My mother and I were amused to find our familiar cast of characters from the defunct show Guiding Light, which she always called her “story” and in which I always took at least a cursory interest, my being home so much during the day for a large chunk of my recent life.
The main source of drama for that segment was speculation as to whether or not someone named Rex was someone else’s father. As the actors looked meaningfully at one another just at the moment the camera cut away, I wondered how often paternity questions came up in regular society. It made me think of the inescapable certainty of motherhood, of the undeniable physical changes, the commitment, the new reality, the lack of doubt because the thing, the kid, the baby is right there.
I suppose I always thought then that motherhood would be the occasion of my first ultrasound, but as I sat, unable to avert my eyes from the hideous varicose vein poster on the wall, and waited, half-dressed in a paper cape, I was alone and sure of nothing. Time ticked on, charted by the occasional glance at my phone, which could have provided a portal to the infinite expanse of the internet’s boredom-killing bounty had there been service in the examination room. As I waited, I wasn’t cold or hot, but I was sweating. A wave of tears would occasionally pass over me when I caught sight of the array of needles on the cabinet, but I didn’t cry, that would have been inappropriate and immature. I was too old for hysterics in the presence of medical professionals.
After twenty minutes, the doctor finally entered, performed a pat-down, hooked up the ultrasound machine, squeezed that cold, clear jelly all over and set about finding the lump. Compared with the lull of waiting, he seemed to be moving at breakneck speed. Suddenly I could see the swirling echo lines on the monitor. The doctor said that if the lump were liquid, the sound waves would pass right through, but there it was, a circle on the screen, a black hole yet definitely solid.
Very quickly and concisely, the doctor explained that the easiest thing would be to cut it out. He barely glossed over the word “fibroadenoma” as the diagnosis and made it clear that all signs pointed to it being benign. They would still send it to pathology, though, once it was removed because, despite my age, with my family history, it was better to be safe than sorry.
My mother was oddly pleased to hear it would be cut out. She said that it was smarter just to have things excised wholesale, which was odd given the way she hung on to stuff almost to the point of hoarding. I didn’t mind the idea of extraction either, although the idea of surgery scared me a little.
It was definitely a mistake then to watch the Lifetime Original Movie about having a mastectomy. Clearly, they weren’t removing a whole organ. Yet I couldn’t help but wonder if that was simply waiting down the road for me. It happened to my mom and I inherited everything from her, good and bad, I was her shadow. Something told me that this lump scare was just a precursor.
My mother never really talked about what happened to her. I only knew the general outline, to which more information was added as I got older. First, I knew that her cancer didn’t show up on the mammogram and no one believed her. Second, I knew that she had opted for a prosthesis that remained a weird secret well into our childhood. My brother found it one day and it was the first we knew about it. Although, how do you really tell kids about a fake body part you have when it’s a taboo word in most households? What was my mom supposed to do, explain cancer as she showed us her jelly-filled artificial boob? That probably would have been hard to absorb as a child. So it stayed an unspoken subject that was only brought up when my mother was looking for bathing suits and needed one for a mastectomy. I always wanted the sales clerk to then give her a hug or something. She was a survivor after all.
But she never drew attention to it. At the Komen Race for the Cure, she refused to wear the pink shirt she was entitled to because she didn’t want strangers coming up to her. I wondered how she felt about the whole thing. In her darkest, most desperate moments she would say things like: “I should have died. Maybe I’ll get sick again.” The illness killed her own mother. Just as I feared that my little lump was a sign of a battle yet to happen, she saw her own fate as matching her mom’s. It ran directly down the line.
So, of course it was my mom, the veteran, who took me to the hospital on the day of my surgery. Everything seemed so space age. They gave us a buzzer like the do at T.G.I. Friday’s and told us it would go off when the nurse was ready to take me back. I felt like a frump in my sweatsuit. The other people were normally outfitted and were watching the screen – oddly similar to a flight arrival and departure board– that tracked patients’ progress.
Our buzzer went off after I had read some trashy celebrity magazine. I went back to the pre-op room. They gave me a gown and socks, made me clean my skin. They hooked up a heat hose to my gown to pre-warm me. I thought I was going to freak out when they set up the IV, but I just chatted with the nurse about how I had H1N1 last year and suddenly it was all over.
I tried to watch television. My mom came in, nurses came in, the anesthesiologist came in. She explained that they were going to give me medication to induce something called a “twilight sleep.” My first thought was of vampires. And then soon, I was out like a light.
The surgery itself went fine. I woke up with a big purple scar on the underside of my breast like I’d been stabbed in the heart and survived — but I had no recollection of anything. My mom took me home and tucked me in bed. I woke up and went to work the next morning because I was self-conscious about missing a day. I managed the pain and lied about where I had been the previous day. I only told a few friends the truth.
When I went back to the lady doctor, she implored me to get genetic testing for breast cancer. I asked my mom about it and she flatly refused. There was no need to know, she said. Because what would happen then? They really would cut off my breasts or, worse, cut out my ovaries. From any angle, it would be a nightmare. So, I suppose I’ll live in ignorance until the next lump scare presents itself. I just hope my mom is there for that one, too.
Recap: maniaaaa OR a treatise on friendship
maura’s mood tracker predicts a spike in impulsive, reckless, weird behavior.
in the category of weird: i wrote a four page fake scientific essay on types of friendship today.
here’s an excerpt on what i term “flash friendships.”
….
3. The Critical Engagement: For a new friendship to make it beyond the stage of casual acquaintance, there must be an event in which both parties share an isolated moment, known here as the critical engagement. Here is an example scenario, which will demonstrate one of the main sub-characteristics — the admission.
Two new friends, upon a third or fourth enthusiastic meeting, find themselves standing next to one another (waiting in line for the bathroom, getting a drink at the bar, set up at the end of a long table of people — they must be somewhat alone and definitely apart from the others in the social situation). One of the two, buoyed by a unique confidence provided by the tentative trust of a new ear, will then divulge an intimate detail of his or her life, often a piece of gossip related to the party or event or involving a mutual acquaintance. Why share this? There are several motivations, not least of which is the thrill of including a new person in one’s dramas. In some instances, the admission is a revelation of the fact that one or the other anticipated a friendship and hoped to meet one day after seeing the person online or at larger social gatherings.
4. The Invitation: The next step is simple—the two invite one another to join in an activity reserved for friends. Occasionally, when no event immediately presents itself, it can be instead an exchanging of phone numbers with the promise of hanging out in the future.
5. Heating/Cooling: Flash friendships follow two trajectories — they heat up to true friendships or cool back down to acquaintances or less. The outcome depends on the frequency of interaction, of course, but also relates to the matter of friend capacity. Day to day, there is an upward limit on how many people that can be considered full friends and these cycle in and out. A good test of this would be to check one’s log of texts. There will be periods of threads with the same people that may then disappear at a different point, yet usually there are no more than ten people in each cycle. Incidentally, a discrepancy arises with this limit in that there is no restriction on social network friends, which highlights a phenomena known as skimming. This is the act of perusing the profiles of individuals in order to fill the gap created by not seeing them in real time. In this way, the actual cooling down of any relationship is perceived in a less intense way than without internet interactions. The outcome of skimming is a weakening of one of loneliness’ most elementary attributes: the essential lack of people in close proximity. Online, one can feel like a part of the lives of hundreds of people. However, this overload inadvertently strengthens another aspect of loneliness: the lack of intimacy.
Recap: Imaginary Loneliness
In Hermann Hesse’s novel Gertrude, the narrator, after a suicidal love-crushed bout, goes to a former teacher when he is back in his hometown for his father’s funeral. The teacher accuses the protagonist of being afflicted with “imaginary loneliness.” He says:
Those who suffer from this illness need only a couple of disappointments to make them believe that there is no link between them and other people, that all people go about in a state of complete loneliness, that they never really understand each other, share anything or have anything in common. It also happens that people who suffer from this sickness become arrogant and regard all other healthy people who can understand and love each other as flocks of sheep. If this sickness were general, the human race would die out…
He goes on to explain that fortunately (albeit very specifically), the sickness only affects the upper classes of Central Europe. If I had to fill in that blank, I would say: it only affects…most of the people I care about.
When I look at the people closest to me, all I see is this imaginary loneliness.
But that might be a lie. Because all those people may only be a mirror for my own feelings of solitude. I’m under the impression that, because I cannot connect in a meaningful way with 90% of the population, that the remaining 10% that I can love must be similarly lonely in society.
Is that a true observation, though? I wish I could take a poll and find out. (Feel free to respond if you would like to participate in the survey!)
Without any definitive answer, however, I am torn between two perspectives. In the first, I simply assume that people around me are as hopelessly solitary as I am in my worst, most desperate moments — that their inability to develop sound, lasting, healthy relationships is a result of varying symptoms of an identical sickness that plagues us all. In the second, I have faith that loneliness is always and forever merely a temporary state and that the prevailing emotion of any given life, be it mine or those I associate with, is one of love and union and community.
I almost believe that if I could set myself up in one camp or the other in a more complete way, I would be better off. I wouldn’t worry when I’m lonely that I’m missing out, nor would I worry when I’m sociable that such happiness will soon end. I can’t honestly decide which way of looking at things is the most productive. Sure, I can tell you which one’s more positive, that’s obvious. But which one would streamline my life by eliminating the uncertainty? If I could be absolutely sure all the time, would I rather be sure of the emptiness of trying to relate to people?
Meh, probably not. Because it’s not empty, even if it feels like it is sometimes.
Because there are quite a few people in my close circle who actually defy the imaginary loneliness label. Amazing that they should want to be around me. I’m grateful.
I don’t know, I guess I’ve been thinking about all this now that I’m in the midst of a relatively stable era. Apart from the week of word salad nonsense, I’ve been doing okay. I don’t feel too lonely, which is why I’m able to contemplate it somewhat objectively. Now, if only I could get this collection of short stories off the ground. I’ve been thinking about it since July. It’s all about friendship and its many forms. It’s about brief and lasting connections—what defines them, what limits them, what enables them. It would be great if I could actually start writing. Maybe tomorrow night…….
Recap: Word Salad
Recognizing the word salad around you is an elemental shift. Once you start to see the world and its conventions as nonsense, it is almost impossible to resume taking it seriously. So, if the cacophony of absurd inanities being spewed all around you begins to sound more and more like word salad, convincing yourself that it is coherent speech is going to take a total re-wiring of the brain. There’s no real going back.
– Maura C. Pennington, Kunst Und Wortsalat (Princeton University Press, 1998).
This is the story of how I first started hearing and speaking word salad.
As a friend recently said, I have a mind that is easily poisoned. Call me Theoden of Rohan (oh god, don’t call me that — I don’t even like Lord of the Rings). The trouble with having a spongy, porous, quicker-picker-upper of a mind is that I soak my neurons in an ever-changing soup of ideology. I go from philosophy to theory to philosophy to theory to RELIGION to philosophy. I also get really interested in something and then drop it and then recapture it and then discard it forever and then oh shit retrieve it from the wreckage of past beliefs and I swear I’ll hold onto it this time until something shinier and more depressing comes along. I never really let anything disappear completely, though. Hence the residual knowledge of LOTR. Hence my contradictory self-appellation as nihilist when I actually spend my whole life creating crap out of words. So, I have an easily contaminated cerebrum. All right. Cue the events of last week.
I was minding my own business by trolling the internet learning about other people’s business when I happened upon an iota of info that upset me. It then upset me that it upset me (that it upset me that it upset me). I recovered for the most part until two days later when the full force came bearing down on me and my sanity slipped ever so slightly out of place. Stress is a kind of poison, and in this case, my mind drank up the emotional stress like Lawrence of Arabia at that well where he meets Omar Sharif. (Does he meet Omar Sharif at a well? I don’t know.) Anyways, my thoughts got a-racing and if there’s anything you must know about my mental make-up, it is that thought-racing is an irreversible event. Here’s what happens when I get lost in obsessive ruminations: I stop understanding the world around me in an intelligible way. I can’t finish my sentences when I open my mouth to speak. I don’t hear people properly. I start to draw sweeping conclusions about the interconnectedness of everything in life to the thing I’m thinking about. Coherent arguments become WORD SALAD. And word salad starts to make sense.
It’s amazing that I never knew the term “word salad” until just last week during my crisis. It only serves to reinforce my conviction that the universe withholds information from me until it is necessary that I know it. Like in a vision quest.
At any rate, time took care of my brief reactive insanity by giving me enough mental space to get a good panoramic view of the issue. This week, I’m fine. For the most part. Everything still seems like word salad and the more I focus on the initial emotional stress, the more I wonder why it had that effect on me.
OH WELL.
Lorem ipsum isn’t lettuce brave?
Recap: Weltschmerz
“O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter. O God, God,
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t, ah, fie, ’tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely…”
– Hamlet
I’m not a flailing post-adolescent, hesitantly emerging adult who can’t let go of how stupendous college was and wishes grown-up life would come with some kind of manual. I’m a different brand of the youthful yet world-weary non-member of society. I would attribute my reluctant embrace of normal life to a general feeling of dysphoria and weltschmerz (i.e. the physical reality of the world will never match that which I can envision or desire). It’s not the 21st century elusiveness of the American Middle-Class Dream that has me all in knots — it’s the fact that even that dream falls short of what I would hope for myself.
Years of introspection have got me coiled around my own core — the outside world is intrusive in its mediocrity. It is an affront to my imagination.
This weltschmerz of mine is lamentable to be sure. However, and perhaps, unfortunately, it is also somewhat superficial and can be outgrown or at least hammered into obscurity by the unrelenting necessities of reality. I may feel homeless, buffeted by emotional winds that carry me to no useful destination, but I still have to feed myself and put clothes on and report for work. Meaning that, despite my best efforts, society will make a productive person of me yet.
A hundred and fifty years ago, you might have called me Madame Bovary. I like to call myself a Byronic hero. You may call me an overly introspective self-indulgent twenty-something. Yay!
Now, I didn’t even broach the subject of word salad or explain my new discovery of pharmaceutical fix-alls with side effects that are scarier than the symptoms they treat. Next time, I promise.
Recap: Weltschmerz, Word Salad, and Warning Labels
Oh, Hades. I’ve descended into a new realm of crazy.
I wish I could explain it to you.
Consider this a red hyperlink in Wikipedia. I’ll write about it eventually.
Recap: Love Stories
I used to write awful love stories that are so inane I can’t even read them now.
Believe me, I’ve tried. The okay stuff is trite, the horrible stuff is HORRIBLE. On the whole, they are hilarious. In one, vaguely set in Medieval France, the prince says the beautifully anachronistic line, “When I heard I had to marry you, I went ballistic.” It all gets worse from there.
There’s a common theme, though. I must have subconsciously decided that no love story could end happily. In every single story (or epic poem—I was freaking Byron, I’m telling you), ALL of the main characters die or go through a transformation that destroys any feelings of love.
I was writing in a silly way about emotions as if they were pretty and fluffy and just like the movies AND I was a love-killer. What gives? Why that intersection of youthfully exuberant belief in sweaty palms and stomach butterflies and the very grown-up, cynical idea that love is elusive and easily ruined?
I’m not sure I know.
I had and still have plenty of positive evidence of love all around me – the happy two-parent homes of most of my friends, every Disney movie. But for some reason, at a young age, I cultivated an idea that love wasn’t real unless it was gruesomely tested, like with murder-suicides. My thinking was that if you are so unhappy after a person dies that you want to die too, well then, it’s true love! If you’re sick because your idée fixe is with another person: true love. If you prefer solitude to someone who’s not your obsession and therefore become a hermit: true love. If you lose your mind in the process of trying to gain affection: TRUE LOVE.
There’s a reason the word passion comes from the Latin for “to suffer” and apparently my pre-teen self was very in tune with that. It continued with age.
I took a French class in college called The Anatomy of Passion and our final paper was to be our own definition of the word based on everything we had read about it. This was my thesis (translated here):
“With passion, there are only two parts: before and during. Nothing exists after. It is a progression towards a certain destiny, a way of the cross with no hope of resurrection. We are not phoenixes; we cannot be reborn from those fatal flames…
We welcome passion… But it is a Calvary without a tomb, without an ascension, an eternal cross…”
I honestly thought that passion was meant to destroy a person forever. And not only that, but it would leave someone in a state of suspended animation, in permanent pain commingled with bliss—the perfect equilibrium of agony and ecstasy.
Craaaazy. And dark dark dark.*
But that’s how I’m wired.
When my Grandpa died, my mom arranged for my sister and me to do art therapy. I drew a picture of a Brontë character trapped in a bramble, trying to get to the wide expanse of a moor. I was about to turn fourteen and THAT was the tableau of my psyche.
Naturally, the stories I wrote reflected that darkness. But I was still only fourteen. I couldn’t help but naively believe that meaningful looks between two people were all it would take to fall in love. Life would be so simple if that were the case. Instead, being a little older, I don’t know if I could even write a realistic love story. I seem to only end up with half-relationships, malformed and stunted attempts at adult emotional connections. I certainly don’t know anything more about the material of love than I did when I was writing my ridiculous repertoire of fiction. Or maybe I do and I’m just settling for less because it’s easy.
Either way, I’m missing out, both on the cloud-bouncing joy of love as told by an adolescent or the inexorable immolation of passion as seen by a twenty-year-old depressive. How do I find those things? That’s the question.
How do I become my own Jane Eyre?
* On a side note: if you notice, all the imagery for my paper on passion is centered on Christ’s passion. I thought about getting a tattoo of the Russian word strast’ but I opted for via dolorosa. They’re the same thing. Passion or way of suffering, which sounds better when you’re explaining it to strangers? Oops.
Recap: Star Wars
Or: Why I actively think less of people who disrespect Episode I, II, and III.
Animosity this strong is usually reserved for political or religious views, but I’m totally serious when I say that I can’t stand people who dis the second Star Wars trilogy. It’s a matter of philosophy when you get right down to it. I stand alone against a sea of unenlightened individuals.
You really are a blockhead to me if you utter any variation of the phrase: “Ugh, how can people like the prequels?” Here’s why.
You are being inconsistent
Sure, it’s very easy to love the original trilogy, but let’s be honest—it’s hokey, occasionally goofy, and nothing but a super awesome space western AKA a formulaic genre film. The reason why it is so enjoyable is not because of the quality of the dialogue (“I don’t know Artoo, it’s like something out of a dream”) or the depth of the characters, but because of the visual delight and pure escapism of the complete universe George Lucas initiated. Disliking Episodes I-III on the premise that they are not serious, quality films is just an example of fashionable hypocrisy. You’ll like the “original” but shun the “new” without any authentic reason besides the fact that it’s just “not the same.” On the contrary, it’s exactly the same. All of the elements of the series are present in every installment. Nothing has been lost besides Han Solo. (But we gained other things, like Jedi culture, so it’s an okay trade).
You are ignoring the more compelling story
Face it—the rise of a despot is more intriguing than the collapse of an empire. Hitler coming to power says more about mankind than Germany losing the war does. So, right off the bat, the prequels offer a better story. A slave becomes ruler of the galaxy. A good person falls into darkness. Pretty deep stuff. (Stuff which I have explicated in this bloglet entry.) Plus it adds an important element to the overall saga. In Return of the Jedi, we’re left with a repenting father. But what does that mean when we’ve never seen the “good in him” on screen? We’ve never seen his innocence, only the corrupted outcome of years as an agent of evil. The prequels let us witness his time in the light, making the series richer. We know that Darth Vader once loved and hoped as any other good person might.
You are dismissing a visual feast
Seriously. Have you seen the opening of Revenge of the Sith? What is your problem?
You are pretending like they weren’t successful
Phantom Menace is one of the top ten highest grossing films of all time. These movies made A LOT of money and that’s not even including all the merchandising tie-ins or the fact that they spawned the animated Clone Wars series.
You are being an unnecessary snob
“The only reason why Episode III was any good was because Tom Stoppard did some ghostwriting,” a friend said. Another one argued that everything was stolen from Kurosawa. Well, I’m sorry, do you watch Star Wars for its theatrical nuances and erudite allusions? No. It’s entertainment. American entertainment. There’s no need to get pseudo-intellectual about unassuming cinematic fun.
–
Huff.
There’s no real debate here anyways. I’m going to think you are an idiot regardless. I don’t even feel bad about it. So there.
Recap: Ten Years
Ten years ago on December 27, 1999, Leo J. McGraw, lion of my life and light of my imagination, died after a battle that raged in our family for years and set me on the course I now follow.
Were he to haunt our house today, he would find his room changed beyond recognition, though I could show him how to squint to see the slight bump under the paint where shelves meant for our computer hung over his bed. My mother deserved to have a nice room and now she does, but the utter demolition of every trace of him breaks my heart even still.
Ten years is enough to time to forget; I just don’t know how.
For an artist, he could not have picked a more poetic passing. We buried him on December 31. When the world woke up the next morning without him, it was a new eon. I sometimes wonder if I have been more profoundly affected than the rest of my family because my life, steeped in the medieval melancholy of its own poetry, collided with the end of his in a way I could not ignore. His death marked my half-hearted and hesitant anointment as a woman. Every clumsy step in my interminable adolescence has been a movement of regret, taking me deeper into a void.
For these ten years I have suffered a quiet kind of emptiness, a decade of inconsolable sorrow that began as mourning and gained frightening strength as an adult mood disorder. Would Grandpa be pained to see what the dark parasite has done to my life since he left?
It was Kierkegaard who said of the despairing believer that God helps him “perhaps by allowing him to avoid the horror, perhaps through the horror itself—and here, unexpectedly, miraculously, divinely, help does come.” (Sickness Unto Death).
I can guarantee you that I have been through the horror itself. Ten years of it. I find it more difficult, however, to prove that help came from God or my own ancient, inexorable fate, in which I am preordained to continue fumbling until the world is fully done with me. I have long given up hope that my grandfather is my guardian angel as it would be very nice to believe. But perhaps he did whisper something in that heaven where he is every soul’s favorite friend. Perhaps he suggested to the man behind it all that it would be better to spare me and so here I am ten years older and not yet destroyed.
The only enduring truth I see a decade beyond my river of tears is that I have survived to see the cycling of another year. He is gone and I go on. There is nothing to do but erect a gravestone and keep writing. Words are my consolation, his lasting gift to me. And if he watches over me, then it is to read me, so here, Grandpa, is my letter of love like the one I wrote the night you died, scrawled in purple ink and the handwriting of a scared girl in a collapsing reality. Shine a light on me so I can find you, but only when it’s time.
Your Maura.
Recap: A Photo-investigation.
I was looking at old pictures today and it occurred to me that maybe it’s not so odd for people from my past not to recognize me now.
Here’s a little timeline.
1. Peaceful, happy child Maura has poker straight, brown hair.
2. Tortured adolescent Maura has awful curly hair.
3. Going off to college Maura has made curly hair her friend.
4. Eff my life Maura begins to make changes.
5. Better adjusted, has her own website Maura continues to make changes, but settles down a little and ends up back at the beginning.
Recap: I love fluff. But WHY?
I started tutoring a freshman in physics. She goes to my old high school and when she said that she prefers English class, I vigorously agreed. Nevermind the fact that I’m helping her with PHYSICS. I was also talking to some co-workers about how our idea of a fun night is sometimes just sitting at home reading a book. Are we doomed to be cat ladies if we get giddy in Barnes and Noble?
I know I liked writing from the earliest age (in the first grade, I spent recess inside penning a mystery novel. No joke.) I guess I liked reading too. Mostly I liked that I was a faster, better reader than everyone else. I would pull this total dickhead move whenever we had to read aloud in class. “Oh, I don’t know where we are. I already finished the passage.”
There are some books from grade school that I remember for their impact. The Giver by Lois Lowry was my preliminary taste of dystopian lit. Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness series was my first foray into fantasy and Katherine Paterson’s Jacob Have I Loved marks the only time I’ve sobbed while reading.
It wasn’t until high school, though, that I really felt myself coming alive in an English class. We read Jane Eyre freshman year and I knew: this is it. This is what makes life worth it all. Stories and words. (Note: it was Jane Eyre and not The Iliad or some other boy lit. Keep that in mind.)
When I think of the kind of literature and language student I was back then, it seems startling and a little laughable to the jaded twenty-something version of myself. I know this because I have compulsively saved everything I wrote.
I was weird then and I suppose you might say I’m weird now. The only difference is that I was not aware of my tendency towards melodrama and (I think?) I am now. In fanfiction, such schmaltzy, unnecessary floweriness is called fluff. And I’m innately something of a master of it. I recognize that now.
For instance, I can see why the following excerpt from an in-class essay on Tess of the D’urbervilles is ludicrous.
“Hardy’s heroine becomes a conductor of lightning through a tragic combination of fate and free will. Her passion and sensuality and her misguided sense of duty raise her up to the lonely figure who channels light and pain to those who touch her. In the end, she too is struck, and her world changes as violently as the winds before a storm, leaving a mess of broken branches and broken hearts.
…
At the Talbothay dairy, Tess finds a way to leave her sin behind and become an Eve before the fall for Angel’s Adam. Yet as their love deepens, Tess’ lightning grows more powerful, as Marian, Izz, and Retty pine with aching hearts for Angel, hearts purer than Tess, stained with sin not easily forgiven. No victim of fate, she chooses to reveal her secret to her husband too late, driving him away from her dark clouds and thunder. Wandering the countryside, Tess finds Alec again, a perverted conductor of his own, whose storm clashes with hers creating the tragic end she ultimately could not weather.”
The pun on “weather” really clinches this as the greatest example of my absurd love of over-the-top imagery.
But there is another high school English paper that takes the cake in the department of odd. And that is the one I wrote for The Sound and the Fury, which, by the way, I never finished. The only part I felt was necessary to read was the section on suicidal Quentin. It was spring of senior year. I was incredibly morose.
I titled the paper “Quentin’s Loss of Virginity” and argued that his death was a consummation of his greatest desire. The teacher said she’d never ever had anyone touch that subject. I was surprised, considering Faulkner blatantly wrote in his notes: Quentin Compson “loved and lived in a deliberate almost perverted anticipation of death as a lover loves and deliberately refrains from the waiting willing friendly tender incredible body of his beloved.”
Maybe I was just the only person who thought that this was worth investigating? The funny thing about the paper is that it was only two and a half pages long. My teacher wrote A+ and scratched out the plus, noting that next time I should try to meet the page requirement.
She wasn’t the last person to tell me that. I had a long-standing record in college of never writing more than eight pages on any single topic. And then in my last terms, I wrote SO much. Almost as if I were making up for it. I still have trouble with word-counts, though. My book is shrinking closer and closer towards a (gasp!) novella. Ew. I don’t know why I don’t like to prattle pointlessly on paper as much as I do in person. “So let me tell you about this awesome thought I had and be really imprecise in how I tell you so that it takes forever and you lose whatever interest you had…”
The thing is—and this goes back to my Tess essay—I’m not so much long-winded as over-dramatic in my storytelling. In speech it comes out as quite a few extra words here and there. On paper, well it might be distilled down and take up less space, but it’s still………corny.
I love fluff. It makes me smack my head in embarrassment when I’m the one writing it. But I love it.
Recap: Romanticism, where are you?
As I mentioned in a Bloglet entry (See My life is busier) I am back writing on ff.net after a hiatus. Which also means that I am back reading fics. One author struck me as having an enchanting yet blunt style, something that stands out among the paragraph-long descriptions of the ice blue sea foam eyes of all male leads and beautiful brown orbs of the plucky misfit heroines. So I was a little confused when this author said on her profile that she thought Bella and Edward from Twilight were perfection in fiction. I wanted to protest: Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester are perfection. But really, is the tumultuous love of an orphaned governess and an older bachelor with a secret any more realistic or less cheesy than an eternal seventeen-year-old and a girl whose best friend is a wolf?
It got me thinking about fiction, especially since I am writing my own book (see Book Preview). A stupendous friend came out of the woodwork to give it the serious read of a good editor and I told her to be harsh when it came to instances that seem outlandish. My genre is supposed to be realistic fiction. Right off the bat she wondered why I named the psychiatric clinic “Ravensglen.” I hardly noticed how oddly gothic it was.
That’s just it: my mind is wired to be a Romantic, capital R. In my heart, I’m the progeny of Lord Byron, Lermontov, Baudelaire and the Brontë sisters. Wanderlust, ennui, superfluity to society, mist-covered moors, and dusk-draped cities are what I go for. I only like love when barriers are involved, preferably dark pasts or feigned indifference. The taste of irony as the Romantics twist it is so satisfying. Wuthering Heights overflows with convoluted, back-stabbing relationships all because Heathcliff and Catherine, by the rules of the genre, cannot end up together. And it’s wonderful.
Literary Romanticism in the modern age, though, takes a different path. We are more jaded and disillusioned than ever. We have drained nearly all situations of their glamour and mystique. Even the fabulous life of celebrities is tinged with some kind of negativity and banality. So we have to reach beyond real life and into the supernatural to be able to create a story that’s half as harrowing or heartbreaking as those of the 19th Century. Because, let’s face it, there are very few barriers these days to people loving each other. Pretty soon (hopefully) everyone will have the opportunity to marry. And then what? What does that mean for the Romantics?
I suppose we can find comfort in books like Ian McEwan’s Atonement, books that set things in other times, letting history create a more Romantic setting. Or our solace may come from altering stories to make them more weepy and gorgeous in film adaptations. Doctor Zhivago anyone? Did you know that, in truth, Pasternak’s hero is a victim of intensely inescapable reality? There is nothing Romantic about the fact that after he sees Lara for the last time, never knowing that she is pregnant with his child, he returns to Moscow, unable to find his wife and family, and ends up very prosaically marrying a girl named Marina and having another set of kids. He dies on a streetcar not at the sight of his great love Lara but at the sight of a minor acquaintance of theirs. UGH. Who wants to make a Masterpiece Theatre with that kind of conclusion?
I wonder if we Romantics will ever be able to write, read, and enjoy stories again that deal with only humans in human situations. Have we lost our genre to Fantasy forever? Is there nothing Romantic left on earth? No wild, untamed wilderness we haven’t paved over with strip malls? No bitter, cold billionaires living in seclusion without a reality series? No unescorted, friendless girls without their thumbs on the keys of a cell phone?
I think I’m gonna cry. In the meantime, I’ll keep writing my Fantasy-Romantic hybrids, falling victim as usual to the unavoidable trend, while I wish for some great calamity to upset the order of the day and restore impossible love to its rightful place as the only kind of love worth having.
Recap: Rainbows
When I was driving my sister back to college in Florida, we were trucking through the Everglades during intermittent rain and somewhere in the most boring stretch of highway and marshland, a rainbow appeared.
I love rainbows because (wait for it…) they’re symbolic of my philosophy of life. I don’t mean rainbows as they have been co-opted by glittery flying ponies on Lisa Frank school supplies. And I don’t overtly mean them as the emblem of the LGBT movement, although that ties into it. I mean actual, naturally-occurring spectrums of color in an endless arc at the border of cloud and sun.
When I was making renovations on this site, I spent quite some time flipping through the hex triplets of web colors. I was overwhelmed. They started me out in kindergarten with Red, Blue, Green. I got the Crayola 64-pack in second grade and it was a big deal. And suddenly I’m an adult and I discover that there are more colors than I’ll probably ever need to use. Even if I were an artist. Or interior designer. There are so many colors that some don’t even get their own name and are just a variation of light, dark, rich, hot, or faded. There are so many colors that sometimes they are only named after experiences. Strawberry Margaritas in Cancun. Winter Nights in Siberia. There are so many colors that the task of picking out paint is riddled with booby traps. Is there a difference between Ivory, First Snow, and Ecru??? There are SO MANY COLORS.
So many colors and yet, when it comes to the human perspective, we love only two of them. Black and White. I used to be the worst offender. There were two categories. If one event, person, or feeling could be labeled in a certain way than whatever else existed was the opposite. Good-bad, right-wrong, happy-unhappy, love-hate. I pushed and poked and squeezed and shoved everything in my life into one or the other. And it upset me when they wouldn’t fit.
I learned this about myself because it was a weakness preventing me from living a full life. I had to break the habit of black-white thinking. But a lot of people never do. They never notice that all those many colors are nowhere to be found. They like their myopic vision. They like oversimplifications because they are pretty and neat and can be preached from a platform. They like the world to be limited if identifiable. They like their slice of reality to be small and easy to manage. They want things to go in order and only in order. The status quo is sacred. The future is judged by precedents and antecedents. The world is only what they have seen of it.
This was hard for me to take. I wanted to relate to these people. They were friends, acquaintances, family. I wanted to communicate on the same level. I tried to. But single-mindedness is tantamount to blindness. And lack of imagination is a sin. There are no endpoints of a rainbow. Any leprechaun-chasing, pot o’ gold-hunting fool can tell you that. So why should we believe that the world divides into two distinct camps consistently at odds with one another?
Embrace the rainbow. Force yourself to see all the colors. Black may always fashionable, but try the rest of the palette. You won’t be sorry.
For further related reading: The Hedgehog and the Fox, an essay by Isaiah Berlin
Recap: Recognition
I received a strange piece of mail today. It was from the Dean of my college, dated July 31. It congratulated me on being in the top 5% of my graduating class. A few things come to mind. First there’s some confusion as to why I’m being notified now. Not that I’m not grateful (although I’m not sure you’re required to give thanks for something that is your own accomplishment), but it feels somehow unsolicited. I didn’t know this award, named after a famous alum, even existed while I was working my way towards that elusive personal goal of my undergraduate degree. And months after I achieved what I thought I might never do, they inform me that I was pretty darn awesome about it. It’s nice, but not necessary.
I used to desperately need to be told that I was at the top. I lived for that affirmation of my worth. It wasn’t enough to be good, I had to be great, the best if possible. I was a perfectionist, quietly competitive, eternally disappointed in myself should I fail. I set my sights on Mount Everest. Anything short of that wasn’t going to give me the well of happy, proud, contented feelings that fueled my efforts. And then I fell into a crevasse mid-ascent. The rest of my writing has already told you about that.
So here I am now, almost positive that the last vestiges of that messed-up system of motivation had been dismantled and I have an award thrown at me, unsuspectingly. It’s a temptation I did not ask for. Instead of reacting to it with a conspiratorial grin, knowing that there once used to be a Maura who cared about that stuff, I’m stirred by it. I’m wondering if maybe I am indeed at the top.
BUT IT’S A TRAP!
Because the minute I start wanting to be the best is the minute I start to consider any misstep proof of the disappointing reality of my pointless, anonymous, no-more-than-ordinary self.
I can’t reawaken those old habits that used to suck me dry. I hate that I can’t enjoy the recognition I receive for my work in the all-consuming way I once did. I’d be elated any time I won anything. Absolutely walking on air. I don’t feel that anymore. I don’t have the luxury. The flip-side is just too dark. Yes, I do still want my achievements to be noticed and I do still want to strive for excellence. I don’t want the prizes to be my preoccupation, that’s all. There’s a lot of them out there and I wouldn’t be surprised if I got my hopes up, inexplicably, for an Oscar. I have to be careful. It’s how I’m wired.
Recap: Name-calling
There’s a type of joke out there with the formula: You know you’re a ____ when you ____.
Well, I have one to add to the canon.
You know are a nerd that needs to go to grad school when you read Dostoevsky’s The Idiot for fun and the first thing you want to do after finishing it is write about it. And then you do write about it.
Bah.
So, this novel, which followed Crime and Punishment in publication, stays true to the standard practice of the day in which serialization stretched out the original kernel of the story until it became a formidable tome and the bane of most modern readers. As I explained on what used to be the Excerpts page of this site, but is now found under Fiction, I believe it is the tiny details and casual comments that make 500-plus page works worth reading, and not the often unnecessary plot shifts that are bound to happen in the course of that many words. I don’t like big novels if they aren’t going to give me a line that I want to mark with a star. I wouldn’t put up with the cumbersome nature of novels by Dostoevsky or Dickens if they didn’t feature some snippet of portable brilliance.
Had Dostoevsky stopped writing The Idiot after Part One, it would stand as one of my favorite books of all time. It centers on the arrival from abroad of the smart, dear, self-conscious, ingenuous Prince Myshkin, the titular man everyone maligns with the epithet ‘idiot.’ His fate becomes tied up with that of Nastasya Filippovna, the beguiling beauty who draws a diverse crowd of admirers towards her even as she descends into madness. Unfortunately, though, Dostoevsky kept writing and I had to put up with Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchin for what felt like an eternity. If ever there was an unlikeable character in fiction, she wins. Her immaturity, insincerity, playful wickedness, and almost fatal obliviousness to how she affects the people around her make her a loathsome individual and uncompelling love interest for the Prince. Part One had me on edge. I tore through it. I got that sinking, tugging, tight feeling that meant I was truly immersed in the story. And then things kind of dissolved. The book became random and, I hate to say it, boring. So when events finally, finally, lined up to provoke a confrontation between Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya Ivanovna with only twenty pages left to go, I was not as happy or interested as I should have been. The eerie, peculiar final scene with Rogozhin and the Prince came out of nowhere, even though the back of the book proclaimed it as ‘one of the most powerful in world literature.’
That said, it’s still an important book, if only for the fact that Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin is a beautiful creation. It’s heartbreaking the way the other characters abuse him. They destroy him without ever recognizing what they are doing. They underestimate him from beginning to end. Even the people who supposedly care about him show little respect for who he truly is. That’s why I was invested in the story of him and Nastasya Filippovna—she realizes he’s too good for her. Even though, by the time he arrives on the scene in St. Petersburg, he has recovered from the breakdown that had him in a Swiss sanitarium and is more than sane and reasonable, the Prince is marked by his illness. There isn’t a single character who does not, whether out loud or in their thoughts, call him an idiot for what he went through and goes through again in the denouement. His condition is inescapable.
The reason why this self-indulgent diatribe is under Recap is because that idea of an unrelenting label frightens me. Most days, I look upon my struggle as the Prince does in a moment of reflection:
“So what if it is an illness? Who cares that it is an abnormal strain, if the result itself, if the moment of the sensation, remembered and examined in a healthy state, turns out to be the highest degree of harmony, beauty, gives a hitherto unheard-of and unknown feeling of fullness, measure, reconciliation, and an ecstatic, prayerful merging with the highest synthesis of life?”
But there are those days every now and then when I wonder if I’m not stamped with some indelible ‘weirdo’ sign. I don’t know. What do you think?
Recap: [blank], My Happiness
When I first went to Paris, I was fifteen and had a bizarre obsession with Elvis Presley. I’m not really sure how I first got hooked on the King, but it was pretty much a defining characteristic of my life in high school. It’s easy to say in retrospect that I chose a twenty-year dead pop idol as a defense mechanism against the insecurity of relating to my peers. In all honesty though, there really is no one who will ever be as charismatically talented as he was. Fact.
Anyways, in Paris I stumbled on a store called: Elvis, My Happiness. It was bizarrely wonderful.
And yet, it provokes a question in me now. If “happiness” stands for that which makes life worth living and loving (family excluded), would I be able to name my happiness?
I think you might know by now that I am not a person who is very intimate with the concept of happiness. It’s just not in my chemistry to be so. There are other people out there for that. And I’ve never really worried about it. But as I trudge deeper and deeper into adulthood, I’m afraid that my innate rejection of the idea that something could be my happiness is going to leave me very bitter and bored. It’s all very fine for a fifteen-year-old to spurn reality and sustain herself on popular entertainment from another era. That’s not really happiness so much as it is a protective mirage, excusable in adolescence. But to be out of touch with no life direction, weird, and borderline suicidal as a grown-up because I sought happiness in stupid places or just completely gave up on happiness altogether—well, that’s pretty bleak.
Part of the problem I have in defining my happiness is that I want it to be a singular thing, a one true something (read My Manifesto bloglet entry). Unfortunately, I also see committing myself to any pursuit as a limitation of some sort. I see it as closing doors and sticking a label on me that I’m not comfortable with. The one true something is just a hypothetical. I love Russian literature and poetry and could burrow myself away in books pretty contentedly for a few years, but I’m not prepared to call it an all-consuming passion. I’d have trouble calling anything that. I just have this nightmare picture of being at some inconsequential party and having someone go, “Oh, so that’s what you do for a living?” and me respond like, um, well, technically, but see, I actually thought about being all kinds of sorts of types of things. I don’t want to apologize for what I’m doing by adding some mumbly explanation about how I also like to paint and play the guitar. I don’t want my myriad aspirations to make me delusional either. I don’t want to be the tool who keeps telling people that I could have been a pro golfer if only my parents had gotten me a good set of clubs. I want my happiness to be legitimate and tangible.
I know that there are people out there whose happiness is simple—their dog, their boat, their garden. And I know that loving those things is not so simple—dogs die, boats sink, gardens dry up. I know that nobody’s happiness is permanent. Tastes change and so do the objects of affection. I know that happiness is supposed to be a composite of many things and most of them are not all great all of the time. I get that. Which is why I hate that I’m still paralyzed when prompted to encapsulate what I live for. I’m writing a book and every time I mention that to someone I do it self-deprecatingly. I think I’m a loser for writing a book. When I say that I play the piano, I say that I suck at it. Even though the truth is it makes me feel calmer in a way nothing else does. I have a Star Wars sticker on my laptop and when someone asks about it, I act like I put it there for no reason. I can’t admit my happiness to others, I can’t open a store with a big sign saying [blank], My Happiness because I’m too scared. I don’t want to be the tool at the party, or the girl who writes poetry in her room, or the Star Wars nerd. I’m paranoid about the way I’m perceived, about the way my quote-unquote happiness is perceived.
It’s that same insecurity that made me like Elvis, only I’m too old now for transparent defenses. I recognize what I’m doing. I can even put it in words: I fruitlessly search for one thing to make my life meaningful while I truly believe I’ll never find it. I send myself on a wild goose chase for happiness to distract from the fact that I’m built around an empty core, drained by self-doubt and the insidious idea that I’m nobody.
I wish my ability to acknowledge that translated into an ability to live peacefully in ignorance of all this. I wish I could fill in the blank in the title and never give it a second thought. I wish I didn’t need a reason to love life or myself.
Recap: hair today, gone tomorrow
My hair should take out a restraining order on me. I cannot leave it alone.
It all started in Fall of 2006. My hair had gotten ridiculously long without my really noticing it or caring that much. When I see pictures now I’m weirded out a little. How could I have left it untouched for so long? It was the end of an era.
Things were taking a disastrous turn and when I received a generic, impersonal e-mail notifying me that I was not accepted into something I really really wanted, I went into the bathroom, put my hair in a loose ponytail, and cut it off above the rubber band. I had it evened up at a salon eventually.
I left school later in the term, came home, interned on the Hill, and my hair started to grow back. By the summer, though, I had to face the fact that I was returning for my senior year. The minute I stepped onto campus, I knew, without exaggeration, that it was the biggest mistake of my life. But I was already stuck there. I went to CVS, got hair clipping scissors and set about changing my look. It was only the first day of classes. My parents came to visit and I had to have the same salon in town clean things up. Because my mother would notice.
Because my mother owns my hair. For the first fourteen years of my existence, she washed it, brushed it, fixed it, and dolled it up with a bow. I had to sit through sessions where she would try out excruciating French braids. I never got my hair cut without her standing behind the chair. When I was in the eighth grade, after many years wishing I had curly hair to the point of wearing sponge curlers overnight before special occasions, my hair changed, got wavier and for the next four years it was really thick, really curly, really AWFUL to take care of, especially because I had never before been allowed to take care of my hair. I was at a complete loss. I went to a girls’ school so I mostly had a low maintenance approach to it: pull it back. My mom thought I didn’t take enough pride in my appearance when I did that. I have her words burned into my mind—“Don’t go out of the house with that rat’s nest.”
If she couldn’t take care of my hair herself, she was going to be sure to point out to me that I wasn’t doing a good job. It is still a monumental source of insecurity for me.
So, after I ditched school again and came home in Fall of 2007, I went on a rampage against my hair that has lasted for over a year. I cut bangs myself, let it grow out, dyed it blonde, dyed it brown again, dyed it black, added some red when that faded out, had it cut short, and in the last week, I took scissors to it again and chopped it off.
My mother doesn’t understand, but I know what I’m doing. I’m fighting to take control of things. I have no idea what I’m doing and my hair, poor thing, just gets caught in the crossfire.
It’s a primitive coping mechanism. Lashing out at the superficial because everything on the inside is knotted up. I need a detangler for my life.