Blunt enough, Myst? While I recognize that hanging with me isn't that much fun these days, I seem to be retaining a good dozen close and closer friends - people who are gambling better than even odds that I will stay glued to this planet a few more years.
As both of my children were born and did die in this lovely little city, it behooves me to take a long wander away from its charms and mementos - which are mauve and ultramarine glitterbombs ticking away every few feet. So I am preparing for pilgrimage - to places far and tremendous - wondering what kind of story I can possibly offer that will serve as a social emollient, yet preserve some of my very necessary dysolation. [No, that's not a word - yet...]
I continue to be a writer, as witnessed by the crepuscular production of the handbook I mentioned in the previous blog. That work --titled HAVOC-- tries to ravel and reweave the first chaotic hours after my son's death. It is the only thing I can work on right now that doesn't interfere with the interiority - dysolation, if you will - this kind of experience demands. But I still have to buy the apples, the coffee, the wine; still have to ask the woodcutter to bring the ksilo down to the terrace, and say pleasant things to people who have earned the solid-gold right not to know how much I am suffering.
~~~
While the question of 'my story' is on auto-ponder, and Havoc makes its way down the mountain, I do realize from time-to-time how much I miss the other work. The work that addresses who we love, and how; what potencies remain unawakened by our forms of cherishing; and the questions of temporality, habit and Nike ~necessity~ that delapidate our caresses. And more critically, what to do about those erosions. What to do... what to do... at one point I had a few ideas. We'll see if they return.
I am not in the same anaesthesia that characterized my daughter's death (how amazingly awful is it that I can compare these?), but the wit I can bring to these issues is off, belayed by this thick longing to hear and feel and smell my son's corporeal presence. And not separately, but with that delicious overlap that declares what you love in its profusion. When a zephyr brings one of those traces to me, or I am sheered blind by his utter gone'ness, my body's only recourse is to weep. And this isn't just your average 3-hankie sobbing fit - this is an infibulated roar, a baying, as if I am trying to succuss my feet up through my hips and out my throat. I've learned to wrap my arms around this and drag it out of social range, but if delayed too long, I begin to burn, to fry from the inside, as if some hidden sun has lost its ozone layer, and it's August all up in here.
And maybe it is. I hear there is a Mediterranean dish that involves cooking a squid in its own ink. Sounds promising.
Mysti, I am in admiration of how articulate you can be about such a vast chasm that can never be properly, nay corporeally, filled. My heart is with you.
ReplyDeleteMay you never know this: and may your mother-struggle be blissfully hard and occasionally, surprisingly, easy. As it is. . .
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