The Dewy Red's Open Salon Blog

She breathes, she walks . . . .

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 11:08:05 -0400

And who cares? Well, she does, at least at times. The odd other person as well. Very odd.

Months pass. It never seems they should, yet they do. Such a calm thing, time. Completely unperturbed at our concern for it, its going.

My life, as one says dramatically, is changing. I am increasingly uneasy with the way in which so many of us document such things in their minutiae on the 'net, but of course I am as compulsive about this, in my way, as anyone else who has ever thought it a good idea to write a blog entry, or anything like it. So I will be doing that over the next week.

Even the fact that I am announcing this makes me laugh. Really, who cares? Some of the good, indulgent people here may do, and that is kind. But of course in the ultimate solipsism that is the internet, we do these things for ourselves. This is why we're so often genuinely surprised, and moved, when others speak to us about it, supportively, softly, even lovingly.

Ashes to ashes

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 12:03:16 -0500

Lent began Wednesday. Last year I wrote of seeking the renewal that belongs to that liturgical season in the midst of my attempts to pull myself out of melancholy and serious moral disorder. Winter and spring were hard for me, in the way that such things can be only to a woman with no real problems and too-great a propensity for introspection. I don't say that to be flippant, or that greatest of all modern transgressions, "hard on myself"; I have always sought to remind myself that I do, in fact, have an exceptionally good and fortunate life, and that my relative bad luck in romantic matters is just that--relative. We are encouraged in the West to believe that we deserve to have everything go our way all the time, and if we don't, there's something wrong with us, we must be miserable, we're losers. I have never fallen for that, at least. At least I can say that much for myself. I have, my entire life, been incredibly lucky. And no-one, whatever we may say, deserves to be lucky.

It has been four months since I last posted here. The second half of 2010 picked up creatively and left me richly busy, resulting in, among other things, the filming of the first episodes of a web series and the founding of a new theatre company, in both of which endeavours I am a principal. I have done three plays since last autumn. I clawed hard to get out of the slough I was in after New York, after the winter with its long hours of darkness, and I felt myself emerging. Too slowly, and too much of it aided by the hectic distraction of sheer overwork, but nonetheless, I was beginning to breathe.

But for how long, I wondered? Always that shadow at one's shoulder. When will the next pit be before me, when will I see the cliff? And then a reminder that no-one is dying here; these are moods, shades of ordinary days, vagaries of fate that, as vagaries go, are quite gentle; detectable only to me. But so very detectable to me.

I made vows, as people do. A vow to myself that I would not be so caught again by something that wants to be thought of as love. I thought of my mother, now so frail, laughing at the thought of a great uncle of hers--I can imagine him, an Irish farmer, brown as turf--beholding the devastation of winter and swearing to himself that he would prepare better next year. He would not be so caught again.

My mother laughed at the thought because, of course, he was caught again. Always caught. Every year.

I find now, as almost a quarter of this new year is gone, thus caught. I find something happened. Someone came across my path. A person I knew years ago, a peer.

And so I am back here, thinking, This is the place where, despite my professed loathing for confessional writing, I confess. I have an impulse to tell you--if there is still a "you" reading this--what has turned up. So that, like my mother thinking of that hapless old farmer, I can laugh at how I was, despite my vows, caught again. And reflecting on that during Lent, which is given to us for reflection.

It used to be that, when imposing ashes on the forehead of an adherent, a priest would mutter, "Remember, man, you came from dust, and to dust you shall return." We are cyclical creatures in all things; we seldom really go anywhere. And thus am I caught again, and thinking about it, what it means--and thinking that perhaps, as the poet said of poems, it should not mean, but be.

I will write of how I have been caught. If you've a mind to laugh at such things, and call them folly, well then, know I will give you something.

Very soon.

Placeholders

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 22:11:37 -0500

It seems all I can do these days to prop something up with something else, something inadequate. I have not posted here nearly as much as I've wanted to, and keep expressing my determination to return, only to have life sweep my hands toward something else. Well, here's no great matter, as the poet said; regardless, I miss this forum, and do want to contribute to it further. I have had a most productive year, and am just about to launch my website, but within a week or so . . . well, I'll be onstage with a Christmas play run, but still, I should be in a better place to write. Meanwhile, I hope the little tribe of greatly gifted people whose work I follow here will continue to thrive into the holiday seasons.

T.D.R.

Meandering

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 01:10:21 -0400

Well, I'm not, really; meandering implies a much more relaxed existence than has recently been mine. I have been drowning, in a not unpleasant way, in creative commitments, including a new theatre company of which I am a founding member, and a long play run (another two weeks to go). I have missed Open Salon and the people I have come to know here, and I have missed indulging myself--as so many here have indulged me--in the sort of writing I allow myself here.

This is all to say that I will soon return. Whether you like it or not. ;-)

Be, as they say, well. Sleep the sleep of the just.

On loving long

Thu, 5 Aug 2010 10:08:34 -0400

I have young friends. A few. Some are former students, who will, to me, always be my students in some way, something which they often sense and in which they indulge me. I am invariably maternal toward all of them. Only the boy himself has escaped this, because of the terms on which we developed our relationship. The others are all my children, perpetually.

One young man, from the same country as the boy, and indeed a friend of his, is like a nephew to me; we joke that I am his Irish auntie. Intelligent, full of mischievous energy, and extremely clear-eyed about the surreal world of acting in which he is enjoying increasing success, he has proven a treasured correspondent and wit.

We recently spoke in a general way about a girl he’d been seeing, about love and its nature, about what it takes in the long term. He is too smart, and becoming too worldly, to believe simplistic things about love, but he is still young enough not to want to let go of some of those articles of faith with which many of us start our adult lives, for fear of the empty space that can gape before us when we lose our religion.

I wanted to tell him something about the view from middle-age and the thickening nature of love, what it trades for its purity when people, happily or not, simply hang in there long enough, until sometimes they love despite themselves or find that strong bonds exist when the bare name of love no longer sounds like itself. I had a couple of glasses of wine one night while in the middle of a writing project, and then turned to my young correspondent’s most recent note. Out of that came something that, when I look at it, makes sense to me. To borrow a turn of phrase from Carver, this is what I talk about when I talk about love.

We start off with love. Amor vincit omnia? For God's sake. Think of love. Think of that poor creature, that see-through thing with little wings like a dragonfly. Think of all we put on its narrow eggshell back. We want it to overcome anything? To save us? No wonder it evades so many of us, runs off, hides. Look at all we want it to do. It's a sweet and lovely thing, but it's delicate, it's crushable, and unless it's handled properly, and fed like any living thing, and not abused or neglected or belittled or anything that kills the living from the inside with a rot one can't see, it will grow thin and paranoid as an addict and wonder why the hell it's stayed around as long as it has. And it will leave, and there we'll be. That process often doesn't take that long, especially when we're young. It leaves; we're standing there.

If we're lucky--if we're really, really lucky--with hard work, it . . . ahhh, no, I'm not going to say, "It grows! It becomes a glorious, strong thing like a magnificent oak, and it can withstand anything!" No. I'm not going to say that. We have entire worlds of aging hippies and desperate boomers and people who call themselves “artists” to say that kind of thing. To babble that “Love is always the answer”, presumably to some overwhelming question that, like Prufrock, we’re all too frightened to ask. We have millions to whistle us past the graveyard. So I'm going to say that if we're lucky, no, it doesn't grow. It is always just itself, even if it thrives. But if properly nourished, it does thrive. And the way it does that, the way it repays us for the feeding, is that it learns to clothe itself. Everything around it, love throws around its shoulders and wraps around its spidery hands. Time. Children. Money. Homes. Memory. Death. Sex. Language. Fear. Things that a couple can share like wine, they can be that rich and that heady. What we consume, love assumes. It puts all this on, layer upon layer, and protects itself like that. And its bones and its skin and wings, beneath all that, if we’re very lucky, thicken and toughen over years with scar tissue and healed punctures and the weight of all those layers, and that's what lies at its core. Old, hard, scarred love, that we can still see clearly beneath all the layers, because we took good care of it and so it took us on. It decided to stay, because we really wanted it and really gave it a home. And sometimes we can even see the little thing with the eggshell skull that we encountered at the beginning, just sometimes, in flashes. But the truth is that by that stage, one can't separate the creature from its garments except in moments quick as a glance. They are fused, elements in a fuel brewed over time from all those things, from the sacrifice of so much remembered and experienced.

We have to work for that. And we won't always like it. It can trap like any sticky thing, like a web or quicksand. Or a spill that covers and smothers everything. But it's real, and it's there. And two people can run on its energy, sometimes, for an entire lifetime, unto death.