I love the dancing on her grave bit. Good for you! And what a good point about people not talking about this.

The day my mother died I felt relief. It was a long, long…

Sometimes I go and dance on her grave…

These human messages from the interior, whether yours or anyone else’s, make me marvel at the varieties of the human soul. “Psychology” is too trivial a term for it. A description of the differences isn’t a critique but an appreciation (in the technical sense of understanding the import of a thing).

Take this sense of yours of Creation as a benign surrogate mother. You’ve written often in that way, often very movingly. Yet that general concept always makes me scratch my head in wonderment. It’s such a different sort of way of looking at a thing which for me is and always has been emotionally neutral. Nature is capable of being experienced in many sorts of ways but is it something (a spirit? a principle of being?) that cares for us as individual humans? Is it something or someone to depend on? At best, it’s capable of giving pleasure or awe – and provoking thoughts about our littleness and lostness in the universe (terrifying thoughts, for the most part).

If one’s human parent is capable of withholding acceptance, how find it in this remorseless thing? Humans can torment us, but they can also love us, befriend us and teach us. We can’t get that from a glacier, a tree or a hummingbird.

True, these things can interest and move us. They have beauty or power, and that’s no small thing. We probably crave the inhuman as much as the human, but for different reasons. They pose different challenges, they are incommensurable.

But there’s one constant: No human, just as no force of nature, is ever going to give us complete acceptance. That’s why people have dogs. I prefer acceptance to be a hard-won sort of thing, not unconditional, based on having done something to deserve it. I like dogs but find them sort of embarrassing. They’re too damn undiscriminating.

Chipper: I’d probably still like to be remembered, for whatever happens from here on out. But that IS a sideshow.

Getting to where you feel the love, where everything’s forgiven and always was, is a goddamned perilous trip for some of us. Maybe it has to do with being a real artist. The crack, the missing pieces, being fucked up, etc. etc. are all clues to where the OTHER stuff is: you walk around in shit until you bump into the gold. I doubt there’s any other way.

Whatever really hurts us is ultimately a gift, I think, for those who dare to go there. Not that that’s the only way to get to know the unconscious, far from it! It’s certainly the hand that I was dealt, at any rate, and now I get to see what else there is for me to play with.

In Helen’s case, I finally asked myself: take away the money, and what IS there?

[crickets]

I hope my siblings get a handle on that. It’s really, really hard to take in, though, the hardest thing there is. If you can’t, you can’t. No blame.