The scene below just struck me in a certain way tonight, and I had to take a picture of it. A lot of things hit me this evening, actually. What’s striking me now is that when I don’t have my own little path through the world to write about–or need to–what do you think I would do?
(Heh-heh-heh)
Tonight was amazing, though. I talked to my wife. No, I mean, I had a mission and I talked…
I talked about guilt, about Johnny the forever-guilty boy. Like about how when I was in third grade, I came home with a report card with a notation from my teacher that I had “exceptional talent” for art. At the time, we were living in Blacksburg, Virginia, where my father was an Air Force captain teaching ROTC at what was then Virginia Polytechnic Institute, or V.P.I. (How strange is it that now as I write that, I can remember how his face smelled?)
My mother was taking painting lessons at the time. She would end up making art off and on for most of her life. There were paper, paint, and brushes around, in other words, but nobody thought to see if I was interested. That’s hard for me to imagine now, knowing how I’d respond if I were a parent, but that’s the way it was.
For absolutely certain, my father and probably my mother, too, were worried by that message from my teacher. They’d have been much happier to read that I was a math or science whiz who might become a doctor or an engineer, and athletic prowess would have reassured my father that I wasn’t a threat to his sexual identity. (The arts, you know…) No one could completely stifle me, thank God, and I was a very inventive and creative kid, but the point is that I got the message. They never knew quite what to do with me, and so they tried to make me into something that they understood by withholding love and approval until I got it right. Or didn’t!
[sigh]
It wasn’t just the art, you know. Way bigger than that. And after 50 guilty years (!) of looking for solutions on the outside, I evidently needed maximum life-shock therapy and moved us to New Mexico. Once here, I promptly failed at creating any kind of secure, comfortable life and have been scrambling ever since. For ten long years, in fact. The hurt and guilt, thundering along such well-established channels, have been dangerous and ghastly. Contemplating what I made my wife give up, what I gave up that meant so much to me, is like holding a wolverine by the tail while he eats my entrails. I’ve had more fun, I’ll tell you that!
But this all had a purpose, I see now, like these things mostly do if we but pay attention–50, 60 years is nothing to the psyche–and tonight it all came down to talking to my wife, to speaking of the taboo guilt. I don’t know how I managed it. In the process, I laid down all kinds of weapons, any one of which she could have used to chop my heart out, but she never did…
It wasn’t supposed to be a ten-year rolling crisis, but a Great Adventure, making the most of our lives, and I just wasn’t up to it. Hamstrung by shock and guilt, I couldn’t replace the things we lost. Becoming personally fulfilled by relocation wasn’t ever going to happen, anyway, but something else did, and one thing leads to another.
Geez, can I retire now, or did the party just BEGIN?!?
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Here’s the thing: the party’s ALWAYS beginning! You’re right — 50-60 years is nothing to the psyche (or 42), but a minute can be everything. Congratulations on all of it. All. Of. It.
Hi Gina, great to hear from you!
The above omits the many POSITIVE developments along the way, of course, but a great log-jam is now at least partly cleared away. We all do what we gotta do, Lord knows, and you’ve had to do some things yourself. That means that nothing is ever a “mistake,” although this business had a charge that needed bleeding off.
Now there’s nothing to be done but be healthy, happy, sane, creative, and productive. I know I can finally make up what we lost, and IN SPADES!!! I’m just sorry that it took me so long to get with the program.
Hi there, John.
Reminds me of a cartoon which someone posted up on a cupboard in the kithen of a commune I was living in in the ’80s. It’s two pictures; the first is of a man, kneeling, looking fervently up at the sky at a big cloud and hands clasped. He is praying. “God, please give me a break”.
In the next picture the same man is still kneeling and looking up and out of the cloud comes a big voice and it says
“This IS the break”.
Gillian! Yes, I think that puts it all quite well.
Taos has a way of communicating the same thing. This IS the break, this IS the revolution, this IS the great fulfillment.
There’s a lot of the same in both Taos and Glastonbury UK (known as the hippie town of the country)and having now read Buffalo Lights, the similarities are even clearer. The big difference is that we are at sea level and you are, literally, way over my head right now at 7,000 feet. This is a ground place, a place of pilgrimage, the location of the first Christian Church in the British Isles; and the location of the biggest music festival in the world which a local farmer Mike Eavis began in 1970 after hearing about Woodstock. Glastonbury considers itself the Heart Chakra of the planet but most of the time it’s up its own ——.
You are in the land of flight and fancy at high altitude, ‘winging it’, as you say, all the way from New Mexico. Head in clouds and flying.
In six months time, I’ll be up there, too, just for a month, in the Land of (again quoting you) of Entrapment. My third visit in five years. A hit of light guaranteed. Blessings.
Gillian, you LIVE in Glastonbury? I know quite a bit about the place from following the crop circle reports. Up its own you-know-what? EXACTLY like Taos!
Thank you for your comment. I have been going through some kind of extended hell for ages, with occasional glimpses of light. Last night I thought I would shoot myself, but I went to bed instead, hah. Things could be worse. This morning I woke up with a John Fogerty anthem in my head, only I’ve never heard it before. Things are looking up!
Guilt is a tough thing to entirely reject. It has been the subject of some of the greatest writing the world has known – from the likes of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and Dante. Knowing you’ve done wrong and taking that knowledge on board is something we humans are meant to do and can’t help doing. The animals – beautiful and innocent as they are – don’t and can’t do it. It’s like despair, remorse and many another another human state we owe to consciousness. Anyone going through a bad patch of such stuff longs to be unconscious and looks enviously at the animals, at children, at simple human beings living seemingly (probably not really) unconflicted lives. I don’t claim I don’t want to rid myself of guilt from time to time. I’ve got a lot to feel guilty about. However, I think I deceive myself when I long to just stop feeling guilty. What I really want is to have the right kind of guilt (over important derelictions, not trivial ones) and to deal with that guilt in the right way. D.H. Lawrence wasn’t much given to guilt, but he talks in one of his poems about having “a pettiness to expiate”. That sounds like guilt to me – the right kind of guilt – and it sounds like the right way to deal with it.
Just my take, John.
K.W.
Kenny me bucko, you did note that I’m ACKNOWLEDGING guilt, que no? Not rejecting it all! Let there be guilt! I shall swim in the shit and emerge smelly but lustfully expectant.
I know whereof I stink, therefore I am free.