My mental circus, inside and out.

This is hand of my son in the hand of his dying father.  In just a few hours, that hand would be cold, white, and waxy, but here it is still living, loving.

Posted by: EmmaPele at March 31, 2005 22:20 | link | comments (1)

Absolution

I felt as if a weight had lifted today after I revealed this stuff about Mark and his sexual fantasies and my reactions to them to Pam, my therapist, and she said, "He was seriously damaged as a child."  I knew this in an abstract way, but it made a difference having Pam give me the authoritative word on this. I asked her where such damage might come from, but she was unwilling to speculate.  She also said that if I had stayed with Mark, that I wouldn't have "cured" him; this would have remained a problem.  Knowing this with certainty allows me to forgive Mark. I suppose he couldn't help it, in a way.  It also helps to know that these were his issues, and not mine, since he projected so much back onto me.  So as it turns out, Mark has his own Memory Underground that he will probably never really confront.   Is it possible that his obsession with the past is a way of skirting his own history, toying with his past in a slanted mirror?  Thinking about this,  I am remembering that Miriam's guilt over the loss of her brother was featured in Mark's story, and Mark has obsessively competitive, hostile  feelings toward his own brother. It is impossible to know all that happened, but there are clues, like the way Mark flinches when his mother touches him, how guilt-ridden he felt when he left her while at the same time secretly despising both his parents in an extreme love/hate relationship. I feel an enormous sadness about it, but it's not a heavy sadness. . more the sadness of understanding.

Posted by: EmmaPele at March 30, 2005 22:33 | link | comments

Haiku

Haiku for My Mother

Your withered hands fold
In the lap that once held me.
Two birds close to flight.

Posted by: EmmaPele at March 29, 2005 00:40 | link | comments

On history

One of the truly maddening things about historians is their relentless control of the past.  When I was with Mark, he never let a single "error" of mine go.  If I was sick, if I wasn't charming at a dinner, if I was ever irritable, in a bad mood, he would bring these moments up years later as evidence of my flawed nature. Worse, he used email from four years back as evidence of my flaws in character.  It didn't matter that most of our conversations had taken place on the phone, that I had spent months living with him.  In the end, only these emails counted, and whenever I tried to present my own analysis of our situation, he would return to these emails to disprove everything I had to say, presenting his interpretation of them as inarguable.  This was his successful technique in Memory Underground, where he disproved Miriam's memory by checking it against other documents and Nazi records. In the end, it mattered little what Miriam had to say about herself or what she presented to preserve her dignity--she was that which had to be corrected by the priest of truth, Mark, who could reveal her to herself.  How maddening it was.  In the end, I wished I had never sent him a single email, that I had put forth nothing that he could use to construct me as an avatar in the theater of his life.

Posted by: EmmaPele at March 28, 2005 14:35 | link | comments (1)

Last night, I was reading the prison account of the nineteenth-century Irish patriot, Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, which includes some sad letters from his wife, the poet Mary.  Rossa was  deteriorating in prison, become more confrontational and angry, purposely aggravating the guards so that he was frequently in solitary confinement. He was, he said, reduced to a skeleton.  But many of his troubles were self-made, because he refused to conform to the vicious discipline of the prison. Mary was devoting her time to fighting for clemency, but she was losing hope and sinking into a deep depression. Rossa's letters were infrequent.  Though he was elected to the Irish parliament, he wasn't allowed to write, and so hid his smuggled ink bottle by attaching it to a black thread and lowering it through the bars outside the window.  He called his wife, "Mollis": she called him "Cariss."  But her love had come to its limit, and, as she imagined drowning herself in the Thames, she wrote to him (very wisely, I think): "One thing, Cariss, you may be sure of--I will never take the trouble for you or for any other man again.  Human love is selfish, except in youth's first enthusiasm. It becomes a passion, living only as long as the object gives pleasure, and ceasing when the object thwarts the will, offends the vanity, or fails to minister to the self-love, pride, passion, or power of the pretended lover. You often said you loved me, but I never put your love to the proof; and never believed but that I did put it to the proof, I should find it wanting."  What affinity I felt for Mary after reading this.

Posted by: EmmaPele at March 28, 2005 14:00 | link | comments