There are simple fears and larger ones. Insecurity driving so many of them, but what does it come to? We are scared, scared of loss, scared of being replaced.
If, as I am, you've got a few things going on out of the hetero/neuro-normative (bi, trans, polyamorous/RA, autistic, is there anything else? It'll come to me; oh yeah, teacher, that counts right?), then you get a few of the fears going on. If your partner meets someone new, you get the Fear. Just a bit. No matter how many jealousy techniques you have going on, no matter how much you face your Abyss, your Chapel Perilous, you're still going to get the stabby feeling every so often.
And the form of it is so endlessly changeable. We all have a universe of them to wake up to; are they better than me? Younger? Hotter? Look better in heels? (Not the last one, I look better in heels than all of you). Or perhaps not as crazy? Less inclined to slur words after 1030 at night? Able to take things not completely literally and not to recite production details for The Prisoner during after dinner chat?
Perhaps it's not new relationship fear. Perhaps it's the fear at the end of the street, the sense that when you leave your house, you don't come home again. The fear of getting lost in yourself. Once, saddened and drunk, I sat down on a street corner at 3AM and considered how easy it would be just to stay there forever. I was a long way from home, literally and figuratively.
What is it? I can't speak for you, but what is the nature of my fear? I interrogate it. I talk to it, coax it out, provoke it with images. It's my fear, mine and mine alone...but maybe it might speak to some of you as well. And as I talked to fright, I understood a few tiny aspects of part of my Shadow (one of my partners is SO into Jung).
That shadow is the shadow of Forgetting.
I am scared of being Forgotten.
Being forgotten...my gods, all our culture is devoted to telling us that this is the worst possible outcome for a human life! Abramic religions make reference to being forgotten by various Old Testament style manifestations. The rise of printed media fills us with dread - what if we aren't written down? The postal service! We are forgotten! No letters today. Empty mail slot on Valentine's day, Christmas, Birthday. They never wrote back after the interview. We lost your test results. There has been an error, please re-submit your details. What was your name again?
Dickens, telling us not to forget the poor, reminding us that the economically lost are forgotten too. Remember the dead of Verdun and a hundred thousand other places, but live in terror of the shadow of the Unknown Soldier, symbol of the worst thing; we lost your son in the mud. Never seen again.
The force of ages. The weight of years. Our history is designed to get lost in, and we now fill it with fame and notoriety. To be Remembered, and this won't be a simplistic rant on the transitory nature of celebrity, with all those classist overtones. Because why do half of us write and paint, if not to be Remembered, to cling to some form of existence as imagined/implied author?
Oh, there are many people who act in the sheer joy of creation - I'm lucky enough to know so many, but what about me? Does the fact that I operate behind a pseudonym absolve me of a desire to be Remembered? I'm guessing that my deep fears suggest not, not at all.
To be Forgotten. To not matter to those you love the most. Nonsense, I know rationally. But I'm human, mainly. My mind generates odd little lizard thoughts. Tells me that those I adore are human too...I will drift from their attention, a little further each time...
But here's the thing.
We say Being Forgotten is terrible.
We're wrong.
Memory is our ego. Memory is our desire to hang on. Can you name every pupil in your English class when you were 13? Can you name every cloud you ever looked at? The shapes of them? Our lives are generated by processes of physics and biology, which can be understood mathematically, as can a cloud; we see no purpose in memorising each facet of the sky. Let them move on.
Not that I want to forget. I want to recall every last possible second of my loves. I want to remember everything, till my mind cascades. But I can't, anymore than the world recalls the name of the bricklayer who built the wall of this room 112 years ago.
My loves will not forget me, though they will get distracted every now and again. They are very, very attractive people. They are likely to get frequently distracted. This makes me happy. I can be forgotten for an afternoon. Old friends will think on me less and it won't change me where I am right now.
When we choose to be forgotten, perhaps only for a weekend or an hour, it's one of the most powerful things we can accomplish. The strongest moment of being ourselves.
We choose to be ourselves, the limit of our own senses, with nothing to support us, no illusions of immortality. We Are.
I can't always manage this; I'm not always that strong. But I understand a little better...even though I just wrote all this knowing very few people will ever read it, perhaps not even any of those it was intended for, that it will get lost. I write this because it makes me feel better to write it.
That said, I still intend to raise statues in my name, so maybe don't take any of this too seriously?
Monday 25 July 2016
Saturday 16 July 2016
Summerlands
That moment.
Remember?
The bell going. On the last day.
That last day in school. Time stretching out and no longer sure of what would happen, one lesson to the next. The whole place is holding its breath, willing the moments along. A sense of letting go finally, nine month's worth of clenched fist released. Perhaps it almost felt comfortable for you? For the first time, perhaps, maybe?
And the bell goes. And suddenly everyone's moving. But in that moment, something shifts and changes -
And then the corridors are empty, the classrooms silent again and it's all over, all gone. All the fears and troubles that seemed so huge and devouring, if you're lucky, they've gone, left behind and forgotten. Old monsters and witches are just papier mache and left in the cupboard. Paper teeth after all. If you're lucky.
That sense of scattering, inexplicable because it's really just the same as any other Friday. But still the feeling that everyone, no matter how old they are, is leaving in a different direction. In my mind, it looks like a cheap TV crossfade, a double exposure making people vanish into the air like perfect ghosts. Then there's only the rolling fields under the sunlight, empty and the silence of a school when everyone's gone, not coming back, this year is over.
And we all became summer ghosts, closer to our own idea of ourselves than anyone else's, just for a little while longer. Six or seven weeks of misrule over our own hearts.
Some authors capture this moment beautifully. For example:
The Summer Birds - Penelope Farmer
A literal summer of liminal transformation, dreamlike and impossible. Not saying much more, but you'll be lucky to find a copy these days.
It - Stephen King
Despite what everyone thinks, it's not really about killer clowns. It's about those perfect/monstrous summers when you learned who you could be...and then forgot all about it when school came around again.
Shadowland - Peter Straub
Not sure why this doesn't get more attention. Cheap horror pulp cover, I guess. A twice told memory of a long lost surreal summer in magical hell, told by an unreliable trickster narrator, about how he came to be a wandering unreliable trickster narrator. "If you go through life with an unchipped heart, you won't get far."
I'm sure that there are classic literary examples. But I'm all cheap dime store magic and second hand horror stories and I think it's how I'm happiest.
Remember?
The bell going. On the last day.
That last day in school. Time stretching out and no longer sure of what would happen, one lesson to the next. The whole place is holding its breath, willing the moments along. A sense of letting go finally, nine month's worth of clenched fist released. Perhaps it almost felt comfortable for you? For the first time, perhaps, maybe?
And the bell goes. And suddenly everyone's moving. But in that moment, something shifts and changes -
And then the corridors are empty, the classrooms silent again and it's all over, all gone. All the fears and troubles that seemed so huge and devouring, if you're lucky, they've gone, left behind and forgotten. Old monsters and witches are just papier mache and left in the cupboard. Paper teeth after all. If you're lucky.
That sense of scattering, inexplicable because it's really just the same as any other Friday. But still the feeling that everyone, no matter how old they are, is leaving in a different direction. In my mind, it looks like a cheap TV crossfade, a double exposure making people vanish into the air like perfect ghosts. Then there's only the rolling fields under the sunlight, empty and the silence of a school when everyone's gone, not coming back, this year is over.
And we all became summer ghosts, closer to our own idea of ourselves than anyone else's, just for a little while longer. Six or seven weeks of misrule over our own hearts.
Some authors capture this moment beautifully. For example:
The Summer Birds - Penelope Farmer
A literal summer of liminal transformation, dreamlike and impossible. Not saying much more, but you'll be lucky to find a copy these days.
It - Stephen King
Despite what everyone thinks, it's not really about killer clowns. It's about those perfect/monstrous summers when you learned who you could be...and then forgot all about it when school came around again.
Shadowland - Peter Straub
Not sure why this doesn't get more attention. Cheap horror pulp cover, I guess. A twice told memory of a long lost surreal summer in magical hell, told by an unreliable trickster narrator, about how he came to be a wandering unreliable trickster narrator. "If you go through life with an unchipped heart, you won't get far."
I'm sure that there are classic literary examples. But I'm all cheap dime store magic and second hand horror stories and I think it's how I'm happiest.
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