A Tarot Story

Art by me. Lyric (in red) by Crowded House.

My Morning In Pictures

#METOO

Taking it back. Rising.

At the Halfway

from my Art Journal today

I found a mirror the other day that had something peculiar about it.

It had my mother's face in it.

It was strange because it had always been an ordinary mirror, and puzzled, I stared back at my mom.

There's a part of growing up no one ever tells you about. Of course we hear, "I'm turning into my parents!" (said with shock and awe by adults somewhere along in their lifelines), but nobody ever says what this means, or how it feels.  They never say just who their parents are, other than insinuating what their parents are. "Dad is so stubborn!" Or, "Mom was always complaining," or whatever, but there is no distinct acknowledgement of how that became so. Who did your parents THINK they were? Better yet, how did you become them? That's the question that needled me when I stared with surprise at my mother's face in the ordinary bathroom mirror. Not "Who am I?" but "Who am I supposed to be?" But maybe "supposed to" are the wrong words for this.

I'm talking about an identity, and a rather fragile one (how could I know it would be that adjective in particular?) that glances in a mirror to find someone older, wiser, and not exactly familiar. Because identities are shapeshifters, emotional lycanthropes.

When I was young, I spent years building myself like a pack of cards: Queens up top, near the head; spades for hands; hearts for blood; diamonds for eyes; clubs (of course!) for feet; and jokers--garish and raw--for the middle. I schooled myself to wear them out, like a good pair of boots. I stuffed their faces into the cul-de-sac of my psychology. I practiced well.

When you're young, there are plenty of people to worship. "That's who I want to be," you'll say. "That's who I'd be if I was clever enough to think of it myself." Role models, I guess you'd call them. There's nothing wrong with them. They help you out, as though they are the expectant fire you are going to cook the clay of yourself in. As though when it is finished you'd be hardened into yourself, unequivocally and decidedly A Person.

This was all fine for me. I had a rag tag team of Personalities to choose from, and they cruised past my eyes every so often with the word "cool" drying on their lips. But it took forever for them to come and I thought it would take the same forever to sail away from me.

Then I became, somehow and inexplicably, Older. I solidified (just as I thought I would, though unexpectedly and without the urgency) into an Adult. When I looked over my years, fingering them like pearls from the deep sea of my experience, they had smoothed out and glided on-- not past me, but back in that other direction I no longer had access to. They were full of movement back to Youth, and it was like a betrayal. I was a jilted lover, helpless among a mountain of paper cards that were defaced and undignified. They covered my feet in the snow of themselves, the powdered somnambulism of Age.

Now directionless, I'm faced with the silence (deep and brooding) of middle age. There are no unworried role models for this phase. All the likely candidates are concerned about Grown Up Things that seem to spread out from them like a stain. They have families and children and responsibilities and houses and house payments and PTA meetings and AA meetings and a whole host of things that just generally distract them from who they've become...until their parents appear in the bathroom mirror. These whirlpools of worries jack knife the vessel of time, sending us Adults askew from the wonder we once licked from our fingers with the greed for adventure we were tacitly taught to follow.

No one in their right thinking says, "It begins again right here, in your fifth decade," but when that ugly halfway place rises up to meet your eyes, it strikes you hard (and so quickly you almost miss it). It leaves marks and lines that always seem to gather around your mouth and under your chin, puckering your skin as if age were a lemon.
The opened up feeling leaves you.
The tight pull of the future slackens and holding its rope is harder;
the coils of it are heavier;
the braid frays out into greyish uncertainty.
Your grip becomes merely a doubt.

It's not that wonder dies. You still have that inside you, but you lose a sense of who you are "supposed to" be. (There's those words again.) People congratulate you on your passage through The Worst of It, but their words seem petty and lackluster. Words like "responsible" crinkle like parchment, as though their venerable secrets wither up under the thumbprint of time. And words like that pop up like weeds, without permission. How did you come by them? And how can you hope to undo their finality?

If you're reading this and you're younger than say, 40, I'm giving you a head's up here. You have plenty of role models and guide posts around you to instruct you on how to perform your role in society, even if it's a role of revolt or dissent. For those of us in our middle age and onward, there are very few. Part of it is this culture that insists on worshiping youth and beauty and the pursuits of happiness therein. After the mid-line, we are a generation of mid-life crises. And it's no wonder. Where we were going when we were young is where we are now. There's no signpost up ahead with a gnarled wooden finger to show you what's next.

All you'll get is your mother's face in the mirror.

The Movie That Weighed a Ton

Tonight Mom and I watched "Montage of Heck", a documentary about Kurt Cobain.

They did a good job of capturing the hopelessness of Generation X. It is a time period I remember all too well. It is the generation I am a part of. 

And Kurt Cobain was a good example of how fed up we were, and for some unknowable reason I want to talk about it. Maybe because I see young hipsters trying to recreate a scene they know very little--if anything--about. (Worse, globbing on to music they know nothing about.) I want to talk about how it felt back then, which is different than it feels now. Frustration is typical for any generation of teenagers, but the vibe I get from the emerging "Millennials" is of a different sort. I'd like to put Gen X's particular frustration into words, if only to define it for myself. 

The problem I'm running into is that my view might be skewed by my own mental illness, which was diagnosed around the same time Cobain ate a bullet: 1994. So, maybe all of what follows is being said because just *I* felt that way. I've never had the occasion to be anyone else, though, so just bear with me. Hear me out. 

I was not the only kid I knew in the 90's to land in a mental hospital, and what I'm talking about has nothing to do with schizophrenia. Kids in the 90's were sent to mental hospitals (though we weren't institutionalized in any sense) the way kids before us were sent to summer camp. We were not kids, we were "problems." [I see loads of youngsters today with a myriad diagnoses and frustrations, but we were the first generation to be treated that way. The difference was we weren't coddled over it; we weren't even told certain meds would make us better. We were left on the doorstep of disappointments and left there. We were dismissed.] 

The way I remember it, we were all seen as delinquents. We were told we would never amount to much and most of us didn't give enough of a crap over it to prove anyone wrong. But (in the grand tradition of adolescence), we were angry. We were a disenfranchised generation. We had nothing to rally behind. We didn't have the Vietnam War, or the Great War, or the "silent majority" to topple. We were (or at least we felt) INVISIBLE. We were forgotten too easily, our struggles overlooked.

So our music got loud. And it got raw. And it got lazy, too. Cobain often went out on stage in his pajamas (I believe he was married in them too). [Oh gawd, and look how all the kids today have taken this on!] But it wasn't just that we were lazy, we were in protest: we stopped dressing up; we stopped showing up; out of rebellion, we gave up. We all felt like nobodies, so we acted like nobodies. (Maybe that's the reason for all those "beautiful loser" songs that came out of that era.)

[See: "Jeremy" by Pearl Jam. See: "The Nobodies" by Marilyn Manson. See: "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by (you guessed it) Nirvana.]

And I had forgotten all of this until I watched Montage of Heck. If you're old enough to remember news footage of Cobain's coma in Rome, if you're old enough to remember playing The Cure's "Disintegration" on the auto-reverse option on your Walkman, if you're old enough to remember Perry Ferrell's humanitarian awards, if you're old enough to have cared about ANY of this, please give the film a watch. I'll warn you, though: it's a trip down a rough memory road, and it weighs a ton.

Sue's 5 Favourite Books of 2015

Facts: Books are my meals.
They sustain me, they keep me healthy.

I've been on a reading jag and I know you like to read, so I'll share the best of my meals with you. I sifted through a few piles from last year, the tastiest morsels. I want to feed you with them if you are still hungry from that last book you read; if you can't stand the common fair of the Big Mac Book variety; if twaddle such as Twilight and 50 Shades bore your taste buds as much as they bore mine; if you care to sample the words that would be gods if they were so inclined.

Here is a Hand-Picked-From-The-Apple-Tree-of-Eden alphabetical list of my 5 favourites from what I read last year (Behold! This year isn't over yet!). I started out with 15, then whittled it to 10, and then decided 5 would do for blog reading. I even put them in alphabetical order for you.

1. The Glass Teat, by Harlan Ellison
Essays and criticisms of television that are in turn maddening and hilarious, eye-opening and infuriating, but mostly just terribly sad. These essays are depressing in the way only non-fiction can be depressing: when it tells us the awful and inconvenient truth about ourselves. The saddest part? Nearly 50 years after it was written we television addicts, we glass teat suckers, still have not learned our lesson. It reminds me a bit of Billie Holiday's 1939 version of "Strange Fruit." She was singing it and no one was listening, and Baltimore and Chicago (and now Dallas) continue to riot and rage. So pay attention.

2. The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin
The easiest way to get the hungry masses to eat a meal of their own self-loathing is to write an expose about them in impossible terms. Most don't realise science fiction is about us, just removed enough from our reality to set us thinking without revolting against what we've just consumed. If LeGuin had set her equality-bent story of feminism and brotherly--yes, brotherly--love in a place we all knew and had taken for granted, she would've been tarred and feathered by Billy Joe Cleetus somewhere (who still flies his Confederate flag), never mind the flavourful poetry of her words. The world is not safe with LeGuin writing, and we wouldn't have it any other way.

3. Legion, by Brandon Sanderson
Okay, this is a short story, but if Sherlock Holmes had been a schizophrenic, wouldn't you want to read about him and his strange intellect even more?
(A friend of mine wondered how true to schizophrenic experience it was and he asked me to read it. I can say (and did say) that it comes very, very close... if only I was enough of a genius to compartmentalize my knowledge and voices in this way.)

4. Tonio Kroeger, by Thomas Mann
This is indeed the "plastic irony of the writer's craft," as Mann himself put it. It's a fictional account of how one can criticise a culture and still remain a participant in it. A story of how an artist can manipulate his creation, and is a living example of doing so at the same time. I wish my words could maintain this kind of clarity while still retaining their poetry.

5. Resurrection Man, by Sean Stewart
I first read Resurrection Man in my early college years, and it is one of my favourites (not just of Stewart's, but of many many pieces). I reread it (again) last year--out loud, to a friend--and the re-visitation reminded me why Sean Stewart is one of the few I lovingly collect for my shelves. Like Ellison (mentioned above), Stewart skips over genres like a flat stone over water. The fantasy of it is a lot like John Crowley's Little, Big, but is perhaps a few shades darker. If you like John Crowley or Charles DeLint, or just urban fantasy in general, check this guy out. The wit and the atmosphere will captivate you.

Enjoy your reading (whatever you read)!
If you have suggestions for me too, I'd love to hear them in the comments.

A Ramble About SomethingOrOther

My always divided attention has turned to books. 

Even though my last post landed in this verdant little internet hillside over a year ago, poems and short fictions have bled from my pen as well. (I've been sharpening the nib to catch the most of its dark reserve and I'm finding bits of me along the way like clumps in the salve, like flies in the ointment. I've put a handful of them into a small collection (which may be soon, but it may be late), and there will be more on that later.)

Where was my much divided attention again? Oh yes! On books. 

Much of what I read goes unattended on this blog--most of it is fluff. I do enjoy good literature and some precariously balanced poetry, but most of what I get lost in are fantastical bits of Never Could Happen. You know, the wonderful, whimsical nonsense that is an easy pleasure to devour. (Neil Gaiman, I'm looking at you.)

A few weeks ago, I ventured to the local used bookstore with a friend from Austin. I usually beeline to the science fiction and fantasy aisles. (And I have an uncanny knack for finding them, though that's gotten easier these days with its resurgence in popular culture. Neil Gaiman, I'm still looking at you.) But my pal steers me into an alcove just before I hit my target. He tugs at my sleeve, leading the way, until we are in the middle of the music shelves. 

My friend is a musician. He plays the drums. 

If you know any musicians, you know that music colours their whole world, as if its patina of rhythm softens the blow of their reality. My friend is like that. It makes up most of our conversations, and he's the only reason I know of bands like "Folk Uke" and "The Hold Steady". So he reaches for a book and hands it to me. I look at the cover, and The Soloist, by Steve Lopez looks back. "Wondered what you'd think of that," he says. His eyebrows raise. I read the back cover, which informs me it is a true story about a schizophrenic and his journey through "the redemptive power of music" (or somesuch). My interest is piqued, and I take it home and read it.

I have to congratulate Steve Lopez on sticking to the point in his narrative (because I can't), even though his point is self-aggrandizing and misguided. It's not really a book about healing through music. It's about the author "rescuing" a man who did not ask to be rescued...with some music thrown in. Mr. Lopez doesn't take much time to question his friend with schizophrenia about what he really wants, or what would make him happy. He just plows over whatever is actually making his friend happy and substitutes those things with what Mr. Lopez ASSUMES everyone must surely want: a house, friends, money. You know, The American Dream. What he does ask himself about his friend's situation revolves around how Mr. Lopez can make himself feel better about this planet Earth we live on, where mental illness and poverty are rampant. The book is a long-winded and irritating pat on the back from the author, to the author.

See, the book claims to be about Mr. Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, a musical prodigy whose life at Julliard was interrupted by the onset of a severe mental illness. But no. The book is all about Mr. Steve Lopez, The Man Who Saved  Someone At Great Cost To Himself.

And don't worry about that last part getting by you. He reminds the reader at least once a chapter that his investment in Nathaniel Ayers has put oh so many strains on his home and business life. Here's the problem: he is the one who approaches Nathaniel Ayers; he is the one with an unhealthy need to "fix" Mr. Ayers's situation; he is the one who lets himself get upset when things don't go his way.  Sure, the mentally ill are stigmatized and thrown out of society, with the added burden of carrying around a separate reality no one can relate to, but does it really help--in light of accepting that this reality is very different--to pigeonhole others into what we believe is best for them without asking, or pausing to consider that not everyone needs that "Normal" label?

I have schizophrenia, and I can tell you for damn certain that the things that make me happiest are not considered "Normal", or even "Sane". Happiness is specific to each person, and who are we to judge?

Nathaniel Anthony Ayers loved living outside, with no walls to contain him. He enjoyed possessing nothing anyone would consider taking from him. He just wanted to play music, out in the open air, but not for you or me or us or Mr. Lopez. He wanted that patina of rhythm that softens the blow of reality, and he wanted it only for himself.

If you choose to read this Steaming Pile of Steve Lopez, please do, but ask yourself just who he thinks he is to enforce his idea of happy onto someone else. Ask yourself who you think you are. Ask why we (Americans, mostly) feel everyone should conform to our consensus reality of what makes Happy in the first place.

And then ask yourself what makes you happy.
And then follow that.