“My heart is maneuvering in rings of trembling darkness and unreasonable echoes of over-thoughtfulness.” ~ Virginia Woolf, from Congenial Spirits: The Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf

“Hornbaek in Winter” (1891, oil on canvas)
by P. S. Krøyer

                  

“A sigh just isn’t a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.” ~ Salman Rushdie, from The Moor’s Last Sigh

Tuesday afternoon. Partly cloudy and warm, 69 degrees.

“Summer Evening at Skagen Beach” (1893, oil on canvas)
by P. S. Krøyer

Last night I dreamed about my father. We needed to buy nitroglycerine, not sure why. Corey, my mother, my father, and I went to an old-fashioned hardware store. The man who helped us told us that we needed to be very careful not to jostle the canister when transporting it, so my dad also bought a weird-looking cart in which to move the canister. My dad and mom went to get the car. My dad called and said to meet them at the school. There was no school anywhere near the hardware store. Corey and I were lugging around this heavy cart with the canister, and I was really worried about moving it so much because I had seen what the nitro could do. The hardware store’s manager had poured a little bit around a door knob and the wood around the doorknob melted.

When we didn’t see my dad and mom, we went back inside the store. Then my dad called and wanted to know where we were, why we weren’t at the school. I told him that we couldn’t find the school. He got really mad and started yelling at me over the phone, and I heard my mother in the background telling him to calm down. Corey and I went back outside to see if we could see them. They were across the street in my dad’s old Falcon, and when I looked again, my dad was punching my mother (nothing like this ever happened in real life). I ran up to my dad and grabbed him from behind. My mother said that he was beating her because he was mad at me. Suddenly, we were in the middle of the street, and traffic was all around us. Then the dream ended.

“Heart on fire, ashes everywhere
— there’s no return from a red like that.” ~ Manuel de Freitas, from “Fado Menor,” trans. Richard Zenith

My mother still has the ability to make me feel like a six-year-old just by uttering four words: “Don’t lie to me.” This was an oft-heard phrase when I was growing up, and it has continued well into adulthood. As an only child, I was blamed for anything that happened, and very often for things that didn’t happen. Example: My mother once had me in tears by accusing me of flushing a bottle of nail polish down the toilet. I hadn’t done such a thing, and it never would have occurred to me to do such a thing.

“Sea at Skagen” (1882, oil on canvas)
by P. S. Krøyer

Today, she pulled into the driveway behind the Rodeo and wanted to know who had banged up the car. “There’s a big one on the front and one on the back.”

I told her that there were no new dents, that the one on the front had rust on it  because it had been there so long, had been there when I got the Rodeo, to which she responded, “Don’t lie to me.”

I wasn’t lying. I don’t lie. I’m not a liar. I felt sick to my stomach.

“The past beats inside me like a second heart.” ~ John Banville, from The Sea

“Summer Night on the South Beach at Skagen” (1893, oil on canvas)
by P. S. Krøyer

My friend Mari asked me in an e-mail what I’ve been doing. I responded with the following:

What am I doing? Thinking about how I used to say to myself that May Sarton didn’t start writing professionally until she was in her 50’s, and that was the perfect excuse. What’s my excuse now? I try to post something every day on my blog. On days that writing is just too hard, I usually resort to something from Jon Stewart or a single poem. I started two novels during NaNoWriMo, but failed to finish either of them. I dream in French sometimes, and I still write poems in that time between sleep and wakefulness, only to forget them entirely before I can write them down. I dream about my few friends, now scattered across the country, and I imagine lives for them since I am miserable about keeping in touch. I bought GRE prep materials so that I could take the GRE this year and apply to GW’s PhD program by January of next year. I wonder if I’ll really do that.

What am I doing?

Nothing.

“and I am only nerves, strung on constellations,
meridians and vectors quivering.” ~ Cynthia Huntington, from “Meds”

I began this post three hours ago. In between I’ve played stick with Tillie and finished reading a book that I started yesterday. I wonder if I have anything to say. I wonder if I ever have anything to say. I wonder why anyone would care what I have to say. I wonder what the point is, the point to this blog, the point to me.

“Painting on the Beach at Stenbert” (1889, oil on canvas)
by P. S. Krøyer

What am I, not who, but what? Am I doomed to be stuck in replay mode forever, that same track over and over again, the one in which I pine over the future that is not and bemoan the fates over the now that is?

I told Corey that I think my brain is full of holes, and I do. My mother thinks she might have early Alzheimer’s, and then she tells me that I’m just as bad at remembering things, so as usual, I take her words to heart, and I think, “my brain must be full of holes because I cannot remember things.” And is this post yet another attempt to dissect the person that is my mother, to try to see past her words into her DNA, the strands that define her, as if in so doing I might finally begin to understand.

No. I will never understand.

“Oh, my friend sometimes the realization runs through my head that I am actually living a supremely dangerous life: for I belong among those machines that can explode! I can’t emphasize that strongly enough. The intensities of my feeling make me shudder and laugh aloud.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, from Selected Letters

My friend Mari’s father died in February after a long illness. We both loved our daddies, but I would not say that we were “daddy’s girls,” or perhaps we were. Who knows. My father, when he comes to me in dreams, is always different, as in each dream is different, and I wonder if I’ve forgotten who he was. I don’t think so. But when I dream of family members, it’s always the past; everyone is younger, like my cousins who aren’t really my cousins—when I dream about the females in the family, they are always young, like they were when I used to care for them in the summers. And one other strange recurring theme: I am always very close to my male cousin, the only male with four sisters. In my dreams, we are always very, very close. We can tell each other anything.

“Summer Evening” (1908, oil on canvas)
by P. S. Krøyer

My dreams are my past, replaying itself, unfolding in different ways. I rarely dream of future selves, either the past or now, alternative nows. But my father is in my dreams much more than my mother. I suppose my dreams are my way of maintaining those connections that in real life have faded into pale, almost transparent threads, from lack of work, lack of maintenance, which doesn’t actually make sense because on a woven blanket or on a quilt, those areas that fade the fastest are the ones that are touched the most.

So does this mean that because I touch these people so often in my dreams, then the imaginary quilt is fading?

I have not answers, only far too many questions today. No answers. No defining moments. Only standing on the porch hugging my arms close to my body, trying not to let a single tear escape as my mothers says, “Don’t lie to me.”

More later. Peace.

All images by Peder Severin Krøyer, Danish painter known as prominent member of Skagen painters

Music by Maggie Eckford, “What If”

                   

Today It Seemed I Had Nothing to Say

that hadn’t been said already—
my head full of moldy
hay and feelings
of futility—

until you asked me
what it was like, for a change,
to have no barred owl
brooding above the barn,

and so I went stealing again,
softly, softly
up the worn wood loft ladder,
hoping to startle up
a glimpse of something

that even now might heft
itself lightly through the mouth
of the mow, and drift just
out of view, off-levelly,
all hollow and feather pillow,

folding and unfolding
and folding itself silently into
the forest where its terrible
utility moves like a shudder
over every living thing.

~ Todd Boss

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