this is M, M being menopause

from mosaic (4) by freda karpf

  Mrs. Scattergood wrote her sister that her characters were sometimes a mirror.  As were her friends.  As was her sister. When she isolated herself, or as she put it, imposed her psychic ghetto experience on herself she thought she had also shut down her feelings and gone, Conrad style, into the heart of self-sufficiency. But she hadn’t, except to momentarily convince herself that sharing a life was getting only half of something when the whole thing could be hers.  She told Claire that she slipped on that banana.  ‘This is why I come to you.  You can see through the charade and still love me.’

~

     Mrs. Scattergood was enjoying the pull that her memories had on her. Also their release. She wanted to get back to Telltale. She created a group called the Naughty New Agers.  At first to make fun of all that nonsense that swept through the world she inhabited. But then realizing that at least for the NNAs, as she called them, she was beginning to see them all as people on a palette.  Each one a young version of herself.  Except for one called Macy.  “Does Macy tell Gimbals?”  That’s her mother speaking, even naming her characters. Her Macy, even though she reminded her of her young self, was a discovery. A teacher will appear when you’re ready. Macy questions everything.  Her motives, her place in history and the people around her.  Mrs. Scattergood felt she was done with questions. ‘Now,’ she wrote Claire, ‘I’m full of questions when I used to be full of action.  Probably I was just full of it.  Strange effects of the weather?  Or as I see it, “this is M, M being menopause.’ 

~

     She told her sister, as if she didn’t know this already, that when she was younger she’d put blinders on and act so damned arrogant; as if she were always on the hunt.  In the bars, she wrote, “I acted as if I could step on the gas and peel out taking whoever I wanted.  The problem with the engine metaphor is that I know it’s no longer a power issue.  This is my life.  There’s more life lived than left.  I want something lasting.  These are the kind of changes the times have worked on me.  I’m changed by my changes.’ As if her sister didn’t know.

~

     Mrs. Scattergood mused as she rested her fingers on the keyboard while emailing Claire.  She remembered the delicious feeling of being one of the few people walking on the streets of Provincetown late at night. In early spring the neon store signs seemed both cool and hot. A perfect reflection for Mrs. Scattergood.  In the summer, the cool blue and green tones are such a contrast to the weather. They invite anticipation and complexity. She used to think, dents in the mattress. She wondered if we have to find reflection in another to understand our humanity.  What if everyone takes as long as she did for the right mirror to come along?  Her feelings toward her distant lover, what she referred to sometimes as her miss, near miss, not now miss, bounced around like a reflection on the water.

~

     Mrs. Scattergood sometimes felt that ability to partner was hardly established on this space-time continuum. But was she one to talk?  She hardly felt connected to the planet herself.  Her frequent mantra these days being “This is M,” was another way of saying everything had a sense of unreality about it.  Really, everything had a sense of not having a sense about it.  Was this the floating world of the Japanese wood block artist?  Mrs. Scattergood would quote her neighbor from the apartment complex in Newark. She would say that ‘Our arms empty but hearts full.’ Meaning we had someone in our lives but they were away and maybe that’s the way we could love them best. Mrs. Scattergood seemed to be playing a version of the Cat’s Cradle game herself.  Either reality or she would weave in and out of her desires for community and the world with what was there and not, with what she expected to take place and hoped would.  But she wasn’t playing Cat’s Cradle.  She knew she was just a thread, not the spinner.  She sighed and signed off from writing Claire.

~

     She had to stop and listen for a moment.  As if coherence would come from the effort.  She felt like she was on the beach with all the sounds moving around her, the usual soft sounds with the sometimes louder sounds of conversations all across a crowded beach popping in and out of her awareness.  Gulls, waves, shushing from the water, children and even the rustle of Sunday newspapers folded against the wind.  She recalled an overheard conversation from one day. A woman was talking about someone who was dying.  At first, Mrs. Scattergood couldn’t tell if it was a person or a dog that was dying. It was someone hanging on by a thread.  She overheard ‘arsenicum, an easy transition to death.’ Sometimes, Mrs. Scattergood realized, it’s not just the living that need help with the dying. 

going down the stony end

from mosaic (4) by freda karpf

Baubo recognized this state as well. She once slept on the ground not realizing that the pods stored for the spring were next to her. The pods started cracking, then exploding all around her, spraying their seeds like the chaotic dance of mayflies.  Even though it woke her from a beautiful dream, it was a relief to find the source of the seed shooter. Then she began to wonder what kind of dreams these plants have. The world is a strange and wondrous place.  Sometimes there is grace, inexplicable grace. Baubo knew that even Mrs. Scattergood’s memories of Jerry dying were spaced and even coupled by the incongruous joy she felt in the world.  

~

     Mrs. Scattergood was writing Telltale for the longest time before she realized that Leah’s search for her aunt Sarah was the same as her search for her mother.  Women don’t always recognize that they have a primal need to connect. “Hell,” Mrs. Scattergood thought, “I can’t even pronounce their names but when it comes right down to it, we can all take turns being Demeter or Persephone.” She became aware of the real nature of their story by telling the story. The next book, she nodded in agreement to herself, she would not explain the story until it was finished.  Then, god willing, she’d just let them read it.  This nested notion of writing a book, telling a book and explaining the book wasn’t for this Russian doll. 

~

     When she realized she was writing about her mother, it felt like looking for one’s glasses when they’re resting on your head. What we don’t know about the connections to our mother can fill an ocean.  She missed her mother something fierce. You could say it was a long time since Lena was gone but really what is the death of someone you love in terms of time?  Time, gravity, the magnetic force all seem like big things in this universe but it means nothing compared to this loss.  “So nu?” she would tell herself just to hear her mother’s Yiddish.  Her Yiddish was mostly a language of accents. She only knew phrases.  They were really just crumbs.   

~

    Sooner or later people seek their own kind no matter how much they want to be alone.  Mrs. Scattergood needed somebody.  People brought this unknown quality out in her.  She might never find peace with it but she accepted the need for the symbiotic relationship.  Way back when there were no flowers, there was no need for sex, seeds or unfertilized eggs.  No need for coupling or communities.  No need to tell the forest from the trees.  It was all green.  That’s all it needed to be.  But something twisted, turned, got corkscrewed into being and the world was sexed through the dispensation of seed.  The colors of the seasons formerly just a matter of decay were now a question of desire. Mrs. Scattergood could trace her life from the city to the shore and back to her cottage as a natural migration and evolution of her spirit.  It felt like time travel but roads and hazy destinations will do that to a person.

~ 

     When she was young she collected stones. She even managed to inherit some.  It wasn’t a simple feat.  Nobody seemed to inherit anything in her family.  Planned obsolescence, indifference to history?  Her relatives all used to being nomads, or a sense of impermanence tattooed on their souls?  She didn’t know, except that they never saved anything.  Kept the important stuff in their chromosomes she guessed.  It suited her.   Some of her stones were collected specimens with labels that she used to read as if they were fortunes. She always remembered her stones when she moved.  They were a part of her survival kit.  These were her weights.  A bit of the anchor she longed for in other areas. As much as she wasn’t always a child of nature she was the bearer of it. 

~

     Wherever she moved, she moved stones.  Had she acknowledged how much of a part of a community she was in this, she never would have felt alone.  So many people she knew and would meet carried and kept parcels of nature around them.  She hardly knew anyone who didn’t have a bowl of stones or shells in their home. Feathers all over the place.  What were the birds were left to wear?

~

     The tidal people would have to have sea glass.  Something old, something new, and something blue.  Blue sea glass, the prize of glass grazers.  The mixed world or the modern psyche, parcels of nature, nature changed and in strange combinations.  Mosaics.  Mosaic lives. Hers was taking on a very loose form.  It was stones coming with her through it all to the end.  The round of dust to dust wasn’t bone and hair, dried blood and semen.  It was stones.  Stones powdered down to a seeming, softer existence.  Stones shaped to travel.  Hand stones and worry stones.  Stones on a pedestal.  Stones now honored guests in the home.  The last word on permanence.  Stones, rocks, minerals, and crystal formations.  Time and pressure taking form out of formlessness and putting it into a material that could be smelted and thrown, powdered and powerful, stones, stones, stones, stones, stones.  Her last thoughts were of stones.  When she did find sleep, it was left up to the deep fingers of dawn to reach through the treetops to wake her from her storied, stony sleep.

Except from riding the waves:  a tale about being home in the world by freda karpf

she carried the sea with her

from mosaic (4) by freda karpf

  Do not give up all metaphors.  Though Mrs. Scattergood rather liked similes herself, she would be hard pressed to give you three reasons why they are different from metaphors. Some suspect that similes lack the nuts and bolts that make metaphors a more significant construction project.  Similes are less formal comparisons and can be used as a description rather than creating a parallel universe that the metaphor is intended to do. Similes are coated with a thin layer of grease if they are elegant similes and can slide into being far more simply than metaphors which require incubation and an elaborate birth ritual. 

     Eventually, metaphors become dials on the dashboard of your consciousness or switches that click.  Eventually, you get touch button controls; then just thoughts. Probably, eventually, you can reach through with your own hand into the deep well of a hologram. Your hand becomes an archetype with robes that are dimensions in time. And you can circle through all the strings of reality the physicists have found until you reach for the contact that is the god or goddess, the holy one, or grandmother, who is really the person you’ve always known when wisdom was a tide pool and you were a new life swimming, just swimming.  And the light and the shadows.  As Shakespeare might have someone sing, with a heigh and a ho.  What we focus on produces heat. Whether fire or foul, the worst that is fear or the energy that is beauty, depends.  It depends on everything going on that particular day. It’s about levels.  Loren Eiseley saw the entire history of the universe from the formation of the earth through to the earliest life forms, in a small puddle. Or you might have someone like Rachel Carson, knees still working, kneeling down over a tide pool watching all the life going on there in that little ecosystem. The water goes in and out pulsing with sounds and miniature currents.

~

     Thirty years ago scientists predicted that the depth and dimension of holograms would change the way we would store information.  Holograms will be the new sea deep and unexplored, with all possibilities, all levels.  Imagine shelves, closets, alcoves.  This new place where you reach in and pick up a starfish, just for a brief moment, to see its tubular feet searching for solid ground to move along.  But your hand is also deeper.  It also has more dimensions, more bodies, more territory unexplored.  Although you know it is your hand it is also an archetype. Archetypes are from way back and come along with their stories, gift of meanings layered and faceted, shining like the night sky, galaxy after galaxy. Suns and moons all over the place.  Many lives. All the languages.  All reaching with your hand into the tide pool.

~

     Mrs. Scattergood liked to think that she carried the sea with her.  She would dive in and the waters would meet.  Sea to ocean. Like recognizing like without a brackish water intermediate.  This is how some might describe desire met in that pool where identity swims round till the whirlpool comes and everything that is you slides down, merging, becoming the whirlpool – dissipating into another realm of being.

     Different people leave different messages, cause different structures to form depending on their need.  Whether duck paddled or boat engined.  Whether full moon or runoff.  The ebb and flow of the tide isn’t as symmetrical as Mrs. Scattergood first thought.  There’s a different tide each time but the coming and going remains the same.

Except from riding the waves:  a tale about being home in the world by freda karpf