from
the sea (5) – merging and menopause, by freda karpf
“Drifting
where the currents carry them, with no power or will to oppose that of the sea,
this strange community of creatures and the marine plants that sustain them are
called ‘plankton,’ a word derived from the Greek, meaning ‘wandering.’”
Rachel Carson
“Desire
recognizes beauty.”
James Hillman
Desire is not all it cracked up to
be. If Mrs. Scattergood could speak for
herself, she’d tell you that. She still has a desire for home. Though circumstances may delay her and her
inner compass might be off, she is moving in the direction of home. Desire has
become something wholly other than what she would have expected. Before there was desire there always was this
hunger for home. But that is to anticipate the journey, for when desire was
born of our sex and sexes home always was the direction.
~
If she could, in this world, with these
governances, she would write from what she knew out toward the edge of the wilderness. Though at the cottage, not in the wild her
soul is that too. Long chains of silence surround Mrs. Scattergood as she stirs
the soup. It’s all in the wrist. She
thinks, “If I had a magic lantern and three wishes, one wish would be for
clarity.” Clarity is mountain air for
the brain; a Peruvian flute song coming through subway stations spilling onto
the street. She crowded her head with
internal conversations, longing, and who knows what else. Clarity dispels fear. Fear is only dangerous
when it agrees with you as you go down the spiral. Then it becomes your worst
enemy. Fear fused with gravity will pull you down. You are not defined. You
lose yourself.
~
All she needed to do was stir the
soup. She remembered what she was like
when she was younger. Apparently you give birth to yourself and then discover
the miracle later in life. When she was
younger, despite the mirror curves on top and below, she liked to think of
herself as an androgyne. What can you
say? She was ahead of her time. There was no open discussion of sexuality in
those days never mind the wider spectrum of possibilities and shifts into the
bodies that made folks feel coherent with their inner selves. There was no shifting but there was this
interior world with its own realities and gravity where she was a successful
actress or cowboy or artist of mysterious skills but really, really good at
whatever it was that she was good at.
Some part of her psyche, she would call her Quanta, was her personal
cheerleader. They worked well together
and the confirmation of her being by a tender, young but smart part of herself,
served her well when times were thin on role models and the world was
analog.
~
She couldn’t remember why they had their
names but she recalled writing this conversation about what living was like
when those you love have died. Quanta would ask Vector questions. Vector was
another part of Mrs. Scattergood’s psyche. He was a young artist; also
androgynous; and he was able to communicate in images and collages better than
speech. Quanta followed Vector
around. He didn’t mind. He respected
her. Quanta asked Mrs. Scattergood,
“What do you need to move on?” She knew
that she needed hope. Without that she
was sunk, she’d say. But Vector needed
interest. He needed to know what he
didn’t know so that he could move towards that place with a sense of
wonder. Quanta liked that he needed
wonder; knew that she needed something different; and she got it, Mrs.
Scattergood needed hope. Hope sometimes looks like a white canvas life
preserver, sometimes like an abstract painting with places you can enter.
~
As she imagined the young parts of her
psyche, she also imagined the old. They took the form of an old couple. In the Gartens, she saw two old people who
were mobile, hungry for more life, rebels against the slotted life of seniors
in their day, moving out, not telling their children where they were going for
fear of closure on their dreams. They wanted to find what was next. She called
them the Gartens because they remembered the Garden of Eden where new life was
devoid of stale categories. In Mrs.
Scattergood’s mind the Gartens were on the move and defied the hardest thing a
person could in their day, the strong pull back of the wave of assumptions that
old people had to live with in the days they occupied.
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