Throw Out the Thoreau, Take Up the Gabaldon

On an evening not too long ago, Mr. Narcy, in a very un-Austen-esque manner, declared that he needed to learn Self-Reliance. He had been buffeted between cultures, languages and different men, and ultimately, which relationship is the most important? The one he has with that little gerbil turning the wheel inside, the one that IS the wheel.

As Maura traverses the corners of the home in which she grew up, as she sometimes ventures out into her old town, she remembers many a night, during the last year she lived there, spent awake, tormented over the state of things, tormented because she wanted so much more than her daily life provided her. She was raised with images of happiness, of love, and rarely with expressions of the thing itself. So to help herself fall asleep, she used to listen to one Oirish singer, she read the tales of her people, to create new images--images of self-reliant women she would become, to take her away from everything in that old town.

Once she moved, those images seemed false, perhaps because there was more of the thing itself in her daily life, sometimes painfully so, ironically evoking the older times she once thought were so simple, but were, in fact, never simple. In lieu of these images, she found herself connecting to people--a far more dangerous thing, but a far more worthwhile effort, in her mind.

But the years have only taught Maura that years necessarily mark the cutting of the ties that bind us--not forever, but at least temporarily and again, painfully. Is this how we sail through life? If we are wise, we sew ourselves to others, only to have the strings cut, seemingly only so that the Master Marionette can sardonically laugh and remind us of the most important relationship of all--the one we have with ourselves, regardless of what the "self" means to you.

Last night, Maura was again in the same bed, a bed which somehow evokes thoughts of fear, separation, and a life half-lived, lived only in the slow passing of images. But she reached for another image, perhaps in a different vein this time--she pulled up a story from one of her favorite master storytellers, telling history, perhaps for Mr. Narcy, somewhat simplistically.

After a few pages, she was reminded of the only lesson she might be able to clean from this object which possesses her mind at night--the cold virginal bed, sweating under the pressure of too much down comforting, holding someone that is perhaps none of these things. Maura has been learning more about Object Lessons through Woolf and Boland, and perhaps this bed is only useful to evoke the lesson she should have learned from years spent in it--years of fevers, nightmares, gentle sleep, day-dreaming, early morning reading, the bed where things fell apart and maybe, someday, will come back together. Perhaps the only useful part of this image is that Maura is in it on her own. Mr. Narcy and the Other feel the weight of an empty bed, but through it also comes the very idea that Mr. Narcy sought--self-reliance.

We've already been practicing it for years--guess it's just time to stretch the muscle a little further.

The Little-Ass Bird Sings

Now that the summer days are through, we do indeed pass through places, and I look to the soles of these traveling shoes, and wonder, where we've come, where we are. Blame it on Jimmy and his constant desire to circumambulate the feckin town he loved and left so well, but thoughts of travel have been flooding my mind lately. These thoughts push forward, wanting the pen to take them down, but as Edna O'Brien once said, "Writing is like carrying a fetus." So I must tread lightly, find the right nutrients and promise a good name for protection on the playground. Now, I tread into the first person, because, after all, it doesn't hurt Maura to let a few Others in every now and again in the Levinasian epiphany.

As of late, I have been working on the epiphany story--what it means, what it does, how one does it. (Yes, you all think Jimmy is the only real writer, but hell, the little fecker got most of his wordplay from me anyways. You think a Dubliner would know those things about the sea? Scrotum-tightening, he said. Hmph. He twisted that from a sheela-na-gig-esque comment I mighta made) The wise souls to whom I have been looking for advice on writing have told me to consider the epiphanies I have had in my own life. Aside from the annual celebrations of those fierce kings with their gifts, those magic or magi ones, I dunno, I can only think of one recent realization that necessarily changed the shape of my summer, and it was entirely swept up with Story.

The night before I left Dublin, I wandered to our old place on the Liffey--a place where The Other and myself have left various...aspects of ourselves, a place lit only by traffic lights and car brights, a place a bit too close to the actual waters of the Liffey to ensure any sense of cleanliness. As I sat there, tipsy on the red wine and cigarettes I'd been consuming, feeling sweet off the last good dark chocolate I've have since then, grief stricken over a sudden onslaught of personal emotions I'd been feeling, I thought about the summer before, where I'd sat with The Other, weaving our the stories of years past and future to each other. As I lit the last cigarette I'd smoke on Irish soil, and thanks be to god, on any soil (heh, sorta), I suddenly knew the only way I could return to Amerikay with any sense of wholeness. I had to write a story.

For most of this past summer, I had been writing and re-writing the same story of my life, knowing it to the point where it was more Hail Mary than Nicene Creed (the fecker is long ladies). It included certain characters, and I thought they were necessary. It included certain habits, which seemed defining. It included an outlook. But in that moment, by the Liffey, I realized that I could write another story, and it would be just as true, if not more so.

Robert McKee says the power of the story, the necessity for a story, comes from the fact that humans can only process, nay, experience the power of their emotional and psychological urges through art. In the moment one witnesses death, in the moment one feels or inflicts severe pain, emotions and thoughts are a muddle. But in art, these are united, and the viewer, the listener, feels the enormity of the truth, the beauty.

I remember a certain conversation, held on one chilly playground with the Lightening Rod, where I discussed the importance of a need to create, a need to express oneself, a need to do something new so as to ensure true life--life lived in the present. Well, the present isn't as pretty as it has been the past few months, in tree-top house overlooking the city lights, where the call of the train whistle threatens to call me away again and again. It's darker here, there's more static noise in those energy sucking news boxes, funny faces pop up here and there as I slip through town, ridiculously clad in black on a bicycle with the loudest breaks ever not-oiled by an Irishman. The tea party tempts us, and I constantly consider slipping off to a nearby airport or BART station to visit the Mad Hatter and Alice.

But here I must be. So it's time folks--let's write a new story for this year. And start to believe it, for once. I've always loathed the celebration of the last day of the previous year--maybe it's time for us to raise our glasses to something new, a something of complete uncertainty, of complete tipsiness, a complete acceptance that the Postmodern Experience is IN FACT Life Lived on LSD.

Edna O'Brien once said, “When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.”

What else are we, ye three wise medieval drag queens? Let's prove her right.

Breaking the Monster's Back

‘Where are you going with those flowers in your hair?’

Where is Maura going with those flowers in her hair? The electrician hanging upside down from the scaffolding posed this question tonight, after Maura spent another Day of Rest teaching wide-eyed Katie Couric want-to-bes about subject-predicate constructions. (Mr. Narcy’s bullet-laced prose is beginning to feel like a warm blanket in comparison.) Maura could feel The Almighty stirring the clouds, mixing the thunder, pondering whether the newspaper’s resident Catholic should be allowed to keep getting away with so many philosophical protestations against the need for weekly mass. But after ending last week with two intense discussions about the point in life she is going to start having those 15 womb-benders, since apparently it is something like deciding when she is going to prison in this Solzhenitsynian universe constructed as of late, she has been considering—where is the dear muse going?

She both loathes and lives on the idea of teleology. But it always begs the question (not logically) about where she’s been, where the entire trinitarian ensemble has been. One thing is certain—they are moving away from this role of the muse, this static position ironically mixed up with longing, a desire for a home, the need for endless self-aggrandizement.

Maura’s trail has been has been charted out, in part, on these pages. The Maura who returned to the dark Galway of her youth is no longer here. The tone, currently a bit more somber, reflects a journey of sorts. A journey that Mr. Narcy and The Other viewed only through late night skype calls, drink-induced Facebook messages and ragged marks on paper, blurred from those rainy nights when Maura thought it was a good idea to light a cigarette from her electric burner and proceed to smoke out her kitchen window. They all viewed their journeys in tiny snippets, marking the characters with epithets so that The French boy, the B.A. Fiction boy and even the boyfriends all seemed like slim caricatures of their true selves. Because all sense of self had been questioned, pushed and maybe even erased.

Now, Maura sits atop a green house full of emotional girls, a veritable whorehouse, where Saturday evening dance marathons shake the neighborhood. She is writing, watching The Other convince the public of the need for social change, with tea in her whiskey, a concoction brought on by The Other’s dangerous rhetorical powers. (Watch out for her exquisite use of silence and the non-look.) Maura sits here and thinks about the journeys the Trinity has been on, what they’ve learned from them.

She went on a few different journeys this summer—one to the one place where all questions of identity and belonging seem obsolete, a place that strips her Romantic longing down to the bare-bones collegiate pretension that it probably is, a place Mr. Narcy rightly notes may someday trap her forever with its barnacle hands. But there were other journeys—coasting out of the bleach-blonde world where sparks flew—the electrical sort—perhaps dangerously, and thus necessarily so, then dragging The Other back to this land of rain and unclear coastlines. The journey was rough—the mixture of new cities, un-sensitively selected Irish music and the desire for more whiskey and beer brought on a maelstrom of tears as the female di-umverate entered each new northern city.

But now the gang’s all here. Mr. Narcy and The Other both recently remarked that they never quite understood the homesick—thus, they never quite understood the perhaps somewhat stubborn one sitting across from them, demanding inspiration and guilt-inducing means of procrastination. Maura never longed for her place of birth, but rather for that place where Romantic longing takes on new meaning.

But the cost of too many journeys can be high—the wanderer never settles, never attaches. Maura only discovered her attachment to Mr. Narcy and The Other when they left. Now, they are here, and all planning their next flight off this boiling hot continental U.S. (The land of beach-blonde film stars is hardly the U.S., more like a non-world that can only be entered when one is armed with a militaristic Narcy-esque goal.)

And yet, maybe for the first time in her life, Maura is not yet itching to leave. Despite tiring of the way in which skinny jeans seem to tighten the scrotums and brains of many of her fellow students, the local dislike of outsiders and The Other and Maura’s inability to be ethereal and flighty enough, Maura must be here, at least for now. Here, geographically, and here, in a sense the Czech philosopher can translate. The Trinity will never be children again, but the joy of a child, the magic of a child, lies in the child’s complete inability to conceive the importance of the past or the future. They are entirely in this moment, this moment where Maura and The Other must cram 5 Chinese girls into Maura’s sex-on-wheels-mobile to find them a proper hotel and give them advice on dating American men. (Clearly they do not understand why Maura and The Other keep fleeing the continental U.S.) The moment when Mr. Narcy stuffs Maura with orgasm-inducing doughnuts after three hours of sleep and a Bon-Ap caffeine high that would put Starbucks’ marketing team to shame, only to stand in Costco’s freezer, debating the merits of different local, organic and oh so eco-friendly mushrooms while Maura searches for whiskey, only to remember that this lovely state does not allow the sale of liquor in grocery stores.

Snow hasn’t yet hit their city, inciting the endless playlists of The Commitments and Joanie Mitchell, the longing for darks ends of the street and rivers that make the Atlantic look like mere puddle in the crossing. But when it does, Maura, The Other and Mr. Narcy will once again feel the pull—the pull back to the cottage where questions of French salonieres, Apocalyptic fervor and depictions of Irish female corporality and their implications for silenced sexuality were all that seemed to matter.

But there is a reason that the triumverate is still here. Here they must remain, forever. Geography an accident, here the station.

Van the Man is breaking the current silence, telling Maura something probably far wiser than her own musings:

“If my heart could do my thinking and my head begin to feel, I could look upon the world anew, and know what’s truly real.”