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.