"He said to me once that most of the time people use the word love as just another way to show off they're hungry." --Colum McCann
If Maura is lucky, she could, within the next six months, be off to the North, to finally embark on the journey she has needed for some time now. If there was a train that left tonight, she might board it. And yet, the image of this room comes back to her. In this room, there were ordinary things, daily things, daily pressures and sadnesses and hurts. And a tree, encasing them from the rain, snow, sun, letting their stillness last. Sitting at the top of the city now, hearing her own breathing, loud and sharp, Maura wants the ordinary, is entrenched in the ordinary and yet isn't seeing it.
Mary Black says she doesn't want to fall in love again, he's living in a glass jar. Maura is wondering what it would be like to look from inside a glass jar.
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.
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.
‘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.”
At this moment when Maura, Narcissus and The Other have an extended break from the world of academia, some of them are currently in towns that bespeak past memories, and in the case of Maura, maybe even past identities, which led her to wonder...if identity is not merely just composed of interactions with others...is it also composed of landscapes? And moreoever, can it be utterly dependent on interactions with certain others?
Currently, as Maura plans to pack up her traveling case to come visit the arid lands of her dear friend she has lately been heavily entrenched in the dry, crisp air, torrential downpours and sunny days that constitute the land in which she grew up. While entrenched in this land, thoughts of the past, and of past individuals with which she had seminal interactions, Maura has found herself missing her Jimmy, not merely for the more obvious reasons, but also because it seems as though living up to her best potential as an individual is greatly aided by Jimmy's presence.
When Maura left her seaside hometown (both the historical Maura and the metaphorical one), she left behind individuals who did not wish her absence. But with stubborn focus, Maura insisted until she realized and moved forward with a new adventure, leaving the town of Galway to the fishermen and their wives. Once she was settled in her new life and had established an independent but co-existent relationship with another, she realized how much the very presence of Jimmy, even a silent presence, was in fact necessary for her to speak sweet words and leave the self-encasing and self-prohibiting persona that can be her own skin. When she returned home for a brief stint, she also realized that the presence of some others from her small town seemed to bring her back to actions and thoughts that she seemed to have grown out of, and necessarily so since they brought moments of pain both to herself and others...yet they pulled at her, in an entirely different way than do the strings that tie us. These were more like the strings that bind us than the strings that lift us up, support us, or fling us into new possibilities.
Is it thus possible that our identities are not merely composed of interactions with others, but utterly dependent on this interactions? Once in her life, Maura would have certainly said, No, because for an identity to be strong and capable of withstanding turmoil, it must have some strength of its own. But clearly, it is all but ludicrous to deny this fact. Once these presences end, naturally or out of forced circumstances, does this identity crumble? Or does the skin go out and seek another one to depend on, in any manner of a relationship? It would seem that this is the case.
It seems natural and necessary that the absence of The Other and Narcissus from Maura's life would change Maura's own identity as well. Do we also depend on the absence of another to define our identity? Anyone who has experienced grave loss beyond the momentary lack of another in their life would probably assure Maura, that yes, this is the case. So these identities are a constantly fluxing, momentarily defined thing.
Oddly enough, all this talking about identity has made Maura give much less of a damn about the entire idea. Partially, because there are more important things to worry about with the Oirish tendency for worry, and partially because The Other, Narcissus and Maura need a new topic of philosophical musings for a bit. They can come back to this one later. Maura's fountain pen is getting a bit dry, so she is going to take a break for a bit. Signing off with sincerity - Ms. Barnacle.
As we all know, the initial intention of this blog was to write the lives of the others. I know that dear Maura has broken from this goal in the last few posts, but given her current situatedness, she began to think about The Other & Narcissus. So she will turn her thoughts back to them...
Due to her itch to move about and settle somewhere with dark corners, barrels of tea, and enough quiet to allow the din of traditional music and her thoughts to meld together and float over her in a wonderful reverie, Ms. Maura has become a whore of coffee shops. She has visited so many that she is now becoming a bit familiar. She has sat in so many seats that she has regular seats in each one...that's a lot of seats.
But looking around, trying to avoid eye contact with the medieval text before her, she thought about what The Other & Narcissus are doing on a night in their respective lands. The sun was coming in on Ms. Maura's dirty locks, and she thought about what The Other & Narcissus would be doing if they were still in the Emerald City, facing the inevitable dust on historical and literary textbooks that arises when one tries to pull a thesis out of one's arse.
And she decided that what they must be up to...must be much better.
So here's what they better be doing.
To start with The Other...Last night, a wonderfully mysterious looking foreign guard knocked on her window to ask a question about the garbage can outside. In Shakespearean moment, this Stranger saw her emerald eyes and dark hair, like that of a mystical selkie, and decided that despite the fact that their countries were miles apart, and perhaps even at odds at times, he loved her. Reaching for her hand, he lifted her down from her window and decided that they must run away together, if only to a pub across town (since he had another shift the next morning, and well, he keeps the streets safe.) Fingering a brandy glass in his hands, he watched The Other's green eyes as they sat, silently in the dark corner of the pub. There was no need for the loud words that scorch The Other's soul, nor was there need for questions regarding The Other's supposed brick walls encasing her. The Stranger was actually a builder in a foreign life, and all who create things also know how to make them fall to pieces. With one look at The Other, he had crumbled her walls. After silent but perfectly attuned communication, The Other & The Stranger wandered through the streets, in a moment as pure as the snow on the ground. As he walked her back towards her apartment, he confessed that his mother was quite traditional, and that she required that his marriage be pre-arranged. The Other nodded and looked down at her big black boots. And so they agreed: both would convince the mother that in fact, they were meant to be and would not see each other until the marriage day in order to abide by the mother's wishes. So now, The Other sits in her room, pen posed above the page, waiting for the weighty words that befall her in moments of enlightenment, thinking of The Stranger and their fateful day.
Narcissus on the other hand...has found himself in the company of another, by slightly more manipulative ways. The company they share is virtual, as of yet, but will soon be corporal and shall I say, embodied. We'll just have to see how that plays out....manipulations don't get as much attention from Maura. She craves the mystery that her own Jimmy offered her. As well as the tension...She forsees that there might be tension for The Stranger and The Other...but sweet tension, troubled by doubt and sharpened by need.
