I had vivid dreams last night involving violence, jealousy and growth. They were old wounds that contained symbols of Oedipus, autonomy and personal responsibility for the role of angry feelings and their relationship to fraternity and respect. When i woke i was not disconcerted and welcomed the communion with self. It was not difficult to detach actual life characters from their dream avatars and to understand them as aspects of my internal terrain. My 1st marriage ended within a month and involved directly and indirectly breaking the 5th metacarpal in opposite hands within 6 months of each other, as well as 60 stitches in my right forearm, missing the ulnar nerve by millimeters; i was 23 year’s old. In the dream i hit a wall and was shouting angrily; this dream event is much different from when i broke my 1st hand that year - i was not yelling and likely should have been; what else was missing from the dream was any sense of the guilt and shame i have carried these many years, as though somehow forgiven for strong feelings i had then as now, but carry much differently today.
The 2nd part of the dream involved members of my younger cohort who have in real life exchanges challenged my sense of reciprocal warm regard - a quality of my character i cherish, and find more and more not to be something one can expect, regardless of decent intention or worthwhile behavior. I did not easily fall back to sleep early, not from fitful resentment and frustration - more a sense of surprise, like unexpectedly meeting an old friend with whom you share a complicated history. I belabor this event because it is the most useful grist for this writing mill i know of. There is little in front of me but death and i would like to be more conversant with an interior that has confused me almost as much as it apparently shocks those i encounter. More to the point i feel liberated from an unconscious dynamic that seems to have reined over repeated patterns of outcomes i tend to judge too harshly, or explore too timidly - like there’s anybody else who gives a fuck why i do what i do¿?
As much as any of all that, i wish possession again of the joy and curiosity i remember as integral to my being before socialization began ascribing valence to things about myself i hadn’t yet understood, much less learned to appreciate. Some of it has to do with the abandon that comes from being a little crazy - like aren’t we all, or wished we could be · As a man-child, i believed things wholly and completely by faith from very early on. The charming quirk delighted my elder siblings when hunting Snipe, for i would sit for hours convinced that their periodic squeals of encouragement meant that “We,” were getting closer to our objective. Even after, i got wise to the game of Snipe hunting i somehow held faith there was a “We,” which ultimately proved to be a mythical domain solely within my tender devoted heart - a domain i mean to protect to my dying day.
Even if i remain the solitary citizen of that romantic principality of “We” - a habitat it would seem is no longer romantic, but integral to the survival of our species. What’s changed is the nature of the Snipe hunt, now transformed into what Noam Chomsky describes as a “limited spectrum of acceptable opinion” within which the ruling class encourages lively debate. I am physically a dual-eyed cyclops and "acceptable" anything is to me an anathema, mostly because orienting visually to do anything in my life has required a very “open” interpretation of acceptable with a concomitant tolerance for unacceptable - however counter-intuitive that might sound · it is even more so for me when i learn from my closest confidants that i tend to be “rigid.”
It is for this and many other reasons, i pursue this open-hearted writing ritual, however unorthodox, for self-examination - there is seemingly no other venue for a balanced estimation of aberrant behavior that comes from caring little about positions others take concerning my: appearance, opinions, strategies, worth or ______fill in the blank. The paradox is that i’m coming to understand the accuracy of Eleanor Roosevelt’s observation about worrying what others think about you - “they don’t think about you as much as you think they do.” I think about others as much as i can without intruding in their lives with my projections and assumptions, and have to stifle my yearning to feel cared for, or more accurately cultivate that skill of self-awareness which results in contentment about one’s fate - whatever that may mean within the wide open array of choices each of us makes from the moment we draw our first breath to the moment we take our last.
jts 19/12/2020
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