Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Fragment #2
My feelings dismay me. I so rarely control them. They are their own kingdom. Too primitive to be a republic, and when they want to, they send their armies to batter me. My total self should include feeling but I do not know how to make a treaty with that warrior state. When I was growing up I rebelled against feeling and now my feelings rebel against me.I separated myself from too much hurt. Even now, there is a close association in my gut between feeling and pain. Logically I recognise that feeling is, often is, pleasure and delight. Nevertheless, at an instinctual level, at a level outside of logic, feeling is pain.
I love badly. That is, too little or too much. I throw myself over an unsuitable cliff, only to reel back in horror from a simple view out of the window. The melodrama of my childhood has located itself in a heroes/villains psyche of He Loves Me He Loves Me Not. The lecherous twirling moustaches, the asexual saintly forehead, my lovers divided into exciting predators and insipid prey.
In this overlit twilight world, the fluorescent compensating for the lack of natural light, my feelings run riot on sadism, masochism, ruthlessness and mutilation. Exactly what you would expect from a barbarian state. I am civilised. My feelings are not. I want to love well. To see you as you are, not as a character in my film noir. I want the unknowableness and intimacy of another human being.
"Her life was imbued with an abiding sadness, a clear-eyed understanding that independence can beget loneliness, that rigorous ideals and raised consciousnesses are not always good company at the dinner table. Yet she shared her compassion among a wide array of characters, those who settled and those who continued to search."
Ethelinde at 8:44 pm