Today marks the one-year anniversary of What the Hell is This? and I’m pleased to say that I’ve managed to reach 4000 hits. That may not seem like much to veteran bloggers, but bear in mind that I’ve told hardly anyone I know about this site. (Anonymity has given me ample freedom and license I wouldn’t have had otherwise; maybe someday I’ll clean house and come out of the closet!) Some readers have clicked over from Urban Monk, from Stumbleupon, or from the blogrolls of kind souls I’ve never even met. I’ve heard from people as far away as the UK, Australia, Germany, and India.
Wherever you may hail from, I thank you for joining me on my bumpy journey, and for your (overwhelmingly positive) feedback, both on-site and via email. Who knew that someone besides myself would want to gaze at my navel?
**
This month marks another anniversary as well: three years ago this month I fell madly in love.
I’ll bet you regulars think you know where I’m going with this, and you’re wrong. Yes, it was March 2006 when I took a fateful tumble for a certain someone…but at the same time I was discovering an incomparable young Irish singing/songwriting phenomenon known as Damien Rice.
Only days ago did I return to my beloved after a long absence; I had put away most of my more evocative music about a year ago, in an attempt to banish unnecessary sadness from my life for the purposes of enlightenment. But hearing his good friend from The Frames, Glen Hansard, delivering similarly goosebump-inducing lyrics with equal passion in the movie Once, put him at the forefront of my mind again. I started cruising YouTube for videos of Glen one day, and wound up unearthing this devastating live rendition by Damien of the 9 album song Elephant.
It felt like coming home.
**
Damien delivers a quiver that only the best poets can; he’s like a street Heaney meets Jeff Buckley, strumming the battered guitar he inherited from Nick Drake. His classic, slightly nasal Irish tenor can go from a hearty blast out of the chest to the hoarsest whisper in the space of a second; his anguished falsetto can elicit tears faster than a drunken pub sing-along of Danny Boy. You long to hear him pronounce words like Connemara or Ballyknockan with that lush Irish brogue. But it’s not just his amazing voice, it’s everything: his sense of the harmonics of emotion, the vibrations of naked yearning expressed through chord and melody, the intelligent, melancholy, confrontational poetry of his lyrics. He can howl “horny” or “fuck you” and make the words sound sublime. He reminds me of why I wanted to write, why anyone makes art in the first place.
My faithful reader in Germany accuses me of being too stubbornly stuck on one man, but I will say this: if Mr. Rice showed up on my lawn tomorrow, yelling my name like Stanley Kowalski, I’d be down there in a heartbeat.
The YouTube comments by hetero women about this comely if elfin powerhouse of a man are of course predictable, but I love to read what some of the straight men say: “I think I just went gay for a minute,” jokes one, while another gushes “I am a man and very hetero, and a guitar player myself. But seriously, if I could marry this man, I would, I would turn gay lol (sic) it doesn’t matter life would be complete being around Damien all day anyway.” The comment that makes me laugh out loud reads “I would hump him, he’s so powerful, I’m not gay but seriously, let the dry humping commence.” They don’t know what to do with another dude whose songs arouse shivers so profound and visceral they don’t know whether to cry or to come.
Some artists can cross all boundaries, and touch the raw, pulsating core of a human being. It’s an extraordinary gift.
**
Damien’s first major-release album O was my soundtrack to that spring and summer, and will forever be linked with the events of those warm, heady months. Delicate, its first track, unfailingly evokes for me the image of shoots pushing up through damp ground in early-morning sunlight, while The Blower’s Daughter will always send me back to a beautiful wood-floored studio glowing red in the late afternoon, watching Sonny hold a Warrior pose like a yogic Michelangelo. I can’t take my eyes off of you. (The first dozen or so times I listened to that song, I could not stop crying — I had never heard such a pure and perfect keen of longing.) Cold Water is quiet desolation tinged with faith, an appeal to both God and Other in the face of impossibility, hope against hope (which would turn out, at least momentarily, not to be in vain). I could go on, but suffice it to say that every song on that album is exquisite, and personally meaningful to me.
The only comparable period and soundtrack in my life that I can think of is probably my freshman year of college, falling in love with León accompanied by the heretofore undiscovered magic of Cat Stevens. Appropriately, his music represented youth itself, unbroken idealism charging heedlessly forward. I can’t keep it in, I gotta let it out. Two fine people should love each other.
Damien’s magic, twenty years later, lay in the pathos of broken and wiser experience reaching out to take one more risk, one more time. Love taught me to lie…it’s not hard to fall, when you float like a cannonball. I’m not a miracle and you’re not a saint.
His unflinching, sometimes brutal honesty is part of what makes his songs so compelling and beautiful. They shimmer with ragged authenticity.
**
Whether or not my absentee friend is a miracle, I’m not a saint, and I’ve failed at Damien-grade honesty. I like the image of an iceberg one of my commenters used: all you know about things is the visible tip I’ve shared. There’s a whole lot more underwater, and it doesn’t all make me look like some sterling Victorian heroine tragically seduced by the obligatory dashing cad. (Although I do appreciate your chivalrous impulses.)
No, it actually felt good, a couple of posts ago, to own my own ambivalence, and to point out the tinted filter created by my own insecurities. The things I’ve obsessed about endlessly don’t necessarily have a firm base in reality, other than what happened one summer, and what I, of all people, have no business judging. So don’t go taking all my fears as facts. I feel like I have to come clean about my own barely explicable caprice.
Briefly: only days after a blessed encounter with my beautiful friend, during the first flush of summer, I departed for a preplanned trip to Italy. I had promised to keep him and a small group of close friends abreast of my activities abroad with a weekly email travel diary.
Well, by the second week, my readers were being treated to tales of an attractive young Englishman I’d met in the lakes region. Overnight, I became desperately and fecklessly infatuated with the bloke: he was funny, caustic, and just the sort of ridiculing intellectual who makes me strive so hard to get Daddy’s approval. (He even dated a graduate of my college.) I made no secret of my ardor to anyone on my list, blathering on and on about it endlessly, expecting it to be my grand Foreign Affair. (It wasn’t.)
So, basically, after finally getting close to a gorgeous man with a warm heart and an emotional vocabulary, whom I had summoned out of the ether and then proceeded to coax all spring long, I went right back to chasing my father — publicly — albeit on a different continent.
Who’s the asshole now?
The strange thing was that the whole time I maintained the unshakable, if “irrational,” conviction that our connection was such that it could survive all circumstances and mutations of form…as if he really were, in some spiritual sense, family. I had said as much before, and he may have believed it: he was taken aback and sorry when I reacted violently (and hypocritically) to his own summer misadventures. Here in the States, he had been busy making like Wilt Chamberlain, reliving earlier, wilder days. (A counselor friend of mine observed very counselor-esquely that it seemed as if after touching on intimacy, we both reverted to older, more pathological ways of being.)
Anyway, before you go judging my erstwhile buddy as just another faithless man-slut, bear in mind who else flaked out completely. Yes, women adore the man, and he adores them, but he did commit himself to his last significant other once they got serious. I can’t point to something similarly redeeming in my own recent history.
**
But speaking of irrational convictions…
Last week I started to seriously entertain (for the umpteenth time) every voice, both external and internalized, urging me to get reasonable, to trust outside judges and the dictates of five-sense empiricism, and accept that I’m just another daft female making up all kinds of crazy shit about the way things are. Don’t I know I’ll never be anything but a miserable failure until I train myself to believe only hard facts, and trust other people’s authority and word over my “impressions?”
Like a child I lay on the bed and sobbed from my diaphragm, feeling chills of pain from this negation vibrating through the marrow of my bones, threatening to shatter me. It was as if my brain were trying to kill my entire being from the inside. This was, as Carol Gilligan has said (as did I, in Sing, Goddess), about so much more than one circumscribed situation. This was about my ability to trust myself, or not, to be able to navigate through the world with the “feminine,” intuitive, instinctual, intangible capacities and tools I have always used, and to be able to say that I know what I know, regardless of what the official line is. It’s a struggle I’ve revisited again and again for as long as I can remember.
Sometimes I’ve felt like Angelina Jolie in Changeling, institutionalized and pumped full of dope for saying “That is not my son.”
But it really wasn’t her son.
**
Later, stumbling to the computer, tear-stained and exhausted from trying to vivisect still-living parts of myself, I started searching for music on YouTube by Glen Hansard. I remembered how Falling Slowly and other numbers from the film made me weep gently with the recognition, the reassurance that someone else embraced unsayable emotional realities and could produce almost palpable variations in the rarefied air around a song. I was already getting somewhat soothed by Glen’s music when I saw Damien in the ‘related videos’ column, and clicked on him instead.
Immediately I was flooded with forgotten gratitude for his passion, his acuity, his humming incandescent connection to unseen worlds. I felt myself growing physically stronger, as if the music were transfusing me. Even the most woeful complexities of emotions he brought forth I welcomed like old, formerly estranged friends. Some emboldened voice within me asserted this is who you are. This is where you belong. You don’t have to force yourself to be different…fuck that!!!
It’s something I love in Rilke, too, and numerous other poets: the masterful evocation of what the tools of ordinary perception and reason invariably miss. Somewhere between a trembling note and an original turn of phrase like stones taught me to cry (which makes no logical sense) a delicate universe blooms, populated by whispering existences seen best from the corner of the eye or felt with a sixth sense. As if a portal had suddenly opened up, between the prosaic everyday world that we assume is the only real one and a hidden dimension of limitless beauty that reminds us of how ephemeral our lives truly are.
If that makes no sense, it’s because I’m trying to use words to describe something for which words are almost entirely inadequate. It’s Laurie Anderson’s famous line about trying to dance about architecture.
**
I honed my critical mind to defend myself at the dinner table, but I never got out of fifty books of philosophy what I get out of five lines of Wordsworth. I’m a poet by nature, which makes me by default a madwoman. We’re not journalists; we rely on the messages we get from unconfirmed sources, rumors, the movement of birds. Our bones ache when it’s going to rain. We watch expressions cross faces, the tilt of a head or the placement of an arm, that say the opposite of the words being spoken. We see desire flash in his eyes, and doubt cloud hers. We contemplate the stillness of trees, and listen to see if they speak. There is always more here than meets the eye.
What I really need is what makes me bleed, sings Damien on the haunting track Volcano. It was by pain, after all, that he was driven and enabled to produce works of such deep resonance. If we were all suddenly filled with the nirvanic bliss of oneness, I wonder, would there be any more art, any more reason to confront and grapple with our relationship to the world and other people? Probably not. But what the best artists accomplish through their struggle, ironically enough, is an experience of union for their audience — who get to see or feel or know what the artist sees or feels or knows. In doing so, they no longer feel so separate.
“You do not have to be good,” writes Mary Oliver in Wild Geese. “You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Defiant words, choosing vulnerable, fallible humanness over the pursuit of perfection. “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.”
I will do just that, by ending with a poem I wrote during a comparable time two years ago when I despaired of everything I thought I knew and everything I knew I wanted. (Another irony: in order to write about my loss of faith in imagination and other vital intangibles, I had to access my imagination and other vital intangibles.)
**
Tie a Knot and Hold On
No place in the world you belong,
and it doesn’t want your gifts,
those labors you laid
at the feet of your wanting
with a pure heart,
your blood offerings.
The sun is too bright
and beauty is nowhere beneath it,
only the tired faces of people
you wouldn’t want to be,
much as you don’t want to be
yourself.
None quicken the heart
or bring the surfaces alive
with gladness.
There is a kind of exhaustion
born of waiting too long
for a star that appears for an hour,
when the darkness is endless
and hard to love.
In this barren landscape,
this exile, beyond faith,
beyond hope,
sit still by the swings
and watch children at play.
Remember that time
before disappointments
and burdens
arrested your skyward arc
and take heart from those
who have not yet lost
that delight, in imagined
heroics, their kingdoms
of sand.
By all means, do be yourself!
For my last comment I’m again sorry, if it made you feel bad…seems that it does not at all apply, so forget it…
I knew Damien’s “Delicate”, but eventually decided that it is just too sad – maybe this is a little different if you understand the lyrics, but the mood it creates without understanding them is definitely very sad. It’s an interesting phenomenon on its own how little of english lyrics I really get purely by listening (without reading them).
Some people might run amok if you torture them with such kind of songs 
Really excellent music, but keep all sharp objects locked away while listening…
Maybe similarly sad is this track, that had an enormous impact on me in my younger years, and I really adored it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NRdA0ST4Zg
Does music like this make you *more* sad, or does it help you to live through your sadness?
Maybe we should *not* hide all the sad songs under the carpet, but on the other hand, also balance them out with some “happy” songs? Like “don’t worry be happy”
For me, an excellent uplifting song is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3mIjoijaSc
Leon got me into Kate Bush in college — Hounds of Love was one of my favorite albums at one time. Liked the title track best. I think she’s kind of an acquired taste. Nice video you put together there…the music is very “chill,” as we yanks say. I’m all for chillin’. Makes excellent yoga music.
I thought of a metaphor, actually. Imagine that emotional landscapes are like actual landscapes. One person may love the green rolling hills and craggy cliffs of Ireland under an overcast sky, and feel completely at home, while another person can’t stand it there and gets depressed. She’d rather be lying on a sunny beach in the topics under a palm tree. Neither is right or wrong, they’re just different kinds of beauty, and different ways of feeling at home in the world.
Well, congratulations on a solid year of a shadow blog. I’ve had my shadow site up for half a year now, and haven’t had a *single* comment. Not surprising, since I’ve had less than half a dozen comments on my public blog in nearly four years. Not that I’m trying to start up any conversations the way you are.
Never heard of this Damien character, but I’m thinking our musical tastes won’t much overlap (except for the Tom Waits). Heard great things about ONCE, and I thought their performance at the Oscars was great, I could see why people would like it. For my own part, I’m waiting for new material from Stone Temple Pilots.
Well, that’s an unusual twist on the Sonny story. Before I say anything, I should mention that I don’t believe monogamy is a virtue, and I don’t seem to experience jealousy the way that others do–so the idea of you having a European fling seems inocuous to me. As does his playing the field. Life is short, take your pleasures where you can, I say. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with two people being exclusive to each other, if that’s how the relationship is playing out.
At least one of those comments was mine! You’re right, I don’t think Damien’s for you.
If everyone were like you, Russ, nonjealous nonmonogamy would probably work. But I think many of us who can talk a great talk about it, the whole hey-I-don’t-own-you-you-don’t-own-me thing (which is true) find it’s different when you get in the middle of a situation and start having feelings.
nonjealous nonmonogamy…nice concept, but I think if this can ever work, it is definitely advanced, very advanced.
like your concept of the emotional landscapes.
But isn’t Damien rather very close to the swamps of desolation?
I tend to believe that we are very much influenced by what music we listen too. You could make an experiment: for three months only listen to the most negative dark wave gothic stuff you can find, allowing only some satanic deathmetal for relaxing in between.
It could be cathartic, but it could also be traumatic
Non-monogamy is one of my most controversial opinions, right up there with atheism, and the assertion that COLOR OF MONEY was better than THE HUSTLER (seriously, I get castigated on that one by my fellow films buffs).
A few things to say here. First off, one of the most common reactions is echoed in your remark, that once you “start having feelings” that monogamy becomes untenable. The implication here being that, if I don’t desire to have someone as exclusively mine (and remain exclusive to that person), then my love must not be genuine or very deep. My response here is that I don’t seem to experience jealousy, so it doesn’t really bother me, and I’m free to love without that complication. That can be a passing love, or the passionate desire I have to be with someone for the rest of my life, as I’m experiencing now. I should define my terms here: I use the word “envy” to denote the desire of having what someone else has, and the word “jealousy” to mean envy that concurrently has a malicious streak, of if-I-can’t-have-that-then-you-shouldn’t-either. I’m rather judicious in my usage, if that will help clarify.
I am envious all the time, but jealous rarely, in relationships or otherwise. I may be an atheist, but I do have a secular concept of sin, and I think feeling and acting out of jealousy fits that definition. The Othello-type green-eyed monster doesn’t resonate with me at all–this must be another benefit of my quasi-autism.
Another factor may be the type of relationships (or lack thereof) I’ve had in my life. Every time I’ve fallen in love, she was already interested/involved with someone else. As a result, I’ve always been something of a second-stringer. Guess that makes it easier to have loose rules of exclusivity.
The way I see it, I don’t *want* to be someone’s only partner, in sex or anything else. I would never tell someone I love that they couldn’t talk to anyone else (and there are plenty of people, men and women, who are that possessive), so what makes sex any different? I know that sexual feelings run deep, so an open relationship isn’t for everyone. For my own part, though I don’t think monogamy is a virtue, I’m pretty much a one-on-one person, so I don’t need to have multiple partners. As such, I end up being monogamous by default, ironically enough.
In the current situation, the Object Of My Obsessions is currently living in Michigan with a close male friend, with whom she has some unspecified sexual relation, and all I can say is: I envy him. If she were living with me, I’d make her sexual satisfaction my priority, so I think it’s unfortunate that, for whatever reason, he isn’t doing that. It’s none of my business, of course, but my first impulse is to set him straight, tell him to be a better friend, a boyfriend in full if that’s what she needs. The notion that I would want her to remain chaste until such time as I can fill that vacancy is anathma to me. I want her to be happy, *right now*. And I can only hope that some day soon I’ll get a chance to play that role in her life.
Blue, I can’t argue my point any further than I have…I don’t think Damien’s comparable to death metal, but if he’s not your cup of tea, he’s not your cup of tea.
Russ, you read things into that phrase that I didn’t mean. People “start having feelings” — of threat, of the fear of abandonment, of unworthiness, of things that go far back into their lives and render them as vulnerable as children. The prospect of losing someone to someone else triggers that, I think, in a majority of people. That, in essence, is what jealousy is. I personally know some polyamorists who wound up very acrimoniously divorced!
I didn’t mean to mischaracterize your remark–I just wanted to respond to the most common reaction to my non-monogamous assertion, one that I had to address if my succeeding thoughts were going to make any sense.
These feelings that you talk about, of abandonment and unworthiness, are common and altogether human, I’m not trying to dismiss them. And I experience them both: I still think that the Object Of My Obsessions will almost certainly not take me, both because she’ll lose interest in me and grow in another direction, or more simply that I’m not good enough for her. But I don’t react to these insecurities by trying to tie her down: I’m prepared to spend whatever kind of time with her that she will allow, for as long as I can. If she ends up choosing someone else…well, not much I can do about that, is there? Certainly, exacting some promise that she’ll stay with me and only me won’t quell any desires she may have in other directions, right? So in that regard, I can say that monogamy can be impractical.
I will resist, however, saying that such possessiveness is childish, though I do think there’s an element of “Mine! Mine! Mine!” to it all. Some vestiges of childhood are very good to have as adults, so long as they can be managed. Hey, maybe that’s why they ended up calling it “adultery”: it meant getting beyond any youthful idealism about being exclusive in one’s affections. (I’m joking–but I think that’s clever, myself.)
When I ask people about why they want to be monogamous, inevitably it comes down to some form of selfish need. And again, I think it’s perfectly human, I just don’t feel it myself. Among those who cite some sort of moralist stance, I’ve puzzled out a type of reverse-engineering. Goes like this: IF you truly love me, THEN you won’t have the need to be with anyone else. Ergo, IF you aren’t with anyone else, THEN you must truly love me. Q.E.D.
I don’t think that’s a strategy for success, but then again I can’t claim that I’ve had a sustained relationship of any sort, so obviously no one should listen to me as any voice of experience. All I know is that I love someone consummately, and wish her as much happiness as she can find, with whomever she can. I’d just like to be her primary.
Russ: I think ideally, and even from a “spiritual” perspective, nonpossessiveness is a the best attitude to have, as I pointed out in that post about jealousy with that workshop by Byron Katie.
However, when one IS in a relationship that involves more than just physical intimacy (I’ve never had problems with FWBs!), inevitably ALL your old stuff comes up — eventually. It’s a difficulty and a challenge, one of the greatest challenges relationships bring — how do I behave differently than I have since I was yea-high, when he unwittingly pushes my buttons? How do I confront my ingrained reactions authentically and lovingly and grow from them? It’s work, a lot of work (albeit rewarding when breakthroughs come), and for those with abandonment or unworthiness issues, I should think having to navigate “partner sharing” constantly just adds to the complexity of the very challenging and intricate dance they’ll have to do. I think that’s why bm3 called it “advanced.” It’s certainly been a lot of work for me to confront just my FEARS about other women, and I’m not even in relationship with the man at this point.
Blue: I guess I’m not feeling the way you think I “should” be feeling. Is my writing so poor that I failed to get across that I felt crappy BEFORE listening to Damien, and that afterwards I felt RESTORED? He helped me feel so centered and so strong in myself, I was able to overcome my fears and call someone important to open up a dialogue again. (He’s really, really upset with me for leaving our community…that explains a lot…he hasn’t heard my side of the story. We’ll talk more, but I would never have been able to open that door if I hadn’t been fortified by my awesome little Irish brother.) So it’s not like I’ve been languishing in bed wallowing in gorgeous Celtic misery. I can’t explain it any better: Damien makes me feel more of who I am.
Re the formatting question: if I want formatting, I have to use my Dashboard. If you know html, I think that will work on the front page.
Hey Russ, I think I have 2 Damien songs you might actually like: “Woman Like a Man,” arguably his rockingest and most foulmouthed number, which he performs quite amazingly here, in Belgium using only a guitar and a pedal. His talent’s so hot he makes me sweat…or something…And then there’s “Cheers Darlin,” which has a Tom Waits tin pan alley sound, and which he always makes into performance art live. This link has a Rome performance, and the story behind it as a prologue.
I had no coffee yet and it’s dangerous to post then, but…I try to be careful.
Babe, deathmetal is probably the one thing on earth that is the maximum least comparable to Damien, that’s for sure.
I tried to illustrate my point by using an extreme.
The point is that the music is very beautiful, and it touches, but it is very sad and maybe just makes you more sad by listening.
I loved for example Jeff Buckley, Hallelujah! Leonard Cohen, too, I still love him. He was depressed all his life, only in his 70ies he felt better. The depression *is* in them music.
btw. how do I turn on rich text editing here? So that I could use italics and so on? Is it any easy obvious setting that I missed or is there a big fat howto that I overlooked?
ok, the depression is in the music and by listening to it you invoke the demons of it unto yourself. You start resonating in the same frequency.
In other words, the earth will split open and eat you
No, seriously – please enjoy the excellence of Damien.
I would just add a little antidote each day, you see?
I just want your best, dear daughter
Babe, I annoyed you – I feel bad about it.
You writing is surely not crappy, mine seems to be.
I did never intend to “accuse” you of anything.
And I don’t at all think how you should be feeling.
I thank you – for pointing out Damien.
I will take a closer listen. I watched two short interviews,
he’s a very likable guy – seems not to be depressed at all,
to the contrary, he seems to be very happy.
Maybe you like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiOmhOumh-w
But let me add that Fiona really seems to have problems, and the resonating and so on, you know, blabla
Thanks for the formatting answer, later I remembered that I could have found out if html works with test comments on my own blog – and will try that as soon as there is more time…Most of all I would like to have an alternative text for youtube links, it looks so ugly like that above…
Wanted to comment on your poem too…but not before coffee!
only that: I totally admire anyone who can write poems and it’s great that you shared it.
And I think sometimes:
Words are very unnecessary
They can only do harm
When I drove to work today, a little after making my last comment, there was turquoise Hyundai driving before me today, with a number plate from Berlin and a bumper sticker saying “love is a fucking bitch…”. It was the second time I drove behind this car, so it must be a sign
At least it made me smile.
I hope you don’t feel that I misuse your blog as a kind of a twitter replacement
I’m tired, but here’s my stuff about your poem. I don’t just want to say “it’s great” or “nice poem”, because I think that not really does it justice. I don’t know how it is for you, but it’s possible that you are a little vulnerable regarding your own works. Be assured, you are very good with words.
I can say it created the impression of sadness for me, like even before one had problems, all it was were illusions, castles in the sky, kingdoms in the sand.
Have a nice weekend, Babe, please, if you like, but if you don’t like, don’t have a nice weekend
I hope you get my humor, it’s only humor
Did you see the film Coffee and Cigarettes by Jim Jarmusch, btw.? Russ? See this excerpt with Iggy Pop and Tom Waits
Just excellent communication there
sorry now for spamming, but…I listened to “animals were gone” on his myspace and I’m converted.
I think I like this kind of frequency.
A little like a mixer applied on my heart – but a gentle and friendly mixer
Next is blowers daughter, “can’t take my mind off of you”. Relaxing! Brave!
Till I find somebody else – he’s funny
So, nice weekend now, last post until next week, promised.
Blue, are YOU stalking me now?
(My real mom continues to inundate my wall, by the way.) Awesome vocals by Fiona…I used to listen to the Elvis Costello original over and over in college. (My roommate had a recording.) She’s extremely talented but does always look pissed off!
“Animals Were Gone” is a lovely, lovely song. I’ve been listening to it myself lately because I just realized how this person I love so much felt abandoned by me.
I think one YouTube commenter summed things up by saying that Damien’s songs were sad and sometimes bitter, but that “love always wins in the end.” And Damien is a terrific guy for sure, life-affirming and globally conscious (there’s an interview out there where he actually weighs in on clean energy). Like I said, I wouldn’t say no if he showed up at my door!!!
That “Coffee and Cigarettes” vignette was one of my favorites…I love those two off-the-wall-ers. The funny Steve Coogan bit was pretty great, too.
Yeah, that poem I wrote was about being “at the end of my rope” — hence the title. That despair is actually what I feel when I’m stripped of what others may call “illusion,” but what I call vital and meaningful and necessary for life.
FWB?
I can understand what you’re saying, I just don’t “get” it, I suppose. I’m interested to hear more on the subject, though, since I hear similar things whenever I talk this over with people. Seems that most jealousy is rooted in just that: a sense that some “rival” will take your beloved away from you. And while I’ve felt that myself over and over again throughout my life, it doesn’t seem to have translated into any sort of emotional aggression. As dominant (at times domineering) a personality as I have, I don’t feel that I can control other people, or want to. If she (whoever she may be) wants to go with or be with someone else, there isn’t much I can do about it. Perhaps now would be a good time to mention that, for however much love I feel for the Object Of My Obsessions, I don’t expect her to love me back. All I ask of her (or have mentally made room for) is that she allow me to love her. Her mere presence is a gift: her love would be…well, unthinkable. It’s not that I have low self-esteem, if you will. Just low expectations.
I don’t fear the other men in her life, however, even though I think each one is at least as viable a candidate for her affections as I am. Is there anything deeper in your fear of other women, other than a threat to your hopeful relationship with Sonny? You’ve never struck me as being catty, but this may be where that kind of reaction stems from.
Sorry, I find the chick-mind to be fascinating. Must be all the ‘tosterone.
BM3: yes, I’ve seen COFFEE AND CIGARETTES. Thought the whole thing was a waste of time, but there were a few good moments. Both Tom Waits and Iggy Pop have done more amusing stuff on their own. Nice concept, poor execution.
What strange creatures we must seem to you, Mr. Spock, said the hotheaded Dr. McCoy.
But seriously, this may be one of the “gifts” of your being different. It’s hard to explain emotional reactivity if you’ve never experienced it, but jealousy requires emotional reactivity as well as feelings of insecurity. (And it’s not just a chick thing; men are known for being just as jealous just as often as women are.) I don’t know how to explain how “triggers” work — why one moment you’re fine, and the next you’re re-experiencing the extremely painful, even traumatic feelings you had as a child being accidentally left at the gas station.
As for insecurity, it’s not so much about the thought “I’m not good enough” or “I don’t matter” as the attendant feeling of not being good enough, or not mattering. There’s not much that goes deeper than that! It’s practically a primal wound.
Maybe it doesn’t make sense to a purely logical mind because the original trouble was so far in the past, but to the emotional body, then is now, your beloved is the feeling-equivalent of your primary caregiver, and you’re being traumatically abandoned all over again.
FWB = Friends With Benefits
I just have to throw in that I’m at a crowded coffeehouse, and the guy sharing my table was totally Damienesque! A freckled little Irish beauty, probably about 25. Pretty pretty. That was a treat! You see, I’m not totally blind, I just know what I want.
So A.B. (meaning Alien Baby, not her real initials) knows what she wants after all!
But seriously, I felt you when you talked about sobbing from your diaphragm, and I got how committed you are to finding catharsis through your writing and undoubtedly lots of other stuff. Love, C
Haha, touche, thanks C.
So glad you got me.
[Meant to respond several days ago. My Crazy Roommate announced on Friday that she's moving back to Pennsylvania...on Thursday. Trying to get as much Seattle done as possible before she leaves. That, and I need another roommate. SOON. Preferably one who isn't *quite* as insane, though I'm open to negotiations.]
Your comments seem to suggest, as I’d initially worried, that you think I’m lacking in some sort of emotional component, that I’m Mr. Spock, or that I’m possessed of/by a “purely logical mind”. And while I guess I can’t or shouldn’t say that this sort of characterization is unfair (I can kind of see it), it’s not entirely accurate and may distract from the point.
So I find myself curious as to the dynamic that makes someone possessively jealous. It’s true, both men and women react this way–though differently, I’ve noticed. And it’s not that I don’t experience emotional triggers, either: I’m still having conversations in my head that began in elementary school. I have something of that whole then-is-now thing you’re talking about, though we must (almost certainly) experience it in different ways. In my own case, it doesn’t seem to manifest any sort of emotional need to possess-or-perish. (I hesitate to say emotional outburst, since I’ve come to realize that part of the stress of living with My Crazy Roommate is that both of us have such good recall that she’ll say or do something that will pick up an argument that left off in, I don’t know, November of ’88 or so.)
Can I point out that monogamy isn’t the norm in most cultures? According to one survey I saw, only about 18% of the world’s cultures are monogamous (mostly deriving from western tradition), with adultery and prostitution compromising a good deal of the single-partner rule. I’ll defer to BM3, of course, but I’m given to understand that Europe, for the most part, treats open relationships with much more acceptance. During the ’92 election and the whole Gennifer Flowers bit, one of the major news sources (TIME or NEWSWEEK) pointed out that sex scandals aren’t as prevalent in Europe, and that a politician seeking office can actually be helped if it’s known he has a few lovers on the side. There seems to be a tacit understanding that your marriage partner satisfies your domestic needs, and that your lover fulfills your passionate needs. It’s what I hear, anyway, and it seems straightforward enough for me.
“Loving is good if it’s not understood…”
You might like this too.
Russ…this may be a problem of theory and practice.
There’s a LOT to say…especially with respect to mild autism
I guess I could write a book…
Let me know if you’re interested…
BM3: this isn’t my forum, so I’m not the one to ask.
My theory often derives from practice. In this particular subject, I should say that all of my relationships (which have not been many, admittedly) have been open, and I have in some cases outright advocated that she go off and try some other guys–and NOT becuase of some sexual fantasy or because I want to hear details or whatever. When you get right down to it, all I can really say is that the idea doesn’t bother me. As long as I get some intimacy, I don’t see where I can complain. If I can’t get any intimacy, then there’s a problem, but it’s not one that I feel I can solve by closing off all the alternatives. I can see that not everyone feels that way, and it’s something that I try to understand in others, but I can accept the idea that it’s just an emotional need some people have, to varying degrees. I just don’t.
Who’s the alien now?…
I’m glad Blue stepped up to reply on that one cuz I’m not up to it right now…although I’d be interested to read that book. Would anyone agree that there is such a thing as taking partners addictively, or compulsively? In Russ’s laissez-faire universe maybe even than wouldn’t be a problem, nor perhaps would some lying about it…but what about STDs?
I’m not sure I’ll be writing anything else for a while. Blue, you could start your dissertation now…
I cannot live with you,
It would be life,
And life is over there
Behind the shelf
April is autism awareness month.
Emily Dickinson is suspected to have had Aspergers.
What is normal, what is mental disease and what is just differently wired brain?
Alexithymia, psychopathy, autism – what else?
Maybe a pinch of it in every one of us, the difference just in degree and continuance?
Amygdalae, love and complications…
Stay tuned for my “book”, but give me a little time.
I’ll try to at least put out a sufficient number of lines via inspired automatic writing
One thought popped up in my mind a few times already: maybe you should continue writing in a new blog, with a different name. Something like wowhowgood.net by HappyWoman?
Power of names / suggestion? Ok, my propsed names need some fine tuning, but what do you think generally?
I listened to 9 a few times on the car stereo and animals are gone now replays in my head. Yes, it is sad – sad and beautiful. My heart is hungry for something more uplifting. But I don’t want to annoy you again! Damien’s music is just not designed to be used like daily bread and butter…
Now to the book…
Non-jealous non-monogamy…
A while ago I heard someone talk on the radio about this, I think it was Rosa Luxemburg, he said he is doing it, having a man with whom he plans to stay together for a very long time, but at the same time having sex with others. It seems to work for him, he called monogamy a very bourgeois concept.
Goethe wrote about it in his Elective Affinities:
Imagine an A intimately united with a B, so that no force is able to sunder them; imagine a C likewise related to a D; now bring the two couples into contact: A will throw itself at D, C at B, without our being able to say which first deserted its partner, which first embraced the other’s partner.’ This is shown below:
AB + CD → BD + AC
‘Now then!’ Eduard interposed: ‘until we see all this with our own eyes, let us look on this formula as a metaphor from which we may extract a lesson we can apply immediately to ourselves. You, Charlotte, represent the A, and I represent your B; for in fact I do depend altogether on you and follow you as A follows B. The C is quite obviously the Captain, who for the moment is to some extent drawing me away from you. Now it is only fair that, if you are not to vanish into the limitless air, you must be provided with a D, and this D is unquestionably the charming little lady Ottilie, whose approaching presence you may no longer resist.’
Hm…I’m really not sure if the chemical reactions will occur that much predictably. The precondition was obviously wrong: that the couples were so intimately united that no force could sunder them.
Ok, my time is up – this is an experiment in time restrained book writing
can I call this a preface already?
The upcoming topics will be: what is love, what is falling in love, jealousy, indifference, trust, feeling of security…
Couples can be together without being in love, just to be not alone, just to be able to release sexual pressure.
When a couple is really in love it is a totally different story.
But what exactly is love? And may love “come afterwards”? I mean for example you are attracted to someone because (s)he is very good looking, without even knowing the character really too much, and after a while of being together, the chemistry increases…the emotional bond gets stronger.
Or does it have to be clear from the first moment? The smell of the fitting genes we unconsciously recognize? But what if our smell receptors are faulty?
I must admit I can only ask questions…
copying this from Max Simon:
1. The signals from your body are always the most accurate
form of discernment. Listen to them.
2. You are a unique individual with unique needs and desires.
Just because a solution works for someone else doesn’t
mean that it’s best for you.
3. If you stay the course, you will always get what you want. It
just might take a little longer than you expected.
Hope you’ll write something again soon, Babe. Take care.
I don’t know what to say to all that, except hear hear Max Simon!
The Goethe is confusing.
I do wish you’d quit insisting I become some online Mary Sunshine, though. What’s up with that, man? Do you have this picture of me like I’m some pissy Fiona Apple type who’s dark, dark, dark all the time, in life as in art, and it stresses you out?!! Remember how Damien was in those interviews you saw. I think he and I are alike in many ways.
I do believe in trusting ones gut feelings (just have read your new post). My gut feeling tells me I should avoid your virtual punch
What’s up with the Mary Sunshine thing?
I feel the wish to express myself in a clearer way, about that and about the whole love thing and mental states and and and…but not here, that increasingly feels like polluting your space – instead on my own blog. I hope I can sort my thoughts out into something less confusing than James Joyce’s Ulysses, and if not that then at least into something entertaining.
I try to manage that within the next ten or twenty years, it would be great to be read by you then and there.