THE SEASONS FLIP IN FLAMES

Myself, 1945-'46

This time of year I’m always a little panicky.  It doesn’t help that the weather shifts now, so around here we are due for a cold spell and even some snow, but in the meantime fires are filling the air with smoke so that the nose-brain is signalling “fire,fire,fire. . . “  

But the real reason is the beginning of school.  From the very first day of kindergarten, which was my own personal first day because my mother had to fight to get me in late, because she said that I was overloading her ability to care for the three of us (me and “the boys” who at that point were like one person).  My b-day is late in October, so I was technically too young, but she made her plea stick.

The result was that I walked into a classroom where everyone had already formed their social patterns and there was no place for me.  Lesson learned.  Maybe OVER-learned.  I wouldn’t have known this had happened if my mother hadn’t told me.  Her position about me all my life was that I was unwilling to take the bullet for her and the boys, for the family.  (My father had a traveling job.  He was irrelevant but he was also the reason my mother felt so overwhelmed.)  She never mentioned a precipitating incident, but there must have been one.

A candle-making demonstration about 1953

She felt that my role as a daughter was to support hers as a mother.  She hoped I would be a do-over for every disappointment she’d had.  That meant she finished college while I was in high school as she could not at the proper age (the Depression), and then sent me through college.  But she was enraged that in middle age I went to Divinity School on scholarship.  Twice in life I really screwed up and got into the crosshairs of failure so that I had to ask to come back “home.”  The first time she assumed I was admitting she was right — now I would get a proper hairdo and learn how to play bridge.  The second time she almost didn’t let me return.  

So now at 77 I make my own place.  Ironically, it was my third of my mother’s estate that bought me this ramshackle house.  I’ve been on my own ever since and have managed the necessities — barely.  But the crucial nub of my real, if secret, life has since 1999 has been aflame with ideas and fulfillment.  Only one person really knows and that person was a gift beyond measurement.  

They say that in a sort of foreshadowing of coitus that bacterial one-celled creatures will sidle up next to each other and both will open a sort of port-hole in their cell walls.  Then they exchange some genetic information.  it’s a vivid image.  For me it brings to mind ranchers out on some rural road, traveling in opposite directions so that they can park with adjacent windows and talk for long enough to shut off the engines.  They used to smoke.  What they learn from each other can be vital.  So this writer and I pulled up our computers next to each other and the result was life-saving.

So many people are trying to resolve their life-issues by writing, that there is a parallel industry now that coaches and gives pep talks.  One of the best is steve@stevenpressfield.com.  Best because he really does know nuts and bolts and has sold books.  All these guys operate off pretty much the same assumption: that “writing” is linear, follows the same pattern of a compelling problem that causes rising action through increasingly tougher problems until finally there is a crisis/climax and then a resolution, hopefully one that leads to a higher plane of life.  

This is narrative fiction, but most of the non-fiction also follows this pattern.  The college educated pre-readers, editors, and agents look for it and endorse it.  If presented with a mass of print, they try to find the “narrative line” and develop it, prune it, espalier it onto the familiar wall.  Many times the most inspired but nonconforming writers are murdered by this.  Sometimes they reframe themselves as poets, which means they’re free but they’ll never make a living.

So what are the new patterns, the alternatives?  One has grown out of blogging, on-going sequences of individually composed writing — possibly chronological like a journal, but maybe only related by the writer having written them, like beads on a string.  Way down at the origin of at least one of my strands is kindergarten, and the dread of starting school again but being driven to take the bullet for the family.  A lot of other strands added since 1945, which is the origin of that bullet metaphor.

The formal philosophical underpinning of the three-part syllogism comes out of Greek drama and was both the origin and the exemplar for the Western world clear up through the Enlightenment.  Science and the scientific method is another version of it: define a problem, take evidence, form a hypothesis, make a triumphant discovery.  There were alternatives, but they were ignored.

Most recently I found “rhizome theory” which is the pattern of how sweetgrass grows: in clumps, then in long runners with a new clump forming at the end.  This is how blogs are.  This is how I think and write.  This how the world seems to be for a moment.  It’s a “Silk Roads” theory.  A town, a trail, another town.

Here on the high prairie the temp and the air quality are balancing, still late summer but predicted to flip over into a crisp fall in the night.  It’s hard to sleep and dreams are worrisome.  A repeated dream is that I’m at a conference in a strange town, not all that interested in the agenda and not knowing any of the other attendees.  I walk through the city and only half-realize they are cities from television, mixed and overlain with the cities I’ve known.  Rarely am I stepping over railroad tracks in a rotted industrial zone; usually I’m passing shop windows.  Often it’s all so real and familiar that I wonder whether I’m channeling someone.  There’s no Freudian symbolism nor even any Jungian tale.  I’m just new to kindergarten and wondering what the key might be.

Alan Deale and I at the tea after ML awarded him an honorary doctorate.

A few nights ago I had a telephone call from my original — and beloved — Unitarian minister, Alan Deale, because of writing about clergy misconduct misconstrued and suppressed, then dragged out of the past in vengeance.  We talked about his intern student ministers from the Seventies, who are involved.  I told him about driving by the church at 2AM after an event of some sort and seeing all the lights on, so I stopped out curiosity and the vague thought that help might be needed.  It was an intern in tears over not being able to write a sermon.  My efforts to help didn’t work.

When I went on, I had to cross what they call the “Pearl District” which used to be warehouses and therefore has railroad tracks in the streets.  Now it’s trendy boutiques and galleries, gentrified but with no residences.  I came to a car on fire — totally engulfed in high flames, just like television.  A man with a camera on a tripod was taking photos.  I stopped again.  

“Is there anyone in the car?”  Knowing if there was, they were dead.

“Yes.  In the back.”  He didn’t stop.  I heard sirens.

I left.  There was never anything in the news nor did I hear anything through the sheriff’s gossip.  Sometimes I wonder whether it was a dream.  What is reality?  When can we intervene?  When is it right to call on others for help?  Are we ever entitled to guard our own interests?

"FELT" MEMORIES

The stone ruin on the Macleay Park trail

This is a powerful idea that was never been put into words until my mother was dying.  Even then the idea was mostly hints until I realized that they explained phantom feelings.  In her last year or so, in an effort to understand her life, I asked her why our street in Portland, NE 15^th between Alberta and Killingsworth, had such a coherent group of women, mostly housewives, who kept close track of each other and sometimes partied together.   (They played "Cootie" and "Bunko" for cheap prizes and had dessert.  No drinking.) They called each other by their last names: White, Onslow, Gross, Hartwig, and McClain.  My mother seemed somehow to be a leader.  Later she was active in the PTA and her church, but this was different.

Now she said it was because in the late Forties McClain’s son had hung himself in Macleay Park.  She and other women thought that McClain, who was older, Catholic and had more children than usual, needed support through her grief.  They organized to go to her house to have coffee every day.  Suddenly I remembered that when we were about that age my mother insisted one day that she and we kids go to hike the trail through the Park.  I had thought that it was because in those years my father worked at Montgomery Wards, which was close to the beginning of the trail.  But it was unusual, both because my father was not on the hike and because there was some kind of urgency.

My mother’s motto was, “I’m going to get to the bottom of this.”  I inherited it.  Sometimes it was intense enough to be labeled “counterphobic,” which is to say, driven to go straight at danger and disarm it by knowing it.  Not a comfortable trait, but a useful one -- so long as one took precautions.

Macleay Park had the usual features of Oregon forest trails.  It followed a stream and was a “soft” trail, not paved.  But some stone work had been done as WPA projects, so there were occasional built structures along the trail, very much like the stone work along the Columbia Gorge highway.  One of them was a 1929 stone building equipped as a restroom.  I remember how tense and alert my mother became when we approached this building.  My brothers wanted to go in and use the facilities, but she was reluctant to let them and stood right by the door, making sure no one else was in there.  She and I did not use the female side so I don't know what the facilities were like.  

In those days, especially during the week, the trail was deserted.  I don’t remember ever meeting anyone.  Now I realize that the bathroom was probably a meeting place for clandestine purposes, like gay interaction.  Now I connect this ruin to the boy who hung himself.   The building was not just allowed to rot but also at one point was filled with dirt.  I had wondered why the boy chose that trail for his demise.  The trees are mostly doug fir with no branches low enough to be convenient for a rope.

The McClain siblings were in their teens.  They were often our babysitters, laissez faire, both boys and girls, but with their parents just down the street one block for backup.  At one point, “valorized” (Eliade’s word) in my memory as important, my younger brother -- still in a crib -- went into a crying storm and could not be comforted.  Whoever was the sitter finally called his or her parents, who came as a couple and were also baffled about how to stop the raging.  My parents were finally recalled from wherever they were.  Then the baby settled down.  Unaccountable storms in children at about that stage happen, evidently the result of some kind of brain growth that connects panic to behavior in a neuron misfire.  But the adults were worried and would not talk about it later.

I was a little girl much impressed that I was responsible, that I should protect, intervene, but without much instruction how to do that.  Both brothers objected to me acting as an assistant mother, which didn’t stop me from trying.  I never did understand what I ought to have done about my brother’s baby storm.  Now I’m wondering whether the boy who hung himself had something to do with it.

For decades, until I was safely sleeping with a lover, I would very occasionally wake up to see a ghostly brother and sister, adolescent, standing side-by-side at the foot of the bed.  They never said anything and as I woke up a little more, they disappeared.  Such figures are well-described in the literature as a phenomenon of half-sleep, but they are not neurologically explained except for a suggestion that they are memories never resolved.  Now I think they may have been our baby sitters.  But the essay appended at the end of this post suggests something more spooky.

I have no memories of ever being molested by anyone, but various counselors over the years have quizzed me about it.  We were trying to understand how I mixed obedient compliance with defiant opposition.  Even my seminary professors complained that I was such a supportive and enthusiastic student at first, but then at some point would switch over and find them seriously lacking, worth attacking.  It hurt their feelings. 

I recognized the behavior but couldn’t really account for it.  I thought it was just that I idealized them until I knew them well enough for their faults to be apparent.  It felt to them like defiance and criticism, esp. since at that point I was the same age as the professors, who had much less experience with authority.  I’d just come from being an animal control officer, an emergency responder.

The word was betrayal.  I think long ago I felt that my parents betrayed us by leaving us for the evening, that the babysitter betrayed us by somehow triggering my little brother’s outrage, and that I betrayed my little brother by not understanding and fixing things.  I think my mother felt that we had all somehow betrayed that hanged boy and was determined not to betray his mother.  She also wanted to understand what Macleay Park was about.  We were visiting a “crime scene,” a clue to lethal betrayal.  Eventually, at seminary I felt that my professors were betrayers because they knew so little.  But it was a pattern from my past, not their doing.

I can remember standing on the stairs inside the McClain house, looking at the simple 2X4 bannister.  I was overhearing something through the half-open bedroom door but not knowing what it was or what it meant.  Probably if I were hypnotized in an effort to bring back the words, my subconscious would produce something literary.  Like this blog post.  How much is memory and how much is invention?

5xx5 NE 15th

That block of the street, between Sumner and Emerson, had been built up with simpler, poorer houses than our block.  The families there were low-income, working class.  They were impressed by our house, not because it was so grand but because it was full of books and had a piano.  My father played classical 78 records loud enough for everyone to hear.  Across the street was Captain Reeder, who ran a tugboat on the river and whose son was a cop, but also a jazz saxophonist.  He played late into the late summer nights, all alone but somehow lamentingly sexy.  We never talked about it.  We felt it.  

"Amor Vincit Omnia" by Caravaggio

Arts are as close as humans can come to wordless felt meaning.  As a family we went to a Forties or early Fifties Portland Art Museum show of masterpieces that included Caravaggio’s  “Amor Vincit Omnia”.   It's quite a large painting; we were hustled right along when we came to it.  I felt this had something to do with the puzzle of the hanged boy, but couldn’t understand how.  For all the parental progressiveness and the stacks of sex education books, none of them resolved it.  I couldn't make the connections from naked to sex to transgression to shame.

Indeed, love and betrayal, secrecy and the ultimate secret of death, can’t really be understood.  It’s not possible to get to the bottom.  This is the real betrayal of any faith-based religion or seminary -- the idea that they are the only ones who know the truth or that it is even possible.  Anyway, I don't think they really believed what they professed.

_____________

Here's someone else's take on Macleay Park, even deeper, with historical references.  (Jaime Dunkle has a namesake website.  http://jaimedunkle.com)

http://psuvanguard.com/arts/double-double-toil-and-trouble/