Scripted
"Ever since that first meeting, I have known you were my fate, however from time to time I may have disguised that knowledge from myself." A.S. Byatt, Possession.
I'm reading a novel that it turns out - after a fashion...ok, like 210 pages - is about a forbidden love. He's a somewhat older famous poet who's been married for many years. She is an aspiring poetess who lives in a sort of solitude with a (nutso) lesbian who secretly or not-so-secretly (I haven't gotten all the way there yet) covets her and dislikes (ok, abhors) her seeming affection for the poet-guy. A chance meeting leads to letters (it's the mid-1800s so...) which lead to a not-exactly-chance meeting or two. In the midst of all that nutso lesbian rips up and burns a bunch of letters and a bit later in the story throws herself off a bridge with heavy rocks sewn into her pockets.
I'm certain that there's more...I don't know...literary stuff I'm supposed to be getting from the book. I mean you don't win The Man Booker Prize (usually a Bat Signal that I should NOT read the book) by writing a fluff piece ala cautionary tale about stepping out on a nutso lesbian. Still, it's me doing the reading so all the important literature-y stuff is going to be lost. Tell me a story and I'll listen. Couch it in academic mumbo-jumbo and I'm not. I am truly that simple - brain-wise and reading-wise.
Just when I was about to give up and start skimming - I knew there had to be a STORY in there somewhere - I found it. A glorious chapter with glorious writing that blew what little hair I have back. Finally, I could see something of myself in a character (Up until that point all the characters - each and every last one of them - seemed far too pedantic, lugubrious, and academic for me to ever relate to). No, I didn''t find myself in the nutso lesbian (Sh**. Seriously, focus). As I turned one page for another, the sad sack old poet turned romantic, soulfully romantic, and I was instantly hooked.
Because if there's one thing I like, it's a soulful romance. Ok, the idea of it. Let's not go crazy. At the end of the day, I'm still me - a traveler woefully unable to make lasting connections who therefore has absolutely no desire for them. I'm not so cynical that I don't believe in anything at all. I believe in make believe, imagination, and intuition. I believe that love exists, that souls can become intertwined. I believe that now often trumps later, that a moment can easily rival forever, that checking a box and moving on beats the dismantling of a soul, the dismantling of a life. I believe that knowing - truly knowing - even for one painfully beautiful, soul searing nano-second is enough. So enough that it might actually be everything.
I worry that most people won't understand. Shouldn't connection with a...let's call it for easy math...a soulmate be the be-all-end-all? Make us want to stop the life we are living, however happy it might be, however perfect it may seem, and....what? Ride off into the sunset? Leave the old wife or nutso lesbian behind and live even happily-er ever after? As I near midlife, I realize that most of what we are, who we are, the lives we've chosen, are set. Or at least we think they are. In many cases life is good - we are good - at least good enough. We settled - anything short of forever with the aforementioned 'soulmate' is a form of settling - and we're living with the consequences of that choice. Consequences aren't always bad; they simply are what has been, what is, and very likely what will be. Life, as I am insanely fond of saying, is what we make it. So we settle and as long as we are happy, who cares?
But what about that day? The moment we realize.......there's something else out there? "No, I can't" is the immediate knee-jerk answer. But then.........it persists, it niggles.....and we wonder...what if? Maybe we decide to dabble. Maybe we let it remain firmly in our imagination. Maybe we dive in head-first. We can do any and all. The consequences are ours to bear.
~~
"That's just her script," my friend told me with a shrug of her shoulders. I'd shared my moderate disappointment following a conversation with a mutual friend about her plans if/when she ever finds herself single again.
"Her script?" I replied.
"Yeah, we all have them. It's what we say to protect ourselves from what we actually want but are too scared to admit."
I don't have a script, I immediately thought. Ridiculous. I don't need to protect myself from what I want. I don't want anything. Days later (and I do mean actual days later) I realized. I fucking have one. I have a script. And it's so ingrained in my consciousness that I couldn't see it. I literally wrote it in a paragraph above -
"I'm still me - a traveler woefully unable to make lasting connections who therefore has absolutely no desire for them."
Really? Am I? Am I? Am I unable? Am I beyond desire? Or am I frankly, plainly, veritably full of shit?
~~
From Seat 17A of a Southwest Airlines flight, I contemplated the horizon, the clouds, and the desert far below. I was traveling as I often do, as I love to do. With thoughts in my head I didn't want to lose and no paper handy, I flipped to the back of the book, to the last blank pages of Possession, and began scratching, nearly illegibly, in ball point pen.
"I travel to be neither lost nor found. To seek the horizon beyond the great desert? No. To seek the desert because it protects? Maybe. Perhaps I am tired of walls - the analogy if nothing else - and choose the vast, windy nothingness of a desert instead. But what of oases? Walls do not have them; walls are impenetrable. Mirage - that's the better word - that of myth and mysticism - the virtual - not real. And so I am safe with my own imagination (my truth) and intuition. The beginning is mine to write; the end as well. What lies between desert and oasis (MIRAGE), lost and found, real and virtual is mine and mine alone. I may reappear and check a box (That's what I choose to call it, how I choose to experience it), but assuredly I will retreat again - as ethereal as dust blown toward a horizon I cannot, will not - ever - reach. Still I travel. Not because I seek, as many may think, but because I know."
~~
I write romance. Maybe one day I will string together words so deceptively simple......and yet so indelibly, so irreparably......deep....penetrating (I do mean that in its best figurative sense)........that a head shakes and eyes retrace their steps to read and re-read the phrases again and again. That pages may be dog-eared and a pen may emerge from a bag days later to draw lines and scrawl stars in margins. They will be the words of a dream....and a nightmare....providing absolute comfort but all the while be so disturbing that the book may be slammed shut.....only to be re-opened again.
"It is a love for which there is no place in this world -- a love my diminished reason tells me can and will do neither of us any good, a love I tried to hide cunningly from, to protect you from, with all the ingenuity of my command... How shall this be the end that is in its very nature a beginning?"
~~
I guess I should re-phrase. I write romance for a reason. I write it so that it can exist safely in my head, within the bounds of my imagination. I write romance because I am loath to live it. Or am I? Am I? Am I? I travel and write romance. I don't have the time, inclination, or bandwidth for the real thing. It's my script so it must be true.
"Even if I find it, I'm still not capable of it." ~ Stacee Ann Harris
~~
By book's end, everyone dies. Well, the old poet, the poetess, the wife, and the nutso lesbian. With the exception of the nutso lesbian, I'm not sure how they die, however given that the setting is the mid-1800s and it's not one of those vampire stories where characters attain ever-lasting life, even though I'm still a couple hunderd pages from turning the final page, I'm decisively confident that they do. All of them. I suppose that's the moral of the story. Regardless what we choose - to write the script and stick to it word-for-word or flip it and rip it into a zillion pieces - eventually we die...either with a happy heart, a broken heart, or one so full of rocks and pebbles that it scarcely beats. It's our choice and the consequences created are ours to deal with, dispense with, live with. For better or worse, 'til death comes knocking.
*** I"m telling you. Sometimes these blogs go a completely different direction than expected, usually without any warning. I didn't intend for it to end so....melancholy, so real. But, nonetheless, here we are... The End.***
I'm reading a novel that it turns out - after a fashion...ok, like 210 pages - is about a forbidden love. He's a somewhat older famous poet who's been married for many years. She is an aspiring poetess who lives in a sort of solitude with a (nutso) lesbian who secretly or not-so-secretly (I haven't gotten all the way there yet) covets her and dislikes (ok, abhors) her seeming affection for the poet-guy. A chance meeting leads to letters (it's the mid-1800s so...) which lead to a not-exactly-chance meeting or two. In the midst of all that nutso lesbian rips up and burns a bunch of letters and a bit later in the story throws herself off a bridge with heavy rocks sewn into her pockets.
I'm certain that there's more...I don't know...literary stuff I'm supposed to be getting from the book. I mean you don't win The Man Booker Prize (usually a Bat Signal that I should NOT read the book) by writing a fluff piece ala cautionary tale about stepping out on a nutso lesbian. Still, it's me doing the reading so all the important literature-y stuff is going to be lost. Tell me a story and I'll listen. Couch it in academic mumbo-jumbo and I'm not. I am truly that simple - brain-wise and reading-wise.
Just when I was about to give up and start skimming - I knew there had to be a STORY in there somewhere - I found it. A glorious chapter with glorious writing that blew what little hair I have back. Finally, I could see something of myself in a character (Up until that point all the characters - each and every last one of them - seemed far too pedantic, lugubrious, and academic for me to ever relate to). No, I didn''t find myself in the nutso lesbian (Sh**. Seriously, focus). As I turned one page for another, the sad sack old poet turned romantic, soulfully romantic, and I was instantly hooked.
Because if there's one thing I like, it's a soulful romance. Ok, the idea of it. Let's not go crazy. At the end of the day, I'm still me - a traveler woefully unable to make lasting connections who therefore has absolutely no desire for them. I'm not so cynical that I don't believe in anything at all. I believe in make believe, imagination, and intuition. I believe that love exists, that souls can become intertwined. I believe that now often trumps later, that a moment can easily rival forever, that checking a box and moving on beats the dismantling of a soul, the dismantling of a life. I believe that knowing - truly knowing - even for one painfully beautiful, soul searing nano-second is enough. So enough that it might actually be everything.
I worry that most people won't understand. Shouldn't connection with a...let's call it for easy math...a soulmate be the be-all-end-all? Make us want to stop the life we are living, however happy it might be, however perfect it may seem, and....what? Ride off into the sunset? Leave the old wife or nutso lesbian behind and live even happily-er ever after? As I near midlife, I realize that most of what we are, who we are, the lives we've chosen, are set. Or at least we think they are. In many cases life is good - we are good - at least good enough. We settled - anything short of forever with the aforementioned 'soulmate' is a form of settling - and we're living with the consequences of that choice. Consequences aren't always bad; they simply are what has been, what is, and very likely what will be. Life, as I am insanely fond of saying, is what we make it. So we settle and as long as we are happy, who cares?
But what about that day? The moment we realize.......there's something else out there? "No, I can't" is the immediate knee-jerk answer. But then.........it persists, it niggles.....and we wonder...what if? Maybe we decide to dabble. Maybe we let it remain firmly in our imagination. Maybe we dive in head-first. We can do any and all. The consequences are ours to bear.
~~
"That's just her script," my friend told me with a shrug of her shoulders. I'd shared my moderate disappointment following a conversation with a mutual friend about her plans if/when she ever finds herself single again.
"Her script?" I replied.
"Yeah, we all have them. It's what we say to protect ourselves from what we actually want but are too scared to admit."
I don't have a script, I immediately thought. Ridiculous. I don't need to protect myself from what I want. I don't want anything. Days later (and I do mean actual days later) I realized. I fucking have one. I have a script. And it's so ingrained in my consciousness that I couldn't see it. I literally wrote it in a paragraph above -
"I'm still me - a traveler woefully unable to make lasting connections who therefore has absolutely no desire for them."
Really? Am I? Am I? Am I unable? Am I beyond desire? Or am I frankly, plainly, veritably full of shit?
~~
From Seat 17A of a Southwest Airlines flight, I contemplated the horizon, the clouds, and the desert far below. I was traveling as I often do, as I love to do. With thoughts in my head I didn't want to lose and no paper handy, I flipped to the back of the book, to the last blank pages of Possession, and began scratching, nearly illegibly, in ball point pen.
"I travel to be neither lost nor found. To seek the horizon beyond the great desert? No. To seek the desert because it protects? Maybe. Perhaps I am tired of walls - the analogy if nothing else - and choose the vast, windy nothingness of a desert instead. But what of oases? Walls do not have them; walls are impenetrable. Mirage - that's the better word - that of myth and mysticism - the virtual - not real. And so I am safe with my own imagination (my truth) and intuition. The beginning is mine to write; the end as well. What lies between desert and oasis (MIRAGE), lost and found, real and virtual is mine and mine alone. I may reappear and check a box (That's what I choose to call it, how I choose to experience it), but assuredly I will retreat again - as ethereal as dust blown toward a horizon I cannot, will not - ever - reach. Still I travel. Not because I seek, as many may think, but because I know."
~~
I write romance. Maybe one day I will string together words so deceptively simple......and yet so indelibly, so irreparably......deep....penetrating (I do mean that in its best figurative sense)........that a head shakes and eyes retrace their steps to read and re-read the phrases again and again. That pages may be dog-eared and a pen may emerge from a bag days later to draw lines and scrawl stars in margins. They will be the words of a dream....and a nightmare....providing absolute comfort but all the while be so disturbing that the book may be slammed shut.....only to be re-opened again.
"It is a love for which there is no place in this world -- a love my diminished reason tells me can and will do neither of us any good, a love I tried to hide cunningly from, to protect you from, with all the ingenuity of my command... How shall this be the end that is in its very nature a beginning?"
~~
I guess I should re-phrase. I write romance for a reason. I write it so that it can exist safely in my head, within the bounds of my imagination. I write romance because I am loath to live it. Or am I? Am I? Am I? I travel and write romance. I don't have the time, inclination, or bandwidth for the real thing. It's my script so it must be true.
"Even if I find it, I'm still not capable of it." ~ Stacee Ann Harris
~~
By book's end, everyone dies. Well, the old poet, the poetess, the wife, and the nutso lesbian. With the exception of the nutso lesbian, I'm not sure how they die, however given that the setting is the mid-1800s and it's not one of those vampire stories where characters attain ever-lasting life, even though I'm still a couple hunderd pages from turning the final page, I'm decisively confident that they do. All of them. I suppose that's the moral of the story. Regardless what we choose - to write the script and stick to it word-for-word or flip it and rip it into a zillion pieces - eventually we die...either with a happy heart, a broken heart, or one so full of rocks and pebbles that it scarcely beats. It's our choice and the consequences created are ours to deal with, dispense with, live with. For better or worse, 'til death comes knocking.
*** I"m telling you. Sometimes these blogs go a completely different direction than expected, usually without any warning. I didn't intend for it to end so....melancholy, so real. But, nonetheless, here we are... The End.***
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