A Southward Tide

Poems, essays and excerpts. A favorite quote or two. An observation. A compendium of imagery. A dream analysis.

Category: Essay

December 13, 2013

Friendships of a Different Kind

The first days of college were a period of great possibility. We had finally arrived, survivors of parental dysfunction, high school theatrics and the ragged adolescent investigation into selfhood and drugs.

From across the country we had travelled, all different colors and sizes and textures, drawn together like pilgrims at the pinnacle of a spiritual quest. The University of Chicago. Within the fifteen block perimeter of this cathedral campus were stone dormitories, eating halls suffused with that particular Aramark smell, a classics building and humanities library, a radio station with a beaten up couch, an underground maze of corridors and basements – clandestine repositories of erudition – an old lap pool with its hexagonal tiles, muddy lawns under blooming canopies, snow drifts and icicles in winter, mosquitos and humidity. We congregated at the overheated student center, in beer bars with black painted floors, and on the back stairs of student apartments with their crusted windows and clanging radiators.

We trudged through the four years, forming friendships unlike any others we had known before or would know after. As teenagers, arriving fresh from the nest, we imprinted to each other like baby birds. Except we did not know that then. We could not possibly realize how unique college would be in the course of our lives.

And four years seemed like forever. But then it all came to an end, tapering off ever so slowly. Senior year. Countdown to commencement. Some of us were voracious planners – interviewing, assessing, paving small pathways toward a larger goal. Some of us just waited, a light anxiety fluttering in our hearts. We were beginning to disconnect from each other, to draw inwards. Some of us left our significant others and bade farewell to the minor friendships.

First we graduated. Then came September 11 and afterwards, our twenties continued for one long decade. We struggled through the process of maturation as we disassembled the staggering passions of youth.

Some of us walked this pain together, moving to New York or San Francisco or London or China, choosing similar careers and exploring fresh avenues together, reformulating and reinventing our friendships, strengthening them with each passing of the year.

Some of us died young.

Some of us drifted apart never to rekindle our former bond. We had each mapped a different route to cope with this thing called life, which in no way resembled what we thought life would be when we were eighteen years old and shimmering with the thrill of beginnings.

Maybe for some, our twenties buckled to cynicism as we realized that reality could not be manipulated like a teenager who constructs his own universe. But certainly and hopefully, some of us realized that within this staunchness of life was a different kind of joy. Now some of us marry. Now we have little children too. Some of us settle down to career. Some divorce. We stand at the dawn of another great era, another realm of simmering promise, albeit different in kind.

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November 26, 2013

Buzzards

After high school, I vowed never to return to Palm Beach, a thin sliver of island that reminded me of all things lost in the cranky cogs of adolescence: wide-eyed jubilance, minnows and unconditional parental love (Later I learned their boundless love was not as mythic as teenagedom suggested. But that took decades…)

The tropical sun was reserved for holidays when I could loosen the vice grip of New York City and laziness became art: poolside reading, Dad’s cooking, twelve-hour sleeps. Over cocktails, I hated it here – how fake, weird, racist, stupid, greedy the inhabitants, how soporific the lifestyle. Couldn’t you just roll over and die in the blaze?

Then on the eve of my thirtieth birthday, a conspiracy of fates shipwrecked me. Moored by family illness and eventually love, I stayed, bought a house over the bridge and had some kids of my own.

Time rounded those reactive edges that tugged me to and fro, that trapped in the dooming treason of choice, the youthful delusion that life is anything other than the reinforcement of habits.

And slowly, the world unfolded before my eyes.

The buzzards float along the currents of the winds, hundreds of feet in the sky. In late afternoon, they swarm on buildings that edge the Intercoastal, covering the mirrored windows with hunched bodies. Actually, they are no more buzzards than butterflies, but rather two species of vultures: the turkey vulture and the black vulture. The former is the larger of the two with a red face and beak, while the latter has a smaller wingspan, a gray face and beak.

Egrets peck through the palmetto grasses and troops of white ibis with hooked bills hang out on the curb of my neighborhood. Often bobbing alone on buoys, pelicans sometimes fly in formation along the crashing surf.

By the glittering blue of the Intercoastal, a hawk beats its wings above the water where old timers on fold-out beach chairs cast their lines, reeling in whatever they can hook, snook if they are lucky. Every evening the sky blooms purple and neon pink; the moon rises over the ocean. And in my garden, hibiscus flower, three types of gardenia and some sweet almond vines.

The two Vanda orchids hanging from my front porch remind me of my father. His grave is shaded by banyans in the old cemetery. Above him, the buzzards circle.

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November 11, 2013

Even the Orchids Miss Him

Even the orchids miss him.

The last few years  he fought the cancer, the orchids exploded in their most vibrant expressions. Perhaps knowing what they knew, they created final symphonies of color where and when they could, blooming and fading as they do every year according to some mysterious tropical calendar. Plants know their temporality better than we – some dying after just one year, some duplicate, propagate, shoot off into replicated bundles, some bear fruit, pecked by blackbirds, their seeds deposited miles away into the clouds. There is no birth, there is no death, just cycles along the wind and under the arms of bees.

And then he was gone, that presence they had sensed for hours of each day as he walked the long rows of the orchid house. The orchids have faded since he passed. They are in mourning, like dogs missing their master. How many plants in the wild have human friends? These were the most beautiful orchids in the world simply because my father had walked through their house, loving them as his own creations.

We can change the colors of the world with our hearts.

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November 5, 2013

The Way They Looked at Him

The way they looked at him you’d think they’d been diagnosed too.

Which was more difficult – his friends looking down on those cavernous eyes, remembering every emptied bottle, all the misbehaviors of youth, or for him to see death reflected in their gaze, exposing a nostalgia years past due?

When he could still stand, dragging himself along on his IV, did he ever look at himself in the bathroom mirror?

Does a dying person think about form?

Did he pause to look into his ice blue eyes? Did he say goodbye to his wide smile, the long slender fingers, the sallow hollow of his cheeks? Did he think – when I go, she ceases forever to be my daughter? Maybe in these last moments – did he think – I will stare just a few minutes more into my mortality, refracted in immeasurable waves in their terrible loving eyes?

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November 3, 2013

Feelings Aren’t Facts

Feelings aren’t facts, they tell me when my father dies. What are we going to do with all those tears, Dee-da, my aunt said while we wait in the hospital corridor for Dad to go. Dry your eyes up before he sees you that way, my uncle says.

Feelings aren’t facts, they tell me when I am pregnant. Why do you have every symptom in the book, asks my husband, as I cry all the anger away and lash out all the fear?

Feelings aren’t facts, they tell me when I try to explain myself. You over-process your emotions, my therapist says, cataloguing them in binders colored Magenta, Cyan, and Yellow.

Feelings aren’t facts, they tell me when I am sad.

How do I meditate when I feel this way, I ask the guru. He replies, you meditate anyways.

Sadness is a river that flows straight from the gut, the river Styx into which our tears eventually trickle, deep pools of sorrow swirling through all consciousness, around our ankles, always within reach. Joy seems like Sisyphus’ fruit.

The guru says build from the ground up and your arms will reach the fruit. Elevate your consciousness and you will no longer be stuck in the morass. The fruit has always been there but you have been too busy staring at the puddles by your feet.

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October 31, 2013

A Spectral Rooster

My second year at the University of Chicago, I moved into an apartment owned by my roommate’s father, a professor emeritus of Arabic Literature. Years before they had purchased the flat on the cheap as the previous tenant had been murdered there by her husband. She had been a sculptor; traces of clay were still visible between the floorboards.

It was summer in Chicago. A few days before the other roommates arrived, my boyfriend helped me move into the grimy walk-up that had been uninhabited for a decade. I had just purchased a single size futon, presumably to torture him. He squeezed next to me on the dusty floor of a bedroom with no air conditioning. That first night, we somehow convinced ourselves  that a human size rooster would soon be seen walking by, its sharpened spurs clicking on the floor, pausing at our bedroom door long enough to turn a feathered head and merciless gaze towards us. Terrified, we ran off to sleep at his mother’s house. So visual was this fear that even today I hold a crystalline image of that rooster in the mind’s eye.

A few years after college, I traveled to New Zealand with the same poor man. We were camping outside of Queenstown and walked to town one evening to watch The Ring. Later back at camp, I bawled in fear. The images on the screen, the images in my head, were no different than reality.  I would not have been surprised to see that evil child’s ratty wig of long black hair and bent arm snaking though the zipper of our tent

From childhood I have carried through the concept that if a negative thought alights on my mind but for a second, that thing, awful, tragic, or terrifying, will be willed into being. It began with the ‘Bloody Mary’s’ chanted in front of third grade bathroom mirrors and continued with ghost stories, roosters and later the sense of impending doom that surrounded almost all of my romantic relationships.

Unfortunately, I have not maintained the logically opposite belief: that wonderful and enchanted things will happen to me if I dare to think about them. And neither have I done much to dispel the negatives. The notion of creating phantoms, tragedies and car accidents with the mind is an intoxicating delusion. But today is Halloween, so you’ll forgive me if I choose to resurrect nostalgic ghosts – spectral roosters walking bandy-legged through the past.

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October 29, 2013

On Jadedness and Magic

I began feeling jaded during teenage hood. As the magic of childhood faded and life started to appear in all its glory, a wretched unjust affair, I experienced the common symptoms: eye-rolling, sarcasm, over-sensitivity, unfounded hatred of existing power structures, a thirst for independence occurring alongside a pathological desire to feel part of a group (my peers – unfortunately also teenagers). Then freedom! Graduation! And all sorts of new things started pouring in again. College. Undesirable behaviors. After experiencing everything there was to experience in a short span, and then moving to New York, activity and boredom capital of the world, now I was jaded again. My twenties were a decade of ugly shiftless feelings, disappointments and ebbing wonderment.

Much has already been said about my generation’s inability to grow up. We have squeezed the last drops of collegiate experience well into our thirties to thirsty, spiritually bereft results. We wait till almost middle age to have children. And to what end? Now a mother of two, I understand that psychic reconciliation with one’s own mother and father can only occur after a few years of interrupted sleep, bathroom floods and crayoned walls. How can we forgive the twisting directions of our own lives if we cannot understand our own incapacity as parents to shield a child from the arrows of existence? Since we cannot forgive, we cannot move on. We remain stunted teens with crow’s feet and graying hair.  

But more importantly, we remain jaded. I’m not suggesting that everyone needs children to perceive magic again. For others, a dog (or three) will suffice. Maybe a pet armadillo. A backyard teepee. Or a scuba tank and a fish-eye lens. But let’s just say: the magic has always been here. We just closed our eyes. And jadedness is this willing escape from the whole picture of life into the comfortable womb of resentment. It is a momentary death as we turn from brilliance to count circles on the ceiling.

Maybe the only way out is not through but on top of – flip it, turn it backwards, throw your life on its head. A call to all fellow werewolves, midnight flutists, bird whisperers and underwater stargazers (you know who you are) –  to paraquote Ghandi – be the magic you want to see in the world.

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October 24, 2013

A Jaded Moon

Since my last post was about Lawrence Durrell, one thought led to another and I found myself rereading The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller. Miller, like Durrell and his zoologist brother Gerald, form the trifecta of my Greek obsession, always hinging on my unquenched desire to spend a summer writing in Corfu. At some point in the book, Miller is wandering through Crete, an island I visited out of college with my then boyfriend.

That summer, I was obsessed with the sanctity of our travels, wanting only the authentic experience and to be waterlogged with big feelings about the universe, the world and the future of all things. My boyfriend, on the other hand, had developed an acute allergy to sunblock. Unfortunately we decided that it was the bright Mediterranean sun responsible for turning his face into a shiny red plane. We kept piling on the SPF. Every time I looked at his taut tomato face, I felt a bubble of anger rising in me. His face was ruining my quest across ancient lands.

Miller too was often obsessed with dissecting locations down to their emotional skeletons. Big Sur. Paris. New York. Here Crete. Of course, he blows the roof off his descriptions. A few phrases stick out:

“Again I had that feeling of the back pages of Dicken’s novels, of a quaint one-legged world illumined by a jaded moon: a land that had survived every catastrophe and was now palpitating with a blood beat, a land of owls and herons and crazy relics such as sailors bring back from foreign shores.”

I too had walked Knossos and Phaestos with cautious steps, hoping to feel fifty centuries of civilization under foot. I wanted a connection with that part of us that mistakes history for eternity. I’m just not sure I was capable. Like a jaded moon.  

Miller goes on, “The island was once studded with citadels, the gleaming hub of a wheel whose splendor cast its shadow over the whole known world…. The last wheel has fallen apart, the vertical life is down with; man is spreading over the face of the earth in every direction like a fungus growth, blotting out the last gleams of light ,the last hopes.”

And while Miller’s prose are voracious dictates about the end of civilization, which he sees everywhere, least of all though in his drunken debauches, I am drawn now to the concept of the jaded moon. Next blog: ennui. 21st C Gen X jadedness. Perhaps also my favorite theme: paralysis.

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October 23, 2013

The Interpretation of Silence

“We live…lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time – not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.” (Balthazar, Lawrence Durrell)

Balthazar, the second in Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, has always been one of my favorite first reads, shattering the constructions so carefully set out in Justine. Is this not the best type of literature – the kind that piles misinterpretation upon misinterpretation, that builds a false belief system so Romeo can drink his poison, where the fiction of the story itself and the fictions created within the story merge seamlessly. In a much quoted line from Justine, Durrell foreshadows the unraveling of the subsequent books, “Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?”

Ultimately, we condition ourselves by the preset limitations of our perceptions. How many little deaths do we create, how many times do we drink the poison believing our dreams to be dead when they are just sleeping? Or sometimes we dream the false dream, like the narrator of the The Alexandria Quartet, when beyond our small castle of thoughts a much larger fortress resides, an entire socio-political, even emotional, landscape. In ninth grade, I developed an intense crush on a classmate who was always staring at me. Only months later did I realize his girlfriend was seated behind me; hours of visual dialogue had occurred between them and in my head, just wasted time.

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October 17, 2013

The Terrible Always Now and Other Ontological Problems

“For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side and the future on another.” (Virginia Woolf, Orlando)

At a lower school gathering, our discussion turned the media blitzed world of pervasive gun violence and pedophilia. Over coffee, we plotted to protect, insulate, even isolate our children from this cruel new decade. And yet, is this era worse than before? What of mangled vets returning from Vietnam? What about Emmet Till? And Jerry Lee Lewis and his 14 year old bride? What about age old alcoholism and The Valley of the Dolls? The Cold War?  Studio 54? The present is myopic; it accumulates no knowledge beyond our own existence. We are like blind moles digging ourselves a circular tunnel that fills in behind us.

St. Augustine questions, “How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.” (The Confessions, Book XI). Accordingly, the present is fluid, unmeasurable, indivisible, time flowing from future to present to past. Change is the only constant, but isn’t the present immutable, always being, always the same?  Is the present the moment where all of life and experience is born and dies simultaneously? If so, as Augustine ponders, does the future or past even exist?

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