A Southward Tide

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

Tag: Crete

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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