• the unreliable narrator • : oneiric

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oneiric

Thursday 14 August 2008 | 4 cookies in the jar

In my dream, I want Mandarin to fight me—physically fight me. She, understandably, does not want to do this: she’s taken vows of non-violence, she protests; she’s not even mad at me, she certainly doesn’t want to hit me.

So I taunt her into it, following her from room to room verbally goading her, until finally, in frustration and hurt, in tears, she turns and thwacks me, hard, with the blade of her hand, like a karate chop. I feel a flush of triumph and savagely happy hatred as we lock in catfight, biting and hair-pulling and grappling, the way I used to fight with my cousin when we were very little girls—completely animal, no-holds-barred, erotic in the clinch, in the blindness of it. Defiantly pleased that I’ve made her feel strong feelings, extorted negativity from her, dragged her down into her shadow.

uma vs. darryl, rrrraow!
We continue this way for a long segment of the dream, gathering a crowd of concerned/appalled/fascinated Zen-student onlookers, moving through rooms, indoors and out, down the street and into the town. (Crowd scenes apparently lifted by my brain from The Quiet Man.) She keeps trying to lapse back into passivity and withdrawal and I continually force her out again and again.

Finally we face off in a public place, surrounded with people, and she looks at me squarely and says, completely exhausted and down to the bone: You are my father. To me, you are exactly like my father.

My self-congratulation evaporates—I’ve anticipated almost any revelatory conclusion to our brawl but this one. But I’m so much more self-aware and conscious than he is! I get angry and critical, sure; but I don’t stay there, I drop it or consider and reevaluate or realize I’m being silly or whatever. I mean, I just can’t be like your dad to you—oh my God, am I really?!

She looks at me, weary with clarity, and repeats: Exactly. Like. My father.

I’m gobsmacked. Crushed and meek, I avert my heretofore bold stare, gather myself, slink away. On my way back to wherever I run into a State School colleague who’s alarmed by my dishevelled hair and clothing. What the hell happened to you? I start laughing hysterically: Oh, I just got into a little fight, is all. You’ll hear about it I’m sure, just ask anyone. Laughing and laughing.

•

A witch-teacher gives me a demonstration, in a darkened room, of how to raise and see and use an etherial wand of light. First I practice with objects, wiggling them and squinting my eyes and trying to see the streaks of energetic light through them. For some reason I can do this most easily with a watermelon: That’s because it’s alive, she says matter-of-factly.

jack chick tracts will save us! Then I open my right palm and she concentrates, and stunningly there appears a long slender wand made purely of neon-green light. I can wrap my fingers around it and direct it, but my concentration is weak and it flickers in and out, like the signal on an old television set. I find I can control it more by having it come out of the bottom of my hand, though this means I make stabbing motions rather than waving ones, and I half-suspect this reveals some primitive violent streak in me which my teacher will also notice and disapprove. But she gives me no instruction, just watches me, and I quite soon I begin to tire mentally and the wand finally vanishes altogether.

I’m overjoyed and babbling messily to her about it: Did you see it? I saw it! Is it real? Can I see it again and learn to use it? Did you do that or did I? I didn’t expect anything really and I saw all this—does that mean I’m doing better than the other students? She doesn’t really answer any of these questions but I gather somehow from her dignified, pointed silence that she did in fact do it all and I was just riding the horse whose reins she held, walking beside; and no I am definitely NOT doing better than the other students. I feel queasy and crestfallen, suspect I am the dunce of the class, but am still elated.

•

I go to the tattoo parlor but wind up dressed in an ugly new outfit of white cotton gauze, a paneled flounced skirt and ribbed lace-edged tank top, which the hip indifferent “tattoo artist” spray-paints. First she puts on red, then white (making pink), and finally adds in black the name of a girl band, some group younger than me by 20 years, The Emilys or something like that.

I ask meekly for the band’s logo (of a little girl in silhouette) to be placed directly on my skin, near my navel, instead of painted on the white shirt. The artist refuses, and says she can’t tattoo my skin because my acne is too bad. She shows me and sure enough, various parts of me are covered with great repugnant wens, and plenty of coarse dark hair too. I am horrified; I wonder if I’ve been taking some medication which has androgenic effects?

When she’s finished I ask what the price will be, and try to seem nonchalant and dignified as I make out the check for $150, though I thought I would only spend $30 or $40, and am deeply ashamed, of being old and ugly and uncool.

•

I go to visit Z., whose boyfriend is a gorgeous Native American rodeo star. Together they have taken his prize earnings and converted Maman’s property into a state-of-the-art rodeo training center with rings and arenas and stalls and barns and horse-trailer parking lots. She is very happy and her boyfriend is extremely handsome and masterful with horses, his long dark hair shining as he swings down from the saddle of a paint, its bridle trimmed in silver.

I am overcome with sorrow, though, because in the dream the many thousands of acres of land had been so beautiful—wildflower meadows, pine forests, babbling creeks. Now it is literally every inch paved with pea gravel, crushed rock, or blacktop. I wander the property sobbing with wrenching grief. Why did you do it, why, why, I sob over and over, wringing my hands like a ghost, like an unwanted houseguest haunting their happiness.

•

The Brujo and I fight, as we semi-annually do, for maybe three minutes.

(This is not a dream.)

douglas fairbanks and joan crawford

I wander into the kitchen around 10 pm where he is eating cereal and reading a (typed, mimeographed) cactus journal circa 1974. I seem downcast and I am. He asks me why, and at first I don’t want to say but then with coaxing I start to tell him. Unfortunately my recital begins with my feeling sad that he and I have come to spend our typical evenings apart, each in our own offices on our computers (partly because we don’t really have a usable living room, thanks to Fiona; and mostly because he is an unvarnished introvert at the best of times but perhaps particularly after a second full day of public high school when he’s taught all five periods and seen about 130 students).

I prefaced my sharing with “Of course you’re completely maxed out right now and I totally understand and I don’t expect anything different,” and I would have gone on to: “…and I haven’t gotten to tell you a single thing about San Francisco; and I found out today that I’m not pregnant and I feel all kinds of things about that; and I feel nauseated and fatigued for no good reason; and I really wish I would do other things in my office besides be on the computer, like write letters or sew”; but I don’t ever get to any of that, because he instantly reacts defensively, predictably, lashing out with raised shaky voice and telling me that, well, you know what, that’s just too bad and you’re just going to have to get used to it for the next nine months. And that furthermore he’s already interacted with 130 students that day. “I know, I just said that.”

He ignores this, caught up; carries on, swells the theme, adds more, including my least favorite gesture (the arms-upraised, backing-away, eyes-rolled, I-can’t-even-DEAL-with-your-neediness gesture). By now I’m looking down and fighting tears but at the appearance of this gesture I feel a flash of my own self-protectiveness; I raise my head, look him in the eye and say clearly, “I really don’t think you need to be this forceful with me.” “Oh, I think I do!” I struggle not to deploy the classically feminine wounded-dignity martyr archetype, just to be appropriate and repeat myself with more breath support. “Yes, but I just said: I don’t. This is me. It’s not necessary.”

Almost immediately he deflates from his protective camouflage of having grown large and scary, reaches out to touch my hand, is contrite. More tears swell in my throat as I think unhelpful thoughts like: So is this how it is, then? I don’t get to make any requests of him ever any more but just have to wait for whatever dedicated time he decides to give to us? Or do I now need the precision of a microbiologist to space out my requests, gauge his mood and time them exactly, even my non-blaming statements of feeling or confessions of what’s going on with me or just plain sharing of information? Or I have somehow to develop a sufficiently thick skin that I just say whatever I need to say and trust he’ll tell me what he wants and doesn’t want to hear, and then be stable and sturdy enough not to perceive this as rejection but just happily go back to my office and be enthralled with cloth and paper in the absence of human contact—or make sure every evening I have a different activity, different yoga/quilting/Al-Anon group, different girlfriend to call? And what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with me that I’m so fixated on him anyway? At this point I realize that of course I can’t stay in the conversation, I’m too far gone into waves of loneliness and self-pity and verging on self-blaming.

I stand up wobbling, say, “I’m going to take a shower,” and cry mightily under the hot blast of it, hanging on to the towel bar for support, attentive to the prickles of boring old searing pain that stab the muscles of my body like stars and make it harder to breathe. Okay, I think; but at least it has to work both ways. If I put effort toward being less dependent on him, he has to put effort toward being more open toward me, both of us sometimes when we don’t particularly want to move in those directions. It’s the dumb old Annie Hall conundrum of having sex “constantly” or “almost never” (but in either case twice a week). He thinks we interact all the time, I think we interact rarely (other than household/domestic business). Yet I also know from bitter past experience (and in the not-so-distant past at that) that any heroic attempts on my part to want less from a relationship, or to “meet my needs” with other relationships/occupations/activities will result in, at most, one or two more years of this—of fights at midnight when we’re both too tired to think straight anyway, and then oh you’d better believe I’ll meet my needs elsewhere all right—by wreaking, per Herself, “some weird karma” that shrapnels not only me and my current romantic partner but also everyone within a ten-mile blast radius, including editors, Zen teachers and married friends.

We should live separately again, I think. That way he would come see me when he wants to see me, and I could be secure in knowing that’s why he’s there, and I wouldn’t be deceived by his physical presence into thinking he’s available when he obviously isn’t. But what if I wanted to go see him more than he wanted me to visit? This never seemed to happen in Santa Fe; but he didn’t have 130 students then. So why does he have to do this? Can’t we get money some other way? Why doesn’t he go to grad school?

But we’ve been through all this before; and this is the way he wants to do it. I turn off the bathroom light and, wrapping the towel around my wet hair, lie down in bed next to him in the dark. We hold hands quietly, waiting for the next steps to be revealed. After a while he pulls me against his chest. “You need a hug. Okay, maybe I need a hug.” My churning stomach starts to settle, as presumably his does too. “The bitch of it? Is that I really miss you.”

“We both need to learn new behaviors,” I mumble, sniffling but having successfully used the DBT Group Leader’s patentable method of stopping crying (which won’t work if you’re trying to invalidate or deny the hurt, only if you make a conscious decision to attend to it later, but choose not to cry now because you’ve already cried a lot, or don’t want to unduly alarm those around you, or just have other more immediately pressing things to do).

“Okay, but can we learn them maybe tomorrow?” he mumbles back, trying to be funny. He pats my hip clumsily through the sheet and then immediately passes out, in that way he can do. I think, I can’t sleep, I have to get up and go into the other room, I’ll never get to sleep; I am preparing myself to do this when unconsciousness engulfs me; and I dream many dreams.

4 cookies in the jar

the almost right word said on Thursday 14 Aug 2008 at 4.16 pm:
Your words wear me out like an intensely beautiful poem and suddenly I remember all the things that made me fall for the unnarrator in the first place.
patrick said on Thursday 14 Aug 2008 at 5.45 pm:
Your post moved me to poetry (such as it is)

The stage is set, the lantern lit, the evening dissolves into a dream.
Whirling dancers tangled in a minuet, lovers bound by a string.
The troupe assembles. The cast select, the roster called and all are met.
The actors in a mirror stare as one by one the mind begets its players fair.
The tome is opened the lines are read and all together the stars are fete
In balance on a single hair as Oedipal sagas, Euclidean chronicles and all the manifold of quests and yearns unfold onto the head of a pin and yawn wide before the chasm…
and once are closed again and morn has come and dawn has broken and twisted seemings of half truths pirouette before the aching bones of slumber and we are cast again into the open

•

Obnoxious editor [for once speechless]: !
patrick said on Thursday 14 Aug 2008 at 5.49 pm:
except “minute” should be “minuet” (curse the spelling fairies of my word processor)
lise said on Friday 15 Aug 2008 at 7.46 pm:
Semi-annual? You are doing extremely well. D and I do this every other Friday…

•

Premenstrual editor: Every other Friday is reserved for baleful stares and muttered imprecations, I’m afraid; we can only fit in a full-blown fight every six months!

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4 cookies in the jar

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