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R.M.

Monthly Archives: June 2018

City Child

30 Saturday Jun 2018

Posted by racheltejas in Meditations and Poetry, Motherhood, photography, Travel

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Tags

chess, chess forum, childhood, education, Eloise, gifted children, meditation on children, New York City, photography, travel, Washington Square Park

City Child

– “It’s an abstract world.
You’re an abstract man.”
~~ The Ramones

– “I am a city child. I live at the Plaza”
~~ Kay Thompson
Eloise is my favorite children’s book not only because of its flawless wit and masterful timing, but because Eloise the child reflects a truth not usually spoken of in the context of childhood:
She is lonely.
Eloise is intelligent enough to live as a small adult, and vulnerable enough to have endless faith her restless adventuring mother will always send for her, though of course she never does. The adults in her life are either absurdly stupid or hired substitutes; they are either affectionate but unreliable alcoholics or they’re frustrated outcasts. She relates most to the latter.

Eloise knows loss. Eloise knows bravery. And hilarity, even in solitude. Eloise is bright enough to outwit her tutor and compulsive enough to draw pictures on hotel walls.

My son is Eloise’s twin.
                      
Recently he took his first trip to New York City. Each of my children are to have a trip of their choosing upon the transition to double digits: an age that feels to me equal parts a turning from (childhood) and toward (independence).  My son chose, I’m sure through no maternal influence, to explore Manhattan.
Or, more accurately, to obsessively play chess in Greenwich Village at the Chess Forum and with the eccentric, often brilliant street players in Washington Square Park.
It was disconcerting to see my young, chronically disorganized first child adapt with such alacrity to the chaotic speed of the city. Within a day he blended to the environment like camouflage, absorbing new smells, accents, energy, and crowds as if he’d known them since the pram.  His temperament is perfectly suited to the urban movement of a busy metropolis: he holds no judgment against anything but stupidity, he speaks quickly and thinks at triple the time of his speech; he is utterly strange and indifferent to those who find him that way. What he appreciates is skill, quality, and competition, and it doesn’t matter if the source of those qualities come from a banker on the Upper East or a drug dealer who talks to squirrels.
Actually, he prefers the man with the squirrels: less pretense, more action.

From the earliest age my first born had preternatural focus. Before he could speak he took apart and put together puzzles of 50, 100, 150 pieces. Deeming the pictures unnecessary, he began to complete the puzzles on their white side, forcing us to maneuver around him for hours in our small dark kitchen. My neck developed a permanent ache from bending over to occasionally help and watch the pictures take form. Eventually a few people told me this was “not normal,” a comment that left me confused, defensive, and cold. He is my son, I would think, that’s all. Not a comparative number on a measuring stick, and not a label to make those of us addicted to cubbies and categories feel at ease. Gifted. Asberger’s. ADHD. Twice gifted (a particularly asinine designation). ODD. OCD. ADD and fuck off please.

Many years later I was to learn the usefulness of labels: they are guides, but only if utilized as such. When one begins and ends with naming, the name, like all form, comes up empty, and creates nothing but its own cage.

Like any mostly functioning mother I am absurdly proud of my children, to the point of being obnoxiously myopic in my opinions of their gifts and beauty. Fortunately I hold these thoughts close to the heart; I know how common my beliefs in the Extraordinary are in the closed maternal world.

My son, though, does exhibit a gift about which I feel open admiration: he possesses a truly adult humility in the context of study. He is as ego-less as he is competitive, and the source of this capacity is a mystery to me. It does not come from me, and it certainly does not flow from his father. He will learn from anyone, in any environment, if there is something of value to be learnt.
The players at Washington Square Park sensed this, and were he to be a true City Child I think he would quickly become as regular to that landscape as the brown skinned nannies, restive junkies, book-heavy students, thin plane trees and great old elms.
My son is a secret. The landscape of his mind he keeps hidden; I am the only one who catches more than a glimpse, and that is simply because of my persistence. He often reminds me of my father – brilliant, angry, depressed – and sometimes of me – melancholic, not quite of this Earth. Mainly, he is just himself, a trickster both toddler and wise old man. I sense he loves the city because he knows he can disappear there, and live among the millions who are also visible and rarely seen.

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Pause

17 Sunday Jun 2018

Posted by racheltejas in Grief, Meditations and Poetry, Melancholia, photography, Travel, Uncategorized

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Tags

existentialism, family, grief, madness, meditation on travel, meditations on death, Motherwell, Paris, photography, suicide, W.H. Auden

Pause
“
The glacier knocks in the cupboard
The desert sighs in the bed
And the crack in the teacup opens
a lane to the land of the dead.”
~~
W.H. Auden

I have grown weary of “I.”

It is so tiresome, to be thinking always of oneself, to write always of oneself. Writing about the intricacies of a daily life, one’s own daily life and history, has value only in that others might see a breathing thread of union, or a mirror of their own joys, passings, miseries.

Eventually language ceases. Where, then, goes the binding thread?

The ceasing is a death. Isn’t it? Or is the ceasing a pause in the recitative, a momentary relief from the constant chorus?

Writing in this little world, my world, is constant, almost compulsive. On my last trip to Florence and Paris I filled a journal of several hundred pages with notes, essays, observations. And, of course, complaint. Perhaps it is the compulsive nature of my need, our need, to communicate, to keep record, that has finally exhausted and humbled me.

I have arrived, I believe, at the limits of language. Or to my admittedly limited creative capacity to use it.

A story:
The second to last day I was in Paris, the air itself was alive with trembling vivid color: green of Cezanne, domed sky of an aged Rubens – blue both soft and electric – limestone glowing a secret inner sun. Wandering from the shadows of the old Jewish quarter in the 3rd into the stunned openness of the Tuileries, the sheer odd fact of my own presence, of this finite body taking part in the communion of the reborn Earth, buds of spring, lovers intertwined like vines, came upon me with a force of brutal primordial Joy.

 

 

These are moments given not earned; they come suddenly and are gone. They carry with them all the baroque wisdom of ancient gods, and like gods they disappear as quickly as they unexpectedly arrive.

I once knew a man who understood gods, who like them spoke the language of grandeur and fearless exploration. He did not observe art, or books, or philosophy; he entered them, encased himself in a life of inquiry, appreciation, and Love for the finest monuments of human creation.

Had he been with me during that perfect moment in Paris, I think I might have clutched his hand. I think I might have said, “The Light.” That’s all. Almost too much. Because he would have been lost in the same wonder.

This is companionship. Brotherhood. Sisterhood. This is Indra’s Net: Union through Communion. Oh, how he knew. He just… knew.

Until he didn’t. At some point the knowing turned to arrogance, the arrogance turned to isolation, the isolation turned to rage, the rage turned on itself, an inferno inverted.

A few months ago he killed himself.

And now his absence is an even bigger presence than ever his life was, and perhaps this was part of his intention in taking his life with such settled annihilation. Self. Murder. He took the perpetrator with him, but we will always ask, “Are we not also perpetrators? At what point does the crime committed become collective? Is there a beginning?” We know, of course, there is no end.

Sometimes the richness of existence is too much. However complex the analysis of existence, or however simple a life seems through the lens of meditative awareness: it is too much, and the only sensation one knows is pain.

 

 

Through luck, love, work, a trick of the brain, that pain can be treated with time, a pause in the flowing phrases of one’s life. In the pause lies both relief and danger: linger too long and agony appears permanent, and those Parisian days drift further away, someone else’s movie.

On that sublime afternoon my thoughts stayed a long time with this death.  I traced as well as I knew how the mystery of this man’s mind as it turned slowly against itself, the months and years it took to turn his back to the light right in front of him. I wanted him with me, I could feel his rough hand, fingers thick and strong.

“Look,” I wanted to say. “Come back. Come back. And just look.”

Who was first to be blind?

~~ For my Father

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