Reaching for the Intangible

Maybe it is necessary for me to discuss on here what my objectives are in my Electra's Dictionary concept-- to clarify for myself the way the purpose of language becomes the need to define. Discussing with my close friend Maria McCabe the medium of the biography and the requirements of the biographer, recently, she made a humorous point. She said that it always must begin with the subject's birth, even as the subject had very little to do with his or her own birth. But where does one begin?

I haven't known where to start but this dialogue with myself has been continual since I first needed to start defining myself. The need to do this was because I was trying to make emotional sense of my personal world that was being warped by my family environment. The paranoia I was forced to deal with was real, I had to worry about my words and thoughts being exposed because I had caught my mother going through my diary and my crumpled trash.

I moved to Michigan twice. Once was back in the late '90s and the second time was towards the end of the first decade of our new millennium. Both times people asked why I would move from New York to Michigan by both New Yorkers as well as Michiganders. There were different reasons both times. There's no need to go into the reason of the first immigration but the reason I returned to New York, in retrospect was, I can say, because my parents were dying, they were both terminally ill and I knew it. There were things that I needed to try and reconcile with them, find peace with them, and try to let them get to know their grand-daughter, who at the time was not quite a year old.

But I did not find peace with my parents and they died leaving a lot of unsolved pain behind them. Although it was not a conscious reason, I can say now that I left New York that second time to escape their ghosts.

Why I moved back to Michigan was really a matter of the only option, the legal problems of divorce and custody, as you see, my by then ex-husband's roots were in Michigan and I knew I had to get out of New York for more than one reason. Restarting a life with no funds to begin anew made New York a death trap and I knew it. You need prospects to make it in New York without them you are dust. I had nothing. No, I did have one thing: I had a very enduring friend whom I later married who was my entire lifeline in a shipwrecked world. A most unlikely friend at the most unlikely time in my life when I was not even looking for it who saved my life because I was really out of fuel by the time I had met him. My parents died six weeks apart and only months after a bitter divorce and custody battle that I lost. My years of optimism and bravado were spent and I was literally at the end of my rope. The young artist in the art supply warehouse where I worked was sunshine over a stormy sea.

He too had no prospects either and he came with me to Michigan because that was where my ex husband's family was and two artists bumming it on Long Island could only survive like that for so long.

What is interesting to me is finding the simpatico in a State that was showing the same ravages of life that I too was experiencing. You would think that should have done me in. You see, when we got to Michigan it was right around the bailouts of the Detroit motor industry moguls. It was like witnessing the sunken ship of the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean to arrive here at this time. But I felt a bonding, oddly enough; a kind of kinship; an association. I had to begin with nothing and I too was as car-less as the Detroit factories because the first thing that gave out when we arrived here was our car that had pulled us here. We were in a ghost town and had landed smack in the dregs with no prospects.

I guess I drew strength from the people here. I don't know if that makes sense. I got a job at a local store that I could walk to and I met all the neighborhood locals. Over time I knew most of them by name because this abandoned little city just next door to Detroit was so sparsely populated that I saw the same people everywhere in the four blocks I could walk to. It really humbled me and changed my perspectives on life. My own heart breaks I could ignore as I allowed my heart to reach out to the lives I saw, the wreckage of an American Dream that was crashed and burned.

I always used Electra's Dictionary as my source of strength in my life. I could not rely on a diary so I had to mythologize my life and my analogies were really my personal forms of mental therapy exercises. Finding myself post apocalyptic in my life in a place that looked like how I felt seemed as good a place to start as any, maybe even better because the decision to survive becomes a decision renewed and re-avowed every day because, truly, what is the alternative? I was lucky to have a man beside me who had also fast become my best friend but our life was not a bed of roses. It was a two way support system between us, he had his own wreckage to deal with so it wasn't a lopsided knight in shining armor scenario. He was considerably many years younger than me and in many ways not fully matured and often times the weight of that fell on my shoulders but it was always worth it to me because what singled him out in the torrential disaster area I had found myself in when I met him was that he has a genuinely sterling character. He is a very good person. A very good man. Honest, kind, trustworthy and he has a gentle and very big heart. I didn't think there was such a thing and I was so world weary by the time we met that I think only he could have saved me because he was true; yes, very much like a knight. I needed that more than I needed a million dollars.

I look around at this ghost town and I see that it still has the spine left and that was where I first was able to rediscover my own strength to survive. You see, I could never identify with New York. New York was my parent's world and we were always like night and day. I was always too sensitive, the brutality of the people's personalities were abrasive to my nerves and the material emphasis of Long Island always depressed me. The contrast to where I now found myself was like a splash of cold water. This kind of survival of the fittest made sense to me, it was a practical do or die kind of fight for me and at first just moving in synch with the emotional slump of the people was a source of comfort that healed a lot of my inner turmoil. I learned about acceptance each day of dragging my ass to work and facing the bleak existences of people who found humor in unexpected experiences. I realized that this was like witnessing history, like the kind John Steinbeck would have written about. Another Depression era entirely. I saw the people that no one in New York believed existed. The ones who were the great grand-children of the auto workers who had made those flashy Chevy's and Mustangs, the Chrysler’s and Buick’s that had once been so proudly displayed along Madison Avenue and on billboards that made a lot of New York advertisers very wealthy.

I guess what I am defining here is that I saw the strength that were left in those old dinosaur bones. I understood why they had created a weekend in the summer known as the Dream Cruise where old muscle cars and classic beauties are shined up and revved down the main drag of Woodward avenue. A pride of place even if forgotten by the rest of the world and country, like veterans from a lost war, forgotten heroes that still deserve to be respected but are left to feel shamed. I know I personally identified with that. And I think recognizing this allowed me to mourn their loss and while doing so, it let me heal my own grief; those unreconciled family scars.

When I reconstructed my idea for Electra's Dictionary from a regular story format where I simply told a story about a girl who had grown up with abuse dealing with life to a staged allegorical platform, I was trying to structure all this into concrete outlines by drawing on classical themes that would help me to define my confusions that need to be exorcised still. Help me understand, help me define this abstract disorder that still seems out of my reach to put into words that could make sense of ….child abuse. And the aftermath of what it leaves a person with, to fight the downward spiral of clinical depression and find beacons of optimism to use as symbols to not just survive but to want to triumph. And maybe help other people too who go through this and have.

I am interested in triumph, not just basic survival. There must be an impetus. It is strange when a professional psychiatrist asks you, “how did you survive all that? It's remarkable when you look at the statistics, how did you do it?” because, you see, I never noticed I was, it was never a choice, not consciously, I guess, for me, it was the stubborn decision to not be defeated that kept me going. It was not so amazing, really, it was just pure stubbornness. I kept envisioning my own glory and I convinced myself that it was possible enough to ignore the nay-sayers and the faces of doom. Because I can see by looking at this neighborhood that I walked through these past several years that every May every little house that I pass has a beautiful garden with flowers that bloom and I watch them tend them with care. There are lottery winners and there are those who triumph. I guess this is something I am reaching to say as I work and re-work Electra again and again.