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The Prance of the Panther
I’m not a number
My fingerprints belong to me
--my fingertips
what I do is my life
& not for public scrutiny
your opinion does not count
I don’t care
I’m not your number
And time is when we share this planet
But I didn’t create your rules
If I was in some other time
There would be other scorecards
I walk away from chains and uniforms
There’s freedom but not
On your time.
There’s freedom on my mind
But it’s not your kind
Chapter 1 -- Premise
I am going to tell you a story about a girl.
Let’s call her Electra.
She
creates a comic strip that tells a story. Within the comic strip is a
diary that is known as Electra’s Dictionary. Through this it is possible
to tell. There is no need to explain or apologize. There is no type of
repercussions for the things that she reveals.
The density of words allows more to
be said as the interpretations of words can always be defended by the
subjective tendency to error in understanding, especially on the behalf
of the reader. I think that in order to be a good secret agent you
really have to be a good spy.
If this were a trail of clues the
blue print would look like splices of a cross-section diagram. You put
different colored films over the surface and examine how this influences
the way that it looks. Other realities are exposed. Within every one of
those realities is an infinite number of interpretations. Which is the
right one? This question is irrelevant because all and none would be the
answer and I know that is a contradiction in terms. Follow me.
You take a knife and cut into the
cross section. You lay a film of ultra-marine over it and then alizarin
crimson. You take away one and view. You put them together in two
separate orders. Ultra violet is my favorite color; it contains so many,
like the violet dawn.
I would make a series of mobiles;
three-dimensional sculptures to explain that the dimensions actually are
more than three-d. Maybe they are like solar systems. Every planet,
every moon, every galaxy… contains many mobiles, many cross-sections and
infinite dimensions. With so many possible realities the pondering of
Truth becomes erroneous.
I remember being handed my
assignment before I was jettisoned to life. I forget my way and exhaust
possibilities while spinning in a battle to steady the focus. I get
lost.
I am lost.
But let’s talk about her. Our
heroine. The one who draws a comic strip. Why comic? Is it funny? The
tragedy of life is hysterical. I still think the Greeks did it best. So
let’s invite their chorus for this comic book opera and this splice may
be seen through Freud’s interpretations or the lunatic inside. Either
way. Not sure. Which way it goes. Or will go.
Ready? Let’s go…
Let Go
I am Electra.
As old as time…..
I’ve been called so many things, so
it doesn’t matter what my name is. Dinosaur or Thesaurus Rex-- wrecks….
the web, the lines get tangled and often overlap. Literary or literal,
words never say enough….
Electra…. Who is she? A
psychological assessment would give us a clinical, deeper understanding
of her. But would it show her in her truest light….? In the absolute
sense of truth?
We consider the Greeks as our birth of thought.
What do we know of Electra? And
here, I do not mean the classical Electra, as in Euripides or Sophocles,
nor am I referring to Freud’s Electra. Our Electra, who remains
silently locked inside a dark world and uses symbolic suggestions
instead of language to keep her barriers up and to politely snub the
world. The dictionary, or lexicon is a primer, every line spoken in
rhymed code. And yet we do know that her use of the choice of calling
her diary Electra’s Dictionary is obviously meant to suggest all
classical references to Electra in the ancient and modern sense. A
guise, concealed behind what seems like simple self-analysis woven in a
diary.
The question remains, as it always
has, how much do we tell or how much do we distort in order to tell
everything and remain safe within anonymity? I have written pages,
volumes and years of this, at this very task. Those volumes have been
destroyed. By me and by someone else who discovered them…. and acted to
keep certain secrets safe. Or to just keep them. Some pages sit in legal
offices, confiscated by…. one of many enemies
It took that last lesson to finally
learn mother’s rule of “never put anything in writing….” Both my mother
and the man who fathered me left no physical evidence or documentation. I
know this because I have looked and searched.
What is a poet to do? Find solace in
poetic license. These facts must be revealed in riddles of
alliterations and allegory for the purpose of the secret(s) I am and
have been bound to, and the need to unburden my soul.
We must begin somewhere. A starting point?
Words work for you and against you.
My cryptic language is not intended to be mistaken for pretentiousness.
The simplicity of words are intentionally dense. Fewer words said the
more truth is stated. Look for it. You must accept these rules, as they
have been the very rules, which have crippled me. Double meanings. Lines
written invisibly or grammatically oblique. You see, I am committed to
truth. And why should anyone care? It doesn’t matter if you do or not.
Not to me. Just that I tell. This. But I will not spell it out because--
I think it was Cocteau who once said, “the matters I relate are true
lies.” The truth lies somewhere between the lines. Sometimes I do not
know which is myself. Mother was a good liar. She kept track. I never
could.
What relevance do I have to this selfish greedy world only interested in immediate self-gratification?
Truthfully,
So-often I despise my species….
Hmmm….
I think I will entreat you with temptation.
Come in:
[in a whisper](As an emotional vampire that feasts on the delicacy of the untainted
I ask you--
How pure is your soul?)
--Because I don’t want your blood.
Cocteau also said, “The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.”
I am an artist but I am a poet first.
I will use poetry to reveal what I
must and to conceal what must be concealed. I must be cautious in what I
say. Suggest but never say aloud. Be careful what you miss. If you care
or dare, take it or leave it. This is a story that must be told.
With 21st Century’s electronics and the Internet it makes sense to use
--along with my poetic license
images….
I am an artist –but, you see, nobody cares about art anymore.
So I will draw in modern cult style.
I always loved Batman and his Gotham city as a kid… and all those dark B
movies in black and white…
-->
Chapter 2 -- Electra's Dictionary
The very first time that it happened, I had not known that I could do
it. It happened by itself spontaneously as sheer pain spliced through my
senses. The skin to flesh slaps had stung like fire, like a scorpion’s
venom, but the lick of the belt sent me clear over the rainbow.
A flash of neurological overload and some blinding red pain. Was I going
to die? Was I still afraid to? Because there it wouldn’t hurt so bad.
Anymore. I heard thoughts the way a lightning bolt vibrates your spine.
I heard, you are safe… I’m watching you… come with me for awhile and
lets talk as this chastisement continues… I watched it all happen to me
from some other far away place. I was enclosed in a net of magical
protection, so familiar that I knew to trust it beyond my life.
So I did.
Part of me fell asleep. Part of me was healed-- that was the part of me
that was eternal and knew of an infinite knowledge I had temporarily
forgotten. I was six.
I watched the small red haired girl get whipped by her dad. I watched
the rage and venom pour out of him like a physical energy of spite. The
little thing took every blow. She lay there unmoving and unmoved. She
was … hollow. They picked her up and brought her out to the living room
and lay her on the sofa. Hours passed. Nobody stirred her. She stared
senselessly at the ceiling. Her dad was far away. Mother was far away.
Her sister was far away. Everything was far, far away. She lay in God’s
hand and his fingers kept her safe. Days passed. She saw the fear in the
faces that peered over her. Grandmother was there. She looked alarmed.
She was shouting at Mother. Loud voices between Mother and her dad. She
went away for awhile again, closing her eyes.
That was the first time it had ever happened. She could slip out of her
body. It was a way out. Some force had brought her to safety there and
told her to return there any time she was in danger and she would be
safe. Not with words, she just knew. It was understood as if from a
previous conversation before landing.
Sometimes it was only in that other place that I existed. So many days
passed and they are forever lost to me. Like a sleep walker, I could
perform in life as I was somewhere else. Why could I do that? Was I a
super hero? This brought a laugh in reply. There is really only one
super hero. All others are messengers. This pain was not my penitence.
There was some other task more pressing to accomplish or fall from
grace.
The last entry of the diary was gone. Incomplete now, like someone
erased I got lost inside my reflection knowing someone had got in. The
reflection stared. Who’s in there? “the face in the mirror won’t drop…”
was it so important that I know who she is? I am not my body. It is the
soul that is eternal, why should the rest matter? It is the uniform. If I
wear my French maid uniform then that is the part I play. Does this
provide insights or hints? Humility. But why? Why a French maid? You’re
not a French maid, you are a female. A female person-thing. No, I am a
bastard, not a French maid, almost the same thing. How so? Because that
role is enslavement, there is no freedom there. Freedom… what is that? A
stupid lie they tell.
Who is she? My face looks like nobody from my family, really. It used to
bother me. It used to anger mother when I asked her about it. It was
something I was not supposed to be suspicious of. Maybe I was adopted?
All kids think that at times. Why the cover up? I knew Trisha was born a
bastard, I figured that out when I was fourteen, years after her death
from a drug overdose. She was a hippie. She was my idol, my role model,
My goddess. My life was empty after she died. And then we moved far, far
away from everybody we knew. We moved overseas. Dad was an ad man.
If ever there could be my most poignant antithesis it would be a
commercial materialist. So my dad and I were destined to be natural
enemies. He once told me I was the bane of his existence. When he said
that, I remember how it had hurt. Looking back, though… now—I’m proud of
it. All the terror of my childhood can be forgiven if I believe that
what he called me was really true; The Bane of his Existence. I caused
him pain. How did I do that? All I wanted was to be daddy’s little girl
and to know a father’s love. He never loved me. My first heartbreak was
his rejection. Then hers.
I think that moving to Europe helped me, but not for the reasons most
Americans go to Europe for. I was eleven when we moved there and deep in
a depressive state as grandmother and Trish’s deaths were only months
past. I had become obsessed with dreaming up methods of suicide.
It was Europe that saved me that time. My vines took root in the romance
of the landscape and architecture that I got exposed to everyday-- the
school field trips to famous art museums that housed the most splendid
of masterpieces. The meaning of life went beyond this one me, this one
self, and being awakened to that woke me up. I flourished. I became some
tuning fork for the gods of the muses and became visited by inspiration
like a re-occurring fever. For the first time ever, I felt alive but
only when engrossed in one of the arts. Visual arts, literature,
classical music took me to a better place and that was the only place
that I chose to ever exist.
I know that is where the key is buried.
There I am not lost.
But there is where I am.
There is Electra.
There before the grace of God go I….
Chapter 3 -- Electra's Comic Book Scene 1: Trent
Electra’s Comic Book
Scene 1
Trent
He dreams in comic book font:
The bat lady…
She came into the room occupying its entire space with her presence. She
moved bat-like in her dark colors, long flowing black taffeta and her
billowing sleeves. They move past her as she walks. Following the wakes
of her arms. Long bat sleeves, bell sleeves, bell towers… bats in the
belfries… gargoyle footmen… belfries, bell freeze…. is she free? Was she
a blaze of the fires of hell, like a torch in a castle? The smoke
affect of her bat material seemed as if to emphasize the smoking of her
Medusa web like hair. Web like, in that, although tangled or tossed,
there was some organization to the mad living mass, some identifiable
pattern …a pattern so easy to get lost inside, with mazes that lead
nowhere. And everywhere.
Or somewhere.
As the trails of her stilled themselves before his eyes, he realized his
error. She was not real. She was an apparition… a fiery-- faery vision.
A vision. She was too small to be a real doctor, Tinkerbell….
Shrink--doc? Headshrinker. Which doctor or witch…? she took minds back
to her elfingroth. She kept them all in jars, enchanted by her obsidian
eyes… scrying eyes she could look into and devour people’s souls.
Beautiful darkness, India ink pools crying India ink tears down a
feather quill pen. She held out her hand and gave him her card. It was
the queen of hearts. But aren’t they all?
She seemed to snap her fingers as if to break a spell. And it did, a
little. He went to scratch his itch but remembered too late that he was
still in the straight jacket. Still? Where was he again…? Bat lady
seemed to be saying something but it was muffled; only some of the words
got through.
The drama is told
Narrator:
Lisa Loath had been missing for a week now and the media was going crazy
over what was behind her disappearance and possible homicide. Trent
MacGowan was arrested, and then sent here --a mental facility-- for
evaluation. How could there be an arrest without a body? She wondered.
She paced about the cold sterile office reading the report that had been
handed to her as she kept wondering how it was that she had been called
to be the mastermind for this incredible case. What did she know about
rock stars and their the bigger than life lives they lived? Her eyes
were drawn to the photo of Trent MacGowan that lay on the pile of
reports. There were newspapers and tabloids with this story overflowing
on the desk in the office. This ugly office that she had been given to
use, her own office all the way on the other wing of the mental
hospital. She had been on the staff here for about five years now. It
faced over a cemetery that was huge and historical and where the famed
oak tree was still standing: in the direct center of the city right
beside this gigantic mental institution in the heart of Regal Grove.
Last night Trent MacGowan’s band had played here. He’d been arrested
this morning. Why would a little city outside of Motown metropolitan
area need such a big loony bin? She studied his picture on the cover of
one of the magazines, somehow compelled by his face and felt a strange
chill.
His eyes… it was his eyes that dispelled any doubt that this person
could possibly be a murderer. They were haunted eyes, but not cruel.
Beautiful, a strange gray-blue with an angelic glint with secrets,
taunting. Intellect…. Yes, that was there. And there was something about
him that disturbed her.
She went down the hallway to the room he was in and entered after a quick knock.
Their eyes met from the doorway as she put down her things, shutting the door behind her.
“Bat Lady,” he said. “Or do I mean dragon-lady?”
“What?” she put a folder away in the desk drawer and searched a pocket
for--a pen or pencil and wrote a note that she tucked into a hidden
pocket. She wore black, not white --like all the sterile doctors here
and the fools that attended him.
There were eight gothic shaped windows (he had spent a long time in here
waiting staring at them and kept counting them to entertain himself)
and all the shutters were open revealing a dark evening October sky that
seemed to go on forever. There was a huge moon. A harvest moon maybe?
Ominous, it loomed behind her, great, like a watching Cyclops with a
foggy, cloudy halo shrouded around it …
Trent MacGowan sat crouched in the corner, long arms and legs wrapped
around him, straight-jacketed. He was ghostly pale and in the shadows
his eyes looked black and huge. There were gaunt hollows under his
sculpted cheekbones and under his eye sockets. So pale, he looked as
though he had no blood… as if a vampire had sucked him dry. You could
see through his skin. She walked over to him.
He
could not see her eyes; they were distorted behind black rectangular
glasses that made her look professional and intimidating. The darkness
of the room cast shadows everywhere on her. Her hair hung as if in long
dreadlocks, some of it carelessly tied up in a knot around a ballpoint
pen in an absent-minded manner. She had a long neck. Bat lady, he
thought again—like one of Dracula’s minions. She looked like the queen
of night. Her skin was luminous marble. From his crouched position on
the floor, all he could make out of her was the shape of her silhouette
that further distorted her so she looked like elongated shadows
that flickered like a candle with incandescent heat. She stood in a long
black dress-- and –shit he could swear she wore combat boots! Was his
shrink Morticia Adams? …This had to be just a very weird dream, what the
fuck had those ass holes given him who had tied him down jabbing a
needle up his arm…?
“Should I call you ‘sarg?’” he asked and looked pointedly and insolently
at her boots. Unexpectedly, she smiled at him in appreciation,
acknowledging his observation, even as he had meant it to be snide. He
felt a strange queasy feeling in his stomach and then there was a
fluttering, like batwings, which blew across his cheeks as she moved
towards him
She knelt down to him in one graceful motion that seemed instantaneous,
as if she had the power to move faster than time. First up there and
then suddenly she was knelt before him, eye level. Her liquid-dark
direct gaze made him seasick. Behind the librarian glasses her obsidian
eyes drew him down into their inky pool --inside there. Limpid, eyes
like liquid …oh mother mercury, look what you’ve done to me, I cannot
run I cannot hide…(Queen, 1978). Up close her skin looked more like gray
marble, not alabaster. This close he could see the worn off dark
lipstick on her full mouth as if she glowed in an unnatural light
emphasizing the sharp contrast of features that looked carved from stone
-–the shock of artificial from lipstick made her look otherworldly, as
if she glowed in an unnatural light.
I am looking at myself from where I see you… down your eyes into the
wall behind you there. Now I can look out and see from inside your head.
See me from the way you look at me. It is not that I am outside myself;
it is rather, that I am rooted to something from your angle. On this
other end the fish bowl is always in view. So the walls must be inside. I
see you better from the vantage of how you see that I see you.
Chapter 4: The Assessment
“Mr. MacGowan, tell me as much as you are comfortable sharing,” Dr.
Torrent kept her eyes steady and omnipotent as they looked directly into
his.
“OK sergeant doctor, can I call you that or do you prefer Doc?” he saw
her flinch and instantly regretted the harsh tone he had spoken to her
in but was not sure why. As if in apology he added, “stop calling me Mr.
MacGowan.”
She considered his response; she studied his eyes with a mysterious caution,
“What would you like me to call you?” she asked.
“Trent,” he said.
“Trent,” she said and saw him shudder as he met her gaze. The wide chasm
of his pupils dilated as the prism shifting shades of blue and gray
irises swirled ---compelling. She bit thoughtfully on the corner of her
lower lip in an absent way that seemed to be her habit, as if chewing
over her own thoughts.
“I am here to help you, —Trent… Do you want to be helped? Or are you on a
self-sabotaging mission? It’s best to let me know from the beginning
instead of playing childish games. Games irritate me.”
“So you prefer to cut to the chase.”
“I’m not impressed with arrogant shows of spoiled brats. I don’t have
time to pander to egos. And it just gets on my nerves, to be honest.”
…a song played in his mind…The night haunts me as dawn now arises…. so
does evening then demise? And all our plans to be revised? Or is it
better to be realized? Is this a mask I doth devise? What is the
compromise? I am straight jacketed in mental lockjaw. Call me pretty
boy…whipping boy…. a mirror as a mask is a …face that I claim here to
be, let me put it down, let me take it off -- let me, please… let
me…please. Let me mirror you, mirror your mask of faces: created by an
artist….
“Tell me what happened.”
“Tell me why I should trust you.”
“Because I’m your best bet. Your only hope here.”
“Hope here for what?”
“For getting you out of this mess.”
“How do you figure that?” he asked. “You determine I’m crazy I don’t go to jail but I get to stay locked up in here instead?”
“Who said I thought you were crazy?”
“Don’t you?”
“Actually, no”
“So what am I doing here, doctor?”
“You tell me.”
“What’s it say in your report there?”
“Why are you protecting her?”
“Who?”
“The person you were arrested for killing. Hmm… all that blood… how gruesome…”
“Blood?” his face seemed to go whiter, if that was possible.
The cool expression on the doctor’s face took a while for Trent MacGowan
to register. Dr. Torrent continued to study his face with clinical
detachment.
“You bitch! What’s going on?”
“You tell me, Trent.”
“Fuck you! --And your fucking mind games! You think you can mind- fuck
me? Dr. Torrent-- or Doctor Tor-ment? Let’s see who can win at that
game, didn’t you know that is my trademark? …What happened to her? Tell
me!” his voice broke in a cry of despair openly pleading with her.
“You obviously care about her. You wouldn’t kill her.”
“I didn—stop fucking with me and tell me the Goddamn truth, you fucking
bitch!” losing his self control, he’d forgotten about his bound arms and
tried to lunge at her, but fell over onto the floor in a pathetic heap.
With a rush of pity she released his straight jacket in one motion. He
sprung to his feet and grabbed her by the shoulders. Now standing, Trent
MacGowan towered over Dr. Torrent, his long arms and legs seeming three
times longer upon his sudden release. Dr. Torrent remained cool, as if
used to being physically accosted by her patients. She overcame him
easily with a strength that he found surprising. The force of this
physical exchange seemed to leave Trent MacGowan exhausted and he
crumpled back down to the floor in a heap of sobs. “Please tell me
doctor…. Is she dead? Please stop doing this to me, just tell me, I need
to know.”
“Well you obviously didn’t kill her.”
He was openly crying in grieving horrible anguish, his face hidden
behind large, elegant, long-fingered hands that tapered into beautifully
shaped tips and nail beds. He had musician’s hands-- the doctor could
not help but notice, strong fingers with characteristically grooved
knuckles and modest grace. These were not murderous hands; these hands
belonged to a sensitive artist who possessed intense emotions.
“There is still no body,” Dr. Torrent sighed and coolly walked over
towards the windows to look outside into the full mooned October night.
“So you were just fucking with me, weren’t you? --Fucking emotional vampire bitch?”
With whiplash coldness he heard the doctor say,
“So are we done with our game playing now?”
“Yeah, if you are. I thought you were suppose to be honest.” He leered
at her threateningly, like a lizard king, looking at her now with open
accusation. And hurt? Looking every square foot the ominous rock star
known for his ear-piercing, hard-core sound, masochistically edged with
the melodious ballads that made the females swoon. What an amazing
contradiction he was she thought: threatening at the same time as
man-child in juxtaposition like a slippery fish with two minds. Right
now the twist of his mouth in a grimace reminded her of a shark.
“Let me know when you feel like talking,” Dr. Torrent began walking in
the direction of the door, picking up the folder that contained his
report, her combat boots making clank-thud sounds over the wood floor.
When she reached the door he said,
“Wait.”
She stopped, turned slowly and looked at him, waiting.
Now his expression had changed, it had turned back to the gentle,
angelic face like one of his faces from a magazine cover, with the huge,
bigger than life baby-blue eyes deceptively fringed with spiky wet
lashes. He looked at her with a look of coy charm,
“Aren’t you going to tie me back up, baby?”
Dr. Torrent laughed softly, then turned the door handle and continued on her way,
“I think civilization will be safe for now,” she opened the door and began to leave.
“Please don’t leave me here…” there was something in his voice that made her hesitate….
“No—wait…. Doctor…. Please don’t go yet.”
Something about the pitch of his tone stopped her. She turned back to
face him. He walked over to her and even as he was twice her height he
seemed boyish and vulnerable. His eyes pleading with her openly, like
hypnotic swirls that caught her by surprise. The mask had dropped away a
little.
He said,
“Please don’t leave me here.”
*******************************************************************
She looked up into his face and found empathy for his present state,
imagining how she would feel if she were him in this exact situation.
Dr. Torrent shut the door and stood looking at him thoughtfully noting
the sheer panic within his eyes and familiar with how that felt she
nodded with a gentle sigh. Her own guard dropped too. She glanced around
the room. There was not much to it, except that it was quite large and
there were plenty of windows—too bad the view outside of them was
grotesquely bleak this time of year. Images of Ichabod Crane came to
mind. The walls inside the room were bare and the only object to look at
was the institutional desk that seemed to judge everything that it
faced. I would hate to be left here, she thought now berating herself
and looked at him with sincere sympathy.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “this must be a very horrible time for you. I wasn’t sure where you stood in all this.”
“That’s OK. I’m the one who should be apologizing. I antagonized you. I’m not usually like this.”
“That’s understandable,” Dr. Torrent walked around the room
thoughtfully, her combat boots making thud sounds that echoed in the
emptiness.
Trent MacGowan moved over to the desk chair and sat down, burying his
face in his hands. His long arms and legs seemed caricature-ly too big
for the chair he occupied, the white straight jacket, now undone looking
massive and huge on his bony frame as the buckles hung off in a
helter-skelter fashion seeming to mock his situation.
“Do you feel like talking?”
He looked up at her, his face full of complete, utter despair and his
brooding brows knit together in the middle as if pleading. His eyes as
wide as the full moon outside and just as stark. After a long silence he
finally said,
“I don’t know what I feel like. To be honest. I just don’t know what I
would do, doctor, if you left me alone right now…. I’ve been alone in
this room since they arrested me this morning and dumped me here ….” He
turned his head towards the ancient gothic windows glancing at the
glowing moon, “and now it’s after twilight. I don’t really understand
why I’m being accused of this….
“And the sick part of all this is that I think I would prefer to be in
here, anyway, because I think I’d feel worse out there wondering where
she was. But then, I’d be able to go look for her, or try to call her… I
don’t know what I’m saying… do you have any idea why I am being accused
of killing her?”
“Your lawyer told me that she had asked for a court order to keep you away from her last week. She filed a restraining order.”
Trent MacGowan was thoughtful as he digested this information. He was calm and did not react.
“Did you know about that?” Dr. Torrent asked him.
“Yes. I did.”
“Why would she have done that?”
“We were fighting a lot.”
“Physically?”
Now he became tense,
“she’s the one who’s more prone to getting physical that way. Lisa is
the one who gets violent. She loses her temper. She’s come at me with a
knife before and, you know, I’m a lot bigger than she is so I can handle
myself against her if I have to protect myself.”
“Could you tell me what your relationship is with her?”
He looked up at Dr. Torrent with a wry smile,
“that is… a very complicated story.”
“Well, try to describe it the best you can.”
He ran a hand through his erratic bleached white hair and sat
exhaustedly back in the chair, lank arms and legs dropping to his sides,
“we used to be involved—like years ago. I was very into her. She was
into me. But things got pretty weird. Fame can do that. Success and all
the media… the money… we were also a lot younger back then. That was
over fifteen years ago. Fifteen years…. Crazy, sometimes I can’t believe
I got this old. We were kids back then. The whole fame trip seemed so
wild, we couldn’t handle it all. We went our separate ways. Then a lot
of things happened in our lives. Life shit, you know. Tragedies, messed
up shit that really ages your soul and I guess we found ourselves with
each other one night at the right time and the right place --or not…
we’ve been through a lot of stuff and … sometimes just having someone
there who knows you and has known you through it all and remembers you
from before everything changed… we keep going back to each other. I see
other people, she sees other people but after the breakups, the bad
press, the legal fiascoes the phone rings and its her and … I go back.”
Chapter 5 Trent Discovers Electra's Diary
In the background the hollow echo keeps repeating, like a steady drone
of the clock. A metronome. It ticks in time. Reminding you of their
time. Outside there is no ticking past. The hum of life has its own
beat. And somehow things are always moving. Is it locked in the
destination of time predetermined? Or brainwashing….
When someone is a prisoner they make a compromise with their jailer, if
they want to live. You can stand by your principles and be dead by your
principles. Or you can claw your way out and plot revenge. You tell me
you are God? OK, let’s say you’re God…. For a glass of water you will be
my God. One day when the God is asleep holding the keys, I will get out
and come back to be his God. The madness of a society is tolerated
because there is a compromise with the jailor.
“Who’s in there?” he asked once while walking down the corridor. It was
the day he’d been moved. For security purposes it had made sense to have
him in a less accessible part of the building. To please Trent
MacGowan’s security people and to keep unwanted groupies from camping
around the main part of the premises, moving him to the East Wing worked
out the best for everyone-- except the groupies.
“Oh, no one,” the doctor had replied to his inquiry, “all the rooms in
here are vacant right now. Since the new part of the building was added,
everyone’s been moved to the newly renovated area.”
“So nobody’s in this part of the building at all?” he had asked.
The doctor had smiled,
“Just you, not including the ghosts though. And some old skeletons in the closets.”
Opening the door to his new room she stepped aside to let him in first.
The room actually looked haunted. Well, at least he wouldn’t feel
lonely, Trent mused to himself. His guitar and equipment had all been
brought here. The plain iron bed in the corner was newly made up for him
with bleached, stark white sheets, like the hasty white curtains that
had been installed hours before, the factory-ironed creases still
visible. Besides the bed there was only a couple of ancient chairs, an
old battered up chest of drawers and a simple sink that had an antique
beveled mirror over it. The historic Gothic windows and accordion
radiators reflected the pre-war time influences on the architecture,
which was consistent with the original structure of the hospital
building’s blue prints. She knew this because it had come up while
trying to wire the building with updated technology, she’d found the
blue print of the original building at the library downtown. It was
named after Harroway, a prominent family name on historical local sites.
Trent walked across the massive room studying the worn parts of the paint on the wall.
“That’s from the headboards rubbing against the wall,” the doctor
explained. Trent followed the line of headboard scars that marked the
room check by jowl. He looked at her thoughtfully,
“How many beds were in here?”
With a steady look she replied,
“At one time or another, over twenty. This place was crammed during the Viet Nam War.”
He nodded,
“I had an uncle who never came home.”
She studied the line of windows that let in light and fresh air,
“The view overlooks the garden grounds.”
He walked over but remained at a safe distance,
“What’s that?” he pointed to the building across the way. It seemed to
be the backside of the building he had seen from the first room where he
had been dumped off at after the arrest. He could see the gargoyles
even better on this side.
“That’s the old church. Back in the day when priests were sure to be nearby for last rites.”
“The grim reapers.”
“You know, there was a time when that church had weekly services and a full staff of clergy.”
“This is the heartland….” He nodded with a casual shrug, “I’m from across the lake, you know.”
She seemed surprised,
“Really?”
“Why does that surprise you?”
“You’re a rock star. It’s hard to think of rock stars as kids who grew up in rural towns.”
“Not rural—there was a ghetto down my block, so…”
The doctor considered this thoughtfully,
“Have you ever gone back?”
He smiled,
“Yeah. That was the first thing I did when our first album went platinum.”
His eyes were veiled. Impossible to read. Just like he was. Which was interesting.
“It doesn’t exist any more.”
“What happened?”
“I guess somebody donated a lot of money.”
“Really? Some philanthropist?”
“Yeah….”
“Some rock star?”
“….uh….yeah…. is that Orion up there?” he pointed up at the darkened sky. Was that on purpose, to change the subject?
After she had left he had wandered around the room awhile. The emptiness
created a hollow echo. Good sound. Nice acoustics. His shoe scraping
cement floor, the echo of his throat clearing sound. He walked over to
the sink to look at himself. His bleached floppy hair had some of his
true color growing in showing now. He was also stubbly. Lisa said he
looked ‘cute’ like this. He rubbed his palm against his stubbly jaw then
leaned closer to the mirror to look at his eyes. Blue-teal, that could
change to gray or clear baby blue. Mom used to say that no female could
deny his eyes. This memory of her made him smile now. It was a comfort
to think of her. He missed her. “What would you think of this mess I’m
in now?” he said out loud to his reflection talking to his mother.
In his mind he heard the likely answer,
“I never liked Lisa for you. Said she’d get you into nothing but trouble….”
He walked abruptly away from his reflection, as if to close off that
thought like with the click of a mouse, he walked right to the gallery
of windows. In one swift, bold move he pulled the curtain sheers over
the windows to shut out their ominous view. He stopped in front of his
equipment, studying his guitar. Like a prosthetic, it had become a part
of his body and even his nervous system, beginning from those very early
years, like his diary. Through evolving as a musician from ignorant boy
and past Stairway to Heaven, it had saved his life more times than he
could ever count. After his dad’s suicide and the world lost all its
color. The years of grieving. The constant shadow of clinical
depression, which ran in his family and in his case, caused him to no
longer be able to discern colors…. Making him, in essence, color blind.
He didn’t like people to know that about him. Most people didn’t know.
He could only see in black and white. Monochromatic. He reached for the
shiny black oracle and put it on, strapping in. He touched it. Like an
old friend. Caressing. Like stroking a cat. Some familiar chords sprang
quietly from fingers onto unplugged strings. He played reflectively for
himself—no song…. Just absent minded streams of randomness. He wasn’t in
the mood, just wanted to hold something familiar close. He felt like he
truly was going to go crazy in here. So it was a good thing he was in
here. Locked up. Why would Lisa do this to him?
He sat down on the ancient wooden chair, guitar hanging off to one side.
He covered his face in his hands. He closed his eyes and rubbed them.
Head examinations, legal cross-examinations…. The press enjoying his
misery…. And dealing with hospital staff people who weren’t sure if he
was animal or vegetable.
Opening his eyes and seeing through the cracks in his fingers, still
masking his face, he noticed something showing through the case of
equipment that held his personal amp. His computer…. He used it to write
songs and store them. He’d forgotten it was still in there. In the side
storage compartment his laptop was neatly concealed. He got up and went
to it. Pulling it out he tried to turn it on. The battery was juiced.
Shit. But he found the charger and the USB plug, so he began to look
around the room for a PC hook up outlet. Wondering if there may be
wireless service he could connect to. Behind the bureau… he plugged in
finding a strip bar. Must’ve overlooked this, damn cleaning people… As
it booted up he watched the Internet logo come on as it instantly
connected.
Was he being paranoid?
He felt as if someone was watching him.
At the corner of his eye he saw a sheer shadowy movement. A cold draft
touched his cheek and his heart seemed to drop heavily to his feet. But
when he turned nothing was there. He turned back to the computer
screen…. What’s that?
There was a weird icon on his desktop screen. He never had seen it
before. What was it? It looked like a gryphon but with the head of a
bat. He’d never seen this. Weird design. He clicked on it.
Something else started to boot up. The screen showed images of logos and
numbers. Then a list of options was displayed for him to choose from.
The first one was: “Electra’s Dictionary” and below that was what
appeared to be titles of Cases. Like a psychiatrist’s notes of patients
and their charts…. One of the other document’s titles was, “Electra’s
history/notes and observations”. Who’s Electra? He wondered. A patient
here? Curiosity got the best of him….
~Electra~
Let’s introduce our Greek Chorus:
Electra's Dictionary
Mother
had made a folly of men. As a child I had a dream where I was being
pulled by the rays of the sun outside the front door where the Sunwitch
watched from the sky, all knowing. I was powerless against the strength
of the Sunwitch with her mane of flame and her roar of power commanding
her stage all around her, everyone her pawns. Like a god, with the cruel
savagery of a jungle feline beast; the Sphinx. The Sunwitch's riddles
were really just lies not meant to ever be solved or even understood,
just to fuck with everyone and rule. Especially her domain.
The Cast of the Chorus:
Jocasta
Oedipus
Daddy-Freud
Electra
Agamemnon
Apollo
Demeter
Persephone
Hades
Hermes
Orpheus
Drama (Comedy/Tragedy)
If
this were a stage we would have the director standing front and center
to guide the super consciousness and stand outside of Electra.
Illustrating what makes her tick, the creator that governs her will,
hides her secrets and holds the light up to her faces. The god --or
would we call this director daddy-Freud, who understands her best? The
levels, gradients entwined in a trinity, masked sometimes like stock
characters which represent the myriad themes of comedy and tragedy and
drama. The range of emotions portrayed through the masks of expression
worn or put on, worn to conceal or worn nakedly without being self-aware
at times. Sometimes the blunt lines are in obvious black and white,
clearly mimed, underlined, Pierrot, Columbine, Pantaloon and Harlequin
with his checkerboard patterns that underline suggestions of something
much more complex but simply dumbed down into caricature because --who
has time?
Look!
From our Greek Chorus, here she comes, the femme fatale of the Tragedy
(irony is often another kind of mask to hide a blatant truth).
Electra writes....
“
…. I don't know why it should matter so much still. Everyone is long
gone. And they are gone-- gone from my reality anyhow, now. They feel as
if they belonged to another life time. Someone else's perhaps.
I
think of the joke of it all. The obvious elephant in the room that
nobody talks about. And I wonder why being a mental case-- it was never
obvious to me. How could I be so blind? Why was I? --was it just because
I wanted to pretend from when I was small? I could not face being an
unwanted imposter. I had to have decided to block it. But I can't
recall-- not clearly. It feels like a nightmare I once had that nobody
ever spoke of again.
But buried within I feel those
claws. The doubting of who I am-- in a deeper and much more intrinsic
sense. I feel like a liar. And I hate lies. I just feel like I am a lie,
this fraud that causes tension in the room. A precocious presence
without opening my mouth.
It's so long ago but my
frames of reference are built on these lies. My foundations are
illusionist, false and-- weak? A structure made of synthetic material. A
reflection in the mirror as I age shows not the same sagging features
of him. I fought to imitate familiar expressions just to fit in. But
awkward like squeezing skin into a suit that does not suit. The skin
flaps out awkwardly.
Who is that face? I still don't
know. How can I claim to be other than the legal print determined? if I
use 'scientific [method of] reasoning'--it is still just circumstantial
evidence.
But it is ages past, I must remind myself of
this.... this obsession will not let its grip off of me.... all the
evidence is or has been long wiped clean. Why should it still even
matter to me? Why? Because I don't know who I am. And-- they hurt me.
And those wounds will never heal. I've tried to make it not matter but--
things seem to pop out in normal daily choice making. Those triggers--
and aversions....why getting close to anyone is not only uncomfortable
but also life threatening; the feeling of not being able to breath. And
the other things—dreading holidays! The knot in my stomach, a knee jerk
reaction. The things that get dredged up. Wanting for it to just please
rush quickly by.
People who have been adopted must go through this too. I’m sure there are many who were never told the truth. Are many.
It's
more than the wish to just feel accepted; included; welcome, wanted.
Much more-- it is the deep massive mystery of what that easy sense of
simpatico is.... instead of that conversation that is always forced and
self consciously performed.
But the wish to move on is
frustrating me. The road has no signs to tell me where I am going. Like
groping in the darkness wondering if there is a cliff up ahead; each
step overly measured, moving like a snail as time speeds passed and
looking back at wasted hesitations that swallowed up years.
Is
the sum of my journey meant only for a list of data that is not
intended for any miraculous conclusion? Meaning and purpose-- I know
this is not a unique concern. Of course. But that is not really my
point. I seem to need...? is it answers? To which question exactly? My
parentage? If it is as simple as this, then why have I not even tried to
find the means to do a DNA test? -- if that is even possible to do....
they were both cremated. I should say all, both paternals and maternal
were. And who ever else is left, how would I even ask for a sample of
their blood or hair? (“pardon me, oops, didn't mean to stab you, let me
just get that for you”) And yet, to finally know? I’m not sure. Maybe
it's better this way. What if it put me into a deluge; a mental loop?
What if, once all the results came in, I find, in the end, that his
rejection of me had no reason; was pointless? And the only likely
conclusion to be made is that his cruelty was just for sport? And
instead then that runs through my DNA-- what if that? That would be
worse.
I want to know that there was a reason for his
hatred of me. A reason that was based on a prejudice that made some kind
of sense... that I could understand. And possibly forgive.
One
of the Chorus steps out onto a stage, the actor comes forward. Tragedy
with a beautiful gilded masked face.... holding his other laughing mask.
Tragedy:
this scene has been played so many times. Everyone knows this one. The
danger of locks are that they have been known to have keys. Erroneously
she thought that she lost it.
Daddy-Freud:
Let me introduce the cast of characters, this is Tragedy, defined by
Illusion (and here he points as someone else takes center stage).
This
character wears the costume of a court jester with a painted mask tied
on depicting an exaggerated smile of a Clown, removed from the Stock
room shelf.
Illusion(dressed as Clown): Galleries of faces locked in lockets, and coats of armor hung disarmingly.
Electra
materializes magically, partially visible but slightly transparent her
body like a nymph or siren hidden by sheer folds and out of focus, an
idyllic conception. Her voice is sultry, like song but clearly spoken.
The glow of the stage light is illuminated through her.
Electra:
My favorite quote of Cocteau is, “mirrors should reflect a little
before throwing back images.” (she reflects aloud with an note of
intended irony:) Orpheus in hindsight .
Daddy-Freud
walks around Electra who now becomes solid, no longer vapid,
transformed. Like Pygmalion, he appears to have breathed life from the
mist into solid rock and he stares at her as one who is admiring his own
creation. He proudly looks her over and is amazed by her, drinking her
in as if addicted but holding himself back with effort in order to best
observe her. He points for her to follow his direction, marking her
place on stage so that the light falls to perfectly bath her in light.
He dresses her as if she is a doll, a mannequin in a shop window, he
puts her in a French maid uniform and without any modesty, he forms his
hands over her breasts as if he molded them himself. He bends his mouth
to taste her flesh but only brushes lightly across the smoothness of her
skin, lingering over the lace of her uniform. His hands run down her
form and unseen we know he seeks her depths but covers her possessively
from the audience's sight.
Electra:
(she is obedient, she is his servant and she responds to him dutifully
melting to his touch, skin flushing out of alabaster, with pomegranate
lips and dew gathering on her and as she awakens a warming berry flush
spreads through her complexion everywhere.)
He
stands back and drapes white satin around her as the uniform falls to
the stage floor in a heap beneath the covering, but the uniform has
turned red like blood and a knife drops from her hand onto the floor,
covered in blood.
Electra: (with over acted exaggerated histrionics) I did it for you, Father. I am Oedipus. Your daughter.
Daddy-Freud
claps proudly, enthralled by her, giving her a bunch of long stemmed
roses as if after a performance, his admiration is all consuming and
poetic, crushing her to him, his hands wrinkling and tearing the white
satin as he loses all restraint to savage her.
Daddy-Freud: Only I know what you truly need, my Columbine.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So
much of her facades are hidden within obvious references or purposely
obscured.... Ancient mythology, idols, theological guilt; icons, like
abbreviations to gloss over; details that are otherwise too tedious or
too painful to reveal in full light.
Trent
The
waning of the moon cast weird shadows on the scared hospital walls.
Trent found time speed as he felt pulled into the words that he read on
his computer screen. He thought he could hear her voice speaking the
words as he read them silently to himself. Throaty, warm with a sultry
allure belied by the strange poetry she used to reveal her soul whilst
she concealed. Across the way, outside the window, the gargoyles from
the church rooftop seemed to mock at him. As if they were somehow
Electra's spies and would report all that they took note of him back to
her. The shudder that rippled down his spine was not really altogether
unpleasant. It seemed strange things were about in this haunting place.
The
excitement and thrill made his pulse beat fast with a kind of life that
felt other worldly. The life of a spirit world. Was it the cemetery
that presided below? The headstones that depicted some undead soul? So
like himself—he'd thought for so long; like he was among the walking
dead. He always had felt that the reason he never got stage fright was
because there had been a part of himself that was as stone-cold dead as
the corpse of his own dad that he had found dead in the bathtub full of
red blood. The last time he had seen the color red-- or any color.
Electra's
words gripped at him. Like a grasping of hands that held him fast in
the darkness. A sort of kindness that was also blunt and crudely real
but spoke from a deeper, more painful understanding of the cruelty that
is life. In this cold, lonely barren place, for the first time in
forever he felt less alone than he had ever known. There was comfort
here. Her words touched. They reached. Where there had been car-alarm
shock pervading his being and padlock safe iron walls she crept through
the cracks in between as she confessed a terror he knew only too well.
She was like the other side of him. A voice where he was dumb. He could
sing and write music that had an Orpheus-idic spell over audiences and
masses....yet he kept it all very tightly vested behind his guitar
shield, left handed over heart.
The Diary Continues.....
Looking
out over the madhouse's cemetery towards the church across the way, I
can see the shadows of the gargoyles as they sit perched on the edge of
the church's rooftop. They seem to me to be daring the devil to enter or
maybe just beckoning him, I don't know which, because they both seem to
be one and the same. Presiding over their flocks, bats of the night
blindly searching for something familiar and safe while sending out
search parties with their cries.
Searching
blindly..... it makes me think that is what I am doing here. Dr. Torrent
who has answers for everybody but none at all for me. So wise and
unable to scratch my surface even as we both know she tries and comes so
close, closer than anybody else ever could. I do not tell.
When
I think of my mother now it is no longer with any bitterness. But
thoughts of my father will always feel like a festering wound. Father
that I am troubled by from both and all and or neither's rejection of
me, to total obliteration of importance of being, their twisted lusts
entwined and choking what relevance I might have had.
They
have been dead for so long now. It really is a waste of time to brood
pissed off over a past that has been washed away in the eroding sea as
it sucks with it earth and sand and cliff. So long ago now. I have grown
up and have become ancient, not that child they had once terrorized,
she is gone. The scars left now seem like old store front signs that no
longer represent anything because the stores have closed and the
buildings have become condemned.
But I don't feel sad.
Only recently did I notice that was gone. The haunting presence of
departed spirits have vacated. My thoughts are my own and for the first
time in my life their voices feel like vague memories, really like
somebody else's life time past. There is an objectivity that I never
could have predicted when I look into my memories of that past and I
feel arrived to some new island somehow. So I look at that church and
cemetery and it does not disturb me at all. I see it every day here. I
am compelled to stare at it like a compass seeking north, but it doesn't
trigger pain or any mourning, but then, their remains are not buried
there. Those headstones belong to strangers and when I read those names
and see the dates that go back centuries it gives me a weird kind of
comfort that I cannot readily explain or fully understand. I think it
has something to do with eternal life.
There
is an old tree in the middle of the cemetery, it fans out like a stage
curtain towards the church and from up here where I write I see the
entrance way pillars like the other framing ornament of a stage. If I
think of the world being a stage, like Shakespeare said, I can imagine
that my drama's props would have to be something just like this:
gargoyles, an old cemetery and the full moon that presides through my
window here once a month. And of course, the madhouse is the most
significant prop. At the center of the drama is Freud, after all. ….And
Hades is what the gargoyles represent and Demeter.
With
the churning anguish and inner agony gone there is actually an
emptiness, a hollow. The wave girl with the ocean overwhelming her has a
hole inside. Once she did mourn the vacated substance, the
indescribable, inexplicable anomie of longing. A longing for something
infantile and locked within the recesses of a long forgotten trauma, a
longing for …. but now it is just a hollow and it is really okay. I
don't mind. No, not at all, it no longer seems to matter. Maybe that is
what the wave girl is mourning.
Dr. Torrent would
suggest writing thoughts in a journal to identify part of that anomie.
Only I am more used to writing poetry. I think I am terrible at clinical
analysis unless, I guess, it is about someone else but that must be
normal, I think? To dissect from outside my own navel feels like
something obscene. The magnifying of ego to that extent is narcissistic.
What would Dr. Torrent tell her patient? That it is an exercise. Or
exorcism, more like-- she would say that the surgical precision would
force the eye to be accurate so as not to cut into a vein thus demanding
objectivity.
If my real father really was a preacher I
wonder what he would say to me? I wonder what kind of pearls of wisdom
he would offer me, but then, he was not above sin, now was he? Knotting a
cherry stem in my mouth with my tongue is easier than this, the laws of
probability have paralyzed my grasp of logic up to the point that it
feels like an infinity of contradictions that twist and turn like a
labyrinth that may be rigged after all.
But I like
thinking about my ”preacher father.” I never knew him but I have read
what the history books say about him and my mother told me things. I
think what I like most about him is that he was a rebel, like me. Not
like the father I knew who often punished me for being bad . I believe
that may be why I like to think of my preacher father and convince
myself that he was really my dad. But like I said, the labyrinth is
rigged, because, you see, he didn't acknowledge me... so-- he too
rejected me. I can excuse that by saying it was because he was a
preacher that he could not acknowledge me, because of the sin and the
public shame to his family, but if he really was a rebel why should that
have mattered then? So, in the end I always decide I don't need either
of them. Or anyone. No, I really don't need anyone. I belong to me.
**************************************************************
Electra
identified with the notorious. Like an obvious stain on a starched
white blouse. She could not be hidden because she always stood out, so
she had to blend by behavior that allowed her to be intentionally
deflected behind the black sheep persona-- the costume they had dressed
her in all her life from childhood; the unwanted, bad girl, wild, crazy.
Her retaliation was to make the stain (which was herself) into
graffiti. To mark her walls. Own them. Murals. Her own creation, the
ones inside, projected.
**************************************************************
Besides
the moon, the only light in the hospital room was coming from the
screen, taking him far off to some otherworldly place. There was a scent
wafting suddenly about the room. It seemed like cedar and citrus. It
hadn't been there before. He closed his eyes imagining her. His fingers
felt for his guitar strings. His left fingers strummed, the tips
caressing the strings as if they were locks of hair. His right hand held
the base of the instrument for a moment to steady her on his lap, as if
it were a hip to be adjusted more intimately to him. Eyes still closed
his right hand found its way up the neck, feeling the frets until
falling where they were want to. He played a chord tentatively and
thoughtfully....his thumb picked a string and he hummed warmly in tune
with the notes he selected that reflected the thoughts in his soul.
Words were only brackets of moody wanderings that selected themselves as
the music presented itself already written like myrrh in the air.
Tuning.... fork and loose verse. Something broke within him. He was
free. Wet came like cooling rain down his smoothly chiseled face. Tears
of cleansing, delivered the passage to verse and refrain and he sang the
nonsensical yet lyrical words with.... a feeling of peace.
Delivered.... he realized....this was a well....”at the world's
end.....” Electra. He whispered her name out loud to himself.
Something
washed over him. Something divine, almost; like something religiously
philosophical: as if he rose from a lower level of self and could
finally.... step upon the ascending ledge. He sensed this was
significant. Because—he felt elated.
He stopped to
reach for his notebook, writing the notes down on the music sheet,
replaying to remind himself. He scribbled quickly. The words matching
the notes he heard to the time and rhythm. The rush was like a charge of
energy. It was like how he felt on stage. The accomplished feeling from
hours spent of rehearsing, the sense of success of artistry well
delivered and appreciated through effort taken. The grace of being
perched on a platform hung precariously with trust of the fates; as it
happened, yet all on its own, magical, as if being kissed by the muse;
floating, weird, lost feeling-- had thus been reprieved. And he was
delivered.
Torrent
Torrent
watched Trent MacGowan's groupies camped just outside of the mental
hospital's property. “Harroway Mental Health Facility” was clearly
written on the embossed sign outside the tall iron gates. It was late
afternoon so the crowd of fans were fresh out of school which was only a
stone's throw from the mental institution. This was not the city of
Harroway, but it was ten minutes from here by freeway. It was named
after the prominent family that had helped found the major cluster of
cities outside Motor City. Indeed the family that had begun with the
railroad industry had dipped their fingers in the motor industry as this
had apparently presented the next new wave for the economic future.
The
sun was still lighting the sky but the moon was also visible, glowing
pale through the periwinkle blue of the horizon. The globe like
ornaments that graced the entrance pillars seemed off, somehow, which
always bothered Torrent. It was as if eclipsed by the moon, one of them
was not quite centered. The right one looked as if Atlas, while
shrugging, pitched it at Hercules where it landed haphazardly and stuck
there. Today it was a Magritte kind of sky so the lack of symmetry
worked with this oddness while also casting a Dali irony to the
facility's landscape. Torrent observed the teenagers for awhile as she
stood in contemplation. They had brought guitars and were sipping energy
drinks out of cans as they strummed at what Torrent decided were modern
day mandolins or lyres making her picture them as medieval troubadours.
Trent....
she had mixed feelings over him. They conflicted with her professional
concerns as well as her personal musings. Trent was an absolute rock
star: he was infamous, gifted, good-looking and had his share of public
romantic connections with fashion models and of course, Lisa Loath, the
very much publicized on again off again relationship with his former
co-band member. But the man she had examined and cross examined was
something of an anomaly. She had expected him to be the stereotype
arrogant overgrown kid—protesting his approaching middle aged years with
the stereotypical finesse of his peers: drugs while still clinging
self-deludingly to a playboy lifestyle. Only Trent MacGowan had been a
surprise to her. He seemed actually uncomfortable with the rock star
prototype that was labeled to him. Trent MacGowan was a musician, she
reminded herself. He was also a song writer; a composer-- someone who
invented turn of phases with words, notes and imagery. This meant he
strove to reach towards something outside himself; something higher
which also meant that his nature was open, not inflexible. He knew how
to leave his self behind and immerse in wonders outside himself.
Certainly—she reminded herself—there are many known song writers who are
also famous performers.
She had
listened anonymously outside his room as his guitar screamed and carried
their ballad like melodies through the halls of the haunted mad house.
Torrent had felt stirred, she had to admit. His music was beautiful. She
had never really heard it before. Not beyond Billboards' top 50
overexposed, song play list that saturated the radio air waves for
decades. His style was so much different than what was commonly heard
and expected from other well known pop and rock bands. And of course
Torrent had once been a teenager herself and naturally had enjoyed the
popular music of her youth, the well known 4/4 tempos, the classic
beats, the “alternative” and the “indie” bands during her club years of
which she had her own collection. But, truth be told, they were
gathering dust in a closet. She had come to actually hate music over the
years. Everywhere anyone went, there it was, invading, interrupting,
permeating and distracting her peace, violating her original thinking
processing.
Lately, though, she liked standing outside
his door. She sometimes found excuses to go to this building to listen.
There was a small office right down the hall from his room where she
would go, taking her laptop and working on other patients' notes. To
herself she used the excuse that she went there in order to avoid being
bothered by the hospital staff. She told herself that this allowed her
professional space for insight to her patients. His music also had the
ability to somehow settle her own nerves. He was a very clever musician.
The chords he chose to put with each other were both discordant but
sensually concordant. The affect this had on her moved her to a place of
inner calm. It helped to take her from things that plagued at her
thoughts and breathing came easier even when she still felt angry over
something.
Angry. Lately she had a lot to be angry
about, in a word: Hayden. Her estranged husband that she was,
essentially, stuck with until her daughter with him had reached legal
age. Which was still going to be awhile. How she ever married such a
schmuck she would never understand; sneaky, spiteful and hypocritical
but worst of all, politically her complete antithesis. Odd how he never
mentioned his extreme conservative views until after they were married.
The worst deception ever but it was now an even more vile betrayal
because he was running for public office.
Which meant,
by default, so was she, in essence that also meant that made her a fraud
since technically, they were still married. Wasn't that ironic? A
psychiatrist who was married to someone that was her personification of
evil. If she were giving advice to herself as a shrink to a patient she
would have suggested that she reconsider the need to stay legally bound
to such a person. Only, she knew better than anyone why she could not
leave Hayden. While they had not had physical intimacy in years, she had
to keep up certain appearances as a kind of trade off. Not because of
the property they lived on-- as that was in her name (mysteriously
bequeathed to her by some unknown beneficiary). Her husband needed the
charade for political reasons and she couldn't leave without Persephone.
This was the source of her deep rooted anger.
Pulling
her collar up as if her jacket was a coat of arms, she dug inside her
glove leather black tote for the security card that opened the hospital
gates. Finding it easily, she slid it into the slot and the gate clicked
open to allow her through. She shut it closed behind her and made her
way to the second building, passing the front of the old chapel as she
walked down the wide path. The new building was very modern by
comparison of the older one it faced. The new building stood tall and
white, built of solid cement with institutional, formal architectural
lines. She missed the old building with its brick face and ancient
accoutrements, the old metal exposed pipes and the ivy that ate away at
the brick outside. As she entered the modern facility she was again
struck by its enormity as she had been when it had first been completed.
Suicide was on the rise and mental illness was too, she reflected with
an ironic sense of macabre, her mind already focusing on her work day
routine, mentally going over the patient rounds she had to face at the
start of her shift. Nodding to the familiar faces past the reception
station, Torrent continued onward to the staff room where the other
doctors consorted, more than ready to relinquish their shift
responsibilities to the changing of the guards that would exchange turns
along with updates of the inmates.
“Babbling Brook had to be sedated,” an orderly whispered in Dr. Torrent's ear.
Surprised Torrent met his eyes from behind her black, rectangular frames, the question obvious in her expression.
“She found a wire cutter,” the orderly explained.
“How?”
“A
careless electrician. The short in the EST room was being fixed this
morning, she was due for some treatment in there but ….she found them
before the orderly got there somehow delayed with another patient.”
“Great. Where is she now?”
“She's back in her room, in restraints. She's so medicated that she'll be out until the morning.”
Nodding as she considered what he said she took the patient chart he handed her,
“thanks,
Justin,” and brought it with her to the coffee maker where a fresh pot
was. Half a cup, no sugar, two percent milk, she memorized the chart
before her and focused on the work cut out for her, she finished her
coffee heading out the staff room door. The concrete floor echoed her
boot heeled steps, sounding off the walls, ricocheting threateningly
like storm troopers hobnail boots. She had switched jackets, the tweed
wool one for the hospital white. And her day began.
Hours
later she was able to step outside for some air as for now things were
under control for awhile. There was an over path, like an enclosed
bridge that connected the two buildings, but Torrent preferred to walk
outside, across the grass, and take in the atmosphere of outdoor life.
This allowed her mind to wander, escaping the recycled staleness from
within the hospital shell.
The downside about having
the later shift was that she wouldn't be able to see her daughter today.
The graveyard shift would end at 10 AM tomorrow morning. She had three
shifts like this for the week, all in row. After a run like this it
always felt as if she were emerging again from some warped-reality
time-capsule, or rising from a crypt from subterranean life back into
actual time rejoining the world again. Yet, it really was just as well
because the arrangement with Hayden required them to divide their
parental visitations evenly. The agreement with him was that they split
their time, much like a time share contract for property, which allowed
them to amply avoid having to see each other as much as they could
manage to. That was the plus side of her job, she often reminded
herself, the less time she could get away with not having to bump into
Hayden the more pleasant her life was. The awkwardness of this had
become actually a normalcy in Persephone's life as it had gone on for
most of her life. Even on that odd seventh day when their visitation was
split, since her daughter's room was linked to both the Gatehouse and
the main part of the estate, the former where Torrent lived and the
latter where Hayden dwelled they didn't have to come face to face. They
had this worked into the renovation plans purposely when the estate
buildings were being repaired and remodeled as prior to this it had been
an old school, a landmark in Regal Grove. How it wound up being left to
Torrent was never resolved, but it was, at the time, the only asset
that worked in her favor as some sort of bargaining chip in keeping her
daughter. Or at least half of her daughter. She had had no other place
to live at the time and Hayden was kicking her out of the family home,
his family pretending no knowledge over this legal maneuver (Hayden was a
partner in the family's law firm). And once Hayden heard about the
school landing in his “wife's” lap, his greedy tune changed a few beats.
The
deed had only said that the property was now hers, there was no
explanation beyond that. She let it go once she assumed it had to have
been her late mother's one of many strange secrets that she had never
got to the bottom of. Her mother was a notorious liar and her death left
a lot of questions unanswered. Torrent had decided not to look a gift
horse in the mouth, and seeing as she was saved from being tossed on the
street (penniless, still paying back her graduate school loans), was
more than glad to take the property bequest to her. Hayden bribed her to
allow him to move in as his family had the money for the renovations
and she did not and the grounds were unlivable without repair.
She
really didn't want to think any more about Hayden. With an effort as
she entered the older building, she dashed upstairs to flee her
thoughts. Dr. Torrent stopped at the padded cell. Reflected. Padded,
like a royal princess in a cage with pillow quilted patterns, walled in;
a grid of warped patterns digitally copied on wallpaper. She was on her
way down the hall and thought about Electra. Who was crazy. But who
could blame her? Anyone sane would have gone mad. And would be crazy not
to, surrounded by a snake pit of nesting, festering maggots. Sanity is a
legal term. It is a generalization of a sort of ideal that really does
not exist. Conveniently contrived to protect social contradictions of
civilization. Civilization-- another word for savagery made acceptable.
Culture is built upon myth. What is myth? A dream of an ideal
superconscious. She headed for the tiny office that was down the hall
from Trent MacGowan and stood outside the office door. And here she
paused. She waited. And then it filled the corridor. She peacefully shut
her eyes to listen to the now familiar notes of an electric guitar,
listening raptly as music ripped, tore and shredded with an almost human
cry. After awhile she went into the office, took her laptop from her
leather bag and set it on the battered old institutional desk to throw
herself into her distracting doctor's notes....
**********
I
found myself thinking about.... him the other day. I think it was
because of something I read. It was a day where it felt as if he was
haunting me, almost feel his lips on mine again. I cannot say that I
never think of him or that I've never stopped thinking about him.
Sometimes it feels as if he was my true self. And when he left my life I
began a life of falseness even as I tried not to let it happen. It
seems silly after all these years. I was only a girl really, when we
knew each other. So does this mean that I have lived my life falsely?
Like my own parents had? --have I really become like them? -- does this
mean we are in fact doomed after all to repeat the sins of the fathers?
I
feels wrong to keep saying “he” or “him” here as I refer to him. It
seems almost sacrilegiously wrong and will just beg more to that sense
of myth. Only, I can't use his name, you see, it hurts too much even
still after all these years. So I will give him a name, make up one,
what can I call him? Maybe Ed is fitting because of the allusion to
Oedipus, which is apropos.... so maybe better, call him “Oed”? He was my
Freudian slip, the obvious cliché not just because he was older and not
just because he was wiser instructing me in the ways of life and
educating me, but because I fell right into the trap of needing a father
figure and he was there ready to eat me alive.
(So maybe then I should call him Freud or Daddy-Freud?)
I
was reflecting on the anger I have not fully freed myself from, anger
that Dr. Torrent would insist needs to be released, but only after
excavating the roots and the foundations of why they were ever
constructed. The drawing I was working on was influenced by the book I
was reading and I felt this funny presence as if he stood beside me
taking the pencil from the grip of my fingers to guide me while he would
say, “no, you have the perspective all wrong,” and his bold hand would
build the walls of reality into my fantastic erroneous imagery. It was
because I was reading Dante's Inferno again for the hundredth time and
every time I read it I can hear his voice reading the words to me again.
I
don't want to think of him. Ed, Oedipus, I don't want to because it
makes me feel like a fraud again as if my entire life has been a waste; a
lie. It makes me hate myself and those thoughts are dangerous. Maybe
this madhouse is driving me crazy. Maybe I shouldn't be here. I should
be ….where?
So I studied the tree that I was drawing,
the tree branches, like in the Inferno and I thought of my mother and ….
thinking that was worse. Much much worse... and I remembered when I saw
her going through my things, my diary wide open, she was reading
private thoughts and I'd caught her. I could not confront her. I could
not. She hadn't heard me, so I retreated; my skin, my face burning with a
dreadful shame. She knew. About Tuscany, that I had lied to her,
because I had just written pages and pages about our time in his villa
there. She never said anything to me about what she had read. I knew
she'd destroy everything after that day. And soon after that it was
over. It ended. Like she had got her way. But it was because she was
jealous, not because she really felt he and I were doing anything wrong,
it was because she was bitter about how her own life had turned out ….
“content thee with my discontent?” as Shakespeare wrote in the Taming of
the Shrew. She enjoyed being cruel. Was it any coincidence that soon
after he left?
ETHAN DEVLIN
The
night following the film awards in Hollywood where Ethan Devlin walked
away with six trophies, he was on his way back to London. His wife,
Celia, had not been with him on this trip, preferring to stay behind.
She detested the States, saying that the country was filled with
illiterate ignoramuses. Celia was a literary agent in London for a very
exclusive publisher, so her refined taste was rather biased. Not that
Ethan Devlin minded this about his wife. Several of his blockbuster film
successes were due to her literary discoveries of some unknown talents
that helped him to make a nice fortune with their co-screenwriting.
It
had been a nightmare in California. The press were like vultures. While
he loved making films, he loathed many of the elements associated with
the endeavor. For him it was the thrill of the creative process which
had always kept him interested over the years. Working with other
imaginative minds, watching the project evolve and unfold, the surprises
along the way that helped to enrich the project, inspired by those
involved.... Yes, all that still thrilled him. Yet, what was this other
new edge in his stride of late? Was it that he had somehow become bored
with it all now, despite the fact that he knew he couldn't just walk
away from all this? He was somehow innately dissatisfied. Only what was
it, was it his life over all or just his work?
He
looked up from the airline's magazine finding it tedious;
materialistically artificial, preferring instead, to distract himself
with the view outside his airplane window. The view was black. It was
night on this side of the Atlantic. There was an occasional electric
bolt of lightening which illuminated some cottony clouds. He thought of
Celia and their London townhouse where his next night sleep would be.
While he did not want to be in California, he realized also that he did
not particularly want to be in London either. He knew it was
restlessness making him feel this way, but he couldn't understand what
it was behind this frustrating and pent in sense of ennui.
What
did he require to cure him of this? This was nothing sudden, it had
been creeping upon him for quite awhile. He knew that he should be
thrilled beyond measure with last night's victory, only it actually felt
meaningless, and anti-climatic. He had won awards before, perhaps he
was jaded? Ethan Devlin fingered the frames of his reading glasses
thoughtfully. He had never been the sort of person that needed awards,
he never sought approval from anyone. Nobody had the right to tell him
if he was worthy of acclaim and he didn't really care about anyone's
opinion. He liked being admired and appreciated but he wasn't blind over
why that was, he was the first to admit he had a more than healthy ego
mostly about his intelligence and the rest was his ease in knowing that
he usually could obtain whatever it was that he set out to gain. Or
always. He couldn't recall not succeeding at his goals for anything.
His
mind considered places left to travel to. Some place new, maybe that
was what he needed, that usually was the cure to this inherent need to
find.... Only.... he had even grown sick of travel. Exploring the
extremities of the globe to fulfill or to –fill? Even as he loved to
travel, and they were always traveling. They did the Pyramids more times
than he felt like counting, been on safari four years in a row, spent
their anniversary in the Mediterranean, the year before in Jamaica, they
summered every year in the Riviera, starting either in Italy and
working their way to France or vice-versa, by car or by train and last
year, for a desperate need for change, they had escaped the western
civilization to spend Christmas in Japan and New Year's in Taiwan.
He was bored.
And
none of this had helped to chase that tedium away. What was wrong with
him? He knew he should be on top of the world, he was a very lucky man
to live the way he did. Celia was always reminding him of this too while
making sure that they contributed to good charities to give some of
their fortune to others. And she was right too, he just was usually too
caught up in his work to want to tear himself away long enough to so he
was glad she did all that for them. Celia found it disgraceful that most
of their friends who could afford to do the same didn't choose to do
so.
He realized now that he felt bored with money as
well. Bored with the affluent. Being surrounded by those people, their
conversations, so hopelessly sleep inducing. He was tired of the society
of vanity and fame, the superficial and fake personalities, the
starving for attention actors and performers, even the exhibiting
pretentious artists --he felt he more than had his fill.
Fill.
He drained his glass of carbonated water and looked at the empty
vessel. He turned the glass upside down on the tray in front of him and
thought wryly to himself. “Something to fill the void,” he said quietly
to himself, but what was the void? What was missing for him? This
feeling was always what drove him to pursue new projects in the past.
His films had always provided the answer for the emptiness. This feeling
…. came from something else.
He knew exactly what it
was too. Who it was. That drove him all these years. Behind every huge
film project. There was ever only one. It was what had driven him. Every
film ….was about her.
His muse.
He
turned the glass upright again, considering its graceful elegance. That
was what he sought, he knew; like every film he'd made that could bring
back the thrill of her; that longing which had been behind the
inspiration for everyone of his award winning movies, year after year:
his muse.
The rush followed by that familiar dull pain
throbbed in his heart now as he received the jolt the thought of her
could inspire as it surged through his memory. All the heroines were
her, all incarnations of her somehow, recalling every detail and
mannerism and trying to get the actor to get it exactly so. Her pauses,
her intonations, the reluctant self effacing swan in flight.
If
he was heartless, as many had accused him of being, than it was because
whatever there had once been alive in his soul was so long become a
ghost. His inappropriate act that had cost him his former career. She
had nearly destroyed him. Only, she would never know that.
Bittersweet,
his ~dove~ he used to call her that: “My dove,” he would say, brushing
the flyaway lock of hair that always fell across those dark, enormous,
wondrous eyes. Such dark eyes and such white skin she would have looked
as if she were in black and white if it hadn't been for that blaze of
wild red hair overwhelming her elfin face.
Statutory
rape, she had been underage. His own student.... she'd sat in his class
at the back of the room, always hiding, but the sunlight from the window
bathed her in a halo of light, it was impossible to miss her. She would
have stood out anyway. Her papers were extraordinary, her mind was so
brilliant, she had moved him with the power of her unique thoughts and
her ability to express herself.
His professional
reputation was ruined and there was nothing else to do but leave the
country in shame, Celia threatening divorce. Of course, after that he
had no choice but to have to re-invent his life. So what does a
Humanities professor do once his livelihood is gone?
Make
epic culture, what else? At least his ego could always carry him
through, which was what ultimately had convinced the investors when he
had first gone in search of the finances he needed to fund his first
feature film. His credentials had been impressive to the banks. The fact
he'd been fired for an illicit affair with a student earned him a few
admiring winks, and actually added appeal to his prospect as a director
with notoriety.
He'd never had the chance to say
“good-bye” to her. He wondered often over the years what she had been
told. He'd received one of her letters before they'd moved away with a
poem in it. There was this one line that he had never forgot: he falls
to me from the sky, son of the morning star....
He had
that line memorized; it was a play on his name Devlin for Lucifer. She
was, afterall, his star pupil, his literary student who had such
promise. He had wanted to help develop her, there was such raw talent
there and like Pygmalion he could not hold himself back. He lost himself
in her; lost himself.... in her talent, there was really no other way
to explain her affect on him, like some heroine from an old novel, she
had such power to haunt his soul, he never could forget her.
So while she had cost him one career, she had launched his next one.
That was over twenty years ago.
The
money he made as a film maker had afforded him some useful privileges.
Among the homes he owned around the world, the cars and other
possessions, he had also acquired some of his own power. A silent
partner in a few lucrative companies, a backer for some advantageous
politicians and other acquisitive endeavors less publicly known and some
not altogether legit. Devil's advocate? He would rather say that he
preferred to tip the scales when his personal politics felt compelled to
economically swing a pendulum in the less monopolizing direction.
Perhaps this was why he found some politics fun to dabble in
anonymously.
He sat starring at the turbulent darkness
outside the window thinking about his present life and wondering about
how strange time was. It had been so many years, yet somehow, sometimes
it felt as if just only an instant had passed. Yet, Ethan Devlin was
still a very handsome man. He was one of those men that somehow became
even better looking as he got older. Women were always making him aware
of this with their forward propositions. He still couldn't get used to
this: women today had no self respect, he often observed. Having to peel
their cloying hands and limbs from around his neck and body was
becoming something of a disconcerting hazard. He still loved women but
the grand daughter appeal was not his first choice, especially the
generation they came from. Empty headed and insatiable sluts were never
his concept of alluring game.
In fact, now as he sat by
the window seat lost in thought he slowly started to become aware of
being watched by a female who kept making open eye contact with his
absent glance when ever he happened to look that way. Dark hair hung
straight down to her hip, red lipstick and a tattoo of a blue and purple
dragon crawled up her cleavage from around her left breast that
threatened to fall out of her shirt.
Ignoring her, he
put on his reading glasses, feigning interest in the airline's magazine
again, but to the female who watched him, this only made him more
interesting. The clean-cut, distinguished gentleman in the silver gray
suit that matched his hair was, in fact, catching a lot of feminine
glances when he stood up to use the lavatory. When he walked back down
the isle and then passed through to the first class section there were
smiles of invitation following him as his tall, impeccable silhouette
moved back to his seat, his own thoughts a million miles away. When he
returned to his seat again the tattooed girl was sitting in it. From
where he stood he was unfortunately able to see down to the base of the
dragon which began, he guessed, at about her bikini line.
“Oh-hello, lost?” he asked wryly.
“I thought you looked lonely,” she smiled with a stupid giggle.
“I suspect you are projecting,” he replied coolly.
“Huh?” she asked looking blankly up at him.
He cleared his throat,
“They're showing a movie about vampires, I noticed. Why don't you run along back to your own seat?”
The girl pouted,
“Naa,”
she said and wrinkled her nose, “I've already seen it,” she was
American and spoke with a very nasally, irritating, high-pitched voice.
“I was thinking—well--it's such a long flight—you know, and all....
you're English, aren't you? I can tell.”
“I bet there
are a lot of us on this flight,” he became impatient now and said in a
manner that reflected this, “forgive me if this sounds rude but,” and
here he narrowed his changeable blue-green eyes, “why don't you run
along back to your own seat?”
When he had finally got
rid of her he realized her cotton candy perfume was left behind, still
clinging to his seat's upholstery. In fact, it was making him nauseated.
He got up to get an airline's throw blanket in hopes of drowning the
odor from the seat where she had left it.
And
then his thoughts detracted him idly back as if desperate to escape yet
even more meaninglessness. His dove with the wild hair, needing to wipe
out the dragon girl who-- he realized, was only just a little older
than she had been when he'd first seen her in his classroom. And yet, so
much more mature for her age than this girl. It made him long to know
about her now. Twenty years later. Not that he really needed to wonder.
Having power had, after all, certain advantages. Over the years
information had passed over to him from various sources, he liked to
call it research, and the private detectives he had hired never asked
any questions, they did his bidding. It got easier over the years to
find out things, the Internet had been very useful so-- he did know
where she was. Knew facts of her life. It helped with the screenplays'
characterizations over the succession of films.
Only
some things about what he learned of her had disappointed him. So much
talent he would have thought.... and now a bolt of lightening lit the
blackened sky outside his airplane window and he had a jolt of some kind
of realization as his thoughts crystallized he said aloud to himself,
“I need to see her again.”
What follows below is what comes after, but I have not included all the scenes that I've got. These are excerpts and some background history for purposes of characterization study that I may or may not include in some future version of a kind of book. Maybe.
She was chiseling. It is necessary to reiterate the
importance of the muse. Slamming away with the ax, hard into stone....
Hayden had made one of his derogatory comments to her that she captured
her victims in stone. “Who was that Greek character who turned people to
stone?” he had asked her. “Medusa,” she had reminded him. “Yeah, that's
the one. That's you. You turn anyone who looks at you into stone and
then you put them in your menagerie.”
“Wow,” she had said, “I think that is the first time I ever heard you say something actually profound.”
She kept their brains in jars, remember? That was what Trent had thought about her early in their association.
Orpheus had been long completed, he had been moved to the labyrinth surrounded by varieties of roses.
As
she pounded thoughts flowed. She moved into her altered state of
consciousness, clarity would often arrive like drops of rain, as they
did now, cleansing her.
If
privacy is invaded the one it happens to must invent new ways of
erecting walls. Her mother would often pilferage through her diary. She
learned to use confusing language, sometimes words that said one thing,
but taken as written, belied the meaning. She invented a language. She
had to. If she said, “Oh, I am so happy...” it meant something else. It
was meant to never be understood. The reason for the words to be
recorded at all were meant only as markers. That was the reason for
Electra's dictionary.
By now, you must have guessed: Torrent is Electra.
She
broadened her tools when words became too easy to be used against her.
Hayden had found her writings too and lay them out to the courts, her
words, her dramas all to be judged and taken for their face value. They
were never meant to be read that way. They were never meant to be
understood. But they were meant to be understood.
Symbolism
is so useful. Poets rely on symbolism. That was one of the reasons
Torrent loved poetry and literary works. It became the obvious choice of
a primer in which to base her entire lexiconic reality. Words can
release you, words can trap you. What do you do with your haunting
thoughts? Her sculptures became her diary. Only she knew how to
interpret them. The subjects and the symbolic heroes chosen became her
new markers. That was why she could never sell any of them. They were
carved into her soul. Without them she doubted she could go on living.
She would lose her mind.
She
found something meditational and religious about working at her art.
Like leaving offerings for the gods and in return she was granted new
wisdom. Answers always came afterward. She served the gods, it was for
them. Her muses were the means for her to interpret. The muses were
chosen by something outside of herself, they came to her. Like Ethan
had.
She had drawn him so many
times as a student that she had his face memorized. Even now. So it was
like breathing to find that the chisel knew where to go, she watched his
likeness unveil from the first slam.
Torrent,
like Trent and like Ethan, needed her muse. She needed to be delivered
out of herself. She needed the seduction of being laid at the feet in
front of something to admire and pull her away from the darkness that
threatened to suck her in. Perhaps it is the tragic part of them that
must find something to wrap around, to be saved from the engorgement of
the ego that cannot otherwise see outside of himself; the ability and
willingness to surrender a power and become enslaved by the genius it
inspires actually requires the strength of ego to know: there is
something higher. The wisdom found only once all self is obliterated by
someone who takes you out of yourself; someone of flesh with the power
to enlighten. And this is as close to Heaven on Earth that maybe we will
ever find.
Her mother had once
told her something strange when she was very young. She had been talking
about who her real father was, telling, confessing emotions to Torrent
of what their affair had been like, speaking with the kind of feeling
she had never witnessed in her mother except while speaking of him. She
had said, “never have heroes, Torrent. They will always have clay feet.”
Because her mother had idolized this man. Even till the end of her
life.
And yet as Torrent slammed
away at the stone she ignored those silly words. She didn't care and
never had. She believed in her heroes, needed them.... and as she worked
now, she thought of this. Her hands moving with a power beyond herself,
caught in the moment of creation while seduced by it, mind enthralled,
her sex wet. His mouth, his cheek bones she carved first, then his eyes,
she knew his face so well. When first she had begun sculpting years
after they had parted, she had been able to reconstruct his face by
memory. That was the actual reason she had first taken up the chisel.
She wanted to touch him again. Feel his mouth under her finger tips,
trace their perfect outline with the sensual arch, the fullness that
sucked her in. And now when she worked, even his deepening lines that
creased his lovely face, made her want to have him under her touch. He
had been the idea of so many of her poems, so many of her words. She had
written countless pages just about him and when words got dangerous
there was this. To make love to, to serve, and to kneel before and leave
her offerings. Is an artist someone who searches for their muse in
order to define themselves? Or is it the muse that discovers the artist?
Do you choose to be an artist or does art pick their victims and turns
you into one after it breaks your heart and cuts and beats you into
becoming one?
***
What
does Ethan need now in his life? He is reaching out for some way to
fill his void. The drained glass of carbonated water. He knows Torrent
is a key to some missing part in himself. She signifies something he
once discovered that he had to give up. Something that had been a way to
be fulfilled. But he had to leave it.
She
is the daughter he never had but why should this be a romantic on going
theme for him? Why is a daughter erotic love to him? He has never been a
father. He does not know what the boundaries feel like because he has
never had to know. The worry over incestuous feelings does not apply.
Instead her symbolizing someone of an age who is young enough to have
been fathered by him allows his need to be someone who can have the same
power over a “child's” world. Thus be immortalized in that person's
memory. To also leave a mark upon her-- not by DNA replication but maybe
almost better this way-- it is an indelible impression of HIM. His
individual importance of his life time will not be forgotten through
“Electra” who is so enslaved by her admiration for him, her father
figure, or Agamemnon (in the absence of her natural father, whom she
never got to know and always longed for in the absence of; while she has
always buried it, he knows she has always longed to be nurtured, to be
nourished emotionally, succored )-- that this satisfies his need to be
that essential to someone's “soul”—or rather-- the innate being. His
innate being is imprinted immortally upon someone he will leave behind.
This would serve for him to accomplish and fulfill his personal void.
He
cannot get this fulfilled through Celia. She is extremely confident and
very independent, an accomplished literary person in her field, a
successful career, so she is not really needy of him at all. But they
are and have been together for so long that the concept of changing this
in their lives would be impossible. Their lives are too enmeshed, their
experiences, their memories are too connected; they would not be able
to just walk away from each other.
However,
Ethan cannot help longing for the girl he left behind so long ago. It
is not that he regrets anything or his marriage, (maybe it is even more
romantic to suffer anyway) it is really more that he feels unable to
give either up. Torrent, who was all these years, long gone from his
physical life had never really left him. He had never really ever given
her up. And in this way, he had been able to continue his affair with
her and still be husband to Celia, fulfill his obligations to her.
They
never had children. Their generation rebelled from the old values,
coming of age in the sixties. They both had wanted careers and when they
had met while still at University, this became understood between them.
Ethan had always respected Celia's mind and her ability to take care of
herself.
Even still—his thoughts
of Torrent when first he had been struck by her had always been
convoluted with a need for ownership; the need to posses her. Which
vastly opposed how he felt about Celia from the beginning. When first
struck by Torrent it had been an automatic reaction, an instant urge
when he first noticed her; to control her, direct her, make her, improve
upon her as if she was his own creation. It fulfilled some paternal
need in him. He wanted to be the center of someone's life, the way a
parent has this kind of omnipotent power. The one who must provide
everything for her; nourishment, clothing, shelter and most of all,
nurturing; and Torrent had no father figure at all leaving this role
wide open for him to assume.
There
had been a time when he and Celia had almost been parents. Early in
their relationship, when they had both been very young, their lives and
future careers still ahead of them both. She had become pregnant. An
accident. There was so much at the time political going on about woman’s
rights. They were caught up in the attitudes of the times. So he had
told her that it was her choice, her body and he would never force her
to do anything that she did not want. He left it completely open to her
own decision. But she had not told him what her decision wound up being.
He found out later after she had already taken care of the situation.
Too late to discuss his feelings about family planning, those quiet
creeping thoughts that had begun to surface as the weeks of her
pregnancy had unfolded as he had begun to want it despite their youth
and their future dreams. He never told her. He blamed himself. What was
the point? It was too late. And some things just never go away.
This
one event shaped so much in his subconscious, influencing a kind of
altering within himself. This choice wound up deciding their future
(actual and conscious), their lives. She had been young, afterall and
she, in hindsight,did not choose very wisely where to go to take care of
her pregnancy. Who to go to. Ultimately, she almost died. And Ethan
blamed himself too for this, felt deeply responsible and very much in
debt to her in some intrinsic sense, especially because this fatal
choice of hers destroyed her chance of ever having children. How could
he walk away from her when he had been as much responsible for this as
she was? He should have stopped her, but she never told him she had
decided to do it. Yet, he should have known, he should have suspected,
he must have sensed she was thinking about it. But he had thought she
would have told him and he had considered telling her then, when she was
ready to discuss things, that he wanted their child. He could never
forgive himself for this. It ate at him quietly all these years. It
became his albatross, because he would not bring himself to even
consider having a family with someone else. For all his lack of
scruples, this one aspect of himself was too deep within his sense of
personal morals and personal obligations. He loved her, and knew he
always would but it wasn't a passionate love. It was a respectful love, a
strong friendship, a long term commitment of years of sharing lives,
memories, opinions. Years of growing into whom they had become in later
years.
Still, there did exist the
residual resentment. At first undetected, he went years without knowing
it was even there, having put those feelings away and with years of
studies, years of working side by side to achieve their goals, building
their lives together.... too busy to look too deeply within. There was
never any question of going their separate ways. They had never been the
kind of couple to argue or to have scenes, they just moved along and
lead their lives, pressed on with their personal goals and successes and
came home to each other to discuss all this, or to chose not to and
enjoy the chance to get away from their work while they were alone.
Traveling and buying homes together, enjoying social events, holidays
and entertainment....
But still
that resentment, although buried over heaps of years and distractions,
was there-- and would only surface during unexpected moments. Those
moments of comparison with others who had families of their own and
spoke of events that concerned their children and then watching those
people raise these very children to become adults in the world, shipping
them off to college, attending their weddings, becoming their
children's grandparents. He knew it would have been so different, their
lives would have taken such different paths had she chosen differently
that day. Perhaps, he often thought with irony, they would not even have
stayed together as so many of their friends had left wives and husbands
after parenting their herds. But he was never really sure who he blamed
more for this. Was it really all her fault? Could he not have been more
forthright about the child? Had he purposely kept his thoughts to
himself to not have to take on that responsibility? Of courses the other
aspect of this was, would he have been more sorry to have been saddled
with a child at that age? Would he have been able to finish his
education? Or if he would have, would Celia have been able to? If she
had dropped out, she never could have become the business woman that she
was and that was so much a part of herself. She might have become
financially, solely dependent on him and that would have dramatically
altered the dichotomy of their relationship and their lives.
The
thought of Celia dependent on him in that way somehow made Ethan feel
uncomfortable. Cringe at the thought. Yet, had it been Torrent....
When
the affair happened with Torrent he had secretly wished, even
entertained the idea of that kind of dependence on him; had wanted that.
That chance with her. He had moments, he could still even recall today.
Moments when he would imagine Torrent with his child growing inside of
her. Moments when he had dreamed of taking care of Torrent and their
child, run off and married, to live like bohemians in wedded, sexual
bliss, bringing up babies and still encouraging Torrent to express her
intelligent mind in her creative talents. He would have pushed her to
publish her works, would have even appointed himself her editor. And had
he known what amazing talent she had as a visual artist he would have
pushed her to do shows of her work, encouraged her to sell them and make
a name for herself.
And now,
years later, during these moments when he reflected on their lost past,
the past they could have had had they taken that path.... it made him
sad of the lost years, sad of the lost opportunities. It was clear to
see that she had not found anyone who was able to give her the things in
life that he had so desperately dreamed of giving her. He would have
liked to have watched her bloom into that person he once saw that she
could have been and would even have applauded her successes.
The
passion that was not present, however, with Celia, had been with
Torrent. Torrential and mind blowing. Forever seared in his total being.
Even young, she had a earthy nature, which had not been evident in how
she appeared to the world. A shock when he discovered this. Like a
secret keyhole he found with a hidden key. A sealed off passage. And
once he had unwrapped her seal by that first touch, nothing and nobody
had ever equaled it. Being with her he had never felt more complete,
mind and body. How could he ever leave their bed of idyllic themes?
But that did not happen.
Never
exhausted and forever preserved, their romance had never got to fully
flower. It had remained all these years the pure block of marble,
waiting always to be chiseled to life by his hands to wake her from her
death-like sleep.
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