A New Home

I've got a new home on Typepad: http://incidentsandaccidents.typepad.com/.

Tangled Mess of Thoughts, Anyone?

Too many thoughts, all conflicting. Sensible (fingers crossed) post to come when I can iron them all out and hang them up in a row.

What is it, exactly?

It's a feeling everyone has, to be sure. After all, nothing in the world is new, and this simple maxim provides a modicum of comfort.

However, it appears to be a feeling not everyone can control - or if I'm honest with myself, one that I haven't confronted with my best efforts at control.

I think that this would all be much easier if there were one word for all of it, the endlessly confusing, constantly changing, hugeness of it. Were that the case, when the feeling started to peek out of whatever dark corners you've tried to banish it to, you could just say, straightforwardly and unafraid, chin thrust forward defiantly and chest resolutely and bracingly pushed out, "Oh. It's you again." Being able to identify it would mean being able to pinpoint it, to hold it down, to incarcerate it, to solidify it - to keep it from being this slippery, dip-diving, shape-shifting thing. Excuse the reference, but did anyone see that X-Files episode where some invisible creature attacks the woman in the middle of the night and carves "sister" on her chest? I remember watching it in 5th grade and lying awake, unblinking, absolutely terrified, scared shitless that if I went to sleep it could happen to me. Which is pretty much where I am right now.

So I'm finally able to say to myself, "In the interest of driving away that nameless feeling and trying to get a decent night's sleep, let's try to identify the fucker in some ways, shall we? Let's flesh out all of his endless identities (telling that I choose the masculine pronomial form, no?). Then when he appears, he won't be able to hide behind the element of surprise. And I'll be able to become that strong-chinned girl who says "Oh, you again. What is it this time? Happy memories? Fearful wonderings? Panic? Intense desire? You have no influence over my emotions any longer. You make me feel nothing. You're just the trickster."

Self-reliance is what I'm after, and achieving it mandates a certain degree of emotional detachment. Since I'm pretty much an emotional open book, this will probably be a bitch.

The goal is to be sufficiently happy entirely alone. And not just generally happy, but actually pleased with myself and the path my life is taking - all of the little things that are actually happening right now, not all of the things I hope will happen. This is the gift that's come out of the current state of things. I know I'm not truly content to drift along directionlessly, in hopes that my life's path will reveal itself to me - I've gotten old enough to realize that I have a much greater hand in it than I'd thought before. And now there's nothing to distract me from that fact.

Hopefully, those two ideas - utter self-sufficiency and blissful togetherness, which now seem to be mutually exclusive - will be able to collide again one day in a less destructive fashion.

There's no more pushing anyone else to perform some self-examination - if I'm ready to take it on, there can't be any more waiting at the station. Besides, that would defeat the purpose. It's something to be done solitarily. So far, introspection offers me only gains in self.

Death of Heath Ledger. RIP.

As superficial and silly as it may seem, the death of actor Heath Ledger seems to have struck a major chord with me - and with many of my friends as well. I've had a crush on him since his days as the bad boy in 10 Things I Hate About You. His talent as an actor really developed - he seemed to be a real actor's actor.

Everyone I've talked to thought he had it together - he seemed to have maintained a some sense of normalcy and decent family values, at least for a time. Fame appeared to have not fazed him. He and Michelle Williams used to live not too far from me right here in Brooklyn. Now some reports are alleging that he was freebasing, or perhaps overdosed on pills.

This excerpt below from the New York Times convinces me that his death was accidental - maybe just a tortured man trying to finally get a good night's sleep.



“I stressed out a little too much,” Mr. Ledger said.

He tends to do that. He is here in London filming the latest episode of the “Batman”franchise, “The Dark Knight.” (Mr. Bale, as it happens, plays Batman; Mr. Ledger plays the Joker.) It is a physically and mentally draining role — his Joker is a “psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy” he said cheerfully — and, as often happens when he throws himself into a part, he is not sleeping much.

“Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night,” he said. “I couldn’t stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.” One night he took an Ambien, which failed to work. He took a second one and fell into a stupor, only to wake up an hour later, his mind still racing.

Even as he spoke, Mr. Ledger was hard-pressed to keep still. He got up and poured more coffee. He stepped outside into the courtyard and smoked a cigarette. He shook his hair out from under its hood, put a rubber band around it, took out the rubber band, put on a hat, took off the hat, put the hood back up. He went outside and had another cigarette. Polite and charming, he nonetheless gave off the sense that the last thing he wanted to do was delve deep into himself for public consumption. “It can be a little distressing to have to overintellectualize yourself,” is how he put it, a little apologetically.




So sad to have left that beautiful baby daughter behind - and at only 28.

The Trickster.

Trickster is at the same time, creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself. He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet through his actions all values come into being.

Few mythological figures have such a remote origin in time and broad distribution among cultures as the one called Trickster. This character has long puzzled its commentators, largely because Trickster defies any purely rational or intellectual analysis. In fact, anyone who has studied any particular trickster story can testify to its disturbing undertones of perplexity and provocation.

Trickster contains a transcendent nature whose epic qualities are truly awesome. We can think, for example, of when Maui, the Polynesian Trickster, snares nothing less than the sun. Yet with all his enormous power he is enormously stupid, the fool of the ages, the epitome or personification of human absurdity.

In world mythologies Trickster's guises are legion; so much so that Joseph Campbell, has called him The Hero With A Thousand Faces.

This outlandish, yet remarkable being in human form, learns, grows in understanding, changes, and at a certain point in his adventuresome blunders, is transformed. Until that moment, however, Trickster keeps changing shape and experimenting with a thousand identities, including shifts in sex, in a seemingly never-ending search for himself.

During all this he inflicts great damage on those around him and also suffers innumerable blows, defeats, indignities, and dangers resulting from his thoughtless, reckless forays. On entering upon existence he is first seen as a blurred, chaotic, hardly unified being, having no self-knowledge or life-knowledge, despite his divine parenthood. It is only later on in his travels that Trickster emerges as a culture hero, demigod, and savior of peoples. But this occurs only after his transformation or self-integration takes place, and brings to the fore the great and epic qualities initially given him by his divine progenitor.

The unity of Trickster with Hero-Benefactor is clear in a great number of the mythoi. The hero must trick the gods of their wealth, steal it, and in some manner make it available to humankind. This heavenly treasure usually is "fire" or is related to it. Raven steals the gods' fire sticks. Maui goes against Mahu-ika, the guardian of fire, to get it and bring it back to the people. In Greek myth it is Prometheus who does this. The many references to the sun-snaring feat of Trickster-turned-Hero extend illustration of this development (Katharine Luomala, Oceanic, American Indian, and African Myths of Snaring the Sun, Bernice P Bishop Museum Bulletin 168, Honolulu, 1940; reprinted by Kraus Reprint Company, N.Y, 1971). The hero who deceives, slays, or by his "wiles" appeases the gods, is honored as a savior of the world.

Trickster's hero qualities were present from the very beginning. But they lay dormant, in seed, until he decided to exercise them, which he did only after a long and painful process of trial and error, growth and metamorphosis. For in all of his manifestations Trickster remains a primordial being of the same order as the gods, despite his prolonged sojourn in the human condition.

No matter how often scholars have analyzed this myth in the attempt to reduce it to any strictly rational value, it endures in all of its polyfaceted and multileveled grandeur. To restrict understanding of it merely to one or two of its features would be to rob us of its unusually important meaning. For serious reflection upon the myth in all of its world variety brings a conviction that it can refer only to the evolution of human consciousness and the full range of phases and multiple colorations which this implies. Yes, the evolution of our consciousness, but from a gigantic perspective and nothing less, one which carries us back to the fabulous illo tempore: into the night of time millions of years ago to the magic moment of first creation, that, dawn time "when first the world was born" and we "walked with the gods."

From the initial dimness of a consciousness newly-born, lacking any real integration of its components, and having forgotten his divine mission, we follow Trickster as his awareness steadily comes forth in ever greater measure. We watch as the self-knowledge of this inchoate entity develops, bringing with it strength, remembrance, and a firmer sense of identity, all this until, at a certain point, by capturing the fire of inner illumination from the gods, he gains a full measure of self-consciousness or self-recollection, and can act to benefit mankind. To use Jungian terms, the Unconscious within himself has been transmuted into the Conscious, bringing lucidity of spiritual vision of self and the universe.

The picture show

There was a time when he would say to her, with tenderness reverberating from the lowest notes of his voice, "You make me only want to be nice to you." This, with his palm cupped around her cheek, calluses gently pressing into her skin. The roughness felt completely masculine, and consequently she felt feminine. He would push his hand back into her curls, so like his. "You're so pretty," he'd murmur. The simplicity of it promised its sincerity.

These scenes haunt her - they've become like short films that flicker to life at random in some automated cinema in her memory. The lights only come up and the screen only dims when she catches cruel whispers, words from sentences she doesn't want to hear the ends of. There's a sadistic little girl with a curl in the middle of her forehead there in the darkness with her. The darkness, black as pitch, obscures the child from view, but she knows the girl's sitting in the front row. "But you can be replaced so easily," the girl points out, her intonation maddeningly innocent.

The picture starts to skip and repeat on itself, the film doubling up in the spools of the projector. "You're so- You're so- You're so," he begins to repeat idiotically on the screen. His hand freezes mid-caress, strands of hair tangled between his fingers. The beginnings of her smile, so full warm and full of love, cease to curve upward past half-mast. Finally, the mechanism in the projector breaks and she's plunged back into the darkness of the theatre.

But only momentarily. Then the lights come up. The little girl is gone. But she sits alone, staring at the blank screen.

A Few Years' Distance

I'm sitting in his apartment. The song he hates is playing. I look out the window I've opened to freshen the stifling room - I see the black bars of the tiny fire escape balcony. Despite their thinness and seeming flimsiness, they remain unforgivingly strong. They occlude my view of the outside world, only affording me glimpses of little pieces and making the room a small prison.

He's at work, feeling sorry for himself. He's unhappy a lot; I don't question the sincerity of his despair when it appears, only the notion that he's the only one who feels it. There is no doubt of the fact that everyone feels and thinks with the same depth and profundity that he does - the difference between him and "the rest," as I imagine he would view it, is that he is able to articulate - only when he chooses, of course - what tugs at his soul. He emotes through wods, filling little lined books with pages and pages of uncertainties, misgivings, deaths inside.

He still has no idea who he is; he thinks he's struggling to find a definition for love, the meaning of which will elude him until he has at least begins to grope at what holds him together.

He can't see the futility of it all, and in his eternal focus on it, he has put me in a box.

He looks at me - all he knows about me is what he can see and what he hears me say.

I'm small to him - I've been reduced to a player in his drama - a character hindering him (the hero?) from himself.

He surveys my face - noticing the makeup.

He watches my body, seeing my clothes, and beyond that, my flesh. Nothing more.

I resent it.

I can feel the anger rising from my indignant intellect - who the fuck is he? Why have I been trivialized this way?

More importantly, why am I still here? I continue to invest in what has become a cheap, trite, poor plotline.

When I'm not here, he sits in the dark, listening to music, pondering the same old questions that forever bubble to the surface of his mind, smoking a joint.

As soon as he is satisfactorily distracted, eyes glazed over, he leans forward on the sofa I'm sitting on now, holding the stub upright between his thumb and forefinger, watching it glow for a moment. His eyes lose focus, not unlike a newborn.

In one sudden movement, he brings his hand down and extiguishes it. The ashtray may as well be my open hand.

Smoke snakes up into the darknesss, dissolving into the stifling, heavy air.