Selkies vs. Mermaids
November 12th, 2009
All of this solitude and greyness and the fear my voice has rusted shut.
It isn’t protective silence, or withholding silence, or shamed silence. It’s just silence.
I mean, it feels more like a gathering up of the voices in my head, sorting them. Sometimes in silence. Sometimes in music. Only if I put on music time seems to disappear at an alarming rate.
Silence the great luxury of the six brief hours the boys are in school.
Truth being lately this terribly fluid thing, my truth one moment being the conviction the world is ending, a truth I can wait out, and it gets replaced with a new truth, with hopefulness, like a tree growing out of my chest.
Trees arbitrarily becoming musical instruments (if they’re spruce) and sheafs of gloriously blank paper and fuel for the fire in the woodburning stove in the studio. Smoke pouring out the chimney alarming some anonymous neighbor yesterday so that firemen knocked at the door, and I had to say, no, no, everything’s fine, it’s just doing what fires in woodburning stoves do. I still feel a little guilty about the bother, the alarm, the smoke.
My truths misplaced. I try to remember what I was thinking, what it was I needed to tell you.
My hours misplaced. My voice misplaced.
Both seem to land in hours where I guiltily practice the violin, benefitting no one, the doing it for the love of it itself when it will never be for performance or money, and the feeling that this time is stolen from the housework, from the helping with homework, from the practicing with the boys, from writing, and from the employment I haven’t sought. The things that I cannot get into words that are in my fingers when I get the notes right. The love it takes to do something imperfectly because, helplessly, I cannot help it. If I sneak away and practice by myself then when it is time for the boys to practice I can empty myself to really listen to them.
Silence creeps in to my Twitter and Facebook accounts. I don’t know how to have a voice light and casual and fitting in 140 characters and still truthful. But tentatively, I want to reassert that voice, to say, no wait, I’m still here. I continue reading your updates, and it would feel creepy skulky-stalkerish or shy wall-flowerish not to at least have the courtesy to say, yes, I’m listening.
The maternal mmm-hmmm. Keep talking.
The brilliant feminist mother blog blue milk had this talking back to the story of the Little Mermaid, and especially the giving up her voice to keep her man aspect of it, and I think about the struggling we do in silence as well as the struggling we do against silence, and how privacy morphs into shame and I decide I’d better see if I still have any voice at all. And the thing about the mermaid story is that when I found after years of immersion in the hard isolation of caring for tiny babies that I needed to write again, first in journals and slowly in the first version of the blog, it felt to me like I was reclaiming my selkie skin. Which is maybe the grown-up version of the Little Mermaid when she tries to reclaim what was lost? This divided self thing makes truth more complicated, surely. But a voice is too high a price to pay.
I am woken by absences and reach reassuringly out; I am still here. And I break the silence, carefully, not wanting to be alarming. I am right where I need to be.
November 15th, 2009 at 10:41 am
Silence. Smoke. Rusted. Selkie.
What she said.
<3
November 15th, 2009 at 10:52 am
PS did I ever ask you what you thought of *this*?
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend
November 17th, 2009 at 9:31 am
I can’t describe how much this resonates, even though my silence is much different than yours. yes, a voice is too high a price to pay. I always hated the little mermaid for that.
and do you know there is a Pokemon character with a tree growing out of his back? http://pokebeach.com/scans/diamond-and-pearl/17-torterra.jpg he’s one of the strongest Pokemons there is. I drew him for Everett last week, exactly when you were writing this post, I imagine.
I am finding much poetry in Pokemon these days. Torterra’s attack is “leaf storm.” there’s another, Bidoof, whose attack is “self-abandonment.” it either does damage to the defending Pokemon, or to itself, based on the result of a coin flip.
so many of my coin flips are coming up “tails” these days. I need a new attack.
November 30th, 2009 at 4:19 am
PS that tree thing? sounds for sure like a poem.
(And maybe “silence” is just narrative’s fracture, that place where straight talk can no longer go, and lyric’s geysery eruption from the breach? You know how that goes. That moment in the musical/opera when people have to stop talking/reciting and burst into aria, because prose won’t contain the emotion any more.)
A poem that has these lines in it:
My truths misplaced. I try to remember what I was thinking, what it was I needed to tell you.
My hours misplaced. My voice misplaced.
And the selkie-skin image. And trees and what they become; and the inevitable smoke. And probably the shoes and the sake bottles too. And definitely the jeweled spider web.
Okay DONE kibbitzing now.
November 30th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
So re-reading three weeks later, I remember that when I wrote this I loved the title and wasn’t sure that the post was equal to the title, so I repurposed the title with this:
I have the perfect title, then for my poem. If it were a poem, then, this, my title for this morning would be set against that mackerel sky. It would be a poem about the tug within me to swim off, without restraint, without care, set against the fascination with the land-bound creatures among whom I live. It would be about my sisters sitting on the rocks luring sailors to their deaths. That a voice is an unbearable price to pay, but at the same time our voices are terrible, are dangerous. It would be a poem about sometimes feeing trapped, sometimes not feeling my true self. About loving nonetheless. It would be about loneliness. It would be about sisterhood and inheritance, about motherhood. And it would be full of the sensuality of having every inch of sleek skin caressed by gentle waters, about the sting of salt and feet scraped raw by sharp rocks. About light perceived filtered through water’s murk so that light becomes a place and shadow a playground. It would be about shedding limitations and fears and following one’s nature, about the power required and the power created to restrain oneself to cradle the small and helpless, about recognition that one can wait, that this is all temporary. It would be about the fisherman’s hut, the flinging of nets, the hope chest, battered, the folded fur at the bottom, neglected, musty. This poem would contain the cry of gulls overhead and the ceaseless roar of waves, and the loss of voice within that roar, sound bleeding into sound. It would be about the rediscovery, the shaking that skin out and stifling the cry of recognition.