The Internal Radio

All her life, the FB has had an internal radio. It plays constantly, or at least it gives her the impression of playing constantly: all she has to do is tune in to listen to what is on. Almost always, it is playing a song with words that have some sort of significance to the FB's current experience or mindset. Sometimes it is a song of vast, embarrassing, and mind-boggling cheesiness; sometimes it is a song whose meaning totally eludes her. And sometimes, it is a song whose meaning only becomes clear when she remembers or looks up the lyrics.

As the FB is currently awash with complicated and confusing emotions, her radio has been playing an inchoate and motley collection of tunes. These include:

1. The Last Worthless Evening, by Don Henley
2. How Am I different, by Aimee Mann
3. I Didn't Know About You, as sung by June Christy
4. Send in the Clowns
5. Complainte de la Butte, as sung by Rufus Wainwright
6. Easy Silence, by the Dixie Chicks

The internal radio is always trying to tell her something, but the FB is aware that where she chooses to place her focus often determines where her focus will be, so she must choose wisely and be vigilant. Vigilant, to prevent her mind from wandering to those scary, worrisome, and destructive places she knows too well. Vigilant about carefully choosing where to place her energy. Vigilant about making a concerted effort not to worry the sore places in her heart and her head, the ones that whisper warnings, omens, and doubts.

This is much harder than she even thought possible. Indeed, sometimes the FB finds this so overwhelming she wonders how other people manage.

Lovers who read stories or look at paintings about love do so supposedly for clarity.  But the more confusing and anarchic the story, the more those caught in love will believe it.  There are only a few great and trustworthy love drawings.  And in these works is an aspect that continues to remain unordered and private, no matter how famous they become.  They bring no sanity, give just a blue tormented light.

--Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost

What is love?

My questions were not original.

Nor did I answer them.

Mornings when I meditated

I was presented with a nude glimpse of my lone soul,

Not the complex mysteries of love and hate.

--Anne Carson, "The Glass Essay"

I listened to Athos’s story of the origin of the islands, how the mainland can stretch until it breaks at the weakest points, and those weaknesses are called faults.  Each island represented a victory and a defeat: it had either pulled itself free or pulled too hard and found itself alone.  Later, as these islands grew older, they turned their misfortune into virtue, learned to accept their cragginess, their misshapen coasts, ragged where they’d been torn.  They acquired grace – some grass, a beach smoothed by tides.

--Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels

 Normandy, June 2011