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

Post Panic

The French Blonde has calmed down, seemingly without therapy sessions, prescription drugs, diabetic-inducing amounts of chocolate, or emergency "talk me down from the ledge" calls with her friends.

She is not sure how this happened, as only last week she was in quite a panic, blithely tossing out predictions of impending leaps from planes. (Hmm. The FB finds she is being over-arch, even for herself. To paraphrase an author she recently read, who cleverly remarked that the word incongruous is incongruous, the FB would like to point out that the word arch is arch.)

So now, amazingly enough, the FB is actually allowing herself to enjoy the HD. And the HD is quite attentive. In fact, the FB isn't quite sure she's ever met a man so attentive, which explains part of her distress last week. What if she got used to the affection, the flowers, the dinners, the terms of endearment, the sweet text messages, the phone calls, the hand holding, the kissing in the car? Why, mightn't she just explode? Or wither away and die if it all came to a sudden halt? What if the HD turned out to be a serial seducer? Or a two-faced character in a Lifetime Movie with a deadly split personality? Yes, go ahead and laugh (please), but the FB's brain was working overtime to find a reason to push the HD away, and even the flimsiest of excuses was entertained before being booted out of the manor. All because the HD's sweetness was causing the FB to panic, and as panic is a feeling the FB prefers to avoid, she kept trying to find a way -- ANY way -- out of it. But somehow, she stayed put, and the panic disappeared.

Fancy that.

Weirdly enough, the FB, who is a verbal creature, is also finding that she enjoys actually not saying anything with the HD. This is perhaps the strangest phenomenon of all, as the FB has never been one to let a silent moment alone. But she finds she often has absolutely nothing to say...AND IT DOES NOT BOTHER HER. She simply stares at the HD with googly eyes and smiles as he does the same. Then the HD says something sweet and she is even more googly. It's disgusting.




The tender pragmatisms of flesh have poetries no enigma, human or divine, can diminish or demean -- indeed, it can only cause them, and then walk out.
--John Fowles,  The Enigma

 


 
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