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When I dream of him, I don't think the dreams are of him.
I think there's something strange going on here, where the real person has been pared away and purged of a lot of things, leaving behind one of those elegant simplifications, like a stylised arc of a person, but not so much himself, but the meaning he had for me.
Has for me; has to be has, or I wouldn't dream of him.
I would be less caught up in this thing if I knew what the arc was, what the meaning was; I just get the symbolism, and I don't feel confident that I have the referents. Even though it's all, y'know, my life.
But that squiggle of meaning, that purified arc of wasn't is my muse, somewhere in there, with little pieces of real person tangled up with other pieces of fantasy and then boiled down from time and the time since there was anything real there at all. It's nearer twenty years now than it isn't since we saw each other, and about ten since we tried contact and failed.
Sometimes I feel creepy and stalkerish about this, the fact that he -- or this distilled fragment of him, boiled beyond recognition -- clearly matters to me. I don't know how to deal with that part, how to treat it as one of those childhood memories that is powerful and evocative and not personal in the same way that a person is -- treat it like it's a smell of baking cookies or a memory of a holiday, maybe. I worry sometimes that he would be upset or distressed by this little cherished bit of selfness that is all tied up with resonances, but too much of me grew out of that for it to stop being there, I think.
So I sometimes think about it and hold it and turn it this way and that with ambivalence. I am who I am; who I am is rooted in this strange thing, this response to this other.
My father read a book a while back that he talks about occasionally, about this idea that Art is, historically, a way for Man to sort out how to interact with Woman. He goes back and forth on whether or not he thinks it's got any truth in it, but he finds it an interesting toy to play with. (Dad's like that with ideas. It's one of the reasons he talked halachic procedure with his co-worker the Orthodox rabbi.)
But I feel like that sometimes.
They say you can never forget your first love.
They don't say that . . . that's kind of weird. Y'know?
I think there's something strange going on here, where the real person has been pared away and purged of a lot of things, leaving behind one of those elegant simplifications, like a stylised arc of a person, but not so much himself, but the meaning he had for me.
Has for me; has to be has, or I wouldn't dream of him.
I would be less caught up in this thing if I knew what the arc was, what the meaning was; I just get the symbolism, and I don't feel confident that I have the referents. Even though it's all, y'know, my life.
But that squiggle of meaning, that purified arc of wasn't is my muse, somewhere in there, with little pieces of real person tangled up with other pieces of fantasy and then boiled down from time and the time since there was anything real there at all. It's nearer twenty years now than it isn't since we saw each other, and about ten since we tried contact and failed.
Sometimes I feel creepy and stalkerish about this, the fact that he -- or this distilled fragment of him, boiled beyond recognition -- clearly matters to me. I don't know how to deal with that part, how to treat it as one of those childhood memories that is powerful and evocative and not personal in the same way that a person is -- treat it like it's a smell of baking cookies or a memory of a holiday, maybe. I worry sometimes that he would be upset or distressed by this little cherished bit of selfness that is all tied up with resonances, but too much of me grew out of that for it to stop being there, I think.
So I sometimes think about it and hold it and turn it this way and that with ambivalence. I am who I am; who I am is rooted in this strange thing, this response to this other.
My father read a book a while back that he talks about occasionally, about this idea that Art is, historically, a way for Man to sort out how to interact with Woman. He goes back and forth on whether or not he thinks it's got any truth in it, but he finds it an interesting toy to play with. (Dad's like that with ideas. It's one of the reasons he talked halachic procedure with his co-worker the Orthodox rabbi.)
But I feel like that sometimes.
They say you can never forget your first love.
They don't say that . . . that's kind of weird. Y'know?
