the weaker light, the incandescent heinies of the fireflies flush against the sky blinking on and off like the planes higher above, and the stars higher still. love is like light not like labels: i just watched Sex and the City (the movie) and it disturbs me how easily they concatanate the two. I guess I should have known, but still. I wish labels were so attractive to me: how easy they are to attain, to have and hold and be fulfilled with. And I wish marriage was the happy ending, but it's not. It just ain't. I don't understand why we keep buying into it, what's so attractive about the happy ending. I think it's not the happy part but the ending part that's so attractive. The idea that it'll all be over once you get there, a sort of secular nirvana.
But I digress. And that's sort of the point of these blogs, to digress freely (Digression! remember Catcher in the Rye?). Let's return to the here and now. The here is Freeville, NY, an address I keep but a town I've never been to. The actual place is a road out in the country, a sweet house I've all but destroyed in my fits of winter frenzy this past year, neighbored by a swamp full of dead tree trunks which serves as a nesting ground for herons and (by the sounds of it) a city of frogs. The aforementioned fireflies are out on the lawn, moving to and fro against the backdrop of dark pines, carrying their lovelorn light in all directions.
This morning I took a walk and saw: meadows filled with buttercups and horses, a dead bat by the side of the road no bigger than a folded dollar bill, phlox, daisies, and two kinds of butterflies: one yellow with black dots (dead) and one black with yellow, blue and red dots (alive and "flitting and fluhting" as David Attenborough likes to say). They were like a positive and negative image of each other. The yellow one reminds me of the other day when I was driving down the country roads at a pace, all mad with pain and self-directed rage, just hurtling down the asphalt in my blue pickup listening probably to the classic rock station and I saw this big yellow butterfly flitting before me and for a moment I was taken out of my doldrums (beauty has a way of doing that) and then the butterfly was on my windshield, stuck in the wipers, helpless against the wind and the velocity battering its wings.
"And all men kill the thing they love,
By all, let this be heard,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword."
That's Oscar Wilde believe it or not, from the Ballad of Reading Gaol. Maybe it was that maudlin sensibility he tried to cover up with his more famous and ultimately tiresome aphorisms. I don't know. I've had one Saranac and it's putting me in a mood. There, now I have another.
"To alcohol: The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems!" That's Homer talking and don't you know. This reminds me of AA which I sat in on a few times in the past months due to a friend who started the program. I've never had alcohol really be either cause or solution to my problems and for that I am thankful, but I realized going to those meetings that alcohol gave those folks a reason to be there-- a label if you will-- that brought them to this ingenious human convention. In Turkish it's called a "kulp" which literally means the handle of a vessel. The thing you pick it up with. Maybe framework is a better word for the whole AA thing: once you identify (and admit) yourself as an alcoholic, then there's this vast support network to help you through your troubles. I'm not trying to downplay the extent of those troubles. I was particularly moved by the testimonial of a man who told the story of meeting folks in prison who were in there for murders they'd committed while being blackout drunk, and he'd thought to himself: that could have been me. And soon after that I watched an episode of Alfred Hitchcock presents-- often wry, dark segments of fantasy and crime-- which dealt very seriously with a similar story featuring an alcoholic heroine and at the end of which Hitchcock appeared not with his usual tongue-in-cheek humor but completely straight-faced and said "we've diverged a bit from our usual path tonight in the hopes that this episode, adapted from a short story by Adela Rogers St. John, will somewhere, somehow, help someone." Not an exact quote, but close. Comedy's good and all, but especially when it comes from an unlikely source, a bit of serious drama is just so much better.
Anyway, what I was saying is that I'm not trying to minimize the difficulty of being an alcoholic, but I appreciate the access that gives one to a resource like AA where people simply share their stories, their experience, without the fear of judgment. Oh I know, even as I write this, that I sound naive, and I'm even aware of the somewhat self-involved, victim-mentality that this program invites, but I was so surprised and relieved (or released) to find myself in a space where people could share their most secret, most shame-inducing stories with each other, that I developed a good respect for the program. And the best part of it is, that people Listen to each other, and through that listening, through the Sharing, they learn that they are not alone and that it helps to listen as well as be heard.
Now where are we? That is not a full-stop above. There is never a full-stop. And if I know what's good for me I'll keep writing here until fate doles out my final stop. There is no ending, not until there is.
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