To have to deal directly with things frees the spirit. Including pain. My hips are like a suburban living room, expanded for better acoustics. Speakers say nothing, though they project a thing like music. Still not the thing itself, which only replays another thing. The man’s cave has only shadows of music resonating from its walls, things divorced from the workmanship that made them. A perfect box constructed for a perfect imitation. Something’s off, despite the mad drive to make it. I took a photograph of two shadows bending on a fence nearby; I called it “Twins,” but didn’t consider whether the shadows were twins of each other, or their sources, men hidden by bushes. Echo varies from imitation. The man at the pool didn’t imitate himself, though his image echoed back. The woman nearby saw her voice reiterate itself as it fell apart. “If I fell,” a frequent Lennon phrase, suggests a possibility answered by collapse into love or concrete. Post-cure, he appeared a zombie.
But where’s the free spirit in this? More spirit on the payment plan, a little this month, and then the next. You rent to own, but by the time it's yours, your spirit is shackled. You break it, you buy it. His sickness felt like freedom to us, and we loved him for it. Decades later, the pit of the stomach testifies that we were duped. Strip your belief, but remember its intensity; that was never false. Followers need their idol, but only as a target. In the hands of a literalist, he became one. We’re left with interpretive energies without form, like word clouds lacking sentences. Word fields reach for grammar, which is not cloud but two by fours prepared for a pour of concrete. The setting is beautiful, but having set, darkness fills in. How quickly it all becomes rigid, words acquiring anchors, unable to adjust to the new weather.
I wonder, did I deal with dementia directly, or as a shadow? Was my mother herself, or my character? Or was she neither, having forgotten her lines? Did taking it all down as dictation preserve anything but my sense of myself in an ash field? Was my spirit freed in witnessing her decline and fall (no if about it). From this distance, I’m dealing with echo; I don’t witness her but my attempts to take her down in words. The man with the perfect stereo lost his sons to bitterness.
Note: based on an article in today’s Washington Post. The first sentence is from Simone Weil.
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