I was reading a new book, The Man in the Empty Suit. In it, the protagonist/narrator is a time traveler who returns to the same dissolving hotel in the same empty city every year to celebrate his birthday with his former and future selves. The Youngsters and Oldsters are in a perpetual game to learn the future and protect the past, and none of them like where they've been and where they are going. It's funny, and I hope the author's attempt to play with paradoxes doesn't get too annoying. But that's not what I want to write about....
In one toss-off comment about the future, he refers to spending time with "sad and lovely Sylvia." Plath, of course. Serendipitously, she is mentioned in another new book I am reading, Forty-one False Starts, a book of essays about artists and writers (very fun to read, btw. I got sucked in by the essay entitled "Salinger's cigarettes" and stayed for the rest.)
So, when I was looking in my brain for a metaphor for my current emotions, I thought of The Bell Jar. Of course, that was Plath's metaphor for madness, but I don't have to descend that deeply to resonate to it. The sense of being cut off from the world around you, observing but unconnected, numb and alone, surrounded by stale uncirculating air....that still fits. Another metaphor that fits is Christopher Isherwood's, "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking." Except, he plans to take all these images and DO something with them. Develop them, fix them.
The images work, but I'm neither mad nor creative. I'm....disconnected. For example, I was driving to work yesterday after visiting my bank, and I took a wrong turning. I found myself going west for a few blocks, then making a break south for the Lead/Coal Corridor, only to be stuck in the dead-end maze of the University. Circle back, go west a few more blocks, go south, get mazed. And on and on, for a good 20 minutes. A normal person would either be annoyed or pull over to check a map. Or both.
I continued my dysfunctional process, watching the cars, the wind-blown trees, the dusty horizon. Feeling the sun heating the air around the car while the a/c blew cool on my arms. Listening to the rock on the radio, sometimes even singing along. I was aware of everything, but none of it was reaching my thinking, feeling, functioning brain. It was all sensory input that seemed to have no connection with the person inside. In fact, I wasn't sure there was a person inside. The mere act of noticing the disconnect does not a person make.
It's an old problem. Be here now, check. Move forward, check. Live authentically, check. But how? Rambling about my feelings doesn't make them real. Scheduling things with friends doesn't make me connected to anyone. Learning and doing new things doesn't add up to a life.
I think about my relationships. I have left the friends who know and accept me for the flawed, annoying person I am. It is easy to call them, to do things with them, to not do things with them. It's comfortable. There's no implied rejection, no feeling that I am importuning them. That is not the case with the nascent relationships here, all less than a year old. I am not important to any of these people; if I moved tomorrow they would not care. I initiate activities, and feel like they are just humoring me: they don't reciprocate, they just go along. Of course, that's not totally true: just yesterday I received 4 invitations to do things in the upcoming week. But it's what I feel. The ease of familiarity is lacking. I'm still feeling them out, still not sure they want me around, still not comfortably connected. I can't expect otherwise, of course. One year is not time enough for those bonds to form, especially when I'm going through traumatic change and am buried in my sorry self. Who wants to be around that? Not me.
When I married D, I vowed to delight in his quirks. Subtext, he'd damned well better delight in mine. He didn't and most people don't. Except, maybe, family. After my father's passing, I wrote a paean of loss. That tribute has disappeared (where? on a thumb drive or CD back in Portland?), but I remember one sentence clearly, "I will never again have a person in my life who delights in me so wholeheartedly."
On Father's Day I found myself reading Dad's old WWII journal from his time on the USS Navarro. My sister E had transcribed it years ago. It was full of one-sentence entries, cryptic abbreviations, and repetition. "Listened to Radio Tokyo. Japs in the hills. Still in harbor. Went to the canteen for ice cream and coke." But, laconic as the journal was, I heard my Dad's voice. He never wrote long letters, and they were mainly a series of bald statements: no description, no commentary. And somehow, they were interesting, probably because Dad was interesting, and whatever he chose to mention was worth paying attention to. You don't need to prattle on endlessly to make your point...a lesson I have yet to put to use.
I miss sharing my life with him, I miss having a life worth sharing. And I'm tired of that friggin' bell jar.
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