Me: I love you, Laura.
L: I love you, too. You make me very happy.
Me: But you're an angel...I thought you didn't need anyone to make you happy.
L: I don't need you. I want you. Wanting is higher than needing.
Me: You may have a point there, Princess [I have so many pet names for L, and they are all sickening...].
L: No one needs God, or Shakespeare or Virginia Woolf or Louis Armstrong....on the earth plane, you need to breathe, you need to eat, you need water and sleep, you need an operative excretory system...but what you want calls you higher.
[We're sitting on the screened porch in cool, delicious night air, sipping Grand Marnier; I'm nursing a cigar that won't stay lit--]
L: This Grand Marnier is the Exhibit A of higher civilization. Who needs it? Someone wanted it...wanted a sweet, warm, orangey-sexual drink...had they wanted to just get pissed, they'd have glutted themselves on potato spirits.
Me: Rien, cette écume...
L: No one needs pianos, or needed Duke Ellington to play one like he was Wallace Stevens.
Me: No one needs scat singing--[I'm really thinking not of Satch but of "Are You Shivering?" by Coil, which seems the most perfect song ever in this caressingly chill night breeze--]
[Silence...we sit, sip, hold hands, shift in our seat to hide eyes from the street light (false moon).]
Me: I love you, Laur [another nickname]. Are you real?
L: Are you?
Me: According to that Science News article, maybe not.
L: I'm as real as you are.
Wednesday, March 8, 2006
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
"Some investigators argue that each person harbors many selves capable of emerging in different situations and contexts." (Science News) -- This made me harken back to Mary Watkins' book Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues (Analytic Press, 1986). Not only does she cover writers' characters as often autonomous "imaginal others" (I quote from that section here), but she also addresses the contexts of shamanism, various therapies, and conditions such as multiple personality disorder.
ReplyDeleteShe writes, "The same kinds of imaginal dialogues in children's play that Piaget takes as evidence for the child's egocentrism can be seen -- and were indeed seen by the Romantics -- as the initial steps in freeing oneself from a self-centered world."
I agree with L.
man, that was a hell of a post on your blog...thanks for the link. I shall have to read that Watkins book--I've been collecting stuff on that theme, as you might imagine.
ReplyDeletein an earlier comment you mentioned all this music you like to listen to--I'm sorry I never got back to you on that; there's so much there I like, too (maybe I'll just email you)...and music on your list that I just can't stand (which is not a criticism, of course! it's a sign of individuality, or at least of different voices in our heads...Scriabin makes me feel like I need a hot shower...cannot explain this...)
K