Texas, and Paris

3.21.13

It was the last weekend I spent at the Catskill home. It would consist, as it usually did, of good food, being lazy, making fires and drinking wine with my dad (and mom when she could be convinced; since he’s gone she drinks a little more for all the times she missed the fun that her tea totaling half Ukrainian side wouldn’t allow of her).  It was frigid as usual, and there was probably snow on the ground. It was the second week in February, most likely. In this one year (if one takes the year to have the seasonal parameters of an academic year, which one still does even when not in school) I had got and lost a younger boyfriend, become dually involved with one who would be there, less than 6 weeks later, sitting in the hospital waiting room while my mother and I said good bye to my father, and met my best girl friend who was, at the time, also dually involved with the very same person. 

There was nothing unique or memorable about the weekend.   I probably headed up on an Amtrak train, so soft, and warm and smooth, and expensive, or perhaps one of my last sojourns on the metro north to Poughkeepsie – my father most definitely picked me up and drove me back to the house.  I was probably later than I originally said, due to some recent late night or too many (I seemed to hit my wild streak, the first one anyway, at 29/30).  Our car rides were many and scattered across the time, and winters, and reflections within ourselves.  I always updated him on things and my track and what I was ‘trying to do’.  He wanted to help the struggle more, and wanted me to have everything I wanted. I think and hope he knows he gave me more than most.

Somewhere in between the meals and the talks, for some reason I decided to watch a film, a favourite, which I had just purchased – Paris, Texas.  Wim Wenders was one of the prophets to me since high school, and brought me to and between so many beautiful things that came into my mind, and stayed there. I had become obsessed with the soundtrack and still remember seeing the film for the first time about 7 years prior, in New Brunswick, Canada.  The people whose house I watched the film at had the soundtrack on record, and played it straight through directly after we watched the film.  I also reinvigorated a love for Harry Dean Stanton, the dirty, quiet angel, and would later commiserate via this film with my other best girl friend.  The much older man and younger, pretty Nastassja Kinski who had to speak secretly their memories, and love to each other via a cheap plastic phone in a Texas brothel, well, it summed up a lot for her, and later for me too.

My dad was not an arty type; he did not go to museums or read long novels, but most of those limitations were due to language and not interest or thoughtfulness.  He understood the more sensitive, deeper part to things like few overtly educated people did.  He learned English formally, in Croatia and in the US, and studied to be an electrician more extensively than many others born in this country had care to.  He secretly wanted to be an architect, but schooling and language and life prevented him.  It did not stop him from building and blueprinting four houses, and re-working and designing another, not too far from this last house in Catskill.  He used to say he went to bed and worked out his problems in his mind while he slept, that he normally had a million thoughts whirling and spinning between his ears.  I now understand what he was talking about.  I inherited it, full stop.  Still, he loved documentaries, especially about history, and religion, and enjoyed what he called “humanism” – to him, not a doctrine or something anti-spirit, but a concentration of human experience usually through culture and creativity – art, sculpture, music, opera…held in the utmost importance just as it had been in the Croatia that he was born into and raised within. 

We ended up watching the film together…just about all of it.  It had long stretches and a lot of inner worlds struggling to peak through eyes, and experience and some grander sense of feeling.  My mom drifted in and out of the film, and respected it all the same (oddly enough, now that she has been alone the 6 years since he passed away, she watches every art/foreign/dramatic/human film she can get her hands on, maybe to hark back to those times and the higher aspects to ourselves that he always aspired to), but it was he and I that fell into the thing. He didn’t speak much—sometimes to ask a question if a line was too soft, or to mention how Nastassja was from an area in Germany he once spent time living or visiting, or how he enjoyed the sound of Mexican trumpets (he loved Ring of Fire and loved to tell the repetitive story about how June wrote that for Johnny Cash and he added those mariachi trumpets in after dreaming of their sounds), but never allowing the experience of watching the story to not engage him.

After it was all done, quietly and vulnerably as it had played, my mom mentioned something about not really getting it (she would years later to her credit), but my dad let the credits run all the way through, and spoke with the very quiet voice he had (when I accent my voice like his or tell people about him, his Croatian voice to them usually is heard in a harsh, Slavic way – a typical Eastern European article-less speech stomping its primitive wares all over the place.  It was nothing like that.  He was the man that women loved to speak to, and felt safe and treasured around, that kids liked to smile at, that humble, hardworking people enjoyed relating to, and educated people found inquisitive and unique.  It had more of a Slavic-Italian lilt, and though broken in parts, never raised its voice unless you Knew something was Very Wrong.  It was gentle, and thoughtful and, like his mother, spoke when it had something of worth to really say).  At that time, letting the film wash over us, in the warm wine laden late Sunday afternoon at the last house he would ever build, my dad simply said “yep…that’s a real story, of things very deep, human”.  I would never see him alive (really) after leaving when that weekend was over, only in the hospital and I know that story well.  This was the last movie, and last normal afternoon we spent together.  I have geared my mind and heart and aliveness to “things very deep, human” since then, faltering on occasion, forgetting on others, but it’s always right there. Teaching me to get to the crux of the matter, and humming along with those mariachis as they echo past each story in the windy skies above.

M. Lucia

Ode to Carl Jung

Maybe memory feels artificial, or muddled or unimaginably locked away behind a pane of cephalic glass for a reason.  Maybe it’s not meant to be the thing we focus ourselves on.  That being said, sometimes we are only left with memory as we see it.  As we write the story inside the cavities, and down the waterfalls of reasons past, it can never be got rid of, unless our poor bodies fail us as they often do, making us do things we didn’t intend on or think was the direction we ought to go.  Most times memory can wake up the aliveness in us, and it should, but it only should be used in that manner.  In aiding not our capturing of the present for a future memory, wind beating itself wildly yet unable to permeate the sepia glass behind which nothing shakes or is stirred no matter the new force arriving to perhaps join it.  Memory cannot become a parallel falsehood by which we exist only half-heartedly in our lives.    There is a great and immeasurable difference between not fighting the waves -- thrashing about in an open sea when you must see where they take you-- and surrendering to them wholly, offering them up your will as a sacrifice, without care or interest in where they might take you, when your body, when left to its own weighted physicality, sinks like a stone, impermeable and smooth, to the bottom.  Sometimes there lie great treasures at the bottom, but admittedly, as many have said who have been there, it’s not all that easy to push your way back up to the top, to the bubbles of air, the light beam creatures swimming with curves and showing you the way back. 

Memory is caught in all of these places – in the dense waters that are so deep that light and texture don’t reach there, in the picture you painted in your mind to replace the one you see, is it real or is it created by you? What of us isn’t created by you? Is it one single dreamer or are we all dreaming our own tiny little corners of the proscenium and, is there an audience or are we just paddling our tiny boats alone.  One thing I am sure of, a sureness that is felt in the sinews and blood fluids and not felt by logic or fact, is that our world if you will, is exactly what we are making of it.  

It does not, however, come without strands which have been borne before us, which have a pull to more than just our selves and individual lifetimes, but it is never rooted in those strands, or rather it is the opposite – we grow down into them, into earth, dirt, connection and staying in place, but they do not pull us from the sky enough that we are helpless.  I think I really loathe that word.  I can’t say there is a personal why, but it is the case all the same.   We are not parceled and bound and sent off to sea by these puppeteers of the sky trying make a buck and make a name for themselves, no.   It is not just That.  There is also what we do with every moment and there are a million routes here, patterned invisibly in the blue water, which is not blue but a reflection of the sky, which makes us think of when we were 3 years old and we sat on our mother’s lap on a rocking chair and asked her why the sky was blue, and where the universe started and stopped, and what was beyond it and where was God and what happened Before everything was created? There was the same silence then as there is now, as one gets lost in this memory whilst sitting in the same rocking chair, in a place far from that home, looking out at the water and the waves being idled by meandering tugboats – dim golden light in rain, red and yellow and black.  They look so clean from here. 

These memories are a neverending game, and there are more of them every day – more with losses, and lovers, and mistakes.  More with regret and boredom and plan.  We can use them in all their glory no matter whether they really happened that way or we are painting them in this colour, shape and light.  The waves are formless, and we, coupled with some of the strands of our communal past, do the forming.  It is when the idea of memory distracts us from our creation that they become a wider trouble to us.  Sometimes when the boat is sinking, you drive yourself mad looking for all the places where there might be holes.  Doesn’t stop it from sinking, and maybe the thematic understanding of why it sinks is more important than the physical one.  Paranoia sets in.  And then we are lost to fear and loneliness.   We must never let that happen.  Keep painting up to the sky which may or may not really be blue, keep walking towards the ends of the universe, for you may not know what is beyond but it can only be greater than a memory, and those ends are often reachable by sinking, by plodding, by continuing the creation of the world with which you are a part.  An indispensible part.  It is even better to not do this alone, but one memory or another will always have you with it.  You can shatter the glass and let the wind inside, and the rain, and the smelly scales of fish who cannot figure out how, in their own minds, to transform into mermaids – or better.  A thing of beauty not named, because it need be named by you.  There lies the importance, in these rows of boats, and drowning children and those unborn to themselves, memory is simply a living, breathing part of the experience of now – the four corners, the two tides, the coming and the going all at once.  It is a rocky road with a mosaic of infinite roads and no road at all.  It is liquid and it moves us towards each other and into ourselves.  The secrets to this are not yet had, but the picture of memory is only as real as we consider our moment- instant, approaching and out of our grasp.  The warm, celestial water splashes up and kisses us on the cheek and we can only look up and realize our place in the painting.  Searching for a center when it encompasses us with every detail of weather, behind every fold in our skin, and in our selves.  Oars in the water.