A Mind of Her Own

I'm finding it hard to sleep.  World catastrophes distort my thought processes; an impending hurricane, the threat of war... they impinge, loom like living shadows.  What is the worst outcome, I ask myself? Death? I have been surrounded by its aftermath; I learned its scent in my parents' bedroom, witnessing their denouement, marveling at the absence of comfort even a lifetime partner provided at the end.  He did not wait for her, nor did anyone honor her simple final requests.  

Suicide has become a devastating unintentional weapon.  When I was a teenager it seemed so innocent and near-poetic.  There was Sylvia Plath and Nick Drake... their deaths seemed to wind the threads of creativity into an organized narrative, with a kind of apotheosis at the end.  

The immigrants haunt my dreams somehow... trying helplessly to find a home in a hostile universe.  The tiny kindnesses of my week are so often offered by those who speak little English but understand the language of human need.  The mathematics of population are broken; there are so many here, and then so many more... where will they sleep, who will feed them? The Turkish fruit vendor who stuffs my bag with things... Happy, he says to me. Happy, as my eyes water. Crossing through Carver Houses on the way home last night, a pair of rats stumbled into the curb-- recently poisoned, they were panicky and deranged. A huddle of teenagers recorded their awkward dance moves on their phones, hysterical; a few of them threw rocks at them.  It was prime entertainment... and they were suffering.. God, what is wrong with me that I can't even bear the discomfort of sewer rats? That I take these things home with me like images burned on my head-screen? A kind of omen?

I woke up with lyrics on my tongue:  'She had a mind of her own and she used it well...' It took a senior minute for me to identify the Stones song which honestly I hadn't heard in years, but the message... kept on playing over and over.  According to my mother I never used it well, nor did I wear it well, in her fashion-critical opinion.  I believed in things... I believed in fate.  I waited for one of the myriad endings of one of my stories to unravel in realtime, with pen dipped in ink, poised-- waiting for the ordained, the handwriting, the lunar device... I rode the train and skipped his stop deliberately... 

Who of us is really using it well?  There are some... but the majority of slide-shows that scroll away-- they are re-runs, or remakes, or tributes... could we possibly have run out of ideas?  Film makers used to cut and cut to fit their dream onto a few reels of image; now there is infinite space and the content not quite as worthy.  I'm tired of biopics and contemporary versions of history and celebrity.  People used to look a certain way; they were iconic and unique.  There is make-up and dress-up and there are roles to play.. but there is also surgery and body shaping and face-contouring and it blurs the edges. The other night I realized I can scarcely tell the difference between Julia Roberts and Kira Sedgwick.  Doctor, my eyes? 

I'm not sure if it's a combination of chronic tinnitus and the subtle motors of technology, but I hear a sort of perpetual soundtrack-- a swelling and then a decrescendo... of music-- chords, harmony... some celestial sort of instrument.  I pick up a guitar and it doesn't synch.  It is either the sound of New York, or my own personal madness.  The inside of my head-- riddled with the kind of messages that undermined the confidence of that star gymnast in the Olympics... the emotional cancel-culture that afflicts the more sensitive among us.  

When we were young we overestimated our power.  I'm not sure if it was the era-- after all, we changed history with our demonstrations and music-- but we walked tightropes with confidence.  I used to obsessively watch my son's basketball games-- as though my presence could change their outcome.  We all do this-- we witness sports; we yell and root.  Recently I spent 5 hours watching a damn tennis game. Afterward I thought of this block of precious time, and I wondered at the end, lying on one's final bed, if one doesn't demand a refund.  

We do the best we can with the diminishing value of the contemporary, the desperate audiences searching while all around our structures are crumbling, our political world sways and we are threatened with daily horror.  I remember when love to me meant the patient impatience between lying-downs.  Then you have a baby and passion is whispered and things are spoken in beds... discovery and adventure are shelved and you find intimacy between sheets of a Memory Motel of your own invention.  Personally I miss not just the bedmates but the sounds-- the subtle music of foreign cities.  To write this into a song obsesses me, and I am failing.

For those of us with a mind of our own,  we cope with some unavoidable bitternesses; we fold our clothes and prepare our version of a coffin.  We assess the sad world-- count the suicides, the murders, the disappointments and failures-- pile them beside the things we have created... our children, our books and music... and we finally choose to believe, in a world where nothing is good enough, that we were just that.