"Out in Nantucket, you see all those cottages with the widow's walk up on the roof: when my husband comes back from the sea."
- Joseph Campbell
When I was eleven, my beloved paternal aunt was diagnosed with cancer. My parents tried to do the best in the days before Oprah parenting: they told me something was happening, and it might end badly, but that things would turn out alright. It's hard to reconcille the idea of an uncaring void of a universe being alright in the mind of a pre-teen who got most of her worldly interactions through fantasy books. The result was that I picked a cheap tin locket out of my jewelry box under the (what would turn out to be mistaken) believe that my aunt had given it to me. I had had it as long as I could remember at least. Throughout the day, when the locket bumped against my breastbone or got tangled in my hair, I would remember to say a prayer for my aunt.
A few months later the practice had evolved out of a talisman and into a sort of touchstone: a locket around my neck; god in heaven; all right in the world.
Then I went to a birthday party of a classmate. Life had not been kind to her on a social front: her birthday fell the day before Halloween, and so we ended up at some sort of third rate scare carnival where we were expected to run through old storehouses full of plastic skulls and fake blood and hay bales. In the straw-strewn queue, I was already nervous because the fair hired high schoolers to dress as serial killers and jump out from behind the hay. Then my hand found its familiar way to my locket, and my locket was gone. It was an ideal moment to panic in any other circumstance, as it was, I entirely lost my shit. I started screaming like I was being murdered, and, interrupted only by desperate sobs, I did not stop until someone's dad managed to produce my bauble from the haystack. I know to the other parents I didn't make a lick of sense - kids lost jewelry all the time, and this one wasn't even valuable. But in my mind, if I lost that necklace, I would have personally killed my aunt.
It's a psychosis valuable enough to take on its own terms: a person in an emotionally invested but relatively powerless place invents a magical element by which to control the situation to a positive outcome.
Remember the story of Penelope and the shroud? Despite being the wife of one of the tricksiest heroes of the Mediterranean, the lady queen suffers the indignity of being made a prisoner in her own home by her alleged suitors, who scheme to marry her for political power, all while she pines for her absent husband. Her solution is to swear off marriage until she can weave a shroud for Odysseus. She never finishes the shroud because she is not an idiot.
Here we have the same idea - Penelope is valuable, but powerless, and she translates her helplessness into a sort of shield. Feminine qualities of fealty and grief become a means to use time to her advantage. She can't fight, but she can wait.
How many of us would have the fortitude to act on non-action, to wage war by waiting, to trust not strength or grit, but patience? The lack of action translates into a sort of action, a reaction, a failure to engage with the world, like Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, until the world gets its shit together. Refusing to react can be a type of action.
This, of course, is wrapped up in more layers of...what did Amanda Palmer call it...."gender shit" than you can shake a stick at.
And how I have fucked that prescription up.
JC up there was trying to translate the idea of a physical journey through space to satisfy an emotional and social need to transform the self to accommodate the demands of an expanded role as a society-focused, instead of individual-focused, hero figure.
The problem with this has always been that women are limited in the extents to which they are allowed to express individuality and social awareness. Translating an adventure from space to time neatly encompasses these limitations, which also touching on the idea of gothic novels, much religion, and the roles between men and women.
I had a bad spell recently. Time is my only solace, but in the meantime, I packed up and moved to the other end of the country. Because I could. Because I wanted to. Because I wanted something more to show for my life than a shroud.
No comments:
Post a Comment