Here we are, three menstrual cycles later. It feels like three eons. A birthday passed, big hopes for a ticket to California, along with any pride in my parenting. Non stories and stories for another time.
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I did end up reading The Old Man and the Sea. I’d surely never read it. It was captivating. The best I caught a fish this big story that could ever have been told. I realized, after having read it, why Hemingway is considered a great writer. Not because he told a great story. Because he told what could be any non famous story of any non famous person’s life experience in a way that makes you forget its mundanity.
People think mundane is boring. By definition it is unimaginative. That doesn’t mean that to live it doesn’t require vast imagination. It doesn’t speak to the creativity required to survive it. It being the ordinary, the common, the banal. Which are, for anybody who has ever been fully present in a moment of their everyday life, not very good descriptors for a term also defined as “worldly” and “earthly”.
My grand niece told me I reminded her of the earth characters in the latest Pixar movie “Elemental”— a dreamy fantasy of opposites attracting for the betterment of all existence. She being a delightful, airy young adult going on 15, I wondered if it was their naughty cameo or the implied smelliness of their limbs.
The story had just political subtexts that were unfortunately for me— the daughter and surrogate daughter of astrological aficionados— completely drowned out by its metaphysical undertones.
No, water and fire should never mix. No air and earth are not a good idea either. These are the wisdoms and folly of sun sign astrology that seep into the truisms of every star weaving seer, whether professional or amateur.
In nature? Yes, it happens. Forest fires meet their end, as do random communities in tornado alley.
In families? Yes, it also happens there. Sibling rivalries, heated arguments at dinner tables, estrangement.
And yet, my closest people are fire signs— perhaps hardening me to obsidian though, in my own experience of them, providing levity and joy.
My beloved is all water— and is he washing me away layer by layer?
What of my own chart, within which the elements mix and dance into a dissonant illustration of various degrees of mud?
Astrology- an immediate exposé of flawed minds. The embarrassment of my early twenty something year old self, when a lover’s mother scoffed at the dinner table.
You know, the kind of people who ask you your sign upon being introduced.
I didn’t tell her my surrogate father was a professional astrologer who died with more belief in the stars than some profess to have in a judo-christian trinity.
Astrology- a bunch of bullsh*t. That They lied to me moment of my later twenty something years when, during a science lab, I used an app that happened to demonstrate how everyone after sometime in the past few millennia has been born in the sign preceding the one assigned to them. Damn those delegates of pop cultural norms, truths and realities…
So maybe Astrology isn’t “true”. Still those who’ve either been exposed to it during formative years or experienced it with confirmation bias are inclined to look at life through its lenses. I’m one of them.
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The earth wobbles. It matters, it changes things.
What this has to do with Elemental the film, or even the elements at all, is lost on my ability to articulate how.
But who am I to deny that it does?
In my contemplation of a world with a bulging rotation, realness and truth only more deeply confound.
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Exhibit 1.
I have throughout my life experienced what can only be described as PMDD- a circ*mstantially diagnosable condition of absolute misery during the luteal— post-ovulatory— phase of the menstrual cycle.
From time to time though, and sometimes for months or years, I have weathered my cycle without much psychological fanfare or emotional incident.
Stress and adverse life experiences have exacerbated it. Exercise, psychedelics, supplements and meditation have made it bearable. sometimes barely.
This cycle, the tumult of my luteal phase has been completely absent.
But there’s no reason it should be. We’ve lived in both my husband’s and now my parents’ home— places, for varying reasons, of grief, consternation and elemental disarray.
I haven’t microdosed consistently as I usually do. I haven’t engaged in the daily, hour long hikes of my last cycle. I’ve cried every day that we’ve slept in their vicinity. Every day experienced the invisible blows of psychological, emotional and verbal neglect and abuse. Then under the exhausting veil of Midwestern nice. Now under the stark seethe of Mediterranean madness and Latino meanness.
During this cycle and against the grain, the waters of my post-ovulatory psyche and heart have been a steady, calming flow.
What is the truth of my reality in this? What is the reality at all? If I had all the budgeting and time to conduct studies in search of some materialistic conclusion— would it satisfy my wonder and amazement?
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Exhibit 2.
I lost a friend several months ago. Not because she died, and not because I did anything that I can figure out. I lost her, and when I did I was left wondering if she’d ever been my friend. If I’d lost her sometime long before and not realized it. If I’d failed to be her friend. etc… There was no warning. From seemingly one exchange to the next, she was open and loving and friendly and then she wasn’t. Soon after she ghosted me. I didn’t bother to be haunted. I just let her go. I ached, I suffered and I kept going.
But what was real about that situation? Without speaking to her about it, can I ever know? If I did have the chance to discuss it with her, would that clear it up at all?
In my mind, the truth is that when I met her I was 5. She was an ugly cute little child with a confident disposition. She asked me, the only brown girl in my school until the next grade, why I was wearing that dress. A fascinating question that mattered too much.
The dress made me feel pretty— a consolation in the kindergarten face of otherness.
When I was 14, I walked into my geology class and turned into an aisle of seats where she sat— an ugly but still cute, if pimply, teenager with that same confident air (now made strange by adolescence) and looked at me as if to say “Now why are you wearing that dress?” Her gaze was a fascinating implication that I could've cared less about.
This also matters. I too was strange, made stranger by adolescence and trauma. So was she, though our traumas varied to some degree. I liked her immediately. I think she liked me.
After high school, we became online pen pals. I visited her whenever I could in the state she now lived. She’d become a lovely, bubbly person with that same confidence. She visited me once in our home state. Our children were instant friends. Our friendship was mainly through text, a convention that didn't bother me and reminded me of her high school penchant for AOL chat rooms.
And then, I came to stay near her— partly hoping to better facilitate support for the both of us. When we both needed a friend the most, she flaked repeatedly on my offers to connect. The she asked me a question that was a Trojan horse, within which sat that first question she had ever asked me. again. A fascinating question still. Only this time, I didn't recognize it. consciously. Nor did I see the question as a string of fighting words. I answered, perhaps instinctively, with a proverbial Because I like it, it’s mine and I can
She, at the lowest moment in her life, shamed me by needling and prodding my response and then suggesting I intended to insult her very being. She was done listening before I could finish my answer
and because it’s the only thing in my life right now that brings me hope and joy aside from my child.
That’s my truth of it, faulty and one sided though it may be.
That and that she’s an Aquarian and I’m a bull. Forget my flawed thinking. This is what’s real to me, in my ever rationalizing mind. in hindsight.
Our breakup was bound to be as inevitable as every time my friendship with my Aquarian mother is broken apart by her tendency to see betrayal everywhere there isn’t. My mother who is lovely and bubbly and jealous and dishonest. My mother, the champion of emotional games. My mother, who I love both too much and not enough. My mother, who wants me to save her from her toxic husband, failing to see her own self in his abusive behavior. When I try, she admonishes me and turns on me by playing my father against me like a chess piece. When I don’t, she acts as if she alone is the victim.
But now I’m not talking about astrology. Or am I?
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Exhibit 3.
I’m reading My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante and also My Three Dads by Jessa Crispin. Both I’m reading with brilliant friends. I don’t know the astrology sign of one, and besides both friendships have already proven greater than the sum of our total astrological parts.
The stories are strange bedfellows so far, paralleling perspectives and accounts of domestic violence from the mouths of women. If Elena Ferrante, a Pseudonym, turns out to be a woman, I guess. Either of them, really. Crispin sometimes seems to think she's writing to fellow dudes/possible paramours.
What I really want is to reread When I Sing, Mountains Dance for what would be the fourth time. What I wish for is the friend that would turn me on to that book and suggest we read it together. Not because my other two friends are not dear and valuable to me. But because I’m greedy with my friendships. I want more, of all kinds.
And not because those books don’t both compel and fascinate and also repulse and resonate with me and my life either.
At the end of the day, an animist narrative like Irene Sola’s reflects the reality I crave— a truth that brings me hope and joy. One that allows for a self so much greater than mine or anyone else's. that in fact encompasses all selves on this planet like a carbon transferred terrestrial chart utilizing life forms as planets and nodes.
The Earth wobbles.
They grow fat in the middle as they twirl around in a dizzying beauty, swirling all kinds of wrong into a cloudy and impossible inevitability. Their dance hides the fires, the floods, the earthquakes, the flat line winds. Their rotation obscures how the elements cancel each other out, mix and marry and entangle.
Meanwhile somewhere, this friend I maybe had— this friend I wish to have— perhaps a dozen versions of her…a hundred, thousand, million… she asks Earth Why, why now, are you wearing that dress?
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Listening:
Sit Around the Fire, Jon Hopkins
Everything is Everything, Lauryn Hill
Keep Going Song, The Bengsons
Hello Earth, Kate Bush
Down to Earth, Peter Gabriel, Soweto Gospel Choir
Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine, The 5th Dimension
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