She Jumps, and Has Her Reasons

Posted on 06/29/2008 by Jane Devin

Every night for several years, you’ve hopped onto a trampoline. You’ve jumped and jumped until your heart raced, your body felt weak, and you were exhausted. It’s this ritual, you believe, that allows you to sleep, and you have slept so brilliantly during these years that closing your eyes has become, in itself, a thing of beauty. You feel healed by sleep, both released and energized by the time morning comes.

Now, though, you’ve developed small fractures in both feet. Your knees are unsteady. Your legs shake in waking hours, as overly strained muscles begin to separate from bone. Still you jump, only more slowly, and more aware of the damage being done. You begin to question your methods, and momentarily consider other alternatives, but nothing feels as perfect or reliable as the thing you are most familiar with. Ultimately, you jump so that you can get there – to the place you love – the place that makes you feel wholly alive and beautifully human.

One evening, your trampoline disappears. It is gone, and you cannot afford to replace it. Your body, despite its accumulation of damages, aches for nothing more than the nightly ritual of jump-bounce-twist-turn. Your legs feel as if they’ve taken on a restless, unhappy life of their own. They moan and twitch and rebel beneath you. Your heart, used to taking a nightly pounding, feels eerily still.

You do not sleep.
You begin to dream of horrible things while you are painfully awake.
Your body, you feel, has betrayed you.
You fear you will never sleep again.

You pace the floors, and so much comes to the surface in the dark of night. Bitterness, sadness, fear, anger, apathy. Your mind, overly-full and anxious, turns dark and despairing. In losing the trampoline, everything else you once loved also feels lost to you. You begin to associate your jumping with all the wonderful things you fear are lost forever, creating a black and white list of reasons you must, absolutely must, have your trampoline back. Without it;

you will never sleep again.
You will never again feel right, or whole, or rested.
Unrested, you will never be happy.
Unhappy, there is no reason to live.

The thought of getting back on your trampoline begins to consume you. It’s only the thought of jumping again that brings you close to feeling any sort of happiness. Small fractures and torn ligaments become, in your mind, a smaller and smaller price to pay, and even somewhat meaningless in your list of self-justified consequences.

You need the trampoline.
Your body demands it.
You, or some very important, alive, or sacred part of you, will die without it.
You’re are in more pain when you don’t jump than when you do.

The trampoline becomes everything, and until you have it again, little else seems to matter. You need to tie off the vein, light the pipe, snort the coke, take another pill, binge until you puke, starve yourself into a silhouette, gamble until it’s all gone, sleep with another stranger, drink yourself into oblivion — because nothing else, you are convinced — will ever make you feel as good or as much like your truest self.

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The Proposal

Posted on 06/27/2008 by Jane Devin

All that pent-up passion, where does it go? It travels in endless loops and spirals like a lost and wild thing that can’t find its natural environment. It cries out in unremembered dreams, and wakes in the morning to buttons and buzzers, fluorescent lights, and just enough sun to keep it thirsty and pulsing.

March on, soldier girl, march on. There are some mercies you will never know, and others you are probably better off not knowing. Carry your arsenal of words proudly, and spray paint the obstacles and alleyways in your path. Write your name boldly, and let your vivid colors splash against the graying admonishments and swells of whitewash.

Once, I wrote you a story by hand, in plum colored ink, in a beautiful leather notebook sent to me by some cigarette company. I did not hover over lines or pause between paragraphs, and I did not sleep for three days. It seemed urgent then, but somehow all those flowing words got lost. Stolen or lost – or maybe never found – does it really make a difference? There was no one there to protect anything, and it was easy, so easy, to pretend I didn’t care. I bought three piece suits from the secondhand store, read books that taught me how to aspire and conform, and forged my way into some musty tapestry held together by false needs and even falser promises.

I faltered then, I know. I was young, and bumbling, and out-and-outside of everything, scrambling desperately just to understand the essential facts, such as the chasm between how people acted, and how they really were in their own private and natural worlds, where no acting is required. I struggled to slow down the alternative other-scripts in my head, where I could create and arrange, rewrite and edit, until every new imprint and revelation made sense. It was not easy to evict myself from that sanctuary, but I did. I took a deep breath, and plowed my whole self into dangerous, unknown territory, as determined as any pioneer looking for a title and forty acres.

I did not have the means then to promise you what I am promising you now.

I want you to do whatever it is you really want to do, love, with any sort of abandon. Stay out and outside, if that is your wish, and I will protect whatever messages you leave in your path. I will let no one pour a whitewash over your words, and in this, I will not fail you. I will be the Theo to your Vincent – the unflagging patience to your spitfire impulsiveness, the protector of your interior art, and the keeper of your secrets. I will secure the essentials, keep the destroyers at bay, shore you up, and pick you up in ways that will be unintrusive and unnoticeable.

I will do it for your art, because it’s not always beautiful. Because it’s often curious, gritty, unrefined, full of question marks, and unmistakably yours.

I will do it for your hands. The ones that still plead when you talk, like a last vestige of childhood, a desire for your soul to be understood, even when your words are wrapped in the esoterica of language.

I will do it for your mind. The one that has been spent in fractions and unjustly divided in a world where half or less of a human being is thought to make a whole.

I have loved you from the day you recognized your separateness. When you gazed at your hands and feet and happily realized they belonged to you alone. When you lolled on the shag carpet of your pink bedroom, dreaming of horses, oceans, and Amazons. When you rebelled against the teachings of a monotonous life punctuated by fistfuls of anger.

I loved you when you were a hero, experimenting with the world, filled with unbridled energy and a desire to do and gather all that was good. I loved you when you were on your knees in the river, begging for your life, praying to whatever god watches over the set-apart and abandoned, and when you felt vindictive, angry, and bitter, knowing that no such god existed, and that you were truly on your own. When you numbered your scars, 1-17, and gave them names. Snake in the Grass. Saint Albert’s Fence. Five Minutes Late. Two Against One.

I know how love begins. It begins alone, in the sacred flesh of a new soul, as an intuitive desire or a biological imperative. It rises up to fill in the barren spaces, smooth the jagged edges of scar tissue, and nurture the mind, body, and spirit. It becomes intrinsic, outreaching, sacred – birthed over and over again in neophyte stages until it becomes agape and all-encompassing.

I do not know, and have never known, how love really ever ends.

All those years when passion was kept in tight coils and stored away for some future days of freedom, had this effect; my love is a renewing thing that knows no end. It is not fickle, or conditional, or wary. Once given, it is given forever, no matter how great the distance, how few the words, or how lost the original reason. For this love, and out of love for you, I will stand my ground, as close or as far away as desired, and guard the gates.

The world that made it impossible for us to be one, to be both artist and worker, dreamer and survivor, existing in the same physical being and outward expression, is no stronger than the shoulders that carry it as a necessary burden. I have grown strong enough to carry that burden for the both of us, and brave enough to face the consequences. So be, my love, that girl under the tree who paints poetry and writes abstracts. Be wild, and unrelenting, and undaunted. Burst your spindly roots out of the ragtag world, and leave the broken branches and dry leaves behind. Abandon the dogtag chains, the crumbling mortar, and the numbers that would subtract art from your every equation.

I will be here, holding steady the balance pole, guarding the gate, and gathering all the good that falls.

From me to you, for us, this is my promise.

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A Pauper’s Tale

Posted on 06/15/2008 by Jane Devin

I had a better Father’s Day post planned, but I can’t find The Picture. The one taken years before my birth, in which either my son or I appear to be about two years old. It’s hard to tell the gender of the child in the Hawaiian shorts and white t-shirt, but s/he is definitely one of us — one of the dark-eyed, olive skinned ones in a sea of green eyes and pale skin. A brother? A sister? I don’t know.

That picture has always been a curiosity. I like to imagine that one day, someone else will see it and be able to connect all the scattered dots and fill in all the blanks. If they couldn’t do that, maybe they’d just be kind enough to tell me his name. As long as it’s not Warren Beatty or Rod McKuen. My mother tried to pass those two off on me at the height of my pubescent naivete, the era of Shampoo, (my favorite movie at the time), and a poetry album I played until there were no more grooves. At ten years old, I filled my mind with lines like I will fly into your belly like a plane flying into Rome. I had no idea, really, what it meant, but I loved the visual of that line, the romance of it, and the way the words rolled off my tongue.

Later, MJ brushed off my who’s-my-father inquiries with stunted lines like “some guy in a bar”, “some sailor”, and my personal favorite, “what does it matter anyway?” Sometimes the chill of her mind was just stunning. MJ was full of high-drama and bittersweet illusions. Her magic was in the way she could sometimes make her wild and fluid self appear to be stable and solid. Her solid self appeared to be promising — it tantalized and teased a moment of reality — a sliver of truth that was just out of reach. I’d struggle across the brutal desert of my mother’s psyche only to discover mirages, like nightmarish funhouse mirrors that scoffed at my efforts, and sent me crawling back to the starting gate. It took me years to un-love her enough to abandon my perpetual place at that gate, and years more to quit torturing myself trying to make sense of her kind of crazy.

Anyway, I was sure I’d get the answer before she died, because that’s what she told me in 1996. “I’ll tell you before I die.” Except that she didn’t. The two months between the cancer diagnosis and her death in 1999 were full of opportunities for mother-daughter moments. Truthful moments. Ones that might have had led to some sort of redemption or understanding. Yet MJ chose, even while dying, to keep her illusions, particularly the grand ones in which she was superior, infallible, and invincible — and not the bulimic-anorexic, violent, narcissistic, and callous woman she really was.

So I have no idea who he was, that dark-eyed and olive skinned, long lost, and never known father of mine. The pauper who left me with an imperious Queen and her soulless stand-in husband. Maybe he, too, stood perpetually outside the gate and tried to pluck the thorns from the roses. Maybe he was just a bastard, a one-night stand, or a really bad poet. Maybe he just wasn’t that memorable.

Except that I live, part pauper, part Queen, and no small part a dark-eyed Alice who can’t stop wishing there was something of substance on the other side of this looking glass.

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Rearrange the Walls when Necessary

Posted on 06/14/2008 by Jane Devin

I.
Everyday brings about some evolution
of thought or matter or circumstance.
You have everything you need to forge ahead, you know,
except the unbreakable spirit.

II.
How many times will you drag yourself to the wall?
How many times will you scrape your spirit against the bricks?
I know what they told you, but it’s time to let it go.
No god, and certainly no person, is worth the blood on your palms.

III.
Speaking of walls, yes, I understand the necessity of barricades.
And maybe I never told you this, but I would not pass through, even if invited.
I would stand outside the gate, and pluck the thorns from the roses.
In life I seek peaceful solitude & beautiful, if slight, connections.

IV.
This is true: A cage can be comfortable or a life can be sacred.
A cage is not a thing to worship, and a life is wasted in comfort.
The part of you that becomes possessed will not be sated by anger or chains.
Spend your mind when it is frantic, exhaust it, cradle it in both hands until it creates art.

V.
Breathe, my breakable spirit. People and connections will be what they are.
Solid, fleeting, real, or ethereal.
Inside or outside the gate, connecting is a choice.
Breathe, my friend, evolve, and rearrange the walls when necessary.

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