Portrait of My Body and Other Horrors

I'm sitting here actually trying to link "Portrait of My Body" and "Why We Crave Horror Movies."  Sober.  I think I've got it, but it all seems a bit too strange for a blog, or for sharing, or for thinking even.    I wonder if several of us were pulled in easily to "Portrait" simply because we wanted to connect to it somehow, have the scars made beautiful or the imperfections justifiable.  What a jolt those of us must have had when it all went wrong halfway in and our tender author betrayed us, made it a bit uncomfortable, and stank up the room.  I wondered the same thing halfway through King's piece.  It was all fine and good until he started saying things like "we" and "madman," and sheesh, so close together like that?

Which brings me to another bit of a loser supposition: what if certain folks are right?  What if there is no "true" us, only the performer on paper?  What if we cannot escape him/her simply because we (the reader) are the intended audience for us (the writer) and, here's the kicker, we know what we cannot bear to hear?  Then, riddle me this Batman, is there any point at all to this academic, masturbatory, narcissistic exercise called writing?

Come on.  You didn't think I was that innocent, did you?

Let's try something here.  Portrait # One:

Long fingers.  Granma loved them, called them piano chasers.  (And they were, years ago, chasers along porcelain sound). Here, a sliver of a scar in the shape of the glass that sliced it, either side of my middle right knuckle.  Hands just beginning to crepe up a bit after years of washing dishes, cleaning houses, working dirt.  They held babies and stroked hair and clasped others and enunciated sentences.  Married by joints that ache when it's going to rain and sometimes just because.  They were the prettiest thing I had and are now the most belligerent sign of my wisdom.  The left one bears a wedding ring so heavy that it has left a permanent, soft dent.  I find comfort in them, the bones and the thinning skin that are the closet thing to my writing, my history, my life.  My hands.

Sookay.  Now.  Portrait # Two:

Cuticles long scarred by permanent teeth, ripped and bit and torn until they bled.  I curl the tips under to hide the flesh when I pay in cash, cut the nails to cripple their chances of self-mutilation.  Veiny and branded by a drop of velvety hot grease -- a moment of self-defense against someone I loved.  Fingers so long that they will have no choice but to become claws in the next two decades, bony things that held cigarettes and formed obscene gestures and slapped a friend once in a drunken rage.  I am terrified of these appendages for they just might one day turn on the rest of me in jointy glee.  Premeditated.  Justifiable handocide.  My hands.

Saalright.  Pick one.  Which portrait is true?  Why, both, of course.  And neither.  Somewhere in the middle.  Whatever I choose to remember or believe or tell.  I think that may be the point, after all: to tell the truth, but to tell it slant (English majors, unite).  Tell it ugly, sometimes, otherwise the writer in you will call bullshit on the whole sweet thing.

And for reasons beyond my own understanding this morning, the following verse just came into my head:

Would you believe in a love at first sight?  Yes, I'm certain that it happens all the time.  What do you see when you turn out the light?  I can't tell you, but I know it's mine.

KPD

Free Style



So . . . last one in is a rotten egg.  I lead these things to the point that it occurs to me: what would happen if I didn't once?

Bounce off our reading of the week: memoir.  Who will begin?

Writing Blindly

Here we are again.  I'm at a bit of a loss, so I will start with what has always worked in my writing: memory.

It's 1978, and for the very first time, I am happy.  My mother has separated from my father, getting her graduate degree at MTSU, and the movie Halloween just hit.  Twelve is awesome in 1978, people.  Poprocks, pet rocks, mood rings, and our very first junked-out slasher flick.  Sigh.  So much life left.  So much Fleetwood Mac left.  I am happy.

I suppose I still hold my mother accountable for the fall, the woman that had the audacity to finish her degree in a city that she didn't love.  And so, the day after Halloween, I began a long goodbye.  We packed and planned, refuted the idea of a Christmas tree (ornaments were airtight in Tupperware), broke up with friends and puppy loves and sent our dog, Bugger, to live with a neighbor.  Somewhere in the middle of all that, I started to tear up the green shag carpet in the corner of my room and leave the notes.  "This was where I learned to play the flute . . . whoever finds this should know I was happy . . . the sound the toilet makes in the middle of the night is not a ghost."  Scraps of paper to no one, shoved tightly under green fibers, probably scrapped without being opened when said carpet was scrapped for hardwood.

This is what I thought of when I read the article, "I Am Writing Blindly." I don't want to make more of it than what it was, just an adolescent shove to the universe.  Surely, those pieces of paper meant nothing more.  Except . . .

Why, over thirty years later, do I think of it?  Our author posits that narrative, and the storytelling it weaves, makes us human.  An impulse.  Finding God in the next sentence.  Why not something else, then?  Why writing?

Instead of going long, this time, I'm going to leave it here.  Call it an experiment.  Whatever.  I guess I'm writing blindly.