the litter mentality
When I was small my older sister told me that Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson were the same person. She explained the whole urban myth -- how Janet was never around as a child, how they never appeared in public together, how the invention of Janet was a way for Michael to explore a new kind of music. To be himself, in some ways. Or a new self. A Janet.
This seemed entirely plausible to me. So much so that when I finally did see them together -- years after I must have realized that they were different people -- it seemed like it still may be true. There they were, cavorting all over a spaceship, yelling into the camera, demanding that the world stop looking, stop talking, stop wondering about them. It made sense to me that they were the same person and that they were brother and sister.
Much of my writing is an attempt to articulate that defining connection for me. In some way I cannot imagine how I am not the same person as my siblings -- my three sisters and brother. I wonder sometimes if when we are apart it is actually because we have become the same person. We are not gone, but moving together; we are in tandem and that's why we are not standing side by side. Our phone calls are actually conversations conducted between our split personality.
And when we are together it is something else. It is a movement so easy for me, so removed from the other questions of the world (there is no erotic, no question of committment or permanence, no inquiry that stretches beyond our intimacy, no reason to remember beginnings or imagine an end) that even here I can't say what it is.
Let me say this: my disapointments in them, in their gaps in knowledge about me, are the disapointments I have in myself. They are my own failures to live honestly, to share freely, to open myself. The things we have fill them: the cookies; the remote lodged in the plaster; the burn pile; soggy fields and darkened stairways; an aversion to the smooth brown of a prescription bottle; piles of names; the safety glass spattered on the freewaythe Pulsar, the Z200, the van, the Datsun -- all those backseats.
It is the meat of me.
My brother is older, strong, protective -- but he is my younger self, shy, self effacing, too sweet. There is the sister I abandoned, there is the one who left me, all our lives repeated in one another, all our regrets mounted onto the same frame.
I know how to reflect because they have always reflected me.
This seemed entirely plausible to me. So much so that when I finally did see them together -- years after I must have realized that they were different people -- it seemed like it still may be true. There they were, cavorting all over a spaceship, yelling into the camera, demanding that the world stop looking, stop talking, stop wondering about them. It made sense to me that they were the same person and that they were brother and sister.
Much of my writing is an attempt to articulate that defining connection for me. In some way I cannot imagine how I am not the same person as my siblings -- my three sisters and brother. I wonder sometimes if when we are apart it is actually because we have become the same person. We are not gone, but moving together; we are in tandem and that's why we are not standing side by side. Our phone calls are actually conversations conducted between our split personality.
And when we are together it is something else. It is a movement so easy for me, so removed from the other questions of the world (there is no erotic, no question of committment or permanence, no inquiry that stretches beyond our intimacy, no reason to remember beginnings or imagine an end) that even here I can't say what it is.
Let me say this: my disapointments in them, in their gaps in knowledge about me, are the disapointments I have in myself. They are my own failures to live honestly, to share freely, to open myself. The things we have fill them: the cookies; the remote lodged in the plaster; the burn pile; soggy fields and darkened stairways; an aversion to the smooth brown of a prescription bottle; piles of names; the safety glass spattered on the freewaythe Pulsar, the Z200, the van, the Datsun -- all those backseats.
It is the meat of me.
My brother is older, strong, protective -- but he is my younger self, shy, self effacing, too sweet. There is the sister I abandoned, there is the one who left me, all our lives repeated in one another, all our regrets mounted onto the same frame.
I know how to reflect because they have always reflected me.
posted by good golly at 5:17 PM
1 Comments:
Good Golly,
I just wanted to drop you a line to let you know that I'm reading, and that I love this exploration. You've expressed something so difficult, so clearly, here. I feel about this entry the way I feel about the entry re: being bi-regional... . Thanks for writing.
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