God and Angel

Angel certainly took a turn for the interesting at the end of season 4.  The force that has been controlling Cordelia gives birth to a physical manifestation of itself, a beautiful goddess-made-flesh named Jasmine.  Jasmine’s rhetoric–”my love is all around you,” “love one another,” etc–screams New Testament, and the divinely-influenced conception along with worship of Cordelia as  the holy mother add weight to the argument for interpreting these end-of-the-season episodes as commentary on religion.

The part I find particularly interesting is that Jasmine herself seems neither good nor evil.  She genuinely wants people to be happy, yet does so by stripping them of their free will (and eating some of them…but that’s beside the point).  It is the horrible things done in her name and the intolerance of free-thought and alternative opinion that make her a villain.  Those who come to understand that the happiness Jasmine makes them feel comes at the price of their free-will are not only ostracized, but hunted down like animals, even by their closest friends.  In the same way, there’s nothing inherently wrong with religion–especially a religion that preaches love–but there is something very wrong when that love turns to intolerance, hatred, and violence against those with differing points of view.

After discovering Jasmine’s true nature, Angel and company struggle with feelings of loss and loneliness.  While under Jasmine’s thrall, they felt at peace, safe, and part of something bigger than themselves, but all that is gone when they find themselves in control of their own minds once again.  The question is, does the warmth make it worthwhile to live a lie?  It’s a question I’ve struggled with myself.  Religion is comforting, and has always been a part of my life.  The ritual of mass, the songs, the safety, the sense that you don’t have to be in control and that God can wipe away your mistakes was liberating.  I always assumed that I’d be married in a church, baptize my children, and send my daughter to receive her First Communion in a frilly white satin dress (with a veil…man, was I bitter about not having a veil!).  But I thought too much, and reading, learning, thinking, and talking led me to the conclusion that it was one big, warm, fuzzy lie.  And, worse, a lie that more often than not leads to hatred rather than love.  And I couldn’t live like I hadn’t noticed, so now when I go back to church with my family on holidays I feel like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, standing among the faithful and seeing with open eyes.  I would never tell them that they’re blind, or misguided, or what have you, because I envy them the comfort of faith.  Logic is real, but it’s cold.

I’ve already thought too much for comfort, so I like a show that makes me think.

 

New beginnings and such

Almost all of my dreams in the past two weeks have been about babies.  Either I’m in charge of a baby, I have a baby of my own, or I’m pregnant.  According to the dream dictionary, babies may signify new beginnings.  The fact that I’m usually terrified, nervous, or overwhelmed by the (expected) babies could thus, I suppose, symbolize anxiety about new beginnings–which would certainly be appropriate.  Or, it could reflect the fact that if I had/were having a baby I would be terrified, nervous, and overwhelmed.  I don’t go for all this dream interpretation hooey anyway.

I do go for literary interpretation, however, which is what I’ve been trying to tell these folks in a non-hokey, memorable 500 words or fewer.  For those schools that allow me more space, I feel like I’ve got a good handle on what I want to say and how I want to say it, but I’ll be a blue nosed gopher (as my mother says) if I can figure out how to get my point across in 500 words.  When frustration sets in, I start to wish I could tell them how I really feel.  It would go something like:

“Dear admissions committee,   Please let me come to your school.  I want to do this so bad; more than I’ve ever wanted to do anything before in my life ever.  If not given the chance to pursue my PhD in literature, I’m pretty sure my mind will shrivel up and die of disappointment and will rattle around in my head like dried beans while I putter around at a boring job, possibly as the checkout girl at a grocery store or in clothing retail.  I have the serious intellectual passion, determination, and focus to accomplish my goals, but there’s no actual way I can prove that to you so I guess you’ll just have to take my word for it, although why should you when I’m sure everybody else is saying the exact same thing.  Please please please please please please please?    Love, KMN       P.S. That thing about the checkout girl/clothing retail was hyperbole…just so you know, I would keep trying to get into grad school in the face of failure because I’m so PASSIONATE and DETERMINED!

Fear of the void

Of the several complaints I have about my disability studies course, one is that it makes me feel so damn fragile.  I lay there reading about perfectly average people whose able-bodiedness was snatched away in an instant by a car accident, a sports injury, or a sudden medical condition like stroke or hemorrhage, and as I read I can feel my heartbeat in the hand against my temple.  The layers of skin and bone, the delicate connections of nervous tissue, the harmonious functioning of the complex whole–it all seems so vulnerable and breakable, like an antique china vase in a children’s playroom.

Death terrifies me.  When I was a very little girl, I used to get out of bed and sit at the top of the stairs while my parents read and talked in the living room.  When they noticed me, I would come down, climb into my mother’s lap, and tell her, in tears, that I didn’t want to die.  I remember being told that most people die when they are very old and that little girls like me had nothing to worry about.  But, you see, I remember that like it was yesterday when truly it was fifteen years ago.  In another fifteen years I’ll be in my mid thirties, and in another fifteen and another, it won’t be such a comfort that death is for the old.

Some people say it is illogical to be afraid of death.  When you die, they reason, you won’t even know you’re dead, so what is there to be frightened of?  But non-being is like a void; when I think of it, it swallows me up and paralyzes me with the claustrophobia of the immense.  I always picture being dead as floating in an outerspace devoid of stars: cold, dark, silent, alone.  The fact that I won’t be alive to experience it doesn’t make death less frightening…it is what makes it frightening in the first place.  The absence of everything is a vacuum, is space, is cold, dark, silent, and alone.

So, much as it scares me that I could slip on some ice, fall wrong, and break my spine, ending up paralyzed and unable to communicate, it scares me more that I could fall really wrong and end up nowhere at all.  While I like a class that makes me think, I don’t so much like a class that spirals me down the path of vertigo and terror that is contemplation of my own fragile mortality.  There are some things that don’t bear thinking on when you’re still too young to die.

A moment of pre-holiday nostalgia

I was going through old pictures for a class project today and I found this one and it got me thinking.  It’s November now, which means I am avidly looking forward to the Christmas holidays.  I love Christmas, not because of the time off school or the presents, but because of the togetherness, the songs, the food, and this unquantifiable warm, glowy essence that makes the commonplace seem magical.

The physical expression of this ephemeral quality is what struck me about the picture.  I was, I think, three or four years old and definitely hadn’t figured out the source of the things that appeared under the tree on Christmas morning.  When I look at my face in this picture, I doubt I was thinking about anything.  I was just experiencing the pure glee of riding this giant, shiny, magnificent horse that had been plopped down in the middle of my grandparents’ living room by a beneficent spirit.  That whole-body, whole-mind, whole-heart-consuming joy is, I think, the source of my excessive excitement about the Holidays.

But, to some extent, I’ve lost it.  Christmas still glows, but its light is more subdued, like a candle flame instead of a blazing fire.  Wisps of that old feeling curl in the turky-scented air and hide among the needles scattered over the packages and the carpet.  There is still the comfort of my cousins’ laughter in the next room and the warm contrast of gold-lit interior against the snowy night sky.  But Christmas is like a play that, when I was young, I experienced in all its mystery and light from a cushy front row seat.  Now I’m an actor–I’ve seen the dressing rooms, the wings, the backstage mechanics that make the whole production possible, and so I understand too much to see it again with a spectator’s eye.  To thank my parents for the gifts “Santa” left, to read the road-signs marking the distance to Grandma’s house, to help plan and cook the Christmas meal–such understanding weakens the magic.  It’s all a part of growing up, but looking at this silly old picture makes me realize that my seasonal excitement is built on a memory, stemming from nothing more than the ghosts of Christmases past.

Capital R

Lately I’ve encountered a lot of capitalization distinctions–realist and Realist, deaf and Deaf, romantic and Romantic.  Generally it seems that such variation is intended to distinguish between simple description and self-consciousness.  So, for instance, deaf is a physical condition and Deaf is a cultural movement.  If this is the case, then it seems to me that a distinction between reading and Reading might be appropriate.  The act of interpreting collections of written words, reading with a lower-case r, involves road signs and menus, dull essays and romance novels.  Anything can be read, and all literate people read.  On the other hand, I suppose some people can go their whole lives without Reading.  Reading, at least in my estimation, involves a conscious settling of oneself with a book and a focusing of the whole attention on the song of its language and pulse of its narrative.  It’s about the way the volume smells and feels in your hands–the reason I am so picky about the physical characteristics of my books.  The same novel that I might read in the noisy breakroom at work I would Read later that same night with a blanket and a glass of wine in a quiet room.  It’s as close to a religious sort of experience as I get these days.

I began to think of all this an hour ago when I went to brush my teeth because I could not settle down to Read with hints of cheesecake lingering in my mouth.  I realized that when I’m angry at myself for something–when I’ve been lazy or self-indulgent or childish–I never feel like Reading.  While Reading helps to cope with a lot of external things, like stress or loneliness or disappointment, I don’t turn to books when I’m disappointed in myself.  It’s almost like I have to be pure to be worthy of the experience.  It’s all a bit ridiculous, but then, religious-type things usually are.  Anyway, I’m glad I learned to Read when I learned to read, and I’m glad that unlike the child-arts of makebelieve and self-confidence, Reading is a skill for which I haven’t lost my edge.

Touch

I love the way old people don’t have a touch barrier.  Obviously that’s a generalization, but my experience in nursing homes and assisted living facilities has been largely one of physical contact.  Old ladies hold your arm as you sit next to them, or reach over to stroke your cheek.  Old men kiss your hand (or pat you on the backside, as the case may be).  Today, my first time in West Wind Village, a woman I’d never seen before reached for my hand and just held it while I passed out snacks at her table.

I should have volunteered at West Wind when I was a freshman and about to shrivel up and die from lack of human contact.  A handshake or clutsy stumble into a passer-by became a big deal, sometimes marking the first time I’d touched another person weeks.  I talked to people–in class, at dinner, at Sigma Tau Delta–but no one was close enough to offer a hug or high five.  Suddenly I was forced to think about something I had taken for granted all my life.  I tend to express affection through touch, so hugs, backrubs, and goodnight kisses were an everyday occurrence when I lived with my family.  My best friends and I, too,  piled up like three lazy kittens when we got together to watch a movie or chat.  Across the distance I could still hear people telling me they loved me but I couldn’t feel their comfort, and that made me particularly sad.

Why are old people so willing to make contact, when peers and adults in their prime restrict themselves to touching only those closest to them?  Is it a function of the age gap?  After all, most people aren’t shy about pinching a baby’s cheek or holding its little hands.  Maybe we’re just so much younger than the elderly that we don’t count as people with whom there ought to be a touch barrier.  Or it’s just a way to grab someone’s attention in a crowded facility.   Or, perhaps, life in a nursing home is lonely just like life in a freshman dorm can be lonely.  Whatever the reason, I know that a main attraction to my upcoming Friday afternoon visits is that I know there will be someone who wants to hold my hand.  I may be a happy and successful senior now, but still I go days at a time without touching anyone and I’m not about to take it for granted again.

In fact, I’m going to make my roommate hug me as soon as she gets home.