sublingua

The heart with a mind of its own.

(Be present.)

The mind with a heart of its own.

(It's past.)

The dream that is your waking life.

(Go there now.)

It must end this way.
Friday, May. 30, 2003

Lunch yesterday with Gry and Max, and a long convo with Gry about his family: his spoiled sister, his troubled brother, his mother working (and getting the requisite guilt trip over it from spoiled sister), his remote father, and the never-saying dynamic in his family. And he spoke also of Ali's family: her "destructively optimistic" (or was it "crushingly optimistic"?) father who lives life with a kind of Homer Simpsonesque mixture of simplicity and luck, her mother who used to be hyper-paranoid and who used to wander the house with guns, her sister who preferentially disciplines the children in the family (including Gry and Ali's, which makes Gry crazy). He also spoke of his mother and her father, his grandfather (who died when Gry was 8), who saved clippings of Gry's mother's accomplishments, but who never supported her in making those accomplishments. His mother was some kind of child prodigy, met Hemingway when she lived in Idaho (where Hemingway died), and Gry is very interested in her early life, but doesn't have a way to ask her about it.

We also talked a bit about how our own relationships are often modeled on those we witnessed between our parents--something that he didn't quite believe, but later he told me something complicated about his and Ali's relationship, which had to do with the dynamic between his own father and mother. His mother, he feels, may have been attracted to his father's lack of self-esteem (a terrible way to say it, but the closest way to shorthand it) because she could be encouraging and helpful to him. He said that originally he thought Ali might treat him similarly, though it turned out not to be quite the case. (Some of this, I think, has been prompted by his beginning to write more, and her expressing the threat that this constitutes to her. She doesn't express this feeling to him directly, but by saying things like, "I don't understand this word ["invulnerable"?]. You're just using this word to impress Max and Sublingua," or "You're just writing to impress Sublingua," or being only "meh" about the ideas for stories that he tells her, which in the past has shut him down.)

Later, standing in the kitchenette area of his and Max's workplace, Gry said he wanted to ask me something (all my prying questions come home to roost, I suppose), and he blushed and stammered and said he didn't think it was an appropriate question, so I immediately said, "Three times a week," which made him and Max laugh in an embarrassed way, so I said, "Okay, two. No, alright. Once a month." And then I offered to come outside with him. He told me it was about marriage, and I asked him whether he knew that if he asked me a question about my marriage that he should be prepared to open the door to questions about his own marriage. It gave him pause, but he decided to ask anyway. His question turned out to be quite pedestrian. He asked me why I had gotten married when it seemed as though I were really down on marriage, and I told him how I felt about the whole thing, about how marrying was like giving up this kind of freedom in my head that I wasn't prepared to give up, and how it was Max who really wanted to get married and how I went along with it as well as I could, but how it really meant to me that I was trapped forever, that I was just trapped, and that I was going to have to just stand there and take it.

I express this to everyone, this feeling of being trapped in marriage, and it makes me sound quite the shrew, I know. But I feel often as though I had done something against my will. Max and I, in speaking about it in bed later, after making love, said that he thought that marrying might give me some sense that he was devoted to me (as though fifteen or so years together could not equal devotion), after the numerous and substantial hurts he'd caused me over the years. I, however, feel as though marrying were pandering to his own insecurities and not some expression of committment, and I was accustomed to feeling always a kind of familiar insecurity which accompanied my desire to be free. There have been good things, and I should say those things as well: There has been the lifetime of freedom from the hunt that characterizes my life with Max, and that freedom has allowed me a tremendous amount of room to explore me, rather than having to expend time and energy trying to be a dressed-up, made-up, faked, tricked-out girly-girl. I am rather glad about that. There has been the opportunity to explore outspoken-ness and all it's ramifications. There has been a companion whose devotion and acceptance seems to know no bounds. (I remember once reading a quote from Yoko Ono about her and John Lennon's relationship in which she said that they, together, were like old soldiers who had fought in the war together. And when I read it, I thought immediately of me and Max and what we've gone through together.) So there have been good things and I have to remember the good things and not think, I suppose, so much about the feeling of being trapped that comes from being married.

A terrible note to end on perhaps, but it must end this way.

retreat or surrender

More lies:
Waking Sleeping Demons II - Sunday, Oct. 30, 2011
Waking Sleeping Demons - Saturday, Oct. 29, 2011
time - Friday, May. 20, 2011
- - Wednesday, Oct. 06, 2010
The Return - Tuesday, Oct. 05, 2010

� sublingua sublingua.diaryland.com.