Tag: marriage
Intimacy
Greetings, in an effort I am making to “make sense”… I have been encouraged to chronicle the benefits of my experiences to investigate personal meanings. That might not make sense. Suffice it to say that I am plunging into the world of my recent past in an attempt to discover how it has changed me. A working title might be “Intolerable Vulnerabilities,” (a phrase lent me by my mental physician) and its subject is yet to be defined…but here are the beginnings of an intro…
The hesitant beginning…
” Most all of us have been caught up in the proverbial “throes of love.” The ecstasy and heartache of opening oneself to another, being enraptured, plagued with doubt and hope, captive to longing and the myopia of the significance of the beloved. But perhaps less of us experience intimacy. Intimacy may be something quite different from love. Although usually initiated in its atmosphere, intimacy reaches beyond the experience of love and journeys toward closeness. Intimacy is about the intertwining of lives, the multiform intricacies of barely-boundaried involvement. What occurs when lives are meshed and melded – shaped with and around one another – physically and immaterially, actually and theoretically, imaginatively and really. Where histories are remade and revamped together in a present. Where hopes are remade and reshaped as a couple. Where the unit and body that counts as an “I” extends to a “we,” and sensation, perception and thought happen always with an external mirror.
Where intimacy takes us is awesome. I mean this in the most fearsome and incredible ways. Human closeness is fraught with archetypal danger. When exposed in such nearness, our lives seem at stake. It goes to the “heart of us.” Within the weathers of love, the wedded experience that intimacy brings seems to make us or break us – our futures and fortunes, significance and meaning rise or fall in accord with an Other. We, in ways, “are not our own” but become something new, something larger and fresh. Something open, extended and possible. Something at risk, distended, and vulnerable. Our lives shared in the hands of another. Our minds shaped with the mind of another. Our purposes, intentions and behavior ever effecting conjoined scenarios. The world is different. Intimate. Involved. Precious and fragile.
There are (at least) two sides to the story…a territory of doubled strength and minimal safety. Of terrifying exposure and (possibly) multiplied protection. Of enhanced security and absolute danger. This is the province of love. This is the prospect of intimacy.”
-John Armstrong, The Conditions of Love–
Announcing: STUDIOVOGUE Gallery Group Exhibit “Harmony in Diversity” with Holly Suzanne
Announcing: STUDIOVOGUE Gallery Group Exhibit “Harmony in Diversity” with Holly Suzanne.
So proud of this particular artist! Congrats – wish we could be there! Love you brilliant wife!
Another day filled with the thickness of love
for my wife on Valentine’s
The Way It Is
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread
–William Stafford
Conjoined Semiosis – A Valentine
HERE:
Conjoined Semiosis – A Valentine for my wife
Amassing contexts and histories barely constitute beginnings. Relations between entities are potentially infinite and full of traces. Somehow, occasionally, they equal: an identity – identities – by what’s between. Continuous dynamic variables.
By chance each of our indefinite immensities meshed boundaries. Bodies permeable as minds, and vice-versa. Reciprocity – reality and dream. Kisses channeling deep into veins, correspondence shipped and received – held gently in the hands while splicing ripples through craniums. Made of margins we, venturing portals and hallways one of another. Each an entourage, an army, and its festival.
Bound by genuine threads. Wrapping rocks and trading rings, patchworking children toward tapestry. Our eyes – microscoping telescopes, telescoping memories. We are wheres and whens, whos and whats – and how! No wonder why receives no answers, only possible descriptions.
We search for language with our bodies. Attempting to define the terms and parse the verbs together: love, trust, respect and honesty. We have said “you are my person,” communication requiring the whole shebang – dismembered pasts and potential futures – all we do not know mustered toward a truth, collaborating is.
If we were to withhold what we cannot show, “whereof which we cannot speak” (as Ludwig tells) avoiding formal pseudo-propositions, we would only telegraph senses, dropping our abstracting frames and their symbol’d referents.
But we are artists – metaphors ourselves – infusing nonsense into world, creating kinds of sense, some of it illuminative. Morphing forms and casting doubts to converge in content.
I love you. I am so glad
WE ARE HERE
We / Holly Suzanne
Fictions of Family, pt. 10
the developing words:
and part 10:
10
It taking so long to figure it out. What it’s “about.”
Discombobulates like sporadic noise. The fragments living are.
Four decades, seven children from three wives until he recognizes relation. Which changes things. Significantly.
It is the third wife (times charm) – out three strikes she staid on. Stays on. The difference between things.
In relation to one another. Evolving perception. The what-not, call it “aboutness.” Or in relation to…
This in relation to that is about this much this high this far. Or else nothing at all. In itself. By itself.
By himself, barely amount, insignificant cipher, plus three plus seven plus anything adding up, er, becomes.
Alone is less than one, or, not a number. It takes 1 to know 1, in other words, all-one really means no 1. Unless distinguished from something else, another 1, an other.
This he could tell. The third wife, the difference between. The aboutness. Differing shapes entirely, nearer still, at this distance.
1 cannot equal. Impossible equation. Might as well be naught, be 0 – a 1 wrapped around itself (turned-in) – revealing just a hole, something seen through. Looked straight through.
Telescope, microscope, still substance unseen, a looking at, really, looking for. Simply looking, opened at both ends. Perhaps a simple function. What an organism is, alone.
She calls out, in fact pursues him halfway across. As if to say she sees something, peering through her self-same circularity – that he is there. He begins experience, begins to get it – something else must be looking, another 1, for him to be seen, to hear of himself.
In what she tells him.
Multiple inputs introduce noise (read chaos, read being), make possibilities, provide things to figure out. With all the variables it takes a lot of time (to get what it’s about).
The Anniversary
FRIDAY FICTIONEERS – WEEK OF February 1
The Anniversary
I remember what the sculptor said, at our wedding:
“How very many years it takes to get to this – the unitary lean. Two figures completed in one. So much stripping and friction, hacking and cuts. So very many tools applied. The hurt and the loss, the heat and the cold. Form and substance are hard to reshape. A person is a stubborn thing. Nuance and habits of matter overcome. Natural processes and straining retrained. Rock removed from its quarry – blasted and torn where it rested and grew. A new context of becoming so forceful and delicate. Ravaged and renewing till it holds itself up.”
– how our weight is supported, these 22 years.
Today’s Nonlinear Equations
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
=
Family: A Fiction the Fifth
to browse the gist of things…a little where-its-coming-from-where-its-going, start here:
otherwise, here’s the newest particles:
5
There being always more sides to the stories.
Building blocks of broken bones.
Families at bone-splintering nearness. Whether abusive or conditional; assertive, supportive, overindulgent or neglectful. The pressures in an atom wiggle and hum, each entity squeezed and redirected into another, without foregoing elemental ingredients.
Why drawing so close hurts so much, compounding all the bruisings.
Take seven shattered anatomies and circle them into a hug. Ouch, oof, shrieks and tears. Sounding like sport or war. Ahem. The game is designed to figure out where it’s safe to rest and heal. Together. Every press accentuates wound, but may also set the fracture.
The littered trail. Fragments, chips, and joints. Ankles, ribcage, skulls. The longer held together, dwindles the percentage unharmed. Increases deformation, reformation, and strength in the bindings. History makes the call. Families get made this way.
Alpha male’s left-side stress-fractures filigree – he brings them in close to the mama. Pain ensues globally, harder gripping cuts and tears her. Dislodging hip and rib, she wails back, threatening to come undone, wrapping and withholding fragile loins. Glass-cracked between the eyes evincing wince, he lumbers to the bottle – an anesthetic, fog-inducing ICU.
Boys pummel and cling on trampoline. Superheroes blasting at their foes, setting right the world. Divine ninja tricksters, eluding all blows, fending sacred space from viral intrusion. Morphing Jekyll into Hyde. Two-against-one turns to three-on-three, searing yelps and hollered rage compound the fractures and spread the lesions until a fuming heap of shame remains.
Emotion rivers throughout a system. Elaborate table-game of chance, every draw altering rules. And conditions. One discretion cheats them all.
Resistance (fear) and just revenge. Creating hypotheses – infinite dis-ease.
Tuck them in with tender warmth. Dabbing sores with salve. Reconnoitre, reassemble, holding court, calling assembly. The luxury is not repeating childhood, home is not a corridor of labs. Parent positioned now as doctor; infected all the same.
Blood is issue, possible transfusion, tearing tissues. Don’t ignore, curing is a share. having invented them in this inventive world, they must also be wriggled through. Calls for help, from any corner, equate a demand.
The family as quarantine.
To serve and protect.
Seek. Assist.
Quarantine.
Sanctuary.
Sanitarium.
Touch base.
Proceed.
Polysemic Stupor 