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My dear friend Claire told me a sad story yesterday of mental illness and murder: matricide so close to her home and heart that it unsettles her to unspeakable depths -- the mother of her brother's wife killed by her bipolar son who had not slept for days and by then believed she was the devil.
At Thanksgiving dinner she was not the devil, sitting at the table with her children and their sweethearts. Her own sweetheart had died years before by suicide. Mental illness sprouts long mutant arms and settles firmly into shame with a strangle hold that can at best be restrained. Those in its clutches rasp out in wonder "how did this happen to us?" At Thanksgiving, the stories of each one around the table stewed inside, barely untold, and ever changing. Every minute, our stories are changing, or at least each coming moment offers an opportunity for reinvention. Or does it? How does Luis reinvent what is now his legacy...a bug in his brain, a hole in his head through which he fell, face planted and belly flopped into a gene pool in which he would eventually drown. When he reemergences, his will be the biggest broken heart of all. The shawdow of his father will, no doubt, threaten to suck him in.
There are no whole survivors, only the broken and fragmented who have the good luck float to the surface. Is it most or some mortally wounded? I'm trying not to count; I'm trying to believe we can all recover.
A Vicious Cycle: Victims Creating Victims
It's mind boggling really. The earth, so old; Collective culture, so compromised. Our heroes now are the clean up crew who crawl into daylight to mop up the carnage. We are little but reactive, stimulated by everything. Art is a reaction to life; life has become reality T.V. from which we cannot look away, we are hard wired and dumbed down. We need the noise, we call it information, we use it to prove our case or to disprove someone else's. We kill each other like heat seeking missles that search out signs of life then zero in on the vulnerable soft spots and the fish-white bellie.
At Thanksgiving dinner she was not the devil, sitting at the table with her children and their sweethearts. Her own sweetheart had died years before by suicide. Mental illness sprouts long mutant arms and settles firmly into shame with a strangle hold that can at best be restrained. Those in its clutches rasp out in wonder "how did this happen to us?" At Thanksgiving, the stories of each one around the table stewed inside, barely untold, and ever changing. Every minute, our stories are changing, or at least each coming moment offers an opportunity for reinvention. Or does it? How does Luis reinvent what is now his legacy...a bug in his brain, a hole in his head through which he fell, face planted and belly flopped into a gene pool in which he would eventually drown. When he reemergences, his will be the biggest broken heart of all. The shawdow of his father will, no doubt, threaten to suck him in.
There are no whole survivors, only the broken and fragmented who have the good luck float to the surface. Is it most or some mortally wounded? I'm trying not to count; I'm trying to believe we can all recover.
A Vicious Cycle: Victims Creating Victims
It's mind boggling really. The earth, so old; Collective culture, so compromised. Our heroes now are the clean up crew who crawl into daylight to mop up the carnage. We are little but reactive, stimulated by everything. Art is a reaction to life; life has become reality T.V. from which we cannot look away, we are hard wired and dumbed down. We need the noise, we call it information, we use it to prove our case or to disprove someone else's. We kill each other like heat seeking missles that search out signs of life then zero in on the vulnerable soft spots and the fish-white bellie.
posted by Ruby Fowler at 11:58 AM
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