Dresses and Broomsticks
Some notes and reflections on recent writing
My last 75 word poem I began after reading Elon Musk’s response to Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian Space Agency, after he asked how we get to space without Russian help. On broomsticks? Musk trolled this comment with “Time to let the American broomstick fly and hear the sounds of freedom.” The broomstick he refers to is Space X Falcon 9.
When I sat down to write, I caught a mental image of a slender woman dressed in one of those dresses that flare at the bottom, so that she looked sort of like a broom. What was she doing? She was talking to somebody at the buffet. She was unobtainable, not because I wanted to obtain her and couldn’t, but because she liked men in a limited capacity, and remarked with dry wit that they generally have limited capacity.
These are fantasies, triggered by comparison and contrasting. An Artemis woman is a mental image with certain dominant characteristics, as is Hera, Aphrodite, a jolly matron, or a gypsy woman. Each image connects with other images which amplify the energy.
The image of the woman’s dress then stimulated the image of a mermaid, which led to the metaphor of a fishing trip by this man whose imagination is being stirred. What is unobtainable by its nature is often pursued nonetheless, as Sisyphus pushes the boulder uphill for eternity. Camus said we have to imagine Sisyphus happy. That’s his gig after all, as it is for most people, and the existential suffering is that there is no meaning to it. We can only change our attitude toward it, not the situation itself.
She pleases me as a round rock pleases Sisyphus. It’s uphill in either instance, but possible.
The woman on a broomstick is the symbol of a witch. I recalled an old (1862) French book about witches, which is in my iPad library. I opened to the following:
The Witch was the Offspring of Despair.
Witches by Nature:
“It is a gift peculiar to woman and her temperment. By birth a fay, by the regular recurrence of her ecstasy she becomes a sibyl. By her love she grows into an enchantress. By her subtlety, by a roguishness often whimsical and beneficent, she becomes a Witch; she works her spells; does at any rate lull our pains to rest and beguile them …
“A religion so strong and hearty as that of Pagan Greece begins with the Sibyl to end in the Witch. The former, a lovely maiden in the broad daylight, rocked its cradle, endowed it with a charm and glory of its own. Presently it fell sick, lost itself in the darkness of the Middle Ages, and was hidden away by the Witch in the woods and wilds: there, sustained by her compassionate daring, it was made to live anew. Thus, of every religion woman is the mother, the gentle guardian, the faithful nurse. With her the gods fare like men: they are born and die upon her bosom.” (La Sorciére, by Jules Michelet)
So, when I began the most recent Lay Psychiatrist piece, I knew that the woman on the broom would be arriving. She is witchy, but also compassionate and daring. And she is going to have an aquatic connection which makes me recall this passage from the father of magical realism:
Tecunas — it’s less direct to think of them in the plural —
some have within their secret parts the bodies of small palpitating birds, others the downiness of aquatic plants which begin vibrating the current the male swirls through; and the magic ones have sexes like pleated bundles which gradually fold and unfold in the ecstasy of love, there where the blood drives its last living distances in an organism that is possessed, then leaps to become the beginning of another living distance. In the final plunge, love is inhuman like a tecuna. Its hidden snout seeks out the root of life. You exist more. In those moments you exist more. The tecuna weeps, struggles, bites, squeezes, tries to get up, gasps, mouthes, sweats, scratches, and is left like a wasp unable to buzz, as though she were dead from suffering. But she has left her sting in the man who had her beneath the breathing of his desire. Liberation ties them together! (Men of Maize, Miguel Angel Asturias)
What is the issue with Mr. Peet?
He is married to a tecuna. Thus his belly is swollen from cortisol. Mrs. Peet likes men in a particular context, but will never belong to one, even though she is married. The Lay Psychiatrist instinctually knows this and begins by trying to distance himself. As soon as she smiles at him he is under her spell, and he knows by the almost inaudible sigh of Mr. Peet that he knows his fate. She is toying with him in French. She is the woman of the world. She will leave him after teaching him a valuable lesson.
I. Trudie Palmer said that Mr. Peet had some good points, and I agree. The erotic language is erotic because it is typically inappropriate and thus suppressed by the social immune system. Dr. Robert Johnson said he could not believe his ears when he first heard (from another Jungian analyst) that if the Self has to choose between the ego and shadow, it saves the shadow and offloads the ego. I had the same response when Johnson said it, but on reflection found it inescapably true. You save what has the most energy, because life without energy does not exist. Mr. Peet wanted that energy he instinctually knew was there, but he could not reach it.
Writing is a process of catching the image as it comes up, and letting it lead the way. I don’t think of what I’m doing until later, when I can see it. Before that, it is all there, but in one location. Writing is sequencing. The sequences might be simple and obvious or abstract and ephemeral. I write quickly without much reflection. Later when I reflect, I can find symbolic meaning in the sequences and expand on them with more analytical sequences. But these are moving away from the primary images of a broom on a stick, the Falcon 9, and the mermaid at the buffet table.
