Rememory
My mother tipped a dresser on me once. I was very young, I don’t remember exactly how old, but young enough to be too short to reach the top of the dresser in my room. Too short to properly reach the switch on the tall, ugly, heavy gray lamp perched on the rear right corner.
I think she’d been yelling at me to get dressed, or some such — I’d been doing something characteristically slowly or incorrectly — and I reached for the top of the dresser, to turn the lamp on or off. But I reached too far, and my arms were too short, and turning the switch just below the bulb only yanked the lamp out of place, pushed it dangerously closer to falling off the dresser than it always was. It teetered and I panicked. Frantically I wrestled, one-armed, straining my fingertips to keep it from falling, but just making the balance worse and worse. Finally, after terrifying and eternal seconds the lamp stopped moving, clanked heavily back into place, and I breathed a tentative sigh of relief. Moments later she stormed back into my room, roaring something about how dare I be so angry that I would destroy her lamp, how dare I think I could throw things around because she yelled at me, so if I wanted to tip things over, here, tip things over, break them! I was still young enough to think that protesting my innocence would make any difference, would accomplish something other than exacerbate the situation. Maybe if I’d kept my mouth shut should wouldn’t have wrenched the cheap white Ikea drawers away from the wall and onto my legs before storming back out.
Then again, maybe not.
Lessons
I have never liked the story of the Prodigal Son. It was so unjust, that profligacy and an insincere apology should be rewarded with celebration. I always sympathized with the elder son – the one who complained of neglect after years of Doing the Right Thing. Who knows what else he may have wanted? Who knows what other lives he might have lived had he not adhered so religiously to what his family required of him? What parties did he miss, what lovers did he reject, to fulfill his duty?
The real lesson of the parable is that constancy will be taken for granted. No one celebrates reliability. No one applauds the car that always starts, that plods unfailingly through the snow and potholes. No: We cheer the junkers and jalopies, the recalcitrant clunkers that start only after we are filmed with sweat and grease.
So it is with people. The father in the story has never thanked his elder son for his responsibility and he never will. He would no more question his reliability than wonder whether the sun will rise the next day. He feels no more need to celebrate his son than his footstools, or his dogs. They come and go like clockwork, delivering what is needed before slipping back into the background.
But the Prodigal Son – there is a character. Even in childhood he must have clamored for favors and attention. And after years of this, he finally demanded everything – everything that was to fall to him, everything that was to be his inheritance. With typical disregard for the needs of others, he demands his inheritance and takes off. He squanders it on strangers, then wonders why they won’t help him out of the gutter. He winds up fighting pigs for scraps.
But as he squats there in the mud, he contemplates not his lack of restraint and circumspection, but ways to win back his father’s affection. He plans it out, just so – for the Prodigal Son has charm even without money. (How else does a child extort his inheritance from his still living father? How else but by wheedling, persistent, inexorable charm?) He was always the child no one could refuse. He can make even being clad in nothing but tatters and filth work to his advantage. So he schemes; while the pigs snort and snuffle, he gazes at the stars overhead and plots his way back into his father’s favor. He will clear a path down the filth matted on his face with tracks of tears. Remembering the mad supplications of a servant caught filching from the granary, he will fall – just so – before the old man. He will engage in all manner of histrionics – beg for forgiveness, pledge his life as a servant – whatever it takes. Even if his father takes him at his word his life will be better than it has become.
But the old man won’t take him at his word. He is too soft for that. He would never let one of his sons live as a servant in his own house. He will welcome his filthy, wayward son back with open arms, and probably even still leave a little something for him when all is said and done.
And so it comes to pass. The elder brother overhears the celebration and learns too late that fickleness trumps fidelity every time.
Family Ties
We are born into “a network of lines that enlace.” The battle lines are drawn before we know what we’re getting into. They are older than our parents, as old as earth and blood and time.
They make us. These outlines cast the shapes that will become our shadows. When we are still molten, before tactility, before consciousness, we are cast against history before we are tossed headlong into our futures.
Or maybe I am too easily enslaved. Without time I do not know who I am. Without time, without history, without roots, without some example to look back on, I do not know how to make myself. What to make of myself.
But what are we without history? We are the fruit of our parents’ dreams. We are their accomplishments. How can we not also be their crimes?
The sins of the father are visited upon the son. It seems so unjust that fate and time and being and chaos and god should conspire against us thus, to endow us with reproach and remorse for crimes we have not committed. For crimes we could not commit. Yet.
Maybe this arrangement pays us in advance for the crimes we will inevitably imitate. Maybe this cause and effect exists to prevent us from committing other crimes. Sins of commission, sins of omission. Or maybe they exist to ensure we commit the crimes for which we are predestined.
The Vatican was right in principle, if not in the specifics – indeed by our very birth we are damned.
Recollection
Flipping through her scrapbooks and albums, I am shocked to see us smiling so much. It must have been another lifetime. Other people. I cannot imagine that there was a time when we smiled so much and so easily. Laughter was as comfortable and habitual as the furniture, a fixture we settled into without a second thought.
I am not exaggerating. I am not idealizing a time so longed for it has been forgotten. Our grief occurred in proportion to our joy then. For every crushing defeat there was another moment of impossible levity. The one sounded the depths of the other. They were inextricable — I would not have my roses without thorns — but balanced.
And now, suddenly, we smile less and less often, even just with each other — my best friend, the sister I never had — those smiles seem mustered and wistful. We are smiling to remind each other how to smile. We are smiling to assuage the realization that a shared past does not ensure a shared future. We are smiling to say goodbye.
Somehow laughter got away from us. But something less than grief — creeping resignation — is assuming its place. As though feeling has become too much, as though nothing can ameliorate this weary acceptance. We smiled wanly, and our paths diverged, and there doesn’t seem to be anything else to say. Just stunned silence, and the memory of shared laughter, withering into something more than grief, and less than goodbye.
Descent and Emergence
So much is made of inauguration, of the statement of mission. I can offer nothing of the sort; I do not know my mission. Existence has been reduced to a series of shufflings between the world above and the world beneath; with each sickening descent I lose more hope, and with each blinding ascent it takes a little longer to get my bearings. Suffice it to say these are the musings of a goddess in the underworld who cannot remember what it was like to live in the sunlight, or to be divine.
Six Seeds of the Pomegranate 