Memory and Dream

Journal Entries

Sometimes I wonder if everything is already known and each of us simply selects the facts that work for us. Is that why we all go through life so disconnected from one another? Not only are our minds these singular islands, each separate from the other, but we’re not even necessarily operating in the same reality. There’s a consensual no-man’s-land that we pretty well agree on, but beyond those basic reference points that we’re given as children, we’re on our own. We run into trouble communicating, not because we lack a common language, but because the facts I’ve selected don’t usually fit with the ones you have. Lacking common ground, it’s no wonder we find it so hard to communicate.

Take art, whether it’s visual, music, dance, writing, whatever. Art is one of the things that’s supposed to break down the boundaries between us and give us some common ground so that the lines of communication can stay open. But the best art, the art that really works, is also supposed to be open to individual interpretations. No one wants specifics in art except for academics. No one wants their work put into a box that says it means this, and only this. So we go floundering through galleries and books and theatre presentations, taking what we can, always looking over somebody else’s shoulder to compare it to what they got, readjusting our own interpretations, until somewhere in the process we end up having processed entirely different experiences from the same source material. Which is okay, except that when we talk about it, we still think we’re referring to the same thing.

No one really knows what you’re thinking, it’s that simple. They can guess the reasons behind what you’re doing, but they can’t know. And how can we expect them to when we ourselves don’t even know the reasons behind the things we do.

I mean, I know why I took Paddyjack from the farmhouse—to save it from the fire. What I don’t know is why I kept it. Why I never told Izzy that I had it. I think it might be because she went so strange afterwards, turning her back on her gift and the numena the way she did. She went so distant.

Understandable, I guess, considering all she’d been through, but still ... I think I was afraid that she would do something to it herself—sell it, perhaps, or worse, deliver it to Rushkin. And then there were those people who said—never to her face, mind you, but word gets around—that she’d started the fire herself.

I know that’s a terrible thing to even consider, but while she saw Rushkin on the island, he had that proof that he was in New York City at the time. I believed Izzy. I really did. I really tried to. But I couldn’t silence that stupid little uncertainty sitting in the back of my head that kept asking, What if I gave her the painting back and then she did destroy it? Paddyjack’s not just some painting she did. He’s real.

I wrote about him. I wrote his story before I ever knew she’d done the painting. I guess I felt, even though I knew it wasn’t true, that I was instrumental in making him real, too.

But the bottom line is I stole that painting from my best friend. I stole it from the one person I love more than anyone else in the world and I can’t explain it. And I would have taken all the others, too, but they were stored up under the eaves in the attic and I just couldn’t get to them so those numena died. All of them. Except for John. I don’t know how his painting survived the fire, but I do know it did because I saw him two days ago. I was on a northbound bus on Lee Street. I don’t know if he saw me, but by the time I could get off and run back to where I’d seen him, he was gone.

I never told Izzy that either.

I think I would have told her everything, except she closed herself off to all of us. She was still friendly, but something shut off inside her when the numena died and I never felt close to her again.

Having Paddyjack was the closest I could come to her after that damned fire.

I’ll tell you one thing, though. I don’t believe she set it. I know there’s some people that do, but I’m not one of them. She could never have killed the numena like that.

But if I really believe that, then why haven’t I given Paddyjack back to her yet?

* * *

I saw Dr. Jane today—she hates it when I call her that, but I can’t help it. The name got stuck in my head and I can’t stop using it. She didn’t say anything, she never comes right out and says anything, but I think she’s disappointed in me. In my lack of progress. I want to tell her I’ve got a whole screwed-up life to sort through, my life is still screwed up. How am I supposed to deal with it when I don’t even know what it is I want?

Though that’s not really true. I know what I want. Some of it I’ve got, some of it I’ll never get. My problem is that the nevergets loom over everything I do have; I think about them all the time, instead of appreciating what’s here.

What’ll I never get?

Izzy’s never going to be my lover.

And kids are never going to be safe.

One personal, one universal. They both hurt in a way I’m never going to be able to explain. Instead, I go see Dr. Jane and we talk about the Mullys, we talk about alienation, we talk about all sorts of crap, but we never get into what really matters. It’s not Jane’s fault. It’s mine. I’m a writer, but the words I need to explain what hurts simply aren’t in my lexicon. Those words got buried under a few miles of rubble when the Tower of Babylon fell and no one’s been able to access them since. Not in a way that would allow them any real meaning. Not in a way that would allow them to heal the pain.

* * *

I had a good day today. I didn’t do anything special and to tell you the truth, I don’t really feel like running through what I did do because then I’ll probably think of something depressing that happened which’d just stay forgotten if I don’t think about it. So I won’t.

* * *

Jesus, reading back through this journal, I see that I don’t come across as exactly the most cheerful person you’d ever want to meet. I’m not really as bad as these entries make me seem. I don’t always focus on the negative, or at least I don’t think I do. But having said that, I also have to admit that I always remember the one negative line in an otherwise good review, and the bad reviews stay with me for far longer than the good ones do. Especially when the critic is wrong. Personal opinion is one thing; any creative endeavor is fair game to a critic’s opinions. What I hate is when they stand there on their pedantic heights and pass judgment not only on what writers do, but why they think we do it.

It’s like when the despicable Roger Tory finally decided to turn his jaundiced eye upon my work and reviewed the East Street Press edition of Encounters with Enodia for The New York Times.

“What the author of this collection has yet to recognize,” he wrote at one point, “is that the very form of her work invalidates any hope of objective plausibility which, in turn, renders it impossible for her stories to make any sort of meaningful contact with the real world. For that reason her work, like that of other fantasists writing in a similar vein, will always be dishonest as a medium for serious social comment.

These authors are desperate in their search for respectability and self-importance, and their attempts to be taken seriously would be laughable if they weren’t so harmful. When not telling outright lies, their stories perpetuate the very worst sorts of stereotypes under the guise of exploring the human condition through the translation of folklore and myth into a contemporary setting.”

From there he went on to tear apart the individual stories, painting a portrait of me as yet one more perpetrator of the world’s ills, rather than as a person who fights against them. He made me out to be a right-wing bigot, hiding behind a mask of feminism and misguided nostalgia, and then claimed that when I wrote of abusive relationships, I was pandering to the people who were guilty of those very same crimes.

“The only honest fantasy to be found in Encounters with Enodia,” he wrote in conclusion, is “when she gives heroic stature to the downtrodden of the world, when she raises the pathetic life stories of hookers and runaways and psychotic street people to the level of the great hero myths of ancient legend.

Someone should put her out on the same streets that her characters inhabit. She would soon discover that at the lowest rungs of the social ladder, one’s time is utterly taken up with the need to survive. There is certainly no time left over for hopes, for dreams, and especially not for encounters with Enodia or any other of the chimerical individuals with whom she peoples her stories.”

Needless to say I disagree. To paraphrase one of my heroes, Gene Wolfe, the difference between fiction based on reality and fantasy is simply a matter of range. The former is a handgun. It hits the target almost close enough to touch, and even the willfully ignorant can’t deny that it’s effective. Fantasy is a sixteen-inch naval rifle. It fires with a tremendous bang, and it appears to have done nothing and to be shooting at nothing.

Note the qualifier “appears.” The real difference is that with fantasy—and by that I mean fantasy which can simultaneously tap into a cosmopolitan commonality at the same time as it springs from an individual and unique perspective. In this sort of fantasy, a mythic resonance lingers on—a harmonious vibration that builds in potency the longer one considers it, rather than fading away when the final page is read and the book is put away. Characters discovered in such writing are pulled from our own inner landscapes—the way Izzy would pull her numena from hers—and then set out upon the stories’ various stages so that as we learn to understand them a little better, both the monsters and the angels, we come to understand ourselves a little better as well.

* *

I got a call from Alan today telling me that Nigel died last night. David brought him home from the hospital on Monday and I’d been planning to go visit him tomorrow. Now it’s too late. Christ, he never even got to turn twenty.

David told Alan that he tested positive as well, but he didn’t want anyone to know because he wanted to keep it from Nigel. “He kept saying to me over and over again,” David explained to Alan,

“right up until he died: ‘At least I know you’re okay.’ How could I tell him different?”

Here’s what AIDS has done to our community: When so many of your friends die, the sheer quantity of death ends up dehumanizing you. You start to lose the capacity to fully grieve each individual. You find yourself no longer as able to share how much you loved them, how much you miss them, not even to yourself. Your grief gets buried under the sheer multitude that we’ve lost.

* *

Plato said everything in the world is just the shadow of some real thing we can’t see. I don’t know if that’s true or not. If it is true, then I don’t want to be in the world. All my life I’ve tried to manipulate the shadows so that things will go my way for a change, but it never works out. I’m so tired of these shadows. Just for once I want to be face-to-face with what’s real. I don’t want to carve a place for myself from the shadows. I want to carve a place for myself from what casts the shadows and let the chips fall as they may.

* *

Alan took me out to lunch today. When we left the apartment I got this sudden tightness in my chest and I almost couldn’t move through the door. I realized that I hadn’t been outside since I’d gone to see Dr. Jane earlier in the week. It took me most of the time I was out with Alan just to get myself to feel that being away from home was normal.

* *

Sometimes, when I’m talking to people, I forget what words mean and I can’t explain anything. I talk, but I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m standing there, my mouth’s moving, and all I hear in my head is “yadda, yadda, yadda.” The only time it’s never happened is when I’m at the Foundation, talking to the kids. I think they ground me, or something.

Those kids. Some of them are so sweet and brave it breaks my heart that we can’t do more for them. But we’re always in a running battle with their parents or the people from the child-services office.

Everybody knows what’s best for them. Everybody’s got advice. Everybody’s got a solution. I say let the kid decide, but nobody wants to hear that.

* *

I finally figured out that I’m solitary by nature, but at the same time I know so many people; so many people think they own a piece of me. They shift and move under my skin, like a parade of memories that simply won’t go away. It doesn’t matter where I am, or how alone—I always have such a crowded head.

When I told Dr. Jane about it, she asked me how long I’d felt that way. I didn’t even have to think about it.

“I’ve always felt that way,” I told her.

* *

I wish I could foresee a better ending for the story of my life. The whole reason for telling stories, even like this when I’m telling one to myself, is to insist that there’s some kind of meaning, or at least shape, to the messy collage of incidents that make up our lives. Most of us have to believe that we’re floundering through the confusion for some particular reason or we simply can’t bear the thought of existence.

I’d like to live for the moment, for the right now. I’d like to always be in the present and not have to carry around the baggage of everything that’s gone before. I’d like to not feel disappointed because all the pieces of my life don’t add up to a story with a coherent plotline and a satisfactory ending.

If I were ever to kill myself, it wouldn’t be to end my life. It would be for a far simpler reason: amnesia.