Barrie Never Stopped Pretending

J.M. Barrie's works are full of contradictions. 

They are burdened with the dilemma between remembering and forgetting, the discrepancies of childhood and adulthood, the disparity between the change and the changelessness, the distinction between love and indifference. 

Still, within the plays of Barrie these distinctions meet one another; they meet perfectly and simply. They get to know one another in which time they connect in a wondrous kinship. Then when the adventure is over and the story thru, they show just how far one lies from the other and how impossible it is for them to be the same. 

In many ways, his plays mimic the man, for Barrie himself was a great contradiction, both a man and a husband, but also a child manifested perfectly in his role as a great pretender. Barrie loved to play pretend, hence the long hours spent playing at piracy with the Davies boys and the many days on which they set out to be "wrecked" on an island. The Davies boys out grew pretending before Barrie did. One by one they all fell away. But even then Barrie did not stop pretending.

 

Barrie's pretending says more about him than anything real or realistic he ever did, such as his insistence that he had no memory of writing the play Peter Pan. Barrie did not wish to own Peter. He did not wish to be Peter Pan's creator, and so he pretended that he wasn't. He would rather have stuck to the story of how he and Davies caught Peter in Kensington Gardens, something at which they had played at in the early days when the Davies still had a mother. According to Barrie, Peter was "caught and written down" rather than created. Catching Peter at the park was an adventure. But putting him into being by writing a play about him was too grown-up, both for Barrie and for Peter Pan.

Still, it would be easy to assume that Barrie's insistence that he did not remember writing Peter Pan was also part of his pretend, some part of a game he played with himself and no one else. For some reason, Barrie did not wish to remember the writing of Peter.

 

 

 

 

 

Barrie himself struggled to differentiate between the child in him and the adult playwright that gained fame through Peter. When Barrie dedicated the published edition of Peter Pan to the Davies he wrote to his boys that he struggled "in vain to remember whether (writing Peter Pan) was a last desperate throw to retain the five of you for a little longer or merely a cold decision to turn you into bread and butter". Barrie did not know whether the writing of Peter was an attempt to preserve their childishness and retain the pretend they had lost or an adult choice to make money from their imaginative games. Perhaps this is in part the reason Barrie gave the rights to the theatrical production of Peter to a children's hospital, so that he did not have to think about it. He did not want to be burdened by the money Peter was making and thus question his motives for the writing of it. 

Barrie did remember acting out the origins of what would later become parts of the play, such as the creation of Nana and early shadows of Jay Hook before he lost his hand. He remembers the pretending of it all, and in his dedication to the Davies he writes at the length about their games. 

He says little about the times when the boys stopped playing them, thereby leaving Barrie an older and possibly lonelier man with nothing to do but to write their games down, stringing a childhood spent together into a story of pretend remembrances. 

Barrie's desire for pretend is clued at by his insistence to constantly keep editing his plays. His works were never completed for him. Many an audience would come to his plays only to discover that a scene had been added which no audience would ever see again. When Wendy Grew Up was one of these scenes once, and so its subtitle calling it an afterthought sits right on its opening page. 

Pretending never ends for Barrie, for his plays are simply manifestations of his pretending, unleashing his games into play so that he and others could watch them come about.

 

And yet, I do not think that Barrie's preference of pretend over the real and the adult is in any way a weakness. Although perhaps it might be Barrie's tragedy. Barrie, like Peter, like Crichton, like Maggie and Mary Rose, changed little throughout the course of his being. He was one of those rare creatures of consistency, like Peter Pan himself. 

Yet it is human nature to change, and thus Barrie's own consistency, while preserving his ability to pretend, also isolates him. Those rare characters who do not change, who somehow refuse to let their soul get older, are slowly left behind by those around them. Thus, Barrie's Crichton can only be loved by Lady Mary while they get to play on their island; Peter Pan is only the source of adventure till his companions feel the need for change calling and abandon Neverland; Mary Rose spends her days searching for the child that grew up without her, a child that reached old age before she herself had touched it; and, finally, J.M. Barrie loses his play mates one by one. 

For J.M. Barrie our best selves lie in our pretending. The heroes we played at as children, the kind princess, the run away child, the companion of fairies, they are our wondrous selves, the selves we thought we could be for real someday when we were no longer burdened by a mothers worry or the trivialities of naps and bedtimes. These are the selves we held on to while the pretending still sufficed. 

But by the time we get to An After Thought in Barrie's book of plays Wendy has lived a whole life, become a wife, and a mother, and woman. Yet none of that life is ever written about; it is only there to give Wendy's daughter something to slip away from so she can take her place in the little house in Neverland. The other, real life lies in wait unmentioned, only there so that she has something to return to. Returning comes almost like an afterthought, for it must be remembered that the Darling children almost forgot to return to her mother, just as Mary Rose nearly did not return to her child.

Still, in a way Wendy was already the things her adult life makes her while in Peter Pan, only there it was part of their pretending. Wendy played mother to her brothers and the lost boys, and even to Peter. She played wife when she loved Peter with a secret love too adult for Peter to understand, and she played wife when she took care of Peter as he confusedly took up the role of pretend father. Wendy becomes a woman when she makes the adult choice of choosing to grow up and stop pretending. Yet the form of these plays suggests that Wendy in her pretending and forgetting, in the play in which she participated in Neverland, is, if not more real than the Wendy we meet in An Afterthought, more pure and more true, and thus, she is worth holding on to, if only with an afterthought, or, perhaps, with a play written by someone who forgets writing it. 

 

"In those days when one by one you came out of your belief in fairies... my grandest triumph, the best thing in the play of Peter Pan... is that long after No. 4 (Michael) had ceased to believe, I brought him back to the faith for at least two minutes" 

~To the Five, Barrie

Keats' Buried Letters

John Keats always knew he would die young. I don't know how he knew, but his poems are overshadowed by that knowledge, haunted by his tragic end. Famously, Keats lies buried in a grave that doesn't even bare his name. He himself desired the words "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water" to be engraved into his tombstone. He died at the age of 25 with the belief that he would be forgotten, tormented by the knowledge that the only legacy he left was the anguish he would bring to the lover to whom he never returned.

 

 

Keats' letters to Fanny Brawne were full of musings concerning his own death, as were his poems. The fear of an early death sits ripe in them, rich as flesh is with blood. In one of the most haunting personifications of death I have ever read, Keats wrote "I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath". The theme of oblivion ripples deep only to be swallowed like an echo that hangs hollow in the air. Reading his works, one constantly feels like the shadow of a spectator watching as Keats stands alone, contemplating "on the shore of the wide world...till love and fame to nothingness do sink".

Keats knew he did not have long, and so, love for him was painful, impatient, and urgent. He was so haunted by the fact that he would have to leave her that at times he fled from her even when he did not have to. It was like he did not want to allow himself to live, to relish in things that belong to a full-lived life, with its experience, and its aging, its soft winding down. But death showed itself with that first drop of blood on his own pillow. Death fueled his exigency every night when he wrote to her desperately only to tame himself by morning. Thus, when his poor health drove him to the warmer climates of Italy, he knew already that he would not return. 

 

 

I recently read the letters that he wrote to her before his flight, when life still held some taste for Keats. 

He did not write to her after he fled to Italy. 

I read in the book's introduction that the letters she sent to him throughout those weeks were buried with him unopened. I also read that based on his friend's accounts Keats was tormented by visions of her on his death bed, visions fueled by the fear of what his death would do to her. She was so young, so new, and he had died a thousand times. 

 

Strangely, these horrid deathbed visions also seem prophesied in Keats' own writing. He wrote to her once that she should "suppose (him) in Rome", saying that he would see her there. "I should there see you as in a magic glass going to and from town at all the hours". Yet Keats never saw Fanny again. The Fanny he described in this early letter sounds like a ghost. Even the magic glass, at first described so lovely and innocently, turns out to be something ghastly and agonizing. 

Towards the end, Keats was haunted by her. 

As I read the works he wrote for her I tracked the lines with etchings, skimming his love letters as they slowly unraveled into tragedy. I could see my own lines even as I turned the pages, like half-healed scars shown through skin-thin paper. 

I did not think there was any particular purpose to the order in which the poems appear, until I read the final one. Not until, at the end, Keats wrote about drawing out her blood with his once live inky grasp into his now cold dead fingers. Like an image wrought straight from Shelley's Frankenstein, love and loss becomes a monstrous thing, vampiric in its ability to draw the heart out of you. 

It was there that Keats reached out to me completely, desperately, from death itself. "See" he says, reaching out his pale dead hand. "Here it is – I hold it towards you."

 

 

At the start of the book, an illustration of Keats slept in shadows, nestled between the pages, a silhouette of man of whom no photographs exist. By the end, the only thing the book leaves you with is the imaginary image of his cold corpse, sweat still drying, blood spots on his sheets from his coughing, fingers unmoving, laying where he last reached out. 

As I contemplated the collection I was left with an image of Keats on his death bed, surrounded by haunted mirrors reflecting the image of the woman he loved but could never marry. 

 

But the is truth, this is not how the story of Keats and his love ends. 

 

It ends with a twenty year old girl cutting off her own hair and spending three years dressed in black, dwelling in the Heath where she had once walked with him. It ends with Fanny's unnamed husband who came thirteen years later and a life lived into old age with no account of the passion with which it began. Finally, it ends with a woman remembered by time only for the greatness of her grief and the love she never got to hold. 

 

After all, it is Keats' anguish that we read about. We never get to hear about her suffering from her own mouth. Her own letters were never read, not by Keats, not by anyone. 

Instead, they lie unread and entombed, withered with her first loves corpse before the woman herself even breathed her last. 

Still, she must have had the gift of a poet within, for one can feel her agony when she asks by Keats' account: "Is there another life?... There must be, we cannot be created for this kind of suffering".

Some Oddities of Time

At the end of the day, the one thing we all need is more time. 

 

The café in which I work is open around the clock. Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week. We’ve got nothing but time. Which is why it’s kind of ironic that the clock on the wall doesn’t work. The levers frozen at 3:42. It’s been that way for almost as long as I’ve worked here, yet no one’s bothered to fix it. Not that it matters, we’re always open anyway. So, if you’ve got time to spare, so do we. 

Most people don’t stick around for long though. Actually, you’d be surprised how many people pass through in a day. They come, and they go, busy and bustling, hustling by, passing between errands and places unknown. Time keeps us all on our toes. We all have appointments to keep, people to meet and places to go; things to do and not enough time to do it in.

It seems we are always pressed for time in one way or another, which is why it does not surprise me how quickly time escapes us. It occurred to me once that perhaps if clocks counted backwards we’d realize how the hours count down throughout the day. Time is of the essence, as they say, and there are only twenty-four hours in a day, after all. 

Sometimes I wonder how a force so strong can be so invisible. How can people be so unaware of something so imminent? Perhaps if we had less to do, or if people took more time to take joy in simply doing nothing, we would notice how the days go by. Time is the great hassler, turning our lives into time lapses of responsibilities and deadlines to meet. Hours that turn into days and days that turn into weeks, and so, all too soon, life passes us by. 

But there are a few times a year when people become painfully aware of the passing of time. During the holidays for example; or when the first leaves begin to fall; when you wake up in the morning and the world is white; or when blowing out birthday candles that grow from a flicker to a burning flame too fierce to blow out in one breath. 

Other than holidays, birthdays, and the change of the seasons, the rest of the year we tend to believe that time never counts beyond its twenty-four-hour mark, always counting up to something that never seems to occur. But then we stand next to grown-up children, or catch glimpses of old photographs, and we are no longer fooled.  

You see, most people think time is constant; dependable; predictable; always the same. But those of us who really pay attention know that time is as varying as we are. Time is fickle and unreliable. And, just like us, time has its quirks and oddities. Even time can be dreary and lazy, at times. It can be eager and eccentric. Time can be exhilarating, and time can be aggravating, as oppressing as it is ambitious. Even time has its peculiarities. And, just like time becomes more palpable in moments when its fleeting, such as when you’re saying goodbye to someone you love, time changes its pace in some places. 

 

 

Take airports for example. Nowhere does the tempo of time march faster or with such impending velocity. Or consider how time works in classrooms, so tedious and lackluster. And then there are cafes, like the one in which I work, in which time stands still.

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, it’s always 3:42, and that’s not just because the clock doesn’t work. Cafes are timeless places. I would know. I work in one. 

And I think I’m not the only one whose noticed this peculiarity.   

There is an odd young man who used to come here for lunch. He always tucked his pants into his socks and wore the same brown bowler hat. I heard he was a business student, and so I’m sure he knew the pressure of deadlines better than most. He always sat in the same booth, in the corner by the window. And with feet outstretched, a unique pair of socks each day, he sat and mulled over his laptop, just passing the time, or rather, trying to escape it, almost as if he knew that his responsibilities would not find him here in one of time’s rare loopholes.

I used to not believe in destiny, but I also used to believe in the reliability of time. But a young man, as odd as time itself, proved that sometimes there is such a thing as being in the right place at the right time. 

Destiny walked in one rainy Thursday carrying a polka-dotted umbrella, her strawberry blonde hair dripping from the rain. There was nowhere else sit. All the seats were taken. 

The young man rarely sat alone after that. They sat together in his sunlit booth by the window all throughout the golden summer. He wrote on his laptop, and she brought stacks of books to read from a never-ending to-read list. They sat for hours sometimes, just savouring each other’s company, unaware of the frantic and frenzied people around them who, unlike them, were always pressed for time; or perhaps, simply less aware of its peculiarities.

 
There will always be those who come in here to “kill some time” before an appointment or when waiting for a bus; those who order a drink and maybe a dessert and glance impatiently at the clock that doesn’t work, slaughtering time instead of savouring it. 

 

Then, of course, there are those who are always running late, like the composed looking gentleman who is always flustered by the lateness of the hour. Perhaps he just hasn’t realized that the clock on the wall doesn’t work, or maybe he just has a bad sense of time in general, but he can never seem to catch up with it. He comes in once or twice a week to have lunch with a colleague and they chat till eventually he rushes off to some appointment or other. Maybe time just goes by faster for some people.

But just because cafes are timeless does not mean that time does not work its tolls here. Sooner or later, something always changes. Outside the café window rainy spring days become sunny summer days, and soon the first leaves of autumn begin to fall in one of time's most prominent moments. The girl with the strawberry blonde hair doesn’t come here anymore and the young business student sits alone, though he too doesn’t come nearly as often as he used to. 

Time is relentless, and, sooner or later, it catches up to all of us. But at least we have cafes, so remarkably ordinary in their timelessness. Every once in a while, when I see old friends reunite over coffee, catching up and reminiscing about the past when life was young and time abundant, I cannot help but think that perhaps they should have spent more time in cafes, savouring time and drinking coffee. 

Of course, there are also those who have more experience with times ability to fly by. Many of the retired folk come here to idle away their afternoons. People think they come for the free refills, but I know better. They come because they know that here time will not escape them. 

I told you that a man in funky socks taught me about destiny. Well, an old woman in chunky jewellery taught me how to savour time. 

It was the winter in which I first started working here, in this timeless café before I discovered its timelessness. It was December 24th, one of the rare nights of the year in which we close. The clock read 3:25, and I was just mopping up to close at four. The café was empty, except for a tiny old woman in a vibrant green and purple dress sitting at a table alone. 

I had never seen her before, but I have seen her many times since. She comes in most nights, wearing every piece of jewellery she owns, from pearly necklaces to emerald earrings. But on her left ring finger she wears only a simple golden ring, as if to heighten its importance. She never orders anything but coffee, decaf, which she sips quietly as she stares pondering out the window, dwelling on the past as she fiddles with her golden ring. 

I did not have the heart to ask her to leave, so I asked her if she was waiting for someone. “No,” she said, smiling up at me with kind old eyes and blush coloured cheeks. “I’m just making up for lost time.”  

 

 
I sat with her that Christmas eve. I was new in town. I didn’t have anything better to do. I would not have admitted it then, but I was pretty lonely, not just because I felt alone but because I felt abandoned; left behind by time, regretful of the years I had lost and the time I had wasted.

We laughed that night, me and the old lady dressed in emeralds and purple flowers. We drank coffee, decaf, and we talked about our pasts, starring out the window at the snow which drifted slowly down into the silent night. 

I didn’t notice it then, but the clock stopped ticking that night. Maybe it was the time we savoured, or maybe it just ran out of battery. Though, looking back now, something tells me that clock isn’t broken at all. Maybe it’s just enchanted.

Because at the end of the day, we all need more time: time to savour, to read a book, or catch up with a friend; time to ponder; to relish in the moments; and, maybe, to enjoy a cup of coffee.

Bird Watching

C.S. Lewis compared his writing process to watching birds. For Lewis, writing came to him in pictures. Ideas settled before him like sparrows. 

 

To me it seems a very vivid way to describe the process because it suggests that there is something at work that is beyond you; a silent sort of being that lives on a different schedule, in a world so secluded from yours, it is like another world entirely. Picture it: you sight a bird, the very image of an idea, once there, up high or down low, then gone with the rise of the wind, the sound or smell of invention still in the air. But the bird flies away, moving at a pace apart from yours, flitting in and out of contact with you.

 

 

 

The more time you spend in a place the more you get to know the birds that live there. You see them often enough, if you look out for them. Other than the spiders, they might be your closest neighbours, for they build their nests in your trees and on your rooftop. Like ideas, birds weave their way in and out of our lives, aloof and stunning, but sometimes they make close contact, such as when they don't know you are watching them from a window. 

 

I made rather close contact myself this summer, but without the glass, for I spent some time napping in a hammock strung from two trees in the middle of August. It was wonderful, for even as I drifted into a light sleep, I could hear the world around me, the wind and the sound of the lake more real than the sun streaked black behind my closed eyes. Yet my favourite part of the nap was the end of it when I would awake silently and the birds, wholly unaware of me, were all around me, living their secret lives as if still completely unobserved.

 

 

 

Like bird-watching, writing comes on a schedule wholly disconnected from your own daylight hours. It awakes long before you do, and so, it sees so many things you do not, for it knows the world before it awakens. Writing feels that way sometimes: Like the start of a day or a story in which no one yet knows what might occur, and so it meanders, flowing slowly into happenings. 

Like a desire for writing, birds come and go, adorning our lives with their needlework each time they appear, for even throughout the day, they move through all the unseen corners around you, passing in and out of sight, slipping into tree tops you never reach, hopping into the shadowy kingdoms under brush and root where only the small critters live. 

 

Yet as with birds and pictures for writing, some people simply do not notice them. They are just mundane enough to not interest some, feeling so like a day dream that many do not take the time to speculate. Many do not ask: What if this was part of a story? 

 

 

 

Lewis saw such pictures. As a young man he saw a Faun with an umbrella beneath a snowy forest. He knew the Faun was carrying parcels, and though Lewis did not know why, he thought it looked like a story. Today almost anyone shown a picture of Mr. Tumnus walking through the snow would be able to tell you where it came from. 

Still, it is important to remember that at one point Lewis himself did not know. I suppose Mr. Tumnus was very much like a bird in that way, for Lewis did not get to see where Mr. Tumnus went after he'd been sighted (or who he met along the way). He had to come with that part himself.

 

Another author I greatly enjoy said something else about ideas and the art of having them that seems fitting to share. When asked how he gets his ideas, Neil Gaiman said that when it comes to having good ideas there is only one big difference between writers and ordinary people: writers notice when they're having them. It is like the gift of being able to remember your dreams; like an awareness for critters, some people notice it, and some people don't. But anyone can, if they try.

Indeed, like bird-watching, writing can at times be tedious and uneventful. After all, a Faun walking through snow with an umbrella is not a story in and of itself.

But it only feels that way so long as you are expecting something to happen. Birds do not lead lives of drama, not to the unimaginative eye. But when the bird takes off and flies away and you can no longer see it, some people simply keep dreaming and drifting. Few take the time to wonder where the bird goes and what it does before the next time it is seen. 

Tom the Oldest

Tom Bombadil is a being so powerful and strange that even his creator did not know what to make of him. 

 

While fans and scholars have speculated and disputed his nature, they neglect to consider that the man who discovered was himself wise enough to refrain from doing so. Tolkien respected the mysterious nature of Tom Bombadil. He did not fret with Tom but simply left him be in his corner of Middle Earth, a corner which by Tom's mere presence is perhaps the most unusual and miraculous of that map. 

 

Since I am rather well-read in Middle Earth lore, casual Tolkien fans sometimes ask me if I know who or what Tom Bombadil is. But in all my years of enjoying Tolkien's lore I have never found an explanation concerning Tom Bombadil that satisfied me, but one. 

 

 

It seemed a fact not worth mentioning that the character of Tom Bombadil was inspired by a Dutch doll that belonged to one of Tolkien's children. While this may go so far as to explain some of the very specific and colorful attire Tom is known for wearing, such as his yellow boots, as well as Tom's carefree and almost childish nature, it does not at first glance say much else about the ancient figure; till you learn that Tolkien used to tell his children stories about that doll.

 

While reading Tom's own songs about skipping through the trees and along river beds, one can almost picture Tolkien bent over his children's beds, the shadow of the doll cast across the bedroom wall as he animated it with his hands and his voice, bringing it to life with his stories. 

 

Tolkien told his children stories long before he ever actually completed writing one that satisfied him; and so, one can know with certainty that Tom came along long before Bilbo or Hùrin, or even Gandalf. 

These were only shadows cast big and small, vague impressions in Tolkien's mind left by the lore he loved and the legends he read. Names of characters he later wrote about can be found in obscure Norse fragments we know Tolkien used to study. Images resembling Tolkien's own line some of the Fairie realms he once dwelt in.

 

But Tom Bombadil was there, real, tangible, childish, put forth with the easy flow of a narrative told for one's own children, living up only to their whimsical standards, and not Tolkien's own. Tom offers us a glimpse into what those stories might have been like, there in the bedrooms of his children when he did not burden himself with self-doubt and a work beyond imagining in the course of an evening. 

It is strange that something that at first seems so easy should puzzle readers for so very long. Tolkien did not wish to understand Tom Bombadil. Indeed, while most everything else about Middle Earth is rich with history and thought, Tom Bombadil exists outside of that, he escapes that, in more ways than one.

We must decide that Tom Bombadil must simply be left be. 

 

 

 

In the end, the only thing that has ever made any amount of sense to me about Tom Bombadil was what Gandalf says about him. At the Council of Elrond, he tells that Tom "is oldest." 

Tom is older than Middle Earth both inside Tolkien's works and outside of it. Indeed, out of all the vivid faces and scenes that linger when I reflect on all I have loved in Middle Earth, I know Tom Bombadil has been around the longest. He was around long before any of Middle Earth's histories were written, for he lived outside of them once. He knew Tolkien before he was weighted by success and immense writings.

I know only that Tom Bombadil is so ancient that the only origin I have ever traced of him in all my Middle Earth wanderings is the curious and puzzling figure of a Dutch doll in yellow boots. And where that came from, none but Tolkien need ever know. Though I greatly doubt that he himself would have been able to remember. 

Margaret Atwood and the Art of Switching Heads

Some books take longer to digest than others. We read them, and something once buried gets dug up inside of us, grimy and sordid, half rotted, like a book buried in the earth for too long. Usually we cannot quite make out what it used to be, much less what it used to say. 

 

But then, a little time and a little rain later, we find the thing baked and parched in the sun, left to dry out where it was found. This time it looks more familiar. 

 

In Cat's Eye the fictional Elaine remembers; she reflects on a once forgotten childhood with all its excruciating details. Atwood etches it in deep. At times reading it was painful, particularly in the soles of my feet when I read about how Elaine used to peel the skin from them. I read, trying to rush to the adult chapters, searching for solace, for an out, or a revenge, a realization or a consoling revelation. I got none of it. 

 

Instead, Atwood lets Elaine forget. She washes away the harshness of childhood with all its articulate deep cutting details into a dim adult life and a woman who is little more than a little bit of each phase of her life, all the cutting edges softly blurred away into forgetting.

 

When I finished reading Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye I did not think I would end up writing about it. The book was far too complicated, at times as ambiguous as it was realistic.

But still, the book inexplicably and inevitably opened up in me a train of thought, first as frail as a nicked thread on an old sweater. Soon, memories started to unravel. 

 

I read the book, slowly at first, but eagerly. I knew that with Atwood all it took was one good line to twist you, or rather, to twist the book in your hand, so that suddenly one reads it out of the back of one's head, disturbed, bewitched, entranced all at once. In her books one look's into someone else's mind so closely, the words written so dark and daringly, as perfectly stitched as an incantation. 

But like a master surgeon or a trickster or some kind of wicked goddess, Atwood does a switch. It is never entirely clear when she does it, much less how. But at some point throughout, when the book is closed and you are thinking about her words and the images they have given you, you will start to wonder why looking into fictional heads makes you look so much into your own.

 

When was the switch done? Whose head is whose? When was one snipped off and replaced with another?

At some point after the book was finished, I caught myself wondering how Elaine could have forgotten Cordelia's cruelty so quickly in the adult half of the book. In the midst of it all, Cordelia felt at times like a character wrought clean from horror. 

Stephan King, I thought, would not have let Elaine forget. He would have created some terrifying means of revenge for Elaine to inflict on Cordelia later on in the plot. If anything, Cordelia should have been the one to forget. It would make the severe twist at the end of the revenge tale that much more exciting and satisfying when Cordelia remembers her sins too late for forgiveness. It would have augmented Elaine's anger that Cordelia could have forgotten when she could not.

 

But Elaine forgets Cordelia's cruelty. She never gets her revenge. Cordelia even becomes a person to pity, and it makes me pause. 

I was doing some idle task today when I wondered briefly how Elaine could have forgotten. Then, with a thought that felt like the oncoming of a scary revelation, I thought of how quick I was as a child to brush cruelty under the rug of memory in favor of an opportunity at friendship, in favor of a lighter life. When a bully's face turns friendly, there are few children who will not want to see a friend. It is easy to wish away a tormentor, and so, when a mean person starts playing nice, hesitantly and then all at once, we as children enter the path of forgetting.

Still, it was not this that disturbed me in the end. It was the memory that I had entirely forgotten. I remember only its shadow. I remember one day when, upon mentioning to my mom a friend from school whom I felt I had known for ages, she asked if I really wanted to be friends with that girl.

I was confused. I did not remember this friend being cruel to me. I still do not remember. But my mom did. She remembered me being quite distraught about it.

I remember later hints of it when I was old enough to realize it and distance myself. 

Other memories followed.

I wondered whether the reason I had always disliked a different girl in high-school was because deep down I knew that once on the playground in the second grade she had hit me with the skipping rope. 

I remembered how it felt to be horribly conscious of your body and how you were holding it when certain girls were present, in a way totally different than certain boys. With some boys, it felt more like your curves got in the way; you wanted to be smaller and stop bumping into yourself. With girls and their peering eyes it felt more like your bones were too heavy, your limbs clunky, sticking out at all your edges. It felt like you wanted to fold yourself up. 

But only with certain girls. 

Still, the strange part is I never remember them once saying anything to me to make me feel this way. I think it was their eyes that did it. But how can I know for sure?

 

 

 

How can one forget? It is not merely because we do not wish to remember, because, after all, the instances in which we felt the effects of the unremembered acts of cruelty do stay, clear and heavy, easy to recall, easy to recognize in the little things we don't like about ourselves without ever questioning why.

Everyone knows little girls can be mean. But the mean-girls depicted in most other works of fiction are so obvious, so easy to recognize, so two dimensional; not at all life-sized. In real life the mean girl's face always melds. Its all part of the head switching game that Atwood writes about so well.

A little girl can put on a new head, like a barbie doll whose head has been popped off, a new one screwed on at the plastic joint. A girl's body is already changing about her, skin shedding, personality morphing, mixing and dabbling with the ones they have seen others use. It is just like the snipping Elaine does with her friends when they cut women out of magazines, gluing in cut outs of a life around her. And, if they don't like the head, Elaine tells us, they simply cut it off and replace it with another. 

All in all, it really isn't so hard. And when one head comes off, the cruel sneer still lingering on the lips, its taunting tongue tucked away, it is hung up by the hair inside some closet. The other, new head might have downcast eyes, the suggestion of a shy countenance. Or it might have hard daring eyes, unloving to women, possessive to men, quick to rebuke and to insult. 

It is when Elaine forgets that she moves on, but it is also then that she stops understanding herself. She has removed herself just enough. She does not know why she resents Cordelia, just as she never realizes why she hates other women, even when she is kind to them, she feels a repressed contempt for them. From childhood onward, Elaine recreates herself, she watches herself from the outside just like Cordelia and her friends used to watch her so that they could correct her, rebuke her and fix her to their liking. Elaine watches herself from the outside, and she makes adjustments when she doesn't like what she sees, and so, little by little, the inside goes unnoticed. The inside, the larger than life parts of her, get ignored. 

It is hard to say when Atwood does her switching. She switches Elaine with Cordelia, and that one can follow, mostly. But perhaps that is the trick. We think we know what she is doing. 

I didn't. Until, I read about how Elaine used to peel the skin off the soles of her feet at night, biting into them just deep enough so that the peeling would hurt. No one, she says, ever looks at your feet. 

Perhaps that is where it always starts. At the soles, where no one ever looks. The skin starts to shed like an out-of-fashion outfit one no longer wears, deteriorating from your wet, growing flesh, and then the girl wonders, what else can I take off? What else can I change? 

It is like we forget with the changing. No one wants to stay nine forever, no one wants to be the always-abused. So, some shed skin, others turn to other means. The easiest way to forget is to change. The easiest way to learn is to adapt.

 

Girls change so fast, after all. It is only later that grown women look back and try to figure out what happened. What is left of the original girl and what is borrowed? Some can pinpoint it into one moment or another, one alternation in something that made them feel self-conscious, and so the cycle starts which turns them into such a capable changeling. Few can name their bully and tell what they did. 

 

Still, somehow, we know at one point in the past we all knew some form of Cordelia. 

We just lost track of her in all the head-switching.

The Richest Violinist

The Richest Violinist knew he was going to be a gift, and so, he felt special from the start. He knew even before I painted him onto his podium that the tree was designed for his leisure and every little critter below was devised by my brush so that they might listen with pleasure. 

I myself knew he was going to be a gift, and I painted him with this in mind. But it was not until I painted in his eyes that I knew this cat was not just a violinist, but the richest of violinists. 

 

He was so rich in fact that sometimes, when the night is clear and still, he would steal away across the hills from his mansion to the very tree I've pictured. There he would sit comfortably on the crook of the sturdy branch, its golden leaves whispering between the silver stars, and with a satisfied sigh, a bit like a purr but not quite, he would play. 

 

 

The rabbits of the countryside knew that this was when the Richest Violist did his best playing, there, unperceived by any but the company of nature that encompasses the clear soft evening. His music was lively and soothing all at once, and so, the eve being bright and song reassuring, the rabbits would play unafraid, even late into the night.  

 

The cat played for the love of it. He played like a dance, till it felt like the night was just a trance of his tune. He played where he perched, in a crook like the curve of the moon, paying no heed to the cows across the bow of the hill, which bounced happily, like the rabbits.

But then as chance had it, before the night had yet run its course into morning, I, the perceiver and the painter, had to come along walking, my brush in hand, and he saw me looking, as you can see by his smug certain eyes. 

And I knew at once by the look of his gaze that this creature before me was not just a cat violist. He was the richest violinist of them all. 

 

 

The View from the Window

Virginia Woolf's To the Light House

 

Anyone reading Virginia Woolf for a story will find themselves sorely confused. Virginia Woolf does not write stories. She writes about people. She spills life in lines, spurring characters into action and musings, supplementing them with acute details, letting them exist with a stubbornness that only real things possess. While her character's outer shapes are cast like silhouettes into memory, their thoughts and musings flow from the page into one's mind so smoothly and so easily, it is as if they were one's own.

No one fits life, with all its richness and wondrous ordinariness, into books like Virginia Woolf.

In To the Lighthouse, Woolf fits a handful of lives, not just into a book, but into a day. We meet the cast of the novel on a summer's day on the Isle of Skye where we spend half the novel with them, observing their thoughts, watching the children play, listening in at dinner. We get to know them only to have them disappear. 

 

 

 

The books first section, titled "The Window" provides a window-view, allowing us a glimpse into the character's lives. Woolf knew how to write thoughts, but she also knew how to write time, and here she draws it out like a beam, gloriously, wondrously. That single day feels like the type of day one longs for as soon as it is over. It is full of good company, walks along the beach and other simple time-passes, and, importantly, revelations realized from the wondrously ordinary. It is indeed not a story, for there is little permanence in it and little happens that we have not experienced ourselves, in one way or another. 

From the beginning, one quickly loses the illusion that this is a story, in which one event follows another. Rather, the book feels from the outset like a memory, and if it is a memory, it is a fond one. 

 

Like most fond memories, this one takes place away from home and the everyday-ness of life, during the summer, surrounded by good company.

 

Throughout, it is as if the people inside the story know they are characters inside a book, for every moment of their literary lives is heightened, full of deep discovery. Through the text-lined window from which we see them, the characters exist at the pinnacle of their being, and every moment, once ended, is immediately stowed into the space in which one keeps their fondest memories. Every moment within the first half of To the Lighthouse reminds one of the good old days, which ever those may be; and though they are not ours, we remember our own golden days; days in which, looking back, we feel we were our best selves, were with our favorite people; the days in which we so gloriously happy that we realize too late that we forgot to revel in it. 

 

 

 

  

Throughout the book, it feels as if the characters are aware that they will never exist outside the limit of these 200 pages. Thus, the moments they do have contain all the life inside of them, reminding one of the days in which they felt most alive. Every thought within reads like a sigh, as if the characters whose minds we momentarily share are taking pleasure in this simple instance of their existence. 

This gives them both a permanence and a vulnerability because I, the reader, know that they will be here again. In their time-span this will be the last trip to the Isle of Skye as a completed family. In my life though, I know they will be here again, for if in a few years I reread Woolf's To the Light House I will find them there still, feeling a bit like a memory or a dream. I will find them going for walks, painting on the shore, reading to their children, alive and returned to those sweet days which they long for in the latter half of the book. 

While at times that single day seems to last forever, one still gets a sense that it is slipping through one's fingers. Moments heightened by thought last a while only to drift away in an instant. So, dinner ends and Mrs. Ramsay knows that it is already a memory. Sometimes it is not clear whether something has already happened. Is Mrs. Ramsay thinking about something that happened this morning? Or is it something that has been done so many times that it is a part of the very fabric of her life? Still, this single day wanders back and forth like the tide, and mundane tasks are thought about as if they are already memories.

Indeed, I had not yet ended that near perfect day for the first time when I wrote in the margins of the book that the characters only existed here, in this stretch of a day across half a novel. There is no day that comes after this one, for when it is over ten years pass in an instant, as with a breath extinguishing a candle. I knew before I'd even watched time unleash itself in the "Time Passes" section that if the family did not decide today to go to the lighthouse tomorrow, they would not go at all. If the missing brooch was not found on the beach that evening, it probably never would be. If Mrs. Ramsay did not finishing knitting her son's stocking by the time the day was through, she never would. 

All one ever has is a day before time unfolds like pages full of unwritten story, and a perfect summers day becomes the good old days of a lost past.

 

To the Light House is itself a window, like a house one often passes late in the evening, the people inside are always there, in the soft light behind the glass, inviting the illusion that they never change. I know I will pass this house with its glowing window again, and I know that even as I circle the garden, time will pass above me like a lapse replayed. 

Still, when the longing for the good days nestles inside me like an ache, I will read about the Isle of Skye and the family that used to come there every summer, knowing full well that even books are limited in their capacity to hold things, and so, I will not get to go to the lighthouse, no matter how many times I try. I only get to look upon Mr. Ramsay and his children come upon it from a distance.