Little Weirds(28)

And I see the leaves turn a bit in the air, and the breeze coming in feels like the whole world is a pet that is breathing on me, and I think, Well, I am so sensitive and I am very fragile but so is everything else, and living with a dangerous amount of sensitivity is sort of what I have to do sometimes, and it is so very much better than living with no gusto at all. And I’d rather live with a tender heart, because that is the key to feeling the beat of all of the other hearts.

And I do know that I have been drawn here, hooked through my spirit just like some woman was drawn here in 1937, 1959, 1976, looking for a break in this place, to be a part of the art of moving images, looking for someone to say, We should all watch you. Wanting to be watched but also wanting to be watched, like by a guardian, like that the whole world wants to watch you to make sure you are safe. If the whole world knows who you are then it is harder to get lost out there, although time and Hollywood have proven that many of the people get lost inside of themselves because of an unbalanced reaction to exposure outside, in the world of others.

This is all romantic and degrading and interesting at the same time—nothing cancels another thing out.

It is gross and great.

I let myself stop holding everything so tightly, I let it all fall away and I feel the warmth of the sunbeams at this time of day and I feel deep pride and spiritual fortification in the fact, not even the idea, but the fact that the light shines on me just as it does on the leaves and that even though I came here to try to do the art that I want and I want to be seen and held safe by my world, truly, in my primary wish for experience, I am asking for nothing more than a kinship with the atmosphere.





A Fact

When gentlemen go to the doctor they need to take off their pants and show it all and turn around and cough to prove to the doctor that the balls are not dead in their bag.



(Having a body is bizarre.)





Geranium

A mistake has been made about wildness.



I was in another country. I was in a small town on a northern sea. All around me were sheep with big bells. They walked silently through the night, I could hear them passing, and they were not bleating and they were not straining against the dark. I could hear only their bells but I could imagine their bodies and their forward linear movements in the dark. I could smell their muddy wools.

Where I was, there was also a rose garden. There was a castle there built in the 1600s for a woman named Karen. How does that feel? Hey, Karen. It’s, like, 1617. I built you a castle with rose gardens. Inside the castle I couldn’t pay for marble so I painted the wood to look like marble. Karen? It was the best I could do for the person who I believe is the best.

You’re the best, Karen. I made you a castle.

The windowsills in the castle were deep and made of stone.



In my own life in another country and hundreds of years later, what had happened was this:

I was born at the time of year when small heroes bravely stick their neck-stems out for all of us, bet every molecule of blind faith on nature’s natural rhythms, and win for all of us, making us clap.

So, that happened first. Then I started to learn and I ate a lot of salty things and became obsessed with things like seashells and breasts and the word refreshment as a food and drink option that is supposed to make you feel a feeling, and I started to fall in love all over the place. I also rode bikes, failed at group sports, but succeeded in a love of water and swimming. I was scared of dogs and then obsessed with them.

I got in trouble for being wild.

I got in trouble for my feelings at school and camp and then always. I got in trouble for not paying attention to things that seemed boring to me but now are gorgeous to me, like clocks and compasses and calendars.

I had, always, a wild call that I wanted to ring out to the whole world. I knew it always.

I wanted to be an actress. I often felt like a bird in a house and I felt that people reacted to me that way so I started to try to find ways to do my wild work in inside spaces. I started to find spaces where I could bring wildness inside. I started to find a way to still be myself but be with the group.

I tried the start of a life with someone and it didn’t exactly take, but it didn’t exactly flee, and I had to let it go and be out there and hope some part of it would wander back to me like an animal that went out young and had to live in the wilderness and came back, and whenever it is that it would come back, this life, this love, I had to stare into its face and say, Is it you? And then we would be friends, at peace with the idea of being two creatures who started together but needed different environments.

But that is in the future and I am talking about the past.

Then I was all alone. I bought a house that was built roughly three hundred years after Karen’s castle was built. The house was empty and waiting for me when I eventually ended up in Norway, looking at roses and the cold seas and laughing about how actually old the name Karen is.



I was in another country. In conversation I made a wish, I said it out loud to a group of new friends. I said that I wished that red geraniums could be a houseplant. I said that I knew that they were for outside. But couldn’t they be for inside if I tried to truly understand them? We all sort of said that they probably could? But nobody knew.

The geranium is a hardy little mother. You can hardly kill it. It takes a lot to kill one.

I had never seen a geranium in a house as a serious thing that was really happening, on purpose.