Cordelia and the Fool

Sansaku: Cordelia and the Fool

6/3/17

I look like any number of places. I definitely looked like Timberline Academy when I taught there, and came to resemble the counseling center at the college. I love our home on Crestview and these mornings in the studio behind the garage.

In dreams, I’m mostly on the edge. My inner city is very close to wilderness. I live in the boundary zone. Chyako dreams of looking down. On one side, the lush-green forests of Japan. On the other, the red-rock canyons of southeast Utah. Both remind me of her pottery.

Corder loved the courtroom, just as he loved the stage. He was artist and performer. The way law was practiced bothered his sense of aesthetics. In time, there was nothing very true, good, or beautiful about it. The more he succeeded the more he failed.

He found his niche at the Crystal Palace Saloon in Tombstone. This was the late sixties and he was the happy hour entertainment. The piano was up against the wall and he sat with his back to the crowd.

It wasn’t his piano playing or singing they remembered. It was him. He was the television character, the ad for Arizona, who stepped out of the box and into the room. He had eyes and ears in the back of his head and knew when to turn around. He was delightfully dangerous and unpredictable.

This was his court, not Lear’s, and he played the role of the Shakespearian fool, the witty clown who tells the truth. I can’t tell you how many times I turned to my step-mom and said, “Did he just say what I think he said.” He had.

He called himself an undisguised paradox, but he seemed more like a constant anomaly, a working contradiction. I paid close attention and knew he was trained as a musician and actor. He practiced and rehearsed. He might have played by ear, but he knew the tune.

He’d run away to escape all kinds of consequences, but mostly he just wanted to be free. He pleaded no contest.   He didn’t exactly feel guilty, but he knew he had no case he could ever defend and hope to win. He’d lost his moral compass and it took some time to find his sense of direction.

I can fully understand how Irma drove him nuts. I needed to get away myself. How she could put up with George was beyond me. It didn’t help she was so damn nice. I felt petty by comparison.

Corder’s complex was not Oedipal in the classic presentation. It’s his mother he would have killed. He married his father in the form of Irma, who was kind and loving, like his father.

I happen to identify with both of my parents. Corder didn’t think he resembled either. Irma idealized her mother and said she was just like her. When she married George, she married her father.

I asked about Corder and she said, “We married for love.” She meant what she said and when I asked him, he said the same.

If Romeo and Juliet are high school lovers, Hamlet belongs in college. Macbeth is about career and Othello comes with marriage. Lear’s at the end of life and the tragedy of age. Enter the fool. He’s the one who tells the truth.

Lear has three daughters and two are false. The third, Cordelia, represents all that is true, beautiful and good.   I feel as though I’m the child of Cordelia and the Fool.

I woke from a dream the other night with a phrase in mind, “A stitch in time.” It didn’t mean what it usually does when part two of the saying is added, “saves nine.” It wasn’t about making a repair before the problem grew nine-fold in time.

A stitch is one iteration or movement. The threaded needle makes a loop. It’s the least bit that’s complete and whole. Stitches add up and when enough panels are made, they can be stitched and pieced together. It’s what I’m doing with sansaku.

When I met Corder he was at the end of the project and taking his time to stitch it all together.   He gave the cloth to me. My blessing. How could I not give him my complete forgiveness?

A lawyer, he had not made a will. No one was surprised. And he said, “I don’t care what you do with my body. Throw it in a ditch and let it be food.” He didn’t even give instructions for his beloved stamp collection. “Let the carrion feeders fight over it.”

I was given two of his possessions. Mary handed me his bolo tie, the one called Knifewing, I’d known it all my life. There was nothing I would have rather had. And she gave me the sapphire ring he wore on his right hand. She knew us both.

His “not caring” was closer to the Buddhist idea of detachment. It wasn’t cold and Trumpian. I knew he cared, but not like that. I got the best of him, his blessing. The blessing was knowing we had given each other our approval.

 

 

 

Gaslight

Sansaku: Gaslight

6/2/17

Nothing ever looks like itself. This is as true in life as it is in dreams. Take Boulder. I grew up there and what I see and remember looks more like a story or a long and complex relationship. It’s the relationship, not the town, that matters.

I’m bothered by how others see Boulder or interpret my father, but he would say, “No one can see into another’s relationship.” It’s one of those things you can’t describe, but I’ll try. My relationship with him was far different than his with others. I know he would agree.

He might have been a wolf, but I was his son and learned that wolves can care. I was also off-spring of a woman with a human heart. She had loved and tried to tame him. He tried to do the same. But wolves make tricky pets and don’t domesticate that well. Something was bound to happen.

Our mother raised us with her values, knowing he was in our veins.

I learned a new word yesterday and it came just in time. I couldn’t believe I didn’t know it, especially after I looked gaslighting up. “If you’ve never heard the term, prepare to learn it and live with it every day. Unless Trump starts behaving in a radically different way, gaslighting will become one of the words in 2017.”

Google tells me, “It comes from a play and a movie, Gaslight, where a manipulative man tries to unmoor his wife by tampering with her perception of reality. He dims the gaslight and pretends its only she who thinks they’re flickering as the room grows dim.” The article from which I’m reading makes it clear, “That’s only the beginning.”

Mother suggested more than once, “He was a master of the half-truth.” I hadn’t known exactly what that meant until I met and asked him. He took full ownership for gaslighting, but turned the lights up high. He wanted me to know him. Our relationship was like that.

I can almost remember when I had to start asking students about relationships. Is this on the internet or here on campus? It had gotten hard to tell. At first, I wanted to downplay the meaning and significance as less than real, but they soon corrected me. “No one knows me better.” It was obvious they meant it.

I know the advice the Fox gave the Little Prince, “What’s most essential is invisible to the eye. It is only with the heart that one sees rightly.” The wolf was also a fox.

I met a man last year in Oregon. He ran the motel where we stayed in Pendleton. We talked the next morning. I’d been watching him carefully tend the flowers along the porch walk. He was Pakistani and a medical doctor before he immigrated. He called me Smith.

He wanted his two sons to have a better life and sacrificed his status and profession to come here. He was not allowed to practice medicine without a license and they made it hard for him to get one. He was living in Miami when he learned about the opportunity to manage a motel. He went from being a physician to cleaning toilets.

He said, “At first, I cried.” But he smiled and laughed, “Now I take great pride in what I do. I love it.” He almost looked enlightened.

When I met my father, he came with a reputation. I’d heard stories all of my life. I hadn’t considered the relationship. Try to imagine a trip through Middle Earth with an unconventional semi-wizard you thought had gone to seed. He wore a good disguise. There was no such thing as an ordinary day with him. Something always happened.