Vertigo

This week has been a real test of living in the deeply uncomfortable space between places. What my dissertation chair Barnett called "the vertigo of lost certainties and the exuberance of new possibilities."

With F, trying to find a way to live gracefully in the cleavage between the now-space and the potential future, when there seem to be so many painful steps between here and that vivid tomorrow. How do we stay grounded, stay connected, hold faithfully to an image of what could be, work through a wrenching letting go of what's real today? Trust that the filters will all dissipate? I feel like my grace has fled the building, leaving me dancing to the music of a lumbering, one-beat-behind too loud bar band.

I'm struggling, too, with focusing on this research proposal I'm trying to write, finding the right words and flow that seem so present when I'm running, but the ideas become darting, indistinguishable minnows on the page. Dripping algae, when it should be silvery life.

And finally, this jarring experience last week in the form of a letter from the daughter of my lost friend and prof who died in May. She found this blog, where I wrote with the only kind of meaning-making I know how to do, trying to interpret and give shape to my own sense of loss, my failures and moments of gracelessness, trying to describe my experience and make sense of it. I did not expect it to be public -- naively -- and it's very distressing to realize that I've caused pain to people I feel nothing but kindness toward.

There is, of course, a discussion to be had about memoirs and blogs in general, and "who owns memory," and whether my experience and interpretation of that experience is more or less legitimate than the experience of someone closer. My book club had that exact conversation last month about Ann Patchett's memoir about her friend, Truth and Beauty, and I remember a rich conversation about that a few years ago when Toronto Life published a piece by Sylvia Fraser after Peter Gzowski died called "Peter Light and Dark." I thought it was a riveting and unflinching piece; many many other people thought it was a violation of his life.

Perhaps they were right -- but I'm so caught up in trying to capture and make meaning of all of the fissures and shadows and curves of our lives that I tend to see that kind of full portrait as an honouring of the person, not a slap in the face. I like to imagine that I'd feel the same way if someone wrote about me the same way, that I can see how my intensity and fierceness is not always leavened by the light and warmth and striving, that I can be a big pain in the ass to be intimate with. Maybe I'm kidding myself, and if I heard it in someone else's words, I'd flinch too. I'd certainly want to hear the part about the warmth and brains as balance, not just the fierceness. And maybe that was part of the problem with what I wrote about John, I failed to honour him enough.

Regardless of where my posts originated in terms of my beliefs about how we tell our stories, of course I'm distressed to cause someone pain. So I took down those posts and wrote K a note of apology.



All of the ravels of this week... they twine together, underlining for me that my stories are always so damned multivariegated, so complex. It's how I live... and sometimes it does make me yearn sometimes for certainty, simpler narratives.

Just before I moved to this loft, when I still lived on the street lined with narrow houses full of families, I was coming home one day and came across a little street poem. One, two, three telephone poles with little red construction paper hearts taped to them, with one word on each: Sorry. I couldn't see where the hearts led to, if they went up a path or not, and they ended just before my house. A few days later, one of them had blown onto our porch, and wedged itself into the ice and snow on the step.

I can imagine so many things about that story... from the mundane First Big Fight between a newish couple, to a generalized apology from the universe for pain and graceless moments. But the simplicity of the speech act -- the careful cutting out of the hearts, the tracing of the one word, the taping to the selected poles -- runs as a thread through my yearning. Cutting to the centre: we don't mean to cause pain. Sometimes we do. Forgiving moves us forward, both as the guilty and the hurt.