jaeleslie

This morning I was reading The Years of Rice and Salt. It concerns itself with the idea of reincarnation (mind you, I’m thinking that is a tactic that allows the writer in this case a certain flexibility in characterization) and described a Chinese woman who recognizes her son as someone with whom she has been through life before. (She quotes a poem by another woman who is approached by a monk who suggests that he should be reborn as her child, already in the womb.) We Have All Been Here Before: I’ve never taken that theory either as true or false. I was raised in a culture but not in a religion that would deny it, but it is a matter on which I am comfortably agnostic, despite my fairly frequent sensations of déjà vu. That, I think, is something else.

There is a great romanticism that I find myself surrounded by, though, about giving birth, and the afterlife, and how our lives are all linked together in some mystic way through Love or something. Families in particular are supposed to be like that. Mine is not. It has never been part of my experience that a mystic indissoluble connection exists between people. It is on the contrary in my direct experience quite easy to dissolve those bonds. People have been moving on and away since before I could walk. What is harder is to make connections.

My experience of giving birth, on first looking at the face of the new person who had come out of me, was not one of recognition. It was utterly strange to see someone (who looked vaguely like my own infant photographs even) so new to me and to the world, and to know that our lives together on the planet however long or short were really linked together in a way that I could never deny. It is the deepest connection I have ever felt. (And he keeps changing in appearance. It is the strangest thing.)

Which is what occurred to me once again in an instant, as I put the book down and went to the kitchen to make coffee. But I am always going around trying to make connections between the people and events in my life. (As I am here, roughly attempting to bring some very incongruous elements into whatever shape I can find in them.) Some of my friends, I know, prefer to keep different spheres of their lives separate, but I find that incomprehensible. I want it all knit together into a village, work and home and family and leisure, and I want my life not to have been such a very long series of separate episodes of people who have never met one another and don’t even want to meet.

I know someone who says that communities need two kinds of people, the greeters and the gluers. That is perhaps a simplification: there are people who say there are two kinds and then there are the rest of us. But I am not very good at the greeting skills. I am terrible at making introductions, even after giving it some conscious attention the last few years. I never write the intro, just plunge into the middle of the stream of passing events. You have to pick it up as you go along. That’s what I’ve always done.

I’ve been plunged into the middle of other people’s stories over and over again. Every time my family moved, every time (and it was for a long time every year) I came into a new classroom, I learned to take in what was already in progress around me and fit in as best I could. It is not always very well despite my long study. Once I was on my own at seventeen I continued to move house at least annually for many years out of sheer force of habit – doesn’t everybody live like that? The strange classrooms where I have entered, and found a seat, are past numbering.

And what I do once I am seated is to make connections. Smash thoughts together, however surreal the juxtaposition, and watch how people bounce off of one another, just as given. When I make paintings they always start with a bit of randomness, throwing colors or piling papers together just to see what happens, what the materials want to do, finding in that something new. I’ve been keeping written journals since I was ten, piling up pages and notebooks and clippings that would mean little enough to anyone else, not knowing what it was to me. Art is working on it till you get it the way you want it...

I’ve been cutting things out since I could hold a pair of scissors, images out of my favorite comic book or the Sears catalog. Things grab me and I grab them back. Now I am finally learning to paste them down neatly -- I’ve always been a bit of a mess. The glue seeps out from under the paper, so now I’ve started sometimes using colored glue. It’s there, why hide it? Just lately I’ve learned to make little books by sewing together all the pages I’ve made. And while I speak quite concretely, of handmade artworks that my friends have seen, it is also a dandy metaphor.

I was looking out the kitchen window at the deck and my back yard, and remembered Andy Hooper standing there on his first visit a couple of years ago. He gazed at the garden beds, with the couple of plastic spring horses that I never had in childhood frozen in mid-gallop among the daisies, and told me magisterially (as is his wont) that I am really a gluer at heart. I haven’t glued any armies of plastic monsters to the top of my favorite muscle car - yet – but I did about that time glue three little fairy cabins together out of Lincoln logs. One has a green roof, one is Fort Apache with a red roof, and one has a folded copper roof. They are fine additions to a fine garden. We are planting purple asters this week, and some lilies and bulbs when they arrive in the mail. The squirrels forget, and keep turning over the tiny houses to see, but they find only spiders living inside.