Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Why Carrie Fisher scares me
"I had ECT yesterday, & the main thing that I remember about it is (other than hardly anything at all) that when they dragged me on my little gurney to its resting place beside Dr. Kramer and his machine that will electrocute me to adorable wellness………
Dr. Kramer gazed down at me and said, “Let’s see how much glitter you have on today!” But after studying me briefly, he noticed that I was virtually glitter free. “Am I to assume that this is a sign that you’re depressed? Should we shorten the time between treatments?”
The bottom line is that to ascertain whether or not I’m depressed these days, you no longer have to scrutinize my bummed out or beatific expression———just check and see how much glitter I’m sporting on my eye lids and such…………
I still haven’t un packed my bags and bags of glitter……….the glitter I used or didn’t use in New York———because I can’t imagine where I can keep it. So there it is, in bags and boxes, in my bathroom, waiting for me to make up my newly electrocuted mind."
It scares me.
I have to backtrack here. . . It was even more years ago that I saw her on 20/20 doing an interview about her "breakdown" (a term I hate more than washing machines, which it should only be applied to) and subsequent recovery. Carrie, a sort of latent bipolar who had flown under the radar, probably suppressing her symptoms with masses of drugs and alcohol, had exploded out of the container in a supernova of mania that was rather dreadful to behold.
But Carrie seemed to be having a great time talking about it. Her gestures were extravagant, her voice plummy, her eyes like pinwheels. In other words. . . she was still manic. On nine drugs or something, but still. I think people should at least wait to be well before doing these things.
A few years after that, she took the worst of her life's turmoil, funnied it up and put on a one-woman show based on her apparently-harrowing memoir (which I can't bring myself to read yet), Wishful Drinking. On the cover is a passed-out Princess Leia, braided buns perched on each side of her head like Kaiser rolls.
I have a problem here.
I have a problem when human pain is turned inside-out and transformed into a gut-busting ha-ha. Mental illness is NOT a ha-ha, and can't be treated as such without perspective (and perspective equals time plus distance). It can't be treated as a ha-ha until you get some sustained relief, get yourself back, find a true path of recovery and (the most important part) STAY ON IT.
Who am I to say that ECT every six weeks isn't the path? I'm not here to judge or play psychiatric expert. But the statistics I've seen on ECT and permanent brain damage are alarming.
Peter Breggin, a psychiatrist who wrote Talking Back to Prozac in the early '90s when Prozac was the sexy, new, revolutionary drug that would make everyone better (even people who weren't depressed), is dead-set against ECT in any situation. He speaks of subtle but cumulative neurological damage, particularly to short-term memory. Fisher laughs this off, which is an admission that she is indeed suffering from it. She says she can see old movies all over again and they seem like new.
He speaks of the denial of damage as a symptom of damage, which made my hair stand on end. If I was really brain-damaged, would I know it?
I don't know what got me on to all this: I guess it was the Stephen Fry documentary where he travels to Germany to explore his love of Wagner. That got me on to his program about bipolar (which I have only seen in bits on YouTube, because I find it hard and heavy going). He speaks to Carrie Fisher, of course, who in her usual flamboyant, even histrionic way makes her agonizing struggles into a kind of heroic comedy.
At the end of the interview when Fry speaks to the camera, he seems disturbed, his voice tinged with what sounds like pity. The camera did funny things during the interview, zooming in on tight closeups of her hands (I think she was wearing 37 rings or something) and bizarre little gee-gaws all over her house. The music had that disordered, slightly strange quality. It was obvious either Fry or the filmmakers had made up their minds in advance that she was cuckoo.
Carrie Fisher scares me. Whatever hobgoblins are pursuing her, she's running from them, with all sorts of things that seem OK, with humour, with one-woman shows, with books, and with controversial psychiatric treatments that shoot electricity through your brain so you don't remember anything (and don't remember that you don't remember anything). What bothers me most is that there is no way in the world some people WON'T consider (or reconsider) ECT because of what Carrie Fisher has said about it. She is beginning to reduce the fear around it. But should she?
There is a cost to everything, but our culture doesn't want to hear about it. It's hooked on quick fixes. Nobody seems to remember the huge fuss about Prozac in the early '90s: it has all been forgotten. Prozac was the future, and it was going to revolutionize society. No one would be passive any more. We'd all be aggressively confident, extroverted firebrands. None of the pathetic introspection that makes people paint or write poetry.
The guy who wrote the Bible on Prozac was named Peter Kramer, which just makes me wonder about the name of Carrie's doctor. Just a coincidence? Anyway, when the first few awful side-effects trickled in, they were vehemently denied as atypical or even psychosomatic. According to the trials, only .01% of people had sexual dysfunction from Prozac, something called "delayed orgasm". But eventually, the numbers settled out at something like 40%. (The other 60% were too embarrassed to report it.) And as for that "delayed" thing, it was delayed until sometime next Friday.
Then came, oops, more problems. It seems a lot of people couldn't sleep on Prozac because they were constantly hyped-up and wired, necessitating adding another drug which kind of rendered the Prozac ineffectual. Eventually a new phenomenon was born called Prozac Poop-out, and it had nothing to do with your bowels.
Meantime, other new drugs were flooding the market, so Prozac was more-or-less swept away in the flood. It's not used at all any more, considered ineffective and far too bothersome in its side effect profile (the very thing that was used to sell it in the '90s).
OK then, what's this near-diatribe really all about? Unfortunately, someone who is in the grip of a psychiatric crisis is generally unable to make wise decisions for themselves about treatment. They are extremely vulnerable and will grasp at anything that seems to make sense, up to and including the advice of a famous, charismatic but very damaged middle-aged actress. So: let the sufferer beware. Most especially, be aware that Carrie Fisher may not be the best role model for mental health. To be honest, I think she's a burnout trying to stay afloat, and it's not funny. I'm scared for her.
And she scares me, too.
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
It took me years to write, will you take a look
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Tromba: ay, caramba!
Whoa, boy! What do we have here? Yesterday I started digging around for info on medieval/baroque instruments. There were some lulus. Crumhorns, which look like you're playing a cane and which produce a sour, whoopee-cushion-like sound. The rackett, which is an incredible-looking object, a big round oxygen-tankish thing with holes all over it. People liked edgy sour honky sounds then, or else they had not figured out how to produce anything better.
Way leads on to way, as Robert Frost once said, and I kept digging out more and more obscure things. I knew a little bit about all those alp-horn-type instruments, but I didn't know they were a form of communication for the village. They could signal births, deaths, coming storms, and other occasions/approaching dangers. Kind of the social networking of 1000 years ago. There are whole ensembles made up of these endless things, which I saw an example of in Switzerland, and they play with such mellowness that I just don't want to hear 'em. No, give me the authentic honky ones, homegrown music played with lusty abandon by amateurs.
But then I found this "thing". I had no idea what it was, elongated but squared-off, not like any horn I'd seen or heard of. It made the most incredible sound, like a garage door opening. After a while I found out it wasn't a horn at all, but a stringed instrument called a tromba marina. Looked like one of those failed attempts to develop the cello or bass. I found very little repertoire for this thing, thank God, and I would imagine just schlepping it around would be torture, trying to get it into a 15-foot case or folding it up or something (the travel-size tromba marina?).
The instrument has a range of three notes, not even as good as a cigar box with rubber bands wrapped around it, but that's not the only problem with it. When I tried to find more tromba marina videos, I got these Spanish things with pictures of storms, tornados and stuff. So I guess it means something else in Spanish, or else it's already in Spanish and has a double meaning? Approaching danger to the eardrums?
I could not help but be reminded of the old Ricola ads: but to my horror, I could only find a very brief clip of the original ad from British TV. THE RICOLA AD ISN'T ON YOUTUBE???????!!! There are a hundred stupid variations, none of which seem to be on TV where I live, but I am not interested in those. They're daft. I want the guy with the horn and the lame singing.
Monday, August 15, 2011
Stephen Fry, Stephen Fry
Since this is a lovely and balmy day,
Let's look at a certain man today.
Not just any man, you see
But a man who is funny, ho ho ha hee.
Stephen Fry, Stephen Fry
When you come on public television,
it's almost like I die.
When you talked about Wagner
and Hitler and such,
I saw your green jacket
and just liked it so much.
You lost a lot of weight there,
you great big kermudge,
But I'm glad you found a shrink or
your brain might now be sludge.
Stephen Fry, Stephen Fry
When you go off to Bayreuth it just makes me cry.
When you sat down to play that piano so great,
It made my heart kaboom and palpitate.
And you surely got my sympathy vote
When you tried to hit one key and got the wrong note.
And when you did that show on bipolar disorder,
It made me just pack up and run for the border.
You drive me all nutty, I don't know just why.
Maybe you're crazy, that's part of your myth,
And even if you're gay I just wait for your kith.
I found out at last why girls like you so,
And boys of course too, vo-do-de-o-do.
Your face is all craggy, it looks so unique
Like Easter Island or a great mountain peak.
Yes, you have that Stonehenge look, you know
That makes the women moan very low.
I don't know how you do it, so effortless it seems,
So forever, silly person, you will dwell in my dreams.
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Cavalleria Rusticana as you've never heard it before
This was another instance of coming in the back door: I was trying to find the name of one of those old penny-arcade flip machines where you put in a penny or a nickel and turned a crank and looked in a little window and a big revolving thingammy with photos attached to it flipped around and provided a crude kind of motion picture. These were peep-show things that often showed mildly dirty movies, all of 30 seconds long. I couldn't find the name of it, so couldn't really get any information or see any YouTube clips on it. At some point, having gone through zoetrope and a bunch of other names I can't remember because they were so weird, gizmatrons and walbergerscopes and stuff, the name mutoscope popped out.
Public response
In 1899, The Times printed a letter inveighing against "vicious demoralising picture shows in the penny-in-the-slot machines. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the corruption of the young that comes from exhibiting under a strong light, nude female figures represented as living and moving, going into and out of baths, sitting as artists' models etc. Similar exhibitions took place at Rhyl in the men's lavatory, but, owing to public denunciation, they have been stopped."
A collector's site describes the contents of one such reel, "Birth of the Pearl" which "pictures a nude woman rising from a seashell and standing." The site notes "this reel has some damage to a whole chunk of photos. They are all in a section where there was full frontal nudity and the cards are quite worn off."
Pretty hot stuff, eh? But then I started to think about a movie I saw eons ago (EONS, EONS!: see former post) called Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson. I had a thing for Joel Grey then, and he looked plain sexy in this, with a full beard that was obviously real. He looked downright Biblical in it, and I lusted. Anyway, at some point one of BB's girl friends trucks a sort of musical contraption into the Wild West show. It was a big ornate wooden cabinet with a revolving metal disc in it, and it played this unearthly music. It took me a while to track these down, too: they turned out to be just music boxes, except with exotic names like 27 Inch Regina (which, come to think of it, sounds vaguely obscene). I think they produce a sound from another time, lyrical and sweet, reminiscent of antique merry-go-rounds and Victorian parlours with tweeting canaries. The tuning is actually pretty good on these two, and the pieces complex.
I don't know who made these, or how, but it must have been quite an art. I LOVE the clatters and bangs at the start and finish, reminding us that these are, after all, hunks of tin. A marvel of design and musicianship. The way the notes decay or die off is sweet and bell-like, making the notes float into each other in a way I find enchanting.
Eon? . . .eon?. . . eh?
OK, this is really a weird one (as if my other posts aren't - ). I've been collecting oddities to write about, but it was such a ragbag that nothing came together. (Why does no one talk about having "nerves" any more? Why is it always a fancy diagnosis like cyclothymia or post-traumatic stress? Why don't we have lumbago, quinsy, grippe - and how can diseases just disappear like that)?
But it didn't gell, or jell, or turn to jell-o or whatever else it's supposed to do. Except for one thing.
The word luncheon.
What's the deal with luncheon? We don't have a breakfast-eon, a bruncheon, or a dinnereon. What is the -eon supposed to mean? It seems to imply a get-together to have lunch, usually kind of a fancy one. So is that what the suffix -eon means?
Uh, that depends.
I had to go on a Wik-tionary somewhere to get a list of words ending in -eon: and they are plentiful. But finding common ground is difficult.
One that popped into mind was puncheon. I remember the long narrative poem The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning which, when the Piper began to play, exhorted the rats to "munch on, crunch on, take your luncheon":
"And it seemed as if a voice
(Sweeter far than by harp or by psaltery
Is breathed) called out 'Oh, rats, rejoice!
The world is grown to one vast drysaltery!
So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,
Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon!'
And just as a bulky sugar-puncheon,
All ready staved, like a great sun shone
Glorious scarce and inch before me,
Just as methought it said 'Come, bore me!'
- I found the Weser rolling o'er me."
I "took" this poem in about Grade 3, and mostly didn't understand the more lumpy vocabulary, which of course was never explained. This poem was meant to be read aloud in one long blurt. I see now that it was nuncheon, not luncheon which was used to rhyme with it. But what the hell is a nuncheon?
I always assumed a puncheon was a sort of barrel that had sugar in it, but it isn't, it's just a long piece of wood or some sort of tool for engraving (a "punch"). But Browning got away with it, I suppose, through poetic license.
I had to look up nuncheon because it was just too weird.
nuncheon 1353, "slight refreshment," originally taken in the afternoon, from none "noon" (see noon) + shench (from O.E. scenc) "draught, cup."
Oh yeah, so nuncheon is taken from "cup". My ass it is. And what the hell is a shench? Was there a fourth member of The Three Stooges?
I might as well make my own dictionary of eon-suffixed words, and I will, right now, before I've even had my coffee.
There's eon, the granddaddy of them all, and we won't bother with what that means. I like truncheon, which sounds pretty violent, and trudgeon, which surely is somehow related to bludgeon except that you walk on the person. Dudgeon is a good one, used with "high" and meaning someone leaving in that well-known vehicle, a huff.
Neil Dudgeon, born Doncaster, South Yorkshire,
England
I was mostly interested in words that might somehow relate to luncheon, that is, the suffix eon added to a known word to somehow extend it, formalize it, attach it to fund-raising for various diseases. There's a nickelodeon, an extinct term for dirty movies of the early 1900s that lasted a couple of seconds (see example, above, 2-second original plus extended version). Nickel plus odeon. The word was resurrected for a children's TV network. But that doesn't quite solve it, because we still have the problem of odeon.
Od. Eon. I don't get it, do you?
So let's go on to pantheon. You have your panth, meaning you juth-t can't get your breath, or miniature panthers getting together for a luncheon (or nuncheon). From there it gets weird, and I have to say I don't know exactly what it means, and I'll be damned if I'll look it up so early in the morning. For now we'll just say it means a whole lot of stuff, the entire pantheon of whatever.
Does anyone know what a widgeon is? Is it sort of like a widget? Is it some strange sort of pigeon, maybe a widowed pigeon? A pigeon dressed in black (going to a fundraiser)?
Chirugeon. A kind of dinosaur, maybe. Chirugasaurus Rex.
Gudgeon sounds like a wad of hard old gum you find stuck under your desk. Ewwwwwwww.
Ieon. Come on, now.
Mezereon must be something archaelogical, some sort of terazzo plaza for sacrificing young goats or children or something. Or else something awful from another planet, like kryptonite.
Pereon is part of a woman's body.
Surgeon is hard to take apart. Sur being, what, above in French? Surge means something quite else. But there's that eon part, like a gathering together. Psychosurgeon, cryosurgeon, supersurgeon, plastic surgeon, all of them give me the willies.
Odeon. Did I get to that one? Isn't that some big old place, one of those old theatres the town council is forever threatening to tear down to put up condos? We still have Cineplex Odeon, as if the theatre association still hangs on by a thread.
But it still means coming together, doesn't it? Even for a really short movie, and a nice bite of something for your nuncheon.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
In the garden of good and evil
I tried to find the original documentary, came up empty (it barely exists on DVD, and only in Europe and only in French. I shall have to wait.) Then I thought about Night on Bald Mountain, one of the most celebrated pieces from Fantasia, and how many images Disney "borrowed" from Murnau's creepy classic from 1926, Faust.
The hideous horsement (whom I saw on TV many years before, an isolated clip that only made sense to me 25 years later); the big scary guy wit' da wings, and lots of other stuff. But I didn't want to post a 9-minute clip from Fantasia, so then I got watching the Ave Maria that follows after: try as I might, I can't diss this, as the animation is so utterly otherworldly. Yes, Disney is strutting his animated stuff, saying, look, have you ever seen animation like this? No. And we never will again.
But THEN I found this rendition of Ave Maria by Barbara Bonney, and I have to say it is the finest I have ever heard. I heard her sing Peer Gynt many years ago (in fact I still have a recording of the complete work, with Norwegian dialogue) and loved her voice, but I have to say I never cultivated her properly, so it's good to hear this.
The visuals in this are crummy, but that makes you shut your eyes and really listen. THIS kind of good really could defeat Faust's evil forces.
(Sorry this came out in such awkward order. The video kept disappearing or half-appearing or otherwise getting screwed up, so it's under the post A pool of stillness: Barbara Bonney's Ave Maria.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Women and sangria: or, how not to be a writer
A friend and colleague of mine, Matt Paust, recently passed along a link to a post on Open Salon by Ann Nichols. It recounted the ordeal she faced as a little girl, already deeply devoted to the written word, who was forced by a shallow substitute teacher to write an inane assignment called "I am a Lost Penny". When it came time to read outstanding pieces to the class, hers wasn't included: the teacher didn't get it, so she concluded there was nothing to get. Unfortunately, this is the kind of reception writers face throughout their lives. Agents don't get it. Publishers don't get it. Editors especially don't get it. But like fools, we carry on.
I emailed Matt today as per usual, and this piece (below) evolved into another writer's story. In no other field are there so many wanna-be's, so many people who talk about writing but don't really do it, who read how-to's but don't really follow them, who attend endless classes but don't ever risk their work to someone else's eyes/mind.
If and when you do, you're in for it. Unless you're one of these rare instant phenomenal successes (and I know a few of those who have flamed out after one novel), you struggle and toil and chop your way through the underbrush, occasionally finding yourself in a howling wilderness of loneliness and despair. Welcome to the wonderful world of being a "real" writer.
The reward? Occasionally being able to dump it all out in words that are meaningful. That post about "someone's" sister was a huge catharsis for me. Since then I've thought of other details. But just being able to sit down and pour it out was reward enough, at least for the time being.
This is already longer than my email to Matt (and I've tinkered with it since), so here it is:
This whole penny thing has got me going on the only time I joined a "writer's group" called Women and Words. I lasted two sessions. I was the only one who had written a novel or, in fact, had anything published (mostly newspaper columns and book reviews, with the odd poem in a lit. mag.) Someone came up to me and said, "Are you Margaret Gunn?" Not sure what happened to the "ing".
Anyway, we all had to go around the circle telling everyone what we had written and what were working on. When I mentioned my novel (which by the way never did see print), there was a sort of muted, fireworks "ohhhhhhhhhhh," tinged with "who the hell does she think she is?". It was weird. Were they impressed, or merely embarrassed?
There was a nice little old lady in a print dress, introduced to me as "our poetry expert", whose appreciation of poetry went back to the late 1800s. A few people read their poems out loud, almost all written in rhyme and meter.
THE EAGLE
The eagle flies
so high in the sky
In power and might
and not showing any fright
If God could fly, the bird
Would carry a holy word
And I'd fly on his wings
As my soul there would sing.
The universal response was "ohhhh, how LOVE-LYYY!". Then a young black woman, dressed rather edgily with spiky earrings, read a very strange but raw, edgy poem in a Jamaican accent. There was a silence. "Oh, that's different," said the old lady.
It surely was.
When I talked about the novel, a woman asked me instantly, "What's the conflict?" I felt ill. I didn't know what she was talking about. "The" conflict. She had been to too many writing courses, read too many how-to books. And the books. They were touted, one after the other, as the one we had to have to learn such-and-such a technique.
I remember wondering, why not just pick one and do what it says? But commitment to your craft was measured by how many shelves you had filled with these things.
But then came an actual project, a book they were self-publishing as a fundraiser. Great! I thought, a book of the group's short stories or excerpts from novels or memoirs. But it wasn't that at all. It was a COOKBOOK, and they wanted a recipe from me by next week. I don't know why I came back. The next week was almost all socializing. We had been assigned something to write (one lady seemed to be in charge, practically holding a wooden ruler to rap our knuckles if we stepped out of line), but no one mentioned it because no one had done it except me.
We were told to choose a character we wanted to develop in our fiction, then list absolutely everything about that person. "You have to know where he lives, what he does, how he dresses, what he likes to eat, where he grew up, everything." There must have been something wrong with me, because when I start writing fiction it's a process of finding out about my characters, and knowing everything from the get-go would bore me to pieces.
But never mind, no one had done it anyway. It had been forgotten. People talked about their kids, and something called "sangria". It seems the group got together between sessions to have a sangria party and get drunk.
Oh, and one more thing. A timid young woman pressed a few poems into my hands and begged me to comment on them and be brutally honest. I should have just said, "Oh, these are LOVE-LYYY!" without even looking at them, but I made the mistake of reading them and commenting as kindly as I could, making sure I pointed out some strong points. These were written in rhyme and meter and seemed to be about some sort of illness, and God and angels. When I gave her my comments, her eyes were brimming with hurt. "Oh, it's OK," she said. "I'm manic-depressive. It's one hundred per cent genetic, I got it from my mother, I didn't have a bad childhood or anything. My psychiatrist encouraged me to write these while I was in the hospital."
I felt like I'd stomped on a bunch of baby chicks. Now I think writing can't be taught. The native lust for wordsmithing is in you from birth, but then you have to do an awful lot of flexing and honing.
It's like being an athlete. If you're born with poor reflexes and a caved-in chest, you won't make it, but if you never work out or train, you won't either. And you have to WANT this and want it and want it and want it and want it and want it. And not have sangria parties behind other people's backs.
Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA
Thistledown Press
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
It took me years to write, will you take a look
Order The Glass Character from:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA
Barnes & Noble
Thistledown Press
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Short Fiction: Sisters, sisters. . .
(Author's Note: believe it or not, this whole story poured out in one blurt this morning. I have no idea how long it is, but it looks kind of like a novella. Did any of this really happen? I'm not sure where anyone would get that idea. But only one person knows for sure.)
My name is Myra, and for a very long time I felt “mired”. Rocking out of the mud ruts of my past has been a long and very gruelling process, and sometimes I’ve come to the point where I didn’t think I could bear to go on.
But I went on.
I have found my authentic life, but had to walk through the hellfire of being silenced, talked out of my truth. It happens all too often. Then others wonder, why does that person drink? Why is that person depressed? – when they should more properly be wondering, Why is that person alive at all?
There is a towering figure in my life, awful as some grinning totem. At this point, I don’t know whether she is alive or dead, so she remains crouched in the shadows. When I was born, I think she was a giant about seven feet tall. I was surrounded by giants. Later I would see them differently, and eventually even grow taller than she was. Photographic records show her as looking very pleased about my birth, even excited.
Of course I didn’t know much about her then. I was too busy being a kid. I see pictures of a little girl in grubby boys’ clothing, passed down twice through two rough boyhoods. When I outgrew my shorts and pants, my mother took a pair of scissors and cut the elastic in several places so they would still fasten. Length was not a consideration.
This not only didn’t bother me, I didn’t even think about it, it didn’t register at all until I had grandkids and saw the way the girls were dressed, sparkly little butterfly tops, slim-fitting jeans with stitched hearts and sequins, leggings with candy-cane stripes, their hair pulled sweetly up in a way that makes their lovely faces nothing short of stunning. And sparkly little ballet shoes, and runners with little lights in them so they blink like fireflies when they run.
I guess it didn’t occur to me. You can’t miss what you never had.
I do remember my older brother Garth who was insane, so we got along well, but he was still five years older, still one of the giants. I had a normal brother Harold who was ten years older. My mother seemed to favour him, while being somewhat oblivious of me. When a sibling is that many years older than you are, they are practically an adult. And if my big, big sister held me and played with me for a while, then dumped me like some sort of animated rag doll, who could blame her? She was thirteen, and not my keeper.
When I was born, a sign that said “OUTSIDER” was plastered on my forehead, and you know something? – here, let me check – I think it’s still there, though with one or two brave strips peeled off. I was a smart kid who was given a battery of tests in Grade 2, then put on an educational fast-track that lasted until high school.
It seems to me that as soon as she could, my sister got as far away from us as possible, literally travelling to the other side of the world. She studied German and wrote her Master’s thesis about Mahagonny, a caustic work of social criticism by Brecht and Weill. When I’d come home from school, from my special classes for smart kids, Mahagonny would be on the stereo, dissonant, dysphoric, bizarre. If I brought a friend home from school, they’d say, “What’s THAT?”
There were German books in the den, Goethe, Schiller. Books by Freud. I tried to make sense of these and couldn’t. But I should backtrack here and mention her brief career as a singer. She did seriously train, had a good instrument, as they say, but something happened. I do remember as a small child seeing her play the lead in a university production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, and being so thrilled and proud of her that I wanted to see it all over again.
And I remember the vocalizing, swooping up by thirds, then coming down like stairsteps. I remember some of the songs she sang, Go ‘Way from my Window being a favourite. (Later in the ‘60s, during the folk craze, she sang such pleasant ditties as Amanda of the Lake, about a crazy old woman wandering around in a yellow wedding gown 50 years after the Civil War ended, Poor Old Horse which was about a cart horse that dropped dead and was eaten by crows, and Gordon Lightfoot’s sour and sardonic That’s What you Get for Loving Me.) Oh, and Down by the Greenwood Side-ee-oh (“She wiped the blade against her shoe/The more she wiped the redder it grew” – this after the mother murdered her two children for no apparent reason).
She played the guitar in the same primitive way I did, plucking awkwardly at the same three chords, but with a difference: she held the guitar between her spread knees like a cello, the neck of it sticking out at a 45-degree angle. I’ve never seen anyone hold a guitar like that before or since. For some weird reason, she named it "The Girl".
The singing career didn't happen, then she went to Europe for mysterious reasons that were never explained, though she must have been studying, talking in German, a mystery to me since no one in our family has the remotest connection to Germany or German culture. The homecoming was not good, for reasons I don't feel I should recount. For many years she lived in a tiny apartment, really just one room in an old house on Roxborough Street in Toronto, a tony area with a shabby underside.
At this point, my story gets interesting. It thickens, it even coagulates. When I review the facts of it, I sometimes feel a sense of disbelief, except that I know it all happened.
I didn’t have a good adolescence, by anyone’s reckoning. I was hypersensitive and depressed and didn’t think I was attractive. I had a few friends, but not many, and no doubt I was hard to be with.
Meantime, everyone in my sister’s crowd was vastly older than me. Mid-‘20s, even 30s. She gave parties. Oh, it wasn’t the first time I’d tasted alcohol: after completing a long and gruelling walk for Oxfam at age thirteen, I was crying with exhaustion in my bedroom when my father appeared in the doorway with a glassful of something. It was dark and muddy. “Drink this, you’ll feel better,” he said. It was orange juice with a couple ounces of hooch in it. I gagged it down, and felt so much better.
This hooch cure came up more than once. One time, summering at the cottage in glorious Lost Lake Resort in Muskoka, something upset me, don’t remember what, and I ran crying to my room and slammed the door. My sister came in with a glass of hooch and said, “Drink this, it will relax your insides.” I think I was fourteen years old.
By fifteen, there were those parties, with friends of my much-older brother Harold as well as my sister. My crazy brother Garth sometimes attended, and entertained everyone with his surreal monologues full of characters that predated the jazzlike riffs of Billy Crystal and Robin Williams.
People floated in and out of these parties. Some of them were married men. It was a kind of sport to get me drunk, though no doubt today they would claim that I wanted to get drunk, that it was my responsibility at fifteen how much alcohol I should drink. All I can say is, I drank a lot, as much as any of the adults, and woke up with horrendous hangovers that sometimes made me puke and sob with wretchedness and guilt.
A smooch and a snuggle. A few days later this same guy sent me two dozen roses, I mean right to my house with my parents watching, which were placed on the dining room table. No one asked where they had come from. It was as if they were invisible. The card on them said, “Thanks for a lovely evening.”
But the thing is, the thing is, the same thing happened with Harold's best friend, his married best friend, while his wife was asleep upstairs. No one found out. He hit on me, as they say. He didn’t fuck me, but it was definitely sexual, not something you’d do to your sister. Nothing his wife could ever watch.
For years I felt I should have been grateful for all this attention. My parents knew exactly what was going on at those parties, including the drinking, but felt my older siblings were taking good care of me. Besides, drinking was fun, wasn’t it? No harm done.
Stuff happened much later that I can’t even get into, but the gist of it is, the general feeling in my family seems to be that my memories of it are somehow distorted and wrong, even fabricated. No one laid a hand on me, and no one could know it better than my sister! My Dad who gave me hooch when I was thirteen and kept my wine glass filled at fifteen and crossed every boundary I ever had: but then, by that time my sister was so far away from the whole scene that she had no idea what was really going on.
So she kind of made something up that she could live with. SHE never saw that kind of behaviour from my Dad, no not ever. I was to learn much later that alcoholism is a progressive disease, as is mental illness. It’s quite possible he wasn’t like that when she grew up in the early 1940s - incredibly, it seems now, during World War II. Thirteen years is a very long time, and a lot can happen. But by this time her distance from the family was less geographical and more existential, meaning she created her own particular legend and stuck to it.
She said a very odd thing to me once: “The most successful person I know is my mother.” My Mum was a housewife who helped my Dad in his grocery store, not out of choice but because it was simply expected of her. She seemed to have some pretty warm feelings towards my sister and once told me she was the only baby of hers that she breast-fed.
Being one of those embarrassing midlife accidents, I sort of had a blank for a mother. But I can hear the protests now: oh no, it wasn’t like that at all! I wasn’t there, I guess, and she was. My sister never experienced the oblivion of her indifference. Which is, after all, the opposite of love.
Yes, there were at least two realities competing with each other, and guess what: the older horse (poor old horse?) always wins because, being older, she knows much, much more than you do. So even if she wasn’t there, even if she was in fact on the other side of the world, she knew exactly what was happening, and not happening.
Still, there were cracks, later hastily filled in. “I don't like to be around him. I find him sort of oppressive,” she once said of my Dad, and in a letter much later on referred to “his alcoholism” (which conveniently disappeared many years later when I tried to tell her what had happened to me).
I have to confess that once I made a rather pathetic, failed attempt to impress her. While I was living in Alberta, I was in community theatre and played the lead in My Fair Lady, one of the biggest thrills and challenges of my life. And my sister was coming from Toronto to see me perform. It was going to be Iolanthe in reverse: surely she would be proud of me now! I had waited for this for so long.
So imagine what she said when my husband took her backstage. Said in that gelled, coolly indifferent voice with that poisonous little eyebrow of a lilt in it:
“Well, you weren’t boring.”
“Weren’t boring.” And that’s all. That’s all.
This could be War and Peace, and it is starting to resemble it. Anyway, getting off alcohol was bloody hard, and my siblings were kind of embarrassed for me to hear that I actually had a “problem”. My Dad wrote to me, “I guess I was lucky that it never happened to me.” I remember receiving a manifesto from my sister, eight single-spaced typewritten pages like the kind of records they kept in the Third Reich, refuting every single thing that I had told her about my childhood, point by bloody point. She originally had planned to show up on my doorstep, I guess to literally strongarm me into her version of reality.
Some people took this to mean sexual abuse either didn’t exist, or had been blown so far out of proportion that it was nearly unheard-of, the one in 10,000 that was the accepted statistic for incest since records were kept. This dilemma was never really resolved, but just dropped out of sight and went underground again. The public was tired of it, apparently, or it had just gotten too contentious and uncomfortable. (Meaning “legal”). The remnants of it pop up today on reality shows: people who abuse drugs or stuff themselves with food or live in squalid mountains of garbage almost all say they were sexually abused by someone in their childhood.
That is, if we want to believe such histrionic distortions.
It amazed me to learn from a psychologist many years later that, even apart from anything my Dad either did or did not do, there had been sexual trauma in my adolescence, very serious trauma. I told her about going to MASH (and by the way, my “date” committed suicide a few years later with one of his guns), and about my brother’s friend with his wife upstairs, as if I were sharing some pleasant adventures of adolescence, when she stopped me in my tracks by saying, “They abused you.”
“Oh no. It wasn’t like that.”
”How old were they? Twice your age? And married? And drunk on top of that, and – worse – getting you drunk. It’s no contest. They held all the power. It’s a miracle you didn’t get pregnant.”
I sat stunned.
“Not only that. Why wasn’t anyone protecting you? They were so much older than you, and they were your siblings! It was their responsibility to keep you safe.”
Safe?
Oh dear. Safe? What is that supposed to mean? That people a decade or more older than you should somehow feel a sense of responsibility towards you? But that’s just the thing, the twisted, sick, distorted thing. They DID think they were being responsible, even showing me a good time. Everyone, especially my sister, seemed to think all this making out with drunken married men was good for me, that she was sharing her bounty, her popularity, especially her sexual popularity, with this miserable depressed girl who wasn’t welcome anywhere else. It was generosity on her part to include me in all those wonderful things, all that fun. Not one of them thought that keeping my drinks topped up all night was a bad thing, even when I was ripped out of my skull and puking my guts out. I think they found it entertaining: I was a sort of mascot. My sister used to “imitate” me saying (though I never said this, not once, and never lisped): “I’m tho pitthed I can’t even thee thtraight.”
I guess I’m sounding like a victim, eh? Maybe in some ways I do feel like one, but I had to step away, way away, to really take my life back. Try: the other side of the country. When I told my sister I was moving to Vancouver and wondered what would happen if I couldn’t adjust, she shrugged her little shoulders and said in her best indifferent, coolly lilting tone, “Oh, I guess you’ll just self-destruct.”
There were several things she liked to say to me. She said them often, and either denied she said them or insisted they were compliments. (Obviously by this time I was making a few sad attempts to dig myself out from under the avalanche of wet cement that passed for her sisterly influence.)
“Myra, you’re weird.”
“Myra, you’re crazy.”
(and): “God, I’m sure glad I’m on your side, Myra, because if I wasn’t. . . “
She went through a period of rampant promiscuity, empty sex with a lot of married men. Married was better, fewer messy attachments. At one point she had a lover about fifteen years younger than she was and bragged to my sister-in-law about how sore she was all the time, because he had such a . . . The two of them mailed me a joint when I was living in New Brunswick, which I smoked alone, listening to the original cast version of A Chorus Line and blubbering.
I remember one scene – God, where is this all coming from? – I was standing in the kitchen with a drink in my hand, heading into the darkened living room, where her boy friend was sitting by himself on the sofa (with a drink in his hand). She turned around, her eyes incandescent with fury, and snarled, “So, what do you think you’re going to do? Are you going to go in there and sit down beside Jack and flirt with him and romance him?”
I was learning the bizarre dynamics of a family system as twisted as a defective strand of DNA: Jack could “romance” me, but I could not “romance” him, was not even allowed to think about it.
Then she did one of her famous 180s. Suddenly she didn’t need sex at all, and anyone who did was subject to her famous contempt. (She was also contemptuous of people who drove cars, because she had never learned how.) By this time she was Queen of the Sardonic Jibe: she had honed a certain technique of toxic sting to the point of sheer genius. Disdain mixed with contempt. She lashed out like a cobra, stung viciously, then turned it around on you and insisted that YOU were the one who was being cruel.
My God, this is like an archaeological dig of pain! One time I made another fatal mistake in trying to reach her and really be her sister: I went to visit her in Toronto, and by this time she was living in a high rise and doing some sort of work that involved computers. When she got home, she started in on me, saying “boy, are you ever wired!” because I was excited about something, and this time I called her on it. I don’t know what I said, but it was pretty mild compared to her “weird” and “insane” comments.
She ran into her bedroom, slammed the door like she used to do when she was in high school, flung herself on the bed, and screamed, and screamed, and screamed, and screamed, and screamed.
I was really afraid the cops would come and she’d say I assaulted her or something. I was afraid, and when she finally came out I placated her and apologized profusely for – what?
It occurs to me now that no matter what I had said to her, if I had told her to fuck off and die (which perhaps I should have), it did not justify the massive temper tantrum she had just thrown in order to make me feel really bad. I did not allow my children to act like that when they were toddlers. It was inexcusable and completely insane. I had never done anything like that in front of her, ever. After that I had to be careful, careful. Look what I did to her – look what I made her do!
Just how awful and heartless can a human being be?
There were layers of pain building up, layers she insisted either didn’t exist or had nothing to do with her, because I was, after all, “crazy”. My attempts to make her understand anything of what I was going through were doomed from the start, but I kept on trying. She never married, see, and there are certain other details I won’t reveal here. I do remember one of the rare times I went to my mother claiming she had said something vindictive and horrible to me, and she said, “Oh, she’s just talking about herself.” (My mother had an older sister too, a sometimes-vibrant alcoholic who later committed suicide. Though the family said “she just lost track of how many pills she took”. It takes a couple hundred pills to die, which is kind of a lot to lose track of: but I digress.)
My sister not only does not acknowledge the elephant in the living room: she IS the elephant in the living room. The tomb has been sealed, and as far as I am concerned, she is in it. I have made a life for myself with husband and children, and she didn’t, or couldn’t, because she never found the courage to try. I find I can’t spare much mercy for her. People say “you should forgive her”, because the intensity of my feelings makes them uncomfortable. They really don’t want to hear about it. If I forgave her, perhaps I would shut up.
I suppose I shouldn’t make any of this public or even write it down, because someone might actually read it and it will make THEM uncomfortable, or perhaps they will recognize themselves. I wonder what happened to the drunken gang at my sister’s house, apart from the man who shot himself. The other guy, the guy whose wife was sleeping upstairs, was getting divorced last time I saw him, and very deep into alcoholism. I don’t drink, not at all, because I see that it isn’t good for me. I do the best I can, sometimes better, sometimes worse. There was a tiny bit of communication with my brother Harold a few years ago, just a couple of emails, and I had the thought that my sister might be trying to find out how I was, mainly to confirm her suspicion that I was either hopelessly insane, or dead.
But I didn’t die, see. Myra is no longer mired. People call me My now, which is sort of nice. My meaning “mine”. My house, My grandchildren, My world. I am a published author now, two novels, a dream come true. And even though part of me still has fantasies of throwing her over the edge of the balcony in her mingy little apartment, I realize now she isn’t worth it. You see, you can outlive your enemies just by taking a closer look at them, and thus diminishing them into the very small people that they always were.
My, my.
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