Caught between the previous world and this one, sometimes I wonder if I am better off now without so many of my ideals and my furies, if the infamous trade-off in which we get to spend a lovely afternoon backs bent and smiles wide, hanging coal-black candelabras over solid oak dining room tables.
Every once in a while I watch films that get me thinking. This weekend has seen a lot of moving pictures race across the screen.
Friday night, in my red dress and his arms, curries and a lesson in what I thought was traditional balti cooking (and makes me want to call Kruti and tell her that the lessons she taught me were the british influence on her own culture), when Mr. Pyke introduced the idea of Movie Roulette I balked and chickened out shamefully but we ended up seeing the movie none of us had ever heard of and "The Barbershop" was a wonderful two hours of learning to see through someone else's eyes.
Driving past Toronto's version of Montreal's Oka-police-brutality-dumping grounds was... Something that I am still thinking about. The warmth of his car and the blinking lights of the beaches and their half-million-dollar homes were a sixty-watt counterpoint to those three tears that my brain allowed me room for.
Yesterday manual labour left time for my brain to unwind, settle somewhat in its continual half-panic. Yesterday my fingers worked and the forefront of my brain focused on space and rangement and dry-wall screws and plant hangings.
Yesterday evening was respite from the rumbling undertone of the core city, respite from the black-walled bars, respite from the confrontation of the inner self to outer influences. Respite from people. Respite from the ID and maybe even the superego.
Yesterday evening was all in my head, hair brushed out to an ephemeral cottony mass at the behest of Mr. Pyke, skin swathed in a pseudo-silk kimono (Marillion) while manual labouring clothing spun in the washing machine.
Yesterday evening was fine finger work (macram�) and just the right jumble of thighs and knees on the suddenly-clear couch, a spontaneous run to the music superstore for DVDs (my first ever DVD! Amadeus!) to replace Real Genius and spontaneously grab Warriors.
Real Genius is still a film that pangs me far too deeply. It still makes me regret what some narcissistic part of me tells me I could have been. It makes me wistful at the time that people call me spastic, thinking of how close I could be to the heroic figure of the hyperkinetic Jordan, of how long ago I gave up the perfect passionate innocence of Mitch (at least some of it).
And of course this is all in my head and in my overblown ego but I am so good at wishing. So good at wistfulness.
ANd every once in a while watching that film pushes me just hard enough to fall into the motivation cycle again.
Real Genius always has an effect on me, it always ends happily, I always end with tears in my brain.
Thoughtful ones, though.
Warriors, though, a 70's kick to the head about gangs in New York...
Now that I wasn't expecting, despite Mr. Pyke's summation even before the DVD floated up from the shelf into his immense hands, despite the tell-tale artsy beginning, despite the very first moments of the movie which belied the fact that people actually put thought into this film, that the characters had more depth than shine.
I wasn't expecting to turn to Mr. Pyke moments before midnight, while Swan and some mattress-backed girl who too closely resembled a once-upon-me raced along the universal m�tro track, and realize that
that
here was someone I could ask about this, for the first time in a very, very long time, almost since the first moment that I stood up from the stoop I'd been squatting on, there was someone who would understand the question.
And I asked and found my own answer.
I don't know how I feel about what I've left behind.
Oh, I know which lessons I've kept, I know that a few of the things I've learned are more important than entire Eaton-Centre universes.
I know that knowing this or that pain, to me, have taught me to not only avoid it, but not cause it in other people.
I know that it has changed me. I know that I am someone I want to be, and owe a debt to unmentionables for it.
But somewhere behind all the Large Wise Words, behind the strength and determination and all the things I know I will always have unyielding, behind the fervent wish to never see anyone else suffer if I can somehow change that suffering
behind all of it every once in a while
when we turn the heating on for winter, when I park my car in a perfect parallel, when I wander the aisle of the grocery store and buy fresh chinese greens and indulge in expensive protein-enriched soy-something-or-other, I have this tiny little nudging of...
guilt, maybe
perhaps regret
perhaps I feel as though I am turning my back on promises that I made with other people, oaths that I breathed into faces that I watched grow still.
I still haven't managed to justify all of it, to compartmentalize all my choices into neat rationalizations.
Maybe I'm on my way to forgetting it all and going yuppie for the sheer ease of living.
I like to tell myself I'm not, and that though I'm still seeking resolution, it is because I want to understand, want to find answers and forgiveness, not because I want to shut my eyes on all of it.
But even that, I sometimes doubt.
Sometimes, moving pictures really can make you think.
Sometimes the television turned on does not have to mean the death of the mind.