The importance of being important April 11, 2013

 


 She posted someone else’s fairy tale on her Facebook page, and I answered by accident on my blog.

This happens a lot. Perhaps synchronicity. I post something unrelated to anything and something she posts seems to connect.

This is not a back and forth any more. Those conversations are long gone (thank God) and more painful.

This is perhaps something unconscious, some twist of fate that has nothing to do with anything and yet for some cosmic reason, does.

I would think of it as a psychic connection, but the concept scares me.

There are some things you’d best move on from or watch from a safe distance. As much as I admire her, as I might a roaring fire, it is best not to singe my fingers by consciously posting anything that would mark me as a target.

Over the last year, I have come to respect (and fear) her talent, and come to realize she is strangely complex, a true innocent encapsuled in the body of a powerful and seductive force of nature, savvy enough to survive, yet vulnerable in her desperation to find true love (which if asked she would deny openly.)

As much as I have come to admire her and her talents, she still scares the crap out of me.

Since the fairy tale she posted is not her original work, it does not reflect her voice. So, I’m summarize it.

It is about a bat meeting a mouse. Both think something is wrong with the other. One had wings and could fly, while the mouse did not.

The bat took the mouse on a flight.

When back down to earth, the mouse felt out of sorts because he couldn’t get used to being a mouse again.

In her response to the fairy tale, she said she would have had the same problem as the mouse as well.

Indeed, her life seems to have been a series of flights, having seen the heights, and not able to get the vision out of her head when forced back into the grind of everyday life. She likes feeling important (who doesn’t?)

Independently and before I read the posting about the mouse and bat, I had written about someone who thought he was a big fish in a small pond, and then upon seeing a really big fish, he was no longer satisfied with his lot in life, and needed the bigger fish to help him breathe. He was only content in his small pond so long as she (the big fish) continued to help him breathe.

What worries me is that I used a fairy tale format that might be mistaken as a response to her posting, and if she sees my posting, she will likely see it that way, and perhaps she will see this as provocation or worse, a return to the situation last summer when we were doing that very thing.

As much as I would love to think that her posting of a similar fairy tale might be a response to my posting, I’ve long surrendered the notion that we can communicate on any level, even as remotely as writing poetry to or about each other.

I read her work, follow her postings, but dare not do more than that, and have to assume she feels the same way about me and what I post

This does not stop me from fantasizing about some private poetic conversation between us in which we share each other’s deepest secrets in a language that others cannot interpret.

A more cynical fantasy might shape this poetic conversation as her protecting herself, communicating these deep feelings in such a way that she might later deny they meant anything, maintaining her cover so that if confronted she might say, (as Freud did about cigars) sometimes a poem is just a poem.

I suspect; however, she likes being about to say things about herself in such a way that only the move savvy can pick up on the true meaning. This is not to say I’m nearly savvy enough or that what I write here about her poems reflects what they are really about, but rather mere guesses, again reflecting Einstein’s study of the watch – trying to get clues from her poems as to what makes her tick.

Psychic connection or not, I suspect I should be more careful about what I post to make certain it does not look or sound like a response or a provocation, not just my poetry, but photographs as well. Too many times, I’ve seen similarities that might be mistaken.

 

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