1.1 metamorphosis without the butterflies

i woke up one morning this week remembering a dream that involved a swedish thirtyish male somewhere in a kitchen half-naked à la Tyler Durden but without the attitude. needless to say that i woke up laughing and humbled by the thought that this is how old age is sneaking up on me. for my mid-life crisis i married a man eight years younger than i, so this dream, is clearly marking the advent of old age. it came sneaking by having a rather prototype male appear in my dreams in the absence of eros.

when the day starts with such psychological petty crimes and then the phone rings and a past lover is on the other side, life is taking its course. a colleague of mine has these days taken to hinting something or other about my men. oh, i get him loud and clear. i will need to face that one straight one of these days as it becames necessary, if it becomes necessary.

on wednesday i walk into my therapy session and the therapist happily announces that she has found my file again. again, i had to laugh, that internal laugh that is half irony, half satisfaction and two-thirds insight, because that very morning i had thought about this episode of the loss of my therapist's notes on my case a few months back. now, it is not everyday that a therapist and member of the medical profession loses a patient's file, and i remained most unconvinced of its loss, and took the view that it had been misplaced somewhere in the office and its many papers and shelves, and in due time it would surface again. it did, it was among the empty file wrappers.

that morning my thought of that misplaced file was that when i entered the therapist's office for the first time over one year ago, it was because i had more than just issues to resolve, i was in the throws of a depression that was choking my life; i needed help. there is here one person who clearly does not have her shit together - that is me - and goes for help to this other person - the therapist - and that together-person then looses the file containing all those notes about who is related to whom and who did what to whom, where and that whole relatory of recollections that get spewed during the course of therapy. ah! perfection is also not to be found at this address. what a delighful relief!

when a past lover rings early in the morning, i am barely awake, and he has good news for me. for a while back there while i was in the throws of some deep funks of depression a few months ago, i did worry about the state of affairs of his marriage following one long call with him. he is a good friend, our separation was a necessary step for both of us, we remain faithful to each other for there is nothing that can separate good friends. now it was easy to joke about the postulate that perhaps he did not need a maitresse, as is common in france, and a few other places in the world. in fact, having more than one relationship that involves copulation is very common among the human species. it so is that the invention of marriage and the preaching of some alledged morality principles within a few degenerate doctrines has caused this de facto practise to be one that is frowned upon. i know, how in our family the gossip of other people's affairs is often used to preach what should be. needless to say that in this very same family of mine, all sorts of overt and covert relationship behaviour is to be found, however nobody talks about it. that is what they call normal, and that is what i call hypocritical behaviour. but then, that is me, the moral me.

all social criticism aside, it was good to talk for a while with this dear friend of mine. it was especially good to remind him that he too is human, like the rest of us. and like the rest of us, he also does not always have all his shit together, and does not always behave ideally. he is a fantastic friend, and always was, yet he too is not perfect. i too often forget that i do belong to the human species and am vested with all the wonderful incongruities and caprices that so characterize the beasts whom we are.

recently i was visiting a friend and cousin for a week and we ended up discussing a lot of our private issues about lovers, loves, life, fortune and fame. she is the ever wise art historian, and i am the insane writer. while i was visiting her, i was also in the midst of a sweet confrontation with one of my dearest muses who was in town at the same time. at one point she declares that he is not up to my level and that i idealize him. i do idealize him and what pleasure that is! on the other hand, inspite of all my cousin's deep insights into french men's behaviour, this is not a question of levels or worthiness. when is another being worth another? never. we, human, we deserve nothing, have a right to nothing. we are alive, we breathe, we eat, we sleep and sometime in between sometimes we connect with each other. sometimes there is poetry, other times there is ease, and most of the time there is nothing at all. in all cases, i say there is life and relationship.

i return to my lovers. literally, i often do that. i return to them for the lessons learned and return to them for the caresses and the pleasure of their company. sexual copulation is not always involved. lover is a word that makes me wonder. lover is often riddled with meanings belong to some social canonry to which i do not subscribe. but then i already have trouble with the concept of falling in love, and certainly no understanding for that other concept that involves perfection when it comes to the object of one's affections. it was exactly to this point that my therapist and i returned on wednesday. if relationships fail these days, one reason can be sought in the idealization of the relationship itself, and the requirement that it has to be perfect and compliant to several concepts of social canonry, and that is so oblivious to the needs of our soul, spirit and psyche. we need dreams, ideals and angels on occasions. i do well surrounded by a few muses whom i love and respect, and who give me the raw pleasure of sincerity.

at this point i recall another french man in my life, another past lover, one whose tracks i have lost, one with whom i conceived a child. one man who was pure poetry. our child left us both before his farewell, and in the deepest core of my being there is this taste of life lived to the fullest that has stayed with me. he is one of the rare people that have departed to not be heard of again. i have no idea of where he is living now, or if he is living. does it matter? no. he enriched my life with his presence. what more could i possibly want? i have my peace of mind.

perhaps this is not old age at all. it can be that one night i dream of an unknown swedish adonis by the kitchen sink, and then the next night it is somebody whom i know, and it is something totally different.

how am i?

i, little me, how the fuck am i?

let me tell you. it is 16:13 according to my friendly local mac sitting on my lap, and my stomach is growling.

i spent the best part of the morning researching a paper, and i think some circuit overheated and i forgot to eat. then i decided that my dizzy spells were due to lack of fresh air and went for a walk and to return a few empty bottle and aluminium for recycling. a few times i had to hold on to the next anchored object as i felt that i was losing equilibrium and would fall down if i did not steady myself. i stopped at the local grocery store on the way back and bought some food, however i had plenty of food at home. i ate when i arrived home, but i need to slow down and cook myself a good soup, and i am feeling more on speed than on anything else. my stomach keeps on growling, it too must be on speed however it feels like it is on laxatives.

i am slightly confronted with my therapist's assertion that my psyche is doing rather well. although there are still a few psychosomatic mysteries in my physiology, the dirty work is done. indeed the depression is gone, and i remain convinced that that depression was necessary in order to illuminate and deal with childhood traumas that were indeed blocking all my self-expression. it has been an interesting road, but the one ahead promises adventures of another flavour and depth. i am anxious, yes, but the good kind of anxious that gives me inspiration each morning, and makes very clear as to why it is that i get up every morning.

clearly, i do not get up to eat. on the way back from my walk, recycling center and grocery parade, i met somebody whom i had not seen in ages. she said something about me needing to eat, i look very thin. i do not feel very thin, and in comparison to one year ago, i have a couple more kilos. i am however lean, and between my muscles and my skin there is indeed not much of a fat layer.

i am as i am!

anyhow, what time is it in tokyo?

or the colour of dissonance

yesterday something strange hit me in the morning and i found myself wearing two mismatching jumpers and a pair of old blue jeans discarded by my son many moons ago. i just could not not wear those two jumpers. one is mustard colour and it has light and dark blue plaid and the other is khaki green. the khaki green and the mustard just dissonated in all tones. this is how i arrived at the dojo for morning aikido practice. morning practice yesterday was a catastrophe. so much so, that the fact that we were almost all slightly off, is not even a consolation. shomein uchi nikyo? you must have been kidding! i could have given you kote gashi or shio nage, but nikyo was temporarily not available (it reminded me of what happens when a server goes down and a service is not available). i do not know if my particular bent for such jumper colours had any influence in my body's ability and aptitude in aikido techniques, but what is certain was that i was fully absent at one point and caught myself thinking of the analogy of learning aikido with the subject of a new project that i just started last week and that will be absorbing me until the end of the year. i was thinking of potentially paid work while on the tatami. i was thinking of the work, and i was thinking of money. i was thinking? oops! yes that project involves looking at some data from japan, but really... it is far far removed from anything martial or anything fictional.

then this morning under the shower i found myself having some strange ideas. i recalled a conversation that repeated itself twice this weekend, the matter of what language is my mother tongue. i do not take well to inquiries into my mother tongue. it ends up being a rather long story and most people end up much too fascinated by it, and that to me is uncomfortable. i like comfort, and english is my primary language, and no, i was not born in an english speaking country, and the rest is history. so when on saturday and then again on sunday somebody started the conversation, i warned them that they did not want to get into it, it would get complicated. well, it was not my concern for their ability to follow a somewhat errant life that preoccupied me, it is just that i remain intensely private, and i really do not necessarily care, or am uncomfortable with revealing all the facts of why my language history developed the way it did.

so this morning i am holding one of this long shower-monologues and saying to myself that it is not easy to be myself. then i caught it! being myself is the easiest thing in the world, it takes absolutely no effort what so ever. no effort! yes, being me, takes no effort what so ever. then i got back to thinking of the catastrophic training yesterday that had me on the verge of tears at one point. when this one aikidoka complained about my ukemi - still nikyo - and i was more than mildly irritated by my own contention that it was this tori's technique that sucked, not my ukemi, then i felt that there was something that i was not getting. it really can not matter how good or bad his or her technique are, if i am attacking and taking ukemi properly, that is, without falling apart at the seams or separating like mayonnaise, then if he or she is complaining, what does that mean? in a morning when training was going so catastrophically, it is amazing to discover how much was happening that was precious and brilliant. by the next round it was i who was tori and sensei uke, and i got to feel how my own technique was full of holes and got hit several times in a way that that our sensei is rather good at: mercilessly and ruthlessly with all the love in the world. come to think of it, such catastrophic and dissonant days are precious indeed, there is much to learn, if one is thirsty for the lessons.

but what time is it in tokyo, really?

i had a fantastic weekend in france! i was in the city where some of my dreams began when i was barely fourteen...

confusion and simplicity

so, what is going on? what is it like, when all seems effortless?

where was i when i stopped posting here on a more regular basis?

i think that i was at the same place that i am now. the thing is that the earth keeps on spinning on its axis and flirting with the sun on its orbit, and somehow in the meantime pluto has been reclassified as a dwarf planet. pluto is unperturbed by all this commotion and reclassification, and so am i.

i have been traveling a bit much since april, or at least that is how i have chosen to call it. i feel a certain restlessness when i do leave on a trip. i like returning home, and it seems that i need a bit of time to settle back, but then i get restless about the settlement process, and it takes a while until i find my groove. i am starting to suspect that i have no groove at all.

summer was much too passionate for the monk whom i am. in one week i found myself between three men, and somehow this was a picture that did not fit my self-image. it turned into some exercise of figuring out who is the whore in all of this, and who is the fucking therapist, and i was much too relieved that i was blessed by the professional help of my own therapist, an experienced professor of medicine.

to me psychotherapy is working when i can laugh out loud in the therapist's office about this amusing and adventuresome construct that i call my life. lately there has been a lot to laugh out loud about.

when yesterday i became fascinated by a few bits of jammed plastic joined by a few screws and their owner expressed his potential gratitude by promising not to marry me, i was most amused. finally i could smile like the cheshire cat. i would have loved to take the whole thing apart, unscrew it, find the source of the malfunction, and repair it. however there was a train to catch, and the gadget was as insignificant as my own life. i like the perspective that looking at the whole of this existence from the reference point of a few pieces of plastic offers.

the attentive reader will catch on on what has changed in my blog writing, the insider will conjecture as to the why, the rest know or guess, that i am exercising the tools of the mystery writer. i always said that mystery writing is not my genre. could it be that i was lying, or was it just plain ignorance? did i forget what i said? was it science-fiction that i said that i would never write?

i had a very fabulous weekend, a total luxury: aikido, excellent company, a lot of behaviour to observe, good interiors, restful nights crowded with strange dreams, and a few moments that i would not have wanted to miss. however i could have done without the intestinal indisposition. before leaving for this weekend for the few hundred kilometers by train, i was about to call it off... had it not been that up to one week prior to departure i had said that i was going, and then a colleague bought me the ticket and by wednesday last week, the whole was a bit on the very committed side. now, was the hesitation real, or just a certain fear or letting life happen and flow?

we arrived at the destination, we all got our three protocol swiss kisses, and i delighted in a the details of the ritual and in one case, in the scent of after-shave. i do get weak knees when i smell a good men's perfume, so much so that i have taken to wearing men's perfume myself. it is so simple, i like men's perfumes and i prefer to separate the perfume from the man. while the perfume can be changed, the man usually stays the same, even when he grows, develops and matures.

am i being seditious? am i trying to provoke? hardly. i like what i like.

i am not used to attention. i thought that we all crave attention, and in particular it seemed to me that i had been looking for it all my life. then in the course of the past few months something changed. i have had more attention than i could imagine possible. here i am seeing my dream getting attention, and i am thinking it is me who is getting attention. no, it is my work, the expression of what is mine. that is the expression of that which is mine and yours, that which we share, sharing life, that is.

"more often than not i can not tell where one being begins and the other ends, and perhaps that is what it means to touch someone"

within the past few months confusion has given was to clarity and simplicity like a morning fog that dissolves in the sun... yet now the days are getting shorter, autumn is here, it is november.

in may of this year, on my second trip out of the local garage, it dawned on me, i have no choice other than to live my dream.

the trouble with us

first let's be clear who that us is. it is you and me, it is us or how we relate to each other as humans. the trouble is that we are animals, and we are the kind of animal that does not want to be one. in short, the human condition is about being an animal, and wanting to escape it.

what leads me to such brash, rash and abrupt conclusions?

in the absence of some form of relating there may be you and i, but there is no us. so it was that a week ago i sat next to a man and he proceeded to behave in a way that i would call oscillatory. he went from deep personal confessions to bad jokes within a short period of time, and then back to the deeply personal and intimate, and so on. now this man is wonderful in my eyes exactly because he exhibits such behaviour that makes his doubts palpable and his fragility evident. other than oscillatory, he behaves like the prototype macho. he seems very real to me, and he feels very far from the idealized utopic view of what a man ought to be; and he struggles with his ego and whatever will and drive he has. he remains animal and he keeps on censoring the animal as though that animal had no right to exist. this is how i chose to describe this man's fragility.

take for instance his smoking. he says that smoking is not a good habit, yet he confesses to not being able to stop. i get that, i certainly get that he feels like he can not stop smoking. i also sense that he is making some progress in coming to terms with his own limitations, he has stopped counting how many cigarettes he smokes in a day. this knowing and not acting according to the knowledge is the kind of behaviour that i find in many around me, and certainly one that i know well enough from my own experience. i know what i ought to do, i feel a craving, ignore the good intentions, and do give in to the craving that the animal whom i am commands upon my rational illusions. but not always, not on all of life's little issues. the animal is simple, and the animal is not linear.

last night my son gave me the key for what i was looking for. i had been thinking about self-confidence, however he pointed me to self-esteem. yes, they are not the same. one being can have loads of self-confidence and zero self-esteem and the result is the animal being out of control. the animal me that is, not necessarly the man. that man from last week is one whom i admire and one that has me being grateful that he ever showed up in my life. he showed up at the right time, with the right attitude. it has taken me years to see him a bit better for who he is. my delay residing in the fact that he seems so much like me, that i end up hardly ever being able to distinguish between what is his and what is mine.

i remember that when i first became aware of his interest in me, i could only feel the attraction that admiration catalyses. i felt that and i felt my own confusion about being attracted to the man and at the same time seeing a father figure in him. at that time when this had happened i had not yet gone through deep psychothereapy and i had a few unresolved conflicts floating around in my mind gnawing at the very essence of my being and paralyzing any expression of what is mine. the idea of engaging in sexual interplay with a man whom i saw as the father that mine was not, was at best disconcerting, it was incest. impossible was the overwhelming feeling of the whole encounter and our interactions that followed, totally impossible. my immediate reaction was to send him a letter in which the tenor was that he was to keep away from me. imagine desiring him, and imagine not being able to imagine anything more than to be held in his arms as though we were both asexual. for months, years, i censored my desire for him, i wanted him to be my missing father. the psyche had censored the animal, and reason was beyond hope then.

then we fast forward to last week and his admissions of his own daughter's sexual advances towards him. at that point i felt like i had fallen victim to my own fiction, and that my madness was the only reality keeping me sane. within seconds i had a whole tempest of feelings back on my lap, and i had invited none of it. we were sitting next to each other, and my immediate thought was how very much i did desire him, and how good it would be to forget all social convention, pierce through all the barriers, and experience the complete sexual beings that we are with all our weaknesses and strengths. yet, i did nothing and said even less. i offered good, reasonable, sound counseling. the coward whom i am, retreated, my animal's cravings for his body were censored and discarded.

the day after this rather intimate and personal exchange there were a few moments when we could have met, we both were in the same building, however between the many floors and the crowds, neither made much of an effort. the next day we exchanged emails and i returned to being my very intellectual mask, a real mask as effective as a man's macho mask, and once more the animal got to take a back seat to that very much in command intellect.

it could be that one of these days one of us will be foolish enough to grab the other, and just let the natural animal satisfy its cravings away from psychology and concepts of propriety. it could also be that nothing ever happens, and that we are left with the assurance of the knowledge that nothing outside ourselves can cause any trouble.

tell me, why do you write?

above all i write for myself, because i need to communicate, and because often when the time would have been right, i can not find the words. i call this writing, fiction. yet, the fiction of this life of mine is based on my experiences and on that which i feel, whatever random and associative thoughts meander through my mind that find their way to my fingertips. the whole of the fluage blog is special to me as it is the one that is dedicated and above all inspired by my most adored muses.

last week one of these muses and i spent the whole of sunday evening together with a group of other aikidokas. those few lines i thought that i had forgotten were inspired by that evening and our interactions which i fail to understand. i feel that i have no way of reaching the man, and all that i have access to is the muse: he inspires me. i am aware that the man is far from perfect, but then humans are only perfect when they are not perfect. it is exactly his fragility, weakness, sincerity and so very human condition that inspire me.

i write for myself and my very selfish need to share life as it happens.