So I've been reading Jung. I admit it. It sounds kinda
highbrow, but hear me out: my therapist and my 'groups' keep offering me all
these readings with easy-peasy titles like "He Loves You, He Loves You
Not". Seemingly facile ideology from the pop-culture phenom craze of my
parents' generation. Truth is: a lot of these tomes are actually steeped in
good, literate, intelligent psychology and not so psycho-babble spirituality,
drawing from Jung and The Upanishads and Buddhism and Yoga and Melodie Beattie
and AA and loads of philosophy. So there's worth in the paperbacks I'm given.
But this morning, as I sat in my sanctuary (cause a girl's gotta create a sanctuary
and mine is my porch with chimes and hanging plants and comfy 1/2 price off
Target club chair deck furniture from off-season, and my $50 vintage find of an
antique plant rack with my herbs and begonias and violets and petunias, an old
fake-persian rug where my dog June will lay spread in front of me, facing
Fatherland, with my greeneries of Cardinals and Robins, songbirds and crows...)
reading, meditating, journalling, I decided to read some Carl Jung and went
directly to the back of the collected works, to "Marriage as a
Psychological Relationship" and was schooled, maybe a bit too early, the
coffee hadn't settled in. But it got me to thinking about Princes and
Princesses and taffeta gown and trumpets. And soul mates.
I remember the last big 'Royal Wedding'. I'd been grounded
severely. My whole family had gone off on vacation somewhere. A beach,
probably. Who knows. But I was grounded. Probably for insubordination. That's
what it always was with me. I fought the law. The law always won. But I kept fighting.
Usually I was talking back ("sassing" they called it) to some moronic
elder with a playground sense of justice. I'd call out the injustice. I'd get
cut down by "you shouldn't talk back to adults" and I'd counter with
"if the adult had something to Say..." and of course, I'd get
punished. Truth be told: nine times out of ten I was right. But who likes a
smart-ass 8 year old? So I'd get the punishment. This time: I was sent to my
cousin's house. My mother's cousin. My godmother Mary Ellen. Now, Mary Ellen's
house was no punishment. Mary Ellen and her husband John were the coolest.
Washington insiders, they were intellects, and later I'd find out that, at
least John, was the sole liberal (amongst myself) in my extended family. So I
could talk to them. And in their house: Reason ruled. So there was debate about
Right and Wrong. And I loved my cousins, Mary Ellen was like my Aunt, but my
favorite Aunt. My Mom's childhood best friend. And her husband John was smart
as shit and funny as Robin Williams and really really liked me. Made me feel
like I belonged and cared. He was like the coolest Uncle ever. He was like a
college professor, smoked a pipe, drank scotch, wore suede padded tweed
jackets. Knew the President. And their kids, my 3rd cousins, were awesome. All
Irish red and freckles.
So on that weekend, I was grounded, I remember being woken
up at like 5am or something, coffee being served and we all parked ourselves in
front of the television (no cable at this point in the 80's, just rabbit ears).
And I remember the dress: the pooofy sleeves, the red of the carpet. She was
ordinary. I loved it. I had her haircut. Bangs and short hair. Brown in a
really dirty water way. She was nothing special and that's what made her
gorgeous to me. An ordinary girl. Like me. And she was a princess. He was
nothing special. Who really cared anyway about Prince Charles. It was Diana we
all wanted to be. To be like. To be.
My sister got married in 1997 and the after party of the
wedding was at our hometown's Sheraton bar and I was sitting in the booth with
one of the red-haired freckled cousins, my brothers and my soon-to-be-husband
and the news came on that Princess Diana had died in a car accident. The shag
carpeting of my Virginia cousins' house where I watched her wedding came back
and I felt sad for time passing and sad for a life, a waste really of time and
so much, gone in a tunnel chase. I missed that girl with the brown hair and the
bangs. I'd stopped caring once she became a glamour queen.
So to tomorrow's wedding. I won't wake early. If I had a
daughter, I'd probably not wake her. Fairy tales are nice, but they can screw
you up. Jung wrote his essay, which reads like empirical truth, on the wake of
a late life affair with a younger woman. Of course he wanted to break apart the
'myth' of the Soul Mate. Its best to read the Greats with knowledge of where
they were coming from in their personal lives. Sometimes Great Insight is
really just the rantings of a pissed off lover dumped.
So I may not watch the wedding and certainly my belief in
fairy kingdoms and castles is long gone. As is my belief in the 'soul mate'.
That was a sad one to let go, and I don't mind admitting that. We all make our
choices and we find ourselves in lives we didn't expect or anticipate or plan for,
but here we are nonetheless, and there's no use in building sand castles. All
kingdoms crumble. Its for the best and doesn't have to be a nihilistic argument
for not caring and not trying. But if we know that really, under the poof and
taffetta, there's just two people who survived a few breakups and getting back
together, two ordinary people with some money who will do their best. And
that's enough right? We do our best, knowing our own flaws, our own misguided
beliefs in false fairytales, but also, knowing the wanting those myths to be
true guides our poetry.
Oh hell. I'll put the coffee on early...
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