30 November 1998: Collage

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Over my desk (at home) hangs a collage of cards (I have another at work). I made it when I moved into this apartment and didn't have a paneled wall to hide and to ruin. The frame is perhaps 2x1.5 feet, so I had to select its inhabitants ruthlessly; in the tenement, I put as many square feet of cards as there were square feet of paneling.

So: the inhabitants:

The cover of Tea for the Tillerman is in the upper left corner. When I bought Tea for the Tillerman on disk, CDs were still being sold in long cardboard boxes with the jewel case inside. The length of the box was meant to deter shoplifters, I guess. Not only is Tillerman a great album, with one of my favorite songs on it ("Sad Lisa," natch), it also reminds me of befriending SEB. Going through her albums in her dorm room, I spotted Tillerman, not because I had ever heard of Cat Stevens but because I recognized the cover: "This album cover is on my middle school wall!" And indeed students had painted it on the cafeteria wall, years ago when the building contained the senior high school grades as well the junior and when the album was first released. I always wondered what it meant. Now I knew. Tea for the Tillerman has always been special not only for its music, not only for "Sad Lisa," but also because it gave me a happier association to make with middle school. I needed one.

Next is a postcard CLH sent me from France with an analysis of a French version of my name, Lise. I prefer to think this is rhymes with "please" rather than "lease," since I do not respond to anyone calling me "Lis." My animal is the hedgehog and my flower the valerian.

Indpendante, tu n'aimes pas les conseils et n'en fais jamais qu' ta tte.
Franche, courageuse, tu dis toujours ce que tu penses. L'adversit ne t'effraie pas.
Tout comme le brisson, ton animal-totem, tu es arme pour te dfendre, et tu n'hsites pas te mettre en boule!
Extrieurement un peu froide, on dcouvre, te connatre, des trsors de tendresse.
La valriane aux proprits calmantes est ton rgtal: tu apportes aux gens que tu aimes douceur et rconfort.
Ta fte, Lise, est le 17 Novembre.

Independent, you don't care for the advice of others and follow only your own ideas.
Honest, courageous, you always say what you think. Adversity does not frighten you.
Always like the hedgehog, your "animal-totem," you are ready to defend yourself and don't hesitate to go into action.
Outside a bit cold, one discovers with knowing you, the abundance of your tenderness.
The valerian with calming properties is your palnt, you bring to the people you love sweetness and comfort.
Your holiday, Lisa, is 17 November.

I guess St. Lise was born or martyred or canonized on 17 November. Who knows.

Then a card from PSA that I think marks his departure from the Impressionist and Georgia O'Keefe reproductions he sent me for years. They're lyrics (I think) by Joan Baez; I don't know the song:

 

You are amazing grace.
You are a precious jewel.
You--special, miraculous,
unrepeatable,
Fragile, fearful, tender, lost.
Sparkling ruby emerald
jewel rainbow
Splendor person.

 

Then a card CLH gave me when I got married: If there was alrady a path it would have to be someone else's; the whole point is to find your own way. --Joseph Campbell

Another card from CLH begins the second row: If you asked me what I came in this world to, I will tell you: I came to live out loud. --Emile Zola

Then a bookmark I nabbed from a beautiful library my friend MRC built for his parents:

 

If you cannot read all your books
at any rate handle them,
or as it were, fondle them --
peer into them, let them fall open where they will,
read from the first sentence that arrests the eye,
set them back on the shelves with your own hands,
arrange them on your own plan so that
if you do not know what is in them,
at least you know where they are.
Let them be your friends;
let them at any rate be your acquaintances.
--Winston Churchill

 

And a Georgia O'Keefe from PSA, Light Iris, and a card from RDC of a duckling lying at the end of a plank, contemplating a basin of water below

Next row begins with a Van Gogh Sunflowers that was RRP's farewell card, a card that therefore never hung in the Connecticut tenement but that I wanted close by in Colorado. Then an image of a tattooed Peter Gabriel from his Explora 1.

Then a card with a complex history. In late elementary school I gave a birthday card to a classmate, which I regretted letting pass out of my hands because I thought it so charming and lovely. That I remembered the card for ten years, not just the incident of my reluctant gift-giving, indicates the chord its image struck in me. It features a small mouse in a blue cloak and clutching a wrapped present, looking rather like Mrs. Frisby, in the basket of a balloon. The balloon, however, is not just a regular balloon but a multitude of small white balloons, each painted with a different flower. A flock of robins hold ribbons in their beaks to direct her travel over patchwork country. Ten years later, a junior in college, browsing in a funky little gift shop, I saw that card. Now I was shopping for NCS, whom I continued not to break up with. Whom I didn't love, but whom I stayed with. Who was a skilled manipulator and who held me in a clenched gauntlet of guilt. Whom I now bought this card to go with his gift. The gift I forget, but the occasion of its giving I do not. We were in my single and I gave him the present. Unlike anyone else over the age of 12 I have ever known, NCS ignored the card and ripped into the present first.

This was so typical of him, this greed for material offerings to prove affection. Our first Christmas together came eight months into our relationship. My friend DEDB knitted me a lovely scarf in a complex stitch and when she gave it to me, she included NCS in the giving telling us we had to share this present. Instead of tact or gratitude or both, NCS pouted, highly offended. "But I'm allergic to wool," he whined, as if this defect of his were her fault, something she should have known about, taken care to respect, and gifted him accordingly. Now, on the occasion of his birthday, with the card that meant so much to me whose significance I was going to explain to him to demonstrate that I was still trying to sacrifice to him, I was less than three months from breaking up with him. I had tried to love him, tried to believe his truth, that his need justified my attention, but increasingly I realized I could not, would not, on his train, could not, would not, in his rain. After his gift-grabbing, I, not he, cleared away the wrapping. Perhaps if he had cleaned up his own mess, he would have tardily noticed the card, but he never did clean up after himself. Angry now at his grabbiness, his immaturity, and his lack of personal responsibility, I claimed the card for my own, a talisman of something meaningful to me that he had not respected and therefore had no right to.

Soon after HAO got here on Thanksgiving, RDC was cooking and listening to Fleetwood Mac's reunion concert, The Dance, and she and I were sitting on the bed talking. Just a couple of weeks before, I had rearranged the collage and I asked, pointing, if I had ever told her the story of this card, then did so.

"So the card in the collage," Hao asked, "that's the actual one you gave him that he never opened?"
"Yup."
She giggled.

Quite a while later, now in the kitchen, I said, "Oh, by the way, the reason I thought to tell you about that NCS card..." (whereupon she fell over holding her stomach: I always wrap up my tangents, even if it takes hours, and the time lags amuse her) "...is that we were listening to Fleetwood Mac earlier." And that was supposedly to clarify the path of my thought? "Because for his birthday the year before, I'd copied out the lyrics of 'Songbird' on his card, which he did open but didn't bother to read--because he was going for the present."

The next card recalls another ex-boyfriend, with happier associations. SSP's family owned a cottage in northwestern Connecticut that had always been his sacred place, like NSF for me. He found a card with an impressionist image of a woman in Edwardian garb sitting on a porch overlooking a lake surrounded by foothills and this he gave to me. Of course he was pleased that the picture evoked his sanctuary for me also. After we broke up, I once wondered if he regretted giving that card to me as I had giving my special one to NCS. I didn't worry about it though. I never denied being selfish myself. I keep the card I gave NCS because it has earned its place through its artwork and because it's a token of an emotional milestone. I rescued the card, as I did myself, from NCS's selfishness and neglect. I keep the card SSP gave me because its image of his sanctuary reminds me of my own.

The last row begins with a treasure. I treasure any correspondence from my grandmother, but seldom do I find it aesthetically appealing. She favors kitties and kitsch. One year's Christmas card stands out though and this I display. A realisticly rendered mother cougar in profile, eyes closed, head bowed, her two cubs looking over her shoulder, with a simple caption: "Peace."

Next, a card PSA sent me from Kyoto, a lovely rice paper fold with a minimally rendered image of two cranes wading among reeds.

Then a card from DEDB of a woman dancing. She is skirted in flowers and strewing other blossoms. She looks rather like a goddess.

The last card is another from RDC. On our second wedding anniversary, I had just finished listening to Moby-Dick. RDC gave me a card with a photograph of the tail of a sounding whale, in honor of its being two years since we turned flukes together, legally speaking.

 

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Last modified 12 December 1998

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