Pocket knives and female Cardinals
I talked in english today about the pocket knife and the rocks. We were comparing Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, and as we sat, staring motionless at the two columns on the dry erase board, my english teacher swerved and demanded of us "Why do you always compare and contrast? Why do authors set up opposing characters in a novel? Why do we always ask you to look at characters like this?"
I like epiphanies, and I like to think they happen to me with some sort of regularity. Much of my life, though, I've been intimidated in a class, or afraid to shout out or speak up when I'm hit with inspiration. It felt like a flash today, and I stumbled and hurried to get the words out of my mouth. To make sure that they really were there, after all.
"It's so the characters can be put in perspective." I stopped, mumbled, strained for an example, a metaphor, a way to say what I saw in my head. In my head, I saw my father's geology books. "My father's geology books have pictures of rocks, and next to every rock is a pocket knife for scale. So you know how large the rock is." The class laughed, and I realized I wasn't making any sense. At least I spoke up.
I see it in my head, though. How can you tell that Huck is a compassionate character without seeing what a person without a sense of consequence? How can you see Huck's maturity without seeing an example of immaturity - Tom. How can you gauge these things without an opposing character?
They aren't opposed, though. They're to bounce off each other, like a mirror. Tom is a pocketknife by which Huck is measured, and the whole novel is a photograph of the scene. Ah, geology.
One of the things I've noticed as I've grown up is how often I'm wrong. That might seem like such a bleeding obvious statement, but that's the point! And really, it's not so much that I'm wrong but that I've misjudged the severity of a situation. I've thought that it's better or worse than it really is because of a lack of experience. Lack of a pocket knife by which to compare.
I guess I shouldn't expect there to be easy, set in stone standards by which to live my life. There aren't pocket knives. Well, if there are I haven't found any. Every thing I do puts every thing else in a different perspective, and as I keep doing things and living keeps changing the standards of grief and happiness and every other emotion.
I sit here, and laugh at myself in my sophomore year. My sophomore year I thought I was buckling under the pressure. It's when I started going to therapy, and I might've been slightly depressed. But it was nothing compared to how I've been this year. I laugh "Oh, you silly girl. How little you knew, and how desperate you thought you were." But it will only be a matter of time before I laugh at myself. There will be times in my future where I'll be dying of depression, where I'll be dying of grief, or dying of pressure.
(or pleasure, or happiness, or lightness. It works both ways.)
One of these days, I want to have a sense that my life is in moderation. True to scale, and makes sense. I'm tired of these extremes. I'm tired of being out of balance.
---
Sometimes I write something off-hand and don't realize it's significance until later on. I wrote a paper about The Tombs of Atuan and Jungian psychology. I talked about the labyrinth as a motif, and the subconscious, and the unconscious. At the end of the paper, I talked about myself. I do this often.
"Like Tenar (the female protagonist of Tombs) I prowl the labyrinth within me and yearn for wholeness." I wrote that. I wrote that to fill space - to fill the six pages I had to write. I wrote that to get the paper over.
Maybe I wrote that because I really mean it - deep down - and just haven't realized yet. Maybe I'm just prowling a labyrinth right now.
---
I tramped through the snow to feed the birds. Sunflower seed fell over my hair and down my shirt, and I huffed and my arms and face turned red with the cold. I filled all the feeders, and turned around to head back inside.
I wanted to take a picture of the back yard, but it would only diminish the beauty of it all. It was three layers - the grey blue and salmon pink sky and the blazing white snow, and the messy but elegant layer of brown trees gangling in between. It was heart wrenching. It was cold, though, and I tramped through the crusted layers of ice and snow back into the house.
I twirl and dance when I'm alone in our house. I turn on the lamps and turn on the heat, and whirl about the living room. There's a large glass window - a wall of glass - and I stopped dancing. A bird, a female Cardinal, huddled in the snow. She had hit the glass. She was breathing; she was fluttering slightly.
I called my father. "There's a bird outside the window - it hit the window. There's a bird outside." "Is it sitting up," he said.
"Yes, and I think she's alive."
"Call your uncle." My uncle and aunt are ornithologists.
It warms me over to play the saviour of life. It's exciting, and I wonder if I should be this excited. I get to be a good person, for once. I get to heal, I get to help, I get to save a life. Maybe I'm excited for the wrong reasons. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself - I haven't saved this life yet.
I called my uncle, and he said "They bite." But he gave me advice on bringing the bird inside so it could recover - "Keep the cat away; put the bird in a box; give it a few hours and if it hasn't started flapping about it's probably not going to make it." I hunted for a shoebox, (our family must not buy shoes) and had to empty the Myrgyryt Goth Chick Kit to use as a box for the Cardinal.
A woman with a mission; I marched out to the bird armed with my shoebox. "What if it's dead?" I thought. "I don't want to touch it if it's dead. I don't touch dead things." I peered at her eyes. I couldn't see a reflection. Tiny eyes. The snow was piled around the bird, but I mustered couraged and picked her up. She didn't bite, but she was alive. She was warm and she was she was soft. Her belly was a mess of brown and red feathers. I almost started to cry - it was beautiful. There was more salmon and grey in the sky than blue by now.
The cardinal is sitting in a shoebox on my dining room table. I want her to live desperately. If she can't fly, she probably won't live. Even though I know I've done everything I can, I want her to live.
2000-01-28, The female cardinal and the pocket knife.
before / after archives / website / hello book / diaryland