Some of you peeps may be lucky enough to remember
the bluechair: a place to read--a little webzine I fired up with my friend/web designer extraordinaire, Tom, and some other literary folk close to my heart nearly 10 years ago. Um, yeah, that was fun.
I lost a lot of the content when bluechair.net was deconstructed, but I was looking for an old set of digital letters tonight and I happened upon a folder with some bluechair content in it. I though you might enjoy this bit. It kind of makes me sad to think how unlike the NOW-ME it is, but it also motivates me to stop focusing on hausfrau-ness and make a little time for Jamie-ness. It reminds me of that old Innocence Mission song,
"I Remember Me." As in, "Oh, yeah, I used to think about stuff other than calendars, timers, stain removal, nutrition, recipes, budgeting, sanitizing, laundry, bedtime, checklists...huh? What was I saying?..." So travel back in time with me to 1999...(cue special effects, swirling spiral, me with the same bad choppy bob I have right now, driving Atticus the Galant around Tucson)
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My Law of Witnesses
["In the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established." 2 Corinthians 13:1:]
Witness"Did you see the moonrise?"
I ask the question hopefully,
As if your seeing it, too, makes it actual,
because I have decided to live my life by the law of witnesses.
Through the eyes of two or three kindred spirits
Shall all of my experiences be had,
shall all the searing sunsets
and the beautiful babies,
and periwinkle moonrises
and tender exchanges
and hot summer meteor showers
be observed.
To my right tonight
the full moon rose elegantly in the east
hovering in blue glory over my valley
while on my left the sun sunk
in orange fire and brimstone
behind roaring, toothy mountains
and I bolted northward to take it in
while my solitary soul longed for a witness.
-jamie, 1998
I have always savored being alone. Perhaps it's because solitude was a rare and precious thing for me, being the oldest of so many kids, having a brother 13 months younger, then twin sisters two years later, and so on.
Perhaps it was my twisted, pensive personality, obsessed even at age four with analyzing and finding causes for things (not exactly the most faithful little girl). I needed time to figure stuff out.
Whatever the reason, I loved being alone. When I first went away to college, I was thrilled with the peace and quiet and time for thought afforded me. Even with great roommates, I had lots of solitude. I lived in a small, beautiful town where it was safe and pleasant to take long walks. And boy, did I walk. My brain reeled and absorbed and pondered as I walked.
I began to have further adventures--road trips, hikes, library epiphanies-- and I wanted to share them. I would write essays and poems, and tell stories to friends and family. Some how, the magic was lost in the relay. Even with an expanding command of the language, with the rich English vocabulary at my disposal, I could not share all of my experiences. This began to be so frustrating, I found myself keeping the most amazing moments to myself, because I simply could not do them justice.
But this wasn't how I wanted to live. I am a social being-- I do not live only for myself, and I didn't want to keep having experiences I couldn't share.
There is a line in the movie
Say Anything, when Diane Court says to her dad, "If I can't share it with you, it's almost like it didn't happen." That pretty sums up how I'd begun to feel. I began to anticipate encounters with the amazing and beautiful, and I would seek out an appropriate witness for the occasion. Somebody who loved what I loved, who saw what I saw, was recruited to be my witness. Then we could recall the experience, knowing the other person understood even when words failed us. There would be an exchange of knowing nods and longing sighs, and the lookers-on could only wish they knew what we were sighing about.
I don't think this is such an odd thing, now that I'm a little older. At the time, of course, I thought there was something wrong with me, that my fierce independence was slipping into some sort of co-dependence. Now I see that it is a human need, a fairly common desire instilled by the divine. After all, if the grand design has us working in twos forever, why wouldn't I be moved to share things?
That's what
Witness is all about. I wrote it shortly after having read Milton's
Paradise Lost, which moved me in so many ways. One of the best things it did was to validate my desire for a witness. In
PL, Adam recounts his version of the creation to the angel Raphael (Book VIII, lines 351-451). Adam tells how the beauty and perfection of the garden were meaningless without someone to share them with, and God responds by creating Adam's "fit help":
"I nam'd them [the creatures] as they pass'd and understoodThir nature, with such knowledge God endu'dMy sudden apprehension: but in theseI found not what me thought I wanted still...how may IAdore thee, Author of this universe,And all this good to man, for whose well beingSo amply and with hands so liberalThou hast provided all things: but with meI see not who partakes. In solitudeWhat happiness, who can enjoy alone,Or all enjoying, what contentment find?...Among unequals, what societiesCan sort, what harmony or true delight?...[Then came] This answer from the gratious voice Divine,Thus far to try thee, Adam, I was pleas'dAnd find thee knowing not of beasts alone,Which thou hast rightly nam'd, but of thyself,Expressing well the spirit within thee free...I, e're thou spak'stKnew it not good for man to be alone,And no such companie as then thou saw'stIntended thee for trial onely brought,To see how thou couldst judge of fit and meet:What next I bring shall please thee, be assur'd,Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self,Thy wish exactly to thy heart's desire."I love how God calls Eve Adam's "other self." Later, Adam explains that between him and Eve, there is "unfeigned union of mind, or in us both one soul" (VIII: 603-604). Yeah, that sounds good to me. If Adam wanted it, I can want it, right?
There is a less romantic view to take of this whole witness thing, though: It is just more fun with two. Of course I still need solitude-- that pensive, analytical personality is still there. It's the little demon that has me reading in the slats of evening sun on my bed on a perfectly groovy Friday night when I should be living it up with my peers. It's the shady side of me that sits scribbling in a journal or pounding away at this keyboard at midnight. But I have found that companionship is a simple, common desire. Anne of Green Gables looked for "kindred spirits"-- so do I. So do most people. Experiences mean more when they're shared. Some experiences mean nothing if they aren't .
Annie Dillard once wrote an essay based on witnessing a total eclipse over Washington State. In this essay, she says of the moon's shadow:
"Seeing this black body was like seeing a mushroom cloud. The heart screeched. The meaning of the sight overwhelmed its fascination. It obliterated meaning itself. If you were to glance out one day and see a row of mushroom clouds rising on the horizon, you would know at once what you were seeing, remarkable as it was, was intrinsically not worth remarking. No use running to tell anyone. Significant as it was, it did not matter a whit. For what is significance? It is significance for people. No people, no significance. This is all I have to tell you."What I like about that is: "No people, no significance." To take it one step further, one person-- one witness-- without the words to convey the experience must simple keep it to himself, then it becomes a vague, inexpressible memory.
Yet another example of hoping for a witness:
"Did you get to see the blue wonder moon last night? Did you know it was a special one? Yep, not since 1915 have we had a blue moon in January, NO moon at all in February and then another blue moon in March. I was pretty excited about the whole thing, but last night was so mucky and cloudy that I just had to imagine that big singin' face up in the heavens. (For me, that moon man has always been singing.) I'd like to think that someone else got to enjoy the lunar beauty last night, and can share with me a little vicarious thrill." -georgia, 03.99
It means so much to "share...a little vicarious thrill." It's precious to have a witness who loves what you love, with whom you can share these natural thrills, first-hand or vicariously.I am thankful for the witnesses I have. Many of them write for this magazine, and we have seen many beautiful things together--those sunsets and beautiful babies and moonrises and meteor showers, and much more. I also anxiously await my
permanent witness who will share all those beautiful things, as well as the hard and ugly and painful things that make the beautiful things that much sweeter. Until then, I'll keep doing what I do: bolting northward to take it all in, and writing to share the vicarious thrill.
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Recycled blog...I'm so green.
