Monday, December 29, 2008

A Glimmering Plain



Here's the last of the essay. Thanks so much for reading and all well wishes for my recovery! I'm going to start with new blog posts to usher in the new year. Hope everyone is well!

Every now and then I think about that dance class from years ago,
sitting on the floor, surrounded mostly by women and the one asswipe on the dance floor, twirling like a dervish to portray his death as a dolphin. I read an article once about how swimming with dolphins could help heal you from sexual abuse and assault. Something about the water and their beauty and empathy. I’ve never had an affinity for animals of any kind so I can’t say if it would have worked for me. My dance had been scheduled for the next day. I chose to go it alone and perform to a brief snippet of a jazz tune that Alice Coltrane had composed to honor her husband John. The room would fill with the music I would listen to as I wrote for many years to come. I did not know that then, of course. The future, once a glimmering plain, had become one foot in front of the other, the way it is for so many people, forty years in the desert looking for the promised land. I could not know that my mind would return to me after years of enemy occupation. What I did know is this: I clapped at the end like everyone else, not because I had enjoyed it, but because it was over.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?" Joan Didion

Cocktail Hour
Drinking memoir suggestion: Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street Michael Davis

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Monday!

8 comments:

laughingwolf said...

more prayers for your full recovery, michelle :)

Anonymous said...

I wish I could be a dolphin. Oh, well, it's over now.--Rod Marinelli

Scott said...

Michelle,

I really liked your essay. I'm glad you're starting to feel better.

Take care, and hope to see more writing from you soon...and if I don't 'talk' to you again before then, have a Happy New Year! :)

jodi said...

Beautiful continuation. Supposedly when you swim with the dolphins, they use their noses to massage your pain. How would they identify yours, Dolly? My guess is that you would recieve a full body dolphin massage. xo

Charles Gramlich said...

I often wonder whether the clapping at the end of many things is for it being over, or for what happened. I've clapped many times for things because I was glad they were over.

Anonymous said...

Wow, you're even more vain than I am!

the walking man said...

There is a theory espoused that says the Jews had to wander forty years so the entire generation that left Egypt would die in the desert. God didn't even want Moses to cross over and pollute the land with old attitudes born of living in a land of servitude.

The wandering and dieing are not the point, the point is that a new mind emerged from those days upon the sand.

Whitenoise said...

The seductive photos o'er top of the potent words... A spell indeed.

-Glad to hear that you're feeling better.