Homework #1 What the move meant to me
keep n. an important part of your personality that others seldom see – a secret flaw, a hidden talent, trauma that never comes up, dreams you never mention – that remains a vital part of who you are even if nobody knows it’s there, like the sprawling archives in the attics of museums, packed with works far too priceless to risk being displayed for the public.
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My Back Pages by Bob Dylan
“We’ll meet on edges, soon,” said I
Proud 'neath heated brow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
Tough Mama by Bob Dylan
Dark beauty
Meet me at the border late tonight.
Idiot Wind by Bob Dylan
I kissed goodbye the howling beast
On the borderline which separated you from me
Like A Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan
How does it feel, ah how does it feel?
To be on your own, with no direction home
Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone
I and I by Bob Dylan
I and I
One said to the other, "No man sees my face and lives”
Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat) by Bob Dylan
I fought with my twin, that enemy within
Bob Dylan and others use the image of an edge or a border, to depict separation in their songs. This edge could be an image of two very different places or keeps, with someone standing on one side and someone standing firmly on the other. Or perhaps this border separates someone who lives on one side of the border from someone they long to meet on the other. Perhaps it’s someone who used to live on one side and is now stranded on the other, who aches to get back, return to that other time or place. Perhaps the two, standing on opposite sides of the line, each in their own keep, are actually the same person.
This border could be called a place of active transition, representing a movement between one location and another, as in moving house. In this sense it can be seen as movement from not just one physical space to another but from one psychological, emotional, or spiritual space to another. Some transitions might include all of these.
To bring this image home, I recall my sixth year, when our family moved house, I started school, and my life, from my sleeping arrangements to everything else in my childhood world, changed. The old, beloved place I moved away from was a simple house in the country on acres of land, with large gardens of vegetables, fruit, and flowers. The new place was a tiny, rented house in a village.
At the old house where I stayed at home with my mother, I explored and wandered freely all over the yard, fields, and gardens. I helped my mother with chores. I watered tender plants with a child-sized watering can and washed towels and handkerchiefs on my own small scrubbing board. During the winter I helped my mother carry stiff, frozen clothing in from the clothesline to defrost in front of the wood-burning kitchen stove. I carried snow in a syrup can and dumped it into the small reservoir attached to the stove. I descended to the cellar and brought up my mother’s home-canned yellow beans and peaches. As we sat in the kitchen and listened to the radio, my mother patched clothes or darned socks and I played quietly with my paper dolls. At night, summer or winter, I heard the train whistle saying good-night to me as it smoked along the nearby tracks.
In the village when I started school, I sat in a wooden desk, listened to the teacher, and learned everything I was taught. At home I played behind a smaller, fenced yard, and watched the vegetables grow in the small vegetable garden my mother tended alone. There was no cellar. I no longer helped my mother. She didn’t need my help.
From sleeping in my own snug bed in the old house, watching shadows on the ceiling and listening to the train whistle, I now had to share a fold-out bed in our living room with my big sister.
Playing alone but creating a happy world of imaginary friends and places was what I was used to. Now I had to learn new names and faces, play games other children played, try to learn all the new school rules, as well as other more obscure rules that I had to figure out for myself.
In my old home I felt lovable and important. In my new home and school, I felt ugly, awkward, incompetent, and useless.
This transition was both sudden and protracted. It was a period of saying good-bye to that other girl and becoming the new one. I wanted so much to go back, and in my daydreams I remembered the swing under the maple tree, the caragana bushes where I made salads for my dear invisible friends, and waited and waved from the garden gate at the CPR engineer in his grey striped cap and overalls who blew the train whistle and waved back at me each afternoon.
Now, I was chased home from school by bullies, was teased about my name, cried when children got strapped, and worried that I wouldn’t get 100% on my spelling tests. I looked at the two pretty girls, Adele and Elaine, and wished they would be my friends. I no longer liked food and grew so skinny that my eldest sister, coming home for a visit, hugged me close and sobbed when she saw me. I was no longer the little girl she had said good-bye to only two years before.
I locked the memories of that happy place away and brought them out when I needed them. I remembered my eldest sister playing her records on our gramophone, and I would hum the melodies, like the haunting “Hungarian Dance Number 5” and the song all about love from “Carmen” to steady me when I became anxious. They transported me to the sublime places I had gone to when listening to them in my old home.
Perhaps we all have a borderline between the mundane where we pass our days and a sublime world, as I sometimes think of these two places. I have since learned, as an adult, that Carl Jung explored places in human psyches. There is a hidden place he called the Shadow, where all that we repress gets stored. I sometimes wonder about my Shadow, and toy with the idea that besides a Shadow world, where the bad memories, the guilt, the fear, dominate, there is a third world, the Sublime world, where all the happiness is stored, but is only accessible in dreams or in imagination when we write or paint or dance.
There is a border line in my life, one that separates the beautiful, the free, the gentle, the safe, from the noisy, the angry, the troublesome. When I need to leave the dark and troubled side I move to the sunny side and find my other self again. I find the “me” I left in that wood frame house surrounded by gardens and fields, wide blue skies overhead on long summer days. I’m sitting in my red wagon at the top of the hill, holding tight to the handle, then rolling down the bumpy hill with screams of happiness, then pulling the wagon back up to the top and repeating the game, again and again.
Sometimes I’m surrounded by hills of pure white snow, building a snow fort with my big sister, the crunch of the snow under my boots and discovering the stickiness of snow as it clings to my woolen mittens.
At times I’m sailing forwards and back, pumping with all my strength, my hair flying ahead and then behind, with the scent of smoke rising to the clear blue sky. As I swing I watch my mother as she tends the pile of burning garden rubble, rake in hand, hair tied in a turban, standing strong and happy in the warm autumn sunshine.
And now the soft sound of trickling of water I can hear as it runs under frozen snow in spring. And the sound of chickadees chickadee-dee-dee-ing to me while choosing a home among the maples and the birch trees where they will build their future homes.
I left it all behind in 1951. I go there in my dreams.
Homework: write about a single space or place but with multiple or a few memories and seasons. Track what makes you move form one memory to another or space to another space. Said another way, after writing see if you can track or follow how you leapt form place to place or memory to memory and possibly weave that in, or just wonder about it for yourself.
All I can say is that I cross over between the two, or three, Keeps and compare them.
Amber Harvey