And when I read about Aslan (Chronicles of Narnia), and the cruelties inflicted on him in the name of love, I wept - a child's tears, to be sure, but I recognize in hindsight the same depth of unquenchable pain that I would feel over and over again throughout my life. Always alone, dying alone, no one there to comfort you, offer a helping hand, care. (I didn't clue into the whole religious aspect of the thing until much later in life, which was just as well - it would have ruined it for me, and I wouldn't have gotten what I so needed at the time, which was something that mirrored the sense of pain and futility that already suffused my young life.)I think everything is a metaphor for me because I grew up with books instead of parents. I mean, my parents physically existed; but mentally and emotionally? they were about as checked out as it's possible to be. And I mean that more in the Mother's Little Helper way of the Rolling Stones than any kind of 60's stoner thing. Meaning, they were some kind of painful cross between the classically distant suburban parents of the 40s and 50s and the hippies-who-morphed-into-self-absorbed-Boomers (but without the weird clothes, hairstyles and trippy drugs). They were less interesting than the adults in The Graduate, while still being equally painfully unavailable. And I thank somebody that I didn't have a Mommy Dearest or that dreadful, frightening caricature portrayed by Shirley MacLaine in Postcards from the Edge.
So if I seem to borrow a lot from movies and books, liberally salting my stories with aphorisms, it's because that's how I learned to think. My parents were simply not around, not available, and so I constructed my own parents, my own world view, like a patchwork doll, a scarecrow, building them piecemeal from the materials I had available.
And now in adulthood I'm trying to disassemble these clumsy stand-ins, cannibalize them for any still-usable parts, and discover how to live life the way a person might who'd actually had some kind of real emotional support while they were growing up. Mainly this seems to be a process of looking for models, of seeking some kind of mentorship (even at this ripe old age!)
I've almost stopped reading altogether, after a lifetime of voraciously consuming everything I could lay hands on. In the last 3 or 4 years, I've obsessively read and re-read and re-re-read everything Terry Pratchett has written, attempting to squeeze every last drop of juice from what I see as his pragmatic, realistic (if still disappointingly misogynist) approach to story-telling. He tells it like it is, no window dressing, and yet his characters get to have their fantasies too.
But now I've come to an end of that, books can no longer fill this lifetime-deep well of need for human connection. I must, at long last, approach the blinding light of the outer world and learn how to connect with other humans. Else I will starve, and no joking.
