“…. A mixed-race body moving through homogenous spaces often inspires attempts at conversations of classification…The films provide no neatly packaged conclusion for the continued ambiguities of their heroines’ hybrid existences—girl or wolf? girl or spirit? girl or crone? The viewer and the heroines themselves might never know, and perhaps they aren’t meant to. Perhaps, in never giving them the full-circle homecoming, Miyazaki is telling us something important about bodies in flux: There is no easy answer to be had; only the conflict, the question, and the transformation it offers. The space between the person one is and the person one is becoming is where the reckoning of self happens. It is where we write our stories, where we recognize the complexity and turmoil of moving through this world in a body flawed and pressed upon by politic and expectation. Though it may not be the home we started in, our bodies become the homes we inhabit.”
In the fitfull night a dream comes on like an ominous cloud billowing into the frame. It gives birth to a creature made of downed power lines. It writhes and arches. It emits deadly electrical sparks. The storm follows closely. The wind howls. The landscape darkens. The dreamer flees on foot, but there will be no shelter.
The dreamer clutches her side as a bulge in her abdomen grows, slowly splitting the muscle, it’s hot and angry to the touch. A hernia or some internal wound, a malignant force squeezing truth from the inner linings of her being, that is what she guesses.
Is this what the interpreter of such events would say?
She stumbles through this hellscape. Help is what she seeks. Medical attention. An explanation.
Does she know she sleeps?
In an odd twist everything she thinks comes to fruition. Still there is no power. No control of lucidity. Even if the thought is absurd and accidental the consequences are swift. Someone falls from a great height. Another loses their tongue when it slides out of their mouth and onto the floor.
She thinks it, it happens. She tries to clear her mind. A house explodes. She tries to picture sunshine and rainbows. A solar flare destroys several satellites that rain down upon Earth.
What is the dreamer to do but wake up haunted?
She asks me what it means the next morning over a cup of coffee.
I have no answers.
She tells me it’s made her superstitious. That she thinks she should see a dr and get checked out, maybe her appendix is about to act up, and maybe it’s time to re-evaluate her life.
“If that is what it takes, maybe this is your wake up call.”
I’m no sage, psychoanalyst, or subconscious shaman. But I can’t imagine any of these scenarios are the signs of a healthy psyche.
I think about a shirt I saw on her the other day and wonder about life’s twists and turns, twilight zone pockets of irony, with its Jinn like qualities, “Dream it, be it.”
How innocent a phrase.
So innocuous without context.
Yet no life, waking or otherwise, is without attachment to people, places, things, and meanings.
I wish my friend well. That her stomach doesn’t actually swell and her guts stay nestled behind toned and muscled walls. That she thinks before she speaks as we all should and that she sleep a little easier tonight.
Scratch that. This one. Plus Lance said he’d come along when I said I was cruising old songs to sing for the next go round.
“But I don’t want a boss…”
The title of my next song.
Told a younger friend about another old friend with high anxiety. Technically I was his boss a long time ago? Idk, it felt like we tried to work more as equals. It was hard because his anxiety made him question and feel weird about a lot of things, esp major life changes, but we did work well for a time. And I think of him fondly even tho there were times I just couldn’t relate to how stressed he felt about his life. Sometimes I wonder if I could have been a better friend in those times where he was in a not great place mentally and emotionally.
Ironically, I guess, I shirked away from the mother of my current employer. She embraced me when we first met and said she was so happy to hear of me and that she was thankful for the work I do. But I was frozen and like, “You probably, no, you actually did, because who are we kidding, voted for Trump and all manner of similar cronies, so don’t touch me. You keep it to yourself and respect my boundaries.” Maybe she sensed it instantly or maybe it nagged at her concious later, but she’s never tried to hug me after that.
This also reminds me of the man who was about to mansplain the fine art of running an indie art organization and then dropped his beer and with it the subject not one complete sentence into his spiel. I will admit I felt myself become prickly right at the launch of his story. Who knows if that read as annoyance. Maybe he was just clumsy. He did feel frail to me when we hugged goodbye. I don’t dislike him. Ironically.
