Christine’s sister and her brother, her classmates at St. Mary’s and most of the families she knew from the backward and insular plantation town of French origin, Natchitoches, Louisiana, prioritized  neatly laying down floorboards to give their feet a safe place to land. Christine intuited, early on, that there was no safe place. There was only being. And she delighted in it, delighted in all of the pieces, pain and pleasure, good and bad,  confetti commingling in the air, gracing one with possibilities.  She made a lot of people nervous, including her mother. She ignited passions and beliefs, for and against everything. For and against herself.

“You like to shock people” was something she commonly heard from those seeking to understand, but generally speaking from a vantage point of limited intellectual capacity, or limited willingness to use one’s intellectual capacity, an impairment common in the crippling South.

The shocking’s not the thing. It was her job. Her spiritual practice.  Nervous system mandates. Her tribe’s way. She reminded others, through her aliveness, of their own.  Some, who knew her well, stately flatly, people either love you or they hate you.

She didn’t hear it so much after having the three boys. Her desire for their acceptance toned her down a bit. That, and the enormous energy required to raise them completely on her own.

She thought she would be with Niall, their father, forever. Even in the furthest recesses of her mind, she was certain that if their marriage didn’t make it, he’d still be a very involved, supportive father. She, (who changed majors from pre-med, with a 3.8 at the end of her junior year, because of the deeply engrained concept that she wasn’t supposed to work,) found herself having to raise and support her children, without a father, in the home town where she was the first Little Miss Natchitoches. Where she endured 11 showers, 13 teas and 7 brunches during the year of engagement to her first husband, the landed gentry attorney whose grandfather was on the cover of Oil and gas journal.

If some one, a guide, had pointed out that Christine would never stay with one man, that her palm indicated a lifetime ordained to learning through men, about their jobs, interest, passions, beliefs, and that it would be futile to attempt commitment,  would she have been better off? Instead of job fairs or career counseling should there be a test, like skin galvanic response for sociopaths that tells one whether or not they are capable of staying, of accepting that yoke?

Christine asked for it, not the yoke, rather the growth that accompanied tossing the yoke, yes, she even asked for suffering or agreed to be willing to suffer in order to grow, in her Senior year at LSU in an Honors English Lit class. The cultural dissonance between all those wedding showers sipping pink fuzzies while amassing silver, crystal and china, and the role models and choices she was discovering in literature, was glaring. The fact that the 60’s and 70’s had transpired and had been experienced by most of the inhabitants of the civilized world, but the Old South continued waiting for Mr. Williamson in a Blanche Duboisesque fashion was too jarring to ignore.

“Just give me that ring” sorority girls, daughters of their time, told her every day, as she let them lift her hand, ogling the stone. She opened up an armoire filled with 12 of each stem Waterford made in her pattern for friends to admire, pre-nuptial prizes.  But at the same time a professor of 20th century lit was proffering a way out, through invaluable truths. They were lessons that shaped her as well as her understanding of the world. She crashed hard, perceptions shattering on the altar of dualistic ontology, thoughts and discourse birthed and developed through opposites.

Carson McCullers’ Ballad of the Sad Café launched the professor into a diatribe that reduced every relationship and everything to which one ascribes value  to the common denominator of “There is an inverse relationship between attainability and desireability.” . Ford Maddox Ford, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Wolfe, Thomas Mann, instructed her.  She studied Chogyam Trungpa’s Five Heaps of Ignorance, moving backwards through ego development to find the hard, bright kernel of Being. Vajrayana Buddhism and crazy wisdom was the first approach to religion/psychology/philosophy in which she found delight. Later in her Lecture Series, “Moving through Fear into a Jucier Life, she would connect the dots between  astute observations of physical markers of ego development in infants, with the five heaps of Ignorance. Trungpa says beings are born at one, knowing no separation from Source. An I-thou dualism develops and spaciousness becomes limited, concrete.

One can no longer dance and delight with the elements, on bumps into hard cold walls of a self constructed prison. More ego constructs develop along with a greater belief in a separateness that we spend the rest of our lives trying to break through.

One psychiatrist  sees ego solidification of reality in eight month neurosis. He theorizes that as a baby becomes mobile, crawling, he or she thinks “Aha! I can crawl away from my Mother.” And the next thing the baby realizes is that the mother can leave him or her. This monumental realization replaces the belief in an invisible umbilicus. Before eight month neurosis, the baby believes that even if the mother is not present that they are connected. Afterwards, fear enters, and an intense need to be informed by the senses that the mother, indeed, is near.

Here was an answer, she realized, to the question that drove mankind like lemmings. She took the bait deep and dove,  like a tuna or sword fish, surfacing to sail in sparling sunshine and struggle fiercely with the hook that served the bait, the knowledge.  It desires to be desired, recognized as the pure desire of nothing. No-thing.

Kojove taught phenomenology of Spirit. Self-consciousness is equal to desire. Desiring itself through other it negates the other, eats the other, like the bones licked clean by the masseuse in Tennessee William’s Desire and the Black Masseuse.”  OR like women emasculating men in their insistence on intimacy. Or, conversely, what men fear will happen if they do submit to total immersion in intimacy.

A Life develops from itself, of itself, free from other. But it is profoundly unconscious of itself. Doesn’t know itself to be free, to be alive. Negating everything that is not itself it must oppose itself to itself and reflect itself in order to know itself. It must confront death in order to become conscious of itself as freedom.

She became frightened to death of being  sucked into and stuck in  that which was illusory, rather than frightened to death of not having expensive face lotions. If she’d been prescient perhaps she could have fast forwarded the cotton batting covered Christine, door number one, showing the highest good  as one day being  like Laura Bush. If she didn’t make a change.

So, she made a solid pact  with the Universe  to suffer in order to grow, as opposed to protecting herself from full immersion with sentries- a husband, money, security of her society, and maid servants. Stupid things struck horror in her heart as she made the wager that greater happiness existed on the other side. She envisioned wearing white shoes before Easter and after Labor day because she might not own any other color.

She still walked down the aisle. It lasted a year. He wanted to move from D.C. back to north Louisiana; she panicked and split, heading for Dallas, divorced, at 22

THE NEXT ONE     She Stole His Seed

The father of my three boys, Nihil,  was a most excellent sociopath. Good sex was a vital component of the respect and love I had to feel for a man in order for me to get my fingers off of the steering wheel. Niall once remarked that getting laid properly lasted me four days. After that I began to get unwieldy, testy, cranky, he said.  And belief system being everything, when I was getting laid, when I was happy from that drug and pictured my man as capable, good, caring, thoughtful, my hero…he was.  And when I looked down from that high wire, whether it was due to too little sex or too much real life disappointment encroaching, the view was often terrifying.

Nihil had trouble in England, growing up.  He was sent to boarding school at 6 years of age, and later attended St. Cuthbert’s, the same school Sting attended in northern England.

Nihil had his share of caneings but he had it coming. He put cherry bombs down toilets.  And was ADHD before the diagnosis was available. He would be called down for daydreaming and thinking the rows of sixes looked like the pretty signets in the dikes between fields on the Romney Marsh.

He was sensitive. And his mother’s favorite. She protected him for a long time.  Evidently, Nihil reminded Jenette his mother, of her first cousin, a willful girl, most fun to spend the night with, creative, living in fables and fantasies which she invited others into. For Jennette, it was no more than playing Narnia, yet when the cousin was prevented from seeing her first beau, and she tore her clothes off as her father struggled, and ran down the street naked, she was hospitalized. A lobotomy was suggested. Her name was Ann. She lived institutionalized. Nihil’s godmother was a schizophrenic who sent christening gowns with three arms. Another cousin. Should be a warning label.
“These offspring will be boys who do bars.”

His father’s peat bog ancestry made relations with his coddled son strained, and while waiting for Nihil, who dawdled, and resentment mounting as Nihilwas the only one of the four children who failed his 11 plus and monies which had to be spent to send him to St. Cuthbert’s, Patrick was not enamoured with interminable waiting.  He had a temper, and he hurled his coffee cup at Nihil’s head across the room.

Nihil’s father worked for the conservative party.  Later, he would have the honor bestowed upon him, by the Queen, of Royal Ambassador of the British Empire, for years of service to the party.

At sixteen, No longer being forced to join his siblings and parents in the tiny caravan that trailed behind their car to France and all over Europe, Nihil opted to stay at home while they sat and slept in terribly cramped quarters of a caravan. He’d had enough salt sandwiches ,cucumber tomato and cheese in white bread.  And dog hair. Bell, his mother’s hearing aid dog shed terribly. The family was much too tight to stop at Little Chef on the A1.  As small children, Brenda made them share one, four ounce can of orange juice, as a  special treat. She’d been through rationing in WWII.

Nihil spent his weekends doing hallucinogens and smoking hash. He brought  squatters into the house on the Jesmond Dene, who looted and violated their home. On one occassion his mother’s prized silver concha belt was nicked. They could no longer  trust him and his father had had enough.  The compromise his father accepted, as they quarreled over Nihil’s fate, was to give Nihil the bomb shelter and a tiny plug in heating element for a cuppa. That lasted a week. Then he hit the strets.

Nihil’s mother would sign all around downtown, and speak in her slow, unheard by herself voice, “Have you seen my son, Nihil.” She drove around NewCAstle for months, thinking, at first, that every cold, scrawny dark headed boy with shoulderblades angling out of a worn coat was Nihil.  Nihil had fled the city and gone on a mission to bust his buddy out of a Greek jail. The whole thing was a blur, really, because he was on acid and stoned not to mention cold and suffering from  malnutrition and, evidently, mental illness.  Whether he did assist the jail bust or whether he just carried around the newspaper article of his friends return to the UK, I don’t know.  In the days when I believed him and believed in him, I did so with certainty.

He told me about living in a squat in Utrecht with one loaf of black bread to last him a week.  He worked for a day on a construction site.  And then made plans to go to America and travel with his cousin Sallie.

I don’t know how he secured airfare. Maybe his uncle Godfrey, a professor of medical economics with a schooner on Block Island, paid his way. Would he now, if he’d known Nihil would be fucking his daughter, Nihil’s first cousin, and that they’d break into camps and steal artichoke hearts from grocery stores along the AL-Can. And  what would Godfreys  take have been on their claim to be husband and wife while living in Valdez, sharing a 9 mm for bear and a terrible case of non specific urethritis  Sallie contracted from  a customer at a lounge she waitressed in, to support them.

The mayor of Anchorage hung out with his gay friends at Sallie’s bar’. The memory of Johnny’s death, a suicide, struck Nihil as he swam in the bracing Aegean off the island of Corfu, years later. It was his first true psychotic break which I,  having been made love to in the past four days, mistook, in a hopeful fashion, for spiritual empowerment.  Before that episode I never really reflected on the significance of Nihil, setting fires at family campsites. Fires that penultimately caused the family to leave, ashamed and afraid, in the night.