puellarina's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- going on a bear hunt. My grandfather appears in my dreams, trying to take things that I find beautiful and store them in his basement or sell them or keep them in his graveyard. I don't give him things, I take them away, I scold him. I tell him, "you could be my sappho" but alas, he cannot. And why not? Because he doesn't think it is okay to cry. He is sad and instead he is angry and silent. the tears are trying to take over, but he doesn't let them. My beautiful things are not effecting him. He cannot communicate with them on the level that they speak to him. He has to distance himself from it, by thinking always of what money he could make off it. the value of a beautiful thing is reduced, made sterile and safe by assigning a value to it. This is, in itsself, not such an evil thing. Just considering the monetary worth of something beautiful. But he misuses that privilage. He overlooks what the beauty could bestow on him, favoring always what the monetary value could bestow. Which is WHAT!? more money to acquire more unloved beautiful objects to acquire more money, and so on. I tell him, "you could be my sappho" because he could. I could be inspired by the way he finds beauty in so many things and by the way he has of discovering their hidden value and using that special knowlege to make a living for himself. That is inspiring. Yes. But I know too much about him and the way he desserts that lover of beauty in himself over and over. He whores her out, so that she works tirelessly for him and he never leaves her with the oppertunity to enjoy the fruits of her labor. She is subservient to him. He allows her to do that fabulous work she cannot live without doing, but only on the condition that he be allowed to take the resulting beauties and do with them as he pleases. Aborting again and again the children she has created. He gives no value to thier lives. He is an artist who will not create with the tools he has and loves. He hangs his hope so heavily on me, because I do what he will not allow himself to do, and yet I am victim to the same degrading attitude. He may venerate me for creating beauty, but just as he does with the other beauty he finds, he wants to sell me. He wants to distance himself from those moving images. Take control of them, catagorize them. I can't blame him, now that I know some of the background. Nona was a woman driven mad by an early marriage to drunken scottsman who eventually died and left her alone in america with her children half grown. Poor grandpa was a 10 year old boy and the new "man of the house". She was powerfully angry about many things and probably scared the shit out of poor grandpa with her mood swings (which scared the shit out of me as a little girl). Not only that, but grandpa went on to marry and and have several children with another mad woman whose grief over bieng a native american woman raised by whites in a society that had destroyed her culture and family had driven her also to a powerful anger that she had not been given the tools (as a woman in the 30's) to confidently and appropriately express. She drove grandpa away with all that mad emotion, dug a lonely hole for herself and her children, whom she abused as a continued outlet for the emotions she had no other way of expressing. Why shouldn't grandpa be afraid of the tears and the anger that boil to the surface. He has seen so many women that he loves being swept away in a tidal wave of their sorrow and rage. Why shouldn't my poor granpa learn to fear beauty as much as he desires it? If only I could reconcile this. If only I could find a way to make peace with the entrepenuer. If only grandpa could somehow integrate his love for these objects with his desire to make money. Find a way to sell art that is not selling it out. I struggle with it. I am caught in a bear trap with it. Do I amputate the leg and limp away from the problem? Or can I figure out how to open this fucking thing? And heal. 1:16 p.m. - 2004-05-26 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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