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When your sights are on infinity, you don't fire blanks
This is a catalogue of talismans: the shrines we build without thinking about them. I didn't sleep much last night, so I started thinking about mine.
These are the things that would travel with me wherever I went. The three-hundred-year-old onion bottle. A netted fishing float, newer and much the same salt-green. A butter-colored fragment of Baltic amber. An eleke of seven colors. The sundial ring and the moonstone pendant I wear daily. The obsolete fifty-franc note in my wallet. A newsboy's brown corduroy cap from the 1960's. The blue-eyed, gold-satin fire lizard I sewed and stuffed in ninth grade. A metal silhouette of Kokopelli from New Mexico. A green-and-gold glass dragon with a melting ice cream cone. A two-thousand-year-old chunk of concrete and white tesserae. The eleventh card from a tarot of goddesses, Oya, the whirlwind, Strength. The mezuzah that was made for me when I was twelve years old. A pair of earrings, cat-headed mermaids. The necklace by Elise Matthiesen, "Remember What You Say in Dreams." A framed print of John William Waterhouse's A Mermaid. Another of Michael Parkes' The Creation. A photograph of the Sibyl's Cave at Cumae, taken by a friend of mine in college. One of a pair of candlesticks, dark blue and dark green. Whenever I moved, I would know which boxes they were in. I would pack them carefully and unpack them first.
And so many of my talismans are books—plays, verse, novels, scholarship—but for now I am leaving them out, because even a short list would run on to lunacy. The same with music and lately with DVDs, as though you can hold on to stories like coins or shells. One year in high school, I carried the same book everywhere with me, in my backpack to and from classes, in my hand when I went out with friends, a little red-spined Modern Library edition with black-edged pages and I still know which shelf it's on.
What do you hold on to?
These are the things that would travel with me wherever I went. The three-hundred-year-old onion bottle. A netted fishing float, newer and much the same salt-green. A butter-colored fragment of Baltic amber. An eleke of seven colors. The sundial ring and the moonstone pendant I wear daily. The obsolete fifty-franc note in my wallet. A newsboy's brown corduroy cap from the 1960's. The blue-eyed, gold-satin fire lizard I sewed and stuffed in ninth grade. A metal silhouette of Kokopelli from New Mexico. A green-and-gold glass dragon with a melting ice cream cone. A two-thousand-year-old chunk of concrete and white tesserae. The eleventh card from a tarot of goddesses, Oya, the whirlwind, Strength. The mezuzah that was made for me when I was twelve years old. A pair of earrings, cat-headed mermaids. The necklace by Elise Matthiesen, "Remember What You Say in Dreams." A framed print of John William Waterhouse's A Mermaid. Another of Michael Parkes' The Creation. A photograph of the Sibyl's Cave at Cumae, taken by a friend of mine in college. One of a pair of candlesticks, dark blue and dark green. Whenever I moved, I would know which boxes they were in. I would pack them carefully and unpack them first.
And so many of my talismans are books—plays, verse, novels, scholarship—but for now I am leaving them out, because even a short list would run on to lunacy. The same with music and lately with DVDs, as though you can hold on to stories like coins or shells. One year in high school, I carried the same book everywhere with me, in my backpack to and from classes, in my hand when I went out with friends, a little red-spined Modern Library edition with black-edged pages and I still know which shelf it's on.
What do you hold on to?
no subject
Robert Graves' I, Claudius (1934). Despite starting Latin in ninth grade, I had remained totally unaware of the book's existence until I spotted the title on a shelf in the living room; this was when we still had the white couch with arms you could perch on, which is what I did, spellbound, reading until my mother finally came in to see why I hadn't responded to her calling my name. Derek Jacobi had stayed similarly off my radar, until I saw him as the eponymous emperor in the 1976 BBC adaptation, and then I was in love with him, too. In several ways, it was an odd book for me to fasten on to. Robert Graves is not a particularly descriptive writer and although I own two books of his poetry, he places rather far down the list of favorites. I can't stand his translation of Lucan's Pharsalia and after reading Apuleius' Metamorphoses in the original, I realized I wasn't all that blown away by Graves' version, either. But in I, Claudius, his summarizing names-and-dates style suits perfectly the character whom it is meant to impersonate, an enthusiastic amateur historian whose first fifty years were spent more with books than politics: Sallust is famous for his thumbnail sketches, after all, and Livy for his patchwork of mythic and historical past, not their hallucinatory richness of language. But the voice of Claudius caught me from the first line: "I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as 'Claudius the Idiot', or 'That Claudius', or 'Claudius the Stammerer', or 'Clau-Clau-Claudius' or at best 'Poor Uncle Claudius', am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-three, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the 'golden predicament' from which I have never since become disentangled." However he sounded in life, here he's wry and shy and exactly as susceptible to tangents and digressions as he later warns the reader, not a little pedantic and not at all stupid, with a faintly vindictive nod to those vanished family who thought him a fool and did not, many of them, live to see themselves proven wrong . . . I may really have needed an archetype like that in high school. And it didn't hurt that this was already the field I loved.
Ah, I am the species of nerd that collects action figures.
I collected baseball cards for a couple of years. In retrospect, I have no idea why.
Unfortunately, I had to throw them all away when my mother kicked me out of the house, and the only one I kept was a model of the Enterprise-D, which I keep as safe as I can.
Damn. I'm sorry.
I've managed not to lose the tiny plastic salamander that came with Tori Amos' Scarlet's Walk--maybe I oughta be more disturbed than I am that her albums are beginning to resemble McDonalds kids' meals.
Heh. What was the salamander for?
I have my old fedora, although my first fedora is long lost.
I approve of fedoras. What happened to the first one?
There's a porcelain mermaid at my mother's house that was one of my prized possessions as a kid, but I don't keep it with me, so maybe it doesn't count . . .
Mermaids always count.
no subject
He does sound like someone who'd be nice to just listen to for a while.
I may really have needed an archetype like that in high school.
Why's that? Well, I can sort of imagine . . .
I collected baseball cards for a couple of years. In retrospect, I have no idea why.
Wow, me too--I also have no idea why. Did you like baseball? I haven't had the slightest interest in it for most of my life, though I somehow like the fact that Keith Olbermann's really into it.
Damn. I'm sorry.
It sucks--I've been through several sudden evictions in my life, and more often than not, throwing away a lot of my things has been the only way to stay as mobile as my life's needed me to be. It's easier when I'm depressed, when everything seems meaningless anyway, but unfortunately I've been pretty happy in the past several years.
What was the salamander for?
I have no idea. It just came in the deluxe box thing version of Scarlet's Walk. I think there were a few different animals it could possibly be, and I think a lot of them didn't turn up in the boxes because they're so tiny and easy to lose. As much as I love Tori Amos, I always get a weird feeling about how she has multiple versions of each album with different little bells and whistles, like she's taking advantage of the rabid fan base she knows she has.
I approve of fedoras.
Then you might approve of my skull; it's been wearing fedoras since I was fifteen;
(That's me at seventeen)
What happened to the first one?
I think it got thrown away, but it doesn't bother me much--it was a tan, canvas thing I got at Disneyland. My fedoras these days are fur felt (like the one pictured).
Mermaids always count.
Yes, true.