struggling to define a self, between the pages behind what makes the mortar of the Noir façade
~As work continues on the following scenes that stands for my allegorical map and legend to the center of a Celf, I am caught and trapped over serious concerns over my own responsibility to my personal purpose and meaning in this life in order to stay true to why I work at all on this divine comedy~ (of errors)
dear e.d.,
but I am reluctant to leave my ivory tower. he tries to convince me to come out to see him before September. he says he wants to see me. am I ready to come home, he asks me.... but what does he mean?
he tells me it is time to come out of hiding. he says everybody misses me. return to the fold of the band of misfits.
we talk about growing up as expatriates, being foreign in a country ....only to find we are foreigners in our own country when we are forced to return years later to our own. we do not fit in. we do not understand our country and culture. we compare notes of the failed marriages and relationships. the partners who just don’t fit the mark and I find it reassuring to know it is not just me so lost; we don’t understand them, they are shallow with empty values; they are ignorant and self centered and they don’t understand us. the ones who were there only a short while adjust better coming back, but I guess they were only visiting. only visitors; the ones like us, where even the money here doesn’t make sense— to us that was home but we cannot go back.... we don’t belong. we are foreigners. I never thought I’d end up married to an American, I never wanted to be. such abrasive and misogynistic personalities. caught between the cultures; neither of the other.... and I couldn’t pretend to belong to any other one culture, I’d never be Dutch, I don’t think one slips on a costume and becomes. nor sheds the other. I’m too shy and reserved to be Dutch as they can be quite invasive, and it gets so exhausting having to be outgoing —but so are Americans.
I don’t know what I am, really, but I suppose as I’m akin to one hemisphere, in particular, I suppose then I could think of myself as generally akin to European, like the friends I knew at school that I became the closest to; they were children of diplomats from other countries and went to our school. also caught between cultures. a stranger. how easy it was just to take a train and be somewhere else within hours, easy to step into other worlds of thought and see through other prisms. no enormous sea isolating you from all that is that other world.
and I wonder of all the others too; was it cruel our parents played with our internal programming? our experience that made us forever such outsiders. would it have been better to remain among the sheep.... to be an ignorant pig, like Mills questioned, happy in not knowing better?
and as we compare our experiences and our fond memories of teachers, friends and shared experiences, we agree why reengaging in our presumed patriotic national culture doomed us to fail in our attempts to pursue happiness; blend our requirement of needs of the pursuit among those we meet here. for too well we understand the stigma of the ugly American ....but where do we belong? ....and then I dare to confide to him the wicked and unnameable horrors about my sister.... it comes out in a few words.... everything, the worst; all she did to me.... and find in as few words as, tells me he’s not surprised and reveals to me how everybody hated her at school —feel released. vindicated ....he says to come see him. he says to come home. but where is home?
....so strange
and with white knuckled grip, I cling to my ivory tower still, anyhow because I built it, brick by ivory brick, as I set my course on my path to escape all the deceivers with false faces; the ivory walls insulated in steel, I trust it, it is what I know and has come to be reliable and all I know ....such a stranger in a strange land.... my dictionary tower, it is what is my home, I know these walls and why they are there. and I could only belong with whom showed a true face, and whom ever could know how to translate the pages because .... surly we know by now I have forgotten how ....somewhere in those crumbs.... dear Electra
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