Your Story, My Story

by Connie Palmen

She wanted more than anything else to love somebody, but when she actually did, she hated it. She wanted more than anything to be adored, but she mercilessly punished anyone who ever loved her.

She tried to imitate the suicide of her idol Virginia Woolf by drowning herself in the ocean, but the water refused her gift and spat her out.

Friends, like family, want you to remain unchanged, while love has the indecent capacity to transform you, to enrich you with a new take on everything you were once familiar with.

James Joyce was the god who blessed our union.

In daily life we try to make ourselves comprehensible by speaking the language of others in the hope that we will be understood, but at night, when rationality and social adaptation have shuffled off to sleep, an unbound self speaks to us in a language that is completely our own.

Poetry often comes into being despite ourselves, a truth that escapes us, that forces its way out between the selected concealments. It doesn’t heed our desire to cover things up.

archetype. If you encounter an Icarus, you know that someday he has to fall. If you sleep next to Dr. Jekyll, you know you might wake up beside Mr. Hyde. And if you meet an Electra, you know she will murder her mother, or the mother in herself.

With audacious strength Pan showed us why panic was named after him: he gave us the fright of our lives, as if we had become overly familiar and not been sufficiently respectful of his divinity. Out of nowhere an angry puppeteer abruptly pulled up my bride’s hand, her eyes shot full of frightened tears, and—having wanted only to please her, chasing after the American dream of a glorious existence like an obedient old sheepdog—I listened, stunned, as she spoke in tongues. Pan dispensed with the slowness of the alphabet and spoke directly through her in a deep, eerie growl, mocking her longing for that hollow display, and asked whether she realized that the fame she so passionately desired would destroy everything she had.

a poet can become fully aware of his poetic self only once he falls in love with a woman in whom the white goddess resides, someone who unites creation and destruction and who will bring triumph and doom into his life.

the denial of the evil lurking within us is the source of all misery, and insight and knowledge then become the salvation. Evil can be used to create something good through understanding, ordering, and ritualization. That’s what literature and religion are for.

she classified herself as a schizo with an IQ of 166, an Electra complex, penis envy, and a larger than average sexual appetite.

No daughter loathes her mother without hating herself.

At the lectures she became acquainted with Anne Sexton—an attractive, flamboyant, chain-smoking poetess who, like her, was the daughter of an ambitious, overprotective mother, and also had firsthand experience of suicide. She told me with a hint of jealousy that Sexton had just been released from an insane asylum following her most recent suicide attempt, that for the first time in her life she’d met a woman who was even angrier than she was, and together they were able to have the most delectable discussions about suicide and the death wish. Although Sexton was four years her senior and the mother of two young children, my wife—as was her wont—believed she’d found a doppelgänger, but eventually, her deep-seated mistrust of women won out over her longing for friendship. When she came home one Tuesday ranting about Sexton’s extramarital affair with the poetry editor of a large publishing house, griping that their talks tended to lack erudition, and saying that while she could acknowledge that Sexton’s poems were good, she did find them a little lightweight, I knew she was protecting herself from too great an identification. If she couldn’t absorb another person fully as an alter ego, she closed herself off, became distant and withdrawn, unreachable behind a facade of husband, health, and happiness.

wondering why in God’s name she felt guilty about not feeling guilty.

I am convinced that the power of imagination enables us to forge a bond between our darker, sometimes terrifying inner world and the objective, rational world outside us;

The gods always hold something back, whether it’s fire or the knowledge of good and evil, to force their creatures to dance to their tune.

Memory is literary by nature. It takes factual events and gives them a metaphorical charge, lending what really happened a symbolic weight, persistently in search of the security of a story.

Oscar Wilde was right when he said that all great minds acquired disciples, but it’s always Judas who writes the biography.

While music meant a great deal to me and my work, to my tone-deaf wife it was more impenetrable than fine art, and she was confused rather than comforted or uplifted by this show of veneration.

pen name. “Victoria Lucas,” she said triumphantly. “Light prevails.” “Or Lucifer wins,” I said.