Your Story, My Story

by Connie Palmen

I should have known that for a woman who bites instead of kisses, loving was the same as lashing out. I should have realized that by stealing her jewelry, I was only tearing away her ornamentation and taking it as my trophy. Whoever begins this kind of love knows that violence and destruction are hidden at its heart. To the death. One of us was done for from the very start.

I loved her—I’ve loved her ever since. If her suicide was the trap she used to catch me, to swallow me, to absorb me, to become one body, she succeeded. A bridegroom taken hostage by death, linked eternally in a posthumous marriage, as inseparable as she wanted me to be from her. Her name is my name. Her death is my death.

I believe in something like a real self and know how rare it is to hear it speak, to see it liberated from its cocoon of falseness and insignificance, the sham appearances we present to others to win them over, to mislead them. The more dangerous the real self, the more refined the masks. The more caustic the poison we would like to spew over others—to paralyze them, to kill them—the sweeter the nectar with which we lure them toward us, to be near us, to love us.

she told me about the death of her father when she was eight, about her mother, brother, live-in grandparents, her German background, bouts of depression, Dr. Beuscher, the rejection of a story, not being admitted to a coveted writers’ workshop, that to her the desire to write was the same as the desire to live, that one didn’t work without the other, that she stopped loving life when her imagination seemed dead, she had been afraid she would never get another sentence down on paper. She admitted she’d secretly hoped that the electroshock therapy would undo that paralysis, resurrect the current of numbed talent, that the engine of the imagination would kick in, that she would rise like Lazarus and write.

my bride’s dear Viennese grandmother who had moved in with them after her father’s death, the grandmother of the ocean and the stories, the music and the noodles, the grandmother who had heard her groaning in the cellar and to whom she owed her resurrection.

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.

seems only men live with the images and ghosts of past wars, of soldiers, leaders, and rebels, collaboration and resistance, murder, blood and mud, as if the feminine imagination stops at the threshold of our histories and resolutely refuses to enter the battlefields on which men—husbands, fathers, sons, brothers—sacrificed their lives and left behind millions of women, orphaned and widowed. I have yet to meet a woman who knows what the Maginot Line is, which battle was fought at Verdun, what the letters SS stand for, and why which war was fought where. Of course, as an American she did not know the war as I did, born and raised in a grieving valley, sodden with tears poured out for the men who’d disappeared, snatched away by the madness of the Great War, and again unmanned by World War II. For her the last war was just a daily radio program, avidly listened to by her German forebears.

Sometimes—in yet another attempt to work out the mystery of her death—I think that her suicide was also the ultimate way to reclaim her own life. The angry child demanded it like a snatched plaything. In her despair and rage, she forgot that others were tied to that life. The children, me.

she typed out our work at the piano of language, her fluttering fingers dancing across the keys, unimaginably quick, the typing like rain on a thatched roof, the carriage return like a machine gun.

She listened to my uncle’s animated stories while he behaved as if he had known the Brontë sisters personally and had visited them on a daily basis. In his view, they were a couple of withered wretches, never experienced anything, all of it made up, the three of them at the top of the hill, sitting around a table fabricating stories, wasting away with tuberculosis, afraid of real life, afraid of love, afraid of ghosts and of God.

Thinking is a discipline that takes time, a holy time which—like the monastic Matins, Lauds, and Vespers—must be consciously set aside to protect it from the intrusive power of the banal.

What annoys me about conventional psychology and sociology is the disregard for wisdom set down since ancient times in myths, folktales, fables, and in the poetic, prescientific manner in which it is represented. There is no such thing as “new man.” He will always have a body and a mind, and his psyche is as restricted in its equipment as the body with its head, trunk, arms, legs, water, blood, and innards. What looks like a modern insight into man and the world is the same old story that’s been around for thousands of years, played by the same characters, except it’s repeatedly cast in a different form.

Robert Graves’s The White Goddess,

To deny violence is to summon it. To deny evil is to summon it.

suspected that giving my wife permission to despise her mother would throw open the floodgates of a devastating self-hate. No daughter loathes her mother without hating herself.

Her love for her mother flourished best on paper, at a distance.