Carole Maso - Break Every Rule - Essays on Language, Longing, & Moments of Desire

O NCE I ROAMED IN BLINDING GREEN. White punctuating the scene. Dandelions in August. Blow on them and they would disperse and scatter their seeds. Brilliant yellow the next spring.

I was drenched in sunlight. Golden seemed to make a sound. Happy, dreaming, lilting child. Look at her, roaming as she is now toward her next adventure, in a place of wonder, iridescence. A green dock. Poodles on a jumpsuit. Beside a gray lake watching the sunfish — and their young, just hatched. You could almost scoop them up in your hands.

Once red flared from the corner of her world: a beach ball, a bird in winter, the roses her father grew. She felt orange, loved sage, the word indigo, a blue wave. A dock — that crystalline, floating feeling. Wildness of the child — her thousand enthusiasms. She tasted a red rose, pet the black swan that came to her, freed the fireflies her brother caught in a jar. Felt the terrible vibrations of the field against which that brother played — he’s very ill. The child who loved the downbeat, stepped out of time — hearing the world that way. Don’t die .

She loved being a horse perhaps most of all. She ran fast as the wind. A dark star blazed on her forehead. Running in clover, in heaths, o’er hill and vale — never mind it was suburban New Jersey, never mind. Limitation, like death, an unimaginable thing. Her heart beating wildly as she raced through every time and every terrain, won’t die, won’t die , her extraordinary, complicated tangle of mane, the nostrils flaring, the mouth and the eyes — devouring, the pounding of hoofs, universe, imagination on fire — the child. Utterly dizzied by the contours of the world — and the word. Its rhythms — its heat and light. Of everything there is to say and everything there is to do and be. The body’s small but genuine heat — plowing through woods, hugging every tree. Dancing interpretive dances in her polka-dotted bathing suit, rattling a pod of seeds. In the idyll that was her childhood. Her mother at her side, a more than willing accomplice. Look, Mother, a bird has fallen from its nest, look mother the rabbit’s lair, look mother, oh look . The child wandered freely. Hers the tendency to joy, to pleasure, irreverence, kindness, empathy, dream. The irresistible universe. A secret, a private place. She flew with arms extended once. She sang with fire. Made perfume from roses. Dashed through water sprinkling brightly colored. Danced the can-can. Sang to summon the snow. Adored the rain. Made a May basket for her mother. Lined it with the moss from her special spot in the forest. Listened hour after hour to music with her father. Prayed for her brother, lighting candles on a secret altar: won’t die . Begged the Virgin to appear. Dressed like a butterfly. Streamers flying. Staged elaborate puppet shows. Collected ladybugs. Tasted the night, felt the cat’s velvet, memorized the sky. The stars seemed to make a sound like song. Twinkling. And in the day the sun rang like a bell sometimes. She raced to the edge of the known world. In freedom she imagined being anything, going anywhere. And if teachers or other forces tried to quell her enthusiasms early on — well, they were easy enough to ignore. In a wave, a star, a prayer, a made-up song, the swirl of her mother’s dress — they were gone. Didn’t they always want to reduce a complicated and terrible and terribly beautiful universe? If in those years there was someone anywhere near trying to rein her in or take any of it, any of it away, she did not notice.

A dark rose. A bottomless black cistern in which she wept. Prayed her made-up prayer. Made potions. Cast spells. A world of charms. Her life opening.

Imagine the shock then of late adolescence when the charms seemed to desert her, when everything she loved seemed to be taken away. Having roamed freely and unencumbered, the voices out of nowhere started demanding in a kind of staggered unison and from every direction the same thing— conform, conform . Abandon song, conform . Abandon reverence, conform . Surrender your freedom. Against nature, against intuition, do something useful .

How did she find herself suddenly estranged and at sea in an adulthood not of her own making? Exiled. For a time she must have tried to struggle against it — but like a butterfly pinned, trapped under glass, she felt her lovely wings as she pulled away from the pins to be disintegrating.

The hairline cracks already beginning to show during the college years . The stress of wanting to know what to do. The burden of a talent completely unrealized, utterly nebulous, just a pressing feeling, nothing even close to words on a page yet. And that strange counterforce coming from almost everywhere. The message— leave that all behind —before she ever embraced it, or tried— leave it behind . Discouragement from every side. Even before she’d ever really begun. Good-bye.

Who is that sniveling baby who feels so terribly sorry for herself?

After the buffer of college where the struggle for the child’s soul began in earnest. She stood smack up against the arrogance and demands of conventionality, its breezy assumptions.

And the request — to go quietly — don’t make such a fuss about it.

A struggle of wills.

Having been raised to be an artist surely of some sort —even her mother now seemed to be defecting— your writing —something to do on the side perhaps? She thought she was protecting her from heartache. Alas.

As she went from one tedious job in one awful law firm after another, she knew she was not going to come true. She was already mourning. She didn’t even know whether there was any real writing in her — but the denial of the chance — the negation of. Yes, but what have you written? Nothing, of course. Not much .

Give up your childish notions, your silly daydreams. Hurry up, it’s time. Conform, conform. Date. Marry. Work at a real job — not writing for Chrissakes — grow up .

In part it was this I suppose, in part something more — impossible to define, even now.

Look at that woman, once the ecstatic child, who walks slowly but undeniably further and further into her remoteness. Not so lonely — not so lonely there really.

A young person’s struggle. She felt the terrible weight of convention on her and the magnitude of its demands. The methods were subtle ones — but the message was loud and clear— give up your life for mine, step into line .

Who is that woman who asks for one hopeful thing — and tries (it’s a little pitiful) to console herself, or erase herself, or something — with recklessness, with sex, with anything she — what in the world is she wishing? A kind of rage, a fast moving inside, surfeit of electricity in her head. And after awhile, after a few weeks usually — she would sink back one more time into speechlessness, dug deep and snug, it’s dark in there, she is, look, she is unable to lift a finger from the bed, or form a word — unable to form a word — oh yes, you’ll be a writer some day! The world flat and drained of color — only shades of gray and then and then—

E. M. Ciorin says, “The universe is a solitary space, and all its creatures do nothing but reinforce its solitude. In it, I have never met anyone, I have only stumbled across ghosts.”

How to describe the place where the woman takes up residence? She waves from the distance to the ones she loves, stranded now. Cut off. Frightened by the gap. How she still sometimes wanted to reach them, touch their faces, say their names, have a glass of wine with them perhaps. But the world was losing its vibrancy, its color, its feeling. She felt herself in a shroud of white. And how the sound seemed muffled. The snow — not possible to move through anymore. And the cold.