Sunday, September 20, 2015
catkins, Kathryne
Kathryne jumped off the ice-encrusted bridge before her students’ final papers were graded, December 2010. So, I guess her impulse to give up wasn’t premeditated. She dearly loved her kitty cat, but didn’t leave instructions about that (I was told). Virginia Woolf had a rather deliberate approach to the option. I don’t know whether she loved cats. November 2009, Janna’s approach was elaborate, methodic, including a note to be e-mailed after her death to everyone who loved her and directions about what to do with her cats.
Linda, in high school, gulped a bottle of aspirin—which, of course, didn’t work. After Paul, Linda wanted to buy a gun. That was when I introduced her to Bonnie. I didn’t have a cat. I don’t know what Marilyn, my Jungian professor of philosophy, had in mind for demise, March, 1972. But in the final years of her life (turn of the millennium), on her emeritus faculty page, there was a gif image of her morphing into a black cat. (I have it archived.)
According to a scholar of symbols, the cat stands in Celtic lore as guardian of the Otherworld/Underworld. “Stoic, silent and mysterious,...they keep secrets of the Otherworld eternally to themselves, as they gaze with guile on a world that does not see or understand the depth of their knowledge.”
Remembrances of Kathryne (reported by local journalists) gelled in senses of her dismissive wit too often forced to suffer fools.
The Literary mind tires of graciousness, as if one is living too early for this world. The counselor—be she therapist or jurist (Linda became an attorney)—listens silently, like a reader to be never met.
If Kathryne had googled my name after I wrote to her, she would have immediately found my “life world” blog and have seen what I wrote at that time, longing for her in the image of Woolf. (Kathryne at 25 looked like a blond Virginia Woolf.) I didn’t expect at that time that she would see what I wrote, her in mind. But I was indeed writing to her, and continued to do so through that summer, albeit ambiguously, before her autumn leap. I was exuberantly flowering (while also focused on the prospect of Terese’s motherhood). I couldn’t know that I was or was not read by a soul on the edge—a woman never able to have her own child
(I discovered).
I don’t read what I write, beyond a day or so afterward. I always want to trek on. When Johanna contacted me, I had forgotten that I had overtly written to Kathryne that summer, nearly two years earlier. An enduring literary address got intensely occupied with Terese’s approaching motherhood, which worried me, yet caused near obsession with issues of enabling a happy child, enabling gloriously thriving self formation. If Kathryne had silently stayed nearby, the appeal of writing about happy motherhood that stayed unavailable to her could have been emotionally unbearable.
Knowing now that Kathryne back then was deeply at risk in the face of my happy postings, literary and in love with the Inner Child, I feel haunted.
Yet, I was writing to every good reason for aspiring to flourish. Love your Inner Child, Kathryne. Be every child’s sister or aunt.
Do not forget the Shakespearean cycle of Northrop Frye that you opened to me: Beyond romance of spring, then comedy of summer, the tragedy of a fall brings the irony of winter because there be providence of spring.
Alas, textual intimacy can’t always save lives. Certainty of spring is forgotten in the tragedy that can’t yet see cool irony. If great poets have a high rate of saving souls, one would never know.
You, Terese, are alive. Before she died, my address of her through you morphed into the determined presence of you wholly, rattlebox, catkin, lover of Invisible Cities.
However sentimentalist I may preciously be, I am certain that expressed love to you has no culpability in her unbearable silence spoken, enacted in demise. My literary child in you did not drive Kathryne over the rail, though maybe she felt otherwise, ha: wise to some otherworldly “truth” that was mistaken.
Love and laughing, tears and rain, reason to live.
It is our address.
