Time is an Experiment
and the soul is seafoam
I am outside looking through a doorway at a sight that shocks me: two legs in a corner. They are prosthetic legs, propped against a wall, but I don't know that. I am only one year on Earth, plus a few months, just learning to walk. To me they are legs like the ones I have just learned to stand on.
Eye level with silver wheels, looking up the world is awhirl. Will I be trampled? What is this place I have come to where I am powerless and small?
Where did I come from? The Moon? The North Star? I don’t remember anything before this. I have plump toddler legs, rosy-skinned and warm, the kind of flesh you want to pinch and nuzzle. Though I back away, I know the legs in the corner are bloodless, cold and hold, touching them wouldn't make a dent, just a flat, hollow sound like rapping on a door to an underground chamber with no way out.
Are they lost? Have they been stolen? Will this happen to me, too? I stand in the doorway, paralyzed. Time extends and then boomerangs, and for the first time I learn as I run back to the adults that I can bend it, too, because when I reach the safety of the grownups the memory disappears like it never occurred.
I don’t tell the adults what I saw. I don’t tell anyone, but the legs return, become something I remember, then a memory as I grow, one that haunts me. I shoot up. Pre-teen me is all legs and I run like a deer through late childhood, faster than the boys, playing capture the flag in summer dusks that slowly fade as adolescence dials me into other channels. Hormones pulse, my brain forms a mind that tells me to search outside my body for fulfillment, to seek reflection in others. I could drown. I am willing to risk all.
Rewind: now we are on Brick Yard Road a few years after I saw the legs in the corner. I have been enchanted by fairy tales. The Little Mermaid is my favorite. She finds me in a book. I move in with her, dwell inside the pages. That is the way I read then. There is no separation between me and the word.
She also lives in a movie, a Japanese anime1 that somehow in 1975 made it to a theater in Connecticut. In those days you had to go to a theater to see a movie. My parents must have brought me, though I have no memory of being in the theater, waiting for the curtain to rise, munching popcorn in the lean-back seats, or leaving the theater to drive back to Brickyard Road in the back seat of the Toyota Corolla. Despite the dazzling technology we have now, exposure to images back then was more immersive, and this story in particular enchanted me so much I was absorbed into it. I flowed across the boundary between the animate world and the screen and became the Little Mermaid, the tragic version who gives up her legs and voice in order to have a shot at love, not the 90s Disney princess who has a name-Ariel-and who gets to marry Prince Eric in the end and live happily ever after looking like a Technicolor teenage dream with perky breasts and no sun damage.
Was the movie a prophecy of what my life was to become, always looking outside for myself for love, willing to suffer, loving people who couldn’t see me or hear me speaking in silence, or did the images mold my consciousness to their will? Was my life for all those years I suffered not actually mine, but theirs, these images drawn from wells that had been filled with sweet, clear water, now distorted by centuries of misplaced sacrifice to powers we believed were outside ourselves?
As I said, I don’t remember sitting in the dark waiting for lights to appear on the screen like a revelatory aurora borealis. All I remember is breaking the surface to see the noble, though perhaps arrogant and entitled young prince through a porthole, falling in love, the terror of the sea witch’s cave and the dreadful bargain I made to give up my voice and tail in exchange for legs, pain like walking on knives is how Hans Christian told it, and he was right. It was that bad. And I couldn’t tell anyone about it, or tell the prince I loved him. He married someone else, which meant I had to die. That was something else that didn’t happen in the Disney version. If the prince didn’t return my love and marry me, if he married another, I would die, return to the sea as foam, liminal and anonymous, without even the comfort of my sisters who still swam free in the vast ocean. They tried to save me, my sisters, made another deal with the sea witch, tossed the knife she gave them through the castle window.
It clattered on the floor like a skeleton rattled by a squall, but nobody heard it save me. I picked it up. I almost did it. I stood over my beloved’s marriage bed, looked down at the smooth flutter of the pulse in his throat as he slept, a steady drum he didn’t even think about it, or maybe even value. But that wasn’t his fault. He was young, untouched by death, unable to value the two solid legs he’d been given to stand on and the hands to caress his new bride who shared his pillow. I waited with the knife raised for her to wake up and scream so they could call the guards who would lock me in the dungeon, but she slept on.
I almost did it. Sold my soul for love. I don’t know how it happened, but all of a sudden the knife was flying through the air and dropping with its own heavy weight into the sparkling ocean and I was following it. When I hit the surface I shattered into seafoam. My sisters were there singing as I rose, made of air and water I would now dwell forever between worlds.
Hans Christian Andersen said I was given a soul because of my sacrifice, but if so, the soul was just seafoam. And that was enough. I lived on in the suss and sigh, in the endless rocking, the rush that channels me in cycles I lose track of through the silver wheel, the pale moon where I bathe in invisible seas that look from Earth like empty craters. I am caught up by Arianrhod, spun until I sing a new song, one that helps me forget and remember, let go of time’s gifts and burdens, and receive new ones, and this will be the pattern for as long as I live on Earth and maybe beyond, but I suspect not forever, because as I learned at just past one year old, time is an experiment and nothing, not even the most haunting memory, lasts forever. Not the earth, not the moon, not the stars.
In the meantime, this round I decide I will worship Arianrhod, The Lady of the Silver Wheel That Descends into the Stars, and fall in love with mermen so I don’t have to split my tail in order to make love. We’ll entwine our tails and spin into the deep without worrying about having to come up for air. Down there-far, far down-we won’t find the bottom of the ocean. Despite what oceanographers say, it doesn’t exist. And though I will not have to give up my voice for this man, he won’t need me to speak to know I love him. Far, far down there are no words, just whale songs and the invisible frequencies of sonar. Still, it’s good to know giving up my voice is not an option.
The film I will see in childhood was drawn by hand, thousands of lines that will stab my heart with dread and longing, far more potent than the CGI version that will appear later in my timeline. In my first exposure, someone will actually draw the images by hand, lines will form shapes the eye carries to the brain whose exultation is found in images it completes itself, not those fed to it by machines who deal in the hyper-real, trying to fool us into giving up our imaginations.
The transition from hand to emotion is seamless, I can’t see it, but I know it’s there because every time I return to land I wish I could have stayed under longer.
Something is waiting underwater for me? Someone, or a memory, which doesn’t just take place in the past, but also in the future, because, as you heard me say, time is an experiment. Yes, I meant that the first time I said it, so I thought I’d say it again because it’s easy to skip over these things when they are typed out in orderly prose according to sequential expectations programmed into us by a collective to whom we lend our obeisance, the bow and scrape that keeps us from unlocking direct access to our own images, both mundane and holy.
We may have lent our sovereignty out, but-as I said once in a poem,2 "to lend is not to give," so we can take our obeisance back and either give it to someone else, individual or collective, or decide to see the world with our own eyes, which, being composed mostly of vitreous humor, may have no power in themselves. The ability to see is located in the brain, and within the brain resides the source of true seeing, the pineal drip of cerebrospinal fluid that can pour down through the 'iwi kuamo’o3 like tupelo sugar, sweeter than honey, or hibiscus nectar so deep in the flowers’ red folds the ‘i’iwi4 birds grew curved beaks to drink it, a fairy elixir that will take you under the hill for what seems like a few hours, but when you return a hundred and one years have been archived. You can count them if you want, or you can remember what it was like to fly to the moon and back in one night. You could also entertain the idea that the eye is not an inanimate object, and that being mostly made of vitreous humor, some fancy words for water, contains all the memories that have ever been created and forgotten, within its small orb.
How can time be an experiment, I hear you say? Or maybe it’s not you. Maybe it’s the court jester in the Hall of Mirrors who keeps trying to get us to think we can never understand each other. The jester is supposed to distract and entertain through humor, but he's really the wisest of us all, he’s the one who knows how to laugh while digging his own grave.
When I was older, in my thirties, I casually mentioned the spinning wheels just above my face to my mother. I don’t remember what motivated me to share my memory. It was so long ago I thought I was no longer afraid of it, that it had no effect on my current situation, my relationship with myself, my family, and the world in general.
I was astonished what my Mom revealed: the wheels in my face were the steel discs of my grandfather’s wheelchair. She filled in the rest of the story, the before and after, telling me of how I used to push Grandpop in his chair back and forth in the hallway in the Stone Harbor house where we lived with my Dad’s parents when we came back from Japan, my birthplace. She told me he took great delight in letting me do this, and though my memory of the wheels in my face was scary, I know I must have taken great delight, too. My grandfather, a grown-up who rode in a magic chariot inviting me to be his horse; back and forth we galloped to the rhythm of waves lapping on the bulkhead out back of the house that was the first ocean I saw.
The legs in the corner were his, prosthetics he fastened on after his birth legs were amputated due to poor circulation. It was said of my Grandpop by a friend at his funeral, that, “If Harris Lighty ever said a bad word about anyone, I never heard it.”
Although he died when I was three, I know those words are true. My Grandpop was a fine ancestor, patient and dignified in what must have been difficult circumstances. In telling me the story of how I pushed him back and forth, my Mother returned me to a story I’d been to young to understand when it happened. Back and forth, crossing the light on the floor we spun. My Grandpop loved me.
If time is an experiment I can go back to that doorway where I saw his legs in the corner, and that this time I’m not frightened. The memory isn’t erased, it’s just been deepened by time. This time I have a
voice and can say with gratitude for the mobility they gave him, “Those are my grandfather’s legs,” and every time the wheel spins and throws me off somewhere without memory, perhaps it will be easier each time to stay in a state of wonder that I am here at all, loving you with these words.
Was the movie a prophecy of what my life was to become, always looking outside for myself for love, willing to suffer, loving people who couldn’t see me or hear me speaking in silence, or did the images mold my consciousness to their will? Was my life for all those years I suffered not actually mine, but theirs, these images drawn from wells that had been filled with sweet, clear water, now distorted by centuries of misplaced sacrifice to powers we believed were outside ourselves?
Kō aloha la ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light,
Jen
Footnotes:
1
The Little Mermaid, 1975. Directed by Tomoharu Katsumata and Tim Reid.
2
Left Without Words
The moon can’t be understood through butterflies
or birdsong. The moon is more like a man
sliding his palm down your belly saying
the most important thing is to feel loved
as he slips his fingers inside you, stroking
the places you were told to hide
before you could name them.
I lend you my body, says the Moon Man. Then,
when you hear these words, when you believe them,
you’ll understand the moon,
because to lend is not to give,
though at the time you’ll think it is.
from my poetry collection, “Breaking Up With The Moon,” Finishing Line Press, 2017.
3
‘iwi kuamo’o, the spinal chord in Hawaiian.
4
‘I iwi, Hawaiian honeycreeper.
Thank you to: Photo by Photoholgic on Unsplash for the spinning wheel image.