Weave a Tapestry, Spread a Myth

Originally Posted Saturday, August 2, 2014

The new shutters are a miracle this morning.  They are open allowing in the morning sunlight, but as the sun rises over my neighbor's roof, it blasts me as it always has this time of year right in the eyes.  I adjust one simple panel and the problem is gone.  Sunlight streaks across the table lighting the vases and candle holders beautifully--but the sun cannot touch me.  This is truly why I spent all the money.  Just for this.  

It is not true, but I had thought about this and it helped me make the decision. 

This morning's photograph is of. . . well, I can't write it any better than this:

“I have done almost everything in life except two things. I haven’t had a son, and I have never come down in a parachute.”

Sylvia Brett Brooke, wife of the last “white rajah” of Sarawak, may have had a reputation for embellishing the truth, but it was decidedly well earned. This, after all, was a woman who inspired naughty nursery rhymes by her pal George Bernard Shaw (“She’ll have bells on her fingers / and rings through her nose, / And won’t be permitted to wear any clo’es”) and sent J. M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, scurrying for cover when he became the focus of her amorous attentions. In the chunk of northern Borneo her husband’s great-uncle had received for his services to the sultan of Brunei, she played hostess to the daredevil adventurer Richard Halliburton. In Hollywood, she spurned Errol Flynn, whose plan for a film version of the original rajah’s exploits was, she decided, vastly inferior to her own. During her heyday, between the two world wars, she presided over a kingdom the size of England whose subjects greeted her arrival with 21-gun salutes and elaborate parades. Marooned in New York in 1941, with little to sustain her but hot dogs and gin, she was reduced to telling fortunes in a bar called Leon and Eddie’s, “where I was known as ‘Toots.’ ” Her novels and stories were published on both sides of the Atlantic, and she jotted down not one but two autobiographies. The second, the reviewer for The London Evening News observed, “could be an Evelyn Waugh novel” (source).

I automatically fell in love, of course.  I love a self-invented woman.  Oh, sure, she would have been dreadful trouble, and I didn't say I wanted to marry her but only that I loved her.  Even that, though, would have been a hardship.  Anyone who could inspire G.B. Shaw to even a faint eroticism and who was attracted to and scared the man who wrote about a boy who never grows up, who was not above telling fortunes in a bar. . . man, she's the girl for me.  

But the difficulties of love never change, it seems.  The hard part is the "other" life.  Partners have those inevitably, the one that is invisible to you which you fear might become visible someday and not to your advantage, the one where the seasons change and the tides ebb and flow, the one from which you must sometimes disappear. . . that one.  

My ex-friend Brando said once about a girl I liked, "You want her to think about you all the time.  Hell, man, you're lucky if she is thinking about you when you are standing in front of her!"  

Fuck him.  I know he is right.  What we want is something impossible.  Even among us.  See the comment section here if you will.  Love is. . . well. . . it is the same as it has always been.  

But Sylvia Brett Brooke seems to have known a way out of it all.  Be the object of desire without being real.  Weave a tapestry and spread a myth.  Never let them see you.  Never let them catch up to you.  Wear a costume and dance the night away.  It is all a fiction anyway.  Nothing is true or real at all.