He says,
“I thought I was rich because I had just one flower, and all I own is an ordinary rose.”

He became upset and frustrated, for he did not understand.
But after thinking about it and going to look at the roses again, the little prince realized that they are nothing like “his” rose.

He goes on to say to the rose garden…

 ”You’re lovely, but you’re empty,” he went on. ‘One couldn’t die for you.  Of course, an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you.  But my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together, since she’s the one I’ve watered.  Since she’s the one I put under glass.  Since she’s the one I sheltered behind a screen.  Since she’s the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except the two or three for butterflies).  Since she’s the one I listened to when she complained, or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all.  Since she’s my rose.’”

The fox in which he befriended looked up at him and told him something very important,

“One see’s clearly only with the heart.”

After going from planet to planet trying to figure out how he could best love this rose, he finally realised that no one could tell him how to do so.  He learned a great many things at each planet, but none of which could explain why he cares so much for this rose and desires to protect it until he dies. 

I think we have a lot to learn from the little prince, and the way he cares for this rose, which he has now calling his own.  When he was with the rose: caring for her, sheltering her and admiring her amongst other things, he did not understand why he did these things for her.  While together, everything came naturally to him, he had a profound desire to nurture her and protect her, and he did not understand this, he had never felt this way before towards anything.  So he set out for answers from people whom he thought could give them.  Yet, after going to several different planets, and meeting a lot of different people, he soon realised that love cannot be explained through any means of what we see, it can only be determined in the heart.
 
He set out to understand what it truly meant to love something, and with every new planet he went to, his love for this rose grew deeper.
 
Yet, this story is not completely about the little prince’s love for his rose.  It is about his friendship with the narrator, that author of this story.  The little prince met him on Earth, at the end of his journey, and described to him everything he had seen, and this is how the story pans out.  The little prince goes from planet to planet trying to find out what love truly means, and he found that his love for his rose was something wonderful and precious, but also his friendship with the narrator is something even more profound.  The little prince changes the author’s perspective on what true friendship means.

The little prince treasures this rose, and while apart, his love for her grew more. Yet apart from her he experienced and learned many things. Now he knows that he must return home to his planet because he knows that he is responsible for this flower and he must defend for her. 
Once I finished this story I realised that there is so much to take from it.  It is a story of love, friendship, child-hood, adulthood, and the great mystery of life itself.

So far in this story, there is a man who has crash landed onto the Sahara Desert, and while he was there, he met a boy who also was known as the little prince. One of the main themes Exupéry discusses is having a child-like mindset, and he talks about how this thought process is lost once children have become adults.  He also makes note of how easily children can be discouraged from achieving their dreams since adults often let go of their ability to use their imagination to full capacity.  He mentions how children such as the little prince go off on thousands of tangents which may hardly mean anything at all, yet the reason they do not is because adults have lost the capacity to experience individualism, uniqueness, and acquire creative thoughts.

The little prince goes talking about tending to his home planet, as he calls it Asteroid B-612, because if he did not call it something which seemed logical to adults, they would not pay any attention to him.  The little prince is the keeper of his planet, raking out the Baobabs which simple means a seed which actually has the capacity to either be a flower or a weed.  This I find quite fascinating, and symbolic to how people pinpoint the good people and the bad people.  At first, they all look the same, like the Baobabs, put once you get to know a person, you can find out whether or not they will be a benefit to you.  Just so, who wants a Baobabs that just turns into a weed and that will eventually harm your planet (life)?  Such things that the little prince discusses with the author seem so unimportant, yet can be looked at more deeply.  He has still not lost his child-like mindset, and he has so much to teach adults, yet he thinks that he has so much to learn from them. 

One thing that caught my attention was in chapter eight, when the little prince watches the development of something spectacular.  It is far different from any of the Baobabs on his planet.  He describes it like this,

“The little prince, who had watched the development of an enormous bud, realized that some sort of miraculous apparition would emerge from it, but the flower continued her beauty preparations in the shelter of her green chamber, selecting her colours with the greatest care and dressing quite deliberately, adjusting her petals one by one.  She had no desire to emerge all rumpled, like the poppies.  She wished to appear only in the full radiance of her beauty.  Oh yes, she was quite vain!  And her mysterious adornment had lasted days and days.  And then one morning, precisely at sunrise, she showed herself.”

As he waits patiently for this flower to bloom, he describes his impatience and sheer excitement as he awaits the arrival of something miraculous.  The way he portrays his admiration for something so exquisite is expressed in the way he describes this flower, by the way he illustrates her beauty, you would think he were talking about a woman.  How could the little prince have such a profound love for something he does not even know yet?  I wonder if it is more like a fatherly love, for this flower which he has been watching over and protecting like his own daughter.  Yet something makes me feel like it is not a fatherly-love, when he goes on to say,

  “But I was too young to know how to love her,”

Perhaps he is worried that he will not know how to appreciate something so wonderful.  Perhaps he is fearful that he will not know how to appreciate her full value and give her the admiration she deserves.

So he sets out to try to comprehend what it means to love something, how to appreciate something so beautiful when he is fearful that she is so delicate and her beauty could just disappear in a moment; she could just wilt in his hand.

His child-like mind appreciates this flower for everything she is.  He waits patiently for her to be ready to express her love back, and he tends to her, making sure she feels safe, comfortable and treasured.  The little prince does not know it yet, but he knows more of love than any of the adults he is going to meet.  Perhaps the reason he feels like he does not know how to love her because he is too young. Is it fear that is holding him back from wanting to love her, or does is truly not know how?  How would one learn how to love, does it not just come naturally?

“When I was a teenager, I thought every kid spent sweaty summer afternoons in their bedrooms, daydreaming of cutting their mother up into little pieces and mailing them to parts unknown.  I did this both prone upstairs and gymnastically about the house.  As I agreed to take out the trash, I cut off her head.  As I weeded the yard, I plucked out her eyes, her tongue.  While dusting the shelves, I multiplied and divided her body parts…I had now not only broken her nose but managed to mangle her body postmortem.  There was no reason why I shouldn’t fulfill my childhood dreams.”

Something about what Helen says here unnerves me, but it is not the thoughts about killing her mother that does so.  Rather, it is when Helen reveals her thoughts on normality, and her assumptions that every other kid felt the same way.  Even though Helen does not reveal exactly why she feels this way, something unexplainable and tragic is starting to surface.  Why would she assume that these thoughts enslaved every person?  The answer is simple; she thought everyone had a mother like hers.  This causes me to wonder what exactly happened to her when she was growing up and I jump to conclusions and find myself saying, something traumatic.  An abusive, manipulative mother sounds about right.

Seabold’s word choice confuses me when she uses the word “gymnastically.” I guess in context it means that in the privacy of her own room she harbors such thoughts, but she also does so as she goes about doing things she does every day.  I find it interesting how utterly blunt Helen becomes when she faces the truth about her malicious thoughts, which somehow, underlying so becomes heartbreaking.  Helen bore something for years, which she is now suffering for in her mid forties.  Something which has not yet been voiced is starting to be revealed, something eerie and fascinating which causes us as the reader to want to rush through the book, but at the end, beg for more.    

Helen’s shocking confession terrifies and also intrigues me at exactly the same time.  She is being brutally honest and the traumatic experiences of her childhood are slowly being revealed.  Right now, the exact happenings of what her mother did to her as a child are unknown, yet it is evident that something ongoing effected her negatively.  Seabold literary style is evident through Helen’s memories as she puts together something normal with something deranged and demoralizing.  Seabold re-categorizes the real meaning for daily routine as she delicately reveals Helen’s poisonous thoughts.  Somehow, the thoughts which massacre her mother forms much more of a cruel and chillingly fierce truth which longs to be revealed.

The mystery of hidden emotions and unmistakably horrifying truths about Helen’s past continue to haunt and fascinate me.  The climax of this story happens in the first line of the book, now Seabold is working her way backwards, slowly revealing piece by piece as to what drove her to ultimately kill her mother.  This is what makes The Almost Moon simultaneously uncomfortable and absorbing.

 “When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.”

 This is the very first line in this novel, and right away a gruesome and dark truth is revealed, yet she has nothing to hide, she has her palms, open faced and bloody before us.  Then, she goes on to say as to why she murders her; “Dementia,” right in the second line; this word spirals out of control in its own realm.  Helen, her daughter, describes it this way,

“the thing about dementia is that sometimes you feel like the afflicted person has a trip wire to the truth, as if they can see beneath the skin you hide in.”

  She is sickened, but also completely aware of the person her mother has become; she cannot bear to watch her mother suffer through psychological trauma any longer, it has already gone too far.  Her mother’s mind has completely turned on her, and so impulsively this is how she killed her mother…

“I smashed these downy towels into my mother’s face.  Once begun, I did not stop, she struggled, her blue-veined hands, with the rings she feared would be stolen if she ever took them off, grabbed at my arms.  First her diamonds and then her rubies briefly flickered in the light.  I pushed down harder.  The towels shifted, and I saw her eyes.  I held the towels for a long time, staring right at her, until I felt the tip of her nose snap and saw the muscles of her body go suddenly slack and knew that she had died.”

One might ask why Helen really kills her mother, and one may draw one of two conclusions.  Perhaps it is the fierce and passionate hate for her that drives her to it.  Perhaps it is out of a bitter-sweet love which is protective for her the mother’s well being, the mother she once knew who is now overtaken by dementia.

She cannot bear to see her suffer anymore, so she wills herself to save her. 

The irony is, in her efforts to save her mother, she kills her.   

Could the reason why she does it possibly be both?  Hate and love, and the thin line which separates them; could it possibly cause her to be unsettled and drive her step outside of herself and kill the disease which is controlling her mother?  Does she kill her mother in her efforts to kill the person dementia has poisoned? 

 Her mother has struggled far too long in her pain and suffering, and as she resists underneath her force, as she is pushing down on her face, it is apparent she does not see her mother suffocating.  She sees her eyes and feels nothing; these eyes are foreign, and she looks into them and senses emptiness, and defeat. She knows that in that moment, the mother she once knew had already been overtaken. 

When I think of the act as a whole, the murder itself, and how Helen could not stop, I find myself asking, why?  The rush of adrenaline mixed with utter terror causes her to start and to keep going until she is done.  And the physical nature of her mother causes her to struggle, however she knows that within her mother is a demon like spirit which has completely transfigured her.  So with every ounce of love for her mother and for every ounce of hate for the dementia which has overtaken her, she pushes down with all of her strength.

This act is a tragedy and a pleasure; it is an act of love and of hate.

IT WAS A MURDER!  By his very own brother in fact.

The reason? 

Perhaps Jealousy…

I think the real reason as to why he did it was…

He lost his true identity.

On stage, he and his brother were the same person.  That is how they achieved The Dancing Man. Erik would be the one Timushka would be pretending to cut in half, and Edvard would be the one coming out of the box, while in the end his identical twin brother Erik slipped into a trap door underneath.  In public, Edvard could not exist; he had to disguise himself so that the public would not know their big secret. 

Miss Van Horne caught Mister Kelgard in the act.

I read on…

‘ “What do you intend to do about this, Mister Kelgard’

He was standing.

She looked about him.

‘I intend’, he said, smiling, ‘to take a breath of fresh air.’

Having spoken, he turned towards the window farthest from where I was seated, lifted the sash and leapt to his death.”

He killed his very own brother…his very own twin brother; obviously it drove him into killing himself, what a horrible thing to do.

Yet, all of his life, he was forced to be someone he was not.  All of his life, he could never be Edvard Kelgard, he was known as Harald Koenig, the man with the accent.

This questions my sanity now…am I taking pity on a man who killed his own brother?  Am I beginning to blame his actions on Erik because he was so selfish?

Does the victim suddenly become the perpetrator?

Now, every chapter turns into a new story which begins with a new character, and thus far, each person’s story encompasses the theme of death. 

*If you have read my previous blog called dust to dust, ashes to ashes, you would know that this theme is apparent. 

Chapter three’s, Miss Vanessa Van Horne, age seventy-one, and also a millionaire, finally decides to travel to Paris to visit an old friend Timushka, (her real name is Rose-Marie) who just happens to be an ex-magician. Timushka’s old friend and partner on stage Erik Kelgard had vowed to each other that they would keep The Dancing Man act a secret until they both died.  This trick is preformed

“by placing the so-called victim in an elaborate box—and when the cutting is done, the box is parted—giving the illusion the victim has been cut in half.”

Yet now, Timushka has decided to reveal the secret in her latest book, without Erik’s consent. 

The secret being… he had no legs to cut off because he lost both in war and also, he also had a twin.

Now with the news that their secret is now being revealed to the world, a secret which he had kept his entire life, causes his depression to spiral out of control and finalizes his decision to hang himself.  Timushka finds his body, hanging there in her bathroom, and his clothes, which are neatly placed on her bed, along with his spectacles, watch and his ring.

As Miss Van Horne waits for Timushka to read Erik’s suicide letter, she thinks… 

 “Someone told me, once—a psychiatrist, I believe—that often, when people intend to kill themselves, they remove their watches and personal jewellery.  Also their spectacles.  Something about finality, I remember his saying.  Something about the moment of death—an acknowledgement that all is over.  No more use for adornment—no more references to time.  And nothing more to see.”

When we are born, we come with nothing, except for the DNA we acquired from our parents, and innate knowledge we attain by nature.  In our lives, we strive to live for something, whether it is, money, sports, fame or family; in the end, we obtain nothing. 

Out of the womb we come naked and with nothing, and out of the world we go, with nothing.  In Erik’s suicide letter, he mentions that his only fate would be, “helpless and sedated, useless and alone,” and this thought drove him into suicide.

The symbolic ideas referenced in this quotation are ingenious; the image of ‘taking off a watch’ represents that time is no longer of the essence.  For that person, they are entering a place where time does not exist.  Time is one thing that everyone feels like they do not have enough of, we feel as if we are robbed of it daily.  In the act of taking off any personal jewellery it signifies that everything of this world is meaningless.  Jewellery merely represents something of a person’s character, but mostly, it is just another object that may or may not have emotional value.  For instance, a ring worn on your wedding finger is supposed to indicate a message of: love and commitment to the person you are with.  Yet, is it the ring that signifies love, or the relationship itself?  Erik takes off his jewellery and his ring, in order for people to understand that he could not take any of these things with him into the realm of death. 

Thus, “no more use for adornment—no more references to time…”

And finally, he takes off his spectacles, symbolizing that he has seen all there is to see in his life, and he does not desire to see anything more.

There is something to learn from all of this…something that we all tend to forget, but might not necessarily think about often, because we do not feel the need to.  Suicide seems so wrong, so cruel, yet Erik had lost everything, and all of the things that he counted to be worth something just ended up being worthless. 

If everything in his life became meaningless and all the things he worked so hard to obtain became of no value to him in the end, then what was the point?  What was the point of him actually living?  If all of it is just going to end up in suicide, why bother in the first place? 

What is the purpose of life? 

Many people do not know this answer, and search their entire lives to find it…

and most of the time, do not. 

“By the sweat of your brow

You will eat your food

Until you return to the ground,

Since from it you were taken;

For dust you are

And to dust you will return.”

Gen 3:19

Dust to Dust, by Timothy Findley, focuses on the obscure, but safe life of Oliver Sher, and it begins to unfold through a narrative perspective.

His life consists of drinking perhaps a litre of rosé by mid afternoon, and his attempts to block out the world as best as he can.  I have learned that he is a widower and that his wife René had died of cancer.  Her time on earth was short-lived but also without sound. Because of this, Oliver grew accustom to speaking in his head more so than he spoke aloud.  

He never refers to René as his the wife he had, yet once, in reference to her he says,

“It wasn’t sex I loved—it was having René’s arms about me.  A presence—not a body,”

and because her physical presence is gone, he feels all is lost.

Questions still linger as to why he has a strange protective nature for cats…and practically has a burning hatred for children.  My guess is that cats do not seek to have an emotional connection, and children do.

Having said this, it brings me to my main point, where Oliver meets a boy who initially tried to kill one of his cats.  Aside from that, this child always shouts “Au secours!” when he is swimming, which means help in French.  Regardless, the child thinks it is a game to constantly yell for help only to draw attention to himself, which drives Oliver completely mad.    

(Findley writes a great deal of the conversations in French, and often I find myself reading phrases over a few times before I can actually understand what is really being said.  At times it makes it difficult, and often breaks the story into pieces, instead of adding to the story as a whole.)

So this brings me to question, who has read the story of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf?” Oliver decides to use this relevant story to illustrate to this child that crying for help when it is not actually needed can be very dangerous.  Still, as each day passes, this child continues to cry “Au secours!” just for attention.  Yet on one particular day while Oliver hears the child’s cry for help, he put ear plugs in and continues to sun bathe; suddenly the noise stops and he notices the child’s water wings lying beside the pool.

“There they sat, not unlike a cartoon manifestation of lungs.  Red.  Red and shining.

Au secours.

This was not a cry.  It was just the words presenting themselves in Oliver’s mind.  Au secours.

He stared at the water-wings. 

He felt ill.

Don’t.

 But he had to.  He had to turn around and look.

The child—just the shape of him—lay in a curled position on the bottom of the pool where it was deepest.

Oliver fell to his knees.  He knew there was nothing he could do.  He couldn’t even swim.  Wolf, he heard himself whisper.  But his voice, like his sense of reality, had quite deserted him.”

I love the way Finley breaks up the thoughts of Oliver which are narrated, and puts Oliver’s own thoughts in italics.  The metaphor of the water-wings in relation to the child’s deflated lungs is strange, yet powerful and Oliver refers to them more than once during his thought process.  The water-wings slowly become more than just an object; they become something that represents life, living and breathing and now lying on the ground bleeding, gasping, and desiring to take another breath. 

The brutal reality in which Oliver had to face was that, he could have saved this boy’s life, but did not.  Suddenly, Oliver becomes the character in the novel “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” who is tired of running to the rescue, so he chooses not to do so anymore.  Out of his own selfishness, Oliver chooses to ignore the cry once more; his own insecurities and fears hindering him from jumping into the pool and saving this boy’s life. 

When I read the word Wolf in italics, my heart sunk, and I drew the parallel immediately; this is exactly what Finley wanted the reader to do.  He wanted the reader to feel remorse and guilt, which he achieved.

I was truly inspired to write, because thoughts of taking chances, and living life to the fullest became evident through the text, and the realization came to me, that one day, we will just be dust in the wind.  How then will we be remembered?

What is revealed?

This is supposed to be a comment on Ricky’s blog, but for some reason it would not let me post.

Jazz DOES resolve, it just may take a great length of time to do so. The musican may fool you, making you think the song is happy, when all of a sudden it is sad.  Bits and pieces of the story, the art, is revealed over time.

Listen to Sonny Rollins, and then you will truly undestand the saxaphone.

In the same way, God reveals himself to us, but in peices.  His love is expressed to us through people, nature, and the Bible ect. and we may spend our whole lives building up in our minds who God truly is. 
We could perhaps understand love by watching it, but we would rather want to feel love by experience. 
Just like music, art, people, sports, God(or anything we are passionate about for that matter)we would rather feel the love we have for it because we know there was something deep inside us that said it was there.  Not because someone told us we should feel that way.

“She reaches fast over to the night table and grabs a heavy motel glass.  It hits me on the collarbone with a thud.  I hear the crack. ‘You’re lucky…I was aimin’ for your ugly-a**-f***in’[sic] face!’ Pain races like an ice shear through me, but I don’t move.  I blink the tears away.  ‘Don’t stare at me like that, you evil f***in’[sic] piece of s***[sic].  What?  You think you’re better’n me?  If it weren’t for me, you’d be burnin’ in hell right now!’” (110)

He blinks the tears away, because this woman, (I can hardly type mother), threatened him saying, that if he cried again, she would send him into the police to be crucified, chopped up, and burned. 

I do not think I have ever read a book that has uses more profanity than this one, but JT Leroy writes in such a way that even the words that should not be said, are said multiple times, over and over, as if to burn them into your mind.  This book reminds me of a song called Like Knives by City and Colour, because it talks about how words have the capacity to be so powerful, and more often, the things people say can cut deeper and hurt more than physically getting cut.  In the song, it says that he holds onto things, hoping that he can keep this person by his side, so that maybe, one day, he can feel love, even when that feeling will never be reciprocated.  Similarly Jeremiah does the same, believing that one day, his mother will show him love and he holds tightly onto that. 

This boy, that was once named Jeremiah by his loving foster parents, is taken away by his manipulative, raging, psychotic more or less of a birth mother, probably because she needed the money.  The only thing that makes her a mother is the fact that he was once in her womb, everything else that defines a true mother is thrown out the window.  The name Jeremiah quickly becomes last month’s name, sometimes he even goes nameless, or is introduced by his mother as her younger sister.  She is on the run, using every guy she meets for his money as long as she puts out, and is so caught up in drugs that she is never in her right mind.  At four years old, Jeremiah was exposed to things that even adults would not want to be exposed to. 

Suffering, pain, fear, and guilt are just a few things that this little boy suffers from because every day he thinks that it is his fault that he is not loved.  His heart longs to be held, treated with respect, admired, cared for, he needs these things to mature and grow physically, emotionally, and mentally.  Instead of getting held or hugged, his mother touches him inappropriately, physically and sexually abuses him.  He is even abused by all the men she sleeps around with; she introduces them as his new “father.”  Since he never gets the physical embrace to feel loved, he believes that the way his mother treats him is what love is.  When she screams, curses, mocks, and threatens him, he thinks that he did something wrong, and that he does not deserve to live.  How does such a mindset take over?  A truth is revealed about the heart, it is deceitful above all things.    

Does she even have a soul, heart, brain?  Clearly, she does not understand what it means to love, perhaps because she never felt love.  How does someone even talk to someone the way she talks to her child…her own child.  If she had a soul, she would not be treating her seven year old child in this way.  She uses manipulation, threats, guilt, fear, rage, and every form of abuse to fight her way into this child’s heart to make sure that he feels much more pain, than what she feels inside.  She uses Jeremiah as her outlet, and because of this he does not know what it feels like to be loved.   Jeremiah suffers from guilt, and the wrong choices his mother makes pushes him to punish himself mentally and physically for it because his image of God is perceived as an abusive God.  Where do you turn when God is seen just as abusive and judgemental as the ones on earth abusing?         

This book has opened my eyes to the ugly truths and the blunt reality of children in abusive homes.  This is not one of those books that you read and just tell yourself not to worry because it isn’t real.  I read this book and will myself not to cry, because I am constantly telling myself that it possibly cannot get worse, but it always does.  Leroy does this on purpose to really get a point across.  He wants the reader to feel the need to do something, to stir something up in their hearts to take action and make it stop.  Leroy’s writing style makes me feel invisible, while everything takes place, unable to move, speak, or do anything about the pain inflicted upon Jeremiah.  In moments of truth, where justice should be served, she acts, a perfect deceitful act, and Jeremiah is locked inside himself, unable to reveal his mothers true character so that he can escape.  And in those moments, all I want to do is jump into the book and scream everything I know and save him.  Leroy causes this feeling in my heart because he understands that there is a terrifying reality behind just a story; this seems all too real to just be made up.     

The heart is deceitful above all things, guard it, for it is the wellspring of life…

(parts of Proverbs 4:23)