Pain Spectroscopy

I wish I’d made this up but the idea came from email as spectroscopy, quite cool in itself. Ed tells me that spectroscopy is the analysis of light frequency to determine molecular structure. You go layer by layer, identifying the number of electrons in each. As a metaphor for this, it stands up.

I know from experience that the only way out is in. Now, again almost overwhelmed with pain, I return to this. Yes, it’s analysis but to do it probes the recesses. It’s a journey of sense-making and feeling, somehow groping forward. Basically, it’s pissing me off feeling this much pain and being so disabled from my daily life by it. I just want to give it the flick.

I indulged, today in pathetic recourse to “are you sure?”. She is. As if I hadn’t known that, I had been “waiting by the phone”, badly. Like a ventriloquist’s dummy, I was tipped into a new trough of lamentation. Jeezers, I am thinking, there’s gotta be something more to this than I realise. I mean, she’s a nice chick but we were holding hands, snuggling up a little.

OK, it’s the prism. But first, notice the alternating pattern between the layers.

1: Conscious, real person: No Playmate

I can’t call her Chicky Babe any more. How’s “L”? We’re not talking magazine here but biking or sitting around, dinner, brunch (she doesn’t do breakfast, apparently), picnic, lingeringly shopping for nice clothes, aromatic delicacies or absolute crap, skipping or scuttling about playing body games, fossicking, doing movies, domestically hanging curtains or fridge doors, music, art, architecture and garden-fancying. All that ordinary nice stuff. Some of it not so ordinary for me. Ok what? L being haughty, dismissive and presumptuous with me. Issuing orders in monosyllables. Chatting online to other blokes for the first five minutes after I arrive. Whoah, we are very close to my ‘ok’ boundary here.. but are we? Somehow, I know that it’s just play and when real stuff goes down, she’ll be there, pretty solid. And when it does, she is. Noticing how easy L is with herself and with people. Meeting Simon and being out about letting go being “on show”. Different way of doing it from me. With substance.

Feeling an electric sensation touching her skin.

Layer 1: no real person whom I like and have much easy fun with.

2: Unconscious, imagined person: No Partner

My unconscious, of course notices about three basic things: woman, friendly, around a lot and goes “latch”. A “live-in lover”. Someone to check in with at the end of each day, stretch out with, get up with, share intimate spaces of the house, comment on decor, share utensils with. No run-up.

Why would there be? A person whom i like and who is giving me attention. Who doesn’t like that? Actually, I know this “pattern” quite well, having had a decent selection of good fits, in my time.

Gotta query rejection here. Call me naive (or narcissistic) but I don’t think this is too bad a case of it. I’d know.

Layer 2: no match with the imagined missing person silhouette.

3: Conscious, real person: No Jane

It’s simple, really. L matches missing person mould but missing person mould is plastic, it’s been deformed, shaped by Jane. My whole life has. I can’t put a twisty tie around a cellophane breadcrumbs bag without her being right here with me.

C’mon, it’s been nine months, can I start having my life back? C’mon, it’s only been nine months, man, what do you expect? Amazing, Dan, only nine months and you’re giving it a go again! Do you know how sick i am of this little chat? I am and I’m not. I know you are here with me, Jane Spears. But what do I do with you, here like this but not? Damn, it’s like you get all the benefit from it, and all the power, and you don’t even exist.

L said she didn’t want to be the first one after Jane. Good call, Honey.

Layer 3: just who do you think i am?

4: Unconscious, imagined person, absent

This excerpt from (I think it’s a draft of the) script of the legendary movie Tombstone has it that, in a bedroom of the Hooker Ranch, Wyatt Earp says to Doc Holliday:

What makes a man like Ringo, Doc? What makes him do the things he does?

DOC

A man like Ringo’s got a great Empty hole right through the Middle of him and no matter what He does he can’t ever fill it. He Can’t kill enough or steal enough Or inflict enough pain to ever Fill it. And it drives him mad. Sick mad. Cold and dirty.

WYATT

So what does he want?

DOC

What does he want? He wants revenge.

WYATT

Revenge? For what?

[Doc looks at him, a look of purest sadness in his sunken eyes.]

DOC

Being born.

Abandonment, loss, lack. Stone-hugging. It’s not just childhood wounds, it’s the the war, and the war before that. Can’t escape this shit.

Layer 4: live with it.