supplicium post mortem

• How RP used to insist on giving Casey a hand spanking across his knee after administering any implement. This was to reinforce the closeness of the relationship and to overcome whatever false stoicism or independence the implement had caused.
• How, in the early days and even later, he would insist she sit on his knee after, especially when her instinct was to go and hide somewhere.
• After remembering 1 + 2, a vague sense of happiness came over me, or was it contentment? Security? Hope? It was  the feeling I used to get knowing M would be home soon from Englandland, home and able to take care of Casey as she so profoundly needed, and as no one else on the earth could propose to, or want to.
• Then, a breath later, the abyss – in fact, just as I realized the feeling of safety, it vanished, like every other awakening since last spring. When he was alive, I sometimes had nightmares that he was dying or dead, and I’d wake up to the most profound reprieve, and reach for him in the bed and weep with relief that it had only been a dream. Now that’s reversed. Is all hope now located in error? Can I only feel hope and goodness in mistakenly imagining he’s coming back, like all those dreams where he has come back? (He was only shipwrecked! He was only on a trip! We were only divorced! It’s not as though he was dead – )
• Then I physically longed – so powerfully – to put my arms around him and hold him. I’d never let him go again if he would only come back. Later, in the park with the dogs, I broke down sobbing. Was it the “O Salutaris Hostia” on my ipod? The “Ubi Caritas”? Oh, da robur! Fer auxillium!
• Earlier that night there had been a dream about a tgi liason with a guy I didn’t know, on the 11th floor of some big, modern building with complicated elevators. I don’t think I ever got there.
• And a dream fragment in which one of my RW students had the idea that I deserved the strap, and so gave it to me. It didn’t hurt, though, and several strokes outright missed. I almost laughed. When it came time for his punishment I said, You aren’t going to like this. I lined up the tawse to strike. This is actually going to hurt, so prepare yourself.

perfect dad, perfect lap

A dream I had before Christmas about the father in Ripping Yarns’s series of stories about the Aken family. The “In…” series…

It was like college, and I was living with roommates. Mr. Aken, the dad from Rip’s stories, turned up. He found some glass shards on the carpet, evidence of a broken light, and this was an expensive and important light in some way. He looked to me and I had to admit I’d known about it. It wasn’t clear if I’d actually been involved with breaking it, but I had known of it and done nothing, which was wrong. I was flooded with guilt when he looked at me.

He walked by me and touched my face with his finger (long, slender, feminine), under my right eye and then just below my eyebrow, as if tracing the contours of the black circles there. Then he was holding me on his lap and I was 7 or 8, like Dan in one of the stories. He was wearing a plaid flannel work shirt and so was I. Mine was over-sized and both were soft, and he was holding me in that hugely protective way, and I was weeping because it just felt so safe and so good on his lap, even though I was in trouble – especially because I was in trouble. He told me he’d be able to deal with this matter even though he couldn’t be everything to me that I needed and wanted. Still, I cried in his lap because at that moment it was perfect. Even though I wasn’t his son, and couldn’t be his son, he could treat me the same as his son for this brief time while I was on his lap and while he dealt with me for the broken light.

When I had this dream I had been tutoring Othello heavily, in particular Act V, Scene 2: “put out the light, and then put out the light,” (1) the first light being Othello’s candle, of course, and the second being Desdemona’s life. I may not have put out M’s light myself, but am I guilty, in my heart, in some way, for not catching it, for all the uncountable failures that preceded and maybe led to his death, for all the times I didn’t love him enough, for fighting about taxes, for all the forever left undone? How can I ever be truly forgiven all of that unless I can be allowed to have him back and redeem it, put it right with him, love him fully like I always really have? How can I truly and really redeem anything without him?

(1)

Put out the light, and then put out the light:
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me:–but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume.