Mama Said

I finished reading Dorian Gray this week. Wilde is very quotable. Generally, after I finish a book I will go back through it and type up all of the quotes that I have highlighted or underlined onto my computer so that I may return to them whenever I need to. I typed up a total of three pages from Dorian Gray and here are a few of my favorite:

"The value of an idea has nothing to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it."
"The harmony of soul and body – how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void."
"The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly- that is what each "of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves nowadays."
"Nothing can cure the soul but the sense, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul."
"Behind every exquisite thing that existed there was something tragic."
"Humanity takes itself too seriously. It’s the world’s original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, History would have been different. "
"No life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested."
"There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has the right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution."
"Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination."

That was me being picky. I have tons more. I have revisited them all a number of times...thought about them, not through them, and simply appreciated the words. Words are so powerful. Filled with charge. Is there anything more powerful than words?

I have decided to, in my free time, lose myself in other's words. Today I created a list of what I will be reading. These books are not books that my students are reading, they are just books I want to read. I am doing it for me.

I assigned word photos to my kids. An example of a word photo is this:

LAX

She stood in a waiting room amidst white collars and sleeveless shirts, pleated skirts, and baby bottles. Dirty fingernails fidgeting the top of her suitcase, like a tourist who had no sense of direction. Sneakers suffocating her sock-less feet; as her right toes cowardly hid under the left, she stared at the departure times desperate for a solution. She was battling her darkened eyelids, pleading with them to stay open, while simultaneously struggling to keep her emotions in control. Tears made tiny wade pools in her lower lid, she clenched her jaw, lit her last Parliament and took a seat right there in the corner. Wishing to be invisible.

That is about a time when I went to LA and didn't tell my mom. I missed my flight and didn't have a credit card or a telephone and thought I was pretty screwed. The idea is to freeze time and recreate it with images and senses. Showing, not telling, what the event was that took place. Most of them didn't really get the idea and turned in a narrative. However, a lot of the kids wrote about a very traumatic time: fights their parents had, the fight that we products of divorce know well which acts as a gust of wind that most broken homes cannot withstand, deaths of animals, parents, or friends, or losing their sense of home. CT and I discusses briefly why it is so much easier to remember those tragedies in life. I want to remember a Sunday morning eating my half of the grapefruit, or splitting an Oatmeal Creme Pie into fourths, or something good. My timeline is mostly filled with memories from that painful refuge in my heart that only opens it's door when I need words to write. My biological father, who has been deemed "Driftwood Dad" in many of my writings has butted his way on the page. Why? I never think of that life or him. Why is it that the happy memories slip away into the goings on of life, but these bad memories, the hard ones, wade at the seabed of our minds? I think maybe it is because they are hard and we have to work at them. Bolo in hand we have to find our way out of whatever jungle of madness we have been put into. My mom always said that something is more meaningful if you work for it. Maybe it's the journey that makes them resilient.