Corey's Comin'

Six months ago, just before the dissolution of my long term (17 year) relationship, I was waiting for Marsha to come back "home" to California and I wound up playing an old song by Harry Chapin over and over; in the car, on my iTunes… in my head. The song, Corey's Comin', relates the story of a young man and an old man and the magical (perhaps imaginary) woman who lights up both of their lives. It's a song I have been deeply moved by every time I hear it ever since the very first time I found it on a record album in a friend's closet on the third floor of a big house on a small street in San Francisco; I even preached a sermon on it once. Six months ago, it expressed precisely the hope and healing I longed for and expected with the soon coming of my long gone lover. Over dinner one night at the end of May, I described the feeling to Marsha with the phrase, "You are my heart."

She wasn't having any of it. At the time I had royally screwed up the far too many financial responsibilities I had taken on with her move to Mississippi and, afraid to let her know of my complete (though well-intentioned) ineptitude, I had lied to her about it. She was not happy about this set of less than desirable circumstances. Sitting across from me, at the last of thousands of dinners we had shared with each other across similar tables, she looked me in the eye and said, "How can you say that, when you then do this?"

It was a good question, a significant and important question. However, it was an impossible question to answer. In my mind, the two things were really not related. The statement,"You are my heart," was an expression of the ineffable gravity of interpersonal connection; a linking of souls and the holding of essence. It was an expression of lucky connection, depth of feeling, shared experience, and a never perfect, but always present intermingling of goals, dreams, hopes, values and life. It was not something that could be destroyed by stupidity, ineptitude, economic crisis, or even deception (well-intentioned or otherwise). It is, in the more formal ceremony of marriage, what we theoretically mean when we say, usually with a total lack of understanding, "…for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, to death do us part." It was not, as Marsha chose to suggest, an empty phrase, nor was it simply wishful thinking. It was a statement of basic fact. I was saying to Marsha, "You are my soul mate. You complete me."

What I am coming to understand now, is that this sentiment was also thoroughly misplaced. This is something I should have understood long before now. Hell… It's even in Chapin's song. Corey wasn't, isn't and couldn't possibly be a flesh and blood woman. It's simply too much of a burden to bear for any human being to be someone else's heart; to carry (willingly or unwillingly) another person's other half. It's a great line, and it plays really well on screen and in song. Frankly, that's exactly where it should play, but it's simply not possible for another flesh and blood person to complete me. No healthy person would desire it, and no healthy person would be willing to try. Corey doesn't exist in the real world, she exists outside of time and space; she exists in myth, and hope and deep in the mind.

In Jungian psychology this opposite is known as the anima (in men) and the animus (in women). He/she is the individual's opposite, the deep part of our psychological make up that most of us, to varying levels of success and failure, are almost perpetually trying to find outside ourselves, in the flesh and blood men and women we have dinner with, make love to, and spend our lives attempting to understand. Anima and Animus are created out of a clay formed deep in our psychology and composed of everything from the ancient imaginings of people throughout all of history, the cultural expectations of our own society, and the ways in which our parents (particularly our opposite sex parent) raised us, treated us, and laid their expectations upon us. Psychologist Robert Johnson, in his book, "Lying with the Heavenly Woman," makes the case for the fact that we cannot be truly whole until we remove our anima/animus expectations from the flesh and blood humans around us and deal with the one who really is our heart, that inner opposite we usually spend our lives running away from.

This is the real lesson of the last six months in my life. First Hurricane Marsha and, shortly thereafter, Hurricane Katrina succeeded in sending my life into a tailspin dive that, for a while, it was looking like I might not rise back up from. But as I was spinning straight down toward the dark psychological waters of my personal deluge (waters that are as toxic as those other ugly waters we saw so much of on television back in September) I caught a glimpse of light at the bottom of the pool. Whether it was a glint from Arthur's sword in the hand of The Lady of the Lake, a twinkle in the eye of Venus rising from the waters, or just the reflection of the moon behind me springing back from the dark surface below, I don't know. Whatever it was, it startled me and it woke me up. When I pulled out of the spin, landed on the shore, and placed my feet on dry ground, this strange and lovely woman was standing before me. She looked familiar, at least a little bit. I know I've seen her in dreams over the years as she has flitted about the edges of my psyche waiting for me to slow down long enough to take her hand and ask her name.

I have a photo of her on my computer. It's a picture by Imogen Cunningham that I have been captivated by since the first time I saw it in a gallery in Carmel over 30 years ago. She doesn't always look like this; she changes shape and personality pretty frequently.Sometimes, she stands to the side, dark and mysterious and removed, daring me to approach and waiting for me to understand something hidden and soulful and new. She's interesting and difficult and engaging, and sometimes just a bit scary. She's absolutely real, that's for sure.

So now I'm spending a lot of time with this new woman that I'm finally coming to know after 51 years of cohabitation in my being, and it's a very interesting experience. I see in her the personality features, the priceless magical qualities, and the frustrating annoyances that I have spent most of my life pinning to the unsuspecting forms of all the women I have ever known like they were wrinkled up paper tails tacked to a birthday party donkey's ass.

I don't really know her very well yet and she goes by many names, but lately I've just been calling her Corey. I think she's helping me come to a place where I can relate to the real flesh and blood members of her sex with a better understanding of who, what and why we are who, what and why we are.

She completes me.

She is my soul mate.

Let the Butts Begin

I have been writing 1,000 – 1,500 word essays on pretty much anything that crosses my mind for the better part of twenty five years. While I have occassionally published these in magazines and newspapers (though usually in some adapted form more fit for human consumption than they started out) most of them reside in multiple mangled versions on the hard drives (and skeletons of hard drives), pads of paper and large black blank books scattered just about everywhere I have ever touched ground. I have for some time wanted to print more of these than I can typically get past editors (or have the time to mail out to editors), but with the beginning of my SpeakLo blog back in July and it's brother blog, Washington's Cousin, shortly thereafter, I began to have a sense of what I can do with some of this stuff.

Hence… Butting Heads.

With a name like Butler, I have been subjected to any number of obvious perversions – butthead, butthead-ler (as a friend in California refers to me with an inordinate amount of self-satisfaction in the thought that this was somehow an original idea of his own) and, of course, Ass-ler, were many of the choice favorites. My own favorite nickname in high school and college was the shortened Butts. I think it was a way of end running the insults by embracing my own sanctified version and owning it with enthusiasm. I even had a football jersey with that name on it from my freshman year at Oral Roberts University (that's another story of its own). This name had only one downfall. At the time, I shared it with the somehwat less than enlightened Secretary of the Interior during the then active Nixon Administration. In any case… Butt.. Butts… Butthead and all the other derivations have been a part of my identity my whole life. I figure I might as well claim them for something of at least semi-value.

The name is also atrributable to the awareness that most of my philosophical meanderings are as pointless as the activity described. Their biggest advantage to me personally being that the pain of the head butting draws my attention away from the pain of the awareness itself. I may not be able to do much about most things in the world, but I can at least scribble down my feelings about them and hope that somewhere, somehow those shared experiences bring at least a little bit of light and life (and maybe an occasional free beer) to the subjects at hand.

Of course… the biggest advantage of all this to me personally, is simply the writing practice. What you get out of these meanderings I will leave to you. You should of course feel free to leave them for me (and other readers) through a liberal use of the comments feature.

One of my favorite books of all time is a little book by Thomas Merton that is difficult to find, "Raids on the Unspeakable." It sits on the table where I write and I pick it up and read short segments on a regular basis. I've been doing this, almost daily, for the last 27 years. In the prologue to the book, Merton begins, "WELL, Raids, you're grown up now. It is time for you to go out and meet people as the other books have done." I'm not sure that the reflections I expect to publish here will be "all grown up," in fact, it's pretty likely that many of them won't be grown up at all, but that's the chance I'm deciding to take.
Finally, a disclaimer and a warning:

Caveat Emptor…

In some of these entries, you may find out more than you want to know. I guarantee that you will find out more than I want you to know, but I am determined that if the most basic rule of writing is "write what you know" then this writing is going to require an honesty on my part that I am generally less than enthusiastic about engaging in such a public way.

For the sake of a certain amount of propriety (and the fact that my mother, sister, daughter and other people who are sometimes too close for comfort read this stuff) I will be at least somewhat circumspect about sharing any truly ugly details, such as they are.

With that said… to quote Dubya's favorite phrase…

Let's Roll.