Lilliputians

"Everything starts today."

-- Guster, "Keep It Together"

--

So. Second day of the year, already pushing against the resolution, To be happier in spite of. Happiness, so I have been told, is not the fleeting feeling of joy but rather the state of living in accordance with virtue, which is fixed. Good grace. Not sure if it necessarily "looks on tempests and is ne'er shaken," but it's a good start to, well, a good start.

Speaking of starts, though... Woke up on the couch this morning (relatives have taken over my room) to sounds of snarl and gurgle, staring into unseeing eyes, just out of reach of unfeeling hands. My aunt, this poor person's mother, was nowhere in the room, and my cousin desperately needs to be either sedated or watched at all times. Her needs and sensations are foreign to me; I cannot help her, and if I tried, I would only do her accidental harm. Relatives rarely pack light; they rather pack heavily, their hordes of baggage dangling from every limb, like Gulliver if he had uprooted the Lilliputian cords and run home, with tiny men still hanging on with tiny killer grips. These tiny men are the infinite little nuisances--conversation pieces better left untouched, odd odors, and sometimes, a severe mental handicap--that land from their swinging journey to infest your house for a time. They squat, they scurry, they surprise you as they roam about. They are foreign to you, brought here from an unknown land by a not-so-welcome ally. You bring your own when you visit them, too, but maybe they are better at ignoring yours than you are. Nobody's perfect, after all.

So. In spite of all that this morning, I calmly restored the living room to order and went upstairs to finish sleep. Since the incident, I have accepted the apology from my aunt, clemency towards the unaware Lilliputian who woke me up. Good grace, perhaps. (Laurence J. Peter, author and teacher, says, "Humility is the embarrassment you feel when you tell people how wonderful you are," and I think he is right, except that it is also a subtle kind of hammer, a soft but ebbing blow that dizzies you with your own height, nauseates you with your own musk. It is the anti-Me, the super-ego's finest weapon.)

--

Headshots today, for sure. The rental car is waiting for tomorrow, when my sister and I begin the sojourn eastward through the night, racing to meet the dawn.

Ajax, with his furry eyebrows and horse eyes, woke me from second sleep this morning, making a strange noise from the inside of his nose, a self-straining sort of sound. He whined. He pawed my face, trying to open it, waking it up. He relayed the same message to my sister, who is also amused and annoyed by his cuteness. We toyed with him, the early rising puppy, our sweet revenge for an hour of lost shuteye. He could hear the relatives' dog on the linoleum downstairs, thick claws clacking and big legs thumping, and he wanted out, too. (Mimetic desire, in its most reduced form.) He whined, this time at the door, digging at the jamb. We tried to pet him but he recoiled, aghast, and stared at us. It took a solid ten minutes for us to figure out that he wanted to go pee.

So the dog knows what it wants and can't communicate it to us: Our own Lilliputian, too small to understand fully, to be understood fully.

--

I feel sometimes like I am the opposite of all that, unable to communicate my wants for another reason. It's not that I don't know the language--perhaps I stupidly believe I know it too well to be humbled before its use--but that I don't know what I want. Too many cords, too many soldiers, tugging, swaying me down. Too much subtlety, not enough substance; too much drama, not enough direction; too many words, not enough worth.

So. For today: Headshots, shopping, and more grace. The persona non grata understands the same as Valjean's rector, that in matters of grace, mercy and forgiveness, there is no wrong end of it. There is only right, and there is no end: A perfect circle rather than a line segment or a ray. Find the circumference of it from an arc, the area from its radius.

After all, I needed to be awake anyway. It was almost eight.