Living in MotherWealth excerpt

Excerpt from

Living in MotherWealth

The Sequel to MotherWealth: The Feminine Path to Money

by Naomi Rose

Illustrated by the author

Published by Rose Press

"Books & Other Fragrant Offerings

to Bring You Home to Yourself"

www.rosepress.com

Burnishing out the Etched Lines

of Not Being Loved by God

Something has persisted in me for more than forty years, which keeps me from playing in God's meadow and causes me to feel as if others can have a large and rich life but I cannot. It is something I remember well, and I even have an understanding in the top layers of my mind that it is an impression etched into my soul and not the actual truth of my life as a soul in the world. And yet that impression remains.

I wonder if this is true for more than only me. In the tight places I can get into, it seems it must only be me; and yet this cannot be true, this must be part of human forgetfulness—where what we have gone through in our lives, “conditioning,” it is called—seems so real and so total that it is almost impossible to see that it is simply a box around our being that we have gotten used to, much less see signs of life beyond that box. Perhaps it can help just to entertain the possibility that there is life beyond that box, to feel a glimmer of its presence, its nearness, even without in the least knowing its look, its form, its manifestations to be. This is the difficulty I sometimes experience in being told to “visualize what I want,” though my imagination works well, I can easily see in my mind's eye a puckered yellow lemon, a great spreading green-leaved tree: that beyond the known is not a well-delineated form, as yet, but the approach of something not yet in form. Perhaps that is the presence of a longing calling us.

This is what has persisted in me, over the many years since; and it is a good part of the inner impoverishment I carry inside, because it feels so real, and it has other threads to other, similar experiences that, together, form a convincing weave.

When I was in high school—and I started young, at the age of thirteen, so that I was but sixteen when I graduated—I had to come home directly afterwards to take care of my younger sister. My parents both worked, and the apartment in the building with the lobby and the elevator was empty of adults, and so it was left to me to be the adult. This meant that after classes, in the Gothic-like building where my high school took place, a seven-story stone edifice complete with a tower and gargoyles, while my schoolmates were standing outside chatting with each other and smoking cigarettes, I had to walk past them down the hundred twenty-five steps to the street, and from there take the subway home. There was a feeling of being excluded, as I walked past people of my own age and generation to assume a role befitting my parents' generation; as if I could not stop the work of school, the work of home, to relax, afterwards, laugh, complain, join forces with people my own age.

When I got home, my sister was there, having walked the few blocks from the junior high school she attended in the neighborhood. And I assumed my caretaking role, which largely meant making her food, and then watching TV together. The food was nothing wonderful: a tunafish sandwich on spongy white bread; a hamburger fried in a skillet, with ketchup on top; sometimes, when I felt like it, chocolate pudding, the non-instant kind, where I would stand in the kitchen with the light of late afternoon coming in the ivy-bordered window, stirring and stirring the cocoaed powder into the milk until that magical moment when it thickened and pudded, and thick bubbles like cauldron stuff started to gulp up, making smacking sounds. Then I poured the hot pudding into a bowl to cool, and my sister and I licked the spoon, and scraped the residue off the sides of the pot into our waiting mouths.

Thus fortified, we made our way into our parents' tiny bedroom, where the television was, black-and-white in those days, and we settled our loneliness—for parents and for a playful childhood—down onto the bed, where we sat and watched movies on TV. This was our routine, this was my “babysitting” for which I had left my peers at school behind me. Eating our tuna sandwiches or our hamburgers, waiting for the pudding to cool enough to eat, we watched “Million Dollar Movie,” a show whose special attraction was that it showed the same movie every day for a week. If you didn't like what was showing, you were stuck; but if you did, you were in heaven.

Our favorite movie, which we watched with religious devotion, our plates of food on our laps, was “One Touch of Venus,” with Ava Gardner as the Goddess Venus. It was a wonderful fantasy: a department-store clerk, mild and somewhat easily pushed around, has night duty; and one night, the statue of the Goddess Venus comes to life—I think because desire got the better of him and he kissed the statue, kissed it into humanness. His expression, when the alabaster statue blinked and turned into the astonishingly beautiful Ava Gardner, was worth everything; because, though I was a girl and, of the two characters, Ava Gardner more represented who I would become, it was the mild-mannered department-store clerk with whom I identified; because although he lucked into an altered reality, his ordinary reality was more like mine: being responsible for things being in order: beds being sold, furniture, everything in its place. He was, though sweet-faced and handsome, prosaic as could be, obedient to the necessities of his unimaginative work; and here, on a whim that had to have taken even him by surprise, he found the statue of the Goddess so beautiful that he could not help coming closer and planting a kiss on her cold lips. When she blinked and stretched and came to life, and looked at him with surprise and favor in her light-filled eyes, he was almost turned to marble himself, so shocked was he that his kiss could awaken a goddess.

The rest of the story had its charms and ins and outs; the couple made a home of the furniture department at night, resting (chastely) together in the department-store bed, singing to each other as only true lovers would do—and those songs the haunting, soul stuff of melodies by the German-Jewish composer Kurt Weill: “Speak Low, When You Speak Love,” a fatalistic, longing love song sung by the Goddess, who knew well that her sojourn with a mortal had a time limit; and the lovely waltz, “Don't Look Now but My Heart Is Showing,” sung by a parallel, mortal couple, who fall in love and sing their hearts out while whirling together around the dance floor. My sister and I disappeared into the world of the love between mortals and the gods, united in our longing, brought out of our loneliness for a time; and always, each of the seven times we watched that movie, our food forgotten on our laps, we were so disappointed, so sad when Venus had to return to being a statue, in the light of realistic day, and the lovestruck clerk had to look at his true love as a statue, then turn away to serve customers; and we knew, we knew his secret longing to be in complete union with the Goddess; his secret story.

This was my refuge, my compensation for leaving my peers, untalked-to, unsmoked-with, unimagining adventures with, the green-shoot sprees of youth together: watching a mortal fall in love with a Goddess, again and again, moving each time from his prosaic, obedient life into the enchanted world of love with a celestial being, and then having, at the end, only the secret memory of that union, able to share it with no one who might believe him.

It could have been worse: There could have been no Million Dollar Movie, or I could have been put to work in the equivalent of the cinders, like Cinderella, scrubbing and cleaning. I only was asked to make food and keep my sister company, and that was how I did it, by sitting together in longing fantasy until my parents came home from work and—tired, querulous—made supper.

But that thing about having to pass my peers by—relieved, to some degree, because I felt so shy and so self-excluded, and so passing them by spared me the imagined pain and shame of standing around and being ignored, or not being able to think of something to say that would provoke knowing laughter and inclusion, a sage nod of the head—still, that thing about having to pass my peers by, as they stood outside the Gothic stone building, gargoyles protecting them or laughing at them several stories above, seemed to seal off my youthfulness from me; told me, “Hanging out and playing is for them, not for you.”

This was a long time ago, now. Yet it remains as vivid and fresh as then, and remains in memory because the impression etched by this on my soul was that my life was not to be filled with playing and belonging; it was to be filled with duty, and obligation, and caring for others while I myself was still young. This memory of passing by my schoolmates, who were my own age, and trudging down the hundred-twenty-five steps to the subway to go home and take care of my younger sister by making her tuna sandwiches and hamburgers and cooled, bubbled chocolate pudding, and be compensated for an hour and a half in imagination, then turn the TV off and become , in effect, the department-store clerk, wondering if that mutual love had even happened, has stayed with me all this time. It arises, whether as a clear remembrance or just a background warning hum, when I think about all the material comforts I have not had that my peers have had; about all the interesting places I have not traveled that my peers have traveled; that there is a way in which I have not felt part of the generation of my peers, setting out to make their fortunes in the world, but have, inside me, returned home to care for someone no longer there—someone who, at the time it happened, ideally would have been cared for by my parents, leaving me to hang out after school, venture into conversations that took me away from home, away from the narrow life known there, into a springtime of youth that suggested, even unreasonably, that something inside me was enough to carry me into the world, over the river and through the woods, and into professions and countries and love affairs and magical blendings with gods.

I work a lot. I work hard. I sit at the computer, sometimes inspired, sometimes just tired. I have a sense that I am building something, at my best times; that I am just trudging, at others, trudging while my peers retire, visit with their grandchildren, and travel to the ends of the earth.

These impressions are etched on my soul like an actual etching.

I actually learned to do etchings when I was young (and I did have adventures, just felt rather guilty about them, as if there were someone at home I was not taking care of), and fell in love with the process of taking a metal plate, copper (then) or zinc; rolling an asphalt-kind of ground on it with a brayer; and with the finest of etching tools, drawing lines into that ground, whether freehand or based on a sketch I had done already. When the drawing was done—visible as a faint metallic gleam from the metal plate beneath—the entire plate would be placed in an acid bath and left there, the chemicals stirred from time to time, until the acid had turned the exposed lines of my drawing into actual grooves.

The grooves were not that deep—perhaps a sixteenth of an inch or so. But they were deep enough so that once the plate was removed from the acid bath and washed off and dried, when I took a dauber (made of something soft wrapped in soft leather and tied at the base, a doorknob of absorbent leather), dipped it into thick, oil-based ink (black or colored), rocked the ink-bearing dauber into the grooved, etched lines of my drawing, then with a clean cloth wiped all the ink off the surface of the plate so that the only ink that remained lay in the grooves—the ink in the grooves (not that visible on the metal plate itself) would (once the imposing etching press was bearing down on the meeting of the plate with dampened paper) impress themselves onto the paper, yield the contents of those deliberate grooves onto the dampened paper as lines; as a drawing. Pulling the etched print off the long bed of the metal press, seeing my drawing transferred to the paper through a chemically based reversal process, was, each time, an absolute thrill. For no matter what my intent had been at the start, until the print was pulled I was working in the dark, working as an act of faith: that lines drawn with a needle-thin etching tool onto a dark asphalted ground would become three-dimensional enough to hold daubed-in ink; and that when the printing press pushed, through the power of its weight and pressure, the dampened, rag-content art paper into those narrow grooves, the result would be an etching: a permanent version of my drawing, the master block, capable of generating hundreds of prints, if I were so inclined.

But what happens when the drawing etched into your consciousness is not deliberate? When you are not the artist, but the ground, and the lines are put there by circumstance, or necessity, or blindness, or none of the above but what you make of it is a certain kind of drawing that always comes out the same?

Then you have to burnish out the lines you do not want.

I did that, once; decided to reuse a plate I had begun drawing a male nude model on. Burnishing, I discovered, was a great deal of work, and far less creative than making a drawing in the first place. It involved taking a “burnisher,” a tool with a wooden gripping handle and a slightly curved, thick metal piece; and with the rounded part of the curve, going over and over and over the unwanted lines, rocking the burnisher back and forth over the unwanted lines, until slowly, slowly, they began to wear the lines down, so that the plate had dips and swells in it, but nothing as distinctive, as catching of ink, as a line. Making an etching was work but inspiring; burnishing lines out was only work. And actually, something unexpected happened with that plate; I did another etching on it, certain my burnishing-out had worked; but when I printed the new plate's drawing, the faint lines of the original etching showed through. Amazingly, the composition and subject matter were such that the two etchings went well together, looked intentional. I lived with it; learned to like it. But still, burnishing takes work.

I wish to grab the jewel of my youth, now, not possible at that time; I wish to burnish out the dutifulness of my youth, the leaving the possibilities of youth for enacting duty. I wish to burnish out the cinders of the story I tell myself about my possibilities in life, wish for actual compensations, not in fantasy, alone; not chocolate pudding and the Million Dollar Movie for the fifth or seventh time. I wish to etch in, on the burnished plate,that I too get to stand in front of my Gothic stone high school building with peers who become friends, with whom I go to have coffee and discuss existentialism, and find out that I really am a great artist in the making, not a prosaic pretender at all. I wish to etch in the question, “I am young, I am full of possibility, what do I want?”

And sometimes, when that longing comes over me, when, in later-than-middle-age I think about the constraints I feel still etched into the ground of my being as I live it, I think back on what it would have been like had I been able to freely stand there after school, to be young, to be supported to be young and live my own life: what would I have wanted to do, situated as I was in the middle of the most urban culture, in the middle of a culture-factory of a high school? And I think, based on who I know myself to be now, something so out of keeping with all that that it makes me smile: “I would have wanted to go into the country and be with the hills and the cows.”

And that's the truth. For all the sophistication available to these youthful artists-in-training, these philosophers and arguers, who would grow up to be sculptors and graphic artists and teachers and pianists and lawyers and doctors, and who knew what else, what I really wanted was nature, and my own nature, and a way to know and be supported by my own nature. I couldn't have said it then, had I stood there and conversed with my cigarette-smoking peers, because it would have had no place, and because I wouldn't have been in touch with it then; cultured urban life was all I knew.

But the original impress had been laid down younger even than that; grooves had been etched into me by hills and valleys, by green waters, by a sunlit sky and a star-filled night; by a cow ambling into view and pausing only breaths away from me, taking my breath away in the seamless, stilled wonder of being alive and in the company of this beautiful, large-eyed cow. That was what I would have wanted, to have all that back; to have had that in me all along, those trees reaching for the sky, those hills I tumbled, laughing, down; those meadows sprouting wildflowers, and the smell of soil and rain.

How can the in-between wounded places be burnished out, leaving the original impress only? Perhaps that is the true “Million Dollar Movie”; perhaps, underneath the unintended lines, it plays again and again and again, all the time, and we only need to be still enough to hear and see.

~ End excerpt~