Mental Illness? or - Salvation Copyright ©2014 Hazel Gay
Oregon
June, 1986
Looked again in Dissertation Abstracts. Jess is now Dr. Campbell. His dissertation was published in May, ’85, the same month my album was released.
July 1986
For the first time I allowed my feelings about Jess to surface without being in any degree of altered state. I “wallowed” in the feelings, feelings like a continuous geyser from an inner source. For the first time no “That’s silly, that’s a waste of time, that’s unrealistic.” About the second day of this “wallowing” I decided to try to make the feelings productive, so started writing songs, five altogether. I wondered about the connection between the feelings, or where the feelings come from, and the creativity. Did they all come from the same place?
Some of the songs were different from anything I had ever written, showing how I was starting to acknowledge different feelings. I must have felt like I was “lowering” myself to even acknowledge I HAVE these feelings. It’s so COMMON – and then to let anyone else know I had such COMMON feelings!!
The following lyrics illustrate:
There’s a place still in my memory
keeps reminding me, just won’t let me be
and I can’t always hide, the feelings there inside
and I can’t always lie your face away
You gave me time and fantasy
you gave me back my life
you went your way and I went mine
but I never said goodbye.
For I never walked with you in a misty dawn
I never touched you the way I wanted to
I never sang your song for you to hear
I never danced with you or whispered in your ear
I love you
and I never said goodbye.
Though you were true, you never fell
your eyes could never lie
so much was left to still be done
that I never said goodbye.
I never walked with you….
If you are interested in hearing this song click here: I Never Said Goodbye ©1986 Hazel Gay
Oregon
August 2, 1986
Staying with my daughter, taking care of my 3 year old grandson, I’m making enough money with self-employment, sewing and other things, to get by, giving me time for my projects.
Found Whitmont’s The Symbolic Quest which at last gives me a frame of reference for paranormal and synchronistic experience. I think I’m ready for increased experience of that kind.
6:15 p.m. same day
Standing in the open door I heard a noise like a gunshot. Across the street the neighbor’s mimosa tree had just split at a hollow in a fork, half of it falling on the ground, for no apparent reason. It reminded me of the dream, ’82-83, where squirrel hid something in a hollow in the fork of a tree.
August 4 Dream
I finally find “true love” with Dick Powell; he dies after we get together. I’m literally up in the air, so broken up over it; people saying I have a right to feel so bad. Dick Powell’s eyes were very haunting…and his voice. (A few hours later I realized I was VISUALIZING Robert Taylor in the dream! I can’t quite remember what Dick Powell looked like…)
August 9, 1985 Dream
I get off bus, like after a few days job, I look like model. In downtown Portland going west on sidewalk on left side of street carrying maybe one foot square box in right hand, a handle out top like train case. It’s a gift-wrapped wedding present – has colored streamers attached at top plus two strips of old white sheet, maybe 8 inches wide and 2 l/2 to 3 feet long, one longer than the other, like streamers on wedding corsage, flowing along in the breeze. I have to stay all night somewhere, wait for another bus or something like a long layover. Stop at light, pick-up truck coming from north, waiting for it to go by to cross street.
*******
Last fall I had started waking in the morning with my fingers hurting, feeling stiff. I was afraid I might be developing arthritis. Now I’m back in Oregon, playing my piano and have had no pain at all in my fingers. (I did exercise my fingers in Oklahoma with sewing, typing, playing the guitar, etc.)
August 11, 1986
Located Jess in New York City, called, re-establishing contact, triggering a reaction in me even though it had been seven years. I learned he had gotten the letters I had sent over the years; I think I felt some relief. Since I had seen a little of the human side of him, I must admit I had done some worrying about him through the years, where he was, how he was. In my imagination I’ve had him from being an alcoholic to having AIDS with everything in between.
August 12
Sent Jess copy of manuscript and record album certified mail.
Dream:
I have a key to a house, don’t remember whose, contents vague, seems not much in it. In a raspberry field to east of house, I’ve seen that the raspberries are getting ripe. I get a bucket, have to go through a wooden gate – I find one raspberry about a foot long except it’s not one solid berry, has regular berries all over it. I start picking from this, have maybe 1/3 picked off top, decide to pick the whole thing, stuff it in my pail, this is extremely early in a.m. (Webster’s #2 definition of raspberry: A sound of contempt made by protruding the tongue between the lips and expelling air forcibly to produce a vibration.)
August 16 Dream
A man and me, caught together standing facing each other, in some kind of ? ring vise?, squeezed so tight together we can barely breathe. A man leaves us like that; we know we can’t stay that way very long. There’s an element of humor in it someway. It’s kind of like no one can do anything yet to get us out, or won’t. Seems other people may be around somewhere.
September 1, 1986
Jess,
Hope you’ve had a chance to get into the manuscript.
If I’ve ever had the hell stomped out of me, it has certainly taken place the last few weeks. You’ve heard the expression, “Stick a knife in the gut and twist.” Well, I feel like somebody stuck a pitchfork in my gut and started twisting; some days have been worse than others. I realized I had to be able to fantasize about you and not get lost in it and I had to feel it all. It goes from ecstasy to agony. I never lost it mentally but I have no idea what happened.
Went to a 7-ll this afternoon where I recognized the familiar, “These people know me” delusion and before I got to the checkstand I realized this is simply the LACK of what I felt before; the oppressiveness, the alienation, the alone-ness. I belong to the human race!
I talked to a man a couple of years ago who had known my dad. Among the things he told me was about his plowing. When plowing a field, the first furrow is the one the rest of the field is plowed by. He said my dad could plow the straightest furrow of any man he ever saw.
A thought crossed my mind last night, no, it didn’t cross my mind, it nearly ran me over. “It’s time to go for the throat,” (of Dammasch). Don’t know why I think that way but it’s the only way I can express it. It’s one of the most deadly, unwavering, calm feelings I’ve ever had.
The more I think about it the more I want to tell you about a dream a couple of nights ago. I’m sitting on the ground writing, facing east, watching two girls leaving high school to my left behind me. Stars on a TV soap, one is very clear to me, blond, pretty, very friendly to me, riding light horse. Other not clear, riding dark horse. I say, “You girls are as pretty in real life as you are on TV.” They ride from my left to in front of me, then start away from me to the east, across a green expanse, football field? blonde girl on the right. Suddenly, a raccoon jumps on the rump of the light horse. Man, this little raccoon has just gone wild! The horse starts bucking; I’m scared the girl is going to get hurt, get thrown, but she slides off the back of the horse. The horse is kind of bouncing up and down on all fours in one spot then. Suddenly, a white pig is standing there watching; I’m wondering if the FFA boys threw him out there as a joke. Without seeing how it gets there, the dark horse is suddenly under the white horse; the white horse is still bouncing up and down in one spot, stomping the dark horse. I think he’s killing the dark horse, everybody else does, too, but the dark horse gets up, is dazed, but alive. The blond girl is inspecting her horse then and he has some strange horizontal ridges on his right side while people come from grandstand on the north side of them. And just now this is getting funnier and funnier to me and I have absolutely no idea why!
******
This month my daughter’s paternity was finally brought out into the open. (The child as a result
of rape.) I guess I had known subconsciously for some time it was coming. When I told another daughter I had told her, I was shocked to learn she had thought it was her since 1976! (Explaining many things in her life since that time.)
My last secret. I didn’t know there was a knot in my insides till I felt it change after I told her. How unusual, how strange it feels to have no more secrets! What a tangled web secrets can weave…
September 5, 1986
I’m beginning to get a better understanding of the coincidental events over the years that I was inclined to interpret as meaning Jess and I were “soul mates” more than anything else. These coincidental things have been the last for me to put into the framework of the theory in The Symbolic Quest. An example is what happened after I sent the manuscript to Jess.
I mailed the manuscript and albums certified mail with signed receipt request on Tuesday. On Saturday morning there was a yellow ribbon bow in my mailbox. There was quite a bit of confusion over the green card Jess was supposed to have signed upon receipt. Detached in transit, it came back unsigned by anyone on Monday. I took it to the post office; they said they’d take care of it. The next day it was back in my mailbox; I took it back to the post office. When I realized it would take a minimum of six days to get it back and my material might be in Timbucto by then, I decided I had better call, which I had not wanted to do. I left a message. Later that night I turned the radio on. Jess and I had never had “our song” of course, but some coincidental things had happened with Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are” in the past and that song was on. At that moment the phone rang; it was Jess returning my call. Two other times when I was expecting him to call, a woman called asking if she had the residence of Jess’ real last name!
I know one thing, it sure feels good to me to have a place to put these things, not that I can understand it, but it sets better with my mind to have a framework in which to put it. I can even start to laugh about it. I was right in ’76; I’ve run up against something I don’t know what is. In a way, it’s amazing I’m staying sane with all this stuff going on. For the FIRST TIME it’s not the gods saying we “belong together.” Jess should be thrilled to death I finally know this! I can certainly understand how some “psychotics” act on their delusions if they have comparable coincidental things happening. In previous years, the increase in synchronous events seemed to help push me on over the edge into psychosis.
September 1986
I ran across my copy of N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain. Momaday’s House Made of Dawn had had a tremendous impact on me that summer of ’71, the way he had made that Oklahoma landscape live again in my mind, that familiar red clay, muddy rivers, feelings of blistering summers, the grandmother images he evoked; the first time I had read about that part of the world that I KNEW, and he had somehow made it more real to me.
Rainy Mountain is about 80 miles from where I was born and The Way to Rainy Mountain is an impressionistic description of the Kiowa people and their trek from the Yellowstone to the prairies of Oklahoma. One of the statements he made in the introduction hit me right in the pit of my stomach, about how the Kiowa people had dared to imagine who they would become. I wrote another song:
I must go to Rainy Mountain, many long nights I will see
a lifetime I may be, on the way to Rainy Mountain.
But I must dare to imagine, and I must dare to dream
and I must dare to be who I see
I must go to Rainy Mountain.
And in my dreams I see Rainy Mountain
I swim the raging Washita
The sun burns across the prairie
as alone I walk the trails of the Kiowa.
To follow those who’ve gone before into the rising sun
takes a breath of life, a touch of death
a magic fire that makes us one
Unseen things that give the strength to live
your destiny.
I must go to Rainy Mountain….
If you are interested in hearing this song click here: Rainy Mountain ©1986 Hazel Gay
*******
For the first time I’m thinking of giving physical existence to my “saving the world” FEELING that has always been just under the language level. It’s taking a real life of its own, as a book or story; for the first time a way I can put it “over there,” to look at, be amused by, be amazed at, taking form as something, in some sense, separate from me. I no longer have to say, “That’s weird, that’s ridiculous.”
November 1986
Went through a “high” during the fall, with a few days of quite intense fantasy, never losing my balance, continuing appearances of normal functioning, making 140 skirts for a restaurant, dealing with the public, etc. I backed out of a trip to New York City at the last minute. Though things in the environment fell apart, creating real obstacles to the trip, I think I also felt a very real fear right in the pit of my stomach.
A “psychic” who did a very brief “reading” of my palms after a lecture said, “You will be involved with people in emotional healing” and “You are a trainer of trainers.” Though I had never put those ideas into words, I recognized it as part of my fantasy. I also wondered if she might simply be picking up on my fantasy instead of telling me some fact of “out there” reality.
But as I was leaving I noticed how she kept watching me from the midst of the people surrounding her.
November 28, 1986
Jess,
Yes, it was practically the last minute when I decided not to go to NY, making what I thought at the time was one of the most rational decisions of my life…No, I will not ask any questions about the manuscript at this time since the first thing I want from you will be your impression of the WHOLE. I can’t see the forest for the trees, of course…
There’s never been anyone in a position to satisfactorily appreciate what a deluded fool I may actually be quite like you. I’ve had my moments of toying with the idea of destroying the entire manuscript, moments of clear comprehension of the possible futility, that I may be living this one life as a total fool. It has been, and is, a very, very lonely place sometimes. Even though the head psychiatrist at OU (Okla.) Med School was encouraging, I’m aware I may be doing nothing more than laying out in black and white a classic case of screwed up thinking and lack of living in “reality.” Yet I’ve always been so acutely aware, even in the throes of that despair and frustration, that that loneliness and isolation and uncertainty were absolutely essential if I ever hoped to learn, finish or prove anything on this road I started down in ’76.
December 1986 Dreams
l. Jess is here, he’s obviously “frayed around the edges” but very matter of fact.
2. Within a week I dreamed I got a letter from him indicating he was under stress, quite “frazzled.”
3. Another dream had strong symbolic material of the strength and “manhood”
I had perceived in him.
I wrote a letter in October for the first time to find out what I’d have to do to get my professional teaching certification back and received an answer December 24 indicating it might not be as difficult as I might have thought.
On December 27 I found two letters in my mailbox, the October 8 letter to Jess canceling the appointment with him in NYC and the one of November 28 to him, both stamped “Addressee Unknown” – even though I had sent them to an address he had given me! Even the U.S. Mail was tying knots in things! He hadn’t known I wasn’t coming and as of December 27 didn’t know what had happened!
I had thought for many years I would NEVER write a song that said, “I’ll love you forever,” I would NEVER say “forever.” I started to wonder.
It’s like year by year, one by one since 1976, I’ve had to back down on each never I ever said. It’s like there is a very real unknown something that has confronted my conscious mind, determined to show it who is boss! And one by one, year by year, IT has been winning the battle. Is my conscious mind after all simply a part of that shadow on the wall of the cave, part of the shadow of a reality that dances closer to the flame?
Deciding perhaps I had to go ahead and give my “saving the world” feeling some kind of physical existence before it would leave me in peace, I started writing a story plot. I could deal with it in this form, didn’t have to make all kinds of value judgments and evaluations about it. I outlined a plot, still a little vague but becoming less of a formless ghost playing around in the shadows of my mind. I didn’t know how to get from A to B though I had both, kind of picking up where Spielberg left the Ark of the Covenant in the catacombs of American red tape in the movie, “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” feeling the ending of my story was there though I couldn’t explain it yet. This writing out seemed to satisfy something in me. I was not repressing it, but I was not being controlled by it; it was becoming “other.”
January 26
While talking to Jess briefly on the phone, my voice went. I couldn’t control it, made me mad at myself. Here it is, I can confront any real or imagined spectres and goblins, swim around in psychosis, challenge the AMA and probably stare down any man alive yet I collapse just talking to one dumb man on the telephone!
For the first time I could experience my feelings about Jess without them having to be “productive.” I could just – feel –
January 27, 1987
Jess,
So glad to know you got the letters. Also, glad to hear something in your voice that sounded like the Jess I knew a long time ago; I didn’t hear that last fall.
I want to tell you about the day I found the abstract of your dissertation at Portland State. Having gone through much microfiche, I was about ready to give up when I thought, “No, I’ll try just three more.” I felt my stomach do something, an accompanying visceral sensation to the sometimes not quite conscious thought, “This is it!” When I read it, my first thought was, “But this isn’t going to shake up the world!” then laughed at myself and coming back to earth, realized I should not be surprised you had researched an aspect of creativity.
I woke up this morning and started writing this. Then started realizing that just hearing what I imagined as an undercurrent of warmth in your voice had had the usual effect on me, making me more aware of the inner me and drawing it out, just as the sun draws the plant out of the seed pod.
A dream I had two nights ago strikes me as humorous. If nothing else, I’ve certainly been entertained by some of them. (Are you aware I have reams of notes, that you see only part?)
Dream:
Like watching a movie; a man, see just his head and arms, supposed to be copulating with an animal of some kind, produces thing that is half human, half animal. Small thing, is ferocious, exhales fire, has like human depth in eyes, stands erect, teeth will rip you up. Men “authorities” have it locked in basement of building with locks and chains. They need to check on it; they open like outside door to basement at a home; fire and smoke comes out from the little thing’s mouth, making a monstrous commotion. The locks and chains are around the door and basement, too, not just the “thing.” It’s like they don’t know what they’ve got and don’t know what to do with it.
The last few months have been intense, experiencing my feelings, not always knowing what was happening, much of the time feeling like I was being put through the wringer. Never lost it mentally but it has been rough. Understanding the coincidences differently probably helped. I’m gradually getting a better distinction of maybe the last fantasy, about you, between fantasy and reality. The fantasy is starting to turn loose of me, or vice versa, whichever way it goes.
I feel like I need to talk to you on the phone very shortly; I don’t know if I can explain why or not. It has been extremely hard on me to talk to you and it may be very hard later but I have to do it. I haven’t come this far to stop now. I’m going all the way no matter how bad it hurts. At some point I will have to confront you. I guess it wasn’t time last fall.
I remember asking once, “Where’s the test that says when I make 80 or above, I’m OK?” I suspect confronting you may be that test.
January 29, 1987
Watching my grandson, trying to analyze my love for his BEING; I know he doesn’t have to DO anything to make me love him – then I try to imagine a person feeling that way towards ME – I feel it, concentrating on the way I feel, then analyze it as I’m feeling it. What a unique experience, what a lack of pressure on me. Makes me feel very solid, very real. A strange thing, it always makes me very aware of my surroundings. I know this is the way I perceived Jess looking at me in ’76.
January 31 Hypnogogic
Electric power line on wooded hill with a pole sticking up above trees. Two people come from opposite sides in like tram cars, may be baskets, meet in head on crash; everything “blows up”? (not literally) a lot of “fireworks,” (not like rockets, etc.) like electrical shorts, sparks; like what I’ve seen when electricity shorts in the socket, except on grander scale, really lights everything up.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a sense of being a “girl,” that there were some things I could NOT do BECAUSE I was a girl. Helps explain some of the situations I got into. A psychiatrist told me, that very typical of girls raised without fathers, I thought like a man, in the sense of “get things done,” not waiting around for someone else to do them for me. (Or to give me PERMISSION!)
Before he told me that I had wondered, and worried, about the fact that, in general, I preferred talking to men rather than women. Men could talk about something! Tools and dies, motorcycles, travel, framing, war, electrical wiring, low gears in a truck! For the first time I decided maybe the fact that I preferred men’s company didn’t mean I was that tramp my mother thought I was after all.
February 5, 1987 (Written a few days after the experience happened.)
I had a mind changing experience. Not sure where the delineation between fantasy and somatic hallucination might be; I refer to it as fantasy. With the initial appearance I chose to allow it; it very much had a quality of “other,” of a separate “entity.”
The first sexual fantasies summer ’85, which were pretty far out in left field, were about power, submission, control and I recognized for the first time an aspect of myself I don’t think I had seen that clearly before. I wasn’t sure I liked it but that was the way I was.
This fantasy is making love to Jess. I have a physical sensation of being “full” – so totally, ultimately “full.” He has total control, I can submit to that control, willingly, abandoning myself to the feelings, to his power! A thing of awe, astonishment, amazement, the feeling of something like penetration but not at the same time starts growing and grows, filling my whole lower abdominal area, from about the naval down. All my stomach muscles start tensing lower down and work up, not fast, but like with a totally controlled penetration, more diffuse, spreads out; I’m set on fire; the fire is all over…feelings I have NEVER experienced in my life! Complete domination in some sense; I accept it, having what might be considered minor orgasms as visions of primeval valleys flash through my mind. After this totally unexpected, extremely intense experience that caught me by surprise, I felt “broken,” (as in “breaking” a horse) “tamed” and – I HAVE NEVER FELT THIS BEFORE IN MY LIFE!
(I did not become bold enough to write Jess about the fantasy till February 9, after I started realizing, though I could not explain it, it was much more than a shallow sexual fantasy.)
February 7, 1987
Jess,
I’m at a place that I feel it’s necessary to be completely open with you. Maybe it’s simply part of the process. You talked once about dealing with things openly, that that was the only way to handle it. Well, I was pretty open but there was something I had to remember; there was a block to my acceptance of my feelings.
I love you. It’s that simple. For the first time in my life I can say that unreservedly. It doesn’t demand a response from you; that’s just the way it is. Last fall I had a moment of holding eternity in the palm of my hand so to speak – comprehending eternity. Each moment in itself, lived at that moment, that’s some kind of comprehension of eternity. It’s like that; it’s not something that can be explained; it’s something to be felt.
(Sept. 2020: I found an explanation for this in Chapter 5 of Ken Wilbur’s The Spectrum of Consciousness.)
And William Blake wrote:
To see a world in a grain of sand
Heaven in a wild flower
Eternity in an hour.
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
Maybe it was not quite true when I wrote I had no more secrets; perhaps there is a sense in which something can be a secret until it’s spoken. At least if it’s not spoken one can always say what one is doing is misinterpreted; there’s a way out. This way there’s no way out; it’s black and white.
When I made the album, the arranger first put your song in a minor key. A beautiful arrangement but I refused to allow it to be used. It sounded like a lament and there was nothing lamentable or sorrowful about our relationship. I didn’t lose everything; I gained everything. Someplace inside me was touched and changed. It is still that way even though I don’t see your face or hear your voice. It’s there when I go to sleep and it’s there when I wake. When I go for a walk, the yellows, golds and coppers affect me more now than in ’76. Every budding apple tree reminds me of you, the way someone moves, something said. I finally stopped looking at Hallmark cards; I only saw things I wanted to send you. So I didn’t lose something; because of you everything has meaning for me. Good God, this sounds like The Little Prince!
******
What have I done?! I always wanted to sit where I could see everyone in a room, where no one could get behind me!….I’m astounded by this latest development, like icing on the cake so to speak. What a totally sensual way to make a concise statement of a new ME!
Somehow, I know I must allow myself to experience this feeling to the utmost while balancing the knowledge of physical reality on the other hand – the pain. I LOST THE FEELING ONCE AND I CAN’T LOSE IT AGAIN!
Standing on this side I’m looking back at the me that was and being overcome with sadness. I couldn’t see it when I was there. That was MY WORLD, the ONLY WORLD I KNEW with NO WAY of knowing any different – until altered states. During altered states I felt things never felt before (or had no memory of), had the chance to “try them on,” to see what COULD be, for something in me to be gradually changed. I had to be in an altered state; I’m too damned sane and rational for anything to get through otherwise!
A psychologist friend and I discussed the problem of the client falling in love with the therapist; he said they had been warned in training about it, not supposed to LET it happen, it could even be considered “mental rape.”
Well. I had not heard that particular phrase to describe it. Question. How do you prevent it? How can one person think they can totally prevent something from happening in another person’s mind?
AND, perhaps there is a real sense in which I needed something like “mental rape.” This is certainly the first time any man got the best of me mentally and emotionally but it wasn’t done by domination or raw power. In a way it’s so ridiculous, that Jess, who in many ways is just another average man, with God only knows how many faults, could accomplish this seemingly impossible task. He was kind of like a concrete wall – that I could bounce off of…and bounce off of…and bounce off of…
Some of my friends hated Jess, thought he was bad for me, that he was getting some kind of kicks out of his power, could not see that he was doing anything good for me. Somehow, I always knew differently. I couldn’t explain it; I just knew I was getting something unique out of it and it felt good.
I don’t know what part what I saw in his eyes played in the whole thing; sometimes his feelings almost oozed from his pores, yet he remained that concrete wall. Maybe it was closer to tungsten steel. At least this was MY perception.
February 13, 1987
Jess,
The conversation was so comfortable last night I was totally unprepared for what happened as I lifted my hand from the receiver after hanging up. It felt like a ton of bricks dropped out of the sky on me; I experienced what might be called ultimate anguish.
About 3:30 today I was sitting in a restaurant when I was suddenly and acutely overwhelmed with feeling – grief – I had to get out of there. I felt like something was being ripped from my gut, a feeling that someone or something has died. If I could do something physical to express this agony it might help.
By 4:30 such a bedrock feeling, pure, clean, total. If there’s a lot of this to go through, I hope it comes in small chunks like this. I’m still functioning, still maintaining, but I need to be out in the trees – wailing in the night.
Tonight may be the first time I can’t sing your songs…. (That night)
Maybe I can write some of the feeling out; let it flow right out of me onto this paper. Some of my latest reading helps me believe I can stand the pain. Went to sing tonight and a musician friend came in who had just gotten back from 8 months in upstate New York. I don’t think I have ever been so glad to see anybody in my life!
I want to get out of Oregon, to run…Oregon, that’s permeated with you; you’re in every raindrop. I want to go someplace where I’ve never seen you. I don’t think there is any place that won’t make me think of you. It couldn’t have apple trees…or green grass…or daffodils…or sunshine.
Deciding I must not repress the pain, that I had to experience it for once in my life, not wait for an altered state to feel it, when the intermittent “waves” of anguish hit me while alone, I became total anguish.
February 14, 1987
Today. There’s a deep, perhaps ache, with a very real weight. I didn’t have to force myselt to get up. It just seemed the thing to do.I didn’t have to force myself to put on my make-up. It just seemed the thing to do. I cleaned my room. It seemed the thing to do. I’ve had a couple of periods of feeling deep sadness but so far, not as intense as yesterday. I see my clothes differently. I don’t know if I can explain the difference. I SEE them, they’re MINE. They’re not “Good enough or not good enough.” Everything seems so REAL, so concrete – while something inside me dies.
********
February, 1987
Sitting alone in a restaurant watching the Oregon rain running down the window, I wrote another song,
A Song I’ll Never Sing
I watch the falling rain
Another winter’s here
I find you in my mind
And write a song I”ll never sing
Time and I alone
This moment we will share
And tho you’re in my dreams
I can’t let you know I care
So I’ll write a letter I won’t mail
I’ll find a rose that I won’t send
I’ll write a song I’ll never sing
One more song I’ll never sing
for you
Those winters you were here
I never realized
The only sun I saw was shining in your eyes
Now memories in the mist
Reflections are there, too
As I write another song
One more song I’ll never sing
for you
and I’ll write a letter I won’t mail…
If you would like to hear this song click here:A Song I’ll Never Sing©1987 Hazel Gay
February 15, 1987
Even in the midst of this pain and devastation I’m working on my writing, putting it together, making sense out of it. I feel perhaps a dignity I’ve never experienced. Today there’s a certain dignity in just – being.
I don’t seem to have to “huddle” around this core of pure grief and anguish, like one would around a flickering candle flame that might go out at any second. I don’t recall ever being able to function this well, look this good and hurt this bad.
I figured out a way to reach the depth of my pain audibly in this environment; turn up the volume on ZZ Top.
Maybe I’m ready to be a regular person. There’s a sense in which I’ve been like a gypsy, or a drop-out from society. No one understanding why, with my talents and capabilities, I wasn’t pushing the music, pursuing a career. I was not allowing myself to be regimented into one of the appropriate roles demanded by our society, a regimentation I felt would be detrimental, perhaps lethal to whatever it was I hoped I was doing – this something I had never heard of! So there were many years of no one understanding, not even me, when all I could say was really the equivalent to “It’s not time.”
Like I told Jess on the phone, “It’s like I’ve lived a double life. There was the life that everyone could see out there in the world. Then there was the life I was living inside, with never anyone to talk to about it, much less to understand. The years of this! It’s like maybe what I want from you is CONFIRMATION that I’ve actually done something! There hasn’t been ANYONE to say, “Yah, you’re really doing something, Hazel.” Maybe I’ve gone about as long as I can without some feedback, some confirmation.” And he gave me confirmation.
When Jess suggested I might want to consider finding someone to help me through what would be coming, what I would experience on the completion of the manuscript for one thing, it flashed across the back of my mind, “It won’t be near as hard to put down the manuscript as it will be to put down the fantasy about you,” while I said, “I don’t want to get tangled up with another therapist; I think I’ve had about all of that I want.” (And of course, I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.)
February 18, 1987
What I was thinking about today: Like the first to be Americans who had left the known (with relatives believing they would fall off the earth), like the first Americans who set out across an aboriginal continent, daring to confront the unknown, daring to hope, I had dared to confront the unknown depths, the wild, the untamed, the instinctual, the basic from which all life comes and CHOSE TO WORK WITH IT to create a new attitude, a new entity, a new being.
Maybe it’s time to take another look at the “frontiers” we’re trying to explore, to conquer. Americans seem to have a genetic predisposition to explore. That shouldn’t be too surprising, we come from a long line of “explorers,” “gamblers.” Maybe it’s time to start looking at maybe the last frontier on this planet, the human mind, practically unknown territory. Maybe it’s time we took another look at our need to “conquer.”
February 20, 1987
Jess,
I want to thank you for your patience and cooperation during the last few months. Being in your position, I realize you have every right to require a fee for services rendered. I was simply doing something that had to be finished, and, I did NOT read about it and decide it was time. (When I had told him about something on the phone he asked, “What have you been reading?”)
It seems there might be a significant difference in what I get from my reading and what a psychology student might get. It’s not just to learn for future reference, to get a degree, to help me acquire a prestigious role. What I’m getting is for MY SURVIVAL, not that 3 o’clock Thursday appointment. I can’t TALK it, I LIVE it. I don’t have enough of a psychology background to understand very much of it intellectually. My feeling is that I’ve gone my own way, sometimes plodding and sometimes not so plodding, in spite of my ignorance of theory.
What am I trying to say?
If the theories are valid, I didn’t have to read about them first. The theories should be based on what people DO, those experiences coming before someone formulated a theory.
I’m beginning to really understand the process of turning loose of something in my mind. I first of all have to totally RECOGNIZE what it is I’m turning loose of, take a long hard look at it. Before I could deal with the fantasy about you, I’ve had to follow a long process of acknowledging in WORDS, beginning with the events of fall ’85 and continuing right on up to the present, in acknowledging the depth, the reality of my feelings. There’s no way I could even start to turn loose of something I’m unable or unwilling to recognize is inside of me to begin with. It doesn’t lessen the process or change it from a gut level process to a head trip just because it might be called transference or infatuation or any of the other terms it might be labeled.
Perhaps I had a little regret after sending you that last letter, that it might make you feel sad. In the past you didn’t appear to have a button to push to keep you from hurting WITH PEOPLE. But then I became aware of a feeling surfacing a few times like, “Tough shit. You’re the one who opened up this Pandora’s box and by God, you ought to have to suffer a little!”
I’m not particularly embarrassed anymore by things I have thought, said or written. Like you said, it’s what I do with it that’s important, how I use it. I will allow you to be concerned about me but don’t do like many people are inclined to do, feel sorry for me or be afraid or feel threatened by the fact that another human being’s mind can get out of everyone’s control and remind us of what we don’t know. Please, remember there’s been an element of CHOICE in what I’ve done since ’76 and I probably know better than anyone that I’m playing with fire. I remember you drawing a line in the sand down at Clackamette Park, a continuum you explained, of the experience people were comfortable in allowing into their mind, some people being quite limited as to the experiences they were comfortable with while others could approach the outer limits. I’ve had to wonder if you had stayed here and I had continued therapy with you if you would have objected to what I was doing – my research. (I’ve also wondered if WE would even have been able to continue in therapy, that we needed the space.)
I’ve made decisions about what to include, what to leave out. I have had to go by how I feel for the most part. I’m sure I may have included some perhaps extraneous or superfluous material but perhaps that’s as it should be. It would help demonstrate that I didn’t go with astute clarity from point A to point B to point C. Quite frankly, intellectually I didn’t know what in the hell I was doing!! My personal title for this book has always been The Nutcracker Suite.
I want to keep you posted on my progress towards publishing; I don’t want you walking into a bookstore someday to be confronted by something in which you were such an integral part. I guess I have to learn to live with the fact that you aren’t going to work with me on my manuscript, much less write anything from the therapist’s viewpoint to go with it. In a sense my book is my child, my creation, even in a way, OUR child. And like with a real child, you simply fertilized and I did all the work!
You remember? There was a time when I had to be crazy to say stuff like that.
March 10, 1987
I wrote before about the periods during altered states when I experienced humor – without an undercurrent of pain. Those periods progressively lengthened with each successive episode. I’ve become aware of the absence of that undercurrent since AT LEAST sometime in 1985, having moments of being acutely aware of the difference. It’s like I have a bubble of humor right in my solar plexus, never bursting, just – resting there….