THE SHADOW SELF

THE SMALL TOWN I CAN NEVER ESCAPE WITHIN ME

(Above: Matty checking out her shadow self on this date, April 27, 2021, in our old loft in Hudson, a small town in upstate New York. We both have new homes now. Hers is with her brother Finn and new companion John in Chatham. Mine? Inside myself as I am now a pilgrim in the wider world.)

I sat down this morning to begin to write a new column titled THE LOST LANGUAGE OF CRAINS, which references the title of David Leavitt’s novel The Lost Language of Cranes which itself was made into a 1991 BBC film adapted by Sean Mathias. It starred Brian Cox. An edited version - though still a controversial one - aired on PBS as part of its Great Performances series in 1992. The controversy centered around its narrative threads, all relating to homosexuality and otherness. Thirty years later America is still steeped in controversy around these same issues. I have been away for six months in London and Paris. Both places have their own political problems - the former also around transgender issues if not the fascistic, theocratic banning of books about race and gay narrative threads that is now going on in America. I am heading back to this America on Monday for five months before returning to London and Paris next fall and spring. I don’t mind going back but I do mind going back to the country’s backwardness which is not small-town-ish but small-minded. I have simplified my life as a pilgrim - shed almost all my possessions, gave up my loft, re-homed Finn and Matty with a new companion and broke my own heart to do it - in order to expand my existence. To return to such smallness, such lack of mindfulness will prove to be a challenge.

It is what the THE LOST LANGUAGE OF CRAINS column, which I will post this weekend now, is going to be about in some way - how in the last two months I have lived in a country in which I do not speak the language and yet feel comprehended in a way that I don’t in America where I speak the language but am not understood. We all have shadow selves that either offer us the solace of their own comforting shade or are shaded by the selves that we present to the world. But in each instance a kind of light is needed to form that other we carry along with us in our lives. In America, one shadowy political party, the GOP, has staked its claim on the demonization of “the other” and defining it as anyone or anything that is not haughtily and hatefully Christian-y (not exactly Christian), white, heterosexual, and radically, nihilistically right-wing. And yet, proving that we all have “otherness” embedded in us, some of those same people can be personally kind while being civically, even dangerously uncivil.

We all have shadow selves. The work required of us is to make that shade not just comforting for ourselves but a place where others can feel at home, seek refuge, be comprehended, be understood. The shadowing of self is where empathy itself can reside and take root or where demonization of others becomes the harmful fungI without the “us.” All shadows need light to exist. Be more conscious of the needed light than the resultant shadows. Seek to be understood when you don’t speak the same language and, more important, when you do. Don’t be afraid of the other’s narrative. Be each other’s threads. Enrich the larger story, don’t constrict it. Ban it not.

(Above: Last night on my long walk home to my writer’s garret in the Eighth Arrondissement from Opéra-Comique where I saw a production of Bizet’s Carmen, which had its premiere there on March 3, 1875, I took this photo of my shadow self on the sidewalk of my block on Rue de la Baume. I had no idea that I would write this column when I took this photo last night. But my shadow self must have known. It just dawned on me I took this photo last night in my contemplative sadness at having to leave Paris and realizing how much I am going to miss these long walks home at night.)

Another post that popped up on Facebook from this same date back in 2021 was about taking a long walk back in Hudson. So much has changed - and so much is still the same. I had no idea back then I would find Finn and Matty a new home in order to give up ours there in that loft and set out with two suitcases - basically all I have left in the world - to make the world itself my small-town on this pilgrimage I am on as a small-town boy in search of the grandness to be found in the sincerity of simplicity. Here is what I wrote on this same date - April 27th - back in 2021 in small-town Hudson. I read it sitting here in small-town Paris realizing I always call places small towns because the boy within me will always be a small-town one - he is my shadow self - who just feels at home in the wider world where cities furnish the burnished light of culture and acceptance, where otherness is celebrated, where I can better comfort that small-town child with the largesse of love if not lucre.

I wrote this on this same date back in Hudson two years ago when the Oscar ceremony was about to air that night, streamed on my computer as Matty lay next to me on the bed more interested in the play of her own shadow than the celebrated human shadows, pixelated, preening, purring in their own less-elevated self-regard on the screen of the computer perched on my stomach. Finn found it all rather too quaintly shadowy and chose to stay in the dining room in the chair he favored and allowed the moon’s light to manifest ceremoniously around him there.

I wrote back then:

“On my walk today I was thinking about the Oscars and how for years they were a part of my life's narrative and now walking in a small town in upstate New York is. Many of us escaped small towns in order finally to create ‘small towns’ based on finding likeminded souls and success and easier sex. Hollywood is such a town. New York once was for me. When I was six I really lived in a small town. Now at 65, I have returned to one.

“For many years I'd head out to small-town Hollywood for Oscar weekend that was anchored by the Vanity Fair party and Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg's picnic. I'd always try to explain to people when they'd ask about it that I was surprised how unglamorous it was. It was just a prom for people who never felt comfortable at their own proms or never even attended one. The picnic? All ease and gracefulness and great food but very small-town. I guess there was at its core an element of being accepted.

“At first, I felt a giddiness about it all. For years, I'd wake up the morning after the party and call my friend Peter Staley to tell him about it since nothing was real to me until I called Peter to tell him about it. The giddiness though finally got up and left the room and a plush sadness - my sadness - sat down in the seat it left. I wrote about that a bit in the first chapter of my second memoir, I Left It on the Mountain. The chapter is titled “The Starfucker.” There is a section in it when I'm in the backseat of Jessica Lange's limo with her and Pat Kingsley, her publicist, and Micheal J. Fox. Jessica had invited Michael and me at the spur-of-the moment to go with her over to Chasen's for the Pulp Fiction party. It happened to be my birthday and it was the moment I realized how sad I really was. And as the arc of my narrative continues, I now live in this small town where Jessica Lange''s daughter lives - we became friendly before I knew she was Jessica's daughter - and now see Jessica sometime wandering Warren Street.

“My favorite part of that part of my life was when for four of those weekends I got to be Auntie Mame to my niece, Joey, and nephews, Jake and Stewart and Price when I'd take them to Oscar weekend as a graduation present from high school. When I took Jake and Joey, Vanity Fair put us up at the Beverly Wilshire. I still worked there when I took Stewart but I had to fly us out myself and pay for our room at The Standard. By the time Price graduated, I no longer worked there but was still invited to the parties yet watching my pennies even more. After flying him out from Mississippi, we stayed at a rather dinky place by comparison to my earlier days heading out there. Some hotel somewhere around the Beverly Center. My first memoir Mississippi Sissy was coming out the next week. The New York Times Book Review was printing a review of it the Sunday before but I still had not had word yet if it were good or bad. It was there at the rather dinky hotel that I got word of the review. It was a bad one. Dismissive. Even rather mean. I remember sitting in something the hotel dared to call a conference room and reading the fax - back when there were fax machines - and feeling so fucking heartbroken. And then I cried. But Auntie Mame was there for Price so I straightened my tits and told the sadness to get its lazy ass out of that seat and go find goddamn giddiness and tell him to get his own ass back in the room.

“Sadness and heartbreak and a giddiness that was never the same once it had left the room. That was what the Oscars were for me for a time.”

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And that too was what life was. My shadow self is much more content now. I no longer seek to be happy. Happiness is just another reason to fail. I seek contentment where happiness and sadness can exist side-by-side, have some empathy for each other. Furnish the balance. And after you break your own heart as I did when I re-homed Finn and Matty - whose own shadow selves still live within me I’ve begun to realize on this pilgrimage - it is hard for someone else to break it further. Indeed, I was more than a small-town boy. I am more than one. Because of the early trauma of losing both parents with their consecutive deaths in 1963 and 1964, I was a broken little boy as well. I am one still. That’s okay. Brokenness brightens the shadows of my self, picks up the gleam in the glory of the light that is needed to shine the shadows into existence. I’ve more deeply realized this too in these last six months in the early stages of this pilgrimage: the already broken are thus unbreakable. Giddiness? It’s good it got up and left so I wouldn’t have to abandon it. Abandon is how I now live my pilgrim’s life - with a mindful abandon - instead of being the thing that happened to me as an abandoned, broken child. Words - the tools with which we build our narratives - have their shadow selves too, their other definitions. Shadow selves are where the shape-shifting occurs. My life is shifting. I feel it. Find the light. Don’t shun its shadows. Shift.

Onward.