It's almost Christmas, theoretically my favorite day of the year, and it's all I can do to not be reabsorbed into the Twilight saga. I haven't knit a stitch since Sunday. I'm reading it again, not listening to it. I'm at the windswept lee, on the cusp of the confrontation between Jacob and Bella wherein she realizes she is in love with Jacob, as well as Edward.
It's not monomania. Yet. I'm not concerned. Yet. (I thought I was querulous, but I'm actually) Just quizzical.
Last week it felt superfantabulous to 'fess up to my Twilight obsession. Shame is one of the demons I need to conquer. Like Neo, I am congenitally compelled to look for The Source. There are numerous signposts. I don't understand all the metaphors, but their gravitational pull is unmistakable.
One of these signposts is the Laurence Olivier/Merle Oberon Wuthering Heights. Even though I don't understand it yet, I just know this movie is one of the sources of my crooked childhood fantasies of love and health, of my learned dysamory. (Dysamory should totally be a word! And so it is, sez me.) The other source may be Janis Ian ("In the Winter," "Watercolours)".
When I was in my early 20's I went to a double feature at the Brattle Theatre, ostensibly billed as a Willie Wyler festival. I went to see Wuthering Heights. The Heiress was the first of the two shown movies shown.
I was all set for the catharsis of Healthcliffe and Cathy's twu luv when all of sudden people in the audience laughed. I couldn't tell you what scene they balked at, as this was 20 years ago, but I remember the sense of assault I felt. How dare they find twu luv funny! Or really HOW DARE THEY FIND TWU LUV FUNNY! FLOUNCITY FLOUNCE FLOUNCE.
Although I didn't know it at the time, nor can I be 100 percent sure due to time and self ignorance, but this may have been my first lesson in irony. Before the movie was over my naïveté was fursploded. I was simultaneously ashamed of my intellectual squalor and skipping to my lou my darling on the yellow brick road of condescension, undeservedly.
I wouldn't realize for another 10 or so years that irony does not come naturally to me. (Note to self: rabbit hole = not being able to stomach Jane. My one dimensional conceit would be a source of even more shame.
Sucks for me, but fear not; I'm so beyond ready to find some humor in it. I'm impatient to laugh at my specious moroseness. Really I am so impatient I'm resigned to counterfeit patience. (Would a google map help? Dude, I'm ovah heeyah! )
Maybe it's my way of coping with the fact that what I love about Christmas is in it's waning phase. Maybe the distraction of the improbable fantasy of the Twilight Saga is here to rescue me from the reality until I learn how to face it more productively. That sounds reasonable enough.
Quick! Look! Lovely, tiny, little stitches. Yum.
