A Thought Of Genius

"She often exhausted me in that ‘After party slump’ way of interesting overstimulation. She was like a kindergarten Kierkegaard-- Plato and playdough, rolled into one.  She was always bouncing from task to project, delighted in fireflies and sparkly shiny things. Terrified of wasps but careless with snakes. She was oblivious regarding the expected mores and habits of a woman her age, though she did try--I saw her paint her nails with the meticulous, tongue-out precision of a child, then immediately smudge them on the cat. She spoke fast and laughed with her head back in unashamed display. 

Then, suddenly, she would pause, perfectly still. Some faint siren from a distant deeper universe would captivate her and she would drink deeply of it. "Do you believe in entelechy?" she would say at last with a thoughtful voice. "Do you think that is a mandate from God? Is the purpose OF life to determine our purpose IN life or is that just a construct of ambitious people?" I say nothing as a moment of general relativity would pass--a few seconds for me, but miles of deep contemplation for her, as if she walked down a well and back out in the same time in which I took my next two steps. I had learned to measure my drinking in of her as her life flowed and crashed against mine.

"Our math is wrong" she would sigh. "It is limited in dimension. It is just the representation of a thing. And we act as if it is the thing, is fundamental, accurate enough to base our understanding of God and the universe in. We are fools trying to eat a painting of an apple." and the weariness of it would weigh her shoulders down. I would nod in generous encouragement at her statement, wondering if she was more mad than genius. She was a mobius strip made of mirror and you never knew if she was climbing to a moment of excellence or was sliding back, weeping and weak, to the bottom of the glass.  Her thoughts and life reflected on itself in infinite loops that went miles but nowhere, but the speed at which it moved often generated a warm energy that we could harness for our own uses.

Every experience was weighted in time and meaning, and instinct was more profane to her than any language of a sailor. Actions taken without consideration were an abomination, and she often tilted at the windmills of those who worked solely from brutish desire.

Once a man said "She handled crisis better than she handles her daily life" and he was spot on. 'Woman, thy name is Dichotomy' I chastised her lightly: the patterns she saw and the disorder she lived in, the silliness of a child and the thoughts of a sage, the taste of the heroic but the life of the mundane. A loving wife and a horrible housekeeper. Broken but unbreakable.  Saint and sinner.  Flashes of brilliance in a mediocre sky. She eyed the tornado calmly as a worthy adversary, but broke down if she couldn't find a shoe. The sight of a crushed butterfly dimmed the sun in her bizarre little world, but she had no fear of death--to her it was a shrugging off of an old shirt.

She was all potential energy and frustrated action until she walked, which she did with such quickness of stride that even her teenage son had trouble keeping up with her. She was always trying to fit into the world in some way, through some work or job or habit, but I wondered if maybe she belonged to that vast inner dimension that sang to her--the only place that would make her still and calm and be.

I felt sorry for her.  In the end she was just a book—ragged and stained and crumpled and holding a story within her that she never was.