The body knows

28

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March 13, 2014

Dear Charlie,

Mom and I are in Mexico—our mother-daughter Yucatán excursion is over two-decades young. Sometimes family members or friends join but we are the foundation, the shapeless days becoming more so as the arc of our lives agree. Once a spring sojourn to honor the anniversary of dad’s death, then a family intervention for brother Eric’s failing marriage or a yoga intensive, is now more carefree. I pack cameras, mom brings canvases and paint. We talk less, observe more.

This morning while walking the beach—post-café con chocolate-chatty—you entered the conversation. I sometimes remind her of you, your temperament, your creative pursuits. So I mined her memory for new details, an often fruitless pursuit. But today she recalled a picnic you shared just a week after your first encounter. That’s a new one. Are there others like this?

After forty years, a forgotten synapse fires and a new scene illuminates on mom’s mindscape like restored film stock. Will I eventually be able to watch the entire film? Will it be in black-and-white or technicolor? Is it a drama, a comedy or tragedy?

And then — another new detail. A mischievous curandera definitely added something extra to the salsa this morning.

Mom plainly revealed, “His name was Charles Brauer.”

Never, have I ever—until today—known your last name.

En route home, during a layover in Denver, I google: Wisconsin Public Access Television. Musician. Charles. Charles Brauer—a typically barren search without a last name. But today is different. Today, Kimberly Warner’s lifeline crease branches into a million flowering promises.

The album Blue Sky and Scraped Knuckles appears on top of my image search. A cyanotype photo of a man kneeling with his dog stares back. His nose is long, eyes gentle. I warm with recognition.

I know that face.

Upon my return to Portland International Airport, Dave greets me outside the terminal with a hug—burnt sugar and cedar envelop and my landing gear settles. For a moment. But when impulsivity wins, I intercept our embrace and shove the saved google image in Dave’s face. I ask with shallow breath and no context, “Who does this look like?” Dave answers without hesitation, “Well I don’t know but he looks like he could be your dad.”

I search a bit more in the coming weeks but Charles Brauer’s web history is strangely limited, especially considering his early achievements. His luddite tendencies of a bygone era help me justify the dearth. But where is he now? Is he still writing songs, publishing essays and dabbling in television? I try to let it go and dismiss my budding paternity suspicions as an impossibility. And anyway, my current life is a good distraction. Dave and I are busy writing a new brand initiative for a tech company and planning a photo shoot in Palm Springs. I’m also excited for the premiere of my second short film 9 at the Dances With Films festival in Hollywood at the end of May.

For mother’s day, I travel to Colorado for a short weekend. While visiting, mom suggests I screen my film for her women’s group—one of a few dozen circles she’s organized over the years to nurture her ever-evolving hearth of mindfulness and friendship. In the film mom plays a wisened prima-ballerina—crowned in a matted “Baba Yaga” wig, she embodies the gravity of a disfiguring rite-of passage with unusual elegance. The protagonist in the film, a young ballerina, discovers this secret initiation and must choose how to hold it.

The film begins with a short poem and the opening to Balanchine’s Serenade, a gestural pose that Balanchine described as “a hymn to ward off the sun.”

One ordinary night/ a girl dressed in white /made her mark and faced the dark/ and found it kinder than the light/

The autobiographical nature of the story is uncanny. When I wrote the script and made the film however, I had no consciousness of the mother-of-all secrets. Is that why I had my first-ever panic attack before filming? I laid on the living room floor before call time, knees up, feet unable to feel the ground. Like a doula, mom pressed her reassuring hands onto my arches like I was about to give birth. To what, I didn’t know. I was scared of what I could not see.

But the body knows. She always knows. The creative process is mighty mysterious—stories, shapes, and stanzas spring from hidden tunnels in our flesh, beyond reason, beyond understanding. Carl Jung’s A Book of Symbols often lights my way through these labyrinths, translating matters of matter into something my mind can comprehend. Jung states, “A symbol does not define or explain; it points beyond itself to a meaning that is darkly divined yet still beyond our grasp, and cannot be adequately expressed in the familiar words of our language.” Worldly objects—from plants, critters, and limbs to mythical beings and cosmic forces—are all part of a lineage of symbolic meaning that the unconscious uses to communicate. I feel, smell, see and hear before I know.

After screening 9 with mom’s gathering, the women reflect, “What was your motivation for making this film?” “What does the secret represent?” We discuss perfectionism, misplaced power, the importance of integrating our shadow selves. We point toward truths but we circle Truth with a capital “T”. We talk about concepts of secrecy but not the one, unidentifiable, embryonic secret. How could we? The truth is still a seed buried in dark earth — maybe just ever so slowly stirring now, tentatively testing if the conditions are right for germination.

This uncertain darkness—not the light and fallacy of my conscious self—is a refuge for truth and harbinger of my becoming.

At the end of the film, Baba Yaga stands before the young ballerina with her severed big toe—her broken, fallible humanity no longer a secret. But the girl doesn’t run. She relaxes. Mirroring each other, they begin Balanchine’s Serenade again, but this time, whole.

Sensing the rising temperature, the first offering of spring rain in the soil, the seed coat gets ready to break open.

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