'Cause they said it really loud...
I've loved Donna Summer's On the Radio ever since I heard it in the early 80s - how two long-lost lovers find themselves all because of a love letter that "must have fallen out of of a hole in your old brown overcoat" was read on the radio and they both just so happened to have heard it - serendipity.
But what if, dear reader, you wrote that letter to yourself? Would you lament the tragedies, the ill-gotten gains, the lost loves, the mistakes? Would you instead celebrate the triumphs, the comeuppance, the beauty you've experienced and witnessed? For me, it would be all of these things - because some of us like it hot.
My mother, as I've spoken quite a bit about her in other pieces, was a bit of a Cinephile - we watched all manner of black and white films with stars such as James Cagney, John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, and Marilyn Monroe. There was always such a sadness to Marilyn I thought - it wasn't until I knew more about her childhood and later adult life that I understood why.
Marilyn had a lifelong desire to uncover her identity, her disdain for those who confused her image with her true self, and her search for some inner peace regarding her worth as an individual, her attraction and ultimate devotion to acting coach legend, Lee Strasberg's teachings are understandable ( Susan Doll "Marilyn Monroe's Later Career" 29 August 2007.)
The objectification of women has been an occurrence since the dawn of time - Monroe, most unfortunately, seemed to be the pin-up girl for it, pun intended. How does one de-couple from the ability to maintain two reflections? The true self, and the image that society associates with you? And what of that love letter? To whom do you pin it? To the true self or to the image, the persona, that others believe you to be?
I thought I knew who I was - a hyper-rational, mathematically calculating analyst - an entire internal courtroom seeped and drowning in analysis paralysis. I'd simultaneously be the defendant, the defense attorney, the prosecution, the judge, the jury, and the executioner. This was a trauma response. To stay locked in this pattern meant I'd never escape nor see, but I would; however, be in a state of hypervigilant listening. This is the essence of the two of swords in tarot - the classic Rider-Waite card of the woman, blindfolded - seated in a prayer position holding swords in each hand with arms crossed. The third-quarter moon looming in the sky behind her - and the moon, like the high priestess in this position, there must be a diminishment, a severing, a cutting and releasing of old ways, ideas, behaviors. Alas, I, dear reader, was addicted to the response of non-response. If I drowned myself in intellectual pursuits, work, courses, etc. then I wouldn't ever have to move from that position now, would I? I could wrap all sorts of excuses to "stay seated" - the best was how the 2 of swords' mundane is a build-up to the Justice card's ethereal. To break the spell - the one I'd cast upon myself - I needed something - HOT - Mercury in Sagittarius - the 8 of wands.
According to NASA, Mercury experiences extreme temperature variations, with daytime temperatures reaching up to 800°F (427°C) and nighttime temperatures dropping to as low as -290°F (-180°C). The average surface temperature is around 333°F (167°C) due to its lack of a substantial atmosphere to retain heat. Not to mention Mercury only takes 88 days to orbit the sun - its speed being 47.87 km/s or 107,082 mph. So instead of blindfolding myself seated in stillness and bound to a cold dark earth under a nearly dark moon, I need to spin and weave at such a rate that I could break any thread, any tether, any chain - well dear reader, that's why I smashed out 8 pieces as the moon became full in my sun sign, LEO. The universe conspired with me for the heat and speed I needed. What does that look like for you?
It was privilege, one that I hope this piece inspires in you as well - one that Marilyn sadly never found - yet I still have my secrets - the objectification that led to stalking, the flirtations that I had believed led to sexual assault - all of which I blamed myself for until now. I am not alone in the silence of these secrets, many women carried such things to their deaths, and many even now may have those whispers buried deep even after the Me Too movement. I was asked by a horrible physician at the VA once if I had been sexually assaulted during my time in the Army - I said "I'm a woman, what do you think?" This was a coy and smartass way to answer her. Firstly, I know the VA has "lists" and I don't want to be on one, and secondly, how she asked this was so intrusive that it felt nearly as if I was reliving the experience(s) all over again. I was 18 and 21 when those incidences occurred - I knew what it meant to report them at the time, so I didn't. These incidences do not even begin to cover the horror of the harassment I and other women endured in the early 1990s under Bill Clinton's integration of men and women in the armed services strategy. I do not fault Clinton or the strategy, it was the men who behaved the way they did that should be held to account, men like the new Secretary of Defence, a deeply mysogynstic abuser.
When I watched Netflix's The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes - I found a bit of myself in those tapes - the deeply understood enigma - for my part, I'd woven as a beautiful blanket of protection - to be a creature of mystery was safe. Marilyn; however, was deeply entrenched in wanting to be understood, respected, and loved, especially by Bobby Kennedy. The first rule of mistress-ship is the husband never leaves the wife - especially a Kennedy with 11 children in tow. The mistress gets the fun, the wife gets the burden - but Marilyn wanted all of it - leading to her untimely end. There was an incredible devotion to her though, from Joe DiMaggio, her second husband who wanted her to end her Hollywood career. Was it Italian machismo or was it a deeper understanding of the industry what it was doing to her and what it could continue to inflict? We'll never know - Joe was one of the few who paid and arranged for Marilyn's funeral and burial - he refused to allow Hollywood "types" from attending. Perhaps now, they both know the real exquisite truth about one another - that's a tearjerker.
That's the challenge from the beginning you see - if you were to write an exquisitely truthful love letter to yourself what would it say?
For me - Shakespeare's 45th Sonnet will do nicely -
The other two, slight air and purging fire,
Are both with thee, wherever I abide;
The first my thought, the other my desire,
These present-absent with swift motion slide.
For when these quicker elements are gone
In tender embassy of love to thee,
My life, being made of four, with two alone
Sinks down to death, oppressed with melancholy;
Until life’s composition be recured
By those swift messengers return’d from thee,
Who even but now come back again, assured
Of thy fair health, recounting it to me:
This told, I joy; but then no longer glad,
I send them back again and straight grow sad.
