Mudwoman ( continued )

The novel "Mudwoman" by Joyce Carol Oates is "growing" in me, the main protagonist, a "mudwoman", mud-shocked, in a way born in mud and almost killed in mud as a child, is a tense, desperate, both hopeful and hopeless powerfully and progressively obsessed individual as most of Oates's characters are; having almost died at an early age drowning in mud, thrown into it by her own mother is what has afflicted and polluted the rest of her life. Her past always present like the shifting sands it was.

Many of us, I fear, have got "mud" in the past we should try to get rid of, our memory festering in a way in it. Mud often like black oil and slime we get entangled in and that makes us painfully and pitifully just shuffle on, dragging our heavy, now useless wings behind us like annoying rags...
Stuff that can assure a permanent job to psychoanalysts...


The extraordinary metaphor of "mud", our soul chocking in mud, our haunting mud-ridden past, is what reminds me of the tragic force of the Shakespearian and Greek tragedies.
And to the multifarious haunted minds in literature and art.
Well and to a conversation I had recently with a friend who told me about the presence in herself of her father who doesn't "leave" her and he is always as he was in the past although now he is dead!

Who and whatever can we ever
really get rid of?

On a just slightly different side we can't forget Wilde who wrote that some of us from the gutter look at the stars, the gutter could also be the mud, the metaphor of the power of land and water together dragging us ineluctably down while we, some of us, keep looking at the stars as long as we can, as long as we can manage to keep our gaze outside, as long as we can prevent the mud from sucking us completely in and down. Our stamina determining in this case, as it does maybe in most cases, our life span.