paramagical

Sometimes I wonder why I am obsessed about this stuff.

Because I am, you know–I realize that. I’m totally absorbed in something that is officially nonsense.

I think I know the reason. But first, a little backstory:

My father was born into an authoritarian Irish-Catholic family. My paternal grandmother attended Mass every single morning of her life and said the rosary daily.

My father used to say things like, “This family is a democracy. Everyone gets one vote, and I get seven,” and “I was wrong once. It was that one time when I thought I was wrong but it turned out that I wasn’t.” When my brother and I became teenagers, my father took over the youth group at our parish (it was a singing group), and we were made to join.

At the time, I was part of a Protestant Civil Rights group. I was not happy to be told I had to leave.

My mother, on the other hand, had a mother who was a Bohemian artist type. My mother’s mother married two men and had kids with the first, but when she learned her first husband was abusing their three girls she packed them all up and moved into a little unheated cabin in a woods in Oregon on Route 1, just a mile from the Pacific Ocean. She painted non-representational nature scenes that look a little bit like what would happen if a Georgia O’Keefe painting fell in love with a Gaughin and had a baby. She was a talented person and gained some stature as a minor West Coast artist before her death.

My maternal grandmother thought that religion was a scam to extort money from cowardly people, and she made no bones about saying so to anyone who would listen. At the same time, she took for granted things that other people didn’t, like the existence of nature spirits, the possibility of communication with animals, the validity of clairvoyance and precognition, and the influence of the spirits of the dead. She gave me my first pack of Tarot Cards when I was about 10.

So when my mother and father married, it was a culture clash to say the least.

(As I understand it, I was the reason for their official union.)

My mother tried hard to be good Catholic convert, but like the pagan Catholic converts of old, she kept her paganish ways. She had regular precognitive dreams that the whole family learned to take seriously because they were so dead-on accurate. She talked to dead people and hung out with psychics.

She was troubled though, and struggled to maintain her own physical and mental health. There were times in her life during which she took way too many pills and spent most of her days locked in her bedroom. There were long surprise hospitalizations, most for imagined physical ailments (and a couple of genuine ones). Afraid that she would leave him, my father refused to get her psychiatric help or counseling.

My relationship with my mother was not good. She saw me as a competitor and was prone to raging outbursts over small things. I was close to my father, at first, but the older I got the more I saw that his views on life and women were doing me no favors.

So I left home the minute I could, and stumbled into an early, painful adulthood.

But here’s the thing: I have some of my mother’s gifts.

Some people laugh at this, others don’t, but I know I have them. I never doubt it. What I don’t know is why, or what they are for. That’s why I refer to them as my “dyfunctional clairvoyance”. I see and know things but I don’t know why or what it’s supposed to be for. I honestly don’t see that it’s helpful to anyone in any way, although it can be uncanny and a little spooky.

In particular, I really do “see dead people” sometimes, in a sort of space toward the front of my head, like a little movie. These images come with knowledge that is “just there”, about how they died, what their life was, etc. Technically this is called clairvoyance (clear seeing) and clairsentience (clear knowing). I cannot summon these abilities at will–they come when they come.

It’s cheap and easy to say that my mother’s psychic side was a function of mental illness (and that so is mine). But I don’t think that’s accurate.

When I look at my mother’s life, it is clear to me that her illness had way more to do with a harsh, narcissistic (but talented) artist-mother and a handful of extremely abusive men. Her mother, after all, had no trace of mental or physical illness, and she had the same abilities and took them for granted.

I think that, as an adult, my fascination with all things strange and fantastic has to do with feeling closer to my mother, with feeling like I have a real connection to the maternal side of family, which in real life was neither warm nor motherly.

And in fact, intuition and imagination are both part of what might be called the feminine side of philosophy and knowledge. They are Platonic, not Aristotlelian.

So much of my adult life has been a quest to validate this side of human cognition. Not because I personally feel defensive about it, (I don’t), but because I think that the loss of this side of human nature has caused real and lasting damage to the world.

All native peoples honor this side of their nature and use it to ground themselves and their actions. Our culture does not. As a result, we have a kind of runaway egomaniacal approach to life that consistently does real harm even when it means to help.

Anyway, that’s my story. What’s yours?

Feel free to share in comments. And thanks for visiting.