It is, of course, en francais!

Ceux qui aperçoivent la lumière avant les autres sont condamnés à la poursuivre en dépit des autres.  (Christophe Colomb)

It translates as: Those who see the light before the others are condemned to continue in spite of others

How ominous, oui?? And yet, it is my life!!!

Anyway.

Unbelievable amounts of rain headed here today & tomorrow. But it's okay, b/c I have to keep my quite comely behind planted at the desk again. Something about speaking to my agent last night and blithely promising her a sample chapter of my memoir ASAP.  I said something like, "Oh, I'm sure it'll just start writing itself...." Oh, right. But at least I already have 100 pages of notes to feverishly pore over and close to 40 diaries to assist me in my artistic frenzy of re-cherching the temps perdu! (À la recherche du temps perdu -- Marcel Proust's legendary memoir, known in English as A Remembrance of Things Past.)

Of course the hardest part of tackling a memoir  (for me, anyway) is finding the courage to look at who I've been and be kind. And also to not see myself as a victim, and to take responsibility for having had a hand in creating my reality even though I was so unaware that I was doing just that for such a long time. Especially in my teens where, on two entirely different occasions separated by 5 years, I was raped. How do you reconcile that kind of horribleness if you also believe that you create your own reality?

I'm also a devout believer in forgiveness. I don't believe in an eye for an eye, or even in the death penalty, certainly. (Although I read Shot in the Heart a million years ago and thought that in that instance, the death penalty was essentially a mercy killing; a merciful release from, as Poe said, "the fever of living.") But forgiveness can be a complicated blessing. Perhaps in the beginning, the forgiven benefit a little bit more immediately from it.

In both rapes, I eventually found myself in the position of being asked to forgive these men for what they'd done to me. In the first instance, I was 14 and I was raped by two men at once; one of whom was a total stranger to me, the other I knew casually. They both wound up going to prison shortly afterward  for different crimes, but when the one man that I'd known got out of prison, the first thing he did was call me on the telephone. I was 17 years old then. I had already attempted suicide and gone through all that trauma without ever once admitting to anyone on the planet that I had been raped. It was a horrible thing -- to answer the phone, and there was that guy on the other end of it, out of jail. But he was, like, "Please, don't hang up. I know you'll never forgive me for what we did to you but I just needed to tell you that I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. I was just crazy in those days and I didn't understand that we were hurting you." etc., etc. And I wound up forgiving him there on the telephone. And I meant it, too. To this day, I still mean it. But coping with having forgiven someone for something you're still so traumatized by puts you into such a weird emotional space. What do you do with your rage, then? Where does it go? Where does the terror go? For me, I was always just squashing everything down inside. (Hence all the bourbon, all the pills.)

The other rape was totally different and the man was someone I knew very, very well, someone my family trusted, but we did not know he was a complete sociopath.  When I was 19, he drugged me and raped me for hours & hours. Sadly, that's something that happens a lot nowadays, but back then, it wasn't something people knew about. One minute, I was talking to him about music, then the next thing I knew it was all these hours later and I found myself totally naked on this filthy floor -- in the middle of fucking nowhere. And then I pissed myself and right away I started vomiting, and then b/c of all that physical trauma, my period spontaneously sort of burst forth. It was just so horrible. So unbelievably horrible. And yet several years later, over the phone, while I was living in NYC, I wound up forgiving that guy, too, but only because I found him so incomprehensibly pathetic. But I was still stuck with all those hours of being defiled that are still mostly a complete blank; I have no recollection at all about most of what that guy did to me.

And then several years after that phone call, when I was having an affair with (yet another) mob guy, and we were talking about that particular rape b/c it had done a lot of emotional damage to my family, I suddenly realized that he was making mental notes and I was horrified. I said, "No, you can't! Don't have someone go after him!" he said, "Why? He deserves it and it would be so easy; no one would ever know."

But for me, you've got to really forgive or you will never have your soul completely retrieved from all the chaos of fear & hate, you know? It is part of why I wound up with the career I did -- writing about sex, the nature of sexuality, the blessings of sex & desire in all its many guises. Because I really do believe that it's as close as we get to the true spirit of the divine, the essence of creation, the joy and the exultation of creativity. That's what I find in sexuality, at any rate. So for me, forgiveness absolutely had to happen or I would have been stuck in that prison of rage. And I'm guessing that by knowing so intimately how merciless and defiling rape can be, it has helped me focus so much more keenly on just how precious & exulting sexuality can be when you're allowing for joy instead of fear.

Well, it's a lot to think about it. It's a lot to try to write about in a healing way for readers, you know? But I know I'll do it. So onward.

Meanwhile, I'm gonna scoot! Hope you have a very rewarding Thursday wherever it finds you, gang. Thanks for visiting! And fight the good fight. Baci, bambinos!!