Mel, you are a jewel, your posting of your questions about continuing with this set my mind in motion, all afternoon.
Why do I come here? I have never really participated in an online community before. My posts on the net have always been academic in nature, genealogical, work related. I like having a place I can come to and express my thoughts and ideas with people I feel are open enough to read them. There is nothing in my life that remains untainted by this experence with Brokeback Mountain, so naturally this is where I come.
For those of us of a certain age we have, some of us, laid the fabric of that story against the contours of our own lives and find fits like a fitted sheet on a single bed. We take from it the lessons and apply them in our lives, and in that way the story becomes more. It becomes a parable. It teaches us. It is not just a story, not just a tragedy, it is a lesson.
I like telling people moving to my town that we are blessed with a lot of characters, we just don't have a plot. Indeed, I marvel in these characters, their stories, how they interact with mine and always looking for that hook, that thing that will make it a story and not just a bunch of random observations.
When I lay the fabric of Annie Proulx's creation against my own life, I see that pair of duces and their seperate but unqueal lives, in toto. Ennis, standing before his creation, the shirts and the postcard, acknowledging closure: "Jack, I swear". I knew it the first time I saw it, this is all he will ever have. It took me a long time to understand what that ment. That closure is the hook that gives meaning to our lives. It makes a bunch of scenes a story.
I saw in mine the story line of my failed affair long ago and how to reach closure with it. I wasn't made whole, but I was, as my friend Rick puts it, Bettered. I was freed to go on to other things, had a little less weight off my shoulders. Every person I come out to now, that is a little less weight. Less space betwixt what I know and believe. Those little story lines, you got to tie them up, or you remain a prisoner of them.
That Annie Proulx is either brilliant, or devine.
I am still looking for meaning, and I check this board everyday for it, and other interesting stuff. We are all our characters, and we are writing our stories. Thank you for sharing your with me.