The Ladybug Symmetry

I have been thinking about a day on the beach many years ago when I came across two ladybugs on the sand and accidentally separated them. I was not in a good way that summer, morbid, paranoid, and sensitive to the extreme. Everything meant something, and the weight of it was too much. I remember being on my hands and knees, trying to find the lost ladybug – so that I could reunite the pair. I remember being frantic, in tears. It was my fault. I had to reunite them. It was the end of the world.

It is lunacy to me now to think of – although quite interesting – how upset I got, how personally I took it, and how real it all seemed to me – and it has to do with my belief in meaning (something I have been thinking a lot about). I never did find the “lost” ladybug, and I had to drag myself away from the scene. I was wrecked by it. This had to be almost 20 years ago, but I remember it vividly. It seems important.

While I have been out here, I watched one of my favorite movies, The Double Life of Veronique, and thought, again, of those ladybugs. And that feeling of doubles. Of reflections and alternate lifetimes. It has deep resonance for me, although I had turned my back on a lot of that, recently. The tendency (to find meaning, connection, symmetry) sprung back to life this past spring in a much more grandiose and, ultimately (I believe) mad way. My thoughts became rigid and perfect. It was the DOVETAIL of a lifetime. Beware the dovetail. It will be hard to give up. There may not be a lot of sense in this, although there will be for some, and it is to those people that I write (as always). When a “dovetail” of events has that much perfection (as my experience this past spring – which even had a perfection in its dates: 3 months exactly, to the day, from beginning to end) – it is a warning. This sort of weightiness (the separation of the ladybugs, the dovetail of the past spring – which ended when a man told me how RELAXED he felt with me – the “double life” of Veronique) has also made me think of Possession, bu AS Byatt – a great book of doubles, and dovetails, and connections – not to mention the weightiness of too much context. The book has a view of romance and love as seen through the eyes of two modern-day literary scholars, immersed in criticism and context – and how can one fall in love under the weight of so much context? To me, my various dovetails of meaning are a weight that now need to be discarded if I want to be free. They create a burden, which, in turn, brings on a disproportionate amount of disappointment, way out of hand and out of balance. Events cannot breathe in the rigid structures of my dovetail.

Having said all of this … after writing out a bit about the Ladybug-Debacle in my journal, pondering the narrative of that small story, and how much it has been a part of my adult life – I went up to my room to put on my hiking boots, glanced down as I tied my shoes …

and saw a single solitary ladybug, crawling up my bedroom door.

In the middle of January. Only one. Not two. Just one.

The implications are enormous, although I also resist. It is this tension – between a lifetime of belief – and a self-protective resistance to those beliefs – that I write from. It IS the creative source. Differences and opposites are not to be reconciled. Veronique gets a glimpse of Veronika in a contact sheet of pictures she took when she was in Warsaw. Her doppelganger. Her double. She has felt alone. And suddenly. As though she misses someone. But who?

The Double Life of Veronique is, for me, the clue to how to live life. Or, no, not how to live life. How to MEET it.

And perhaps the dovetail doesn’t need to be too rigid, if I can manage that. Perfection cannot be attained, no matter how much my consciousness turns towards the perfect, the smooth, the symmetrical dovetail. But surely there is no harm in imagining that after all of these years the lost ladybug has reappeared. The ladybug is okay. Still alone. But okay.

I am on the fence about all of it. I resist answers, because art is not in the answers. I also distrust answers in matters such as this. It is the thinking about it that really matters.

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7 Responses to The Ladybug Symmetry

  1. bookeywookey says:

    With answers or just with more questions, TDLOV is the best, isn’t it? Now I will have that haunting music going through my head for the rest of the day! How is your chilly little oasis?

  2. alli says:

    As I read this, I looked over toward my wall. And there’s a ladybug crawling up my wall.

    Wish I had a camera, y’all will think I’m lying.

  3. Kate says:

    The tension. The ying yang. The meeting in the middle. For me it is fate and free choice – I think of it always.

  4. Cara Ellison says:

    You write beautifully about such complex things. Dovetails are always the end of the story in movies – the thing that brings everything to a nice, neat package. But life goes on after the movie, you know? Things fall apart. The center doesn’t hold. So when you encounter a perfect dovetail, it is important, I think, to remember that there is more. You don’t freeze in that moment. That’s where I get stuck. Always trying to grasp the moment, hold on to it. And later, after things fall apart, I look at the dovetail moment and think I’ve failed somehow.

    Objectively we know that is not the case. And that is why we are artists – to make sense of the “after” in a way that fits our overall narration. As you said, it is the asking the question of questions that matter.

  5. Mary L says:

    You FREAK me out! Stated in more perceptual, associatively bewildering and therefore even more suggestive terms than I could muster, you give language to my perennial obsession. Do the random things that keep happening mean anything? You get at the flux of it, keeping polarities in a delicate balance: the given and the made, accident and pre-destiny, God in the works and God absconded, fate and chance in a hovering sort of either or. The phenomenal revelations that make you ask, what the freak is going on?

    You seem attuned to the subtle signs, the puzzling hints, the little enigmas, but also seem able to let them exist in their negative spaces, free from rigid or dogmatic conjecture. Your resistance to answers isn’t skepticism but a necessary patience that keeps the doorway open.

  6. David says:

    When your life is often a literary conceit this becomes even more difficult.

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