This one, entitled MAELSTROM is about relationships. RELIC and I had just at this point had her closest friend stolen away by a highly manipulative and extremely controlling man who ended up marrying her. And succeeded in estranging her from all of her family, church, music and friends.


MAELSTROM



Friendships are cables that bind

and ladders to climb.

Take care to see

that they are anchored

outside the maelstrom.





How like an Escher print these things are! Friendships are, definitionally, one-to-one, each one climbing "up" the ladder toward the other. One cannot have "friendship" with a group since he/she does not relate to the "group", but to individuals in the group. How strange to see two people vow to meet in the center of their respective ladder and watch only one climb! To see only one accommodate. To see the other ask for more and more changes.

As a friend, one rejoices as he/she sees another friend spin out the first tendril of floss of a special friendship. As we watch that first floss spin into a cable and into a special ladder which promises a lifelong climb and a lifelong meeting in the middle. As a friend, your heart turns as you see one of the partners stop climbing. Have they tired of the climb? Is it perhaps more work than they had thought or farther than they had thought to get to the calm center?

Or, were they, perhaps, less than honest about their need to escape the maelstrom? Did they wish to escape, or , did they only wish to share their maelstrom? To have someone to cling to as they are tossed about. And how does a person respond, as a friend, with a different kind of cable and ladder, when one sees this? The twin, almost parental urges toward expressing the brutal, crystalline, almost adamantine reality of our perceptions and toward an almost blind, soft, comforting expressions of love and caring can start to unravel the cable.

Too much of one and the cable can be cut, too much of the other and the cable is softened and becomes unpredictably stretchy. And all the while each has his or her own cables and ladders to attend to and climb, and his or her own maelstrom to contend with. For, almost definitionally, each person has many of these cables and ladders to tend to, and to climb. Each one is a bit different, perhaps the cable is thicker or thinner. The ladder has more or fewer rungs, is wider or narrower, twisting in the wind of the maelstroms it crosses or iron solid.



c C. Rienzo 1996