Blood on The Blinds

"Each heart hides its pain away. Some you can see it in their eyes, and others in their smile." (from Lewenswaarheid ~ Livingtruths. Grap blad vir almal ~ Joke page for all) 

We peep into our world without. We cannot possibly see it all. Some things we choose to screen from others; they choose to screen some things from us. Curious, we open our blinds to let in the sun, to see the light. Caring, we close our blinds to shade our more delicate colours from fading. Protection is innate. Blinds serve a purpose. We rig them up, or allow another, or get someone else to do it, all the while intending that degrees of privacy, of comfort, of commonality be obtained. It is a perpetuation of our acculturation. We do but remain cave dwellers. Evolution brought us down from the trees and into the firelight, yes, yet evolution still (especially with our some-what surpassing aeons of circadian rhythms,) …evolution still keeps us comfortable when ensconced by a roof overhead, with solid walls around us, and a particular privacy while we sleep.

So, we put up blinds. (Yet the JoHari window panes would have us aware of the quadrants of our lives.) We see ourselves somewhat clearly. Others see in us the things we do not even see in ourselves. We see in each other the personality we both know. And then there is that fourth pane; the unknown in either you or me, however many blinds we may release from their catch.

But some blinds are made of metal, others of plastic, or wood, and some, flimsy and perhaps least permanent, are made of paper. Yet small paper cuts from putting up paper blinds can leave blood traces, forever, down the lines.

History proves it. King William (1066 and all that) with Queen Matilda begat a Henry who also begat a Henry who, with Eleanor, begat eight children. One of them was that famous crusader! (Ha! In ‘Finian’s Rainbow’ there’s a catchy song about ‘begatting’. (Yes, I once played Og, the leprechaun.) Indeed, all down the line we leave our blood traces. Even Og becomes a human!

“Did it hurt much?” one might ask of the beleaguered. But no, at the evidence of bandaged paper cuts, revealed at a dinner conversation, I first asked my friend if he’d "left blood smears on the blinds?" After all, the permanent is what can really signify. All down the lines of our family constellations, since the very long-ago history of Adam and Eve, we’ve been affected, imprinted, imbued with, and acculturated by the versions of our past. Whether being a reincarnation, or not, our very DNA continues the physical mold by which we are procreated. And whether self-made or not, there is a Biblical sense of the “sins of fathers” being perpetuated down the lines. But when do we water them down so much as to leave “no traces no-more”? (“True love leaves no traces,” goes the Leonard Cohen song.) So, is there a moment, if not a given lifetime, in which one may indeed spill over and become so large-a-lake as to leave but the original vessel of one’s birth-passage just that, a mere corridor by which one found one’s own door? Yet not even adopted babies escape their natures. Nurturing may indeed layer the psyche with new enlightenments, but deeply at root go the bloodlines, all the way back, and at some provocation, history proves, some trace of the past, like a seam or a crack or a scar or a vein, surfaces to show that in our reaction (as opposed to a response) we are composites of the past, atavistically, a-spiralling toward what?

There lies the question! What’s it all about? If not about contributing-toward-the-health-of-the-Whole, then what? (And never mind whose “Whole”!) Problem is, there’re so very many of us at variance with just what that “health” part means! The economy? The populace? The family? The self? The nation? The world? What about the universe? How (the hell) do I contribute to that?

My friend jested, hurt: “What about me?” he asked, showing bandages. “Never mind the blinds!”

Ha! Indeed. Each thing that we do, each moment that we have, each intention, followed by an action, impacts an ‘other’; it resonates.

Yes, one best be careful with one’s blood, (especially ‘bad’ blood) one trusts, all down those lines.