Maritime Magistery

By Lucy Daniels

In this compelling collection of linked short stories, Lucy Daniels illuminates both the beauty of the North Carolina coast and the complexity of the people who own and inhabit it. In her words, the stories evolved from two seemingly different but amazingly similar transformational situations in my life. The first was experiencing the natural world I knew as a child: the sea, the sandy beach, and the maritime forest at North Carolinas Crystal Coast. The second, based on my lifes work, was my clinical (psychoanalytic) and personal experience dealing with human psychology.
Through stories told in expertly crafted prose, Daniels is able to identify with a live oak twisted by wild winds as well as with a person traumatized by loss. In doing so, she invites readers to make their own personal connections with the relationship between the unforgiving forces of nature and the struggles of the human predicament.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504969093

Book preview

© 2016 Lucy Danicels. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written these stories or of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 03/23/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5049-6910-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-6911-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-6909-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015921042

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Interior Graphics/Art Credit: Katie LaRosa

Cover Art Credits: Gayle Lowry

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Dora

The Teach Toilet

White Lightning

Geraniums

Maritime Magistery

Passionate Pursuits

Scaring to Squash

Timeless

Memory’s Jar

Flaming Cactus

Color Blind

Terror Retreat

Into the Wild Blue Yonder

Esther

After the Storm

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Lucy Daniels

Caleb My Son

High On A Hill

With A Woman’s Voice:

A Writer’s Struggle for Emotional Freedom

The Eyes of the Father

Dreaming Your Way to Creative Freedom

Walking with Moonshine: My Life in Stories

To the wild seashore weather and the multiplicity of human craziness that,

experienced together, have enlightened me and inspired my creative process.

Foreword

Lucy Daniels, a clinical psychologist with deep roots in and around the Carolina coast, has written another amazing book. This time it’s a collection of 15 short stories that illustrate and illuminate the kinds of problems we can all relate to -- universal themes that will surely draw you in. I absolutely loved some of the stories, but kept asking myself where all these characters came from. Were they people Lucy knew, or products of her imagination? Either way, readers will see themselves in her work.

The various characters’ sufferings and epiphanies make it clear that personal discovery continues through our lives … some discoveries happen quickly and others take a lifetime to complete. Some of the stories create a mysterious, Catcher in the Rye atmosphere where it seems perfectly normal that Holden Caulfield would cross paths with Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard. Overall, for me, this is a happy book, a collection of stories about self-discovery and coming of age, at any age.

Living on the coast of North Carolina as I do, I was extremely pleased with the coastal setting of many of the stories and the direct references to real-life communities and places. Like the characters in this book, people come to the beach to escape, to grow, to discover, and to hide. Lucy Daniels has captured the power, beauty, and majesty of Mother Nature at the beach, and the magistery referred to in the title is a core element and unifying theme that ultimately brings many of the disparate characters together in a surprise ending.

The range of people portrayed in these stories—young and old, rich and poor, black and white—come to life in a dramatic and alluring way that is now widely recognized as the author’s signature style. Lucy Daniels has a watchful eye, a keen sense of observation, and the skill and ability to animate, communicate, and transfer this wonderful cast of characters’ thoughts and feelings to the reader.

John Brodman

Pine Knoll Shores, North Carolina

Introduction

Illogic’s Logic

In the beginning, God and magic were one for me: both supernatural forces that could save or destroy at whim. The stories I learned in Sunday school about Noah’s ark and King Midas’s golden touch seemed no more fantastic than the magic performed by my wonderful half-sister Bibba, who delighted in being a sorceress. At three I longed to emulate Bibba, even as I braced myself against the spells she cast—invisibility, putting a frog in my throat, shrinking me to the size of the elves she insisted conversed with her from the hollow in our cedar tree.

In that same period, what I came to know about madness was equally compelling and indecipherable. My mother sometimes flew into fits of rage. When this happened, Bibba, who was eight years older than I, and to my mind, much wiser, would often whisper, Mommy’s crazy. I didn’t understand whether she meant that losing her temper made Mommy crazy or that being so furious was a symptom of craziness. I was even more confused by the discovery that mad meant angry in some instances and crazy in others. Then I was both disturbed and relieved when our nurse, Bea, declared during one afternoon walk, No need to worry about crazy people. They’re all locked up in Dix Hill, the ’sane asylum over yonder. To me that meant crazy was much worse than Mommy and that crazy people were not on the loose to attack you.

When I developed anorexia nervosa at age eleven, some people called me crazy. But I believed they were wrong because I knew that not eating was my own fault. Indeed, I tended to think that people like my father and sisters, who labeled my self-starvation selfish were right: I was deliberately not eating in order to not feel fat and guilty. In the psychiatric hospital where I was stowed from age sixteen to twenty-one, before the availability of psychotropic medications, I observed people in all manner of bizarre states that put Bibba’s spells to shame.

Many years later, as a psychologist in private practice freed from the spells of both anorexia and writer’s block by years of psychoanalysis, I have the privilege of working with all kinds of individuals, aged two to eighty-plus who are suffering from emotional disorders. The youngsters I see call me a feelings doctor. Our work in pursuit of their emotional freedom has given me insight into conditions that mystified me as a child. I’ve come to understand, for instance, that Bibba’s sorcery probably developed out of a need to feel less helpless in the wake of her real mother’s untimely death in delivering a baby that died. To me at four, however, that sorcery was magic. And even today, neither training nor experience has reduced its wonder.

Indeed, the struggle to write fiction again, as I had done decades earlier as a means of survival in the mental hospital, has intensified my excitement and appreciation of this magic. I am still awed by both the unconscious fantasies that turned me into an anorectic (and, later, a blocked award-winning novelist) and the human psyche’s extraordinary capacity to reverse such magistery. Furthermore, the transformations of the human spirit that I focus on in my office—whether produced by life’s blows, or, in reverse, by the expanding process of psychotherapy—often seem similar to the muteness and invisibility once produced by Bibba’s spells. The storyteller in me is driven to share my discovery of this similarity, which is how I came upon the concept, magistery of madness.

Magistery refers to a power in nature associated with transmutation, the act of changing from one form or state into another. My thesaurus lists magistery with madness, craziness, and insanity. The most effective phrase connecting all three is loss of one’s senses. In my experience, the transmutation from normal to crazy results from the impact of life events evoking feelings that the individual finds unacceptable. Madness occurs when feelings have to be disowned at all costs. Sometimes this is more visible in its reverse form—feelings or behaviors have to be maintained (no matter how destructive) in order to ward off an emotional state deemed to be annihilative. For me, the magistery of madness follows this course: an individual experiences a situation, feeling, or behavior which is unbearable; as a result, a transmutation takes place which removes all related feelings and capacities even though memory of the traumatic event may remain. Outwardly the very same trauma can produce opposite effects in different individuals—deadness in one and wildness in another, passivity or compulsive acting out. And shedding either of these extremes is no easy task.

I, for instance, stopped writing due to unconscious responses to trauma that made me view my work (including published, award-winning fiction) as weak, tedious, faltering, and thus, humiliating. Years later, as I began to resume writing, these same qualities tormented me and, in fact, were sometimes reflected in the work itself as well as in my response to it. But by then, several years of psychoanalysis had helped me develop the capacities to understand my unconscious conflicts and to recognize behaviors and feelings that acted them out. Consequently, unlike earlier, I was able to persist with writing.

However, persistence required growth to remain bearable. I became driven to remove ineffective ways of writing, and psychoanalysis had shown me that the only way to do this was to discover my unconscious reasons for expressing myself in ways that shamed me. Working at this brought fantasies into awareness where I could shed both ineffective writing modes and the compromising behaviors associated with them because they no longer felt essential for psychic survival.

As a result, I recently achieved one more liberating discovery: the unconscious cause of my anorexia nervosa was fear of becoming pregnant and giving birth. This fear was planted in me in early childhood when Bibba told me about her mother’s death in childbirth. And that same experience is also the basis for my writing stoppages. Publishing a book is like birthing a baby. Becoming aware of one’s fears doesn’t remove them, but does allow you to deal better with them.

This new freedom enabled me to make the thrilling discovery that our problems can be the roots of our power. What makes problems useful in this way are two mirrors that now continually enrich me. These mirrors are major reflectors of the self—our creative process and its products and the dreams we have in conjunction with them. Process and products show us the drawbacks that compromise our work. Dreams show us the unconscious conflicts that require these compromises. Consciousness allows the freedom to choose and discard both inhibiting fantasies and the flaws that support them. And, discarding a crippling fantasy is like removing a blindfold or regaining the use of a paralyzed limb. It amounts to coming to one’s senses.

Furthermore, the miraculous creative freedom discovered in this way excites me even more than the psychological liberations I work toward with my patients. As a result, like Bibba, I cannot keep that freedom secret. Regardless of how readers approach this collection, my hope is that these linked but independent stories may bring them to their senses about life’s transforming experiences.

I’ve titled this collection Maritime Magistery because the stories evolved from two seemingly different but amazingly similar transformational situations in my life. The first was experiencing the natural world I knew as a child: the sea, the sandy beach, and the maritime forest at North Carolina’s Crystal Coast. The second, based on my life’s work, was my clinical (psychoanalytic) and personal experience dealing with human psychology. What I’ve observed over the years—and what I hope these stories will convey—is the similar transformational impact of weather on nature and life events on the human psyche.

Sometimes the impact is negative; sometimes positive. But rarely is either result permanent, because typically, both nature and the human psyche endure—even if compromised. Furthermore, none of these effects on nature or the human psyche are universal: one live oak may be battered to the ground by the wind, while another is twisted into a uniquely beautiful sculpture. Similarly, the exact same life opportunity can be liberating for one person and devastating for another.

For me, noting these comparisons and weaving them into fiction has been a life-enriching process. Identifying with a live oak twisted by wild winds as well as with a person traumatized by loss allows me to feel more alive and connected to both the natural and human worlds. My hope is that readers, too, will benefit from making their own enriching personal connections with the characters and situations in these stories.

Dora

Scared was how I felt that first time at the beach. Because it was so desolate. Nothing there but ocean, sand, and woods. Not a single person besides us. No other car. Not one house. We went there to swim, because in Morehead City, where we vacationed each summer, there was no ocean. Only the sound.

To get to the beach we had to drive over this long narrow bridge where cars passing in opposite directions almost scraped each other. Mommy breathed in loud when another car approached; Father just glowered at the drivers.

But by the end of that first summer, I’d come to love both the ocean and what they called its maritime forest. The awesome isolated peace there, despite or even enhanced by the thundering waves, felt like the crowning power of our down-to-earth vacations, which were so different from our life in Raleigh. In our big house back home, proper appearances and maintaining our family’s importance in the right circles was all that mattered. Highlights of this included listening to President Roosevelt talk on the radio about strange things like the Depression and the Nazi party in Germany, staying clean in my dotted Swiss pinafore so that the ladies who came