The high flyer

This is taken from the book "The wounded woman" by Linda Scierse Leonard

The one who flies high is an other puella/ puer* pattren. This person lives by impulse, is free as the wind is exuberant. She/he seems to be spontaneous and free, leading a wild and exciting life, going with the whim of the moment and with whatever is happening. Soaring away, she/he lives in the realm of possabilities. The lifestyle tends to be ethereal as well, magically appearing and disapearing, like a cloud that forms for a moment and disapears.

Timeless and "spacy" this puella/puer usually has a poor relationship to boundries, to limits, to the practical order, to the corporal realm, and to time. Her/his life is largely undirected and open to the syncronious. Such persons are often intuitive, with artistic or mystical tendencies, living easily in imagination and close to the unconscious and archetypal realms.
They share this in common with the shy and fragile puellas/puers, but unlike the shy ones they are not fearful and retiering, nor are they hidden from the world. Rather, they are up there adventourously floating along in rarefied air, often seeking the thrills of danger.

Anais Nin, herself a puers* daughter, has described beautifully this type of excistence in her novel "A spy in the house of love". As the title implies, the main character, Sabina, lives the life of a spy. Uncommited and deceitful in relationships, she must live like a a spy to be free to move on at any time and is constantly on guard against revealing herself and thus exposing her various deceptions. Like a kaleidoscope, she changes personalities and stories with the rapidity of one obsessed.
Sabina cannot bear the exigencies of ordinary, daily life and rebels against them. Life´s limitatins and resting points are to Sabina like a prison. Boundaries, identifications, houses, any sort of commitment - all these she feels mold her into a static place without any hope of change. She describes herself: "I want the impossible, I want to fly all the time, I destroy ordinary life, I run towards all the danger of love..."

The moon and not the sun is Sabina´s special lighting source and her special planet. The night world and the unconscious are her domain. At sixteen she took moonbaths because everyone else too sunbaths and because she had heard they were dangerous. Like the moon, which keeps half of itself in darkness, so does she, living many mysterious lives and loves and eluding clocktime by her dream-like extension into the infinite. Activated by the moonrays, Sabina imagines she knows the moonlife which is "homless, childless, free lovers." It is to this ideal that she is drawn.
Sabina realizes that it is her father is "walking within her, directing her steps" in the feminine form of his Don Juan existence.

She questions herself:
"Was it Sabina now rushing into her own rituals of pleasure, or was it her father within her, his blood guiding her into amourousness, dictating her intrigues, he who was inexorably woven with her by threads of inheritance she could never seperate again to know which one was Sabina, which one her father whose role she had assumed by alchemy of mimetic love. Where was Sabina?"
This question "Where is Sabina?" obtrudes more and more into her consciousness. Guilt, shame and anxiety are not so different from those of an addict or a gambler; i.e.; the same compulsion and irresistible impulse and then the same depression, and guilt which follow and then once more the compulsion.
Sabina´s addiction is love, but the need effect is the same. She feels the dispersion, the desperation, the weakness at the center. She looks at the sky arched overhead and realizes that for her it offers no cathedral protection, only a "limitless vatsness to which she could not cling" Sabina weeps and asks to be held so she will not continue to race from the one love to another, so she will not continue to be dispersed and disrupted.

In desperation during the deep of night, she makses an anonymous call to a stranger, seeking help. The man who answers is a lie detector, symbolizing Sabina´s inner possability to detect her own self-deception and achieve a higher level of consciousness and responsability. The lie detector confronts her, asking her what she wants to confess and telling her that she is probably her own most severe judge. Sabina asks the lie detector to set her free from the guilt she suffers, a guilt and imprisonment which is paradoxically born of the limitless freedom she has sought. But he tells her that only she can set herself free and that will only come when she is able to love. When she tries to justify that she has loved by mentioning her many lovers, he points out that she was only in love with her projections, e.g., the crusaders who faught her battles, the handsome Don Juan princes, the judges continuing her parents´ role. Rather than relating to them as individuals and seeing them as they were in reality, she dressed them in costumes of the various myths she wanted to live out, who she wanted to see.

For Sabina the change can come only with the tears of acknowligment for her deception of her self and others. Up to now she has been trying to elude her guilt and find self-justification for her lack of commitment and recognition of limitations. To recognize that continuety exists in the tension between movement and permanence is something she needs to learn.

The difficulty for this type of puella is that she tries to live totally in possability and ignores the limitations and realities of others and herself. But what she needs to do is accept the boundries and commit herself to something. Accepting the paradox of finitude and possability is her way of resolution.

*different patterns of dealing with pain by women/ men, resulting in a sertain way of behavour.