*
So for those who are mad "why" is really a tragic word -- a soft articulation of the tragic -- it has a tragic sound. Not because events don't have a meaning (I believe they always and everywhere offer up meaning for whoever seeks it) but because the meaning so often can't be used. It seems to point outward to the transcendent place that is outside even "outside" or that extends beyond "extension" itself. Take something like the death of an innocent person, say that young woman in Iran, whose death a cellphone recorded.
The sane shake their heads and move on. But the mad brood over it.
They can't shake it. The event is like a string tied to something we are aware of but can't see. The string leads out of history to another dark and intuited place. A "place" with no place in the world.
"She is in heaven." What is heaven? Is heaven just the lumber room where everything is stored that doesn't fit elsewhere? No. It has an order of its own. How do we know that? How do we infer its having an order? We know this because "order" itself is one of those things that is always being killed in history. It is killed yet it survives and so must have a "place" to survive. So the transcendent itself must be ordered and orderly.
And the tragic part of this is that all the wonderful things that are killed and yet survive cannot survive here. We are here and everything we love is elsewhere. We can't let them go and move on because there is no place we would want to move that doesn't contain them. They pull us out of the world. They seem to make life impossible.
*
Now you ask the mad to get over this vast melancholy and move on. But they say no. They seem to insist on staying where they are.
What is the "why" of this?
Surely the best reason is the most obvious -- the melancholy contains a deep joy that no one who feels it can relinquish. It is like a little lane through the broken glass into the things that most matter. The core of the "why". The sustained land of what is intrinsic and beautiful and completely useless.
"Reason not the need".
But the sane rub their hands and worry, saying: you must go on. You must live. You must move forward.
And the mad are forced to see the logic of this. It seems that reality doesn't stop. It too is transcendent. There is something transcendent about history itself, always picking itself up and moving on past disaster.
Itself full of tragic gestures.
So we pick ourselves up too. We move on. We move on a little bit but never completely.
If we should break a little bit while we are moving then the poor people who love us will need to follow that breakage to its "place". The place where the breakage is stored.
Always asking this question: where is why?
I sometimes feel that in some way this place is impossible to describe to those who don't believe in God. They can continue not to believe but then can never understand this place. This storage and what it stores.
They will call it absurd and thus substitute a word for an understanding.
It exists or it doesn't.
But if it exists then humans can run away. But it never runs away.
*
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Story: A sorceress
*
At a certain point, desperate to win his lady's love, Gilles resorted to magic. Maybe magic -- maybe nonsense, he didn't know. In introspection and dismay he crossed the trackyard and went into a different part of town. his best friend, Peter, had told him about a sorceress in his building.
You don't have to believe, Peter said. All you have to do is ask. And then watch.
If nothing happens, you're still right where you are now. Right? The pain won't go away but it won't get any worse, man. There's no place worse than this, right?
Gilles had to laugh. Peter was like what you'd call an A student in love. All the pretty ladies loved him and always had. He'd never had to work a day in his life for love. His problem had always been fending them off. Or limiting the selection. Choosing only one.
Whereas for Gilles? There was one there was one there was only one there would forever be only one, one heart, one soul. And the fact that this one ignored him, scorned him, well that was just annihilation. It was like not existing at all but feeling it deeply at the same time. It was an unsustainable way of life. It made death sound like something easy by contrast. Little did he know perhaps.
As he walked along the flowered side path, a large limbery dog -- sleek and handsome -- ran at him. He let the big guy lick his hand and wished he had treats in his pocket. The dog flicked his head like a horse and made a gentle whinny sound, mostly a form of soft breathing. So big guy, why are you loose? Who's your owner? When Gilles reached down to inspect the collar the dog backed away. Okay. Past Peter's apartment, the sorceress's front door.
Hey do you really want to do this?
At the first ghost of a knock the front door opened. Come in, said the lady in the leotard and Gilles trundled in, feeling like a clumsy beast. Sit, she said and handed him a glass. She was so thin she looked about to break. Down into cross-legged fusion with her mat. The drink she gave him tasted like "Tang Slime" and immediately turned his stomach upside down. She'll be out in a minute, said the woman who turned out was not the sorceress.
He could not seem to sit in his low chair without creaking but every time he moved the perspective changed in the apartment, now like a long tunnel in a deep-focussed lens, what was happening to him? What was in that drink? From far away he heard the muffled sounds of someone fussing in a bathroom. Another lady came out of perhaps the kitchen holding a tray. She was wearing even less than the first one. She was intensely beautiful and her hair was white. Gilles felt more and more like a beast invading this ultra feminized space that was at least twice the size of what it possibly could have been from the building you saw from the street. He needed to get up and walk around but the chair was so very low. Not comfortable, debilitating. I'm Giselle, the second lady said. She went to the front door and opened it. In came the dog, twitching his head in a way so oddly familiar. He flattened himself onto some tiles. Then Giselle climbed on top of him and made herself comfortable, loading her weight onto the haunches, good gooood dog. There was a buzzing sound from the bathroom and then someone kicked the sliding door off its runner and a young woman burst out, clad in a towel, partly clad in a towel, clad in part of a towel. A sorceress.
Crap! she said. Walked over to a sickly potted plant, picked up a figurine and slammed it into the crown of leaves. They shattered and what seemed like a million white bugs swirled into the air. Oh, you grisly little things. She swooped a handful of them into her fist and pivoted to the center of the room smiling. Animalcules into the little pot and then grind and grind. Let us pour some of that terrible orange fluid into the paste. Get over here, the witch cried and Gilled tried to get out of his chair. He felt rubbery, doubled in size and covered in bristly hair, was that just his nerves on end? Could he walk across the room without destroying it? Could he step over that dog? Why were men so damn clumsy?
Hand me her picture, sweetheart, the witch said and the big beast that was Gilles reached into his faraway pocket and gave her something he would have been ashamed to explain or justify: it was a picture of Karen in the shower -- unaware of the camera -- something that he had no business owning or seeing. Nor could he have explained to anyone how he'd gotten it. It was clandestine, illegal, and the sorceress cooed over it, then brooded. Then she tore it into little bits. A girl like that is easy, she said. But what about you? A coarse monster like you.... Young man, you are lucky that I'm not attracted to you.
Something about the way she said "young man" gave him a sudden insight into her. She did look about 16 years old. And yet when she moved into and out of the light minute wrinkles rose all over her face, stippled lines that seemed to open and close but vanished whenever you focussed on them. She could have been 100 years old. But no, she was very young and very corrupt and it was only the corruption itself that looked so old. When she handed him the filthy brew he didn't hesitate but drank it all down. In his hideous paw the cup was as small as a thimble. So it seemed. The other girls moved around the room and seemed to be three or six or twenty girls. No towels, no need for towels. The features of their wings made the air seem heavy and he had to lean on the sill, panting heavily and staring out the window at her huge garden, her estate filled with cypresses and swallows. Jungle drumming inside his ears. Even within the vision he knew he was very sick, hallucinating, so light headed that he couldn't touch the ground with his feet. It was like the time he lay in a spa, reached forward to touch his toes and found them missing. Then the great dream-ship in his head turned abruptly left and the scene changed. Help me, help me, madame, he cried. The dog whimpered and circled below his feet.
Our merciful lady placed the namaste stone in his hand and at once he felt placed again, feet flat upon some Turkish carpet. Now you keep this stone on your person, she said. And whenever you next touch your lady, even to shake her hand, she will be yours.
He went home and slept a plenitude of time, then wasn't sure, when he awoke, how much had really happened and how much had seeped out of his usual crazy dreams. The namaste stone, that was real -- it lay on his night table. The love he felt, okay, that was just as intense and sharp and hurtful as ever.
He went out looking for Karen. It was a Saturday and she was at the church, doing something beautiful and characteristic to the sanctuary with flowers. Herself a flower, that went without saying. How it hurt him even to look at her. When she saw him she took on a look of concern, conferred with her friend, backed out into the breezeway. Before he could follow, the friend came up to him and said: If you're going to walk the labyrinth with us, there are rules.
You don't bother the other people there. You don't talk to them or touch them. You let God lie thick between you.
God. Thick. Of course, Gilles said, not understanding a word. They labyrinth was outside, lying under the pale sun, painted and partly carved on the cement. He had trounced it a thousand times, barely noticing it, on the way to some store or other. Peter used to practice his roller blading within its old fashioned curved lines. Twitching his head like a lion.
Pretentiously solemn people moved along a sinuous curve and then stood still in the center with their lips moving. Gilles clutched his namaste stone in his pocket, warm and swollen as a piece of flesh. If he could only touch her hand casually in the center of this place, then she would be his. Involuntarily, even -- that part didn't seem to matter. He stepped onto the pattern and felt it shift slightly like the deck of a boat. Because others had, he closed his eyes. He felt the nudge of something, a tug. Move this way, now this. When he opened his eyes, she was next to him on a lane moving opposite. She ignored him, they separated. She wore a pin that said: Take no thought for your life. I go before you. He began to feel intensely dizzy, surrounded by mostly women, a paltry couple of men, and they were all so quiet, so solemn, a million miles away. And the damned platform continued to turn under him. Even balancing was hard. When his foot touched the carved edge of the path his whole body felt the tingling shock. Touching it was like a sin. His palm was on the line and his head ached. Breaking a rule, Karen reached from the center and plucked his shirt, pulled him upright again.
She was so beautiful he couldn't breathe. He realized that what he wanted was not even to marry her, not (in some alternate reality) sleep with her, but just to inhabit the same world that she did. Her spirit seemed completely lifted and, being near him, lifted him up. Cured him of a depression he didn't know he'd had.
The stone in his pocket was unbalancing him and pulling him back to the ground. He didn't want magic anymore. It would only be a wall separating him from her. And his old ugly grasping soul, that was another wall.
He stepped into the wavery pool at the labyrinth's center, its hot core. People were picking up and then abandoning stray objects: a shell, a feather. Gilles reached down and put his hated stone on the exact central prick of the design. Ooh, calmness. He could feel how wrong it had been, how misshapen. It made the invisible water dirty, it sullied the air. He put it back in his pocket. This vile thing goes back to its owner.
On the other side of the circle Karen looked at him as though he were a stranger. If he was ever to win her it would have to be a different way.
That night he had the "bear" dream for the first time in many years. Something was thrashing in the backyard, shaking the bushes of flowers. His companion, a women he couldn't quite see or identify, held him by the elbow. A large creature trapped in a black bear suit, an oversized and clumsy guy with sad trapped eyes, a human -- but all animals looked human when you gazed at them. Oh look! the invisible woman said. Look! Somebody to play with!
And the bear suit flapped loose but wouldn't come off. There was no other skin underneath.
In the morning Gilles drove by the apartment building but it was as dark and derelict as a movie set. He called Peter on his cell but got no answer. At his work number the same. No one had seen him for a week.
Things felt wrong. He felt like a crude clumsy animal. He blamed it on that stone. It was a sort of clot blocking the world's normal flow of grace. Yet he couldn't just throw it into the road. He had to give it back. He drove again to the apartment building, stone in his right hand. Knocking on the sorcereress's door left an echo that seemed suffused with something, blood maybe. She was in there not answering, could that be?
But when he knocked on Peter's door the sound was different, hollow in a different way. It seemed that no one would be home for longer than he'd ever be able to wait.
He heard a snuffling noise behind him. He turned and saw the dog -- or a dog -- or was it the dog from before? He was now so emaciated it would seem he'd have trouble even walking. And he had that horrible look in his face, was it love yearning? Could a dog yearn? And he twitched his head in that all too familiar way. When he put his snout on Gilles's hand he was shivering.
I will feed you. I will feed you as soon as I can, Gilles said. The dog nudged the apartment door and began whining, no, it was not a whine but an even more complicated sound. It was worse than the sight of starvation. Just that sound.
Could you be .... ?
And Gilles turned to knock at the door, even harder than before. The echo of nothing -- something -- nothing. The sound of nobody there was like somebody there. No one. Someone. And he knocked again.
And knocked again. And again.
*
At a certain point, desperate to win his lady's love, Gilles resorted to magic. Maybe magic -- maybe nonsense, he didn't know. In introspection and dismay he crossed the trackyard and went into a different part of town. his best friend, Peter, had told him about a sorceress in his building.
You don't have to believe, Peter said. All you have to do is ask. And then watch.
If nothing happens, you're still right where you are now. Right? The pain won't go away but it won't get any worse, man. There's no place worse than this, right?
Gilles had to laugh. Peter was like what you'd call an A student in love. All the pretty ladies loved him and always had. He'd never had to work a day in his life for love. His problem had always been fending them off. Or limiting the selection. Choosing only one.
Whereas for Gilles? There was one there was one there was only one there would forever be only one, one heart, one soul. And the fact that this one ignored him, scorned him, well that was just annihilation. It was like not existing at all but feeling it deeply at the same time. It was an unsustainable way of life. It made death sound like something easy by contrast. Little did he know perhaps.
As he walked along the flowered side path, a large limbery dog -- sleek and handsome -- ran at him. He let the big guy lick his hand and wished he had treats in his pocket. The dog flicked his head like a horse and made a gentle whinny sound, mostly a form of soft breathing. So big guy, why are you loose? Who's your owner? When Gilles reached down to inspect the collar the dog backed away. Okay. Past Peter's apartment, the sorceress's front door.
Hey do you really want to do this?
At the first ghost of a knock the front door opened. Come in, said the lady in the leotard and Gilles trundled in, feeling like a clumsy beast. Sit, she said and handed him a glass. She was so thin she looked about to break. Down into cross-legged fusion with her mat. The drink she gave him tasted like "Tang Slime" and immediately turned his stomach upside down. She'll be out in a minute, said the woman who turned out was not the sorceress.
He could not seem to sit in his low chair without creaking but every time he moved the perspective changed in the apartment, now like a long tunnel in a deep-focussed lens, what was happening to him? What was in that drink? From far away he heard the muffled sounds of someone fussing in a bathroom. Another lady came out of perhaps the kitchen holding a tray. She was wearing even less than the first one. She was intensely beautiful and her hair was white. Gilles felt more and more like a beast invading this ultra feminized space that was at least twice the size of what it possibly could have been from the building you saw from the street. He needed to get up and walk around but the chair was so very low. Not comfortable, debilitating. I'm Giselle, the second lady said. She went to the front door and opened it. In came the dog, twitching his head in a way so oddly familiar. He flattened himself onto some tiles. Then Giselle climbed on top of him and made herself comfortable, loading her weight onto the haunches, good gooood dog. There was a buzzing sound from the bathroom and then someone kicked the sliding door off its runner and a young woman burst out, clad in a towel, partly clad in a towel, clad in part of a towel. A sorceress.
Crap! she said. Walked over to a sickly potted plant, picked up a figurine and slammed it into the crown of leaves. They shattered and what seemed like a million white bugs swirled into the air. Oh, you grisly little things. She swooped a handful of them into her fist and pivoted to the center of the room smiling. Animalcules into the little pot and then grind and grind. Let us pour some of that terrible orange fluid into the paste. Get over here, the witch cried and Gilled tried to get out of his chair. He felt rubbery, doubled in size and covered in bristly hair, was that just his nerves on end? Could he walk across the room without destroying it? Could he step over that dog? Why were men so damn clumsy?
Hand me her picture, sweetheart, the witch said and the big beast that was Gilles reached into his faraway pocket and gave her something he would have been ashamed to explain or justify: it was a picture of Karen in the shower -- unaware of the camera -- something that he had no business owning or seeing. Nor could he have explained to anyone how he'd gotten it. It was clandestine, illegal, and the sorceress cooed over it, then brooded. Then she tore it into little bits. A girl like that is easy, she said. But what about you? A coarse monster like you.... Young man, you are lucky that I'm not attracted to you.
Something about the way she said "young man" gave him a sudden insight into her. She did look about 16 years old. And yet when she moved into and out of the light minute wrinkles rose all over her face, stippled lines that seemed to open and close but vanished whenever you focussed on them. She could have been 100 years old. But no, she was very young and very corrupt and it was only the corruption itself that looked so old. When she handed him the filthy brew he didn't hesitate but drank it all down. In his hideous paw the cup was as small as a thimble. So it seemed. The other girls moved around the room and seemed to be three or six or twenty girls. No towels, no need for towels. The features of their wings made the air seem heavy and he had to lean on the sill, panting heavily and staring out the window at her huge garden, her estate filled with cypresses and swallows. Jungle drumming inside his ears. Even within the vision he knew he was very sick, hallucinating, so light headed that he couldn't touch the ground with his feet. It was like the time he lay in a spa, reached forward to touch his toes and found them missing. Then the great dream-ship in his head turned abruptly left and the scene changed. Help me, help me, madame, he cried. The dog whimpered and circled below his feet.
Our merciful lady placed the namaste stone in his hand and at once he felt placed again, feet flat upon some Turkish carpet. Now you keep this stone on your person, she said. And whenever you next touch your lady, even to shake her hand, she will be yours.
He went home and slept a plenitude of time, then wasn't sure, when he awoke, how much had really happened and how much had seeped out of his usual crazy dreams. The namaste stone, that was real -- it lay on his night table. The love he felt, okay, that was just as intense and sharp and hurtful as ever.
He went out looking for Karen. It was a Saturday and she was at the church, doing something beautiful and characteristic to the sanctuary with flowers. Herself a flower, that went without saying. How it hurt him even to look at her. When she saw him she took on a look of concern, conferred with her friend, backed out into the breezeway. Before he could follow, the friend came up to him and said: If you're going to walk the labyrinth with us, there are rules.
You don't bother the other people there. You don't talk to them or touch them. You let God lie thick between you.
God. Thick. Of course, Gilles said, not understanding a word. They labyrinth was outside, lying under the pale sun, painted and partly carved on the cement. He had trounced it a thousand times, barely noticing it, on the way to some store or other. Peter used to practice his roller blading within its old fashioned curved lines. Twitching his head like a lion.
Pretentiously solemn people moved along a sinuous curve and then stood still in the center with their lips moving. Gilles clutched his namaste stone in his pocket, warm and swollen as a piece of flesh. If he could only touch her hand casually in the center of this place, then she would be his. Involuntarily, even -- that part didn't seem to matter. He stepped onto the pattern and felt it shift slightly like the deck of a boat. Because others had, he closed his eyes. He felt the nudge of something, a tug. Move this way, now this. When he opened his eyes, she was next to him on a lane moving opposite. She ignored him, they separated. She wore a pin that said: Take no thought for your life. I go before you. He began to feel intensely dizzy, surrounded by mostly women, a paltry couple of men, and they were all so quiet, so solemn, a million miles away. And the damned platform continued to turn under him. Even balancing was hard. When his foot touched the carved edge of the path his whole body felt the tingling shock. Touching it was like a sin. His palm was on the line and his head ached. Breaking a rule, Karen reached from the center and plucked his shirt, pulled him upright again.
She was so beautiful he couldn't breathe. He realized that what he wanted was not even to marry her, not (in some alternate reality) sleep with her, but just to inhabit the same world that she did. Her spirit seemed completely lifted and, being near him, lifted him up. Cured him of a depression he didn't know he'd had.
The stone in his pocket was unbalancing him and pulling him back to the ground. He didn't want magic anymore. It would only be a wall separating him from her. And his old ugly grasping soul, that was another wall.
He stepped into the wavery pool at the labyrinth's center, its hot core. People were picking up and then abandoning stray objects: a shell, a feather. Gilles reached down and put his hated stone on the exact central prick of the design. Ooh, calmness. He could feel how wrong it had been, how misshapen. It made the invisible water dirty, it sullied the air. He put it back in his pocket. This vile thing goes back to its owner.
On the other side of the circle Karen looked at him as though he were a stranger. If he was ever to win her it would have to be a different way.
That night he had the "bear" dream for the first time in many years. Something was thrashing in the backyard, shaking the bushes of flowers. His companion, a women he couldn't quite see or identify, held him by the elbow. A large creature trapped in a black bear suit, an oversized and clumsy guy with sad trapped eyes, a human -- but all animals looked human when you gazed at them. Oh look! the invisible woman said. Look! Somebody to play with!
And the bear suit flapped loose but wouldn't come off. There was no other skin underneath.
In the morning Gilles drove by the apartment building but it was as dark and derelict as a movie set. He called Peter on his cell but got no answer. At his work number the same. No one had seen him for a week.
Things felt wrong. He felt like a crude clumsy animal. He blamed it on that stone. It was a sort of clot blocking the world's normal flow of grace. Yet he couldn't just throw it into the road. He had to give it back. He drove again to the apartment building, stone in his right hand. Knocking on the sorcereress's door left an echo that seemed suffused with something, blood maybe. She was in there not answering, could that be?
But when he knocked on Peter's door the sound was different, hollow in a different way. It seemed that no one would be home for longer than he'd ever be able to wait.
He heard a snuffling noise behind him. He turned and saw the dog -- or a dog -- or was it the dog from before? He was now so emaciated it would seem he'd have trouble even walking. And he had that horrible look in his face, was it love yearning? Could a dog yearn? And he twitched his head in that all too familiar way. When he put his snout on Gilles's hand he was shivering.
I will feed you. I will feed you as soon as I can, Gilles said. The dog nudged the apartment door and began whining, no, it was not a whine but an even more complicated sound. It was worse than the sight of starvation. Just that sound.
Could you be .... ?
And Gilles turned to knock at the door, even harder than before. The echo of nothing -- something -- nothing. The sound of nobody there was like somebody there. No one. Someone. And he knocked again.
And knocked again. And again.
*
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Story: Safety
*
Giles would meet with his therapist in his office on the most exposed floor of a tourist hotel -- what a strange place for therapy! The location might have been chosen to facilitate the "purging through dreams" that the therapy promised. A dreamlike location seemed guaranteed to hasten the whole process. That was the theory.
The worst part -- was it the worst? -- was stepping into that elevator. The entry door closed with an indecent whoosh. Ahead not only was the whole view exposed but management had taken the glass out in order to intensify the thrill. The chute leaned inward over the fantastically high lobby, which meant that anyone careless would fall and make a permanent splash. You had just enough time to recognize the danger but not enough to ward it off. And then you were there, on a very high floor, but still 20 stories from the top, and you were hanging over all those milling people, your brothers and sisters who were like yourself looking up at you. Later how would you ever get out of here?? You were even afraid to pry your fingers loose! But when the elevator wiggled to its stop the force of attraction more or less vanished. It too was somehow mechanically generated. He tumbled to the floor and rolled out of the elevator.
Among the therapist's many sayings -- for he was a man built out of healing cliches -- was the following: I don't ask you if you wish to be cured, I only cure you. His techniques were unpleasant. Also there was no evidence that they worked. You wouldn't even find brochures with testimonials. Most who consulted him were in no shape to ask for anything like an evaluation. The patients merely came and then went. Did they ever ask themselves if they were better? If so, how did they judge? In emotional terms, Giles today was only where he'd previously been but that outcome might have been the best of all the different possibles. Without this treatment he might have been worse. In any case he came back another time. When he fell out of the elevator there was no floor beneath him. The rumor was that the very space was digitized and that management did whatever it wanted with the result.
Abruptly Giles had that sensation he hated so much, of looking out the airplane window and seeing ocean above and sky below. It was that moment when you were upside down and simply supposed to trust that the pilots knew what they were doing to get you rightside up. A panic attack had come and enclosed him so that he couldn't move. Oh don't let this happen here! when I'm not even sure what "here" amounts to: here? He wasn't going to faint or cry -- he couldn't do anything. The wings slanted and righted and now he could see the lobby underneath him. Of course what guarantee did he have that it wouldn't disappear again? And this breakdown in trust was in fact the sum total of Giles' neurosis and had the same trapdoor structure that paranoia had, namely, that its fears were largely grounded and founded -- they were true -- but had to be considered sick and demented at the same time.
The flight attendant held him by the elbow. But no she was a tourist holding a matinee ticket and only wanted to get past him into the elevator. He knew the importance of giving the impression that he wasn't suffering or sick. He stood rigid like a strong and independent man, a soldier, a guy with no problems. He moved aside for her like a gentleman from a romance. The pretence actually made him feel healthy, though it was just pretend healthy, but you get points even for pretend. And so the minutes passed. And when he walked down the corridor he was able to pretend, like everyone else, that there was a florid hotel rug under his feet. Another one of the therapist's sayings: your feet aren't crazy, only you are. So let them walk you somewhere better. Giles walked. Even though he knew. He knew it would be manipulated. But another look out the window, a whoosh of the panic returning, no. No. He walked. His ex-wife mumbled in his ear as they walked. She spoke just loudly enough that he could hear she was speaking but not loud enough for the sense to be grasped. You know how that bothers me, he said but then corrected himself, rephrased the comment, since there was a need not to antagonize her, or anyone.
Darling, my ears are buzzing, I can't hear you.
A mumble like the substructure noise on a plane.
Why are you here? he asked. I am the one who is sick.
Oh Giles, you know what the therapist always says: I divide the world not into the sick and the well but into those who know they're sick. And those who don't.
Whatever relief or knowledge you receive here, I want it too.
It is no longer safe not to "know yourself". The airplane glides, the sky turns upside down. Your children look at you strangely. The car won't stay in its lane. Strangers scream at each other in the supermarket. You get home, sit in your kitchen chair and find yourself crying, without a reason but the truth is that the reason is plain, what is missing is the realization that you should always have had: "know yourself".
As the therapist says: Queasiness is the single path to health.
Giles looked down and the plane's window was underneath his feet. He closed his eyes and took another step. The lavatory door was locked, his wife was gone. Only a tourist with a ticket in her hand, walking briskly to the elevator. Women were the only thing in the world that he really liked.
As the morning progressed, the path stretched like a rubber band ahead of him and the office receded forever until suddenly, in its own mysterious time, it was simply there. It chose the moment in which it was to manifest itself, in space: another form of realization. I can see the sense in which space could be envisioned, Newton-like, as God's sensorium, the issue being that space cannot simply exist, outside anyone's consciousness (or why would there be space instead of non-space?) and yet that consciousness cannot belong to a puny human. Because space encloses us and transcends us. It transcends us but does not transcend consciousness. Ergo the consciousness belongs to one unimaginably large. And we are mere tokens on its gameboard.
So it was that when these dreams and visions invaded Giles' own space, he had no obvious way to turn them off, given that that mega-space of mutual claims that we call "reality" was by no means under his own control. God controlled it, he did not. And the dreams, those also were of God. He hoped so.
He stepped into the long foyer. Delectable slim girls -- that is, women -- were filing, almost dancing along the corridors, hidden by the svelte columns, they had a sort of private domain, and the women were running, running. Why would anyone run in an office environment? He kept trying to see their faces but couldn't. Way down at the end of the room was the emperor, no, the therapist, wearing an expression of undiluted delight, waiting for him. Giles' feet sank into the marquetry as though it were taffy, he could not get his footing. When he reached the blue rug in front of the dais, he wedged his foot down into what was no rug at all! It was sheer air, a 20 story drop and he screamed as he fell, It was a very quiet scream, more the thought of a scream. And the therapist cried out: you needed that! You needed that!
You must learn from suffering!
When he picked himself up, he found himself at the building's utter top, as though he had fallen up not down. He was shaking so much he couldn't move. The penthouse restaurant swung above the city like a kind of lighthouse beam. Businessmen in very expensive suits wee crashing the elevator. You typed the number of the floor you wanted and it told you which letter elevator to use, but the businessmen crowded in front and wouldn't let others get on. Giles shook like the last leaf of autumn and he still could not thrust himself forward.
Finally (in the late afternoon?) a lady with a kindly and familiar face put her arm around his shoulders and led him to the open door. Let this man get on, she said. Get out of our way. Perhaps she pushed him inside. So, with his back to the spectacular view he descended to the ground floor, let himself be kneaded into the lobby and somehow, through some unrepeatable maneuver that was like opening a can, got himself outside. Later he was seen walking along the atrociously crowded sidewalk, and he was going goodness knows where. Goodness knows.
Come back soon!
*
Giles would meet with his therapist in his office on the most exposed floor of a tourist hotel -- what a strange place for therapy! The location might have been chosen to facilitate the "purging through dreams" that the therapy promised. A dreamlike location seemed guaranteed to hasten the whole process. That was the theory.
The worst part -- was it the worst? -- was stepping into that elevator. The entry door closed with an indecent whoosh. Ahead not only was the whole view exposed but management had taken the glass out in order to intensify the thrill. The chute leaned inward over the fantastically high lobby, which meant that anyone careless would fall and make a permanent splash. You had just enough time to recognize the danger but not enough to ward it off. And then you were there, on a very high floor, but still 20 stories from the top, and you were hanging over all those milling people, your brothers and sisters who were like yourself looking up at you. Later how would you ever get out of here?? You were even afraid to pry your fingers loose! But when the elevator wiggled to its stop the force of attraction more or less vanished. It too was somehow mechanically generated. He tumbled to the floor and rolled out of the elevator.
Among the therapist's many sayings -- for he was a man built out of healing cliches -- was the following: I don't ask you if you wish to be cured, I only cure you. His techniques were unpleasant. Also there was no evidence that they worked. You wouldn't even find brochures with testimonials. Most who consulted him were in no shape to ask for anything like an evaluation. The patients merely came and then went. Did they ever ask themselves if they were better? If so, how did they judge? In emotional terms, Giles today was only where he'd previously been but that outcome might have been the best of all the different possibles. Without this treatment he might have been worse. In any case he came back another time. When he fell out of the elevator there was no floor beneath him. The rumor was that the very space was digitized and that management did whatever it wanted with the result.
Abruptly Giles had that sensation he hated so much, of looking out the airplane window and seeing ocean above and sky below. It was that moment when you were upside down and simply supposed to trust that the pilots knew what they were doing to get you rightside up. A panic attack had come and enclosed him so that he couldn't move. Oh don't let this happen here! when I'm not even sure what "here" amounts to: here? He wasn't going to faint or cry -- he couldn't do anything. The wings slanted and righted and now he could see the lobby underneath him. Of course what guarantee did he have that it wouldn't disappear again? And this breakdown in trust was in fact the sum total of Giles' neurosis and had the same trapdoor structure that paranoia had, namely, that its fears were largely grounded and founded -- they were true -- but had to be considered sick and demented at the same time.
The flight attendant held him by the elbow. But no she was a tourist holding a matinee ticket and only wanted to get past him into the elevator. He knew the importance of giving the impression that he wasn't suffering or sick. He stood rigid like a strong and independent man, a soldier, a guy with no problems. He moved aside for her like a gentleman from a romance. The pretence actually made him feel healthy, though it was just pretend healthy, but you get points even for pretend. And so the minutes passed. And when he walked down the corridor he was able to pretend, like everyone else, that there was a florid hotel rug under his feet. Another one of the therapist's sayings: your feet aren't crazy, only you are. So let them walk you somewhere better. Giles walked. Even though he knew. He knew it would be manipulated. But another look out the window, a whoosh of the panic returning, no. No. He walked. His ex-wife mumbled in his ear as they walked. She spoke just loudly enough that he could hear she was speaking but not loud enough for the sense to be grasped. You know how that bothers me, he said but then corrected himself, rephrased the comment, since there was a need not to antagonize her, or anyone.
Darling, my ears are buzzing, I can't hear you.
A mumble like the substructure noise on a plane.
Why are you here? he asked. I am the one who is sick.
Oh Giles, you know what the therapist always says: I divide the world not into the sick and the well but into those who know they're sick. And those who don't.
Whatever relief or knowledge you receive here, I want it too.
It is no longer safe not to "know yourself". The airplane glides, the sky turns upside down. Your children look at you strangely. The car won't stay in its lane. Strangers scream at each other in the supermarket. You get home, sit in your kitchen chair and find yourself crying, without a reason but the truth is that the reason is plain, what is missing is the realization that you should always have had: "know yourself".
As the therapist says: Queasiness is the single path to health.
Giles looked down and the plane's window was underneath his feet. He closed his eyes and took another step. The lavatory door was locked, his wife was gone. Only a tourist with a ticket in her hand, walking briskly to the elevator. Women were the only thing in the world that he really liked.
As the morning progressed, the path stretched like a rubber band ahead of him and the office receded forever until suddenly, in its own mysterious time, it was simply there. It chose the moment in which it was to manifest itself, in space: another form of realization. I can see the sense in which space could be envisioned, Newton-like, as God's sensorium, the issue being that space cannot simply exist, outside anyone's consciousness (or why would there be space instead of non-space?) and yet that consciousness cannot belong to a puny human. Because space encloses us and transcends us. It transcends us but does not transcend consciousness. Ergo the consciousness belongs to one unimaginably large. And we are mere tokens on its gameboard.
So it was that when these dreams and visions invaded Giles' own space, he had no obvious way to turn them off, given that that mega-space of mutual claims that we call "reality" was by no means under his own control. God controlled it, he did not. And the dreams, those also were of God. He hoped so.
He stepped into the long foyer. Delectable slim girls -- that is, women -- were filing, almost dancing along the corridors, hidden by the svelte columns, they had a sort of private domain, and the women were running, running. Why would anyone run in an office environment? He kept trying to see their faces but couldn't. Way down at the end of the room was the emperor, no, the therapist, wearing an expression of undiluted delight, waiting for him. Giles' feet sank into the marquetry as though it were taffy, he could not get his footing. When he reached the blue rug in front of the dais, he wedged his foot down into what was no rug at all! It was sheer air, a 20 story drop and he screamed as he fell, It was a very quiet scream, more the thought of a scream. And the therapist cried out: you needed that! You needed that!
You must learn from suffering!
When he picked himself up, he found himself at the building's utter top, as though he had fallen up not down. He was shaking so much he couldn't move. The penthouse restaurant swung above the city like a kind of lighthouse beam. Businessmen in very expensive suits wee crashing the elevator. You typed the number of the floor you wanted and it told you which letter elevator to use, but the businessmen crowded in front and wouldn't let others get on. Giles shook like the last leaf of autumn and he still could not thrust himself forward.
Finally (in the late afternoon?) a lady with a kindly and familiar face put her arm around his shoulders and led him to the open door. Let this man get on, she said. Get out of our way. Perhaps she pushed him inside. So, with his back to the spectacular view he descended to the ground floor, let himself be kneaded into the lobby and somehow, through some unrepeatable maneuver that was like opening a can, got himself outside. Later he was seen walking along the atrociously crowded sidewalk, and he was going goodness knows where. Goodness knows.
Come back soon!
*
Monday, May 11, 2009
Poem: "I looked into the icon's eyes"
*
I looked into the icon's eyes
but they looked to my right -- I could-
n't turn I couldn't take my own
eyes off those eyes but wondered did
he see his father behind me?
so could I if not face to face
still feel the presence of my own
creation in the icon's space?
The self was not the center of
this gold place -- but felt an assuage-
ment rise, a great weight taken off
these shoulders lifting like a bridge.
*
I looked into the icon's eyes
but they looked to my right -- I could-
n't turn I couldn't take my own
eyes off those eyes but wondered did
he see his father behind me?
so could I if not face to face
still feel the presence of my own
creation in the icon's space?
The self was not the center of
this gold place -- but felt an assuage-
ment rise, a great weight taken off
these shoulders lifting like a bridge.
*
Friday, April 24, 2009
Story: We get healthy
*
I don't know what it is about heights. Perhaps that they aren't there. You are high, you look down and see the ground and recognize that there is nothing between. Nothing really. It's space, yes, but you see through it. It might as well be nothing. You are virtually touching the ground so why not just go there or be there or admit that you already are? Oh no no no, I say. I'm not doing that. I have an enormous will for negativity. I can't do anything but I am very powerful at resisting something happening that I don't want. Change, for instance.
So I hovered up there with the other students who were so much more graceful than I was. Always. It goes without saying. But they weren't perhaps animated by the same sort of fossilizing fear that held me as if protected in its grip, not grip, but something in its own way ethereal, otherworldly. Embedded in me, in any case. The visuals shifted in front of us, square panels with humans in the air, actually us. I don't know quite what, there were skyscrapers or cornfields in the background. A grid anyway. That was comforting. My foot touched the bleachers behind me, or above me, or back there somewhere. I hooked my foot and hung swinging. Get your shoulders down, away from your ears, the teacher said. Engage your core. Focus. Whatever you do, don't look at your feet.
As I looked at my feet or through them, I saw her gliding, Andrea, so beautiful and in control -- she was so poised she could also do the arm movements, as synchronized, so antiquarian. Whereas I huddled freezing on the side, my foot snagged, my eye all over the room. What would it be like to be nothing but an eye? To wander everywhere, to be virtual and free of risk? "Pleasures of reason are subject to a natural growth or development, reflective of the development of the understanding" (Donald Rutherford). My own reason hung deliciously suspended, it swayed and waited. Did that mean I was secretly happy to be so afraid?
The bleachers went down in reverse. That is: instead of each row extending further than the row above, they went the other way. Or I was looking at them upside down, that had to be the reason. So if I just turned my own self upside down.... And then the hunger to fall, to jump, to break through the non-substance separating me from the ground, that hunger would rest from its constant hunting for me and I could finally relax. I rescued my foot and stood motionless on the bleachers below me. . Then the bell rang and the strangers came plunging into the room. Immersed. And the clock moved forward.
I moved through the dungeons that were segregated by sweat, no, by sex. The grim statues of the warriors were staggered everywhere, too crude to go on display "upstairs". One was stuck with one sock on and one sock off, sock on sock off, another combing his hair like a hideous Spartan, another on the scale, frowning forever at the number he saw. Their balls clattered as their phantoms walked into the showers and washed themselves away. Now I climbed the old stairs and yet I found myself another floor down. How could that be? I felt the muscles in my legs. They were tired but it might have been the fatigue of going down instead of up. There didn't seem to be up just down. The room seemed to lie in the bowels of the world but there was a giant window, which seemed to have a ship embossed on it, no it was moving toward us at an angle. Then the building prudently turned and avoided the crash. All the weights clanked down. The Punishment Room turned on its pivot. Ahead of me but inaccessibly aloft, Andrea was practicing her flying. Her arms moved in perfect arcs.
Think of pain as a massage. That was what my trainer had told me. There was said to be a point in the center of a lift where everything, even the lifter, lay perfectly poised. It was a sweet spot and a still place, full of meditation and the fruits of meditation, but it eluded me. All activity in the Room was sealed both ahead and behind (did I mean up and down?) by rows of hermetic screens, behind which the "scenes of torture and violence" ever played themselves into exhaustion, a form of entertainment for some -- or perhaps a lesson. A screenful of bleeding peasant farmers from a faraway land. A turgid remake of Psycho filmed in 3D and BloodVision. The deoculation scene from Let's Go Swimming. If you tried to look away you couldn't because where you looked away to had another screen. Indeed one felt sealed inside them, both in and out of the Klein bottle, oneself a Klein bottle. One sock on, one sock off. Oh how the enormous Punishment Room weight the spirit down and so like the Psalmist I lifted my eyes, trying to find at least the floating woman who could soar outside the pain. But lifting my eyes was now like lifting steel. Were the eyes then part of the physical body? Was there no escape?
But even mouthing the word "escape" assured me that there was one.
As in a dream I floated backward letting the images grow smaller -- but this was no dream because the space had its own technical specs, which no dream of mine could ever have. That is, I was in a place, with an integrity and intensity of its own. It existed outside me. I was merely here. If I wanted so very badly to renew my relationship with Heaven, I couldn't do it in this palce. It had to be broken down so it would stop blocking our sight of God.
I looked up but the rafters were completely dark. Horrible spotlights beamed down to hurt us.
The Nazi Kommandant's wife was in her customary place, near the door to the washroom and exit. She never left the place, she was always here. Some witch stood over her in trainer's costume of saturated black. She lay on her back holding the weight, the excessive impossible weight halfway aloft. She was too weak to bob it back into its rack. It was too much of a thing to rest on her emaciated chest. So it just hovered. And the trainer did nothing to help. I stepped forward to lend assistance and I bumped into glass. We rested on the curves of the bottle. The woman was real but she was also an exhibit. What then to say about oneself? A weakness and depression began trying to enclose me or seal me off really, like a giant piece of cellophane, which I knew I'd never escape if I once let it get onto me and attached. But no. What this place lacked but what I surely had were alternatives.
I needed to pee so badly and the door to the washroom had as it were climbed to the other side of the gym. That old familiar slog to something that receded from you, a losing game. It was a pinprick in the distance, a painful rhythmic throbbing. This was the pain that wished to be subject not object -- wished not just to be felt but to be the one feeling you and then simply take over. I willed myself to ignore it because there was something else that needed to be done first.
Squeezing around the staticky flickering glass of the TV screens I stepped forward to where someone very special lay. He was so delicate that I wasn't even able to see him except when I had fasted, meditated and slowed my own seeking down. To see him you had to be in almost a hallucinatory state, one that left you unprotected from the world. I cannot explain it more coherently than that.
The ship lurched as I moved forward. He too lay on a bench, he too was oppressed by some weight. It didn't matter how much, any amount was too much. He was structurally nothing, a blob, a white larval shape. There was nothing to be called a carapace, a shell, a skeleton, not even bones. You might say I'd not known the meaning of the word naked before. He was so frail that the slightest touch, I suppose, would break him and kill him. He was like a man of soft foam. And with weights hovering above him!
The gassy liquid in my stomach began to knead itself and leap in its hissing swamp. As so often, my heart seemed to be in my penis and my bowels. And the lights on the ceiling were sputtering. Disastrous music played.
I myself was mostly foam.
I reached down or tried to, I tried to pick up that anomalous weight hovering above him. Dear one, let me take that thing away from you. But my fingers were just froth, they could not establish a grip on the bar nor could the bar hold still. Like a vision the things melted in front of me. And at that point the vision came to an end.
12/24-12/30/08
I don't know what it is about heights. Perhaps that they aren't there. You are high, you look down and see the ground and recognize that there is nothing between. Nothing really. It's space, yes, but you see through it. It might as well be nothing. You are virtually touching the ground so why not just go there or be there or admit that you already are? Oh no no no, I say. I'm not doing that. I have an enormous will for negativity. I can't do anything but I am very powerful at resisting something happening that I don't want. Change, for instance.
So I hovered up there with the other students who were so much more graceful than I was. Always. It goes without saying. But they weren't perhaps animated by the same sort of fossilizing fear that held me as if protected in its grip, not grip, but something in its own way ethereal, otherworldly. Embedded in me, in any case. The visuals shifted in front of us, square panels with humans in the air, actually us. I don't know quite what, there were skyscrapers or cornfields in the background. A grid anyway. That was comforting. My foot touched the bleachers behind me, or above me, or back there somewhere. I hooked my foot and hung swinging. Get your shoulders down, away from your ears, the teacher said. Engage your core. Focus. Whatever you do, don't look at your feet.
As I looked at my feet or through them, I saw her gliding, Andrea, so beautiful and in control -- she was so poised she could also do the arm movements, as synchronized, so antiquarian. Whereas I huddled freezing on the side, my foot snagged, my eye all over the room. What would it be like to be nothing but an eye? To wander everywhere, to be virtual and free of risk? "Pleasures of reason are subject to a natural growth or development, reflective of the development of the understanding" (Donald Rutherford). My own reason hung deliciously suspended, it swayed and waited. Did that mean I was secretly happy to be so afraid?
The bleachers went down in reverse. That is: instead of each row extending further than the row above, they went the other way. Or I was looking at them upside down, that had to be the reason. So if I just turned my own self upside down.... And then the hunger to fall, to jump, to break through the non-substance separating me from the ground, that hunger would rest from its constant hunting for me and I could finally relax. I rescued my foot and stood motionless on the bleachers below me. . Then the bell rang and the strangers came plunging into the room. Immersed. And the clock moved forward.
I moved through the dungeons that were segregated by sweat, no, by sex. The grim statues of the warriors were staggered everywhere, too crude to go on display "upstairs". One was stuck with one sock on and one sock off, sock on sock off, another combing his hair like a hideous Spartan, another on the scale, frowning forever at the number he saw. Their balls clattered as their phantoms walked into the showers and washed themselves away. Now I climbed the old stairs and yet I found myself another floor down. How could that be? I felt the muscles in my legs. They were tired but it might have been the fatigue of going down instead of up. There didn't seem to be up just down. The room seemed to lie in the bowels of the world but there was a giant window, which seemed to have a ship embossed on it, no it was moving toward us at an angle. Then the building prudently turned and avoided the crash. All the weights clanked down. The Punishment Room turned on its pivot. Ahead of me but inaccessibly aloft, Andrea was practicing her flying. Her arms moved in perfect arcs.
Think of pain as a massage. That was what my trainer had told me. There was said to be a point in the center of a lift where everything, even the lifter, lay perfectly poised. It was a sweet spot and a still place, full of meditation and the fruits of meditation, but it eluded me. All activity in the Room was sealed both ahead and behind (did I mean up and down?) by rows of hermetic screens, behind which the "scenes of torture and violence" ever played themselves into exhaustion, a form of entertainment for some -- or perhaps a lesson. A screenful of bleeding peasant farmers from a faraway land. A turgid remake of Psycho filmed in 3D and BloodVision. The deoculation scene from Let's Go Swimming. If you tried to look away you couldn't because where you looked away to had another screen. Indeed one felt sealed inside them, both in and out of the Klein bottle, oneself a Klein bottle. One sock on, one sock off. Oh how the enormous Punishment Room weight the spirit down and so like the Psalmist I lifted my eyes, trying to find at least the floating woman who could soar outside the pain. But lifting my eyes was now like lifting steel. Were the eyes then part of the physical body? Was there no escape?
But even mouthing the word "escape" assured me that there was one.
As in a dream I floated backward letting the images grow smaller -- but this was no dream because the space had its own technical specs, which no dream of mine could ever have. That is, I was in a place, with an integrity and intensity of its own. It existed outside me. I was merely here. If I wanted so very badly to renew my relationship with Heaven, I couldn't do it in this palce. It had to be broken down so it would stop blocking our sight of God.
I looked up but the rafters were completely dark. Horrible spotlights beamed down to hurt us.
The Nazi Kommandant's wife was in her customary place, near the door to the washroom and exit. She never left the place, she was always here. Some witch stood over her in trainer's costume of saturated black. She lay on her back holding the weight, the excessive impossible weight halfway aloft. She was too weak to bob it back into its rack. It was too much of a thing to rest on her emaciated chest. So it just hovered. And the trainer did nothing to help. I stepped forward to lend assistance and I bumped into glass. We rested on the curves of the bottle. The woman was real but she was also an exhibit. What then to say about oneself? A weakness and depression began trying to enclose me or seal me off really, like a giant piece of cellophane, which I knew I'd never escape if I once let it get onto me and attached. But no. What this place lacked but what I surely had were alternatives.
I needed to pee so badly and the door to the washroom had as it were climbed to the other side of the gym. That old familiar slog to something that receded from you, a losing game. It was a pinprick in the distance, a painful rhythmic throbbing. This was the pain that wished to be subject not object -- wished not just to be felt but to be the one feeling you and then simply take over. I willed myself to ignore it because there was something else that needed to be done first.
Squeezing around the staticky flickering glass of the TV screens I stepped forward to where someone very special lay. He was so delicate that I wasn't even able to see him except when I had fasted, meditated and slowed my own seeking down. To see him you had to be in almost a hallucinatory state, one that left you unprotected from the world. I cannot explain it more coherently than that.
The ship lurched as I moved forward. He too lay on a bench, he too was oppressed by some weight. It didn't matter how much, any amount was too much. He was structurally nothing, a blob, a white larval shape. There was nothing to be called a carapace, a shell, a skeleton, not even bones. You might say I'd not known the meaning of the word naked before. He was so frail that the slightest touch, I suppose, would break him and kill him. He was like a man of soft foam. And with weights hovering above him!
The gassy liquid in my stomach began to knead itself and leap in its hissing swamp. As so often, my heart seemed to be in my penis and my bowels. And the lights on the ceiling were sputtering. Disastrous music played.
I myself was mostly foam.
I reached down or tried to, I tried to pick up that anomalous weight hovering above him. Dear one, let me take that thing away from you. But my fingers were just froth, they could not establish a grip on the bar nor could the bar hold still. Like a vision the things melted in front of me. And at that point the vision came to an end.
12/24-12/30/08
Thursday, April 09, 2009
Good Friday reflection
*
As Jesus walks or stumbles toward his death, he encounters the women. In Luke they are called "daughters of Jerusalem", nothing more. They lament the crime that is coming to pass and that they cannot stop. They are powerless. In the way the world measures power they have none at all. And Luke doesn't even tell us their names. It is amazing how many women in the Bible don't even have names. The Syro-Phoenician woman. The widow with the mite. The widow with the judge. They have no names yet we know intensely who they are.
Here at this moment in time you almost feel the Gospel writers are saying: Look how low Jesus has now fallen. All the men have fled. There are only women.
Only?
Only women? If the women in the Bible are only women, if they have no worldly power, why do they strike us, strike me, as of an awesome power? What is power anyway?
On Good Friday all power seems to be veiled and put away. It's true that some toy soldiers are moving forward to inflict terrible pain, a murder, but the soldiers and officials don't feel powerful. They are mechanical, as empty as machines. Evil has no freedom of movement, it is just a stereotype.
For us the power of Friday is in the figure moving to his cross. And it is surely in those women. Because they are there. They have shown up, they are present, they witness. They are with Jesus. They don't need titles and sometimes not even names to be fairly the most powerful people on the planet. How could that be? What is the power? It is not a power that can be cashed in or used. If you are Jesus's closest, witness, that's something you can't trade in for something more valuable. Nothing is more valuable than that.
These women are at the center. I want to stand next to them. At least I say that now but had I lived in their time there's a good chance that I would have scorned them as the other men were doing. Let's face it. there's a good chance I would have scorned Jesus too. Within my historical moment I am a coward and a conformist too. Anyway you have to take a contemplative distance to understand the deep worth of something that you take for granted when you just live with it day by day.
Gazing at these amazing women I can't help thinking of my mother. She was like your mother: a totally unique and powerful being who hid like so many women of the 50s and 60s inside a cloak of anonymity. In a way she didn't expect people to notice her. When she did something she certainly didn't expect it to be acknowledged or rewarded. When I was a suicidal teenager she saved my life, I think more than once. Well, isn't that what women just did? She was a life-giver and a life-saver. Hey, no awards were going to be passed out for that. Aren't life-givers pretty common?
But now she's dead and very few people on earth even know her name. And I would give just about anything to be able to stand next to her now.
*
As Jesus walks or stumbles toward his death, he encounters the women. In Luke they are called "daughters of Jerusalem", nothing more. They lament the crime that is coming to pass and that they cannot stop. They are powerless. In the way the world measures power they have none at all. And Luke doesn't even tell us their names. It is amazing how many women in the Bible don't even have names. The Syro-Phoenician woman. The widow with the mite. The widow with the judge. They have no names yet we know intensely who they are.
Here at this moment in time you almost feel the Gospel writers are saying: Look how low Jesus has now fallen. All the men have fled. There are only women.
Only?
Only women? If the women in the Bible are only women, if they have no worldly power, why do they strike us, strike me, as of an awesome power? What is power anyway?
On Good Friday all power seems to be veiled and put away. It's true that some toy soldiers are moving forward to inflict terrible pain, a murder, but the soldiers and officials don't feel powerful. They are mechanical, as empty as machines. Evil has no freedom of movement, it is just a stereotype.
For us the power of Friday is in the figure moving to his cross. And it is surely in those women. Because they are there. They have shown up, they are present, they witness. They are with Jesus. They don't need titles and sometimes not even names to be fairly the most powerful people on the planet. How could that be? What is the power? It is not a power that can be cashed in or used. If you are Jesus's closest, witness, that's something you can't trade in for something more valuable. Nothing is more valuable than that.
These women are at the center. I want to stand next to them. At least I say that now but had I lived in their time there's a good chance that I would have scorned them as the other men were doing. Let's face it. there's a good chance I would have scorned Jesus too. Within my historical moment I am a coward and a conformist too. Anyway you have to take a contemplative distance to understand the deep worth of something that you take for granted when you just live with it day by day.
Gazing at these amazing women I can't help thinking of my mother. She was like your mother: a totally unique and powerful being who hid like so many women of the 50s and 60s inside a cloak of anonymity. In a way she didn't expect people to notice her. When she did something she certainly didn't expect it to be acknowledged or rewarded. When I was a suicidal teenager she saved my life, I think more than once. Well, isn't that what women just did? She was a life-giver and a life-saver. Hey, no awards were going to be passed out for that. Aren't life-givers pretty common?
But now she's dead and very few people on earth even know her name. And I would give just about anything to be able to stand next to her now.
*
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Story: Sam and me
*
I was so young. I dreamed of falling into the arms of a man. Then what? Feeling safe? There was nothing about a man or his arms that guaranteed safety. I knew what a man was. I even knew from the inside. They were all as dumb and as blind as I was. It made no sense to love them so much. But sense was something on the sidelines. I dreamed of his arms.
Sam was my confessor, spiritual guide. He was somewhat fat -- I loved fat men. He had arms that looked just right to me. I confessed many sorts of things to him but one thing I was careful not to confess to him, the love itself, my love for him, that remained unspoken and even undemonstrated. So the confessions were incomplete from the very start and oddly, paradoxically, became even more so as my love for him grew. That is, the larger it became, the more there was to hide from him. More and more as the time went by. Finally, the thing that filled my life was the one thing I couldn't say.
And, you know, as I loved him more and more, in a way I respected him less and less. Because he had no idea at all about the terrible thing playing me. He was wiser than most people I knew and at the same time very blind. Insofar as it could, my love expanded within his blindness. A piece of art for art's sake, a thing with no application at all.
He took me to his gym. Bad idea! I tried to turn away as he unwrapped the cloth and linen from his toasty body. He was indifferent to his own physical presence, the way straight men used to be, in the early eighties, say, before they came to recognize that they were pretty too, like the women that they long for. We ran along the trail, hearing highway noise that couldn't touch us. The knees sang. I was so happy in that temporary way. He was very fit for his size. Some sort of tank. Sam.
The horrible part of my divorce, he said, is that I not only miss the kids but I still love her, as much as the day we married.
I could not control my drinking and I still can't. I spend all my time running away from it. I can't actually achieve anything because I'm still running.
Kid, you are so lucky not to have an obsession like that. I do have obsessions and they're huge, I said. I was sliding open the door to my own revelation and definitely keeping it closed at the same time. Unfortunately I am great at keeping closed.
Sam, like most of the other clergy that I'd met, and all of the best of them, "supported gay rights", even fervently but he didn't have a clue what it might mean to be gay, how deep it went. He thought it was a "way of life". Without wanting to, straight people really did think it might be something superficial like a "choice". They of course didn't feel the power, the trembling. I mean, they didn't feel where it was centered.
We walked through the leafy labyrinth. He kept touching my shoulder, hugging me. Each time it felt as though my skin would simply slither off and I would just become a pool of liquid. The sheer unplaceable feeling of it. Oh you poor paralyzed penis, you don't fit anywhere! It was a gun that pointed more at me than at him. Back in the locker room I didn't know what to do. I went to the john and tried the squeeze the feeling out.. Toothpaste from a tube. In soreness longing only grew. He was so beautiful, so warm, he was more than a man to me. How could that be? What could it mean?
I was in love with his goodness -- his goodness heated me up. I didn't want to soil him, i just wanted him.
An icon with God flashing through? More likely utter idolatry? As I stepped into the shower with him I became Russia, as in a game we used to play in college. Russia? Big sad place. People on their own offering sweet kindness, giving rubles to strangers. But unable to take charge. Unable to organize. Soaked in booze. Riddled with corruption but not really corrupt, just unable to cough it up and spit it out. So decay stayed put like an absolute given. Oh, they were so resigned and their resignation was like steps that criminals climbed -- the steps basically the backs of humans who couldn't remember how to stand up again. Really we longed for a strong man to pick us up. We craved a strong man, a man without doubts. That was Russia, frozen in fear. Not healthy at all. Not likely to get better. And yet there midst all the ball-clashing warriors, the naked strangers, there was Sam, not exactly America but a little bit like America. Warm, brown and completely oblivious of me. It almost seemed that if I touched him he wouldn't make the effort to feel the touch. Oh, this dissolution of my soul, it couldn't be good.
Sam, nights dreaming of you. Mornings recovering from what didn't even happen. Sam.
So. Established distance. Went weeks without seeing you. Sam. Wandered the street at night instead of sleeping. Scrutinized every man I passed. Ah, Sam, scrutinized was the wrong word, an unhappy word. What they were was to me completely veiled. It was the veil I studied and got lost in. The shape of the groin, that I memorized. Idolatry? But none of the words applied correctly.
When I saw someone who looked like you, I would be pretty much devastated, Sam. And many did look like you. Like but not really like enough, not the same, so nothing like.
Grace fell on me even in my bad dreams. I felt affection -- well, ignorance but also affection -- for every man on earth. Any color. Any class. The unbeautiful in fact were what they were claimed not to be. Ravishing. Important. And the women I loved even because they couldn't hurt me.
Trashy roads, dangerous, with these guys like angels walking along. Sam, there was a grace. Not to mention searing pain. A spear from my throat to my butt.
In the bars, Sam. Places you would never go. Hot ones leaning back, peeling the label off their beerbottles. Feeling mentation drain. Too much noise to think through. People liked that. Music like hot syrup from the speakers. Agitation. Vital energies leaking into the darkness. So much motion would have to land somewhere. I had had to fast for a blood test, so why not? just continued the fast. So I was light headed and next to hallucination. The guy that looked most like you was at the top of the stairs, theatrical. In a single beat he just fell forward like a panel of flesh, down the stairs, joints like water. It would be some drug the rest of us never heard of. Solemn Samoan bouncers carried him out of the house, forever. Miguel stood next to me. Never ever do that, he said.
I dreamed that night of a larva, soft and white, a creature so soft that the smallest touch would crumple it and pulp it into juice. Sadness, so vulnerable -- why would anything let itself be so easily attacked? Then the morning tried to pull itself together. Was that dream creature me? Or was that a form of God, daring to enter the world without armor?
I needed my guide to help me ponder things. But it wasn't even safe to go near him, that is, near you. You you. I was left exposed to Jesus without mediation. Sitting on the edge of my bed I shook softly and silently four times but no. It wasn't that I shook but that I was shaken. Not alone, I wasn't at all.
Miguel Miguel. I found him at the coffee house and tugged him by his sleeve, for all the world like a spoiled child, right, not far from the truth, both spoiled and child. Take me home with you Miguel. Please. Let's not wait.
I need to f*******ck you instantly.
What's got into you, crazy boy? he asked. Is it that you've lost access to your clay angel?
To fat old Sam, that pious fake of yours. Then I kissed him to shut him up and he finally got up from his couch. It was low low low. Somehow we got to his apartment and climbed the stairs.
Miguel was someone that to my shame (but sort of a numb shame because, in fact, I barely thought about it) I had ignored and possibly in some strange way even scorned -- because he had always seemed to me a bit sluglike in his effeminacy and we straightish looking guys were always afraid of getting near and suffering contagion -- this is a disgusting thing for me to say much less admit and I wouldn't say it except that if I don't tell the whole truth, why even bother? But now the cards had all restacked in a different order because 1) he'd gone to church with me and knew Father Sam too; 2) being feminine is not such a bad thing, is it?; and 3) well, Miguel had this odd Miguel quality that could not be scorned. Not in my condition for sure.
He opened the door, I jumped onto the bed like a beached fish and then the wonderful part began. Ignoring my infused genitals as though they weren't even there, he slipped off my bloody shoes and solemnly caressed my feet and that was it. When I squirmed on the bed he grabbed them from a different angle that was all.
These have been stepped on and despised too long, he said.
Little wallflowers always sitting in their cardtable chairs, at the rim of the dance floor, my poor little feet, always having to dance but never being asked to dance. They melted under the unexpected attention as the rest of the body drifted into and out of sleep. Could feet be awake by themselves?
I left him at 5 am. We had been intimate but hadn't had sex, which a lot of people considered to be impossible, not to mention a loss of time. The expression "like a virgin", what it really signified was a time when knowing a person had multiple tracks, deepening intimacy that didn't go only one direction. Maybe Freud was upside down and sex was not the substructure of everything else but itself only a superstructure of something richer and leafily truer, whose existence we had stopped noticing or suspecting. You know, Miguel said, you are really a bottom at heart. You are not afraid of black men, you're comfortable with women even when they lead, you treated with respect, at least once you let yourself do it. You're a bottom pretending to be a top. That's part of being a Christian anyway. The bottom. The shame.
You know, he said, it used to hurt me so much to see you walking through that bar, twisted tighter than a pretzel. Trying to be so tough.
In the morning I had to rush away from my chaste friend. In the courtyard beautiful Lili and the others were rushing to their yoga. We kissed like apples bobbing. I had to rush home to get ready for work.
In the shower I thought about Sam. I still loved him but didn't crave him like a bad food anymore. Let that person be. I could feel him in the water but didn't try. Let it go. I will set you free of me and me free of you. My little cross bounced on my clavicle. Sam Sam Sam.
I dressed and went in to work, sort of a long ten hour sleep. Then I climbed out and scrambled home, stopping at Sam's apartment on the way -- thinking I could risk at least that. I assumed we could interact like 2 normal humans, whatever shape that interaction might take. I found him packing boxes in a half-empty echoey room. Man, I'm so glad to see you and get a chance to say goodbye.
I started helping him fill a box, moron that I am. I had to move slowly because the foundation of the floor was not quite steady. The world rocked and changed its angle like a heavy boat or rather a light boat with something very heavy in it. Looking out the window you might see west, you might see south. I had to hold my body still.
I wanted to be free of him but I didn't want him to leave. I was still lost in something like idolatry. What was so damaged in me that this could happen?
I have to go try to patch things up a little bit and at least see the children, take care of them or try, he said. It's been like living with half my organs removed. You're so stable you maybe won't understand -- how unstable and incomplete I feel. There are aspects to marriage that maybe you'll never know, in your situation. And I wonder if you're the lucky one. We all know it's better not to be so bound to the world.
As he talked I managed to look at him and saw -- something unexpected -- the image of someone I would soon not be seeing, I mean, I already saw him a thousand miles away, and me right here, trying not to stagger as the room moved like that idiotic boat. A big chunk of something was missing right next to my heart, on top of my heart. How did it feel? Was the best thing to have it just forcibly pulled out like this?
I was like a dog who'd just been given an exotic worrisome treat -- maybe it was toxic, maybe not -- and who urgently needed to take it into solitude, to taste it and break it down and see what it really was.
*
I was so young. I dreamed of falling into the arms of a man. Then what? Feeling safe? There was nothing about a man or his arms that guaranteed safety. I knew what a man was. I even knew from the inside. They were all as dumb and as blind as I was. It made no sense to love them so much. But sense was something on the sidelines. I dreamed of his arms.
Sam was my confessor, spiritual guide. He was somewhat fat -- I loved fat men. He had arms that looked just right to me. I confessed many sorts of things to him but one thing I was careful not to confess to him, the love itself, my love for him, that remained unspoken and even undemonstrated. So the confessions were incomplete from the very start and oddly, paradoxically, became even more so as my love for him grew. That is, the larger it became, the more there was to hide from him. More and more as the time went by. Finally, the thing that filled my life was the one thing I couldn't say.
And, you know, as I loved him more and more, in a way I respected him less and less. Because he had no idea at all about the terrible thing playing me. He was wiser than most people I knew and at the same time very blind. Insofar as it could, my love expanded within his blindness. A piece of art for art's sake, a thing with no application at all.
He took me to his gym. Bad idea! I tried to turn away as he unwrapped the cloth and linen from his toasty body. He was indifferent to his own physical presence, the way straight men used to be, in the early eighties, say, before they came to recognize that they were pretty too, like the women that they long for. We ran along the trail, hearing highway noise that couldn't touch us. The knees sang. I was so happy in that temporary way. He was very fit for his size. Some sort of tank. Sam.
The horrible part of my divorce, he said, is that I not only miss the kids but I still love her, as much as the day we married.
I could not control my drinking and I still can't. I spend all my time running away from it. I can't actually achieve anything because I'm still running.
Kid, you are so lucky not to have an obsession like that. I do have obsessions and they're huge, I said. I was sliding open the door to my own revelation and definitely keeping it closed at the same time. Unfortunately I am great at keeping closed.
Sam, like most of the other clergy that I'd met, and all of the best of them, "supported gay rights", even fervently but he didn't have a clue what it might mean to be gay, how deep it went. He thought it was a "way of life". Without wanting to, straight people really did think it might be something superficial like a "choice". They of course didn't feel the power, the trembling. I mean, they didn't feel where it was centered.
We walked through the leafy labyrinth. He kept touching my shoulder, hugging me. Each time it felt as though my skin would simply slither off and I would just become a pool of liquid. The sheer unplaceable feeling of it. Oh you poor paralyzed penis, you don't fit anywhere! It was a gun that pointed more at me than at him. Back in the locker room I didn't know what to do. I went to the john and tried the squeeze the feeling out.. Toothpaste from a tube. In soreness longing only grew. He was so beautiful, so warm, he was more than a man to me. How could that be? What could it mean?
I was in love with his goodness -- his goodness heated me up. I didn't want to soil him, i just wanted him.
An icon with God flashing through? More likely utter idolatry? As I stepped into the shower with him I became Russia, as in a game we used to play in college. Russia? Big sad place. People on their own offering sweet kindness, giving rubles to strangers. But unable to take charge. Unable to organize. Soaked in booze. Riddled with corruption but not really corrupt, just unable to cough it up and spit it out. So decay stayed put like an absolute given. Oh, they were so resigned and their resignation was like steps that criminals climbed -- the steps basically the backs of humans who couldn't remember how to stand up again. Really we longed for a strong man to pick us up. We craved a strong man, a man without doubts. That was Russia, frozen in fear. Not healthy at all. Not likely to get better. And yet there midst all the ball-clashing warriors, the naked strangers, there was Sam, not exactly America but a little bit like America. Warm, brown and completely oblivious of me. It almost seemed that if I touched him he wouldn't make the effort to feel the touch. Oh, this dissolution of my soul, it couldn't be good.
Sam, nights dreaming of you. Mornings recovering from what didn't even happen. Sam.
So. Established distance. Went weeks without seeing you. Sam. Wandered the street at night instead of sleeping. Scrutinized every man I passed. Ah, Sam, scrutinized was the wrong word, an unhappy word. What they were was to me completely veiled. It was the veil I studied and got lost in. The shape of the groin, that I memorized. Idolatry? But none of the words applied correctly.
When I saw someone who looked like you, I would be pretty much devastated, Sam. And many did look like you. Like but not really like enough, not the same, so nothing like.
Grace fell on me even in my bad dreams. I felt affection -- well, ignorance but also affection -- for every man on earth. Any color. Any class. The unbeautiful in fact were what they were claimed not to be. Ravishing. Important. And the women I loved even because they couldn't hurt me.
Trashy roads, dangerous, with these guys like angels walking along. Sam, there was a grace. Not to mention searing pain. A spear from my throat to my butt.
In the bars, Sam. Places you would never go. Hot ones leaning back, peeling the label off their beerbottles. Feeling mentation drain. Too much noise to think through. People liked that. Music like hot syrup from the speakers. Agitation. Vital energies leaking into the darkness. So much motion would have to land somewhere. I had had to fast for a blood test, so why not? just continued the fast. So I was light headed and next to hallucination. The guy that looked most like you was at the top of the stairs, theatrical. In a single beat he just fell forward like a panel of flesh, down the stairs, joints like water. It would be some drug the rest of us never heard of. Solemn Samoan bouncers carried him out of the house, forever. Miguel stood next to me. Never ever do that, he said.
I dreamed that night of a larva, soft and white, a creature so soft that the smallest touch would crumple it and pulp it into juice. Sadness, so vulnerable -- why would anything let itself be so easily attacked? Then the morning tried to pull itself together. Was that dream creature me? Or was that a form of God, daring to enter the world without armor?
I needed my guide to help me ponder things. But it wasn't even safe to go near him, that is, near you. You you. I was left exposed to Jesus without mediation. Sitting on the edge of my bed I shook softly and silently four times but no. It wasn't that I shook but that I was shaken. Not alone, I wasn't at all.
Miguel Miguel. I found him at the coffee house and tugged him by his sleeve, for all the world like a spoiled child, right, not far from the truth, both spoiled and child. Take me home with you Miguel. Please. Let's not wait.
I need to f*******ck you instantly.
What's got into you, crazy boy? he asked. Is it that you've lost access to your clay angel?
To fat old Sam, that pious fake of yours. Then I kissed him to shut him up and he finally got up from his couch. It was low low low. Somehow we got to his apartment and climbed the stairs.
Miguel was someone that to my shame (but sort of a numb shame because, in fact, I barely thought about it) I had ignored and possibly in some strange way even scorned -- because he had always seemed to me a bit sluglike in his effeminacy and we straightish looking guys were always afraid of getting near and suffering contagion -- this is a disgusting thing for me to say much less admit and I wouldn't say it except that if I don't tell the whole truth, why even bother? But now the cards had all restacked in a different order because 1) he'd gone to church with me and knew Father Sam too; 2) being feminine is not such a bad thing, is it?; and 3) well, Miguel had this odd Miguel quality that could not be scorned. Not in my condition for sure.
He opened the door, I jumped onto the bed like a beached fish and then the wonderful part began. Ignoring my infused genitals as though they weren't even there, he slipped off my bloody shoes and solemnly caressed my feet and that was it. When I squirmed on the bed he grabbed them from a different angle that was all.
These have been stepped on and despised too long, he said.
Little wallflowers always sitting in their cardtable chairs, at the rim of the dance floor, my poor little feet, always having to dance but never being asked to dance. They melted under the unexpected attention as the rest of the body drifted into and out of sleep. Could feet be awake by themselves?
I left him at 5 am. We had been intimate but hadn't had sex, which a lot of people considered to be impossible, not to mention a loss of time. The expression "like a virgin", what it really signified was a time when knowing a person had multiple tracks, deepening intimacy that didn't go only one direction. Maybe Freud was upside down and sex was not the substructure of everything else but itself only a superstructure of something richer and leafily truer, whose existence we had stopped noticing or suspecting. You know, Miguel said, you are really a bottom at heart. You are not afraid of black men, you're comfortable with women even when they lead, you treated with respect, at least once you let yourself do it. You're a bottom pretending to be a top. That's part of being a Christian anyway. The bottom. The shame.
You know, he said, it used to hurt me so much to see you walking through that bar, twisted tighter than a pretzel. Trying to be so tough.
In the morning I had to rush away from my chaste friend. In the courtyard beautiful Lili and the others were rushing to their yoga. We kissed like apples bobbing. I had to rush home to get ready for work.
In the shower I thought about Sam. I still loved him but didn't crave him like a bad food anymore. Let that person be. I could feel him in the water but didn't try. Let it go. I will set you free of me and me free of you. My little cross bounced on my clavicle. Sam Sam Sam.
I dressed and went in to work, sort of a long ten hour sleep. Then I climbed out and scrambled home, stopping at Sam's apartment on the way -- thinking I could risk at least that. I assumed we could interact like 2 normal humans, whatever shape that interaction might take. I found him packing boxes in a half-empty echoey room. Man, I'm so glad to see you and get a chance to say goodbye.
I started helping him fill a box, moron that I am. I had to move slowly because the foundation of the floor was not quite steady. The world rocked and changed its angle like a heavy boat or rather a light boat with something very heavy in it. Looking out the window you might see west, you might see south. I had to hold my body still.
I wanted to be free of him but I didn't want him to leave. I was still lost in something like idolatry. What was so damaged in me that this could happen?
I have to go try to patch things up a little bit and at least see the children, take care of them or try, he said. It's been like living with half my organs removed. You're so stable you maybe won't understand -- how unstable and incomplete I feel. There are aspects to marriage that maybe you'll never know, in your situation. And I wonder if you're the lucky one. We all know it's better not to be so bound to the world.
As he talked I managed to look at him and saw -- something unexpected -- the image of someone I would soon not be seeing, I mean, I already saw him a thousand miles away, and me right here, trying not to stagger as the room moved like that idiotic boat. A big chunk of something was missing right next to my heart, on top of my heart. How did it feel? Was the best thing to have it just forcibly pulled out like this?
I was like a dog who'd just been given an exotic worrisome treat -- maybe it was toxic, maybe not -- and who urgently needed to take it into solitude, to taste it and break it down and see what it really was.
*
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