Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
August 18th, 2010
So there is the experience of telling someone one of your deepest darkest secrets and having them say “Oh! It’s not just me?” Not once, but twice this has happened to me this week, and it shouldn’t have surprised me. But I am beginning to think that every thinking person I know walks around at least some of the time thinking that there is something secretly deep down unfixably wrong with them. And all the recollection of suffering I can summon and stay sane seems to have this kernel of “something is unfixably wrong with me” and that all of the desolation and ache is an inevitable result of that wrongness.
There have been several moments this week when I have had to summon all of the listening and compassion skills I have to just be present with someone I love who is suffering, and I have had to confront my own failure to find the consoling right thing to say. The willingness to be there unable to find the right thing to say, to shut up and be there anyway may be worth something in and of itself, or it may be a day late and a dollar short. On the other hand, what choice does one have?
I know that I do think better in writing than in conversation and especially with time to revise and sleep on it and re-write. So I jot down what it is I wish I could have said, the composite of the conversations I’ve had with all the friends I have going through the really difficult shit right now.
I don’t know if this is even slightly true for you. I don’t know that I am not being self-indulgent with the projection etc., but, oh, you have loved me enough to go out on limbs and say things that I might not want to hear, so I try to get over my fear of saying the wrong thing. If I could wave a wand and give you faith in anything, it would be that there simply isn’t anything wrong with you. It’s probably oversimplifying to imagine that just that one piece of knowledge would render all of the suffering tolerable, and yet your enough-ness could flow over all the cracks and crevices in your universe right now, and nothing could touch you. You would know that you have been okay, and that you will be okay, that as unfair as the suffering is, it isn’t permanent and that love will find its way to you. That you feel alone but you aren’t alone. When I tell you I love you, I am asking you to accept on faith that I know you this much, that I know you enough to have accepted you as you are and that when I tell you there is nothing really wrong with you I say this as an informed if not impartial party. I don’t say it to just anyone, after all. If the most devastating part of the human condition is our overwhelming separateness, then I have to at least claim the privilege of this platform of standing outside of you to tell you the loveliness I perceive in you you may not be able to see in yourself. It may have been a rhetorical question on your part, or a mere wailing to the universe, when you ask what is the point, but right now, this is precisely the point: this is how things are and why they are, that we have words that we can hold out to one another and that I know you would do this for me if things were reversed, that you have already saved me more than once.
July 22nd, 2010
Tacit.
There are things that exist only so long as they are unspoken. That are torture to the mind that would make everything explicit. Things that defy categories and resist speech. Things I may have so long as I don’t give in to temptation, turn my head, look back. Having being thus conditional. Everything is conditional. Nothing is absolute. Almost nothing.
A summer of being unable to write anything except in the privacy of journals, I find my violin is trying to give voice to everything that is resisting words. And it sounds best when no one else is in the room. I fight to reclaim skills lost years and years ago.
I ask myself for whom I write, why I am writing. I write to hide, which I fear implies, in fact I write to be found. It is irritating, your insistence on seeing through me, but then there’s delight — really, I am worth the effort? Or wait, was it all childishly easy, am I then again dismissible? Too obtuse?
How did Eurydice feel being dragged out of Hades? Was she relieved to slip back, then, leave Orpheus to be adored by the woodland creatures, the trees, the nymphs? Did she find it easier to inspire, become immortal, once she was dead? Was she the sort of girl who was always falling for musicians? How does she feel about her relatively passive role in the myth?
July 22nd, 2010
Or her inversion.
Because I keep noticing how women try to remake their men. Or improve them. Maybe men do this too.
I reach back to myself fifteen years ago, I made changes, gave things up, tried to break my worst habits or bury them. It took a while to really be done with cigarettes, I still use more crude language but try not to when he’s around, or the kids. But haven’t I always done this? Not just susceptible to influence but willing to try on whole new aspects of identity, change what I listen to, what I read, how I dress if this is reinforced or that is? And wasn’t I improved, weren’t those good changes to make? With the right Pygmalion, isn’t the marble benefitted? (But what about everything that is lost?)
It’s the makeover show. The improvement program. The diet, the exercise regime, the products bought to make us more appealing and attractive. It’s the Cinderella story. It’s the unacceptable-as-we-were, and therefore, forever not-accepted, with one’s origins shrouded in shame, hidden. Only the triumph is only complete if one knows that that swan was an ugly duckling.
One creates, one falls in love with one’s creation. One misses what was there. The white marble is chilly beneath one’s fingers, but one drapes it in elegant clothes and ignores one’s own shivers.
The problem with sensing what story people want to hear from you, what they want to believe of you is that you become capable of creating it for them, feeding it to them, you are in danger of losing the thread of the original story. People line up with their versions of who you are and how you should be, tell you what your problem is, tell you what cures they can sell you, prices ranging from pennies to your self-esteem, your validation of their worldview. Sometimes it’s a pyramid scheme, you must then sell someone else to make back your own costs.
Authenticity is problematic.
Can one create oneself? But what about the models one uses? Must they be destroyed? Is unconditional love possible? Does that mean what we think it means?
July 22nd, 2010
It’s an old dream, the one where I am secure in my sea-worthy box, curled up, my baby boy beside me as the waves toss us, carry us away.
This is one of the things you observe as a mother, the two impulses that drive the human being, the longing for freedom, for exploration, for autonomy: he goes crawling off to see new things. But then, he also looks back over his shoulder, he makes sure you are still there, and when he is frightened by his own independence he comes back as quickly, reclaims your lap, his need for security as intense as his need for freedom. The tension between the two requires repeated resolution. You sacrifice a little bit of security for your freedom, you sacrifice a little bit of your freedom for your security. Loss is the shadow to both of them.
You cannot see it outwardly, maybe, my life looks so sedentary and settled, but inside I suspect I am by nature a nomad. I want to know what is essential, what I would keep in the caravan, what comforts I would insist upon, what books, what music I would have to have recourse to in the middle of the desert. I am fascinated by compactness, by the design of ships’ cabins, by packing lists, by how little one can stuff into a backpack and live on for weeks at a time. It’s always been there: I remember as a kid trying to make the bunk beds in our small bedroom into a spaceship, with elaborately drawn cardboard control panels, but half the trick was to empty out the Fisher Price medical kit case, white, for me, and the brown identically sized tool box that was my sister’s and load these suitcases with the things we needed.
Reduced, these objects take on more importance than the flow of objects with whatever utility or aesthetic value through the comfortable household where boy-play may break any item, where everything, practically, is replaceable. The objects we carry with us from one place to another become home when home is transitory. The economy, the limits of having to choose only the essential turns them into identity, phylacteries, laden with meaning outstripping their compact portability.
And then, like a starvation artist, one practices giving these up. I could, I note, live without this item for five minutes, thus, I could live without it an hour, the hours adding up to weeks, to a lifetime (one travels backwards across Zeno’s paradox, this way, a survival trick). It was the surprise last night of glancing up and seeing the W constellation and greeting Cassiopeia, surprised at the recognition because I don’t identify as a stargazer, but that familiarity with the constellations has the consolation that wherever one wanders one can be at home.
June 1st, 2010
1) Be disappointed.
2) Let go of the story of how understanding and generous and forgiving you are, because the only thing worse than being disappointed in someone else is simultaneously discovering you are not the person you thought you were and not being able to reconcile yourself. Cognitive dissonance and unnamed, unnameable feelings only amplify the disappointment.
3) If you were my kid and you were disappointed, I’d totally tell you to feel what you’re feeling, but I might put boundaries on the behavior. It’s fine to be sad, but not so fine to throw yourself on the ground in the middle of the coffee shop and kick and scream because they are out of your favorite kind of scone. The floor is dirty and people give me funny looks.
4) Notice the script in your head that tells you of course you’re disappointed, your expectations were completely out of touch with reality. It never shuts up there, though, it points out that you are spoiled, self-absorbed, self-centered and used to having things go your way so that you are unable to deal when they can’t so of course you’re disappointed. It will go on abusing you because sometimes it easier to have the problems come from inside of you instead of outside you because then if you could just become a perfect person, you’d have control of your experience again. Laugh at the mean little voice and tell it, yes it’s scary not having any control isn’t it? But disappointment, like rain falls on the nice and the nasty alike.
5) Dispel the Disney heroine in your head who, chipper, is always looking on the bright side, making lemonade, finding silver linings, and making everyone love her with her sweet good-naturedness. Real people also don’t walk around with birds singing circling their heads, and honestly you would be swatting the birds within minutes as their incessant song gave you a headache. On a similar note, if hagiography makes you bitter rather than inspired — well, of course she bore up, she was a SAINT! then set the hagiography aside for now.
6) You don’t have to explain the disappointment away. Disappointment happens, and it doesn’t, in fact, mean that you’re a bad person, God has it in for you, or that you’re stupid for not having learned that life is just one disappointment after another.
7) Be careful what you “learn” from the disappointment. Pets die, some friends are regularly ten minutes later than they promised to be, soufflés fall. There’s all sorts of disconfirming evidence for every theory of how the universe is, so disappointment is not the time to decide that it is always going to be so painful.
8 ) Notice the brittle shell with which you try to protect yourself against future disappointment. Notice when one morning you feel hopeful again and that means that the brittleness has melted away. It happens. I promise.
May 28th, 2010
This is unimaginable to me, that as I write my mother is locking up her classroom and leaving for the last time. On the phone last night she said that she had been busy taking loads of all of the things she’s acquired over the years for teaching home so that this afternoon after the last bell rings she can walk away. Also unimaginable.
My father called earlier this week to make sure I was aware, in my physical distance from their lives, that today was her last day, and — our lives spinning fast here, tonight’s recital the 8th performance with at least one of my children in four weeks — the reminder was not ill-conceived. But he asked if I knew what it meant. And I suggested that every book that goes in a box to come home, ever mathematics manipulatives block that gets thrown onto the pile bears the imprints of each student in more than twenty years worth of classes. That there are ghosts.
I think the thing about growing up as the child of teachers is sometimes you get jealous of these, your parents’ other children, the ones to whom they also give themselves. Last summer I was talking casually to someone at the food carts to someone who turned out to be from Albuquerque too, and oh, where did you go to school? My dad was a teacher there… “Mr. Collins! Really you’re his daughter!” and it was strange. He had memories of my dad that would be different from my own, my dad’s performing teacher persona, that was so fiercely caring and idealistic and my parents are still the people I am trying to grow up to be like. But I think about the side of teachers that doesn’t get seen, the utter collapse on Friday afternoons from exhaustion, the sacrifice of personal lives to grading papers, the classroom filled with books, some of which were my sister’s and mine when we were little.
Another recollection is my dad encouraging me on a visit back to New Mexico to stop in and say hello to one of my former teachers — after I graduated he taught at the high school I had attended, and so the place was weirdly past and present, my own and his but not overlappingly so. And I don’t know if he understood how a former teacher was someone I couldn’t interact with casually, or maybe it was just me not knowing how to have a different relationship as a former student than that other more intense and hallowed one. I’d be thrown into a stuttering uncomfortable place, unable to make eye contact when I’d never had a moment’s shyness in the classroom before. And yet, in my head this seems right, that the sacred and intense relationship that exists between student and teacher is sacred and intense because it is temporary, because it is transient. My teachers all remain as ghosts in my head, just as I know all of my parents’ students remain ghosts in their heads. That there are pieces of all of our hearts given out and carried around whether we are aware of it or not.
Maybe that’s just the essence of civilization, the ghosts of teachers and students carried forward. An email yesterday from Portland Public Schools yesterday afternoon announced that they are slashing the school budget $19 million, and unthinking in my dismay I exclaimed in front of my alarmed seven year old, “That’s it! We’re living in the end times!” because what future can one imagine when the work of teachers isn ‘t valued? And when I asked my parents and friends of theirs, all former teachers, what the hardest part of the job was, my dad’s answer wasn’t inept administration or a lack of resources, the fact that they are expected to perform miracles and blamed for everything that they cannot fix, it was the daily encounters with hopelessness.This is how I know that my parents gave away small pieces of their hearts caring for every single kid they came in contact with, even the ones they couldn’t do anything for.
It all sounds sort of schlocky, in a big Mr. Holland’s Opus sort of way trying to write about, to think about their impact on all of these other lives, my parents, and I don’t think that skepticism of that story is an expression of pure cynicism. My parents will tell you that teaching is a good second career, that the idealism required to be a good teacher must be tempered by boundaries, to close the gradebook, make sure the fish is fed, straighten the desk chair stacked on top of the desk to make it easy for the custodians to vacuum, and turn out the lights with one lingering glance, and head home to collapse, talk about something that isn’t school. I worry that if I describe my mother, or my father, as heroic, it’s too pat, too easy. That to idealize can be a cheap recognition of the work, the heartbreak, the exhaustion, the limits of what they can do. But the thing they have done, it is not something small.
In some ways this is a reiteration of the cyclical post I write, about the May maudlins. Which is only right. One of the confusing things about a teacher’s life is they way they get to be in a student’s life, traveling this distance from September to May each year with a new group of students, seeing them grow and change and then taking two months to put themselves together, and starting again. Of course, they never retire as my parents and remain part of my life’s journey, as well as my kids’, but what I am left with this afternoon, wanting to pay tribute to my mother and all of the lives she’s been a part of, is how lucky I am to have gotten to witness this repeating heroism, and having no idea how she’s been able to do it.
May 28th, 2010
Having turned off comments did (briefly) help with blogging, strangely. I think it had to do with having the sort of convoluted head that wants to manage other people’s impressions of me, that wants to give others what they want from me so much that I can start to lose myself around other people, and that it seems a little crazy, but it’s just one of those basic things about being me that I have to come to terms with — when comments are off, I am writing this for myself, but then I am free to share it, which — yeah crazy. And so also, I am careful with the stats that are available to me, that are mostly a generic where are the hits coming from, what are people looking for. And it’s this that kills me: at one point the unreliable narrator “bestowed” me with her two top search terms, “snorting abilify” and “edna krabapple porn,” which, really, what does that say about who we are and what we do? But I think that the search term bringing people to this blog that has surpassed that is “External Validation.”
So I feel a need to address anybody who arrives at my blog looking for — what? information about what external validation IS, or advice about how to get it? I have a sick feeling, from doing my own searches on the term that there’s this impression one can conquer one’s need for external validation, which, you know, we’re not wired that way, and there’s probably a reason for that, it’s the psyche’s very own checks and balances system.
And I feel uncomfortable addressing a generic “you” who arrive here presumably because your need for external validation has started to seem problematic. I would absolutely give you external validation because I think that as a human being (look! I assume you are not a bot or Eliza or a Turing test, but, heck even if you are…) you are entitled to external validation. But my saying that? Has got to undercut my authority when I tell you, you are a fabulous human being, your sensitivity and intelligence and — there’s no one else like you, and the universe is a better place because you’re here. That has all the reassurance of “You’re really special. Just like everyone else.”
But what I wonder is if it helps to know that there are apparently thousands of other people searching for external validation?
Blah. The above has been sitting in my drafts folder for weeks, like when I said that having comments off helped me blog it was simply true and not ironic. So now I have another blog entry in my head and want to clear this one, but I’ve been thinking about what works and doesn’t work in blogging. I was with a friend the other evening and we were discussing the news in another friend’s life which had been announced in her blog, and I wondered how I had stumbled across it because “I don’t read her blog.” My friend laughed “None of us read each other’s blogs. I don’t read your blog.” But I sort of laughed, “I don’t write my blog for you.”
The times when blog reading has been most compelling is when there is clearly a story unfolding in someone’s life, when they are clearly at a critical juncture. And I am perfectly happy that things have been no more eventful than my husband working long hours, my kids having recitals, which are their own stories, but with very slow, curvature-of-the-earth imperceptible arcs.
On the other hand, I am experiencing wrenching feelings of all the eventfulness in the lives of people I love, milestones and movings on and general May-ness, strain and exhaustion and stricken again and again by how interconnected we all are. And the writing comes out anyway, but I don’t expect any readership, don’t expect it to seem compelling.
On the other hand, if you arrive at my blog wanting some serious advice about external validation, the best I can do is promise you that it’s okay. You’re going to be okay. I’m going to be okay. We’re going to have to be okay together because we may not be aware of how interconnected we are most of the time, but it doesn’t change the truth of it anyway. And your needing external validation? That’s completely okay. I need it too. I’ll think everything’s cool and then the next day be wobbly with insecurity again, and the lovely thing about it is I don’t get to maintain any illusions about being self-sufficient or having all of the answers.
April 9th, 2010
There exists, apocryphally (does apocryphal existence count as existence?) a Suzuki teacher in Portland who uses a squirt gun on parents who cannot keep their traps shut during the lesson. I don’t know how such a teacher would have any students come back, but, I am grateful the lessons my kids get are with teachers who recognize that we are all learning in the room.
Because three of the boys get lessons with the same teacher, it’s interesting to watch themes emerge in the lessons, different for each child, for the level each child is at, and still, the same truths. This week was a lot about attention. Of course, it’s always about attention, but when Soren, tired, clearly wants to please, wants to do what’s asked of him, and telling him to “pay attention” to how the teacher is doing something repeatedly doesn’t work, I suddenly realized that he has to learn how to focus his attention, and that the key to this was giving him questions to ask himself; paying attention to bowing, he could ask where the bow was set, ask what direction the bow moved, ask about the speed, the pressure, how loud, how smooth it was. I timidly suggest that these are the questions that the teacher wants him to ask himself as he is watching the teacher play, and all three of us light up, that this has opened a crack in some wall that stood between Soren and doing what he was asked to do. There are further questions. Which things will his eyes tell him, which, his ears? How does the adult working with him know when something has clicked for him?
Questions suddenly seem to me a miracle tool for focusing. I realize that as much as any physical change yoga precipitates, I have learned to ask my body questions, what’s the alignment I am working towards? It changes the way that I respond to discomfort, I first ask what is this discomfort telling me, how would I report this discomfort to Dana? Which instantly calms me down, engages me differently.
The nineteen Bahà’í months are named for attributes of God, glory and splendor, knowledge, perfection, power, loftiness and mercy, words and will — and the one that is surprising, I think is questions. Aren’t questions the opposite of assertion? And if you get lazy and reduce God to the “I am that I am!” assume that to be faithful is to be a sort of English infantryman, ours is not to question why, ours is but to do or die, isn’t questioning the opposite of faith? Only this morning, it all looks different, I don’t want a fragile faith that falls apart under the force of a small question.
In one of my favorite classes at UNM we were charged with keeping journals that we never turned in, they were just supposed to be a practice, and every class we would be given a few questions to act as prompts, I don’t even remember what they were, but they tended to be surprising and thoughtful, of the sort, what weighs more, a kiss or a blow, do you prefer memory or anticipation, how do we know when something is finished? Even though I had come from a program that was supposed to be shaped around the Meno and the Socratic method, it was still startling to realize that a question could teach so much more than a lecture. Some questions were more leading than others, they would reflect to various degrees our professor’s interests and biases, and there was no pretense they weren’t, what was sure was that the answers were to be our own, not written to please him as he would never read them. I wish I could find them again.
It’s in my favorite book for Suzuki parents, Sprunger’s Helping Parents Practice, that children will retain the things they have been allowed to discover as they will not retain things that have merely been told to them. It’s better to ask “What tone are you getting? How can you change it?” than to say “Less pressure, less pressure, less pressure!” But it is so very hard to have faith that the child will find it on his own. it’s hard to find the right question. It’s easy to ask the leading question, to satisfy the form. Most children, I suspect, are smart enough to see through that.
I re-read this, and some of it seems so basic, so obvious. I never know whether I am talking about pedagogy, theology, philosophy, or psychology and I muddle terms from all of them, I continue with ambivalence about technical language. I think that in the history of my blog there is a clear tracing of a wrestling with a perceived deficit, that I ask questions where I would be assertive, that among the things that being me feels like, there is occasionally bewilderment to be surrounded by people who comfortably sound judgements and say how things ARE, when I feel fuzzy with possibilities, tentative with suggestion. And it is a gift to accept one’s own questioniness.
April 4th, 2010
“Forgive them Father, they know not…” Lord forgive me, I have carried this around as the model for forgiveness for, well forever. Somebody hurts you and you see beneficently into their limits and let go of your frustration with their failings. Friend late to lunch, husband says something insensitive, stranger on the street scowls when you walk by, you’re disappointed in any way? Well, you understand don’t you? You don’t even need to bring it up, because, after all they are doing their best. Plus, aren’t you the generous one, to overlook shortcomings like that?
I have an ancient list of the pitfalls of reading too much. It includes, for example, an alertness to situational irony that gives rise to superstitious behavior. In books, the person who finally, after a long struggle, recovers from hypochondria is liable to have a lump emerge under her fingers in the shower that very evening, so I imagine my hypochondria keeps me safe. One becomes susceptible to apophenia, seeing symbols and connections everywhere, because, after all that is how books work. There is always forebodings of foreshadowing, thinking that we must be getting along to Act III now, and remembering the gun introduced in Act I. A literary cough is never, ever mere allergies.
The worst, most insidious pitfall of reading incessantly, though is thinking we have access to the interior lives of anyone else. I do writing exercises with Sarah where I tell about the same encounter from the points of view of four different characters, and each one is vividly real to me, I know, I think, exactly how it feels to be in that position, even though the knowledge is in contradiction to what I knew writing it from the other point of view.
So I imagine that I can write out the — I don’t want to say disagreement, but, um, working out of differences, maybe? with my husband from his point of view. I have lived with him fourteen years, know him better than I know anyone but myself, right? We seem to have had the same conversation again and again and again, theme and variations, so it is not hard to guess at his point of view. To play out the whole chess game, one move after another, based on how it has been played in the past, so you don’t even bother pulling the chess board out. Except. I am not allowed behind the curtain. Everything I know, everything he has told me, is what has been brought from behind the curtain, made exterior; the report of interior states is always an exterior act.
I don’t know if I even know what’s happening behind my own curtains.
So if I “forgive” with this little patronizing nod to his limitations, I lapse into the sort of illusion of superiority that has been my lifelong enemy The insecure superiority emerges from behind the curtain and (I imagine) appears to others as aloofness, generating a whole new string of disappointments, apartnesses. I think I have taken on all disappointment, all risk of rejection and hurt with this little reassuring nod to the self, surely, this doesn’t reflect on my lovability, therefore it’s the other person’s limitation. Which it could be? But there’s the terror of making the leap, of asking for what I need, of acknowledging the hurt, because if I say “it hurts me when you…” if I let the other person know I am hurt and take away the limitation that existed that he could not know he was hurting me, then if I am hurt again, maybe my amour propre will be more vulnerable? That the hurt was done knowingly? Maybe. This is one of those fears I open only very tentatively, gingerly. I have grown unfortunately attached the image of my magnanimous self who understands and forgives.
[What surprises me, though it maybe shouldn't, is that self-knowledge is subject to Russell's paradox, it tries to be a set containing sets that are not members of themselves. I am watching myself watching myself and the curtain is the only way I can explain the limits of everything I understand about myself and others. I am also profoundly grateful for the mystery, for existing as more than a set of pre-programmed responses to pre-programmed stimuli. If there were ever grace to meditate upon, it might start right there?]
But I think that, barring an omniscience I wasn’t built to bear, authentic forgiveness for me looks more like “I acknowledge my own hurt and I choose to put it to rest instead of nursing it or using it as evidence of my pure martyred saintliness.” Or something.
March 31st, 2010
And this from the Writers’ Almanac for Tuesday March 30, 2010
It’s the birthday of Vincent Van Gogh, born in Zundert, Holland (1853). As a young man, he was deeply religious and went off to do missionary work in a coal-mining region in Belgium. One day he decided to give away all of his worldly goods and live like a peasant. But his religious superiors thought he was having a nervous breakdown. They kicked him out of the mission and he had to go home. It was then that he started to draw and paint. He taught himself with art books and by studying the masters.
Will I scandalize painterly and artistic friends if I say Van Gogh has never gotten a lot of my attention? I probably watched a movie about him, and I love some of his paintings, know the same stories about him everyone knows, listened once too often to McClean’s Starry Starry Night because somebody in my family of origin really loved that song, but mostly, well, he is neatly tagged in my brain as painter whose work is essential to cultural literacy, who changed painting. That he’s one of the artists who was having a Moment as I went to college, so that prints of his work were sort of de rigeur for dorm rooms, and that shouldn’t change the meaning of the paintings, but it was easier to pay attention to artists who seemed less iconic? Especially during that 18 year old land rush of cultural heroes as a way of staking out identity?
And lately I have struggled with mixed feelings about what happens when we (by which I mostly mean I) let artists’ (and by artists I mostly mean writers because that’s where I am living right now) lives occupy our imaginations, our attention beyond their work, their personalities ballooning and overshadowing the work by which they attained their immortality, the fetishizing, as if we could make the dead our personal totems and spirit guides. If I sound judgmental, I mean I struggle with it because I have this tendency. Which can obscure what is really there, just as surely as posters hung in dorm rooms.
It might be a whole other blog post, the emergent theme in reading lately of the audience of the dead, the hope offered in the literary biography, or my own observation that there is a safety in the swooning adoration of somebody no longer on this plane, because they’re not going to disappoint you, that the one-wayness of it is a built-in feature, you can identify endlessly, never be rejected.
Which, none of this was what I thought I was going to write about when I went and found that quote, one that startled me yesterday because I never knew that about Van Gogh, after all, and it suddenly threw into clarity for me that religious fervor has in common with the creative impulse and insanity the willingness to step outside of cultural norms, to leave the safety of the flock, and the fact that the three can be a little difficult to tell apart, especially if you have spent your life struggling to understand why you feel different from everyone around you, unsettling.
And I think it is a life’s work, working out what makes you different, what difference means. My eleven year old has a love of the glib right now and threw out at me a few days ago, yes, I am special, just like everyone else. There wasn’t a bitterness behind it, thank goodness, but it does signal, I think, the onset of those tricky years of struggling to define yourself, of being unable to take identity for granted, the increasing particularity about appearance and what it signals, the grade-wide choosing and unchoosing of friends as if they were accessories, the finding relief in expression, whether it is music or drama or drawing.
Lately the word that has settled in my head as a decent way of straddling the feelings of difference and knowing that your specialness doesn’t make you, you know, special, is self-possession. That the self-possession I am working on is the knowing what I know through my own knowledge and not what other people tell me, trusting my own judgement while knowing when to ask for help, and also whom to ask. It’s the skepticism of any thought or system of thought that is incompatible with humility. It’s the attempt to channel the impulse to give away worldly goods, or curl up reciting the Pilgrim’s Prayer endlessly, or to sever ears, into small acts benefitting the people around me. I know it has a ways to go, and also that I do catch glimpses of this quality in certain biographies and memoirs (like M.F.K. Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me!) And I think we are supposed to look for truth in the dust, in the completed examples of the dead, as well as in the struggles of our living comrades.
