this had to wind up on the cutting room floor:
We learn as adults that even people who love us can do us great harm. It’s not strictly their fault. Humans are the product of their genes and how they were handled when they were young. The research is in about the harm of adverse childhood experiences, even the DNA and immune systems are changed by abuse and neglect. Certain things are impossible to truly recover from, though the human capacity for healing is also remarkable.
Said a small voice, easily ignored. I should get the timer, set it for ten minutes, since I can’t let myself slip into this tap tap tap right now, must somehow, you know, leap into action, as though I mean it. I enter a kind of focused hypnotic state here, outside of time, not thinking of what needs to be done, thinking of other things.
I’m thinking about an art exhibit I saw the other day, beautifully mounted in a nice space on the fifth floor of an inconspicuous office building on West 21st Street. The artwork was created by men and women of all ages locked on an overpopulated prison island, the stuff of nightmares. 10,000 people waiting, sometimes for more than a year, for their speedy trial, or to accept a plea deal that will spring them, with “time served”, from what can only be described as hell. A tiny proportion, perhaps a few hundred, participate in art therapy sessions, sessions most of them love. A much smaller group wind up dead, like the teenager from one of the art therapy groups, not long ago found hanging by some kind of noose.
Overcrowded with people arrested in NYC who can’t afford bail, this island is a fortress with a long history of brutality toward the possibly guilty. Anyone who has the money to post bail is spared the purgatory these poor souls are jammed into. I recall from law school that a person able to post bail is something like 95% more likely than one who stays locked up to avoid prison time in the end. There is institutional injustice in our broken Criminal Justice System, we all know that, and cities like NYC have long, sorry histories, we finally have a mayor who seems intent on addressing this injustice and blah blah blah.
In the meantime, people like this good woman struggle to bring a bit of light into that dark world in ‘the belly of the beast’, as one man with a talent for words, many years in that darkness and an unquenchable need to be violent once styled it.
The woman who arranged the exhibit, spent hours meticulously typing out the professional descriptions of each work, spray-mounting paper works onto mats so they could be hung for viewing, taking care of all the publicity and other details, is someone I’ve known since we were young teenagers. I walk in and join three others viewing the art on the walls of the large, airy gallery. I give her a tired smile and she returns this smile with one so exhausted-looking it is almost heartbreaking. We hug and she offers me a tour, once I’ve had a chance to look at the work.
The theme of the show is Hope. Hope is written on many of the collages, the elements of which must either be torn out and glued or given to an art therapist, who, at some other time, will neatly cut out the indicated elements for later collaging. The prisoners are not allowed to have even the scissors kindergarten kids use. Too dangerous. While a marker can be jammed into a fellow inmate’s eye socket, they seem to be allowed to use markers, these mostly non-violent prisoners assumed innocent until their speedy, if long-delayed, trials.
I point out one drawing I love, among many that reflect only the game attempt to cling to hope in a hopeless place. There was something about the drawing that drew me to it, the lightness of touch, the colors, the joy in the childishly rendered woman who stands with her arms open at the center of the frame, the lovingly rendered foliage and prayer beads forming a frame. My friend briefly lights up, this was done by a sixty year-old woman in one of her art therapy groups. She’d be thrilled for a note from me.
I write to her, tell her the drawing was beautiful, gave me great joy to see, as it must have given her joy to create. I tell her I hope she will continue to draw. I felt good expressing this appreciation.
I forget to tell her something very obvious to me now. “I hope you get out of prison soon.” I don’t realize that omission until just now. I nod to think I’d done something nice in writing the note, can’t really get too worked up that I missed a chance to write the thing that would have meant the most: I hope the tumor is benign and they get it out with no pain and that you have a fast recovery and are reunited with the children whose names you lovingly inscribed inside the heart-shaped frame of the prayer beads.
After a beautiful memorial service for a cousin of mine who died at 40, after apparently sucking every moment of joy and meaning out of her short life, I shook her father’s hand. “It was a beautiful memorial,” I told him.
“Yes, if only we didn’t have to have it.”
The art therapist cannot bring anything that can be used as a weapon into the prison. This means no umbrella when it’s raining. She drives over the guarded bridge to the island, parks her car and walks to a checkpoint and if it’s raining, so be it. A small price to pay to do blessed work.
Even I realized this, as I strode crosstown cursing Gandhi after the penultimate wasted session with the bright, sympathetic but inexperienced student therapist. Atmospherically the day was about perfect, cool but no need for a sweater. The sky over NYC was the perfect eternal blue backdrop for a gorgeous technicolor post card, or a painting by Dali at the peak of his powers.
For Sekhnet’s part, she was dodging leaping kittens as she puttered contentedly in the garden, a lush natural world far from her troubles and worries, and my worries, and my troubles.
It’s like going to the dentist, really, a ten minute drill (and more for the reader than for me, perhaps).
Thinking of some recent folly, which I’d like to comb out of mind. With high hopes I began a course of CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) with a student therapist, at a steeply discounted rate that added up, over many weeks, to the price of a decent guitar, or a very good acoustic amp. I’m not crying over the money (though I’m resentful) as much as over the long stretch of unthinkingly wasted time.
CBT is a technique that allows the successful practitioner to run negative feelings through the filter of Reason, to consider these feelings from a more productive perspective. Identify their source and move beyond them to do what negative feelings often stop one from doing. I’d gone into the program with three distinct but inter-related goals, made no progress at all on the first two and only minimal progress on the third.
Trouble was, the therapist was a student. Trouble is, I speak well, fluently, concisely. This student, young enough to be my daughter, revealed, after many, many weeks of spinning my wheels, that she deferred to me, because of our age difference, because I speak so well, am so analytical, seem so capable and confident and blah blah blah.
“Have you no supervisor?” I finally ask, aghast. I had begun suggesting exactly what the therapy should have been doing, the simple, practical steps that should have been reasonably taken, but many weeks too late, the sessions are almost done. Another exercise in uselessness. If I could have designed and implemented the course of treatment myself, motivated myself to move forward toward the three unrealized goals I came here with six months ago, why would I need to be coming here? “What has your supervisor advised you?”
She was cagey about the supervisor, yes she had one… but… it’s good that we’re talking about how disappointed you feel. I realize now, since each session is video taped, since her supervisor is clearly not helping her to be a more effective therapist, that she’s aware that this person who is evaluating her will watch with twitchy, beady eagle eye for the moment in any session when she might admit, in the interests of that candor so important to effective therapy, that her supervisor is a bit hands off, distracted, stuffy, paranoid, pompous, kind of the caricature of that useless, tic afflicted maniac we think of as becoming a supervisor and evaluator of other shrinks.
“Do you feel better now?” asks Siri.
Well, Siri, a tiny, tiny bit better, yes, thank you. I’d better get back to designing my own therapy program now.
Interesting talk by a well-spoken and insightful guy. He talks about the demoralizing effect of seeing no effect from your work. He describes his experiments designed to show how important a sense of meaning and progress is to continuing to do good work.
The good news: it takes little conscious planning, and little effort, to motivate good work. The bad news: it takes far less consciousness or planning, and no effort whatsoever, to demotivate.
Twenty minutes, interestingly spent.
From a short book he wrote toward the end of his life, a series of mini interviews with famous and infamous people from the world beyond. Afterlife Correspondent Vonnegut would enter the Pearly Gates for each interview, pursuant to the deal the atheist made with St. Peter to be allowed into heaven to conduct these short chats with historical figures for the benefit of those of us walking on the earth at that particular moment in time. The proceeds from the sales of the book were donated to National Public Radio, or possibly to WNYC.
In his short intro Vonnegut describes the loneliness of modern life, a theme he often revisited. He contrasted life in modern industrialized society to the vastly more social lives lived for millennia by groups of humans. An Ibo baby in Africa is taken to meet her 400 aunts, uncles and cousins who take her in their arms by turn and coo at her and tell her how beautiful she is. Wouldn’t you love to be that baby? asks Vonnegut.
The truly genius take is this, and I don’t have the text ( less than two sparsely type-set pages in total) in front of me so you’ll pardon (or not) a paraphrase.
Freud didn’t know what women want, wrote Vonnegut, but Vonnegut does. Women want to talk, to everyone, about everything. What do men want? Some pals and nobody to be mad at them. The modern arrangement, a man and a woman pair off and live together, become the largest part of each other’s social universe.
The woman gets somebody to talk to about everything all the time: but it’s a man.
The man gets a pal and somebody not to be mad at him: but it’s a woman.
Because a great Vonnegut insight should end with a profound, yet comic bow he adds:
Each one, unwittingly, has the same anguished complaint against the other: “you are not enough people!”.
As pithy a nutshell of something fundamental as any you’ll hear today, it seems to me.
There is a great scene in Norton Juster’s fantastic The Phantom Tollbooth where Milo and Tock stop at a house with a sign “World’s Smallest Giant.” They ring and an average sized man comes to the door, rendered with beautiful simplicity by Jules Feiffer, and identifies himself as the world’s smallest giant. Bewildered, they are invited to go visit the World’s Largest Midget, who, by a neat quirk, lives right around the corner.
Around the corner turns out to be the side of the same house where a sign over the door proclaims “Midget.” They ring and the average sized guy comes to the door, deadpan as can be, drawn identically by Feiffer, but for the sign above the door. They go on to meet the world’s fattest thin man and the world’s thinnest fat man.
(You can read the entire short, delightful chapter for yourself here, as it turns out, only slightly different, and infinitely more charming, than the version above. In fact, the whole wonderful book is at the link above.)
Branding and selling, baby. The quality of the actual product is important, most likely, but the branding and selling of it, and the deadpan confidence to always insist it is exactly what you say it is– way more.
Among the things that have me by the toe, the waning of democracy and the ever steeper upward tilt of the so-called level playing field.
“Are you fucking crazy? You are held by the toe by a myth that was, at best, an exercise for keeping order and property, designed by the wealthy and maintained, whenever necessary, by their goon squads?”
Democracy was more than that.
“If you say so, my idealistic friend.”
Take the example of public education, a once truly democratic institution. Not that long ago the children of immigrants, educated in New York City Public Schools, could attend the City College, for affordable tuition they could earn by working as they studied, get an excellent education, graduate debt-free with a degree that was worth as much as degrees now costing $160,000, and find work in their chosen field that allowed them to move out of the tenements where they grew up.
“OK, nice example of democracy in action, and meritocracy, but times change. Systems evolve.”
Ya, mon. This is what has me by the toe, in the New Gilded Age, working with an outmoded belief in something good that is now under constant, coordinated attack by a well-funded army of profiteers. I designed a program for public elementary school students, to work as a group, guided by their own ideas, supported by adult facilitators. My idea was to show public school kids, in poor neighborhoods, at their best– give them a showcase to demonstrate what they could do if they weren’t being actively trained to be factory workers in factories that no longer operate in the US, or, failing that, failing, dropping out and becoming prisoners in a privatized for-profit prison system.
“You are pissing into the wind and ignoring the fact that, sad as it may seem to you, you are one of the few people you know who is even passingly following this sickening debate about public education. Only people with bleeding hearts give more than a passing thought to the fate of the kids you want to work with. The children of the disenfranchised are an abstraction. ‘Disenfranchised’ — without the right to meaningfully participate in decisions about their own governance. But let’s not get lost in emotionality.”
“Look at the numbers, it makes everything easier to understand when you view it with a calculator in hand. Simply multiply the number of students entitled to a free public education in the U.S. by the sum each state and school district allocates per student. That number is hundreds of billions of dollars a year, left on the table for substandard education.”
Hundreds of billions of dollars a year. No need to pull a number out of our asses, when we can pluck one from the internets: $621 billion a year, as of a couple of years ago.
“No small sum, my friend. Private entrepreneurs who have already shown they know how to make billions are the best stewards of that kind of dough, not people with interesting theories about how children learn, or a quaint belief that cooperation yields more social benefit than competition. You can’t expect public school administrators, teachers, educational theorists and the like to know as well as Bill Gates, Michael Milken, Michael Bloomberg, giants in making mountains of profit, some of the richest and most enterprising men in the world, how to maximize the profit of that enormous investment in such an important human resource.”
You make my case for me, friend. Milken served his time in prison, ten year sentence generously discounted by 80%, seemingly got to keep most of his ill-gotten money and is now called a philanthropist on his Wikipedia page. We learn at a glance:
Michael Robert Milken (born July 4, 1946) is an American former financier and philanthropist. He is noted for his role in the development of the market for high-yield bonds (“junk bonds”),[1] for his conviction following a guilty plea on felony charges for violating U.S. securities laws, and for his charitable giving.
Forbes currently lists his net worth at $2.5 billion.
Read on and learn how you do it. This is how you do it:
“This is really the best use of your time right now? Showing how a convicted billionaire felon/philanthropist is profiting by redirecting public school dollars to his own for-profit enterprises? This is really the best use of the time that is slipping like sands through the hourglass?”
Not at all, friend, not at all. Just a small piece of what hobbles me.
Excellent advice, read after my timer went off, 48 minutes of cleaning picked at, when I popped back on to the screen.
Do you see any significant clearing in the tangled undergrowth of your desk, your kitchen table, your chair? That tangle on the floor next to and behind the chair? The precarious pile of boxes, paper, musical instruments and effects balanced next to the chair?
Another 48 minutes for the timer, your back into it this time, instead of looking hopefully at the screen for something that will distract the mind. There is a rich universe of things here for distracting the mind, although rich is probably the wrong word for the kaleidoscope up here on the screen.
Very well, 48 more, let’s go.
