In answer to the unasked question, I don’t know the answer. If you consent to be bullied, participate in the cruel and grotesque dance of it, what advice can compel as much as the terrifying, all-consuming tango of that?
There are many situations where we are powerless, or virtually so. In other situations, though the choice may appear very scary, there are life-affirming choices within our power to select.
Easier said than done, I suppose.
You have the right to rage, but there is a price you must be willing to pay. You might think the rage itself is price enough, but you would be fucking wrong.
A mother, say, may rage at her child. In the moment nobody is fast enough or strong enough to prevent the attack, certainly not the kid. The enraged woman might have a right to her rage, a lawyer could argue, but if she takes a bottle and skulls her kid she has a right to be taken to the police station and sent over to the Laughing Academy for observation.
My father had been treated to this kind of tough love as a very young boy. This kind of tough love may be more properly called hatred. It leaves only betrayal and rage behind in the child who, instead of being protected by his mother, was beaten by her. “A face only a mother could love,” has a bitter ring to someone who was brutalized by his own mother.
My father, to his credit, rarely lashed out with his hands to hit my sister and me. It was the tongue, sharp as a bullwhip, that he lashed out with. I won’t describe the torrent of hate speech that often foamed out of his mouth. I understand it now, but, shit…
It is not unusual for children, watching one parent rage and the other cower, to make the obvious mistake: the raging one is strong, the cowering one weak. It is not weakness to cower and not strength to scream and threaten, or lash out. I’ve seen many situations where a kid winds up emulating the style of the parent they identify as strong. These situations are always sickening.
My father was very smart, and a gifted arguer. He taught me the Socratic Method years before I heard of it. A series of logical questions, with answers beyond dispute, leading to a conclusion, also beyond dispute. I did some ju-jitsu on him one day on line at a wedding buffet in a bistro on Metropolitan Avenue.
“You’ve said many times that physical violence and verbal violence are exactly the same in the harm they do to the victim,” I said, piling some shrimp on my plate.
“Yes,” he said, swallowing, dignified, ready to rumble. He already knew where we were going.
“So all the verbal violence around the kitchen table directed at A___ and me was the same as if you’d been beating on us?” I asked, pulling a celery heart out of ice.
“That’s right,” he said, not avoiding it now.
“So would you say A___ and I were victims of child abuse?” I asked him, moving the Queen behind the Rook, and the celery heart behind the shrimp.
“Yes,” he said, “I would have to say that you were.”
The thing I remember most about this exchange, which took place more than twenty years ago, is the angry look my sister shot me over the old man’s shoulder. She was mad on his behalf, her identification with the strong parent was greater than her realization of the damage he’d done to her.
You have the right to rage, everyone does. But for the love of God, don’t do it.
Yes, I’ve been hopped up lately. Thinking of my mother’s life and death a lot as the apartment where I spent time with her the last twenty years was sold yesterday. Excited about the workshop with the nine kids grades 2-5 that will begin a week from yesterday. Hopped up about the state of this apartment, which has been this way for a long time and needs to be fixed up. Hopped up that I am drawing the same picture over and over, reading, emailing, reading, listlessly surfing the internet, drawing the same picture. All around, the chaos I would tame, looking on mockingly.
Exhausted, truly. Eyes tired all the time, reading a novel in too fine print, staring at this screen for hours at a time. I can’t look away, even to make a long overdue appointment with the eye doctor. Too many details to take care of lately, too many things on my mind. Tired, yet unable to sleep for ten hours or however long it would take to not be so tired. The picture I keep drawing finally tells me to stop it.
Immobile, drawing the same picture over and over, staring at the computer screen. Thinking. “Stop thinking so much,” says Sekhnet, echoing the voice from Ecclesiastes “For in much wisdom, there is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow” Ecclesiastes 1:18. But I can’t help it, Ecclesiastes, old boy, not to say there is much wisdom in my vexation, nor agreeing that increasing knowledge necessarily increaseth sorrow, you know, I’m just sayin’.
Saw a Ted Talk by a man named Sugata Mitra, whose research shows the power of groups of poorly educated children to learn and teach each other what they are motivated to learn (watch it here, I recommend it). He concludes that “values are acquired, doctrine and dogma are imposed.” This is a very deep conclusion, if you ask me, comes close to the core of what’s wrong with the world we live in.
He also concludes, as I do, that “learning is a self-organising system” (he spells ‘organizing’ like a former subject of the British Empire). In other words, individuals and non-hierarchical groups can learn what they need to learn in an organic kind of way that reveals itself as it goes. I’m in the process of trying to prove these very things, even as I can’t clear off my kitchen table or desk.
So the mind doesn’t stop thinking and the body doesn’t start doing, except to dance here on the keyboard, eight fingered, with the right thumb playing bass on the space bar. I’d be better off sitting at a piano keyboard, or playing a guitar with eight fingers. But even that wearieth me, man.
Why am I not going to sleep? Most people in my time zone are having some serious REM sleep about now, dreaming.
I woke up in a room piled high with clothes on one side, random unused items carpeting the floor, a cracked wall and peeling ceiling, a Sony Trinitron and VCR un-used for perhaps a decade. The clothes I’d put in a black contractor bag after the fire in the apartment downstairs were still there, in front of the blankets piled haphazardly on the trunk of drawing books. My beloved Oinsketta had been alive during the fire, I rushed her and her tiny lungs out into the street. It was probably a year before September 11th became a day of infamy.
“That bag of toxic, smoky clothes has been there for more than ten years,” a voice said indignantly. And it’s true.
I woke up realizing it’s probably me, not the other maniacs I know, who is closest to being a kind of crazy. Everyone I know carries their collected wounds, scars and disabilities, but not everyone does it so stylishly.
My friend inquired from her Blackberry. I wrote back that my head was fine, better than her rear-view mirror, then could not help adding:
On the outside, I mean, the outside of my head is fine. Demons are hopping around inside of it, playing rugby, by the sounds of it.
We took the long way back to my place so she could tell me a few more sad stories. I could not shake the feeling that all the people I have met, in some fundamental way, are mad. They pay mortgages, raise children, possess professional expertise, make all kinds of choices, live complex lives, but there is an element of madness to all of it, it seemed to me. The thought struck me as slightly mad too, made me wonder if it wasn’t me. The evidence that it wasn’t just me seemed strong, but then again, isn’t that what every delusional person believes?
There was a spot across from my place, and she double parked in front of it, shutting off the engine. We were exchanging somewhat sorrowful anecdotes as we sat and one led to the next. At one point she turned the radio down, and I didn’t think about it until later. After a while a car pulled up next to us and asked about the spot we were blocking. She turned the key to move the car, cranked, a weak cough, then nothing.
“But I don’t understand,” she said, not understanding. “The lights go on.” She flashed the headlights.
The driver in the other car said “put it in neutral” after she told him she had jumper cables in the back. Her car slid back a few feet once she took the parking brake off.
“What’s he doing?” she asked, as he did a three point turn so his battery would face her’s.
The jumper cables sparked as she went “yow” and I pointed out that I shouldn’t let the claws on the other end of the cables touch after I’d connected the jumpers to her battery. They sparked again, then I attached them to the red and black terminals in the other guy’s car.
A black SUV conducted a neat maneuver and began sliding into the guy’s spot. There was a quick exchange in Spanish, my friend dashed around to calm things down, the driver of the first car yelling “he doesn’t have to come at me like he’s going to kill me” and my friend pointing out that this is New York City and parking is a rough business. To my surprise he seemed satisfied with her statement and drove off.
She turned the key and her engine roared to life. I disconnected the cables. Just them a white Humvee looking like a warship came from the wrong direction and wanted the spot. The passenger came toward us menacingly, looking like the bad cop Denzel Washington won the award for playing in Training Day. “It’s illegal to hold a spot in NYC,” he informed us. He reached into the collar of his sweater and pulled on a length of chain. “I’m a cop,” he said, “and it’s against the law”.
I explained that we were trying to leave when the battery died, and this guy getting the spot was doing us a favor, we hadn’t been holding the spot, he had been waiting to park. Denzel sized me up. “We’re not trying to get over on anybody, this guy is just doing a good deed,” I said, sounding very reasonable. Nobody would have suspected the mad thoughts that had just been racing around my head.
He got back into the white war machine and drove off. I shook the other driver’s hand and thanked him, he parked the car in the contested spot. I got into the passenger seat of my friend’s car and leaned across to kiss her goodbye. There was a loud crack and pain in the center of my forehead, the rear view mirror now hung at a crazy angle against the windshield. It was impossible to reattach it so it could reveal the rear view it was intended to show. She assured me it was fine, she was only going a few miles on the West Side Highway, that her guys would fix it tomorrow.
She was philosophical, and her philosophy struck me as a little bit crackpot. I told her to wait, ran upstairs, got a roll of gaffer’s tape and tacked the rear view back in place. She patted my now damp brow. I kissed her goodbye and crossed the street to go back upstairs. A giant white Humvee, with silver studs on the sides like shark’s gills, paused to let me walk in front of it on my side of the street. I waved my hand by way of thanking them for pausing.
“Did you get it started?” a deep voiced asked me from the passenger window.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said, without turning my head. I hopped up the one step to my lobby, went inside, up the two flights and sat at the computer, where I am now.
New York City, baby.
Sekhnet’s father, during his last long hospitalization, at one point shared a room with a noisy insane man. The insane man was well-known at the hospital and always fretfully and annoyingly attended by his troublesome, equally insane wife. Sammy soon had his share of stories, which he told with a wry world-weariness that was very becoming.
“He came over in the middle of the night to try to take my glasses,” Sammy reported one morning.
“He tried to climb into my bed last night,” Sammy said matter of factly the next day.
Once, when the madman turned to me in fear and fury and accused me of being his landlord, and told me I couldn’t harass him in his hospital bed, that he was a veteran and an American hero and so forth, Sammy raised his eyebrows to the ceiling in a gesture more eloquent than any rejoinder I can invent now, years later.
The crazy man complained about the poisonous food, the criminally negligent treatment, threatened legal action. He barked a series of accusations at Sammy who said “the Complaint Department’s on the fifth floor.” For some reason that quieted the agitated man. Perhaps he was wondering how to get there from the hospital’s top floor, which was the fourth.
