Category Archives: musing

The difficult art of making amends

Ask your spiritual advisor what true repentance is. They will tell you that it is sincere regret for a wrong that you did to someone and a determination to make it right in whatever way is possible.  

Repentance contains an acknowledgment that you’ve hurt somebody, with an admission that what you did to them would have badly hurt you too.  Key to repentance is a willingness to help in the healing and the promise not to do that thing, or anything like it again, to that person, a soul just as precious as your soul.

The opportunity to be forgiven is a gift a hurt person can give to another, but the words “I’m sorry” and “I accept your apology” are meaningless formalities much of the time, as many of of us have experienced.  

Most of us know how easily a formal apology can be turned into a club to beat your victim with “I fucking apologized to this unforgiving asshole ten times, it’s never enough!”

The heart of repentance is atonement, the true determination of the person being given the gift of forgiveness to return that kindness in kind.

The human propensity for cannibalism

Given the right horrific circumstances, every human being is capable of eating another human being. We live with this hard to digest fact the same way we live with the certainty of our own death: by putting it out of mind as much as possible.

We are social creatures, human babies are more helpless than most baby animals and need the most care if they are to survive. We feel tenderness toward babies, even if they are strangers to us, and most of us have a reflex to leap to their defense if we see one toddling into traffic. At the same time, we are also programmed to survive.

In my first semester in law school we read a British case from the height of the British empire, Regina v. Dudley and Stephens. Dudley and Stephens, sailors, had survived a shipwreck with two other guys, one being the teenaged cabin boy. There were four of them, barely alive in the lifeboat in a remote area of the ocean, day after day. The kid was close to death, but hanging on. Reasoning that the boy was going to die very soon anyway, and that they’d all die if they didn’t eat him, two, Dudley and Stephens, voted to kill the boy. They killed him, over the moral objections of the third, and all three men ate and were eventually rescued. The principled cannibal gave evidence in the criminal case against Dudley and Stephens, who were sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead.

The verdict was designed to send a message to the civilized British navy. You cannot eat the cabin boy until he is dead of natural causes. Once that lesson was imparted, the queen (Regina) quietly commuted the death sentences of Dudley and Stephens and that was that.

In real life, recently, I have seen this impulse toward cannibalism among friends I’ve had for decades. When you are under enough stress, and feel desperate enough, you will believe any lie that makes you feel alive, part of a loving group and righteous in your shared fury. It is a short trip, step by step, from angrily denouncing someone, based on an ugly lie, to hating them, to hanging them from a tree, to eating their barbecued corpse.

We are all capable of this kind of abominable group behavior, in an extreme enough situation, but some are able to do it even when there is no direct threat to their own life. I don’t want to sound judgmental, God forbid, but my best advice is to avoid this kind of grimly transactional motherfucker, once you see that hungry gleam in their beady eyes.

“Face twisted and contorted with hate”

This is how sick, damaged and destructive people who can never be wrong are. They will do anything to prove they can’t be wrong. For example:

Their eight year-old kid is upset and no matter how many times mom and dad assure the kid there is nothing to be upset about, the stubborn little bastard insists he’s upset. In fairness, this could be very upsetting to a certain type of parent, one who feels responsible for their child’s well-being but truly doesn’t know how to sit with upsetting feelings themselves, let alone help someone else with them. Imagine how upsetting it is to them to see their child upset! The natural thing for this type to do is escalate things until the upset person is way more upset than they are.

Now they are talking about the basic lack of courage in the child, his self-pity, his sadness, his completely irrational anger. These things are bad, each of them, and together constitute a pathetic excuse for a human personality. They are reflections of a lack of character. They are sad predictors of a miserable life of failure and blaming others for his problems. They remind the boy how angry he was as a newborn baby, furious and hostile, all the time, for no goddamned reason.

Eventually the kid starts glaring at his accusers. This reaction is what they were going for the whole time, though they couldn’t have put into words. Now that the kid is angry on top of being upset, he stares at his parents angrily. The moment is right to strike:

“Look at his face,” the father will sputter, “twisted and contorted with hate.”

My younger sister and I heard this phrase often enough that we both quoted it to each other and laughed about it, back in the years when we were still talking to each other.

To show a face twisted and contorted with hate (isn’t a contorted face always twisted, a twisted one always contorted? Isn’t the overkill of the one two punch a tell?) is different than protesting that your feelings are always dismissed, or calmly stating that as an eight year-old you need to be heard by your parents when you are upset. A face twisted and contorted with hate is the despicable face of a klansman at a lynching, a Nazi, some kind of hate-filled sick fuck who can’t be reasoned with. Certainly not the face of a child who deserves to be heard when he is upset, reassured with kindness.

My father apologized for his abusiveness the last night of his life, and it was good to hear, but the damage had long ago been done. I was close to fifty the first time my father apologized for being a monster as a father. The next evening he was gone.

We are left holding a heavy bag, full of the weighty things our parents were too overwhelmed to carry themselves. It is passed on, endlessly, until someone gets the insight to put the fucking thing down. In that moment she can finally untwist and un-contort her face and feel not a hint of hatred toward those who did their flawed human best to love her.

The Fundamental Terror/Beauty of Life

The most terrifying thing humans are up against is the erasure of our right to exist.   This is why my grandmother used the phrase “screamed bloody murder” so often, why she drank so heavily as she got older, why she got tearful when her vodka-fueled gestures of affection toward us made us uncomfortable.   She had good reason to feel this way, her entire family had no doubt screamed bloody murder, though their screams were drowned out by drums, out of tune brass and drunken catcalls, in the ravine where they all met a nightmare end.

Death is one thing.  We can be philosophical about it, since it is inevitable, but until we find ourself in unbearable, unrelievable pain it is not an option anyone finds palatable.  Life is the precious, irreplaceable thing, and feeling grateful for our place in this ongoing miracle, breathing and loving for the wink of an eye that we exist here.

The most painful thing, as far as I have experienced, is having your feelings erased, contested, fought to the death by people who claim to love you.   It is a pain I recall well from my childhood, it is a pain I revisit every time something I say is met with silence, dismissed, contested, fought to the death.  I don’t want to fight to the death, but many cannot restrain themselves, they must fight to the death, these clueless gladiator fucks.  The alternative is the humiliation of being wrong, admitting imperfection, which is unbearable to this type. 

I can fight as well as any clueless gladiator fuck who has ever come against me with a sword or ax.  I have had to fight, from my earliest memories.  My life has been a long, slow journey away from the need to fight these senseless, idiotic battles with people who profess to love me.  I spent decades learning to control my temper, with some success, although never enough sometimes.  For example, I still suffer from instant Tourettic outbursts whenever I am buggered by technology.

Having a supportive social network is one predictor of longterm health.  Sadly few people have these networks in our modern, corporate world.  There is an epidemic of loneliness in America, which expresses itself in deaths of despair.  If nobody gives a fuck about you, after a while you conclude “what the fuck?” and whatever you must do to answer that question seems legitimate, even if it kills you.

The only antidote to this life threatening isolation is talking to someone who cares.  It is a true horror that so few get this chance to be heard when they need it.

If you have a painful medical procedure and find yourself abandoned by your social network, amid recriminations and expressions of your unworthiness to be loved, your recovery will be slower than if you are visited, checked up on, wished well, sent jokes and funny videos.  As Martin Luther King, Jr. observed “in the end it is not the words of our enemies that we remember, it is the silence of our friends.”  Dig it.

An anguished soul can be a heavy burden to carry from day to day, even for people who love you.  I have to be sensitive to Sekhnet’s frayed nerves and her endless worry for me.  I isolate myself today and tap here, speaking silently to the universe of anyone who may stumble on these words, instead of troubling her.  We all need a day off.

This is where imagination and creativity come in.  I noticed at a very young age that I was closing myself in my room with the intent to set my dismissed feelings out on a page.  My drawings were often disturbing.  My writing was grandiose and rambled, trying to cover every subject in the world at once.  Sixty years on my drawings are often oddly cool, my writing focused and somewhat compressed.

The beauty of writing is that you can go back as many times as you like, comb through ambiguity and weak expression to make your writing as clear and elegant as possible.  A piece of writing is as perfectable as our delicate, malleable human souls. 

The phrase neuroplasticity is used to describe the ability of a pain damaged brain to heal itself.  It doesn’t happen without hard work, but what better work is there, during the wink of an eye we get to participate in this ongoing, if often tragic, miracle?

Tired and disgusted

Some days, today for example, I am too tired and disgusted to write anything of use to anyone, myself included.   These days are part of every life, days when the accumulated weight of psychopathic demands (corporations have feelings too, and millions to pay lobbyists to protect their tender feelings) is just too fucking heavy to shrug off.

On such days, just a few taps, to keep the fingers limber and your mind in the game.  When the library closes in a few minutes I go back to my apartment, now an internet dead zone, on Verizon as it was on T-Mobile, and try not to think of the next step I will have to take to get the service we are paying for.  After some sleep, and the rehab exercises for my replaced knee, I’ll get back on the fucking horse.

“Hello, FCC?  This is Eliot, yes, complaint number blah blah blah”

Thank God there is always some kind of robot to listen.

Morality is not theoretical, it’s practical

In talking there is always the chance of accidentally rescuing a broken friendship. In silence, only the grim certainty of continued death during life, a true shame on both of us, to share the short remainder of this brief moment when we are both alive and waste it in mutual anger.

Given the choice between redemption and condemnation always choose redemption when it is within reach.

If your parents lie to you

If your parents lie to you, you’re fucked, kid

Trust me when I tell you that your parents cannot help lying to you, if they are the kind of parents who tell their children lies.  Liars truly cannot help themselves, except by telling lies.  Whatever actually happened to make them this way is too shameful for them to talk about at all, let alone honestly.  Impossible to share this with children whose love and obedience they desperately need.  A good lie covers that painful, gaping wound, though it comes with a cost.  

The cost to the child is almost incalculable.  It is impossible for a five year-old, a nine year-old, to consider that her parents are lying.  For years the most outrageous lies are taken as true, until such time as the cognitive dissonance in your head makes it impossible not to question the more outrageous lies you’ve been told about yourself. 

When your truth-challenged parents tell you anecdotes to illustrate your terrible fear, when you were tiny, they are telling you about their powerlessness to protect you, to overcome their deep pessimism about anything beautiful coming out of life.   When they tell you that you were a fearful, untrusting, oversensitive little kid plagued by nightmares and hypochondria, that’s as close as they can come to telling you they surrendered, because they couldn’t do any better, because nobody can change, because we’re all already doomed to our fate.   We are already doomed to lie instead of confront anything painful about ourselves, and if you don’t believe it, we got some serious pain for you.

What lesson can a child healthily take from lying parents?   An understanding that nobody lies to someone they love unless they are supremely damaged and live in terror of their shame.  Shame is the motivator of all violence, and lies are a special category of violence, they damage your ability to trust, to perceive reality, to act with integrity based on simple cause and effect.  

You can learn from your lying parents’ inability to be vulnerable, to acknowledge faults in themselves, their mad need to never be wrong, their inclination to punish those who insist on “truth”, not to be like them.

You can understand that the greatest treasure in life is making loved ones comfortable enough with you that they can be vulnerable.   We are all very vulnerable.  Only an asshole can deny this, and they always do. 

Don’t be like them, don’t close your heart to everything but the need to protect yourself at all costs. 

You will be much less unhappy once you can consciously act with integrity, based on real experience in the real world, instead of conforming to a twisted universe of lies.  You never have to confront lying parents about their lies, it is almost always futile (and can expose you to desperate rage), but you have to acknowledge in yourself that you were lied to about essential matters from the time you could form memories.  Then you adjust accordingly, the work of a lifetime, boys and girls.

Superficiality is its own reward

The demons that may descend on you in moments of weakness, the worries that rob you of sleep, the doubts you may harbor about your ability to overcome these things, to ever feel better — a terribly debilitating pack of torments. I’ve known many people who adopt a simple solution for this. It doesn’t work for me, but I try not to judge those who adopt it. It is hard not to judge them, I have to say, but here we go.

Here’s the quick fix: simplify, deny and stick scrupulously to whatever is on the surface of things, the things most easily controlled. All the risk and terrors involved in vulnerability to others and honesty with yourself, swept away at once with a magnificent, unwavering commitment to the superficial. In this world of appearances you can actually, clearly win. Here’s all you have to do:

Have a beautiful home that people will admire. Have a large circle of social friends you can point to as proof that you are well-loved. Have children who willingly do what you tell them to do. Have a well-paying, high-status, job. Dress well, exercise religiously, avoid gaining an excess pound. Allow your charitable work to be publicly honored by your peers. Accept all awards graciously and with modesty. Cut anyone from your life who does not adhere to these simple rules for a good life. Make sure everybody else in your life knows these sick fucks are good and fucking dead and that communication with them will be punished harshly.

The things that torment you at night, that wake you early, in dread? Hide them from everybody, hide them from yourself. Remember, above all else: I am perfect and nobody can see these silly things that torment me and everybody else. There, under the surface of things, be dragons, here, where all is above board, be peace, security and no threat from anyone. Here on top be victory.