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.
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.
“You search for love, that never stops as long as you live, it’s the human condition. If the love you had when you were little was a little crazy, or very crazy, well, that’s going to explain a lot about the rest of your search,” said the Israeli. “You think it’s easy to trust crazy people? But you can’t live without love and you can’t truly love without trust, I can tell you that from my own life.”
“What’s all of a sudden with the fucking Israelis?” asked a second Israeli, no less impatient than the first to be on to his favorite subject.
“I’m trying to explain to him not to feel like a schmoke, him and his beautiful friend over there, I also don’t want her to feel like a schmoke, ” said the first Israeli, “he and his beloved both had very scary starts in the world. She will deny it, turn it into something that made her strong, he will admit it with way too much not always hilarious detail, but basically similar stories. You look for comfort in a hostile world and the person who is giving it to you is a victim twitching with terror, eyes darting nervously, cortisol is being released every two minutes. Children from war zones have this kind of elevated cortisol and adrenalin, programmed with fear as they develop only the most primitive childish theories on how to live without terror.”
“You want to talk about terror?” asked the second Israeli, “I can tell you plenty of stories about terror. In fact…”
The first Israeli cut him off, “I don’t want to talk about terror, we’re talking about love. I mentioned the extreme form of fear only to illustrate a point. Fearful people can act brave, and its an inspiration to the brave among us sometimes, but at the core of their operating system there is fear. Terror is terrifying, everyone knows about that.”
“I’ll tell you about terror,” says the second Israeli, “I have some interesting theories for you about terror.”
“Terror we’ll talk about another time, love is the subject today,” said the first Israeli, undaunted. “Love is the highest feeling there is, connection to another, to others. Love is what every song is about, finding it, losing it, lamenting its loss, getting a second chance, hoping for new love, the redemption of loving and being loved. ‘The greatest thing you’ll ever learn, is just to love, and be loved, in return’ as the strange enchanted boy sings to Nat King Cole.”
“Yes, we can talk about love songs, it’s a nice topic, but they are on their way to Yad Vashem, these two, looking for the lost hamlet where the river split into three branches to the southeast of Pinsk. The place where the angry side of his family was stomped like so many cockroaches. You think they are thinking of love songs, Shmulik?”
“Why do you have to say my name, Doody? We are abstractions, literary devices and you have to pull off the masks like it’s nothing? I don’t understand you, man. Yad Vashem is Yad Vashem, love is love, mixing things is mixing things. You like to mix things, don’t you?”
The second Israeli waved his hand dismissively, “you like to keep things simple. I get it. OK, love is love, we search for love, if we were raised in a fearful house where we were not heard, felt in danger all the time, developed massive defenses, it will be harder for us to move past fear and trust people and give and take love in the comforting way everyone hopes to. Is that a pure enough telling of what you were talking about, Literary Devicesky?”
“You dance so divinely, Doody. Why is it that you have had so many wives?” said the first Israeli.
“Look, Mr. Don’t Mix Things In, now we are suddenly talking about my three wives, only three. Not so many, really. And why are you… eh, never mind. Have you noticed that neither of us has let either of these two get a word in? Not a single word. That’s kind of funny, I think, since they are your guests. I think it’s funny.”
“I don’t know if it’s funny,” said the first Israeli.
“Schmoke,” says the Israeli firmly, with that delicious pronunciation of the Yiddish word schmuck, which comes originally from the German for jewel, but, by reducing the man to his ‘jewel’, his procreative parts, renders him ridiculous, a putz, somebody who should know better, much better, not an idiot exactly, because not stupid, but something worse than an idiot, a kind of schvantz. Which is like calling a dog “a tail”.
“Nu, very interesting, schmoke,” says the Israeli, not interested at all. “People do not buy an idea, no matter how ingenious. You have an ingenious idea, that’s wonderful, mazal tov. We are happy for you, your idea is the idea of a genius. There’s no question, genius idea, wonderful, we love it, honestly, we love the idea. But to sell an idea….” he stretches the phrase out, drawing out “sell”, watching you lean forward. He waits, taking his time, to emphasize his point and to emphasize that he’s a successful salesman talking to a schmoke.
“Fucking Israeli,” you say, but it’s worse than saying nothing, really, because you actually said nothing.
“You do not sell the idea. Only a schmoke thinks you can sell an idea. An idea, it’s like a flavor, a gas, a color, you can’t hold it in your hand, you can’t touch it. An idea you can’t sell. You can only sell the implementation of an idea, the system for delivering some version of the idea. If you don’t realize that by now you have been trying to put together the wrong puzzle, I’m sorry to tell you.”
“Fucking Israeli,” you think, but the guy makes an excellent point. Worse, he knows he makes an excellent point.
“People don’t invest in you because you’ve got a brilliant idea, trust me. They don’t really care about the idea at all until they read about how it’s been put into practice, until some other genius explains, in a prestigious journal, how you managed to take this genius concept and actually put it into practice. Took this amazing thing you imagined and made it real in the world so every idiot could point to it and say– hey, look at that amazing thing! I need that! Think of that schmoke Steve Jobs, the fucking genius Jesus of Technology they are making all these movies about. His idea, I put all your two thousand long-playing records on something so sleek you can fit between the cheeks of your ass, the sound is better than your fancy quadrophonic stereo, I’ll put ten thousand albums on it, I’ll put fifteen thousand albums, and movies too, and a hundred of your photo albums. If he can’t deliver it and make you pay whatever he tells you you have to pay — you never heard of Steve Jobs, I guarantee. I hate that schmoke, personally, but you have to recognize what he did. It wasn’t the ideas themselves, though they were smart ideas, things nobody thought of before, but the way he delivered them.”
He leans forward and pours another round from the bottle on the low glass table. Under the table polished tiles glow in the golden light of the small city holy to three major world religions.
“I don’t call you a schmoke to mock you, please understand. I say it with love, or at least with rachmunis. It’s hard to have integrity in a world like this, OK, almost impossible. You want to live as a man with integrity, better be very rich. If you are very rich, you can have as much integrity as you like. If not, well, I’m very sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, and I know it will not go down smooth, like that scotch you brought over here– and I thank you, it was a wonderful thing to do and I hope you will do it every time you come see me– I’m sorry to break this fartlike news to you– you say ‘breaking wind’ right, it’s a fart?– but the working man has only the integrity of doing his work well. Ideas can be terrific, but they are not the same as work. Work is what you have to do to make your idea real. If you can show me the thing that is in your head, or better yet, have somebody else show it to me, a very beautiful girl delivering perfectly the excellent script you wrote for her, then we can do business.”
“Otherwise,” he looks for a second at the caramel colored liquid catching the light in his glass, “please, don’t waste my time.” He tilts back his glass in the Jerusalem sunset and savors his drink. He closes his eyes, smiles, shakes his head as if he can’t believe it. “Oh, Jesus Christ and Jesus of Technology, this is good whisky and you are a very nice guy, even if you are, also, and I mean this in the best possible way, a complete fucking schmoke.”
What did you think you were going to hear, schmoke?
Corporations are people, you know, our highest court has affirmed this truth, as self-evident as the proposition that all men are created equal. Corporations are just like you and me, endowed by their creators with certain unalienable rights, although skeptical Bill Moyers says he’ll believe corporations are people when the state of Texas puts one to death.
I heard an excellent talk by a man named Yuval Noah Harari describing the ascent of one hominid species, homo sapiens, to dominate the planet. Homo sapiens were not the top predators, far from it. There were many animals who could easily kill and eat homo sapiens, there still are a few. Homo sapiens were bound together by common terrors, and driven by fear and a large brain, came to dominate all the other species on earth, and wipe out many of them on our way to planetary domination.
He compared us to sheep with a nuclear bomb. A truly terrifying and profound comparison. He pointed out that you don’t fear a lion with a nuclear bomb, not that he would ever try to create one, because a lion is not afraid, knows its power, can defend itself without a bomb, but a sheep with a bomb? The top animal in a group of sheep will press the button in a heartbeat when a lion comes too close, the second he runs out of weaker sheep to shove into that lion’s jaws.
Harari also pointed out how homo sapiens are driven by our abstract world view, march forward as societies united by belief in a common myth. He underscored the fluidity of the self-created myths that humans live by. We can turn on a dime, when it comes to the beliefs that drive us. Torture, for example, (although I don’t think he mentioned it), a practice universally reviled as barbaric, quickly becomes acceptable to many once it’s rebranded as something that moral freedom-lovers necessarily use against evil fredom-hating monsters. Harari gave the humorous and horrible example of members of a divinely inspired religion based on peace and brotherhood who obey God by setting on fire those who deny the divinity of the awesome god who has commanded them to be merciful, to love their enemies. We eventually get to an idea like the “Free Market”, another good one.
An empathetic person can see things from another person’s point of view. So let me not be so judgmental about a freedom loving and prosperous people who consider the inadvertent downstream poisoning of impoverished babies in some faraway hellhole, or the wholesale destruction of life-sustaining jungles, “externalities”, the unfortunate but acceptable price of doing business in a “Free Market”. That millions were displaced by a war we started, hundreds of thousands maimed, killed and orphaned on orders from our leaders, who may have honestly believed they were doing the right thing? Regrettable, of course.
Jesus was very judgmental about the injustices of the status quo of his time, and the status quo wasn’t having it, nailed him to a cross, made an example out of him. Few are willing to be made such examples of. I am certainly not hoping to be made such an example of, as I preach quietly to my distracted flock of three or four. Let me, therefore, try to be more empathetic toward the powerful.
Seeing things from a corporate point of view, as our lawmakers are obliged to, things are not so black and white, Mr. Moyers. Really the only thing corporations want is unlimited immunity from the justice-biasing of their profit vectors. If fairness were the only yardstick by which we measured our actions in the world, few great things would ever be done. How many great fortunes were made by people who passionately believed in across the board fairness? Grow up, would you. Life is unfair, get used to it, stop bellyaching about it, move on.
Allowing a justice-bias into the conversation about the Free Market just gums up the works, kills job creation, makes us all less wealthy. Think about it. You can’t spend time (which we all know is money, and therefore, also, free speech) considering every abstraction, after all. And bias of any kind is wrong, as we are reminded constantly. If a very profitable process for extracting a valuable commodity from the earth causes earthquakes, well, a lot of bad shit happens every day. You cannot blame people for wanting a good life. It’s certainly not smart to blame those people too shrilly if they have their finger on the trigger of a nuclear bomb.
Corporations, like people, can be oversensitive too. We all have a limit to what we can take. For the sake of us all, and our prosperity and our freedom, and for the love of God, take a stand against the unfairness of those who would call for the justice-biasing of our profit vectors. The Free Market cannot tolerate such meddling!
Sekhnet’s one-time friend, a likable quack she came to refer to as a ‘caboose’ because of the drag he exerted on the rest of the train, once did astrological charts for her. He did not live by the stars, but had a lifelong interest in them and a fond belief that they held deep secrets for the mortals rushing about below. He did two charts for her; one for her and one for me, her, then, new love.
Each chart was arranged in a circle, like a clock face, or a pie. Sekhnet’s pie was almost completely eaten on one side, solid pie on the other. My chart was the mirror image, wherever she had pie, my tin was empty, where mine was empty, her’s was full.
“These charts show two complementary souls,” he reported happily, “look at how you complete each other! This is the strongest bond you can have with another person.” She was happy to believe this and I smiled to see her so happy. Our bond is, indeed, very strong.
We are, in some fundamental way, like complementary angles, you dig, or properly aligned magnets, or any number of analogues from the world of science. Adding our strengths and weaknesses together forms one very strong, complete composite person, though that person may be a slightly mad one. I have noticed many things that seem to prove this complementary thesis.
Deadlines, for example, which famously trouble people, in part because of their sweaty similarity to death. Sekhnet and I are on opposite ends of the spectrum on these. Though we both complete absolute necessities by the deadline, our approaches are completely different.
I give myself an arbitrary deadline, say 3:00, which, as I glance at the clock now, I see is rapidly coming up. OK, I have thirty minutes and then I must make those calls I’ve been putting off for two, or three, or six weeks. At 2:55 I realize it will be impossible to make those calls by 3:00 and I will generously extend the deadline to a more comfortable 3:30. I feel merciful having done this, and continue whatever else I was doing until… oh, crap, 3:29.
Would 4:00 work better for you? I ask myself. Oh, yes, I answer, relieved, and then we both smile and: 4:00 it is! In the end I put it on the list for tomorrow, with only the smallest pang of regret. This is not the recipe for ambition, I understand, but it is how I tend to do it– unless there is some pressing external reason I must have the thing ready by a certain date and time.
Sekhnet is exactly the opposite. She is tormented every day to know she will meet only a tiny fraction of the hundred deadlines she sets herself every day. She may accomplish several big tasks in a given day, things that have been bothering her, but that is almost never a reason for self-congratulation or relief. When I try to pat her on the back she is not having it. She is quick to point out that she did not accomplish many more tasks, which must now be added to the long list for the following day. When I try to comfort her she will not take comfort, not from someone who hasn’t made any of those two minute calls he wanted to make two months ago.
Reminds me of other stressful situations where I try to reassure her when she becomes anxious. I’ve taken to adding a semi-humorous caveat to my reassurances, it sometimes works very slightly. “Don’t worry,” I urge her, “… said Nearly Headless Nick….” And I put my arm around her, my head lolling slightly to one side, where the neck has been hacked.
Oh, crap! It’s 2:53. I’m late!
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