The young therapist-in-training seemed at a loss when I asked why her supervisor seemingly gave her no advice about a patient who reported no progress week after week on two of the three goals he came into therapy seeking help with.
“But you speak so well, and seem to know exactly what you need to do, and talk very precisely about it, I…..” and her voice trailed off as I looked on, alert, eyebrows sympathetically raised, listening actively with body language showing her I was not shutting her out.
“Ah,” I said, philosophical as always, “that’s the devilish subtlety of it. I can always see another side and even as I feel bad that I cannot, for example, motivate myself to do an amazing thing that perhaps only one in a million people would even dream of doing, I can also reassure myself that it’s cruel to chide myself for not being able to do what perhaps one in a million would attempt to do, on their own.”
I watched the wheels turning in the young therapist’s mind. She was forced to agree.
“You’re a tough nut,” a friend concluded with a tiny chuckle when I told him about the unhelpful dance I do with this psychology student for about 40 minutes every week. His long-ago CBT therapist had eventually found a way to get him to have a good cry. That cry made him feel pain he was then able to release himself from, in an important way. I don’t want to feel that kind of pain, of course.
“Part of what makes you such a tough nut,” said my friend, clapping me on the shoulder and moving our glasses to the sink.
“Makes her the perfect therapist for me, I suppose, she’s not going to make me cry. Something to be said for that.”
“Yep,” said my friend, running some foamy water into our glasses.
The difference between a skilled amateur, content to pursue their talent as a hobby, and a paid professional, who lives by selling their skill and passion, is the ability to make a successful pitch. The pitch must be delivered confidently, smoothly, with grace and music.
Everything rides on it, true, but a winning pitch must move the other person seemingly without sweat or effort. A difficult transition to make without a mentor, from the schoolyard to the pros, fair enough, but one that can theoretically be made. I say this as the croupier eyes me impassively, me and the stack of chips piled precariously on a single spin of the wheel.
I drive from my mind the offer of the high-powered literary agent who, after howling over a complicated horror story only made funny by my telling, assured me she could sell it and get me money to write the book– if I could pitch it just like that. Turns out it was like an offer to give me a half hour comedy special on TV because I’d been funny over dinner. The gig could be mine, provided I crack the execs up with my pitch for the show. The meeting is set up, just go in there and do your stuff, you’ll be great.
“Let’s hear your pitch, we’ve heard good things about you,” says one of the execs, leaning forward with a wolfish smile.
“Knock ’em dead,” I hear my friend’s good luck call as I left to tap dance at the meeting. I’m thinking now that maybe I should have written some material for this meeting. Failing that, it would be nice, I suppose, to just knock them dead, these hungry carnivores.
Let’s start small, I tell myself mercifully. There’s a website I’ve just heard of that will pay a neat, symbolic sum, a week’s spending money, for short, tight pieces of human interest. Pitch the guy, here’s his email address, tell him you know me.
A practice pitch, then, before I get back to work on my larger pitches, the one to the Department of Education, the one to the Childrens’ Hospitals, the one to recruit someone to deliver the winning pitch to the Department of Education and the Children’s Hospitals. I can’t do it alone, after all, I’ve learned that much, and going forward I will need partners in any case. A single smart well-spoken ally would be a game changer, someone excited about the idea of kids who are rarely given a chance getting a chance to be producers, artists, technicians, stars.
Dream on, baby, but first pitch this 1,000 word piece to get on the score board, something to build on. A solid single, up the middle, maybe another base hit later in the game before the walk-offs start later in the season.
Hello. I am an old friend of so and so who sent me to your excellent site which I browsed with great interest. Here is a pitch for a piece I’d like to write for you:
Too abrupt? Too blunt? Too long? Too short? Wait, wait, it’s not done.
The View from My Father’s Death Bed (why not start with that old chestnut?)
My father was smart, funny and brutal. The brutality came from his upbringing. My sister named him the D.U., the Dreaded Unit, and the name was fair. He felt kind of flattered by it, often signed his notes “The D.U.”. Our family dinner table was a war zone, each against all, which always struck me as a bit crazy. My periodic attempts to broker peace deals were angrily rebuffed, I was a combatant, not a diplomat, after all. The impasse continued for decades until I entered my father’s hospital room where he was quickly dying from undiagnosed liver cancer. My need to forgive the poor devil met his need to tell me how sorry he was, to be forgiven. The final conversation was a gift to us both.
Fucking heartwarming, no? Who could resist it? Like that colorful slide show, seasoned with kids’ faces, hands and voices, touting all the great benefits children take away from being listened to carefully, encouraged, put in charge of the wild productions they dream up. Pitch that shit to the right person, baby, they could not resist it!
Knock ’em dead, man!
I have a snapshot that captures the relationship of my younger sister and my mother, near the end. They are looking past each other. The older woman wearing a long skirt, a cane in her hand, looks toward the photographer; the younger one turned slightly away, her face showing a bit of the exasperation she is fighting off. They had ongoing battles over the years, as many mothers and daughters do, but as their roles slowly reversed, my sister becoming more and more the caregiver as our mother’s 24 year death from endometrial cancer progressed, some hard edges were rounded off their conflicts. I could show you the photograph, if not for invading the privacy of the individuals depicted. A little background, instead.
My sister named our father “The D.U.”, The Dreaded Unit. The name was apt, my father was able to convey his dreaded aspect with nothing more than a withering facial expression, no words necessary, though he was quick and deadly with a word or phrase too. My sister once reported an answering machine message from the D.U., the mere tone of his voice making her want to rip her ears off so she could stop hearing it. Our mother loved and always defended the D.U. and, after his passing, took on the name for herself in her last five years.
“Of the two of them, she’s by far the more dreaded,” my sister always said. I had the opposite experience, but I knew what she was saying, from her point of view, and watched their struggles with sadness.
My sister lived a mile or two from our mother and looked in on her often, took her to doctors, had her mother take her and the kids out to dinner once in a while. Each resented the other’s ingratitude, and complained of it to me from time to time, swearing me to secrecy. Any decent mediator could have helped them resolve the most fundamental issues between them, but both refused to consider it, for the same reason: the other was too stubborn and would never agree to it.
“She’s cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs,” my sister told me often, citing the most recent example of our mother’s supposed slide into dementia. My mother had a variation on this for her daughter. During my visits I never found my mother in the least bit demented, though she sometimes mis-spoke.
“I can’t stand it in this hotel anymore!” she declared one day from her bedroom in her apartment, not long before she died. I looked over at the guy who cleaned for her and took her shopping and said “well, we can fire the bellhop,” and he smiled, “but this is your home, mom, it’s not a hotel.”
“I know, I know,” she said, annoyed “I can’t even talk any more…” The sad fact was, she didn’t have many friends left to talk with. When a group of women from the hospice came, days before her death, I heard laughter coming from the bedroom. “One thing for sure, your mother is not demented,” said one of the women as she came out of the bedroom, a big smile still on her face.
The New York Times published a piece by a woman who went to visit her mother, toward the end of her mother’s life. The two had always had a very contentious relationship and the daughter set off on the visit with trepidation. When she arrived she found that her mother, her dementia fairly advanced, did not know who she was. She was surprised at the happy greeting she received. As heartbreaking as she found the situation it soon emerged that her mother mistook her for a long lost friend, or maybe a beloved sister, and they had a wonderful weekend together. It was like old friends meeting for the first time after a forgotten lifetime.
I gave the lovely piece to my mother to read on the plane as we flew from Florida to New York for her last visit. My mother liked it very much, and I’m sad that I never got it back from her to pass on to my sister, she might have gleaned some insight from it.
The piece disappeared like many other things when my mother died, like a life, finally whole, studied, and appreciated, and existing now only as lessons, digested and undigested.
Here we go again, goddamn it, tap tap tap like a blind man here at the keyboard instead of picking up the phone and being in contact with other humans, like my wonderful nephew or my very cool niece, instead of going visiting, renewing ties with living, breathing creatures.
Although here on the blank page, things can be set out and pondered in a way that is rare when we sit with others, listening, waiting, thinking we know what they are not hearing, hearing what they are, possibly, not saying.
“I thought that piece about the ticking time bomb was another screed against Dick Cheney, the personification of evil, I just couldn’t take another one….”
“Was it about Cheney?”
“No, not really, but the opening made me think it would be.”
“Ah-HAH…”
Expectations. There is what there is and what we think there is. More precisely, what we feel there is. Our thoughts and expectations are influenced by our emotions, obviously. There is no truth-based reason for general optimism or general pessimism, these are features of general mood. Genetic, perhaps, a tendency toward the major key or the minor key. Me, I steeped myself in the blues, a five note minor key, that music is in my soul. The major key, often considered happy and optimistic, set against the sadder minor scales, always gave me an uncomfortable shudder of church.
The church, to me, in the abstract, an institution that long sanctioned the mistreatment of my kind. Bad-smelling incense, a super-wealthy institution that tolerates terrible crimes against the most helpless of its own innocents, using shameless threats about God to shame the victims into silence. And let us not mention the swords wielded and oceans of blood spilled in the name of the Prince of Peace. “What you do to the least of us you do to ME!” warned Jesus. The fighting popes had infallible reasons why Jesus didn’t really mean this, skewering the least of us, disemboweling and plundering in the name of Christendom.
“You mean, I’m sure, to exempt from this merciless portrait of Christianity hundreds of millions of good, kind, generous Christians who take the proper lesson from the life and teachings of Jesus.”
Yes, thank you, of course. I certainly do– along with a few billion fine Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists too, and everyone else who practices their religion for the right reasons. The righteous of all nations have a share of the world to come, no doubt. I’m painting with a broad, savage brush today, but it doesn’t change the larger truth. Most people in the world are decent people, most religious people are humble and good in their practice.
The hellishness of the world was set out brilliantly in Catch 22, the concept of Catch 22. You can get out of the army if you’re crazy. Plain, clear, merciful. There is one small caveat, Catch 22. If you can prove that you actually are crazy — wanting to leave the army shows that you are actually not crazy, therefore, in the army you will stay. Catch-uh 22! This merciless catch sums up the world of men as well as any single concept.
The precepts of the church are mercy, charity, peace, gentle practices, service, devotion, loving our neighbors, even our enemies, but those precepts do not always translate into following the way of Jesus. Unscrupulous religious demagogues have always carved out exceptions to Jesus’s love edict for those neighbors who hate our freedom, disagree on any significant aspect of our Christian belief (a sect of religious Christians once fought a hundred year war against another over whose love of Jesus was set out the right way), for people who insist they were born homosexual, or those who shrilly try to hold the church accountable for life-altering crimes against children, or blah blah blah.
“Oh! Taking a stand against the institutionalized hypocrisy of the worst of the Church on a Sunday! Very bold.”
No, that’s not my goal today. I give the example to show how mood colors our interpretation of the world. Everything I’ve written above is true, even if not the entire picture. Does it cancel out the comfort widows and orphans have always taken from the church? The deep Christian faith that sustained American slaves generation after generation?
“Why do you have to bring slavery into it, pantload?”
Because Christianity was indispensable to ‘the Peculiar Institution’, as you know.
“Jeez, you’re in a mood today….”
One slave ship captain had a revelation as he was steering another ship full of captured Africans across the murderous Middle Passage to lives of almost unceasing torment. According to the story he turned the boat around, released all the prisoners, got out of the human trafficking business. He wrote Amazing Grace, the hymn about God saving a wretch like him. One of the most popular hymns around, they probably sang it at Klan rallies too.
“They didn’t sing it at fucking Klan rallies! Have you no decency?! What the hell are you on about?”
Catch-22.
“The thing you need to do is shave, shower, go outside and visit a sick person. Put on a clown nose and cheer up a dying child in a cancer ward. Go find homes for one or two of those adorable, doomed little kittens. Spread some goddamned joy, instead of ruminating on the horrors of the church. The horrors of the church, the horrors of the church… Jesus, how goddamned original….”
Catch-22– the things that would help my mood the most today, my mood prevents me from doing.
Suddenly, in my head is the Temptations great version of “I Can’t Get Next to You”, one of the greatest tracks ever spun on a piece of vinyl. I can turn the grey sky blue-uh, I can make it rain, whenever I want it to… but the things I want to do the most, I’m unable to do.
“Unable, or unwilling?”
You clearly know nothing of my work.
This afternoon, at a loss for anything better to do, and having written that piece referencing Cheney that activated Sekhnet’s PTSD and made her cry one sentence in (where I stopped), I found myself sitting in the universal pose of resigned inaction, head in hands. My few chores done and a futile attempt at a restorative nap aborted, I sat wearily at my desk near the window overlooking Sekhnet’s farm and my head sank into my hands. I sat that way for a long moment. The symbolism of this posture dawning on me, I lifted my head, opened this computer and resolutely tapped out a few hundred words that disentangled some tendrils, put it about as well as I can.
It was a different kind of post than most of these and it felt like a good day’s work. Writing it put my thoughts and feelings in order, explained some things I was hard pressed to understand or express and salvaged an otherwise fairly bleak and low-energy day for me.
Sekhnet and I went shopping and after the long trip I opened the blahg to read it to her. There was no sign of the new piece anywhere, not in drafts, not in the trash. “Head in Hands” does not exist, I was informed. I was sure I’d hit publish, I’d definitely selected the categories, which appear below this post now, which I have already saved now three times. It was hard to believe I had never even once saved the draft. I hadn’t shut off the computer or logged out of WordPress, yet, no trace of the ninety minutes of writing.
Seeing it wiped away at the moment I was going to read it to Sekhnet I felt panic and then rage, at once it became the most profound thing I’d ever managed to write, of course, being now irretrievably lost. In despair I realized how impossible it would be to recreate the integrity of the piece, whatever music it had contained. It took all I had not to scream or smash something. Sekhnet was sympathetic, immediately reminded me I should always save my work, no matter what, we’ve both learned the hard way, blah blah blah, helpful advice I couldn’t listen to. 850 something posts on this blahg with no hitch that I can recall, maybe one. Fitting reward at the end of a day I dragged myself through, to have some of my best work wiped away without a fucking trace and for no explainable reason. I went outside and stalked for a mile.
I’d started off wondering if dysthymia had me by the neck lately and posted a link to a wiki describing the condition. I compared the inevitable hopeless feeling to music, the depressed theme striking a familiar chord, persistent fatigue providing the bass, empty stretches of senseless inaction like a sad string section, the dulled, receding emotions forming amusical harmonies to a background music as pervasive and hideous as the sickeningly effective ad jingle that plays involuntarily in your head.
I mused about the genetic component of dysthymia and described my mother setting out for work every day, carrying dysphoria on her shoulders, working all day, coming home on the train, cooking us dinner, watching TV, reading, looking forward to the emotional release of the opera Live from the Met that throbbed from the stereo every Sunday (it may have been every Saturday). She became tearful easily, was often angry, over-ate, reported feeling blue when she was alone, though she was always convivial and had a good sense of humor in company.
I spent hours alone in the basement, listening to blues records, the same sides over and over, playing along on an acoustic guitar, learning the ropes. Friends came and went, I never questioned their qualifications or motives. I enjoyed interacting with them, cherish a few of them still, but probably spent much more time by myself than in their company. When alone I worked in one expressive medium or another, it always seemed important to me to express myself well. I follow the same practice now.
This tendency to isolation is quite possibly a symptom of dysthymia, a diagnosis I dismissed, a hazy condition easily waved off because it lacks the sharp drama of a scary depression, or a rising anxious terror, or the wild mania that will land one in the Emergency Room. The proclivity to oversensitivity and introspection could also be called part of an artistic temperament, I suppose, but that temperament famously comes at a steep price.
I was considering, in far less words than this, that I should probably go off to work every day, or at least several times a week. Any work, meaningful or not is not important, the main thing is to keep oneself busy. This is universal therapy practiced by most people in the world and much mischief and violence are the result of enforced idleness, too much time on one’s hands. Working people have routines and stay busy, the validation they get from doing their jobs well is part of what makes their lives make sense to them, makes them feel productive. At the end of the day they have a good reason to be tired, to relax and unwind, and they have to be ready to get up for work early the next day so too much emotional heavy lifting is out of the question.
Unlimited time to ponder and imagine is not a good thing in the long run. It is difficult, maybe impossible, to sustain vital creativity in isolation anyway. Creativity is intended to be shared, it’s collaborative by its nature. You may sometimes create fine work, hone it to a great smoothness and clarity, provoke thoughts and feelings in a unique way, but such work, done primarily for yourself, has an element of madness to it, is not complete as expression until it is received by another. It is necessary to find a partner or two, it seems to me, if the work is going to have real meaning and resilience. Things I write here for a small handful of readers, sometimes true things, at times elusive but obvious when pinned down, a good in and of itself. But in another sense: what the fuck?
I noted that with no warning, today, I find myself again in that hot August night outside Vishnevitz, the tortured little town where we’d been forced to fence ourselves into a crowded quarter six months earlier, using barbed wire, splintered boards, chicken wire, plaster. They’d forced us to pay for it too, with money we needed for food and medicine, and now had finally marched those of us who survived to the side of the ravine, my tiny nephews and nieces walking at the unnatural pace of the feeble, hobbling elders I’d assisted up the road.
This forced march was supervised by our neighbors, people who cursed their difficult lives and had for centuries looked with superstitious ignorance for someone to take it out on, to make pay. These captive fellow citizens of Vishnevitz had been ordered to murder by conscripted German men brainwashed by a madman in a society conditioned by generations of militarism, conformity and war. The Ukranians collaborated gladly, having the chance to freely pour out the hatred and humiliation that had been boiling in them for generations.
They made the night stink with their drunken anti-Semitic songs and their infernal banging to cover the groans and cries. I tried not to look at them, what was the point? There was nothing to say. Why give them the satisfaction? Humans, these were not exactly that. The deadly play was written in blood and shit by people who hated themselves, murderers.
“Goddamn it Vasily, I hate this fucking life, I curse my goddamned mother for bringing me into this fucking life, Vasily. Give me the goddamned vodka, Vashke, and we’ll do what we have to do. Fooh! It tastes like your stinking spit, Vasily. That’s OK. It’s good. Let us do what we came here to do to these fucking kykes, OK.”
There was no point to run, nowhere to go and the old people and the children couldn’t run anyway, there was nothing to be done, no expression to even have on your face. Running would only provide a moment of challenge and excitement for these reptiles, and they have excellent depth perception and three dimensional vision, reptiles. I said nothing, my face two eyes, a nose and a mouth. I flattened myself into two dimensions, both eyes on one side of my profile, fuck you, reptile.
Why invent the time machine for this particular trip, I cannot say. Pessimism is wrong, nothing good can come from it. It is not always right to be optimistic, of course, but hope is a better mistake than hopelessness. In a world of miracles and atrocities there comes a time to simply sit with your head in your hands sometimes. It just is what it is, as they say and, as I did not make the world, I just live in it, for whatever time I am given.
One of the great bullshit hypotheticals, used to justify medieval barbarity that is both immoral and useless: the ticking time bomb scenario. In this fantasy you have captured the insane fanatic who’s planted a powerful bomb somewhere where it will imminently kill thousands. Make it a dirty bomb, or a suitcase nuke, even better, poised to take out two million innocent citizens in a major city. You have the undeniably guilty guy, handcuffed to a chair, smirking, the bomb ticking away somewhere: what do you do? You spend five seconds consulting your lawyers, who nod grimly and turn away, and then you do whatever it takes to get the insane fanatic to tell you where the bomb is hidden.
Of course, if it’s planted in Grand Central Station he’ll tell you St. Patrick’s Cathedral, send you up to the Bronx where the President, the Pope and dignitaries of all nations are visiting Poe Cottage. It’s such a bullshit scenario it’s not even worth thinking about– if the guy is ready to die for what he believes is his cause, and knows the bomb is set to go off in twenty minutes, what’s his motivation to tell you the truth just because you’ve attached electrodes to his testicles? The real terror of torture is that it will be endless. Most fanatics can take twenty minutes of the worst you can dish out standing on their heads, naked in an icy room full of hissing snakes.
The real ticking time bomb is us, our lives. Not that we’re going to explode, necessarily, the end, in the words of an immortal anti-Semitic poet, is as likely a whimper as a bang, but our personal extinction is certain. That suspicious mole on my left leg just above the knee? Too bad you didn’t have it looked at six months ago, the dermatologist will say, we could have saved the leg, your life. Melanoma is treatable when it first appears– now you’d better start going through that mass of papers in your apartment, there may be time for a cruise with Sekhnet, if you schedule it today and make it a short one.
A week stealthily turns into three weeks, to a month of Sundays, to the limit of human endurance. Your great idea, the unwritten novel, the memoir…. pffffft. For some the certainty of an unknowable end drives them to make the most of every moment. For others, the vague dread causes them to steer as far from the heart of it as they can. If I do not think about my death, well, maybe… oh, you know, I’d better stay busy!
I listened to another interview with a famous writer yesterday. They very matter of factly discussed the prolific author’s bouts of depression, uncertainty, paralysis. The lot of every creative, introspective person, it would appear– a certain amount of torment and self-doubt. Most creative people are troubled, it seems, the greatest comedians are often tortured souls. Are you surprised when a great poet puts her head in the oven? The only surprise is the lack of a farewell note. Not to bring up a sore subject, but, Bill Cosby, at the height of his fame, when he was a handsome rock star with a killer wit who could have any woman in the world, and in the years that followed, preferred his women unconscious. I mean… what?
The trick, I suppose, when trying to ride this impossibly high horse– the view from which often makes old friends invisible, they can’t be expected to understand the things that drive someone to practice arts they do not even try to sell– is to maintain a kindness toward oneself, toward the world. Remain interested in others, be mild, do not complain, do not raise the lash over your own back for failures to move an impossibly heavy boulder endlessly up an endless hill.
The clock is ticking, true, but it ticks in any case. Set reasonable goals, take human bites. The clock may well run out on you, as it does on us all, but succumbing to the pressure of the relentless ticking… as good an option as futilely torturing that sick fuck in the chair who smiles as you slice at him. He ain’t telling you where the goddamn bomb is, Dick, no matter what your lawyers tell you about the tortured legality of the unspeakable things you are doing to him.
My father grew up in an orthodox Jewish home, in ‘grinding poverty’, as he always phrased it. My mother’s cousin, whose family moved many times during the Depression to get a free month’s rent here and there, told me a few years ago “we were poor, but your father’s family was really poor.” I don’t doubt my father’s childhood was a nightmare. He was still clawing his way through it on his deathbed in a Florida hospital seven decades later.
His tyrannical, violent mother was the religious one. I don’t know that his father particularly cared one way or the other, though he swept the synagogue for a dollar or two a week. My paternal grandfather was described to me as eternally deadpan; his face simply two eyes, a nose and a mouth. My father’s mother would give generously to the synagogue, even though they had almost nothing themselves. Nobody there was in any position to question this practice.
My father became less and less religious over the years. Bacon started being cooked in the house at some point during my childhood (he didn’t eat it) and eventually, and much to my disappointment, somehow, he tasted pork in a Chinese restaurant. He liked it, though, to my knowledge he only did this once. Growing up we’d hear: I’m so hungry I could eat ham! Something he got from his days in the army when Corporal Israel ate side dishes at meals of ham. Like many modern American Jews, he took the High Holidays seriously, bought his expensive ticket and sat and stood and sat (“please be seated”) and stood (“please rise”) all day at the services I found so hypocritical and meaningless.
My mother had no use for religion, although she proudly identified as a cultural Jew, could not have been mistaken for anything else, really, except, maybe, ethnic Italian. My sister and I stayed out of the synagogue too, for the most part, after experiences there that probably turned off many to the rituals of our ancient religion. I often said my experience at Hillcrest Jewish Center Hebrew School turned me into an anti-Semite, though that’s an overstatement for effect. The heart of religion is good. I’d have to think the heart of every religion is. The practice is where the trouble generally comes in.
I have a few friends who take deep comfort from the rituals of religion; I don’t. I cannot look past the dark side, the crimes and bloodshed so many avowedly religious people take part in, with the monomaniacal self-righteousness that comes from believing God smiles on their horrible acts. The examples are too well known to require any listing here. But the experience of wonder, of gratefulness for the many gifts of this world, the impulse to create, to be gentle, to laugh, to share, to care, to repair what is in need of fixing, all these are encompassed by most religious teachings.
The religious background I had was Judaism and my values were informed by its stories. There are two Jewish holidays I find very meaningful and that have shaped my life to a great extent. One is Passover, the holiday that commemorates the eternally incomplete journey from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the world. A Jew is commanded to retell the story at the seder, an ordered meal that sets out a template for the discussion of values. This was always a serious discussion in my childhood home, as it is at the seder Sekhnet and I now attend every year. The value expressed is realizing there is no difference between the children of the rich and the children of the poor and oppressed.
We are encouraged to take the lesson of our people’s persecution to heart: to identify with the stranger, the other, the underdog, the slave, the oppressed, and reaffirm our commitment to fighting for justice for everyone. I find this holiday very meaningful and important. It has probably influenced me more than it should have, I haven’t separated out the symbolism to the extent most practical people do.
The other holiday I find profound and valuable is the New Year tradition of seeking forgiveness and releasing others from our anger. We are commanded to make amends with those we’ve injured in the past year during the ten days of repentance, between New Year’s Eve and Yom Kippur, when our fate for the coming year is metaphorically sealed by our imaginary protector with the long beard, the Creator, blessed be He, who created everything miraculous and, because he is all merciful, left humans to figure out what to do about the Hitlers, Stalins, Pol Pots, Cheneys, the raping priests and bloodthirsty preachers.
The blessings are all from God, the man upstairs; the curses of mankind, as theodicy concludes, are all the result of humans’ misuse of the free will generously bestowed by the Holy Name. Yeah, yeah. Fuck all that shit. The part that interests me is the tradition of righting our psychic accounts at this time of year. We are supposed to honestly search our lives over the past year for times we have behaved badly, acted wrongly, hurt others. It is our duty to humbly seek to make things better, to apologize, forgive, offer peace instead of further bad karma. Prayer and good intentions won’t do it, we have to humbly approach humans and keep our vows to act better.
It is far easier to see the harms others have done to us than to take an honest inventory of our own hurtful actions and cruel inactions. I see this more clearly every year as I ponder. Also, how hard it is to forgive the unrepentant, even as I am challenged to sincerely repent for things I’ve done that I can’t imagine were as hurtful as they may well have been.
I always think of one Yom Kippur when I went, as usual, to meet my father outside the synagogue after a long day of fasting and services, everybody ashen faced and bad-breathed, trudging off in the gathering darkness with quick, tottering steps to break their day-long fast. I walked down there as services were getting out, met him and we walked back home, less than a half a mile along Union Turnpike in Queens. I had a long list of bad things my father had done and would never apologize for, including many terrible failures that had undermined my sister and me over the years, but I’d formulated it as one thing I needed to put on the table. I’m sure I’ve written out this story before, but I’ll offer the fast version of it here.
I am reminded of this because my closest friend, a very good man, about the best man you can imagine, has too much pain from his mother’s long betrayals to find it in his heart to truly forgive her for her considerable limitations. I don’t hammer at it often, though I’ve brought it up over the years, he will be gentle with her as she lays dying, there is no doubt, and it is a shame the healing won’t start until then. Life is a very painful matter sometimes.
Anyway, the particular Yom Kippur I’m describing my mother was putting the finishing touches on some no doubt delicious dinner and I sat across from my father in the living room. I had fasted, as I always do on Yom Kippur, not in fear of God, if there is such a thing, but because it is a good practice, and I always think I should do it more than that one day a year. If we never feel hungry how do we remember what it is that much of the world experiences every day?
My father was a brilliant, adroit and witty man. He used these skills brutally much of the time. His humor had a sting to it, more often than not. His skills in constructing arguments were used to build impregnable walls around his vulnerable childish heart. He regretted these things on his death bed. But walking back from the shul that Yom Kippur he was silent as a sphinx, cautious, waiting to defend himself against anything I might say.
What I said when we sat in the living room in the little house I grew up in was that I was glad to hear his fatherly advice, provided he stopped using it as a delivery system for his hostility. I would no longer tolerate being reduced to the sum of my faults while listening to the harsh things “your friends are too spineless to tell you.” Whether my friends had spines or not, I needed to be treated respectfully by my angry father. I told him if this did not happen we would no longer have the pretense of a relationship. I reminded him of my many attempts to make peace with him and he fought as hard as he could not to give a millimeter. I was determined, and undeterred, and in the end he agreed that he would try to do better. We broke the fast.
“That’s what you have to do with a bully,” my friend would agree, “be direct, do not back down, do not give in to fear or anger. Keep pushing the fucker back, it is the only thing a bully understands. Good for you.” So, for the next fifteen years or so my father and I had a superficially better relationship.
At the end of that fifteen years he revealed, during an argument in which he was for the first time overmatched, that he’d only pretended to change his feelings toward me, that if he ever told me what he really felt it would do “irreparable harm” to our relationship. Checkmate, Dad, have it your way, you win. And for the last two years, as unbeknownst to both of us he was steadily dying from undiagnosed liver cancer, we kept things cooly superficial. In the meantime I realized how damaged he was, and that he could not do any better, that it was up to me to make some kind of peace with it. I made some kind of peace with it, lucky for both of us it was a couple of months before he started actively nosediving toward death.
As he was dying, of course, he lamented his lifelong inability to be truly open to people, to experience real intimacy, to express love. “I wish we could have had this kind of conversation fifteen years ago,” he said weakly toward the end of the last conversation of his life, “but I was just too fucked up. It’s my fault, I felt you reaching out to me many times over the years…”. I recall thinking at the time what a modest and pathetic wish that was– thirty-five years of senseless war and fifteen years of peace.
Of course, I’d take it now, fifteen years, five years, one year, a week, another 24 hours. There is not time enough to heal certain wounds and it is an uncertain process at best. We are all left to heal ourselves, as best we can, and to stay open and caring to those who share our best hopes for a good world. There is no time to struggle with drowning souls determined to take us with them to the nightmare depths as they irrationally defend their right to drag us with them, but the time for healing– very important time.
There is no shortage of irony here.
I am striving to bring interactive creativity and fun into places where these things are spoken of highly but rarely practiced; myself, creative, yes, but not having much fun.
The program I’ve already implemented is capable of injecting some encouraging news into the depressing discussion of American education, the non-discussion of real participatory democracy; I am a marginal participant not actively discussing the issue with anyone who cares.
The program is therapeutic, I saw haggard women with chronic disease transformed into laughing girls at the end of our sessions; it gratified me, but, burdened with logistics, I was not laughing with them.
I’ve solved dozens of logistical and psychological problems so far, though some very large, possibly insoluble, ones remain. With the best of intentions, as I try to maintain my focus on promoting this inclusive, participatory program, I have somehow become a kind of hanging judge.
Nuance has become harder for me to discern; holding multiple truths in mind, and choosing the one that casts the best light– not always possible. I listen to the prosecutor making his relentless case, nod my unsmiling head. Fine, I think, give the guy the chair, let the Court of Appeals worry about it, there are many worse tragedies happening everywhere. Bang the gavel, next case.
I’m not always able to refrain from doing what was so hateful to me watching my father do it: reducing a person to the sum of his faults. We are flawed, all of us, and gracefully accepting the flaws of others is an important part of being a decent person. Whipping a fucking goat? Really? I take pride in not being the sort of person who inflicts harm, particularly on those with limitations. Lately I couldn’t rest until I’d given a particular animal a hard kick in the ribs. The thing was perhaps less than perfectly thoughtful, or even characteristically oblivious, but in either case, why the need to kick it?
The seventh stage of Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development is called Generativity vs. Stagnation. Being productive, successful and involved in the world during the middle and later stages of adulthood versus being isolated and removed from the world, dogged by feelings of failure and hopelessness. The eighth and final stage, Integrity vs. Despair, takes place at the end of life, looking back, when one feels satisfied at a life well and authentically lived or is bitter and full of regrets.
I embarked on a project of encouraging expression, using free play as an educational strategy. I undertook this ambitious project knowing nothing about how to plan and build a business, how to run an HR department, how to secure funding to hire professionals needed for several live or die jobs. I have no connections or friends who can fill these gaps.
The program is a success, as far as implementing it in five minutes anywhere, as far as how easily it does what it purports to do. The student-run workshop vindicated my best hopes for how it would work. The creativity and competencies of young kids, and ailing adult women, for that matter, exceeded my expectations. Yet, not having a network of people in a position to participate productively… so far enforced stagnation.
Those who don’t understand what I am striving for, or who take no interest in it, who now quite sensibly avoid the subject, I can’t help thinking of as partial jerks, even as I know I have only a passing interest in all the details of their working lives. I was surprised and touched when a hard-working friend took a few moments to enquire about the progress of my program a couple of months ago. I told him the program itself, curriculum and all, works smoothly and wonderfully wherever we’ve done it, and that now I am focused on packaging, promoting and selling it.
I described my initial hope– that kids would work together to produce original animation in a workshop setup where adults would set things in motion and step back as children learn and teach each other. This big taste of autonomy fosters students’ confidence, brings out peer-mentoring and leadership skills. It has happened quickly every place we’ve done the workshop, about a hundred times so far.
Now that the program itself works smoothly, I told my friend, I am wrestling with the crucial tasks of packaging and promoting it. I told him I’m optimistic that someone in di Blasio’s administration would be quite interested in the presentation that I have recently put together, that is just about ready to roll.
He told me he now understands the important goals I set for the program, the workshop’s many great applications. He said he was impressed by how well thought out it was, acknowledged the tremendous amount of work I’d done and the ingeniously simple design of the program. He wished me success, strength to my arm and told me he agreed that di Blasio’s people would be very interested in a program capable of producing a cadre of peer-teachers entering Middle School.
This reaction was as wonderful as it was rare. We have but one measure of success in our society and until friends read about the program in a NY Times piece, or hear a well-crafted moment about it on NPR, it is a dream I am dreaming alone as I sleep my fitful sleep.
One more note in the polyphony of my imperfect sleep: my attempts to avoid bitterness in old age seem ironic to me much of the time these days. These attempts are hampered by the difficulty of living by words I have written on pages many times with various calligraphy pens, words I must inscribe in my heart as I find ways to become more actively and productively involved in the world: cultivate mindful empathy. Everybody we encounter is fighting a hard battle against killer odds. Just because somebody almost never keeps their word, for example, is no reason to write off the rest of their virtues.
Now, if you will excuse me, there are some kittens in the garden I have to go be sarcastic to.
“Did it occur to you that this person you refer to as a ‘goat’ may have performed a great act of friendship by calling to say he wouldn’t be an obstacle to your spending a day with two old friends at the beach? Do you get that maybe it was hard for him to do, that he was trying to be considerate and not irritating? Isn’t it possible that you are the merciless, passive aggressive bastard and not him?”
“Yeah,” I said, leaving every muscle in my face exactly where it was before the question.
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