Category Archives: writing

End of the line

I’ve had this kind of conversation before. Every time it is the saddest imaginable conversation, because at the end, in spite of great affection, both parties will be dead to each other. Alive and walking around in the world, and doing acts of kindness, and trying to be the best they can be, and dead to each other.

We don’t come to this kind of final conversation lightly. First of all, we have to care enough about the other person to extend them the final chance to avoid our mutual deaths. The average jerk who acts like a jerk and hurts us in a jerky fashion does not get this kind of final discussion. We just write them off, smile when we see them and avoid anything of consequence with them. But with people we deeply care about, who have deeply hurt us, it sometimes comes to this final conversation.

Personally, I tend to avoid starting these conversations once I’m fully aware of the hideous terrain we are both stuck in. Once the other party insists that nothing you have said changes anything, you are pretty much done. Words at that point have no ability to change the emotional reality that makes it impossible for us to continue as friends. In fact, if you express yourself clearly you are only making the wound deeper by seeming to blame the other person for being heartless, clueless, unforgiving, unyielding, rigid, needy, childish, etc.

The outline of this talk is always the same. The person calling will say they love you, that they have taken about all that they can take, that they have tried their best to be your friend and give you what you need but nothing they have done has been enough for you. They will place it on you, pronouncing the final death.

After all the aggravation, the soul searching, the health threatening stress of trying to find a mutual solution with somebody who is unable to overcome their righteous anger, their inability to forgive, words are of limited use. That said, it is good to remain honest until the end.

Trust me, you will get no acknowledgment of your honesty, and truly it means nothing in that moment. But you remain true to yourself by not pretending that all of your hard work has produced any tangible result. It is time to put down the cadaver of an old friendship you were carrying, alone, in hopes of a miracle.

I find that at the very end of these talks sometimes a last precisely calibrated insult can be very helpful in allowing your dear friend to permanently write you out of their life. At that moment, it is the least you can do by way of mercy.

What it means to be unforgiving

Being unforgiving means you cannot let go of your hurt and anger, even after someone does their best to make amends. Even when someone expresses sincere regret for their harmful actions and humbly asks for your forgiveness, you can’t forgive.

This kind of angry person, who tends to live in a zero sum world of winners and losers, cannot forgive themselves, cannot calm themselves when they’re upset, have not learned to sit with strong, painful emotions and wait until they are calmer to try to resolve a conflict. Unregulated anger is destructive, it arises from pre-verbal fears and shame and it extends to an inability to forgive.

Holding on to anger is a maladaptive way to try to feel righteous and superior. This type, with its unhealthy bent toward indignation and rage, is clueless about how to resolve conflicts with others and within themselves.

When you think about it, it’s pretty clear that you have no obligation to forgive someone who hurts you and blames you entirely for making them hurt you. When no apology is offered, hurtful behavior is never acknowledged, your obligation to forgive disappears. That is not being unforgiving, it’s health, common sense and what’s best for yourself and other people that you love.

Those who can’t forgive, no matter what? Dangerous, wounded, supremely destructive motherfuckers. We might well feel very sorry for them, if we care about them, but not being able to forgive their eternal blaming anger does not make us unforgiving.

This type will force her mate to kill his best friends, and her mate will do it because he feels he has no choice but to become enraged at his best friends and kill them. Otherwise he will be derided forever as a contemptible weakling. The alligator he is wrestling with will point toward his more sympathetic friends and tell him that they are the vicious alligators and if he doesn’t fight them to the death he’s a pussy.

As long as he stays angry, he will never have to to be tormented by his own immature, self-harming actions, which is the greatest blessing to this eternally trapped poor bastard type.

A sad finale

An old friend broke his silence of a month, calling me on this rainy Friday afternoon. After a few moments of small talk about our upcoming biopsies and other medical procedures, the concomitants of living to the ripe old age we have reached, he came to the point of his call.

“I’m not going to be responsible for trying to fix this,” he said. “I’ve done everything I can. I want to be friends.”

So you’re not going to take responsibility for your own actions this last year and a half?

“Don’t put words in my mouth, that’s not what I said,” he said, saying it all. “We all did things to each other,” he began.

I haven’t lied to you once in all the years we’ve known each other. Every time you got upset in the last year and a half I behaved like your friend, heard you out and calmed you. You have never answered a single question that I’ve asked in the last 15 months.

“And I’m done with being questioned,” he said. “I guess I got my answer.”

I offered one last slightly acerbic rejoinder, which, under the circumstances, I thought was pretty good.

“I’m going to hang up now,” he said, as I disconnected the call.

contempt

When you are treated with contempt, there is no mistaking the corrosive feeling it arouses. It is dismissal on steroids. It causes a unique and terrible injury.

Contempt means nothing you say needs to be considered, your opinions and ideas are bullshit, anything you think of as insight is a bunch of stinking crap. Contempt means never having to even consider saying you’re sorry because the person acting hurt has no gripe except against her contemptible self.

Contempt doesn’t mean I disagree with you, it means you and your thoughts and your feelings are so far beneath me I don’t have to even consider them.  If I have contempt for you, you are nothing to me, so far inferior that I have no need to consider anything in regard to you, except how contemptible you are.  

You need understanding?   It’s only because you are weak and needy.  Some intimate fear you need to share with me?  You are a coward.  Something bothering you that you need to talk to me about?   Forget it, maggot.  You show me vulnerability?  I show you the back of my fucking hand, asshole.

Contempt is the precursor to every act of individual and organized violence.  It is not enough to simply hate the people you are about to beat, torture and murder.  You have to feel contempt for them.  Once you have that deep conviction of their contemptibility, you feel justified in doing whatever you have to do to the smelly, weak, pusillanimous, poisonous little pukes.   Another gruesome page of human history, written in the blood of the contemptible.

Senseless enmity

My father’s mother, a diminutive red haired religious woman with a brutal temper, used to snarl whenever my father and his little brother fought.  “Seenas Cheenam!” she would say, Yiddish for “senseless enmity!”   They lived in poverty impressive even by the desperate standards of the Depression, their mother openly hated their father, the larger older brother was regularly whipped in the face by his mother, the sickly younger brother was always pampered by that same mother.   Add it up and you get “Seenas Cheenam!”   

My father spoke very little of his deeply scarring childhood, except to point out from time to time that he grew up in “grinding poverty.”  That was the phrase he always used when comparing his lot to my sister’s and mine.  We also heard the phrase “Seenas Cheenam” often enough growing up that it sticks in my head.  I later learned Hebrew and the word cheenam means “free,” or “gratuitous,” if you will,  seenas being the Yiddishized version of the Hebrew seenat, hatred.   

Psychological insight into human behavior is not necessarily a widespread human characteristic.  Certainty, of course, is.  We like to be sure before we whip somebody that we are doing the right thing.  And so it was with my grandmother, an uneducated woman from a family soon to be murdered en masse, prone to fits of righteous rage, a woman who died young, of cancer, a few years before I was born.  The irony of her dismissing any reason the boys might be at each other’s throats in that sadistic experiment they grew up in is not lost on me.  Blaming her boys for being at each other’s throats for no reason was her way of being certain that she was always doing what was best, exactly what God wanted her to do.  Certainty is the human genius.

Before my uncle died (in a rehab center) he told his son and me that he had framed photos of our great grandparents in the house his son was selling.   We looked everywhere, didn’t find them, and, on a last pass through, before locking up the house for the last time after it was sold, I walked into the sun room.   There behind the wicker couch my demented aunt had secreted the almost life-sized portrait heads of my grandmother’s parents, in beautiful oval frames.  I could barely stand looking at them.   These two had created a monster of their youngest child, my father’s violently unlucky mother.  

I can only imagine the household that raises their youngest to whip her infant son in the face over and over.  I look at the face of her mother, in a photo taken before 1914 when my grandmother arrived here in the US.  I shudder.   The father looks a bit more human, though as I look a moment longer I start to cringe.  People who were being photographed for the only time in their lives tend to look stiff, and rigid, and perhaps not at their most natural in the photographer’s studio, but there is something about these two that gives me the creeps.  

It is the knowledge that they raised a girl who grew up to viciously take out her misery on her first born son, a toddler who grew up to be my father.  My father, though he did much better than his mother, also was unable to resist taking out his misery and his unslakable anger on his children.  He was not one to hit, but his brutal words, as he eventually admitted, were as harmful as any regime of slaps, punches or kicks could have been.

We don’t want insight, we want to be right.  Keep it fucking simple, you merciless asshole!  I am right, as my gut is telling me, as my muscular tension tells me, as the surge of fight/flight/freeze chemicals urge me, as my every justification fucking tells me!

My sister and I had a terrible fight almost thirty years ago when my niece was a toddler.  Frustrations from years of conflict flared up and I lost my temper.  So did my sister who began screaming for me to get out of her fucking house.  My niece said, from her highchair, “mom, stop screaming at Uncle Elie!”   Sides clearly had to be drawn more decisively, as they were over the years, until my niece and nephew were convinced not to communicate with their crazy uncle any more.  Right is right when it comes to seenas cheenam, you understand. 

Irv’s dilemma

My father was a friend of the underdog, ally of the oppressed and broken-hearted idealist turned bitter cynic in the latter years of his life.   He truly wanted to instill in me a love of independence, unwavering honesty, fearlessness in advocating for what was right, and resoluteness opposing tyranny in all forms. 

His dilemma was that his own trauma compelled him to behave tyrannically whenever he felt confronted.  He was unable to control this impulse to dominate, by any means necessary, and so he constantly offered himself as the model of the tyranny I must reject, according to the principles he taught me, while wanting more than anything my respect for his authority and my independence from it.  Damn!  Talk about a no win dilemma.

He instilled in me a lifelong quest for justice, even as he insisted on the most unjust proposition imaginable — the child who is being made to suffer is the cause of everyone’s suffering.   

This intolerable proposition had been forced down his throat, from the time he could stand.  His mother, a diminutive redhead prone to fits of uncontrollable rage, used to whip him in the face.   How does a mother whip her toddler in the face?  She truly believes the kid is viciously defying her.  She has to beat this devil out of him.

The kid, in turn, grows up to hate a bully more than anything in the world.   The only problem is that nobody is more prone to bullying others than someone who has been bullied.  The anger toward the bully is there, along with a determination never to be bullied again.  If the only way to avoid being bullied by a challenging, defiant new born baby is to bully them, how is that anybody’s fault?

So my poor devil father had a dilemma that could only be solved by difficult work that was too painful for him to do, too excruciating to even consider doing.  Poor bastard!

Authenticity

My niece, when she was a toddler, began using the toilet to urinate.  She was hesitant to do the rest of her business there and her mother asked her why.   “It’s very dangerous!” my little niece apparently said, with great conviction.   The seriousness with which she delivered her answer made it a great laugh line in the family for many years, though we never learned what the actual danger was.   

The last Mother’s Day of my mother’s life, a week or so before she was taken to the hospice to die, was one of the saddest days I can remember.   Her daughter, my sister, had long been operating under the principle that our mother was “kookoo for Cocoa Puffs.”   The phrase harkens back to an ad for sugary cereal that ran for a while when we were kids.   The mascot, a very excitable cartoon bird, apparently a kookaburra (famous for its hysterically laughing call), went wild for the delicious cereal, bouncing off the walls and squawking “kookoo for Cocoa Puffs!” over and over as it freaked out.   Saying our mother was kookoo for Cocoa Puffs was a cute way of saying she was batshit crazy.   When my mother “lost” her wedding ring, her mother’s solid gold bracelet, the one with the little photos of our family lovingly cut out and pasted into sections of a little gold orb that opened and  expanded like an accordian, it was because she was kookoo for Cocoa Puffs.   When my mother was pissy that her daughter and grandchildren never thanked her for anything she bought them, same verdict.

During that last meal with the family, gathered around our dying mother’s kitchen table, many meaningful looks were shot behind the old woman’s back.  She’d say something and eyes would quickly roll, facial expressions would flash all around, silently and constantly, “phew, nuts, eh?”  My sister, her husband and her children were convinced of the old lady’s lost grip on reality.  She was nuts, and they humored her, if barely.In the end my mother started to cry, which they felt proved their point. 

I never found my mother to be the least bit nuts, except when she was in a situation where everyone was pretending.  That shit drove her crazy.  A week or two before she died, a new hospice nurse met her with a small group of hospice workers.  I heard them all laughing from my mother’s bedroom.  When the nurse came out, she said to me, with a big smile,  “whatever else you want to say about her, your mother is sharp as a tack.”

Meanwhile, before an early dinner on that final Mother’s Day, there had been a tense negotiation, for the hours leading up to that carefree meal, with numerous phone calls back and forth, due to a serious, ongoing suicide threat.  A door had been slammed and locked, wailing tears from within, nobody could reason with the inconsolable teenager who’d been humiliated on line, as teenagers are when their friends turn mean.   It had apparently been touch and go for a while, until finally the younger brother quietly talked his way into the room and was able to calm his sister down.   They arrived a few hours later, big smiles on all their faces, with Chinese take-out and the firm conviction that grandma was insane.   It was an excruciating experience.  A few days later a van from the hospice came and took my mother to her deathbed.

I have that same tic my mother had when faced with dishonesty, selectively poor memory, a failure to acknowledge when my feelings are hurt, an insistence that I’m crazy and the people insisting on my insanity are beyond criticism, no matter what they have to do.  After my mother’s funeral I mentioned a historical fact, someone’s prior marriage, that sent my sister into a frenzy.  She desperately made the slashing “ixnay!!! ixnay!!!” gesture across her throat to get me to stop talking.  The prior marriage was, for some reason, a humiliating secret that left my sister no choice but to lie to her daughter about it.   It upset me to be called a liar, and in my confusion I held my tongue.   The next day, when we spoke alone, my sister promised to clear things up afterwards, but put so many conditions on when and how, that it took over a year and then, she explained, the conditions were still never right.   After a year she was hurt and very angry that I still had an issue with being called a fucking liar.  A year!   My fucking insane brother only knows one thing — how to hold a fucking grudge.

My mother’s funeral was more than twelve years ago.  Now, in my sister’s mind — twelve fucking years later my brother is still upset that I inadvertently called him a fucking liar and that there was a slight delay in telling my children the demanding, judgmental asshole hadn’t lied.  Is there no statute of limitations on his insane, prosecutorial bullshit?  What about love?  What about fucking love?  My brother wouldn’t know love if it came up and lied to his face!

Call me kookoo for Cocoa Puffs, but to me love does not include a need to lie whenever necessary, a pass for all hurtful behavior, a license to do whatever you feel you need to do to someone else, whenever you feel hurt or upset, with a lifetime entitlement to unlimited, unconditional understanding, kndness and graciousness.  That’s something, we can all agree, but I’m not sure we can call it love.   

For one thing, it is a one way expectation, since the party insisting on it does not extend the same privileges of unlimited forgiveness to the other.  For another thing, without authenticity, what is there between two people?

Being authentic means being honest.  In an intimate relationship it means being honest while taking care with other people’s pain when they feel they’re not getting what they need from you.  To some people it hurts too fucking much to consider making themselves vulnerable that way.  They tend to believe that we all have our own perspective, our own reality, that nothing anyone you love says is necessarily true or false.  This essential solipsism is untouchably real to someone to whom the pain of rejection is much more terrifying than accepting that we are, on the most basic level, eternally unknowable to each other.   The price of maintaining this kind of solipsistic relationship is very high if you are so kookoo for Cocoa Puffs that you insist on difficult abstractions like honesty, apology when someone is aware they’ve hurt you and so on.   If you can’t love and forgive without conditions, they insist, you are not worth loving.

And, of course, they are completely right.  You certainly will never be able to convince them that they are not, since it is humiliating to them to ever admit being wrong or acting hurtfully.   You know them well enough to know what will make them tense up, set their faces, become cold, whenever they feel you are criticizing them.  You are prying open an unbearably painful primal wound, proceed in the face of resistance only if you want to end things.

Sometimes, even with your best efforts, relationships you love, that have long been a source of comfort and security, will end.  It can be very, very hard to move on, but sometimes it is necessary for everybody.   Sad, and true, as death itself.

How dare you?!

“How dare you use us as characters in your mordidly self-regarding ‘fiction’?!” she said, glaring just the slightest bit.

“And I’m not glaring, you sick, judgmental weasel, I know how you twist everything. I’m simply looking at someone who’s acting with despicable arrogance and responding appropriately,” she said, drawing a clear line between herself and someone like him.

“As you wish,” he said, turning away and making another notation on his pad.

“Yeah,” she said, “that’s right, write down everything I say.  It’s all just your distorted perspective anyway, it’s no truer than anyone else’s perspective and certainly not as true as my perspective, having known you for fifty years and having humiliating secrets I could reveal, if you force me to with your passive aggressiveness.”

“Fifty years of humiliating details,” he said, nodding and making another note.

“I wish you would stop with the goddamned notes,” she said, “it’s annoying, distracting and, frankly, very aggressive.”

“As you wish,” he said with a smile, closing the cover of his pad and laying the pen on top of it.

“Now you expect me to start the conversation,” she said.

“Not at all,” he said.  “I was thinking what a great idea it was at that wedding in Ohio to seat everyone next to someone the hosts thought you’d hit it off with.   You recall, I wound up drawing the high card that night, that guy seated next to me was a mechaya, as my father would have said of such a person, like a cool drink on a mercilessly hot day.  He was funny, smart, deep thinking, ironic, comfortable in his skin, down to earth, agreeable but opinionated.   A great idea, to seat people among other people they can meet and enjoy.”

“And your point?” she asked.

“We should have assigned seating like that for our divorce party,” he said.

“Our divorce party, you said?”

“Well, we’d have done it at our wedding, if we’d been wise enough, although nobody is that wise at that age.  Now we have a perfect second chance to do it right.  Invite all these wonderful people we love to our divorce party and assign them seats next to someone else we think they’d get a kick out of.  How about Al and Nancy?  Would they not hit it off?”

“Our divorce party?” she said.

“Al and Nancy, come on, Barbara, would they not hit it off and become fast friends?  They’re practically the same person,” he said.

“Al and Nancy on a blind date at our divorce party?” she said.

“OK, you just want to keep focusing on the occasion, I’m talking about the beauty of introducing people who are sympatico, souls who’d really appreciate each other.  You realize that guy I sat next to at the wedding would have been one of my favorite colleagues in a different world.   At one point I described one of the best books about atrocity and politics ever written, a very short, brilliantly compressed, beautifully written account of the media attention, and long term political fallout, from a certain pogrom that became instantly front page news everywhere only because a member of the Zionist movement hopped the first train out and telegraphed from a nearby town while the two day kill-fest was going on in a remote part of the Russian empire.  It turned out a friend of his wrote the book, which he hadn’t read but intended to get a copy of now.  He’s going to tell Steven Zipperstein that his Pogrom is a masterpiece.” 

“You really are an asshole,” she said.

“So you keep telling me,” he said, opening his drawing book again and drawing a graphic, three dimensional vulva.

“You think you can just write down whatever comes into your twisted head and then put it on the internet for some random lonely kid in India to read and that makes you a writer.  Writers have editors, agents, publicists, get paid to write.  I have no idea why you think just writing things down has any value except as a means of expressing your endless frustrations and dressing them up with the occasional ‘insight’ you get from somebody else’s writing,” she said.

“I don’t,” he said, turning to a blank page and scrawling a note to himself.

Compromise

Compromise is finding a middle ground that, while it may not solve the worst of the conflict, at least makes things better.  It moves each person toward the other enough that each side can feel they got something they needed.   It is not perfect, in terms of everyone getting everything they want, but a good compromise gives you something essential that you weren’t getting before.  Compromise is a starting point for rebuilding trust. It also restores faith in reason’s (with compassion) ability to solve otherwise intractable problems.  It’s a necessary first step back to healthier relations, once things have deteriorated badly enough to require negotiation.

If your complaint is that you were blamed unfairly, got 100% of the blame when at most 50% was your share, and the blame was insisted on over and over during a year of emotional withdrawal, accusations, threats, framing everything as a war you cannot win (hi, Dad!) a compromise saying “OK, fine, you were only 50% to blame for our little impasse” is probably not enough of a compromise to satisfy you, unless you are very easily satisfied.  For one thing, you have no reason to trust that next time you won’t experience the same thing, with the identical maddening aftermath.

A long, tense negotiation to get what should have been given to you at once, something like the benefit of the doubt based on a long friendship, only after a year of fighting (if you consider months incommunicado to be a form of fighting), is unlikely, after a year of senseless warfare, to produce a compromise to undo the harm of that long war.   Getting an apology from someone, after months stubbornly posed in the same judgmental position, is like getting an expensive get well card a year after you get out of the hospital and are fine.   

Most of us are bad at apologizing.  The most important part of the apology is recognizing the pain you caused somebody else, empathizing with why what you did was hurtful.  If the same thing had been done to me, I’d be hurt too.  Without this crucial component, and telling the other person we were wrong, and asking for forgiveness, a formal apology is a pose for prigs.  The prig [1] can later say “I fucking apologized to you, you unforgiving fuck!” and once again feel like the righteous victim.

An apology that doesn’t recognize the harm done is a poor excuse for an apology.  An apology that does not contain a promise not to repeat the same hurtful behavior is very, very weak tea (piss, actually).  What gives an apology the power to heal is the sincere concession that you would have been just as hurt as the person who is upset about what you did, if the roles had been reversed.   Without this recognition of the other person’s right to be unhappy, you have only the meaningless shell of an apology.

Instead of real apology, many try to argue there is no need for any such thing, since what hurt you wouldn’t have hurt them and is so much water down the drain anyway, so long after the fact.  You see, ha ha, I’m doing it to myself now, it doesn’t hurt!  You see, I am strong and not hurt by things like that, normal people aren’t, you sad weakling.  This “I’m strong and wouldn’t have been hurt by that” line calls to mind Wanda Sykes beautiful takedown of right-wing blowhard Sean Hannity who bragged that he could take being waterboarded, would never be broken by the “enhanced interrogation” technique.  Sykes said “please, I could break Sean Hannity in a minute, just put him in a middle seat in coach, that punk would be singing in sixty seconds.”

As long as a failure of empathy is desperately defended to the death, I’m pretty sure there is no compromise that can bridge the inflamed gulf between two people.   Continuing to assign blame, no matter what, instead of demonstrating real empathy, is a sign that nobody is going to emerge from the negotiation with what they need.   If the party responsible for at least 50% of the hurt puts “fine, I’m 50% responsible, but you’re still wrong, too” on the table, that’s about that for our negotiated compromise.

Be ready to be pleasantly surprised by an offer of real compromise, but remember, too, the real world we live in.

[1] A prig is a person who shows an inordinately zealous approach to matters of form and propriety—especially where the prig has the ability to show superior knowledge to those who do not know the protocol in question. Wikipedia

found notes (circa 2011)

If you badmouth friends, judge them, withhold the benefit of the doubt, keep silent, express grievances, make excuses for all your actions, accuse, blame, lie and stick to your lie, people will eventually begin to avoid you.

Being straightforward, constant and willing to listen is a much better way to resolve conflict.