Cause and Defect

Well, this feels awkward.  I feel, simultaneously, that my head is filled with things to say, but that I can't think of anything worth putting down on cyber-paper.  It reminds me of the plight of our late dear friend Irene, whose beloved parakeet Nicky is buried, wrapped in a scrap of blue silk, at the foot of the yew tree beside our house.  Sometimes, when Irene wasn't feeling well, and hadn't been out of her apartment for a few days, she would gracefully lament a temporary loss of her voice -- a terrible thing for a singer.  'I haven't been talking with anyone,' she would say (Nicky, though attentive and eloquent for a bird, had a necessarily limited world view) 'and it feels so strange to try to make words some out.' 

In a digital sense, I've been similarly silent.  Part of this has been because of a weird and unpleasant, though not life-threatening, medical situation, which required me to take antibiotics, which (I found out maybe a week into the three-week course of enormous liver-colored pills) counteracted my antidepressants.  Fascinating.  Here's the menu:

I can have one normal-sized arm, and one infected arm that's roughly twice as big, making it impossible for me to touch my own face with one hand -- and be in a fairly good mood, while waiting to die of blood poisoning.  Or, I can take the medications that should work at eliminating the subcutaneous infection, keep my ailing arm on a heat pad, and go back to my all-too-familiar fantasies of ways to kill myself.  The major difference in this case (as compared to life without antidepressants) being the sense of relief, available in the relatively very near future.  Two weeks of feeling like a pile of something the street cleaners should take care of?  No problem.  Except for every waking moment, of course.

During one of those waking moments -- actually, about twenty consecutive minutes of a public reading, sponsored by Forest White, a poet I've met through Combat Paper -- I was able to stay on point, and read a (lightly edited) entry from this very blog series -- the entry about Wednesdays, as a matter of fact.  As it's not exactly poetry, I felt a little odd and conspicuous, reading it to this group of listeners in the Newark Public Library last Saturday, but aside from the fact that I'd brought the wrong reading glasses with me, and couldn't really see the pages clearly, the audience didn't seem to notice, and it felt like they were following along nicely, as we skidded, narratively, from Alabama and Illinois to Paris and Pennsylvania, with some temporal leaps as well.  Afterwards, the responses were quite heady (at least from the people who liked it.  Who else would say anything, after all?), and I was a little taken aback.  Pleased, but suspicious, as is my wont, I'm sorry to say.

Fortunately, when I went back to my car, I found that I'd gotten a parking ticket, and that served as the necessary tartness I seem to need (or have grown inured to) in my daily life.  Later that afternoon, I was to drive out to a perfectly lovely suburb, roughly south-west of here, and I managed to turn a 45-minute drive into a curse-filled two-hour trek, as I circled around the same blinking locale, finding myself dumped onto blinking Rte. 22 East at nearly every turn, and hopelessly exploring perfectly lovely suburban neighborhoods I hoped I'd never blinking see again.   Unless one of them had a blinking Strawberry Drive on it somewhere, which was where I was supposed to blinking go.

Finally, I parked in the empty lot of a vacant volunteer fire department in Green Knoll Grove or some such picturesque place (the fire house was immaculately clean, and as empty as my idea of where I either was, or was supposed to be), and tried to press into service that accursed cell phone.  Which, even after I managed to figure out how to unlock it, was of limited help, because nobody else, at the actual party, knew where Green Knoll Grove was, or how I could get to anywhere meaningful, relative to them, from there...

I finally did arrive after all, having gotten to within two miles of the correct turnoff at least twice, but having stopped just short both times, as is my wont, I'm afraid.  The sun had already set, but there was a lovely twilight in the expanse of well-groomed back yard, and I got an enthusiastic greeting from those hardy few guests who still weren't ready to go yet.  I was quickly served with a plate of tasty home-made desserts, and a cup of coffee.  All seemed well.

But I'd realized something, back in Green Knoll Grove (it might have been Glen Plaid Hill, I'm not sure), just before I spent that five minutes cursing at and decoding the phone security so I could call John, who never gets lost -- the anger I had been carrying around with me on this peregrination (one of my favorite words, by the way), was the direct result of the praise I'd received, earlier that day, at the poetry reading. 

Not that this was a huge surprise -- I've seen this before, but somehow, the phenomenon always catches me off-guard.  Praise makes me distinctly uncomfortable -- and the more lavish the praise, the antsier I get, until I break out into all-but-uncontrollable incivility.  When I used to record books, for instance, one of the tape recorder operators would make an admiring comment about a particular passage I'd just read, and although I liked knowing I was doing a good job, I actually had to ask her to criticize me -- even if she did it as a joke -- so I would stop feeling so confused and self-conscious, and could get back to work.

This backlash seems to be all the more vitriolic when, as with the Newark reading, I'm trolling through the murky, unpleasant psychic waters of my childhood and adolescence.  (I know I've touched on this before, so some of you may want to skip of this part, or get a cup of coffee, or think of something else...)  The feelings I live with, of being bad and wrong and of little or no value, are powerful, and dependable.  For most of my life, I've set myself the challenge of working very hard, to be very good at what I do, and yet failing in as unconditional a way as possible.  A little uninformed, superficial praise is okay, as long as it can be undermined as soon as possible.

I know, intellectually, that on my part, this is is an evasion of psychic pain.  Jung is credited with having said, 'All neurosis is the avoidance of legitimate suffering'.  Today, so late in my life, I can say that it has been more important to me, to be able to think of myself as essentially worthless and discardable (while struggling valiantly to be otherwise), than to face the terrible knowledge that I was not, as a child and a young man, bad and wrong and valueless, but that I was thrown away anyhow.  I have been trying, all my life, to deserve, retroactively, those profound early abandonments, and the constant emotional abuses with which I lived in my father's house.  I'm dimly aware that I'm deeply afraid of the anger that would surface, if I were to look squarely at the abuse, and see it as something wholly separate from me -- something evidencing, not my lack of intrinsic value, but the sickness of those who had such damaging control over me for so long.

Let me put it this way -- when the World Trade Center Towers fell, I remember feeling guilty.  I suspected that, somehow, my anger had managed to seep out that day, and that all of that grandeur of destruction was my fault.  That is how enormous the anger feels, when I can manage even to get a glimpse of it. 

Now, for the really interesting part.  I hope your coffee isn't too cold yet.  When I went to Combat Paper on Sunday (Fox News was broadcasting live -- the reporter had that hard flat news voice, a snug fuchsia bandage dress, and truly extraordinary hair), two members of Saturday's library audience were there, and they resumed enthusing about my writing.  David, one of the coordinators of the program, suggested I make a book of that reading, and print it on Combat Paper.  I was stunned by the idea -- mostly because the story has absolutely nothing to do with the military -- the main characters being a pink-frosted angel food cake and Marie Antoinette, for heaven's sake -- but I'm also flattered and maybe just a little more than intrigued.  I've already listed five illustrations I could make, using linoleum blocks for the prints, although I'm also mulling over the idea of photo transfers.  The most satisfying aspect of the project would be using the letter press, so that the type, rather than sitting on the surface of the page, would be really embedded into the paper -- there's something incredibly gratifying about that, to me.  I'll have to think about it, carefully. 

And I'll have to plan it carefully, too.  Because if we do print it, I'll have to make sure I don't have a party to go to the next day, because who knows where I'll end up.  Wyoming comes to mind.  Cursing all the way.



©  2012               Walter Zimmerman