As seems to be usual for me, I'm having difficulty getting this started. As usual, this isn't because of a dearth of things to talk about -- instead, as usual, I find myself reluctant to tell the truth (or, at least, certain truths), which reluctance is really just another impediment to managing a successful launch into the wonderful world of words on something like a page.
I've been at home a lot recently -- not, maybe, more than usual, but feeling more... trapped, pehaps? The house is being painted -- it's the first time I've ever lived in a house while this process goes on -- and because all the doors and most of the windows have to be left open, for the painters to have access, I need to be here as they wind up their day's work. Which happens sometime around dusk, on most days. Which means (due to my lack of imagination, I suppose) lots of sitting around, playing my 'Bookworm' game for hours on end...
It used to be that I spent equal amounts of time -- or more -- on Facebook, but a couple of weeks ago I had what I think amounts to a kind of psychotic break with that system. I'd suddenly reached the saturation level with all the cheery little 'How You Can Be The Happiest Person In The Known Universe In Six Easy Steps That If You Don't Take Them, There's Something Deeply Wrong With You' messages, complete with flowers and chirpy birds, or beaches at dusk. It was like being trapped in the cheery section of some grocery store greeting card department, when all I wanted was cards of condolence. At the time, of course, I didn't know that the medicine I was taking for my infected elbow was cancelling out the medicines I take for my depression -- I just thought I was a sour jerk who needed to practice being dead for a while. So, that's what I did. I do get the occasional nudge from Facebook, on my email account, saying I've got 'notifications pending'. But I don't fall for this. One of the main benefits of being dead, it seems to me, is the freedom from having to pay attention to things like this anymore.
The 'Bookworm' project isn't completely perfect, but it does prove sufficiently engaging, and even, from time to time, emotionally satisfying. Of course, ultimately, it's a complete waste of time, but I like the exercise of 'seeing' the words splayed out across the scrabble-like board, reading in all sorts of directions -- it's especially gratifying to find a word all curled in and twisted around on itself, like a tender little larva. (Hence, perhaps, the 'Bookworm' part?) I generally don't pay much attention to the cumulative scoring, until it has reached what, for me, feels like an empyrean level -- in the early millions of meaningless points. But then, infallibly, one of the little burning death tiles -- a Z or a V or sometimes even an I -- slithers its way down the screen, without my being able to find a use for it in any word in English. And when the burning tile reaches the bottom of the playing field, it sits there, jumbling about a bit in a threatening way, until I make another word (knowing that I'm defeated, I usually try to find either an extraordinarily simple work, like 'the', or something rude, like 'poop') and then the whole screen goes up in smoke, leaving ash traces of the last array of letters I had to work with. I always play with the sound turned off; I imagine that, at this stage, there are screams of derisive glee.
Of course, I take this all personally. When I gather splendid words (I really should be keeping a kind of journal, I suppose), I feel as though the game 'knows' who's playing, and it's cooperating with me. Sometimes those flaming squares seem hopeless, but then an easy solution reveals itself just moments before I would be facing defeat, and I feel that I have a beaming accomplice on my side. When I've been sliding the cursor around, in one particular game, for a couple of days on end, and then the treacherous burning tiles pop up before I can do anything to counter them (how many English words do you know that feature five 'i's and one red 'a'? Me neither), and the carefully-built tower of valuable points comes tumbling down, I feel hurt and betrayed. Oh sure, there's a list of the games I've played, an accounting of the high totals I've achieved, but those are also defeats as well, and they only show up when the curtain of fire has done its dance. I feel all sour and bitter. I vow I'll never play again. Which works for entire blocks of, say, fifteen minutes to half an hour at a time.
So, it seems that the only things I feel that I can claim, as assets that may make me valuable as a human being, are my intelligence, and my physical strength. This is why my recent bout with that staph infection was such a blow -- not being able to touch my own face with my own hand, which had blown up to twice its normal size, was a terrible threat. I imagined amputation. And even now, with nothing left of the illness except what the doctor called Post Infection Hyper Pigmentation, or PIHP (can I get a parking sticker?), or a dark spot that will go away over time, I'm still richly aware that I'm long beyond the physical prime of which I was unconscious even as it was slipping past me. I've devised, for now, a regular routine of physical training that, I hope, will forestall, as long as possible, the inevitable fracture or twist or dislocation that will spell the end of my independence. How will I value myself then? How will I summon the psychic strength to undertake the equivalent of getting out of bed?
Likewise, I use the word games -- cross word puzzles, acrostics, the Bookworm addiction -- as touchstones, as reassurances that I've still 'got it', mentally. The daily Times challenge is, for me, about half pleasure, and half obligation, depending on the day of the week. I wish I hadn't learned that the Saturday puzzles really are the hardest ones, because it makes me even more nervous when the Thursday offering keeps me successfully at bay for far too long. And all those Bookworm points, and the vanishing lines of strung-together letters -- they're really only the equivalent, I think, of being able to doggy-paddle, successfully, for one more day, far out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Day in, day out, managing to stay afloat for another solar rotation. Day in, day out, proving to myself that I'm smart, even though there's really nothing for me to use my smartness on -- no particular problem or challenge, just a meaningless jumble of programmed letters that, come to think of it, won't let me make a word longer than 'governess' -- even though any simpleton could think of words like illegitimacy, or hallucination, or senescence -- and I somehow stay afloat out in that endless, temporarily benign body of water, the depths of which have never been successfully charted. What will I do with myself when, say, a Wednesday puzzle leaves me stumped? How long can I convince myself to keep treading water?
I was about to suggest that these admittedly silly and pointless occupations may be all that keep me on this side of sanity's porous borders, but honestly, I'm not completely sure that's true.
© 2012 Walter Zimmerman
Thursday, June 14, 2012
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Cutting the Cord
(For some reason, the following image has been cropping up for the past few days, so maybe I'd better just get it out there, and see where it leads me...)
It was the Christmas of 1957. That's the one I spent in that great dark house on a low hill, with other abandoned children, and our keepers. There was a big, lavishly-decorated tree in the downstairs hallway, outside the common dining room. There were gifts underneath, but they were just for show. When it came time for the 'real' presents, we children were all sent to our separate departments, where wrapped boxes were slowly distributed and eagerly opened.
Now, the Home had a policy about toys, it seems, with special emphasis focused on who 'owned' what particular plaything. For instance, just before our family broke apart, my mother had taken me to see a little traveling carnival, and I got a big yellow stuffed poodle, with a red collar and leash. (What she might have done to 'win' this prize must be left to the imagination, I'm afraid) With the intense affection that children can have for ultimately unimportant things, I loved that stuffed toy, even though it wasn't especially cuddly, and probably wouldn't have withstood much real play. When my brothers and I were deposited at the orphanage, and our few personal effects were unloaded, one of the first things we faced was a weeding out of 'special' items, ostensibly to keep jealousy and competition and favoritism to a minimum. So my yellow poodle, with its shiny red plastic collar, was put up high, to sit alertly on the top shelf of walk-in closet in the attic dormitory we all shared. Once in a while, that door would be opened -- probably for stowing another item too good for use -- and I would get a breathtaking little stab, looking up at the alert dog face with its useless collar and leash.
So I had mixed feelings, opening my gift that morning -- what if it was 'too good', and after playing with it for an hour or so, I would have to watch it being put into protective custody, with all the other treasures? I was especially concerned about that, because I had asked for... a remote-controlled car. A Ford Thunderbird convertible, that I could make go wherever I wanted, with just the push of a button. The ads had shown a clever and attractive hand-held key-pad -- it was all very modern and exciting.
So I was puzzled that the box was as big and heavy as it was. And then I found out why. There was the car, all right -- the promised Ford Thunderbird, a turquoise convertible (which was the coolest imaginable color at the time), so I could imagine myself sitting behind the driver's wheel, like in the TV ads. And there was the control pad too, just like in the commercials. But, to my consternation, there was nothing really remote about this toy at all. Running from the back of the car, where the exhaust should be, was a great thick cable, connected to the control pad. In an effort to make this umbilical cord 'invisible', the designers had decided on a particularly bland, dead, pinky-browny-putty color for the thin sheathing that ran down the length of the cable -- and I think this sad attempt at camouflage was held in place by some crude early version of cable ties.
The whole thing was profoundly disappointing. I tried to feel excited about it. I didn't want to be accused of being 'hard to please' and 'ungrateful'. I gave the car a test drive; it went forward when I pushed that button, and backed up when I pressed the other one. It may even have had some rudimentary control system that allowed me to turn the car in one direction or another. But I had to follow the stupid car everywhere -- the cable was maybe three feet long, which was why the box was so heavy -- making any meaningful creative fantasy impossible. No zooming under things, taking reckless curves and then stopping on a dime, so the miniature, imaginary me could jump out in triumph, and pat my dependable vehicle admiringly -- another successful adventure for both of us! But that fat cable, with its greasy texture and clumsy feel, disgusted me. The whole thing was a trick. A triumph of advertising, a failure as a toy. In less than twenty minutes, I didn't care whether the Thunderbird went into the special room or not. I may even have given it away, or traded it for a yoyo or a box of crayons.
Because, basically, I lusted for freedom. Even vicarious freedom. Even the thinnest, flimsiest freedom. For example, this kind of freedom:
There was another boy in our department with whom I had an especially close friendship -- so close, in fact, that it roused the lurid suspicions of the grinning housemother, so that, if she saw us talking together for any length of time, we were sure to get a beating with the razor strap that night.
But, being children, we had relatively short memories, and seemed to believe that things wouldn't always be bad and painful -- even though the world was, at that point, doing a pretty good job of convincing us otherwise. Billy, I'll call him (because that's what his name was), was from Pittsburgh, and he worshiped his father, who, I was told more than once, was going to show up any day, to take Billy away from that awful place, with him. In the meanwhile, Billy's father led an unimaginably glamorous life, traveling everywhere, living in hotels, driving race cars, sailing boats and flying airplanes. The usual stuff.
The bond Billy and I formed -- so far from being anything sexual, as our housemother was desperately convinced -- was based partly on this figure of his father, and partly on the elasticity of our own imaginations. While the other kids played in the grassy circle, with the treacherous jungle gym and the slide that could turn punishingly hot under the summer sun, Billy and I would sit on a bench under the sycamore trees, and our conversation would unfold, something like this:
One of us would observe that, even though it was high summer, soon the weather would be changing -- the heavy drapery of leaves would be all gone, and it would be cold enough to snow. And if it snowed on a Saturday, we boys would go down to the bathhouse by the swimming pool, and pull the collection of sleds out of storage. Each of us would haul one of them up the two-tiered hill, to the paved circle at the top of the long driveway, and then we would spend a long day, speeding down past the barberry bushes, and then trudging back up again, pleasantly sweaty and exhausted with the exertion, until it was nearly too dark to see, and the sleds had to be put away again.
Billy would say that he and his dad used to go sledding, in Pittsburgh. Billy had a special sled, he said, and his dad had a big house at the top of a dangerously steep hill, that everyone else around was afraid to use for sledding. And I would say that there was room on his sled for both of us, and Billy would agree. And so we imagined, for a moment, both of us, sitting together on that particularly wonderful vehicle, poised for what must come next.
Billy said that, because his father was so clever, and loved his son so much, he'd built Billy something called a 'Yankee bump' -- a special structure like a ski jump, but sharper and steeper, and just for Billy's use on that sled. No one else would dare to risk taking that great leap -- except for Billy, and me too, since I was on the sled right behind him. It took just the slightest leaning forward, a creeping gather of momentum, and then we would have only a few seconds to catch our breath, before we had already reached an almost impossible speed -- the neighbors' houses, on both sides, just a grey blur, with streaks of yellow light -- and with the wind stinging our faces, we swooped downhill, hit the smooth slick surface of the Yankee bump, and...
Up, out, away over the city, we soared together on the sled. We exchanged eager suggestions of all the wonderful things we could be able to see, while we were still aloft. The Heinz pickle factory, that smelled of baked beans, and where our fifth-grade class had a field trip. Snow-filled Forbes Field, where the Pirates played ball in the summer. The ice-covered steel bridges across the Allegheny and Monongahela. We would fly so long that night would fall, and we could see the sparkling lights all over the surrounding hills. Because, with the marvelous ingenuity of Billy's father, and the power of the Yankee bump, our flight could last...
Until the warning bell rang, meaning that it was time to get in line to go in for dinner, under the malevolent glitter of housemother's tiny pale blue eyes. I looked at my shoes, trying not to think about the sharp stinging that probably awaited me and Billy in our beds that night.
I don't know how long Billy stayed in the orphanage -- I was there for a year and a half, and on one summer visit some time later, I saw him again, down by a pond on the Orphanage property. Apparently, his father still hadn't shown up, and Billy had coarsened. He only seemed interested, apparently, in the fact that the dragonflies that darted about over the murky water were mating. He used a different term. We were both, by that time, different boys.
But for that sliver of time, as we sat on the bench outside, we had both been as free of our immediate surroundings as I desperately wanted my little plastic Thunderbird to be. We had been able to twist and shape our imaginary excursions in any way we liked, to come away with what still feel to me like actual memories, instead of two boys' desperate dreaming.
That's what I wanted, when I opened the box with the car inside -- I wanted a means of letting at least some imaginary portion of me to escape -- to wend its way recklessly beyond the linoleum flooring, and tumbling down the dim-lit back hallway -- across the rough-paved asphalt drive, passing the little white infirmary, on the way to someplace wonderful, far far away...
© 2012 Walter Zimmerman
It was the Christmas of 1957. That's the one I spent in that great dark house on a low hill, with other abandoned children, and our keepers. There was a big, lavishly-decorated tree in the downstairs hallway, outside the common dining room. There were gifts underneath, but they were just for show. When it came time for the 'real' presents, we children were all sent to our separate departments, where wrapped boxes were slowly distributed and eagerly opened.
Now, the Home had a policy about toys, it seems, with special emphasis focused on who 'owned' what particular plaything. For instance, just before our family broke apart, my mother had taken me to see a little traveling carnival, and I got a big yellow stuffed poodle, with a red collar and leash. (What she might have done to 'win' this prize must be left to the imagination, I'm afraid) With the intense affection that children can have for ultimately unimportant things, I loved that stuffed toy, even though it wasn't especially cuddly, and probably wouldn't have withstood much real play. When my brothers and I were deposited at the orphanage, and our few personal effects were unloaded, one of the first things we faced was a weeding out of 'special' items, ostensibly to keep jealousy and competition and favoritism to a minimum. So my yellow poodle, with its shiny red plastic collar, was put up high, to sit alertly on the top shelf of walk-in closet in the attic dormitory we all shared. Once in a while, that door would be opened -- probably for stowing another item too good for use -- and I would get a breathtaking little stab, looking up at the alert dog face with its useless collar and leash.
So I had mixed feelings, opening my gift that morning -- what if it was 'too good', and after playing with it for an hour or so, I would have to watch it being put into protective custody, with all the other treasures? I was especially concerned about that, because I had asked for... a remote-controlled car. A Ford Thunderbird convertible, that I could make go wherever I wanted, with just the push of a button. The ads had shown a clever and attractive hand-held key-pad -- it was all very modern and exciting.
So I was puzzled that the box was as big and heavy as it was. And then I found out why. There was the car, all right -- the promised Ford Thunderbird, a turquoise convertible (which was the coolest imaginable color at the time), so I could imagine myself sitting behind the driver's wheel, like in the TV ads. And there was the control pad too, just like in the commercials. But, to my consternation, there was nothing really remote about this toy at all. Running from the back of the car, where the exhaust should be, was a great thick cable, connected to the control pad. In an effort to make this umbilical cord 'invisible', the designers had decided on a particularly bland, dead, pinky-browny-putty color for the thin sheathing that ran down the length of the cable -- and I think this sad attempt at camouflage was held in place by some crude early version of cable ties.
The whole thing was profoundly disappointing. I tried to feel excited about it. I didn't want to be accused of being 'hard to please' and 'ungrateful'. I gave the car a test drive; it went forward when I pushed that button, and backed up when I pressed the other one. It may even have had some rudimentary control system that allowed me to turn the car in one direction or another. But I had to follow the stupid car everywhere -- the cable was maybe three feet long, which was why the box was so heavy -- making any meaningful creative fantasy impossible. No zooming under things, taking reckless curves and then stopping on a dime, so the miniature, imaginary me could jump out in triumph, and pat my dependable vehicle admiringly -- another successful adventure for both of us! But that fat cable, with its greasy texture and clumsy feel, disgusted me. The whole thing was a trick. A triumph of advertising, a failure as a toy. In less than twenty minutes, I didn't care whether the Thunderbird went into the special room or not. I may even have given it away, or traded it for a yoyo or a box of crayons.
Because, basically, I lusted for freedom. Even vicarious freedom. Even the thinnest, flimsiest freedom. For example, this kind of freedom:
There was another boy in our department with whom I had an especially close friendship -- so close, in fact, that it roused the lurid suspicions of the grinning housemother, so that, if she saw us talking together for any length of time, we were sure to get a beating with the razor strap that night.
But, being children, we had relatively short memories, and seemed to believe that things wouldn't always be bad and painful -- even though the world was, at that point, doing a pretty good job of convincing us otherwise. Billy, I'll call him (because that's what his name was), was from Pittsburgh, and he worshiped his father, who, I was told more than once, was going to show up any day, to take Billy away from that awful place, with him. In the meanwhile, Billy's father led an unimaginably glamorous life, traveling everywhere, living in hotels, driving race cars, sailing boats and flying airplanes. The usual stuff.
The bond Billy and I formed -- so far from being anything sexual, as our housemother was desperately convinced -- was based partly on this figure of his father, and partly on the elasticity of our own imaginations. While the other kids played in the grassy circle, with the treacherous jungle gym and the slide that could turn punishingly hot under the summer sun, Billy and I would sit on a bench under the sycamore trees, and our conversation would unfold, something like this:
One of us would observe that, even though it was high summer, soon the weather would be changing -- the heavy drapery of leaves would be all gone, and it would be cold enough to snow. And if it snowed on a Saturday, we boys would go down to the bathhouse by the swimming pool, and pull the collection of sleds out of storage. Each of us would haul one of them up the two-tiered hill, to the paved circle at the top of the long driveway, and then we would spend a long day, speeding down past the barberry bushes, and then trudging back up again, pleasantly sweaty and exhausted with the exertion, until it was nearly too dark to see, and the sleds had to be put away again.
Billy would say that he and his dad used to go sledding, in Pittsburgh. Billy had a special sled, he said, and his dad had a big house at the top of a dangerously steep hill, that everyone else around was afraid to use for sledding. And I would say that there was room on his sled for both of us, and Billy would agree. And so we imagined, for a moment, both of us, sitting together on that particularly wonderful vehicle, poised for what must come next.
Billy said that, because his father was so clever, and loved his son so much, he'd built Billy something called a 'Yankee bump' -- a special structure like a ski jump, but sharper and steeper, and just for Billy's use on that sled. No one else would dare to risk taking that great leap -- except for Billy, and me too, since I was on the sled right behind him. It took just the slightest leaning forward, a creeping gather of momentum, and then we would have only a few seconds to catch our breath, before we had already reached an almost impossible speed -- the neighbors' houses, on both sides, just a grey blur, with streaks of yellow light -- and with the wind stinging our faces, we swooped downhill, hit the smooth slick surface of the Yankee bump, and...
Up, out, away over the city, we soared together on the sled. We exchanged eager suggestions of all the wonderful things we could be able to see, while we were still aloft. The Heinz pickle factory, that smelled of baked beans, and where our fifth-grade class had a field trip. Snow-filled Forbes Field, where the Pirates played ball in the summer. The ice-covered steel bridges across the Allegheny and Monongahela. We would fly so long that night would fall, and we could see the sparkling lights all over the surrounding hills. Because, with the marvelous ingenuity of Billy's father, and the power of the Yankee bump, our flight could last...
Until the warning bell rang, meaning that it was time to get in line to go in for dinner, under the malevolent glitter of housemother's tiny pale blue eyes. I looked at my shoes, trying not to think about the sharp stinging that probably awaited me and Billy in our beds that night.
I don't know how long Billy stayed in the orphanage -- I was there for a year and a half, and on one summer visit some time later, I saw him again, down by a pond on the Orphanage property. Apparently, his father still hadn't shown up, and Billy had coarsened. He only seemed interested, apparently, in the fact that the dragonflies that darted about over the murky water were mating. He used a different term. We were both, by that time, different boys.
But for that sliver of time, as we sat on the bench outside, we had both been as free of our immediate surroundings as I desperately wanted my little plastic Thunderbird to be. We had been able to twist and shape our imaginary excursions in any way we liked, to come away with what still feel to me like actual memories, instead of two boys' desperate dreaming.
That's what I wanted, when I opened the box with the car inside -- I wanted a means of letting at least some imaginary portion of me to escape -- to wend its way recklessly beyond the linoleum flooring, and tumbling down the dim-lit back hallway -- across the rough-paved asphalt drive, passing the little white infirmary, on the way to someplace wonderful, far far away...
© 2012 Walter Zimmerman
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
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
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
Saturday, May 19, 2012
The Giraffe/Peach Paradigm
Was it really just last week that I made that entry about Mothers' Day, and the twisted meaning it's always had for me? It seems so much longer ago than that. But now I remember -- the choir I sing with in New Brunswick was on duty that day, and there was a particularly lovely pink hat on a woman in the congregation, toward the back, stage left.
Well, bringing up all those old memories, those layers of my personal history, has had a different impact than I would have expected, at least in the sort term. I don't know why I didn't anticipate this psychic backlash, but it has nonetheless caught me somewhat by surprise, and I'm still staggering a little. The image that came to me this morning, as I was dragging myself around the house, was that of a man, walking down a country road one afternoon, with the sun shining and the trees all leafed out and providing the occasional bit of shade as he passed them. And then, out of nowhere, comes an enormous, seventy-foot wave of cold, murky salt water, knocking this man off his feet, taking his breath away, and turning him head over heels in its surge. There's no way for him to regain his footing, and he can't even tell, in the green swirl, which way to struggle, toward air and light.
And that's kind of how it's been, this week, really.
Now, I want to make it completely clear that I'm not trying to compete for the title of King of the Sad People, who I imagine holds court under a bridge somewhere, with a crown of wet newspaper slapped onto his head. I find myself constantly trying to combat the emotional state in which I find myself with rationality -- seeking to prove to myself, over and over again, that I should be happy, that my life is a miracle, that things are so much better for me now than they ever were when I was a kid, and on and on. But as demonstrably true as all these things are -- and this is only a mini-fraction of the things for which I am grateful indeed -- holding them up and examining each precious blessing does, unfortunately, exactly nothing. I might as well be trying to reason away the existence of a giraffe, by holding peaches up in front of it.
If there were some scientific discipline such as emotional chemistry, I might try to express what I've got all over me as Sh2Gu3 -- the tarry salt produced by the interaction of shame and guilt. Though invisible at room temperature, it is nonetheless one of the densest, most burdensome of the known emotional elements, and one of the most durable as well. The only known solvent is alcohol, and that working only temporarily, before the stubborn and pervasive substance recreates itself.
The guilt comes from telling the truth.
Once, when my Dad was home for supper, and was sitting at the kitchen table with my mother, while my brothers and I, having already eaten, were playing in the living room, I casually leaned over in my dad's chair, and pushed over a stack of wooden blocks my brother Glenn had built. He recreated his tower; I nudged it over again. Glenn began to cry, and complained to my parents. I said I hadn't done it. My mother, who had been watching, said that, yes I had. I remember looking her square in the eye and saying, 'No, I didn't.' I remember, still, how daring and how necessary it was for me to say this, how important it was for me to tell the truth by telling a lie. Hadn't she lied to me, over and over again, about more important things than a stupid pile of wooden blocks?
She turned and said a few words to my Dad, who then took me into the bathroom, sat me down on the closed toilet seat, and slapped me across the face so hard that, just like in the cartoons, I saw stars. "Don't you ever, ever let me hear you call your mother a liar, do you understand me?" he said, wagging a finger in my face, and speaking in the most vicious tone of voice I'd ever heard. Of course I nodded, still a little dizzy. I wouldn't ever call her a liar again. Even though that's exactly what she was.
A few months later, after we'd moved to a different house, I was on a shopping trip with my mother, and we had stopped in a parking lot, when she saw my father across the way. "Hurry, hide," she said, and pulled me down out of sight in the front seat. I wanted to call out to my father, and run to see him, but she seemed excited by somehow fooling him, or by escaping something -- there seemed something soiled, to me, in this game of hers, and I didn't like being part of it. But I was part of it.
The shame comes from the truth being true.
In spite of all that I knew, about what was going on 'backstage' as it were, in my parents' marriage, I was still only a boy of nine when the family cracked into two segments, and then the segment to which I was attached was deposited at the orphanage. In later life, I came to understand that, when children are institutionalized, they always assume the blame. It is always the child's fault, no matter how hard the truck hit the car, no matter how flattened the house was by the tornado, no matter how many bullet holes one adult pumped into the other. This mantle of shame and guilt is a pathetic grasp at somehow exerting, in retrospect, the most feeble thread of control, in a world that has otherwise proved to be unreliable, treacherous, whimsical and cruel. And in spite of all the best-intentioned self-help books in the world, no child believes that bad things happen to good people, when the worst things in the world have already happened to that child.
We all of us, in that institution, were like vermin in a dumpster -- hating ourselves, hating each other for reminding us of ourselves, and then hating ourselves some more. And the 'real' kids -- our classmates in the schoolrooms down the hill, who sat in desks next to ours -- knew there was something wrong with us too. No one had to explain that to them. There was, I guess, the scent of Sh2Gu3, that we could never wash off ourselves, or rinse from our clothes -- we'd become so inured to it that we didn't even smell it on each other, back in that big industrial dining room where we were reminded, every Sunday, to shine our shoes.
Now, at this point in my life, I honestly can't tell whether remembering is better than forgetting. I don't know whether unreeling all these griefs is a wiser choice than otherwise to let them rot in hiding. It does appear unassailable, however, that like the chemical model to which I allude, the facts and histories both generate woeful, unproductive emotions, and also serve as a kind of framework onto which these dismal feelings will crystalize without much apparent provocation. Sometimes all it takes is a particular angle of the light, or the smell of pancakes, or a few notes of a song, and --hey presto! -- a fresh crop of shame is availablle, whether you like it or not.
I try, on a more deliberate level than ever, to 'normalize' my life experience, by referring in conversation (and appropriately, I hope) to 'the time I was in the orphanage', if the subject turns to growing eggplants, for example. Or how often you buy your children new shoes. But even now, there's a chill that sparkles through the talking, and if anyone does make a remark, it's invariably a semi-accusative 'Why were you there?'. Because everyone knows that bad things simply don't happen to good children.
So. This has been the main struggle in my life, I think -- both to own, as my heritage and the basis of my identity, my peculiar history, while simultaneously attempting to shield others from the more troubling truths of how I've managed to survive, in such redundantly cruel surroundings. I think that, without being at all aware of any inner bargaining, I had hoped that, by succeeding somehow, at something, my very real past would be transformed into some other story -- one to which I could point with pride. But nothing I've managed to do has made even the smallest retroactive impact. And even this imagining, having taken place in secret places in my heart, about which I obviously know so little -- even this imagining gives me a twinge of shame. How could I manage to be so stupid?
Another week begins. I'll try my best to crank up something approaching enthusiasm for something, for whole moments at a time. Too close to my own surface, though -- too close for comfort -- sits the cold realization that none of this matters at all -- none of these pretended enjoyments will fix the things that could never have been fixed, from the moment they became reality. All of this tangle is my own particular mess, and there's no one to clean it up but me. A cleaning which, really, will make no difference, whether it's successfully executed or not.
Oh, there's that stupid giraffe again, and the little basket of peaches. Take care of it, would you mind?
© 2012 Walter Zimmerman
Well, bringing up all those old memories, those layers of my personal history, has had a different impact than I would have expected, at least in the sort term. I don't know why I didn't anticipate this psychic backlash, but it has nonetheless caught me somewhat by surprise, and I'm still staggering a little. The image that came to me this morning, as I was dragging myself around the house, was that of a man, walking down a country road one afternoon, with the sun shining and the trees all leafed out and providing the occasional bit of shade as he passed them. And then, out of nowhere, comes an enormous, seventy-foot wave of cold, murky salt water, knocking this man off his feet, taking his breath away, and turning him head over heels in its surge. There's no way for him to regain his footing, and he can't even tell, in the green swirl, which way to struggle, toward air and light.
And that's kind of how it's been, this week, really.
Now, I want to make it completely clear that I'm not trying to compete for the title of King of the Sad People, who I imagine holds court under a bridge somewhere, with a crown of wet newspaper slapped onto his head. I find myself constantly trying to combat the emotional state in which I find myself with rationality -- seeking to prove to myself, over and over again, that I should be happy, that my life is a miracle, that things are so much better for me now than they ever were when I was a kid, and on and on. But as demonstrably true as all these things are -- and this is only a mini-fraction of the things for which I am grateful indeed -- holding them up and examining each precious blessing does, unfortunately, exactly nothing. I might as well be trying to reason away the existence of a giraffe, by holding peaches up in front of it.
If there were some scientific discipline such as emotional chemistry, I might try to express what I've got all over me as Sh2Gu3 -- the tarry salt produced by the interaction of shame and guilt. Though invisible at room temperature, it is nonetheless one of the densest, most burdensome of the known emotional elements, and one of the most durable as well. The only known solvent is alcohol, and that working only temporarily, before the stubborn and pervasive substance recreates itself.
The guilt comes from telling the truth.
Once, when my Dad was home for supper, and was sitting at the kitchen table with my mother, while my brothers and I, having already eaten, were playing in the living room, I casually leaned over in my dad's chair, and pushed over a stack of wooden blocks my brother Glenn had built. He recreated his tower; I nudged it over again. Glenn began to cry, and complained to my parents. I said I hadn't done it. My mother, who had been watching, said that, yes I had. I remember looking her square in the eye and saying, 'No, I didn't.' I remember, still, how daring and how necessary it was for me to say this, how important it was for me to tell the truth by telling a lie. Hadn't she lied to me, over and over again, about more important things than a stupid pile of wooden blocks?
She turned and said a few words to my Dad, who then took me into the bathroom, sat me down on the closed toilet seat, and slapped me across the face so hard that, just like in the cartoons, I saw stars. "Don't you ever, ever let me hear you call your mother a liar, do you understand me?" he said, wagging a finger in my face, and speaking in the most vicious tone of voice I'd ever heard. Of course I nodded, still a little dizzy. I wouldn't ever call her a liar again. Even though that's exactly what she was.
A few months later, after we'd moved to a different house, I was on a shopping trip with my mother, and we had stopped in a parking lot, when she saw my father across the way. "Hurry, hide," she said, and pulled me down out of sight in the front seat. I wanted to call out to my father, and run to see him, but she seemed excited by somehow fooling him, or by escaping something -- there seemed something soiled, to me, in this game of hers, and I didn't like being part of it. But I was part of it.
The shame comes from the truth being true.
In spite of all that I knew, about what was going on 'backstage' as it were, in my parents' marriage, I was still only a boy of nine when the family cracked into two segments, and then the segment to which I was attached was deposited at the orphanage. In later life, I came to understand that, when children are institutionalized, they always assume the blame. It is always the child's fault, no matter how hard the truck hit the car, no matter how flattened the house was by the tornado, no matter how many bullet holes one adult pumped into the other. This mantle of shame and guilt is a pathetic grasp at somehow exerting, in retrospect, the most feeble thread of control, in a world that has otherwise proved to be unreliable, treacherous, whimsical and cruel. And in spite of all the best-intentioned self-help books in the world, no child believes that bad things happen to good people, when the worst things in the world have already happened to that child.
We all of us, in that institution, were like vermin in a dumpster -- hating ourselves, hating each other for reminding us of ourselves, and then hating ourselves some more. And the 'real' kids -- our classmates in the schoolrooms down the hill, who sat in desks next to ours -- knew there was something wrong with us too. No one had to explain that to them. There was, I guess, the scent of Sh2Gu3, that we could never wash off ourselves, or rinse from our clothes -- we'd become so inured to it that we didn't even smell it on each other, back in that big industrial dining room where we were reminded, every Sunday, to shine our shoes.
Now, at this point in my life, I honestly can't tell whether remembering is better than forgetting. I don't know whether unreeling all these griefs is a wiser choice than otherwise to let them rot in hiding. It does appear unassailable, however, that like the chemical model to which I allude, the facts and histories both generate woeful, unproductive emotions, and also serve as a kind of framework onto which these dismal feelings will crystalize without much apparent provocation. Sometimes all it takes is a particular angle of the light, or the smell of pancakes, or a few notes of a song, and --hey presto! -- a fresh crop of shame is availablle, whether you like it or not.
I try, on a more deliberate level than ever, to 'normalize' my life experience, by referring in conversation (and appropriately, I hope) to 'the time I was in the orphanage', if the subject turns to growing eggplants, for example. Or how often you buy your children new shoes. But even now, there's a chill that sparkles through the talking, and if anyone does make a remark, it's invariably a semi-accusative 'Why were you there?'. Because everyone knows that bad things simply don't happen to good children.
So. This has been the main struggle in my life, I think -- both to own, as my heritage and the basis of my identity, my peculiar history, while simultaneously attempting to shield others from the more troubling truths of how I've managed to survive, in such redundantly cruel surroundings. I think that, without being at all aware of any inner bargaining, I had hoped that, by succeeding somehow, at something, my very real past would be transformed into some other story -- one to which I could point with pride. But nothing I've managed to do has made even the smallest retroactive impact. And even this imagining, having taken place in secret places in my heart, about which I obviously know so little -- even this imagining gives me a twinge of shame. How could I manage to be so stupid?
Another week begins. I'll try my best to crank up something approaching enthusiasm for something, for whole moments at a time. Too close to my own surface, though -- too close for comfort -- sits the cold realization that none of this matters at all -- none of these pretended enjoyments will fix the things that could never have been fixed, from the moment they became reality. All of this tangle is my own particular mess, and there's no one to clean it up but me. A cleaning which, really, will make no difference, whether it's successfully executed or not.
Oh, there's that stupid giraffe again, and the little basket of peaches. Take care of it, would you mind?
© 2012 Walter Zimmerman
Sunday, May 13, 2012
'That Day' Again
Well, it's 'that day' again. And, as these things go, this one hasn't been as bad as others in the past.
For one thing, she's no longer some dream figure, hovering out in the San Francisco area. I've seen her, at the door of her dilapidated double-wide trailer that faces onto a two-lane road outside a tiny town in rural Delaware. Her bath robe -- a blue one this time, instead of the pink one she wore, all those years ago -- was filthy, smeared with brown steaks down the lapels. She refused to look me in the eye. She later told my sister that 'he'd changed so much'. Forty years will do that to a person.
She also told her husband, finally, that yes, she had had other children besides the daughter he knew about -- that she'd disowned me because I 'turned out to be gay'. She also admitted that she'd 'had some other sons', much the way one might admit to having gone to a fast-food restaurant from time to time. That casual, that unimportant.
So it can't be a great wonder that, even as a very little boy, I wasn't sure of her love. She did tend to me when I was sick, I can't deny that. But otherwise, there was, I think, always a sense that she was about to disappear -- there was an air she had, as she ran the wet laundry through the hand wringer in the basement at 222 South Jackson St., in Belleville IL, before taking another basket of flattened garments out to hang in the back yard, an air that this was all only temporary. I think I sensed the sort of tension one might feel, watching an escape artist, underwater, struggling to free herself of her bonds, finally to pop to the surface for a breath of fresh free air, and run away.
And then, poof -- she did. She disappeared. The treachery she'd promised, she delivered. "I'm going to take one of you with me," she'd said, over and over. And she did. My brothers and I were dropped off at an institution, where women pinched and beat and sexually abused us. And when my father remarried, we heard about her from other cruel women. "She never loved you," they would tell us. "She only wanted a girl," they would say. "She never wanted you in the first place," they would tell me and my brothers -- this, in spite of the fact that none of these women had ever been in the same state at the same time at any time in their lives, let alone met and talked about their preferences in children.
I saw her again, in 1969, thirteen years after the divorce. She and my sister were living in a little trailer, in a little suburb outside of Philadelphia. On my ride to meet them, on the train and the bus, I was certain that she was there, watching me, deciding whether or not I looked like the sort of son she'd want to own. When I saw her, coming out of the pet store that was our rendez-vous, I recognized her instantly, we look so much alike. And my sister too, I recognized, because she looked so much like my father. How ironic, I thought, that each should have taken the child that looked the most like the divorced spouse.
We walked to the trailer -- she, much shorter than me, my sister trailing behind us -- where there was a simple dinner, and of course, awkward conversation. Did I even mention the orphanage? I don't remember. I do remember that, because the trailer was warm, I took off my necktie, folded it, and lay it on a little end table beside my chair. At one point, while my sister was telling me some high-school tale, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a hand slyly reaching across the little table, to the folded necktie, and flipping the end up, to check the label.
I went out to the little suburb two more times. On the last visit, as I was leaving, I was given a slim little gold-plated pocket watch. "You know I love you," she said, and then shut the door. I had a bus to catch, so I didn't have the time to ask just what that meant.
The watch was a piece of crap she probably stole from the jewelry counter where she worked as a sales clerk. When I tried to reach her again, after I'd returned to college the next spring, there was no response. When I called her parents two years later, to tell them that I'd gotten through school, and had a BS, they said she'd remarried and moved to California, and they didn't know how to get in touch with her. I ran across town, in search of my best friend on earth. I ended up at the door of other friends we had in common, and I broke down in front of them. Heaving sobs, incoherent. Unable to breathe, except to force out more tears. These men brought me into their apartment, and let me cry for a while.
"You can always find her," they said, meaning well. "She's probably just as afraid of rejection as you are," they said, putting to use their Psych 101 class. I think it was then that, finally, I was able to say something that made sense.
"I don't need a mother now," I said, emphatically. "I need to have had a mother."
(The word, as you can see, is laden for me. As it is, I'm sure, for my brothers, none of whom has laid eyes on this woman since 1956)
And it puzzles me, that the older I get, the more deeply I feel this retroactive wound of not having been cared for, not having been cared about, not having been acknowledged (after the divorce, my sister was strenuously told that those boys she remembered playing with weren't her brothers -- they were just boys from the neighborhood. Until she believed it), of not having been valued. And I have to say that, no matter what sort of accolade I might stumblingly allow myself to earn, no matter what accomplishment I might back into unawares, no matter what credentials I might have earned while disparaging the very effort involved -- none of these things seems to have any appreciable impact, in terms of balancing the great void of not-having-been-loved that is, it seems, the center of my being. No praise, no kiss, no dollar amount, no number of column inches, does anything but tumble over the edge, into the abyss. As I get older, my external defenses and interests and diversions shrink and pale and thin out, and the abyss, by comparison, seems to expand. Intellectually, I know that I am unimaginably fortunate; the abyss, unfortunately, is a cold, implacable place that eats up rationality just as easily as it swallows degrees and exhibition credits.
So. I've decided that, given my bent for things grammatical (I don't need a mother; I need to have had a mother), next year I'm going to think of the second Sunday in May as 'Happy Mothers' Day. And leave it at that.
© 2012 Walter Zimmerman
For one thing, she's no longer some dream figure, hovering out in the San Francisco area. I've seen her, at the door of her dilapidated double-wide trailer that faces onto a two-lane road outside a tiny town in rural Delaware. Her bath robe -- a blue one this time, instead of the pink one she wore, all those years ago -- was filthy, smeared with brown steaks down the lapels. She refused to look me in the eye. She later told my sister that 'he'd changed so much'. Forty years will do that to a person.
She also told her husband, finally, that yes, she had had other children besides the daughter he knew about -- that she'd disowned me because I 'turned out to be gay'. She also admitted that she'd 'had some other sons', much the way one might admit to having gone to a fast-food restaurant from time to time. That casual, that unimportant.
So it can't be a great wonder that, even as a very little boy, I wasn't sure of her love. She did tend to me when I was sick, I can't deny that. But otherwise, there was, I think, always a sense that she was about to disappear -- there was an air she had, as she ran the wet laundry through the hand wringer in the basement at 222 South Jackson St., in Belleville IL, before taking another basket of flattened garments out to hang in the back yard, an air that this was all only temporary. I think I sensed the sort of tension one might feel, watching an escape artist, underwater, struggling to free herself of her bonds, finally to pop to the surface for a breath of fresh free air, and run away.
And then, poof -- she did. She disappeared. The treachery she'd promised, she delivered. "I'm going to take one of you with me," she'd said, over and over. And she did. My brothers and I were dropped off at an institution, where women pinched and beat and sexually abused us. And when my father remarried, we heard about her from other cruel women. "She never loved you," they would tell us. "She only wanted a girl," they would say. "She never wanted you in the first place," they would tell me and my brothers -- this, in spite of the fact that none of these women had ever been in the same state at the same time at any time in their lives, let alone met and talked about their preferences in children.
I saw her again, in 1969, thirteen years after the divorce. She and my sister were living in a little trailer, in a little suburb outside of Philadelphia. On my ride to meet them, on the train and the bus, I was certain that she was there, watching me, deciding whether or not I looked like the sort of son she'd want to own. When I saw her, coming out of the pet store that was our rendez-vous, I recognized her instantly, we look so much alike. And my sister too, I recognized, because she looked so much like my father. How ironic, I thought, that each should have taken the child that looked the most like the divorced spouse.
We walked to the trailer -- she, much shorter than me, my sister trailing behind us -- where there was a simple dinner, and of course, awkward conversation. Did I even mention the orphanage? I don't remember. I do remember that, because the trailer was warm, I took off my necktie, folded it, and lay it on a little end table beside my chair. At one point, while my sister was telling me some high-school tale, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a hand slyly reaching across the little table, to the folded necktie, and flipping the end up, to check the label.
I went out to the little suburb two more times. On the last visit, as I was leaving, I was given a slim little gold-plated pocket watch. "You know I love you," she said, and then shut the door. I had a bus to catch, so I didn't have the time to ask just what that meant.
The watch was a piece of crap she probably stole from the jewelry counter where she worked as a sales clerk. When I tried to reach her again, after I'd returned to college the next spring, there was no response. When I called her parents two years later, to tell them that I'd gotten through school, and had a BS, they said she'd remarried and moved to California, and they didn't know how to get in touch with her. I ran across town, in search of my best friend on earth. I ended up at the door of other friends we had in common, and I broke down in front of them. Heaving sobs, incoherent. Unable to breathe, except to force out more tears. These men brought me into their apartment, and let me cry for a while.
"You can always find her," they said, meaning well. "She's probably just as afraid of rejection as you are," they said, putting to use their Psych 101 class. I think it was then that, finally, I was able to say something that made sense.
"I don't need a mother now," I said, emphatically. "I need to have had a mother."
(The word, as you can see, is laden for me. As it is, I'm sure, for my brothers, none of whom has laid eyes on this woman since 1956)
And it puzzles me, that the older I get, the more deeply I feel this retroactive wound of not having been cared for, not having been cared about, not having been acknowledged (after the divorce, my sister was strenuously told that those boys she remembered playing with weren't her brothers -- they were just boys from the neighborhood. Until she believed it), of not having been valued. And I have to say that, no matter what sort of accolade I might stumblingly allow myself to earn, no matter what accomplishment I might back into unawares, no matter what credentials I might have earned while disparaging the very effort involved -- none of these things seems to have any appreciable impact, in terms of balancing the great void of not-having-been-loved that is, it seems, the center of my being. No praise, no kiss, no dollar amount, no number of column inches, does anything but tumble over the edge, into the abyss. As I get older, my external defenses and interests and diversions shrink and pale and thin out, and the abyss, by comparison, seems to expand. Intellectually, I know that I am unimaginably fortunate; the abyss, unfortunately, is a cold, implacable place that eats up rationality just as easily as it swallows degrees and exhibition credits.
So. I've decided that, given my bent for things grammatical (I don't need a mother; I need to have had a mother), next year I'm going to think of the second Sunday in May as 'Happy Mothers' Day. And leave it at that.
© 2012 Walter Zimmerman
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Fasten Them If You've Got Them...
Why, what's this I see before me? It looks like an imaginary sheet of blank paper. I know I've seen imaginary sheets like this before... And there was that thing I did, like I'm doing now, wiggling my fingers and making little marks...
I think it's apparent, to me at least, that when Lent reached its culmination with Easter, it might have been better if I'd continued with some sort of, perhaps less rigorous, but at least regular writing regimen. I've felt out of sorts, and kind of mentally flab-i-fied, if you will, since Easter, what with having various thoughts on various things, and not remembering that there was a place I could conveniently stash said notion. (The likelihood of someone actually reading these many thoughts wasn't actually all that attractive, difficult as things have been of late...)
But today -- because I have far too much to do in the time allotted, and because I'm dealing with a very minor physical challenge that is consuming my focus and energy -- of course today I'm deciding to re-enter the pool of blogue-land, if only at the very shallow end.
So I'll start with my elbow.
My right elbow, for the accuracy-minded. Although I can't be sure when my current challenge began, I suspect it might have been on an artist's visit and lecture that I gave, at Tyler School of Art, in Philadelphia, about a three weeks ago. I'd been asked to come speak with the glass students at Tyler, visit the grad studios, and maybe do some glass blowing as well. After the talk (which wasn't the dynamic success I'd hoped for, in my opinion), I allowed myself to be talked into working in the hot shop. There, the first thing I did, to my eternal amazement, was to show off my t-shirt (from the famous Wet Dog Glass studio, formerly of New Orleans, and operated by a former school-mate of mine, Eddie Bernard), and then... I took the t-shirt off!
Of course, I was wearing an athletic shirt underneath, as I always do, but I'm still quite amazed that it occurred to me that these college juniors would be at all interested in looking at the pacemaker scar in the skin of someone old enough to be their grandfather (and to spare, year-wise...); they seemed, if not shocked, at least intrigued as I told the story of the little spiral-ended wires burrowing into my heart -- nothing quite like bringing your own horror movie with you wherever you go, I guess -- and then I got dressed again, and made some glass pieces, to show these poor kids just how ugly an otherwise voluptuous and sensual material can get. And so quickly too!
I worked, pretty much alone, as is my habit. I hadn't done any hot shop work in over a year, and I'd been afraid I would break down sobbing as I took my first gather of hot glass. Or maybe it would be as I was shaping it at the marver. Well, in any event, tears did not flow, but sweat certainly did. And there were those physical stresses unique to glass blowing. After doing my little show'n'tell, I went back to my little show'n'hotel, and changed clothes for dinner out, spent a night worrying that the alarm wouldn't go off in the morning (which it didn't), and after a brief couple of student visits, I came back home again.
I noticed that my right elbow was a little irritated just a few days later, but thought nothing of it. Bought an elastic elbow brace (to go with the elastic knee brace. Soon, I'll be shopping for the elastic 'whole right side of the body' brace...) and went on with life as usual. Actually enjoying my return to the gym, after the post-pacemaker interim period had finally passed.
But that right elbow kept getting a little sorer, and more prominent, and finally I went to see my doctor -- which visit being overdue, since she needs to know about the pacemaker too, I suppose. But in a change from the usual run of things (you know -- you call in to work sick, and then instantly feel better?), when I took my shirt off to show the doctor the offending elbow, she looked shocked. It was actually noticeably worse than it had been earlier that day. She gave me an antibiotic shot, a prescription for more such medication, and referred me to a specialist in rheumatism and arthritis. She also took a blood test, for possible gout.
The rheumatism doctor also seemed impressed when, the next day, I exhibited my own personal traveling freak show (Guaranteed Never Before Seen in North America, folks...); he decided to drain off some of whatever was... in... there, and said I should come back on Monday, if necessary.
Well, blah blah blah. I did have to go see him again on Monday, in his office in another North Jersey city in that seamless conglomeration of human habitation hugging the Hudson at that latitude. (Who knew there was a West Kennedy Boulevard and an East Kennedy Boulevard? Where I'd lived, there was only... Kennedy Boulevard. So much more refined) Found the doctor. Showed him the activity, which had extended to swelling of my right hand and upper arm. More... material removed, perhaps to be tested for... something. But the doctor said he felt fine, and that I had nothing to worry about.
Continue the medication, hot compresses. Live long and prosper.
Well, now it's back, and in my opinion, worse than before. I went back to the cheery rheumatologist, who confided that he felt he has the best job on earth, and that he loves his life, while I was wondering if I could still get over-the-counter rat poison at that little family-run Ace Hardware on Duncan Avenue. He was surprised I'd only been given a week's worth of antibiotics (because surely, a week of having your intestines scrubbed on a daily basis isn't really long enough in this vale of tears), and called in a three-week supply, cheerily waved me on my way, and went back to the best job on earth.
So. I'm now tethered to a heating pad, which works intermittently at best. I had to improvise a means of actually affixing said pad, because the 'designers' have only attached some decorative cotton ribands (sic) with which to hold their wimpy product close to the human body presumably in need of such warmth as their 'product' may decide to supply -- perhaps they thought that no one ever needs to heat an upper limb? Or, that everyone purchasing their product has live-in help, and after the farthingale has been tied on, what's another couple of bow-knots in the grand scheme of things? I used something I think I saw in the second section of the Lord of the Rings, where Aragorn, after the wild warg ride (which didn't happen in the book) fell to his near-death in a river (never happened), only to be rescued by his preternaturally savvy horse (guess what -- didn't happen), so he could ride back to the seige of Helm's Deep. Which, in a rare departure, actually did happen in the book. (Only differently) And as he was riding off on his oh-so-smart horse, he was loop-knotting a bandage onto his left arm. Aha!
So, I've used the arm-loops of an athletic shirt (could it be the same one I showed off in the Tyler hot shop? Stranger things have happened) to lash this whimsical heating device to my right arm, and I'm about to embark on stage two of the deepest housecleaning of several years, to prepare for... houseguests. Who Must Never Know.
But I don't want to talk about that whole issue at present. I want to mention a realization I had last night, as I was, once again, relashing the soi-dissant heating pad to my arm. I was thinking of a themed group art exhibit in which I participated, some time ago, in a Hudson Street gallery that was later turned into a shop for maternity wear, when babies became fashionable again. In the deep recesses of the pre-pregnancy period, the gallery liked to show off-beat and 'edgy' things, and the curator suggested that we contributors think about the writings of Jorge Luis Borges as we made or selected our works for the show. As I happened at the time to be in something of a Jorge Luis Borges moment in my life, this seemed singularly apt.
So I made a wall-dependent piece, featuring three average-sized (think, your usual adult liver) pieces of blown glass, all of which had been made at different times in what was then the recent past. In something I found truly uncanny, given the unpredictable way in which I work, two of those pieces seemed to have undergone exactly the same sort of blistering damage to their outer surfaces -- the only difference being that one of these looked older, more fragile and decrepit than the other. I found a slightly smaller, fresher-looking glass thingie, which practically oozed the stupid optimism of youth, and voila -- Section Two was born! It evokes a kind of hospital ward - scientific lab kind of feeling, with three slant-topped shelves each holding one of the glass pieces. Left to right, we see: optimistic youthful slightly sickie-looking one; mature, more inured, definitely sickie one; old, broken open, hopeless one, with a stained bit of cheesecloth under it. The three separated from each other by two stained plastic curtains, also affixed to the walls. More stage-dressing is involved -- tangles of wires under each shelf, mysterious circular metal basins covered in plastic; towels of differing degrees of cleanliness. That sort of thing.
I thought it was brilliant, and I rarely like my own work. It helped me talk about past/present/future, all at the same time, all in one piece, Something, I thought, Sr. Borges would have liked, fond as he was of playing with concepts of human time and space.
But not all viewers agreed. Oh no, my precious. They didn't agree at all. One man was very angry because, in the listing of works provided by the gallery, my piece was listed as the ninth work he would see. "But what are all these two's all over the place" he asked, "if it's supposed to be number nine? How am I supposed to know what I'm looking at?" He wasn't going to buy anything anyway.
And there was another group -- two women and a man, as I recall, who reached a certain point along the floor of this long, narrow gallery, and then stopped. Stopped cold, even though the wine was beyond my work, out on the back patio. Even the lure of zinfandel could not entice them any closer. They had their heads together conspiratorially, as though they were electing a pope. And at moments where the background hum of the chain saw chewing up a bowling ball died down a bit, I could pick up bits of their hissed conversation. "Excrement" "Bodily wastes. Urine" "Disgusting" Then, to my recollection, they left. Not having bought anything either.
But their comments made me think, somewhat sanctimoniously I now realize -- did any of them have someone they loved? Did any one of them suspect, in the least, that someone they loved might become ill, or injured, or need some kind of physical caring? Were they only prepared to love their loved ones if there wasn't anything wrong with them? In an odd way, this bit of art-provoked psychodrama on their part (which, in my own defense, I don't think I misinterpreted at all) helped me feel more assured about the sort of work I had been doing, and continued to do. What do you do, when the worst things happen? How do you react to these ordinarily subcutaneous realities, when they come spilling forth, unceremoniously and having no consideration for schedule or my narrow convenience?
As it happens -- and perhaps this is due to my being the oldest in a family of seven kids, with two being, at 12 and 13 years younger, practically my own children -- I don't generally have much trouble, that I've noticed, with the occasional eruption of this or that 'unpleasantness' (to borrow from Barbara Pym); Generally, I tend to the calm rearrangement of proprieties, along with the usual soothing noises and the odd hot or cool towel as needed.
But. No. Such. Compassion. For. Me.
And this, (whoever out there is still with me, this is for you), this is where all my orotundity has been leading -- to my very recent head-on collision with my own very deep, very passionate, very unflinching lack of sympathy for my own body and my own physical failings. From the way I'm reacting to this elbow drama (a staph infection, though from one of the more common types, not the one in the movies with Dustin Hoffman) you'd think I'd grown a second head that sported a singularly unpleasant complexion and badly-aligned teeth. I don't feel safe when I'm sick. I don't feel valuable when I'm not capable. I feel unacceptably vulnerable if I can't hold my grocery basket in one hand, as an older woman shopper noticed me doing the other day. And this mind-set is not amusing, because the temporal waters into which my little physical bark is headed has the worst rapids I will ever have faced -- and I've already almost died twice in my life that I know of. Three times if you listen to the hysterical cardiac specialist...
So, this is where I am (plus I do have to finish, so I can run to the bank, to get money so I can pay the handyman for mowing the lawn, so he won't come asking for cash at 10 o'clock at night because his grandmother died again); If I'm willing to be so judgmental about people who can't approach my artwork (which, by the way, is totally composed of man-make, inorganic materials, and only refers to the ideas which the viewers themselves create), without getting nauseated and offended, might I not think about trying to scrounge up a little bit of sympathy... for my own physical rendition? I made fun of the pacemaker, as a defense against its terrifying message. It's cute to show it off, because the scar is so negligible, and it looks like I've got an emergency saltine stashed under my skin, just in case. But this red, rude swollen joint of mine, with the skin peeling off, and my right hand looking like it belongs on a 300-lb version of yours truly, with which I can't even touch my own face, not that I would want to, with a hand like that -- with this, I find, it's much more difficult to have anything even remotely resembling acceptance, let alone sympathy.
In all probability, this infection episode will pass. (Either that, or I'll need a prosthesis. In which case, stand back) But this does, nonetheless, feel like just one of the very first bumps. And I don't think there are any seat belts in my little canoe.
© 2012 Walter Zimmerman
I think it's apparent, to me at least, that when Lent reached its culmination with Easter, it might have been better if I'd continued with some sort of, perhaps less rigorous, but at least regular writing regimen. I've felt out of sorts, and kind of mentally flab-i-fied, if you will, since Easter, what with having various thoughts on various things, and not remembering that there was a place I could conveniently stash said notion. (The likelihood of someone actually reading these many thoughts wasn't actually all that attractive, difficult as things have been of late...)
But today -- because I have far too much to do in the time allotted, and because I'm dealing with a very minor physical challenge that is consuming my focus and energy -- of course today I'm deciding to re-enter the pool of blogue-land, if only at the very shallow end.
So I'll start with my elbow.
My right elbow, for the accuracy-minded. Although I can't be sure when my current challenge began, I suspect it might have been on an artist's visit and lecture that I gave, at Tyler School of Art, in Philadelphia, about a three weeks ago. I'd been asked to come speak with the glass students at Tyler, visit the grad studios, and maybe do some glass blowing as well. After the talk (which wasn't the dynamic success I'd hoped for, in my opinion), I allowed myself to be talked into working in the hot shop. There, the first thing I did, to my eternal amazement, was to show off my t-shirt (from the famous Wet Dog Glass studio, formerly of New Orleans, and operated by a former school-mate of mine, Eddie Bernard), and then... I took the t-shirt off!
Of course, I was wearing an athletic shirt underneath, as I always do, but I'm still quite amazed that it occurred to me that these college juniors would be at all interested in looking at the pacemaker scar in the skin of someone old enough to be their grandfather (and to spare, year-wise...); they seemed, if not shocked, at least intrigued as I told the story of the little spiral-ended wires burrowing into my heart -- nothing quite like bringing your own horror movie with you wherever you go, I guess -- and then I got dressed again, and made some glass pieces, to show these poor kids just how ugly an otherwise voluptuous and sensual material can get. And so quickly too!
I worked, pretty much alone, as is my habit. I hadn't done any hot shop work in over a year, and I'd been afraid I would break down sobbing as I took my first gather of hot glass. Or maybe it would be as I was shaping it at the marver. Well, in any event, tears did not flow, but sweat certainly did. And there were those physical stresses unique to glass blowing. After doing my little show'n'tell, I went back to my little show'n'hotel, and changed clothes for dinner out, spent a night worrying that the alarm wouldn't go off in the morning (which it didn't), and after a brief couple of student visits, I came back home again.
I noticed that my right elbow was a little irritated just a few days later, but thought nothing of it. Bought an elastic elbow brace (to go with the elastic knee brace. Soon, I'll be shopping for the elastic 'whole right side of the body' brace...) and went on with life as usual. Actually enjoying my return to the gym, after the post-pacemaker interim period had finally passed.
But that right elbow kept getting a little sorer, and more prominent, and finally I went to see my doctor -- which visit being overdue, since she needs to know about the pacemaker too, I suppose. But in a change from the usual run of things (you know -- you call in to work sick, and then instantly feel better?), when I took my shirt off to show the doctor the offending elbow, she looked shocked. It was actually noticeably worse than it had been earlier that day. She gave me an antibiotic shot, a prescription for more such medication, and referred me to a specialist in rheumatism and arthritis. She also took a blood test, for possible gout.
The rheumatism doctor also seemed impressed when, the next day, I exhibited my own personal traveling freak show (Guaranteed Never Before Seen in North America, folks...); he decided to drain off some of whatever was... in... there, and said I should come back on Monday, if necessary.
Well, blah blah blah. I did have to go see him again on Monday, in his office in another North Jersey city in that seamless conglomeration of human habitation hugging the Hudson at that latitude. (Who knew there was a West Kennedy Boulevard and an East Kennedy Boulevard? Where I'd lived, there was only... Kennedy Boulevard. So much more refined) Found the doctor. Showed him the activity, which had extended to swelling of my right hand and upper arm. More... material removed, perhaps to be tested for... something. But the doctor said he felt fine, and that I had nothing to worry about.
Continue the medication, hot compresses. Live long and prosper.
Well, now it's back, and in my opinion, worse than before. I went back to the cheery rheumatologist, who confided that he felt he has the best job on earth, and that he loves his life, while I was wondering if I could still get over-the-counter rat poison at that little family-run Ace Hardware on Duncan Avenue. He was surprised I'd only been given a week's worth of antibiotics (because surely, a week of having your intestines scrubbed on a daily basis isn't really long enough in this vale of tears), and called in a three-week supply, cheerily waved me on my way, and went back to the best job on earth.
So. I'm now tethered to a heating pad, which works intermittently at best. I had to improvise a means of actually affixing said pad, because the 'designers' have only attached some decorative cotton ribands (sic) with which to hold their wimpy product close to the human body presumably in need of such warmth as their 'product' may decide to supply -- perhaps they thought that no one ever needs to heat an upper limb? Or, that everyone purchasing their product has live-in help, and after the farthingale has been tied on, what's another couple of bow-knots in the grand scheme of things? I used something I think I saw in the second section of the Lord of the Rings, where Aragorn, after the wild warg ride (which didn't happen in the book) fell to his near-death in a river (never happened), only to be rescued by his preternaturally savvy horse (guess what -- didn't happen), so he could ride back to the seige of Helm's Deep. Which, in a rare departure, actually did happen in the book. (Only differently) And as he was riding off on his oh-so-smart horse, he was loop-knotting a bandage onto his left arm. Aha!
So, I've used the arm-loops of an athletic shirt (could it be the same one I showed off in the Tyler hot shop? Stranger things have happened) to lash this whimsical heating device to my right arm, and I'm about to embark on stage two of the deepest housecleaning of several years, to prepare for... houseguests. Who Must Never Know.
But I don't want to talk about that whole issue at present. I want to mention a realization I had last night, as I was, once again, relashing the soi-dissant heating pad to my arm. I was thinking of a themed group art exhibit in which I participated, some time ago, in a Hudson Street gallery that was later turned into a shop for maternity wear, when babies became fashionable again. In the deep recesses of the pre-pregnancy period, the gallery liked to show off-beat and 'edgy' things, and the curator suggested that we contributors think about the writings of Jorge Luis Borges as we made or selected our works for the show. As I happened at the time to be in something of a Jorge Luis Borges moment in my life, this seemed singularly apt.
So I made a wall-dependent piece, featuring three average-sized (think, your usual adult liver) pieces of blown glass, all of which had been made at different times in what was then the recent past. In something I found truly uncanny, given the unpredictable way in which I work, two of those pieces seemed to have undergone exactly the same sort of blistering damage to their outer surfaces -- the only difference being that one of these looked older, more fragile and decrepit than the other. I found a slightly smaller, fresher-looking glass thingie, which practically oozed the stupid optimism of youth, and voila -- Section Two was born! It evokes a kind of hospital ward - scientific lab kind of feeling, with three slant-topped shelves each holding one of the glass pieces. Left to right, we see: optimistic youthful slightly sickie-looking one; mature, more inured, definitely sickie one; old, broken open, hopeless one, with a stained bit of cheesecloth under it. The three separated from each other by two stained plastic curtains, also affixed to the walls. More stage-dressing is involved -- tangles of wires under each shelf, mysterious circular metal basins covered in plastic; towels of differing degrees of cleanliness. That sort of thing.
I thought it was brilliant, and I rarely like my own work. It helped me talk about past/present/future, all at the same time, all in one piece, Something, I thought, Sr. Borges would have liked, fond as he was of playing with concepts of human time and space.
But not all viewers agreed. Oh no, my precious. They didn't agree at all. One man was very angry because, in the listing of works provided by the gallery, my piece was listed as the ninth work he would see. "But what are all these two's all over the place" he asked, "if it's supposed to be number nine? How am I supposed to know what I'm looking at?" He wasn't going to buy anything anyway.
And there was another group -- two women and a man, as I recall, who reached a certain point along the floor of this long, narrow gallery, and then stopped. Stopped cold, even though the wine was beyond my work, out on the back patio. Even the lure of zinfandel could not entice them any closer. They had their heads together conspiratorially, as though they were electing a pope. And at moments where the background hum of the chain saw chewing up a bowling ball died down a bit, I could pick up bits of their hissed conversation. "Excrement" "Bodily wastes. Urine" "Disgusting" Then, to my recollection, they left. Not having bought anything either.
But their comments made me think, somewhat sanctimoniously I now realize -- did any of them have someone they loved? Did any one of them suspect, in the least, that someone they loved might become ill, or injured, or need some kind of physical caring? Were they only prepared to love their loved ones if there wasn't anything wrong with them? In an odd way, this bit of art-provoked psychodrama on their part (which, in my own defense, I don't think I misinterpreted at all) helped me feel more assured about the sort of work I had been doing, and continued to do. What do you do, when the worst things happen? How do you react to these ordinarily subcutaneous realities, when they come spilling forth, unceremoniously and having no consideration for schedule or my narrow convenience?
As it happens -- and perhaps this is due to my being the oldest in a family of seven kids, with two being, at 12 and 13 years younger, practically my own children -- I don't generally have much trouble, that I've noticed, with the occasional eruption of this or that 'unpleasantness' (to borrow from Barbara Pym); Generally, I tend to the calm rearrangement of proprieties, along with the usual soothing noises and the odd hot or cool towel as needed.
But. No. Such. Compassion. For. Me.
And this, (whoever out there is still with me, this is for you), this is where all my orotundity has been leading -- to my very recent head-on collision with my own very deep, very passionate, very unflinching lack of sympathy for my own body and my own physical failings. From the way I'm reacting to this elbow drama (a staph infection, though from one of the more common types, not the one in the movies with Dustin Hoffman) you'd think I'd grown a second head that sported a singularly unpleasant complexion and badly-aligned teeth. I don't feel safe when I'm sick. I don't feel valuable when I'm not capable. I feel unacceptably vulnerable if I can't hold my grocery basket in one hand, as an older woman shopper noticed me doing the other day. And this mind-set is not amusing, because the temporal waters into which my little physical bark is headed has the worst rapids I will ever have faced -- and I've already almost died twice in my life that I know of. Three times if you listen to the hysterical cardiac specialist...
So, this is where I am (plus I do have to finish, so I can run to the bank, to get money so I can pay the handyman for mowing the lawn, so he won't come asking for cash at 10 o'clock at night because his grandmother died again); If I'm willing to be so judgmental about people who can't approach my artwork (which, by the way, is totally composed of man-make, inorganic materials, and only refers to the ideas which the viewers themselves create), without getting nauseated and offended, might I not think about trying to scrounge up a little bit of sympathy... for my own physical rendition? I made fun of the pacemaker, as a defense against its terrifying message. It's cute to show it off, because the scar is so negligible, and it looks like I've got an emergency saltine stashed under my skin, just in case. But this red, rude swollen joint of mine, with the skin peeling off, and my right hand looking like it belongs on a 300-lb version of yours truly, with which I can't even touch my own face, not that I would want to, with a hand like that -- with this, I find, it's much more difficult to have anything even remotely resembling acceptance, let alone sympathy.
In all probability, this infection episode will pass. (Either that, or I'll need a prosthesis. In which case, stand back) But this does, nonetheless, feel like just one of the very first bumps. And I don't think there are any seat belts in my little canoe.
© 2012 Walter Zimmerman
Monday, April 30, 2012
Little Offshoots...
I may have a twenty minute window of opportunity here, before I must leave to drive myself to New Brunswick, for this evening's choir rehearsal. And of course there are about three billion other things I should be doing, instead of using this twenty minute window of opportunity for writing about who knows what. But when have I ever made a wise choice, with regard to using my time?
And, because I can't really luxuriate in any particular topic right now, I want to mention two silly things that have given me unusually pleasant feelings recently. Both these events (?) involve planted things.
Two years ago, when I had my autumn exhibit in the space generously lent to me for the purpose, by Bryan Christie, I had originally intended to use the great empty space (right above the Maplewood Movie Theater marquee, within spitting distance of the train station if you're a really good spitter), as both a construction space and a gallery, but it soon became clear that I would never have enough time and energy to haul everything I would need, out of my basement, pack it into the van, and then haul it all up the stairs in Maplewood, only to have to remove it all again when the work would be shown. So, at first, all I mostly did, those early days in October, was to crank open the windows over the black-topped roof of the marquee, and look out at the trees in the park. There was some detritus on the roof, as will happen, and one of the things I found was a plastic florist's pot, with what looked like a sad onion in it. I stretched a little, to pick it up, and suspected that, at one time, it had been an amaryllis. Whether it was still viable or not remained to be seen. And really, if the only investment necessary is a bit of water from time to time, I was pretty sure I could manage that.
So I brought it home, put some real dirt into the pot, set the bulb-like thing in place, and put it in the sun room, next to another amaryllis I'd inherited from a neighbor. It had died too. I don't so much grow things as I try to resurrect them. Usually, the efforts are what one would expect, if one were to bring a twig into the house and get it to bud, just by sprinkling water on it occasionally.
But in this case, both bulbs proved to be tougher than I would have expected. The one from the movie marquee, which I would have thought had been fried more or less all the way through, sent up green leaves first. Then the other followed suit. And now, much to my everlasting amazement, the marquee bulb has lofted a lovely, mysterious, folded green gesture, at the end of an extending stalk. I just checked -- the flowers are going to be a salmony-red color. How amazing to me.
Likewise, a couple of years ago, a neighbor offered me an old climbing rose that wasn't fitting in with the new garden design. Sure, I said -- I'll just stick it here along the driveway, where there's plenty of light in the afternoon. The long, curved and very thorny stem made a nice rhythmic curve against the neighbor's chain-link fence. I nestled the roots down deep, added a little rose food, tamped the soil back into place, did the watering thing, and went on to other things.
Well, it had apparently failed to make the transition from one side of Sinclair Terrace to the other, because all that year, and all the next, there was nary a sprig of green from where I full well remembered having planted that climbing rose. The long swirly thorn sprig broke off while the squirrels were clambering around. I turned my attention to trying to figure out how to resuscitate a hydrangea I'd moved from the front yard to the back, were it was failing to thrive. I always feel so guilty.
But the third year after being moved, that tough old rose root sent up a little signal -- not dead yet. I was fiercely protective of this, even though I wasn't sure I had correctly identified the leaves. It has taken two more years of this semi-tender-hearted tending, but when last I checked, I saw a little bud on one of this year's new branches -- which means that, unless I run it over with the van, there will be an actual rose blooming where none had been expected, ever again.
This is deeply satisfying. This is almost defiantly gratifying. Now, if only this coming January, when I go to separate the Christmas tree from its plastic stand, I can find the merest hint of root threads from the balsam's trunk, I will be, I think, a truly happy, if somewhat bemused, man.
That's all. Time to go harmonize...
(I'm trying to add the copyright sign, but Google has apparently improved this site, so I can't do that. Don't you love it when things get so much better that they don't work at all?)
Well, anyway, please consider the above content to have been copyrighted by Walter Zimmerman, in the year 2012. And Google? You've got spinach in your teeth.
Walter Zimmerman © 2012
And, because I can't really luxuriate in any particular topic right now, I want to mention two silly things that have given me unusually pleasant feelings recently. Both these events (?) involve planted things.
Two years ago, when I had my autumn exhibit in the space generously lent to me for the purpose, by Bryan Christie, I had originally intended to use the great empty space (right above the Maplewood Movie Theater marquee, within spitting distance of the train station if you're a really good spitter), as both a construction space and a gallery, but it soon became clear that I would never have enough time and energy to haul everything I would need, out of my basement, pack it into the van, and then haul it all up the stairs in Maplewood, only to have to remove it all again when the work would be shown. So, at first, all I mostly did, those early days in October, was to crank open the windows over the black-topped roof of the marquee, and look out at the trees in the park. There was some detritus on the roof, as will happen, and one of the things I found was a plastic florist's pot, with what looked like a sad onion in it. I stretched a little, to pick it up, and suspected that, at one time, it had been an amaryllis. Whether it was still viable or not remained to be seen. And really, if the only investment necessary is a bit of water from time to time, I was pretty sure I could manage that.
So I brought it home, put some real dirt into the pot, set the bulb-like thing in place, and put it in the sun room, next to another amaryllis I'd inherited from a neighbor. It had died too. I don't so much grow things as I try to resurrect them. Usually, the efforts are what one would expect, if one were to bring a twig into the house and get it to bud, just by sprinkling water on it occasionally.
But in this case, both bulbs proved to be tougher than I would have expected. The one from the movie marquee, which I would have thought had been fried more or less all the way through, sent up green leaves first. Then the other followed suit. And now, much to my everlasting amazement, the marquee bulb has lofted a lovely, mysterious, folded green gesture, at the end of an extending stalk. I just checked -- the flowers are going to be a salmony-red color. How amazing to me.
Likewise, a couple of years ago, a neighbor offered me an old climbing rose that wasn't fitting in with the new garden design. Sure, I said -- I'll just stick it here along the driveway, where there's plenty of light in the afternoon. The long, curved and very thorny stem made a nice rhythmic curve against the neighbor's chain-link fence. I nestled the roots down deep, added a little rose food, tamped the soil back into place, did the watering thing, and went on to other things.
Well, it had apparently failed to make the transition from one side of Sinclair Terrace to the other, because all that year, and all the next, there was nary a sprig of green from where I full well remembered having planted that climbing rose. The long swirly thorn sprig broke off while the squirrels were clambering around. I turned my attention to trying to figure out how to resuscitate a hydrangea I'd moved from the front yard to the back, were it was failing to thrive. I always feel so guilty.
But the third year after being moved, that tough old rose root sent up a little signal -- not dead yet. I was fiercely protective of this, even though I wasn't sure I had correctly identified the leaves. It has taken two more years of this semi-tender-hearted tending, but when last I checked, I saw a little bud on one of this year's new branches -- which means that, unless I run it over with the van, there will be an actual rose blooming where none had been expected, ever again.
This is deeply satisfying. This is almost defiantly gratifying. Now, if only this coming January, when I go to separate the Christmas tree from its plastic stand, I can find the merest hint of root threads from the balsam's trunk, I will be, I think, a truly happy, if somewhat bemused, man.
That's all. Time to go harmonize...
(I'm trying to add the copyright sign, but Google has apparently improved this site, so I can't do that. Don't you love it when things get so much better that they don't work at all?)
Well, anyway, please consider the above content to have been copyrighted by Walter Zimmerman, in the year 2012. And Google? You've got spinach in your teeth.
Walter Zimmerman © 2012
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